MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-10-05 02:54:44+00:00
1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently.

They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
by ccccrrriis | 2025-10-05 02:54:54+00:00
It's being shoved down our throats at work, which is really annoying. Beyond being able to search for documents, there is little utility beyond what a local <1B param LLM gives me.

Even the "productivity" suggestions in teams are ridiculous - one of them is "roast me by my calendar"...wtf is that? How is that related to productivity at all?
by James_K | 2025-10-05 02:55:42+00:00
I'm still not really convinced. Look at it from my perspective: I have my website, BSky isn't compatible with the web, therefore I would have to provide two different versions of all content I publish to satisfy someone else's protocol. It's very annoying. It would be simpler and more effective if it was built on existing web technologies. The only actually new things AT and BSky provide is a signature scheme for content, and the ability to store replies, follows, and likes. You manage most of that in as a few HTML meta tags à la OpenGraph. The other parts of it already exist, those being a web-page designer and an indexer.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-05 02:56:31+00:00
Not sure if it potentially will break the Win11 reboot unsigned install method:

https://youtu.be/ETqvtZomqV8?si=-gd34UzaLNDNNDc7&t=50

If at some point I can recall the interview from earlier this year, than I will post a link. Otherwise, we will both have to wait and see. Best regards. =3
by Telaneo | 2025-10-05 02:57:00+00:00
Good! I hope the taboo remains, and for that matter, spreads.

Are there countries outside of the US where tipping is functionally mandatory/very common? I know it was common in Europe before card payments were the default, but it was just to make transactions a bit easier by rounding up to something that's simple and easy, but that trend has disappeared in cases where you pay by card. Similarly, dark patterns (usually caused by imported US hardware/software) trying to maximise tipping ('you sure you don't want to tip 10%?' before actually getting to pay) is frowned upon by everyone I know, and the only cases anyone actually considers tipping is at well-established restaurants and we're a group of 8 or more people (and there wasn't anything to complain about), and even in these cases, the tip rarely breaks 10%.
by quotemstr | 2025-10-05 02:58:33+00:00
It really is a central example of the bell curve meme, isn't it?

The reason we tell people not to parse HTML/XML/whatever with regular expressions isn't so much that you can't use regular (CS sense) patterns to extract information from regular (CS sense) strings* that happen to be drawn from a language that can also express non-regular strings, but because when you let the median programmer try, he'll screw it up.

So we tell people you "can't" parse XML with regular expressions, even though the claim is nonsense if you think about it, so that the ones that aren't smart and independent-enough minded to see through the false impossibility claim don't create messes the rest of us have to clean up.

One of the most disappointing parts of becoming an adult is realizing the whole world is built this way: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

(* That is, strings that belonging to some regular language L_r (which you can parse with a state machine), L_r being a subset of the L you really want to parse (which you can't). L_r can be a surprisingly large subset of L, e.g. all XML with nesting depth of at most 1,000. The result isn't necessarily a practical engineering solution, but it's a CS possibility, and sometimes more practical than you think, especially because in many cases nesting depth is schema-limited.)

Concrete example: "JSON" in general isn't a regular language, but JavaScript-ecosystem package.json, constrained by its schema, IS.

Likewise, XML isn't a regular language in general, but AndroidManifest.xml specifically is!

Is it a good idea to use "regex" (whatever that means in your langauge) to parse either kind of file? No, probably not. But it's just not honest to tell people it can't be done. It can be.
by omcnoe | 2025-10-05 03:01:42+00:00
Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence.

Put the LLM on answering (or at least triaging) your support tickets faster.
by chatmasta | 2025-10-05 03:03:17+00:00
> Why wouldn’t they [US Citizens] be subject to UK laws like any other person living in the UK?

Yes, anyone in the UK is subject to UK law. But there is no UK law criminalizing the choice of a UK resident to enable Advanced Data Protection (or, if it’s already enabled, to not disable it).

They’re threatening Apple, not its users. Sure, Apple is subject to UK law (although it’s debatable if they’re even violating it). But they’re not immune to lawsuits in the US just because another country told them to violate their implicit contract with users.

> As someone using ADP the risk of this led me to manually disable it at the time.

That’s precisely the opposite of what you should have done. I was (and am still) using ADP in the UK. If I disabled it then I would no longer have the option to enable it. Nothing is forcing me to disable it – where is the threat of data loss? It’s only a risk if I don’t disable it, which I can do at any time in the future. You surrendered your only form of leverage for no reason and made yourself less safe in the process.
by submerge | 2025-10-05 03:03:30+00:00
You don't have to do anything. But as you say, they are the one in the position of power. If you are working on some side quest they don't see as valuable, it may not end well for you. Doubly so if you are shirking what they see as a high value task for your side quest.

It's not about what is right or who "should" do what, it's about securing the best outcome by making sure you and your manager have the same understanding, even if your manager isn't doing a good job of making sure you have the same understanding. (Also known as "managing upwards.")
by II2II | 2025-10-05 03:03:41+00:00
Multiple impacts is the standard hypothesis for a source of Earth's water. If I recall correctly, outgassing from volcanos is another source.

Keep in mind, the solar system formed from a relatively homogenous nebula. It was the formation of the sun that forced lighter elements to migrate outwards, and that only happens if the lighter elements aren't already part of a larger object. There isn't much of a difference between a 10 km chunk of ice and a 10 km chunk of iron gravitationally speaking. Bouancy doesn't play a role here, so density doesn't matter. Outgassing does matter, but that is a slow process for large object, like the Earth, or for smaller objects on Earth crossing orbits that don't get too close to the sun.

It's also worth considering that each planet's situation is unique. There is much more water ice on the moons of the outer solar system because there was more water at the time of formation and the lower temperatures mean the water that was there stayed there. As for Mars, even though it is colder than the Earth, it is much less massive. As such, its atmosphere bleeds away lighter molecules (never mind lighter elements).
by monkeyelite | 2025-10-05 03:04:39+00:00
It’s scary that:

1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants. 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people. 3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
by quotemstr | 2025-10-05 03:04:46+00:00
> On the contrary I would not call Zig very C-like at all, and that's what makes the interoperability so impressive to me.

Zig isn't C-like in its syntax or its developer experience (e.g. whether it has a package manager), but in its execution model: unsafe, imperative, deemphasizes objects, metaprogramming by token manipulation.
by tavavex | 2025-10-05 03:04:46+00:00
Safety, security and thinking of the children was always going to be the vector that this would be implemented with. Once the school boards clear this and schools begin filling up with real-time voice recognition hardware like this under the guise of "safety", going further is just a small step away.

I wouldn't be shocked if in ten years, parents will be getting monthly summaries of their kids' out-of-class activities, complete with the most objectionable things they said out of class, their compliance score, the topics they like to discuss, the kids they associate with. Then we'll see the normalization of things like Flock from this post, followed by endless expansions in what these businesses can do to "keep you safe".
by init1 | 2025-10-05 03:05:12+00:00
What exactly is a "type-related disadvantage"?

As far as I'm aware, Ada has a much more expressive type system and not by a hair. By miles. Being able to define custom bounds checked ordinals, being able to index arrays with any enumerable type. Defining custom arithmatic operators for types. adding compile and runtime typechecks to types with pre/post conditions, iteration variants, predicates, etc... Discriminant records. Record representation clauses.

I'm not sure what disadvantages exist.
by iambateman | 2025-10-05 03:08:09+00:00
We went to see the Savannah Bananas tonight…they have a very dramatic “start the clock” opening. But when the clock starts, there’s 2:00 until the game is over.

It was kinda nice to know that it would end at a specific time.

My family went to see the July 4 fireworks at our minor league stadium this summer. I remember thinking “it’s 2-2, what if there’s extra innings? My kids will be devastated.”

I hope we as a society can find ways to keep baseball interesting…it’s really a beautiful game.
by quotemstr | 2025-10-05 03:08:35+00:00
Of course. But the mathematical, computer-science level truth is that you can make a regular pattern that recognizes a string in any context-free language so long as you're willing to place a bound on the length (or equivalently, the nesting depth) of that string. Everything else is a lie-to-children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children).
by debugnik | 2025-10-05 03:09:45+00:00
> What makes just polyglot?

The link they shared and you didn't open, which is precisely an example of multiple recipes with different #!/usr/bin/env shebang lines, such that a single just file can mix different languages.

I'm not sure I like how they handle the shebang on different platforms, though. It makes just files non-portable even when using a language other than a shell.
by quotemstr | 2025-10-05 03:12:11+00:00
> If I’m not mistaken, even JSON couldn’t be parsed by a regex due to the recursive nature of nested objects.

You can parse ANY context-free language with regex so long as you're willing to put a cap on the maximum nesting depth and length of constructs in that language. You can't parse "JSON" but you can, absolutely, parse "JSON with up to 1000 nested brackets" or "JSON shorter than 10GB". The lexical complexity is irrelevant. Mathematically, whether you have JSON, XML, sexps, or whatever is irrelevant: you can describe any bounded-nesting context-free language as a regular language and parse it with a state machine.

It is dangerous to tell the wrong people this, but it is true.

(Similarly, you can use a context-free parser to understand a context-sensitive language provided you bound that language in some way: one example is the famous C "lexer hack" that allows a simple LALR(1) parser to understand C, which, properly understood, is a context-sensitive language in the Chomsky sense.)

The best experience for the average programmer is describing their JSON declaratively in something like Zod and having their language runtime either build the appropriate state machine (or "regex") to match that schema or, if it truly is recursive, using something else to parse --- all transparently to the programmer.
by ohthehugemanate | 2025-10-05 03:12:27+00:00
Speaking as someone with a company in the arts based in berlin:

Sister comments get excited about population growth, gentrification, rising rent prices, and everyone's favorite c-word. Those are all real things that are happening in berlin, that are favorite bogeymen to complain about at parties. None of them apply here.

Rising rents are much more of a residential problem. Prime commercial rents are also rising, but at 1.1%/yr... and non-prime/specialty commercial like the subway arches in Hansaviertel are generally stable or declining since COVID.

The museum cites loss of premises as a factor. The Deutsche bahn leases the subway arches typically on 5 or 10 year terms. Since they moved in 2016 it sounds like DB is declining to renew the contract and they are facing another move.

But the really big elephant in the room is a lack of funding. The museum has always been proudly privately funded and volunteer operated. But that still exposes them to indirect effects from public funding cuts, and berlin cut 13% of its culture funding in 2024. Private donations are down 6% year over year, and what there is has seen significant diversion to political and Ukraine support efforts. Similar impacts happen in volunteer time, but we're all waiting on the 5-yearly survey from 2024 to be released to get real data.

Fixed costs are often the killer for museums, and the buchstaben museum blamed these in particular. Heating and electricity, and general climate maintenance in nonstandard spaces like the subway arches is always expensive, and museums are relatively energy intensive to begin with. Wholesale electricity costs jumped 5-7x in 2021-22. They've since come back down to a more modest 30-40% increase, but that's still a huge problem for a small, privately funded institution like this. Especially coupled with public funding loss, reduced private donations, and staring down a move.

Bear in mind, German non profits can't create endowments like American ones can. Most categories can't even roll budget from one year to the next!

Hope this helps you understand why so many privately funded cultural institutions are dying in Germany and Berlin right now.
by electroly | 2025-10-05 03:12:29+00:00
For years and years I ran a web service that scraped another site's HTML to extract data. There were other APIs doing the same thing. They used a proper HTML parser, and I just used the moral equivalent of String.IndexOf() to walk a cursor through the text to locate the start and end of strings I wanted and String.Substring() to extract them. Theirs were slow and sometimes broke when unrelated structural HTML changes were made. Mine was a straight linear scan over the text and didn't care at all about the HTML in between the parts I was scraping. It was even an arbitrarily recursive data structure I was parsing, too. I was able to tell at each step, by counting the end and start tags, how many levels up or down I had moved without building any tree structures in memory. Worked great, reliably, and I'd do it again.
by goalieth | 2025-10-05 03:12:34+00:00
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by o11c | 2025-10-05 03:13:23+00:00
Re "SVG-only" at the end, an example was reposted just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45240391

One really nasty thing I've encountered when scraping old webpages:

<p> Hello, <i>World </p> <!-- And then the server decides to insert a pagination point in the middle of this multi-paragraph thought-quote or whatever. --> <p> Goodbye,</i> Moon </p>

XHTML really isn't hard (try it: just change your mime type (often, just rename your files), add the xmlns and then doing a scream test - mostly, self-close your tags, make sure your scripts/stylesheets are separate files, but also don't rely on implicit `<tbody>` or anything), people really should use it more. I do admit I like HTML for hand-writing things like tables, but they should be transformed before publishing.

Now, if only there were a sane way to do CSS ... currently, it's prone to the old "truncated download is indistinguishable from correct EOF" flaw if you aren't using chunking. You can sort of fix this by having the last rule in the file be `#no-css {display:none;}` but that scales poorly if you have multiple non-alternate stylesheets, unless I'm missing something.

(MJS is not sane in quite a few ways, but at least it doesn't have this degree of problems)
by omcnoe | 2025-10-05 03:16:01+00:00
The US needs sufficient energy surplus to power industry. US energy production has been essentially flat for the past 25 years and the country has forgot how to bring new capacity online. Chinese energy production is up over 6x over the same period. China has more clean energy generation capacity today than their entire capacity a little over a decade ago.

Instead of panicking about data center electricity usage we need to be worrying about getting back to a state where we regularly bring new (clean) generation capacity online.
by schoen | 2025-10-05 03:16:45+00:00
DJB has been complaining about this NSA position since 2022 (I guess long before it was an issue at the TLS WG):

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20220805-nsa.html

I'm actually quite surprised that anyone is advocating the non-hybrid PQ key exchange for real applications. If it isn't some sort of gimmick to allow NSA to break these, it's sure showing a huge amount of confidence in relatively recently developed mechanisms.

It feels kind of like saying "oh, now that we can detect viruses in sewage, hospitals should stop bothering to report possible epidemic outbreaks, because that's redundant with the sewage monitoring capability". (Except worse, because it involves some people who may secretly be pursuing goals that are the opposite of everyone else's.)

Edit: DJB said in that 2022 post

> Publicly, NSA justifies this by > > . pointing to a fringe case where a careless effort to add an extra security layer damaged security, and > . expressing "confidence in the NIST PQC process".
by RossBencina | 2025-10-05 03:17:50+00:00
Kevin Buzzard - Where is Mathematics Going? (September 24, 2025) Discusses the state of the art in research mathematics practice, application of LLMs, proof assistants, and work towards combining the two.

For me two of the main takeaways were, given that you can't write proofs without correct definitions and theorem statements, (1) LLMs can't be trusted to accurately write Lean definitions of mathematical objects or statements of theorems from the contemporary research literature (hence a new funded project to get humans to do more of this), (2) LLMs are getting good at writing Lean code.

Kevin didn't speculate about what happens next, but it is certainly looking like a verifiable domain.
Show HN: I tried to remove dynamic watermarks from Sora2 videos using AI
by bingbing123 | 2025-10-05 03:18:04+00:00
Hi HN

I recently ran into a common issue with AI-generated videos — dynamic watermarks that move across frames. Instead of manually editing them out, I decided to experiment with AI-based cleanup and wrote a small tool called *Sora2 Video Cleaner*.

It uses frame-level detection and temporal consistency to automatically identify and smooth out watermark regions, restoring a cleaner video output. The goal isn’t to “crack” anything proprietary, but to help creators improve their visuals and repurpose their content more cleanly.

Try it here: [https://sora2video.us](https://sora2video.us)

Would love feedback from the community — especially around: - Efficient ways to handle temporal noise in video cleanup - Integrating real-time processing in web pipelines

Built with Python + OpenCV + some lightweight diffusion-based filters. Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious!
by BryantD | 2025-10-05 03:18:14+00:00
Loved the Thunderscan back in the day. In college I worked at a little computer store in Harvard Square that didn’t bother to stock real scanners — students who could afford them had better places to buy gear. One day this nice guy came in looking for a scanner and I did my absolute best to sell him on a Thunderscan based on the price point. “I’m not telling you the quality is as high as a flat bed scanner, but it’s so affordable!”

After he left and after the store owner stopped laughing, she explained that I’d been trying to sell Robin Williams on the basis of price. I like to think he enjoyed being treated like a guy off the street.
by alganet | 2025-10-05 03:20:26+00:00
Irrelevant. I actually started by describing the system, which was my first comment on the post.

I am not responsible for anyone that gets offended if I say that something is not as AI as it seems to be. It's obviously not a personal offense. If you took it as such, it's really not my problem.

Rejecting an argument by authority like "I'm an ex Googler!" or "I'm a security engineer" is also common sense. Maybe it works a lot and you folks are upset it's not working here, but that's just the way it is.
by handsclean | 2025-10-05 03:20:46+00:00
It’s gotten a little old for me, just because it still buoys a wave of “solve a problem with a regex, now you’ve got two problems, hehe” types, which has become just thinly veiled “you can’t make me learn new things, damn you”. Like all tools, its actual usefulness is somewhere in the vast middle ground between angelic and demonic, and while 16 years ago, when this was written, the world may have needed more reminding of damnation, today the message the world needs more is firmly: yes, regex is sometimes a great solution, learn it!
by HumanOstrich | 2025-10-05 03:21:04+00:00
By this logic, Bash is a "polyglot task runner" too. With a shebang and executable permissions, I can run `./task1.py` or `./task2.js` or `./task3.sh`. I can also run inline tasks in various languages within a Bash script by piping the source into the appropriate interpreter.

I like and use `just`, but I think the project author's claims around it being "polyglot" are misusing the term.