MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zajio1am | 2025-10-08 19:24:08+00:00
(depends on jurisdiction) there was already concept of pre-booked transport that was distinct from taxi and does not require taxi medaillon to operate. Uber just made pre-booked transport as convenient to use as taxi.

So it is not that Uber avoided taxi licencing 'because of app', but it avoided taxi licencing by providing slightly different service that do not fit into legal definition of regulated taxi services. And one could argue that these slight differences are in fact important, because the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber.
by justlikereddit | 2025-10-08 19:24:27+00:00
>nobody seems to want it

I've had a lot of genuine fun playing with AI art generators dating all the way back to deepdream. I love the tech, I want it as it was, as it is, and as it will become. This tech have in the last few years given me much more joy than any artist have come close to. It shares creative powers freely, a far cry from the overly commercial streaks dominating much else.

What I don't want is to see yet another has-been meme artist rehash the same anti-AI tirade that we've seen so frequently that any given LLM could re-create it verbatim due to overfitting.

All talk about "Human originality, soul, heart, the divine spark" and yet all they display is hysteria.
by m8vn3m | 2025-10-08 19:24:28+00:00
Title: Show HN: Huq - JavaScript runtime for real-time blockchain data

I built a serverless platform that lets JavaScript developers work with blockchain data without knowing anything about blockchain.

$ huq init token-processor

$ cd token-processor

You write a simple handler in main.js:

async function onTransfer(transfer) { console.log(`${transfer.chain}: ${transfer.amount} ${transfer.token}`); console.log(` tx: ${transfer.txHash}`); }

Play it: $ huq play

Deploy and forget it: $ huq deploy

And you get every token transfer across Ethereum, Binance, Base, Polygon, Tron, Solana, and Bitcoin - all in the same unified format.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/3SeYLV9 Web editor version: https://lambda-bloom.lovable.app/editor Code: https://gist.github.com/nozim/d824de45f4b0ba9cc7ab4be4a358d7...

The problem I'm solving: Raw blockchain data is unusable. You need to run nodes, decode transaction logs, understand different chain architectures, handle connections, etc. Takes teams 18+ months and millions to build.

What Huq does: - Decodes blockchain events in real-time (ERC-20, TRC-20, SPL tokens, Bitcoin) - Unified API across all chains (same fields, same format) - Serverless runtime - write JavaScript, deploy, it runs forever - No infrastructure management

Every transaction hash in the output is verifiable on block explorers - this is real blockchain data, not mocked.

Use cases: whale tracking, portfolio monitoring, trading signals, fraud detection, cross-chain analytics - anything that needs blockchain data.

Built solo over a year while single-parenting. Currently runs on €150/month on bunch of Hetzner VPS. (will need dedicated nodes to scale properly).

Early version with rough edges - websocket connections drop occasionally, working on reconnection logic. Looking for feedback and early users more than production deployments right now.

DM for access - onboarding in small batches to manage load.

Tech: Real-time decoding layer, NATS streaming, ClickHouse for historical queries and S** ton of Go and a bit of Rust here and there, custom JavaScript runtime for user code.
by baobun | 2025-10-08 19:25:14+00:00
> Note that other threads in this post have said "with a warrant"

I think there's some confusion and people talking past each other there.

With a warrant, LE can extract messages from devices, request and receive data dumps from service providers, and attempt to crack encrypted data. In many places they can also insert backdoors (server or client side) with a warrant. We see some people pointing this out as being sufficient.

This is different from every device and citizen (except politicians) preemtively having their devices backdoored with access granted after a warrant (which you seem to be arguing for). Most of us agree that this is unacceptable and is already unconstitutional in several EU countries.
by neom | 2025-10-08 19:25:17+00:00
Not OP, but:

4o, the model most non-tech people use (that I wish they would depreciate) is very...chatty, it will actively try to engage you, and give you "useful things" you think you need, and take you down huge long rabbit holes. On the second point, it used to be very "high EQ" to people (sycophantic). Once they rolled back the sycophancy thing, even a couple of my non-technical friends msg'd me asking what happened to ChatGPT. I know one person who we've currently lost to 4o, it's got them talked into a very strange place friends can't reason them out of, and one friend who has recently "come back from it" so to speak.
by aapoalas | 2025-10-08 19:25:42+00:00
I do like the idea of this, but after writing a longer response explaining my positive view on this I came to a different conclusion: I was thinking this'd be a possibly useful measure for programs running on CPUs with contention, where your data will occasionally drop out of cache because the CPU is doing something else. But in that sort of a situation, you'd expect the L1 memory speed to be overtaken _before_ L1 memory size is reached. This function instead fits fairly well to the actual L1 size (as given by ChatGPT anyway), meaning that it's best thought of as a measure of random access speed on an uncontested CPU.

That being said, I do still like the fundamental idea of figuring out a rough but usable O-estimate for random memory access speeds in a program. It never hurts to have more quick estimation tools in your toolbox.
by walkabout | 2025-10-08 19:25:47+00:00
Careful about reading too much into "employee ownership". It can be and at least sometimes (I suspect usually, at least in the US) is structured such that it doesn't really work the way you might think.

1) The shares can be non-voting shares. LOL.

2) Only a relatively small portion of the overall "pie" has to go to employees for them to be able to say they're "employee owned". There can still be non-employee owners involved to a large degree.

3) That slice of the pie will tend to be weighted so heavily toward those near the top of the org chart that in practice it may be more like "upper-management owned" anyway.

I think the main reasons companies in the US choose it are:

1) Propaganda. "You're an owner!" It's a way to trick unwise employees into working harder for (effectively) nothing extra, and even into exhorting others to do the same.

2) Probably some kind of tax-avoidance reasons.

3) As a vehicle for a kind of stock-compensation system without having to take the company public or do occasional odd maneuvers with investors for that stock to be de facto liquid for employees.

IME there's zero percent more meaningful "ownership" involved than, say, Google folks who receive stock as part of their comp (and nobody calls Google "employee owned"). It's a misleading name for the structure.
by bitwize | 2025-10-08 19:26:10+00:00
Yes.

https://www.thomaselectronics.com/

But they're only building them for specialty niche military and industrial applications (e.g., replacement parts for old fighter jet HUDs). You could ask them about building one for your SNES setup or old arcade machine, but it'll cost you call-for-pricing dollars (tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps?)
by hedora | 2025-10-08 19:27:39+00:00
I wonder if an FPGA is still necessary. 4k/8k are running way over 60 fps these days. Presumably a gpu could do a decent job emulating the phosphor.

In related news, atari 2600 emulators are keeping 4-8 cores > 50% busy these days. How else do you get accurate ntsc “red blur”, and capacitor effects from blinking pixels?
by serbuvlad | 2025-10-08 19:27:52+00:00
I have never bought an Arduino. I have bought a few Picos, a few ESP32s, and a couple Picos. And a clone of an Arduino Nano integrated in a system with a Pico for 5V logic, specifically, to implement a PS/2 controller. I don't see any advantage an Arduino has over an ESP32, aside from 5V logic support.
by lordnacho | 2025-10-08 19:28:11+00:00
> This was a very fun problem to debug.

I'm sure it was a relief to find a thorough solution that addressed the root cause. But it doesn't seem plausible that it was fun while it was unexplained. When I have this kind of bug it eats my whole attention.

Something this deep is especially frustrating. Nobody suspects the standard library or the compiler. Devs have been taught from a young age that it's always you, not the tools you were given, and that's generally true.

One time, I actually did find a standard library bug. I ended up taking apart absolutely everything on my side, because of course the last hypothesis you test is that the pieces you have from the SDK are broken. So a huge amount of time is spent chasing the wrong lead when it actually is a fundamental problem.

On top of this, the thing is a race condition, so you can't even reliably reproduce it. You think it's gone like they did initially, and then it's back. Like cancer.
by MisterTea | 2025-10-08 19:28:12+00:00
> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community,

No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product.

The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.
by adolph | 2025-10-08 19:28:35+00:00
> a burger flipping business wants to spy on people

"It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17."

For example, the Manna software in each store knew about employee performance in microscopic detail — how often the employee was on time or early, how quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the phone and responded to email, how the customers rated the employee and so on. When an employee left a store and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other Manna system could request the employee’s performance record. If an employee had “issues” — late, slow, disorganized, unkempt — it became nearly impossible for that employee to get another job.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna2
by karmakaze | 2025-10-08 19:28:36+00:00
There are plenty of examples on both sides. There's no need for one to be true and the other false. Geniuses get recognition, so it makes sense for the smurfing contributors to also get a nod.

AlexNet for example was only possible because of the developed algorithms, but also the availability of GPUs for highly parallel processing and importantly the ImageNet labelled data.
by lxdlam | 2025-10-08 19:28:42+00:00
I'm reading some literature(fictions and non-fictions) reviews these days, and realized that literature itself, is just recording our lives in thousands or even millions of different views. The events in the real life can be similar or even identical, but will finally result in many different books, some of them are bad while others are masterpieces. Then I suddenly realized that why I hate some AI work as a long time content consumer, because that the creator behind them are just utilizing AI as a "tool", to quickly generate something meanlingless only for sensory stimulation, which stays at the surface-level, becoming a sort of cheap sensationalism works.

In contrast, I must admit that there are some AI assisted creations really shine , for example, generate an AR annotated POI image with nano banana(https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1960529167742853378). But sadly, there are only 1% of creations, regardless it's an image, an audio or a video, are good, inspiring and exciting as previous ones.

Before AI can get a consciousness, it's a tool, no matter how "smart" it looks like. Only the human who use the tool smartly will create outstanding works.
by alphazard | 2025-10-08 19:29:56+00:00
Now that the internet exists, it's harder to reason about how hard a breakthrough was to make. Before information was everywhere instantly, it would be common for discoveries to be made concurrently, separated by years, but genuinely without either scientist knowing of the others work.

That distance between when the two (or more) similar discoveries happened gives insight into how difficult it was. Separated by years, and it must have been very difficult. Separated by months or days, and it is likely an obvious conclusion from a previous discovery. Just a race to publish at that point.
by hopelite | 2025-10-08 19:30:29+00:00
"Suspicionless" is poor translation of "Anlasslose" which would more appropriately translated as "unfounded" in order to convey the uncommitted nature of "anlasslose". "Anlass" in this context is literally "reasons".

Because the language is far clearer in the US, you would and do hear "warrantless" being used in both the legal and general sense when it comes to these topics, but translating "Anlasslos" as "warrantless" would imply far too much confidence than is given.

"Unfounded" also reflects the weak perspective on hard boundaries of law and limitations on the state that simply do not exist in Germany and effectively all of Europe in the way that they do in the USA as de facto immovable law of the Constitution. "Anlasslos" implies a mental framework and conception that defers your rights (free speech in this case) to the subjective judgement of various people like politicians, judges, technocrats, bureaucrats, regulators, police officers, etc., i.e., someone does not like your speech so they will monitor your communication with our grandma for the abusive and narcissistic, manipulative concept of "hate speech", aka. "speech I hate".
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-08 19:30:54+00:00
Those are valid opinions (though I disagree with several of them), but what yo seem to be missing is that you barged into a general discussion in modern warfare to express your antipathy to Islam.

Islam isn't a big factor in the Ukraine Russia conflict, it's not a big factor in US domestic politics (which are tilting toward military conflict), it's not a big factor in Asian geopolitics. IF you want to make a point about Islam that's one thing, but ignoring the larger context and harping on your pet issue is distracting and rude. You could at the very least acknowledge the existence of the bigger picture and situate your concerns as a specific part of it.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-08 19:31:35+00:00
We've already 90% killed the word "engineer" by applying the title to someone who completes a 6 week bootcamp; this should pretty much finish it off. I don't see much engineering in the list of benefits; mostly seem like administration, and it's even referenced so why not call it "vibe management"? AI seems far closer to replacing mid-senior managers than it does developers.
by iammjm | 2025-10-08 19:32:11+00:00
I think they just lack the sophistication to do it any other way. According to their own doctrine, they should be trying to flank and encircle a city, cut off enemy logistics and reinforcements, and suffocate the defenders. But in most cases they were unable to to do, so they just default to pure destruction. It's just simpler to bomb everything that could shelter Ukrainian defenders. Russian artillery and aviation is not really known for their precision. There is nothing surgical about their approach. They are just throwing tons and tons of explosives at urban centers until they are stopped or there is nothing left to bomb. I think the siege of Mariupol was the only somewhat successful Russian urban operation in this war.
by ksherlock | 2025-10-08 19:32:21+00:00
The 65816 has valid data address (vda) and valid program address (vpa) pins which are essentially the same as fc0/1/2 , minus the supervisor/user mode support.

vda vpa 0 0 internal operation, address bus may be invalid 0 1 valid program address, may be used for program cache control 1 0 valid data address, may be used for data cache control 1 1 opcode fetch, may be for program cache control and single step control
by cwyers | 2025-10-08 19:32:35+00:00
The Doctorow school argument, as best I can tell, would go 'the regulations on black car service were meant for things like limo services that don't compete directly with taxis, and once Uber started competing directly with taxis, regulators and authorities should have moved more aggressively to write new regulations/laws that regulated Uber the same way taxis are regulated.' They would not agree with "the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber."

And this is exactly why I think the question of "what is the correct way to regulate car ride services" shouldn't hinge on incumbency bias towards taxis, but actually ask the question of what is best for participants in the market (which doesn't just include taxis and Ubers but also includes public transportation and its users, for instance). But that doesn't fit neatly into Doctorow's enshitification narrative.
Show HN: I built a local AI agent desk toy
by syx | 2025-10-08 19:32:59+00:00
Source: https://github.com/syxanash/maxheadbox

Hi HN, I've always been fascinated by local inference, especially on small hardware like Raspberry Pi. After researching online, I found that many pre-made solutions seemed to have a piece of the puzzle, like speech-to-text or LLM handling, that was managed by a cloud service. Because of this, I decided to give it a try and build this tiny agent that can run entirely on a Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB/8GB) and it's 100% local. It is capable of executing tools and runs some of the best small models I could find, such as Qwen3:1.7B and Gemma3:1B.

From wake-word detection (using vosk), to transcription (faster-whisper), to the actual LLM inference, everything happens on the Pi 5 itself. It was definitely a challenge given the hardware constraints, but I learned a lot along the way.

I've added a demo and detailed everything in my blog post if you're curious: https://blog.simone.computer/an-agent-desktoy

Cheers!
by AdamH12113 | 2025-10-08 19:33:22+00:00
I don't think this holds up. Historically, memory sizes have increased exponentially, but access times have gotten faster, not slower. And since the access time comes from the memory architecture, you can get 8 GB of RAM or 64 GB of RAM with the same access times. The estimated values in the table are not an especially good fit (30-50% off) and get worse if you adjust the memory sizes.

Theoretically, it still doesn't hold up, at least not for the foreseeable future. PCBs and integrated circuits are basically two-dimensional. Access times are limited by things like trace lengths (at the board level) and parasitics (at the IC level), none of which are defined by volume.
by dang | 2025-10-08 19:33:24+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 - July 2023 (303 comments)

A few things to know before stealing my 914 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 - April 2022 (417 comments)
by caminante | 2025-10-08 19:33:39+00:00
I wasn't looking for conspiracies and disconnected facts (i.e., flash flood through a rural, summer camp).

Dallas was a T5 datacenter hub before Uri in 2021 and did well during the storm because they were designed to service level guarantees [0].

It's also silly to claim that TXSE's performance is disconnected from serious TX investors.

[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/how-data-cent...
by procaryote | 2025-10-08 19:33:48+00:00
The Pi 5 is working well for me with encryption. I tried dding a cold file to /dev/null now and got

1293685061 bytes (1.3 GB, 1.2 GiB) copied, 5.14336 s, 252 MB/s

which is good enough for me on magnetic disks

It apparently hit 387MBps for a few hours while running the montly raid scrub. I run luks on top of mdraid though so the raid scrub doesn't have to decrypt anything.

scp to write to the encrypted disk seems to get me something in the 60 - 100MB/s range.
by jasperry | 2025-10-08 19:34:04+00:00
To me, the greatest contribution of mediocre scientists is that they teach their field to the next generation. To keep science going forward, you need enough people who understand the field to generate a sufficient probability of anyone putting together the pieces of the next major discovery. That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor.

Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.
by HanShotFirst | 2025-10-08 19:34:10+00:00
I want to gently push back on this from my perch in NYC. Pre-Uber, taxis had their monopolistic issues but were: - available at most times on major thoroughfares with a raise of the hand. - reliable - I was never once jerked around or overcharged by an NYC yellow cab, which I can not say about private cab companies I've seen in other cities.

The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).

There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber): - In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app. - The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going. - Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently. - Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.

Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
by yardshop | 2025-10-08 19:34:11+00:00
It was not obvious to me that I needed to click the New button first. I clicked around everywhere else and tried typing and no go. Then after clicking New and getting a text area, it made sense and I said "well of course".

So maybe not too many other people had this problem, but perhaps the top line could say "Click New, then just write." =)

And/or start the page off with a note that describes the basic process:

"click new, write, and click Publish to finish the note, then click Save to save it to index.html on your system"

When I went back to edit a note, Publish didn't work for me.

Trying this in Vivaldi, I didn't try on another browser yet.
by lukan | 2025-10-08 19:34:21+00:00
It seems we are not talking about the same thing. You seem to be talking about strict isolationists. Those are usually of the cult type and no doubt they will all create their version of nationalism likely within the 1. Generation.

But all the other self sustainable projects that I know, are far from the idea of wanting to shut themself of the world.

The main idea is just to not be so dependent on the crazyness of this world. But still be connected to the world. Trade, travel, exchange, ..