MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hakunin | 2025-10-20 15:14:22+00:00
I mostly OCR English, so Japanese (as mentioned by parent) wouldn't be an issue for me, but I do care about handwriting. See, these insights are super helpful. If only there was, say, a benchmark to show these.

My main question really is: what are practical OCR tools that I can string together on my MacBook Pro M1 Max w/ 64GB Ram to maximize OCR quality for lots of mail and schoolwork coming into my house, all mostly in English.

I use ScanSnap Manager with its built in OCR tools, but that's probably super outdated by now. Apple Vision does way better job than that. I heard people say also that Apple Vision is better than Tesseract. But is there something better still that's also practical to run in a scripted environment on my machine?
by jerf | 2025-10-20 15:14:54+00:00
Textual language is really, really amazing if you sit down and think about what it does versus the resources it consumes to do it.

It's a common pasttime for programmers to claim that our textual programming languages are just terrible and need to be replaced somehow with something visual, but I think this very often comes from a place of not understanding just how amazing textual languages are. Not they couldn't possibly be improved by something in at least some domains, and there are after all some successful niches for visual languages, but I think if you set out to wholesale replace textual languages without an understanding of and appreciation for the impressive nature of the competition they offer you're setting yourself up to fail.
by myth_drannon | 2025-10-20 15:15:08+00:00
Corporate espionage is ever present but it is criminalized. The only time US as a country did that you can say "stole IP" was after WII when it took Nazi rocket scientists and technology. China is the opposite; stealing tech is done by the state apparatus (same was done by USSR and reverse engineering computers for example).

Frankly I'm not surprised that this is done, probably if US was so behind it would have done the same to reduce the gap. Everyone is trying to survive and outsmart and outwit the other, instead of collaborating.
by caycep | 2025-10-20 15:15:13+00:00
this is true for anyone - create challenges, and you optimize efficiency elsewhere.

Also, isn't this the usual path to better computer science? Reducing computation needs by making better/more efficient algorithms? The whole "trillions of dollars of brute force GPU strength" proposed by Altman, Nadella, Musk et al just seems to reinforce that these are business people at heart, not engineers/computer scientists...
by barrell | 2025-10-20 15:15:43+00:00
I’ve been a ClojureScript developer for many years, and we (as a community) have had the pleasure of the reagent library. From the early days of react, it was basically a signals-like library with an ergonomic api. Signals are almost a requirement in ClojureScript, assume you want to do any sort of REPL-based workflows.

In the time that I’ve been using ClojureScript, the whole react community has switched to hooks. I find it so baffling - requiring your entire data structure to be contained within your component lifecycle? The thousands of calls to individual “useState” to track the same number of state items? The fact that every function is closing over historical state unless you manually tell it to change every time the variable does — and then this last bit in combination with non-linear deep equality comparisons?

I recently have been in the process of switching phrasing.app from reagent atoms to preact/signals for performance reasons (and as part of a longer horizon move from react to preact) and I have to say it’s been fantastic. Maybe 50 lines of code to replicate reagent atoms with preact/signals, all the benefits, and much much faster.

Very happy that there is react-like library so devoted to first class support of signals.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-20 15:15:53+00:00
The fault is in your teachers pretending that the pilgrims discovered jack-all. They meant to be farmers, but did not pack shovels. They were a grumpy religious splinter group that couldn't get along with others, not amazing explorers of the "New World".

It's often mockingly said that they landed when they ran out of beer, which is true, but not because of frustrated frat bro reasons - they ran out of drinking water, more generally. And small beer was more nutritious than intoxicating.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-20 15:16:53+00:00
I think you can categorise Amiga enthusiasts in various ways, this is my taxonomy:

1. Hardware enthusiasts who specifically love the Amiga's original hardware, its peripherals, and the early post-Commodore direction (PowerPC accelerators), and/or modding all of the above. These sort of people used WarpOS back in the day and probably use MorphOS or AmigaOS 4 today. The question is whether, for these people, modern single-board computers "count" as Amigas or not.

2. Nostalgic enthusiasts of the system that the Amiga was, who are happy with a real Amiga, or with an emulated one, or an emulated one running on some board in a box shaped like an Amiga. Possibly with a non-Amiga UI to boot some classic games. These enthusiasts may enjoy fake floppy drive sounds that remind them of booting disks in their youth.

3. Software enthusiasts of the Amiga's OS, and the directions it took that were different from its contemporaries, and the software ecosystem that came from it. These people have a longer user-startup than startup-sequence. They probably have most of Aminet downloaded. These people might be interested in other alternative OSes, e.g. QNX or BeOS. If they're still using Amiga hardware, or emulators, they'd be interested in AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 and 3.1.4/3.2. This can also include AROS and the work to get it running on native hardware, not just m68k but also x86 and arm... but it's unlikely that it will ever support as broad a range of hardware that Linux does, which limits how many people would want to use it, because it's unlikely to be able to drive a random modern laptop.

4. The reverse of 3, Amiga users that were big UNIX fans, e.g. Fred Fish, the sort of people who ran GeekGadgets and replaced their AmigaShell with pdksh. They probably just moved wholesale to Linux and didn't look back.

There are probably other categories, but I think the one you're looking for is 5: enthusiasts of the Amiga's look and feel, but not its broader OS or its software. If they did care about that, they'd be in groups 2 and 3, and emulators or alternative AmigaOSes would satisfy them most.

I can't say why there aren't many alternative desktops for Linux. Probably because it takes a lot of resources to build a full desktop environment for linux - a Window Manager, or even just an existing Window Manager theme is not enough. A file browser is not enough. Ultimately it takes the applications themselves to play along, which only works when have the clout to make people write software in your style (e.g. KDE, GNOME, Windows, macOS, Android, etc.).

The only alternative UI taken from retro machines to Linux, that I can think of, is ROX Desktop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop) with its ROX-Filer... and even that doesn't look entirely like RISC OS, which you could be running instead of Linux.
by whartung | 2025-10-20 15:17:20+00:00
The Forth super power is that you have full control over how a symbol is evaluated, both at compile and runtime. I don't know of anything else that offers that. Lisp doesn't.

That gives the developer pretty much free rein to do whatever they want, which can be both good and bad.

I've always loved the elegance of Frank Sergeant's 3 Instruction Forth paper [1], it's very cool once you wrap your head around it.

Also, studying the F83 Metacompiler is valuable as well. F83 is a very capable 8/16-bit Forth system.

I honestly marvel at how much work must have gone into F83, given the tools of the time. I wish I knew more about its development journey. How it got bootstrapped.

[1] https://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html
by hansvm | 2025-10-20 15:17:22+00:00
The problem is that we're using "blame" to mean two different things:

1. In an ideal, fair world, which parties should have to change to make the outcome not happen? Scammers shouldn't scam, murderers shouldn't murder, etc.

2. With a reasonable understanding of the world, which parties could have predicted the outcome and changed their behavior to mitigate the problem? JPMorgan not doing due diligence on a deal of that magnitude is pretty negligent. I don't carry open bags full of cash walking around the city either, and I don't comment negatively about our new glorious leader and all of his kingly power. Yes, if I had my savings stolen or were murdered on my next boat trip to the Caribbean that'd be somebody else's "fault" via definition (1), but as a practical matter my life is a hell of a lot better on average if I avoid those activities regardless.

The courts sometimes agree with point (2) to an extent as well. If JPMorgan's negligence caused harm to others, the criminals involved would still have full responsibility to JPMorgan, but the harmed parties might have a civil claim against JPMorgan. By way of analogy, what happens if your local bank's safe is found out to be an unmonitored cardboard box? The fact that somebody would eventually break in is predictable, and the bank would be liable to its customers.
by dijit | 2025-10-20 15:17:28+00:00
> If everyone has secure chat, then won't that benefit criminal organizations? I struggle to understand the love for private communication when it seems like that would benefit, for example, religious sects and sex abuse rings. NOT that I like that Zuckerborg keeping all my messages.

Yes, sort of.

The thing is, the government is already not permitted to wiretap people, at least without reasonable suspicion.

Wiretaps themselves are not admissible in court, and can only be offered as a mechanism to correlate behaviour anyway. At least in the UK. (Which, is ironic when you consider what's going on there with online speech, but I digress).

Factually speaking, in order to do a crime you have to physically do a crime, the police knowing when and where do not require access to your communications to figure out. They will sting people, get people to turn on other people or simply catch red-handed when doing ordinary police work.

If we legitimately believe what the governments of the world are saying: that we need to embolden the police. Then funding them properly is the right start, yet nobody seems to be doing that. The EU has been making cross border communication easier though, which is in-line with emboldening the police, so I'll give them that.

Having more information will do very little to help, for the same reason that phone taps aren't given out freely (and never have been) - because even if you have the data, you have to choose how to act on it, and you'd need the resources to investigate and follow-through.

There is a distinct irony that unencrypted SMS is more secure than online messengers, because there are legal protections.
by some_furry | 2025-10-20 15:17:31+00:00
This is factually incorrect.

https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-us...

https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...

Signal uses a whole suite of modern cryptography, including post-quantum ratchets for key agreement and zero-knowledge proofs for group membership.

Meanwhile, Matrix has a plaintext mode and knowingly shipped libraries with side-channels for years, by their own admission (and left many clients in the ecosystem depending on the vulnerable C implementation when they rewrote their cryptography protocol in Rust).

Even today, they are not the same protocol. Olm/Megolm is distinct from Signal in a lot of ways that I've outlined in my previous blog posts.

I don't particularly care if people like Matrix, but please don't spread falsehoods about the cryptography being used.
by piltdownman | 2025-10-20 15:17:38+00:00
Since we don't use cold-war classifications like 'first-world' anymore, I'll refer simply to National Airlines with long-established US and European route access from country A being forced to land in country B to have a citizen of country C arrested.

This excludes the (arguably contentious) incidents like:

- 1954 in Israel where forced a Syrian passenger plane to land in order to gain hostages which it then hoped to exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. - 2012 in Turkey grounded a Syrian plane in 2012 in order to detain and transfer a suspect to the US. - 2016 in Ukraine grounded a plane with military jets to have a citizen of country C arrested

Leaving the following three exemplars:

Egyptair Flight 2843 - EgyptAir forced to land at a NATO base in Italy in the 80s by US fighter jets due to PLO members onboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking#Interc...

Aeromexico Flight 006 - The US diverted a France-Mexico flight to Canada in order to detain and transfer a suspect to the US https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aeromexico-flight-diverted-pass...

Bolivian president's jet - Bolivian president's jet rerouted amid suspicions Edward Snowden on board with France and Portugal accused of refusing entry to their airspace, with plane forced to Land in Vienna due to pressure of US State Department https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden...
by bisby | 2025-10-20 15:17:41+00:00
A space elevator doesnt just take you to the karman line (like in the OP website), to get to orbit, you'd need to get up to geostationary height. That's 22,000 miles.

What's the best way to pull yourself directly vertical along a cable for 22,000 miles?

What's the best way to descend 22,000 miles quickly, but also with a braking mechanism that isn't going to require a heat shield?

Some sort of slow cable car going at 10mph even is going to take 2200 hours... 1000mph is going to take 22 hours still. That's a full day to orbit even going REALLY fast. And getting up to 1000mph vertically, for a sustained 22 hours... that's not an easy feat.

And if the goal is just to get up past the karman line and use the elevator as a stage 1 for a rocket launch and detaching from the elevator while suborbital is fine, then it's a one way trip, and still need to re-enter the old fashion way.

The scale of space makes all of the problems far more complicated (edit: not just the cable strength issue, but traversing the cable)
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-20 15:17:55+00:00
You need a long time to establish trust. In European villages, if you moved to a place, and weren't born there you were considered an outsider, newcomer, and what's more, likely even the first generation who was born there was still considered a newcomer. Just because you went there from 100 kilometers, even though you speak the same language and have almost the exact same culture.

High trust communities need a lot of time to develop and a lot of annoying gossip and reputation stuff that can feel nosy. My grandparents were always keenly aware of "but what are they going to say?!", what will they think of the mother if this or that (if the child uses swear words, if people peek through the window and see a messy room, if there is weed in the garden, if a guest is not stuffed full with food, if the curtains are still closed at 7 am, indicating that they are lazy and sleeping in etc). They were always worried about optics and reputation. They were in turn always evaluating how everyone else lived and behaved, who helped and who didn't, who lives neatly and orderly, or who doesn't cook for his (edit: her) husband properly, or which man is a drunkard or gambler, who shows up to church and who doesn't etc. This is suffocating but necessary for the kind of reputation that prevents antisocial behavior.

Of course that's the other extreme, but the point is, you need 10+ years of living together and interacting, helping out in renovations, knowing the families, regularly sharing dinner etc to get it going. People move too often nowadays for this to be viable. And of course having to stay put has disadvantages for efficiency and adaptability, there's a reason why people are moving around.
by Bjartr | 2025-10-20 15:18:11+00:00
> Everybody

Not everybody everybody. Some people want to charge/pay/receive the maximum reasonable amount. Where "reasonable" is informed by social norms. The existence of so many amoral corporations, and sociopathic individuals running them, has absolutely skewed social expectations though.

Such people are certainly less common, but they do exist (anecdata of one, me)

Homo economicus does not actually exist.
by jaaustin | 2025-10-20 15:19:18+00:00
To my knowledge this connection was first noted in 2021 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03006 (page 5). We wanted to do text diffusion where you’d corrupt words to semantically similar words (like “quick brown fox” -> “speedy black dog”) but kept finding that masking was easier for the model to uncover. Historically this goes back even further to https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09324, which made a generative MLM without framing it in diffusion math.
by ricardobeat | 2025-10-20 15:19:48+00:00
I don't know.. Servo has been in development for a decade and still has quite underwhelming performance and UX. The binary is 100MB+ on Mac, scrolling is janky, a google image search takes 10+ seconds to render and goes through very buggy states. Meanwhile Ladybird renders a legacy UI, but feels really fast and stable.
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-20 15:19:57+00:00
Yes, it was something we would do to maintain certain contracts. Sounds crazy, isn't: they used a significant portion of the capacity, anyway. They brought the auditors.

Real People would notice/care, but financially, it didn't matter. Contract said the edge had to be lost for a moment/restored. I've played both Incident Manager and SRE in this routine.

edit: Less often we'd do a more thorough test: power loss/full recovery. We'd disconnect more regularly given the simplicity.
by hermitcrab | 2025-10-20 15:20:27+00:00
To get to the Kármán line (100k) a mountain with a 60 degree slope would require a base of 115km. A cone with 115km diameter base has a volume of 3.5×10^5 km^3. Which is 3.5x10^14 m^3, which is about 10^15 kg of rock. So it is going to take you a while!
by froobius | 2025-10-20 15:20:53+00:00
That's a paradox that comes from getting ideas mixed up.

The most likely time to fail is always "right now", i.e. this is the part of the curve with the greatest height.

However, the average expected future lifetime increases as a thing ages, because survival is evidence of robustness.

Both of these statements are true and are derived from:

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

There is no contradiction.
by sfmz | 2025-10-20 15:21:21+00:00
You probably don't need very much news at all. I like learning interesting second-order effects of current events, but they aren't necessary for my life. Here's a few I found interesting lately:

Gen-Z doesn't go to parties anymore because they are on screens all day and/or have social anxiety

Photoshop tutorial business is cratering because people aren't interested in learning how to manipulate photos when they can just create one via text

Japanese guy called do-nothing-guy gets paid to go to restaurants with pretty women in Japan because apparently they can't get a date or are too shy or something terrible is happening with the social fabric in Japan idk what

Its interesting to think about automating the news, you'd need a news feed from every courthouse, twitter feed, sports arena, press release -- run them through various processes, identify trendlines, etc. no small task
by vidarh | 2025-10-20 15:21:24+00:00
My point is that this isn't "reckless" - it's a core part of the value of a closure.

We do this regularly enough in Ruby - usually with lambda rather than proc/blocks because of the return semantics, but you can do it just as safely with proc/blocks as long as you don't call "return" within them (there's no reason to, on the other hand).

It's a way of e.g. building generator methods that returns distinct callable objects without constructing a whole class. In that case the closure environment effectively becomes the instance variables.
by drivers99 | 2025-10-20 15:22:08+00:00
Ordered a founder's edition in August. Looks like I might get it this year (originally estimated October). Retro Recipes x Commodore posted a video update about the manufacturing process recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BffeaLbKHkw

(In my case, it's not about nostalgia. I actually have been using a shared one in a hackerspace to play around with 6502 machine language and want my own.)
by movpasd | 2025-10-20 15:22:31+00:00
I used Claude to get the outage start and ends from the post-event summaries for major historical AWS outages: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/pes/

The cumulative distribution actually ends up pretty exponential which (I think) means that if you estimate the amount of time left in the outage as the mean of all outages that are longer than the current outage, you end up with a flat value that's around 8 hours, if I've done my maths right.

Not a statistician so I'm sure I've committed some statistical crimes there!

Unfortunately I can't find an easy way to upload images of the charts I've made right now, but you can tinker with my data:

cause,outage_start,outage_duration,incident_duration Cell management system bug,2024-07-30T21:45:00.000000+0000,0.2861111111111111,1.4951388888888888 Latent software defect,2023-06-13T18:49:00.000000+0000,0.08055555555555555,0.15833333333333333 Automated scaling activity,2021-12-07T15:30:00.000000+0000,0.2861111111111111,0.3736111111111111 Network device operating system bug,2021-09-01T22:30:00.000000+0000,0.2583333333333333,0.2583333333333333 Thread count exceeded limit,2020-11-25T13:15:00.000000+0000,0.7138888888888889,0.7194444444444444 Datacenter cooling system failure,2019-08-23T03:36:00.000000+0000,0.24583333333333332,0.24583333333333332 Configuration error removed setting,2018-11-21T23:19:00.000000+0000,0.058333333333333334,0.058333333333333334 Command input error,2017-02-28T17:37:00.000000+0000,0.17847222222222223,0.17847222222222223 Utility power failure,2016-06-05T05:25:00.000000+0000,0.3993055555555555,0.3993055555555555 Network disruption triggering bug,2015-09-20T09:19:00.000000+0000,0.20208333333333334,0.20208333333333334 Transformer failure,2014-08-07T17:41:00.000000+0000,0.13055555555555556,3.4055555555555554 Power loss to servers,2014-06-14T04:16:00.000000+0000,0.08333333333333333,0.17638888888888887 Utility power loss,2013-12-18T06:05:00.000000+0000,0.07013888888888889,0.11388888888888889 Maintenance process error,2012-12-24T20:24:00.000000+0000,0.8270833333333333,0.9868055555555555 Memory leak in agent,2012-10-22T17:00:00.000000+0000,0.26041666666666663,0.4930555555555555 Electrical storm causing failures,2012-06-30T02:24:00.000000+0000,0.20902777777777776,0.25416666666666665 Network configuration change error,2011-04-21T07:47:00.000000+0000,1.4881944444444444,3.592361111111111
by dijit | 2025-10-20 15:22:37+00:00
No, it's based on the AMD Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA.

Jeri Ellsworth's was actually an ASIC.

She made a "C-One" which was FPGA based, but this one is different, the C64Ultimate uses Gideon Zweijtzer's design in the AMD Xilinx.
by byryan | 2025-10-20 15:22:39+00:00
If you're doing it yourself, learn Ansible, you'll do it once and be set forever.

You do not need "managed" database services. A managed database is no different from apt install postgesql followed by a scheduled backup.

Genuinely no disrespect, but these statements really make it seem like you have limited experience building an HA scalable system. And no, you don't need to be Netflix or Amazon to build software at scale, or require high availability.
by georgeecollins | 2025-10-20 15:22:59+00:00
I'm fine with series not following the books. But the show bugs me because it has great production values -- particularly the third season -- and great actors. But the writing and plotting is all over the place ranging to very bad. It is a bit dumb and always pretentious. It's the 70's version of Battlestar Galactica of our age.