MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fletchowns | 2025-10-25 00:15:45+00:00
I've been using Nextcloud for years, but I've never used the web UI. Windows desktop app for syncing my Documents folder, and Android app for synchronizing a few folders on my phone, as well as the "append only" upload of my photo reel that something like SyncThing doesn't support. Works great, never had any issues with Nextcloud. The real value is in the companion apps.

I use a cron job to back up Nextcloud to B2 and S3 Glacier.
by avianlyric | 2025-10-25 00:17:25+00:00
I’m not sure point to the UK is a good example. There are plenty of weird and obscure laws that simply aren’t enforced or followed anymore. Everything from laws about handling salmon suspiciously, through to various right around who can drive sheep across Tower Bridge.

Those laws survive not because anyone considers them a good idea, but simply because the issues caused by ignoring them are substantially smaller than the effort involved in removing them.

We also have a bunch of laws that are still followed, but only in the most technical sense. Every “Parliament route” train schedule falls into that category. Train services that must be provided at least once a day, sometimes only once a week, which nobody actually uses, and in some cases only travel to stations with no practical public entrances. Those laws don’t survive because anyone things they’re a good idea, it’s just easier to run the train, than it is to get parliament time to abolish the law.
by ssuds | 2025-10-25 00:17:40+00:00
I presume you're not in the US - the numbers you quoted here align with the costs I observed for heat pumps in India (https://www.heatpumped.org/p/you-can-have-it-in-any-color-as...)

Skilled labor in the US is expensive! Most of the install costs come from labor, not equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars is pretty typical for a heat pump installation.

(For what it's worth, the person you're quoting is referencing a whole home system, either ducted or multi-zone ductless. I think you're referencing a single-zone ductless. Those are cheaper, but still are typically $5-10k installed from a licensed contractor in the states)
by kleinishere | 2025-10-25 00:18:12+00:00
For the many posters recommending BPA free paper - does anyone have suggestions / a link for a reliable seller?

I looked on Amazon after another receipt printer post on HN but couldn’t find anything that provided confidence in the BPA characterization. ULINE is quantities are absurd for personal use. Imagine their most be a decent alternative but never see any named.
by ChristopherDrum | 2025-10-25 00:19:17+00:00
Author here. Yes, I’m glad someone agrees with my assessment on the documentation quality. It pulls off a pretty amazing hat-trick, considering it was the first exposure anyone had with such a program.

`sc` is the only option I’m aware of that is like a “spreadsheet vim” though there are likely others.

Interestingly enough, the original name of sc was . . . wait for it . . . vc
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-25 00:19:17+00:00
During COVID people were losing their minds about one in a million chance of complications caused by vaccination. I did some research (but actually), and found that that’s comparable to the rate of complications for any use of an injected drug or even saline. Just piercing the skin with a tiny needle is a “medical procedure” with a non-zero risk, especially in the elderly and the immunocompromised.

I had a couple of MRIs recently and got curious about gadolinium contrast. Again, there is a non-zero risk, but if you eliminate the cohort with reduced kidney function and those getting regular repeated MRIs, the risk is comparable to the use of an I/V, which is how it’s administered.

The only thing that upset me was that the staff didn’t ask me verbally about kidney issues to double-check. They also didn’t remind me to drink a bunch of water to flush it out of my system. (Some articles recommend administering a diuretic.)

For that matter they didn’t check me properly form metal fragments either!

Similarly, I’ve had vaccinations administered where I had to remind the doctor to clean the area with alcohol first and to tap the syringe to get rid of the bubbles.

Bad procedures are more dangerous than the drugs being administered!
by sgc | 2025-10-25 00:19:31+00:00
My kids went to charter/public Waldorf. I personally am Catholic (not Protestant-adjacent like Waldorf tradition) and even though they do have some weird ceremonies that I am happy the charter Waldorfs don't adopt, my decidedly agnostic-to-atheist siblings sent their kids to private and charter Waldorfs and did not seem to find it so much of a problem. A Dragon Pagaent focused on Saint George and the Dragon (which we did have) is not much of a problem for most I would say. There is a chance you had a bad school. There are problems in every school, but none centered around Waldorf curriculum for any of us, and collectively we have over 50 school years of our kids in several different Waldorfs around the US. Any older pedagogy: Waldorf, Montessori, traditional schooling - they all need improvement. Still, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
by mystraline | 2025-10-25 00:19:51+00:00
> Undereducated, worrying about their likely life threatening potential illness or injury. That's basically under duress

I was never communicated about gadolinium pollution. Not once.

And yes, on my recent MRI, I explicitly asked why there was metal particulate in my joint. "I dont know, sometimes it happens'... No you fucking tool of a doctor. Its gadolinium.

And I finally find out here.
by didibus | 2025-10-25 00:19:53+00:00
> This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.

That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".

I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
by ebb_earl_co | 2025-10-25 00:19:54+00:00
I’m in the same boat, and what tipped me there is the ethical non-starter that OpenAI and Anthropic represent. They strip-mined the Web, ripped off copyrighted works in neat space, admitting that going through the proper channels was a waste of business resources.

They believe that the entirety of human ingenuity should be theirs at no cost, and then they have the audacity to SELL their ill-gotten collation of that knowledge back to you? All the while persuading world governments that their technology is the new operating system of the 21st century.

Give me a dystopian break, honestly.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-25 00:20:04+00:00
That's the wrong way to look at it. The Bible does not refer to other laws as a source of authority. Saying murder is "just" illegal killing is the real meaningless statement. Clearly people in the Bible are allowed to fight and defend themselves. Murder is typically intentional and unnecessary killing of someone else for malicious reasons (or no reason at all). Malicious reasons would typically be spite, greed, or convenience.
by torginus | 2025-10-25 00:20:17+00:00
I think you're underselling the field of language processing - it wasn't just a single field but a bunch of subfields with their own little journals, papers and techniques - someone who researched machine translation approached problems differently to somebody else who did sentiment analysis for marketing.

I had a friend who did PhD research in NLP and I had a problem of extracting some structured data from unstructured text, and he told me to just ask ChatGPT to do it for me.

Basically ChatGPT is almost always better at language-based tasks than most specialized techniques for the specific problems the subfields meant to address, that were developed over decades.

That's a pretty effing huge deal, even if it falls short of the AGI 2027 hype
Google Demanded My Drivers Lic Before Letting Me Read an Article
by keernan | 2025-10-25 00:21:06+00:00
2025-10-24

ME: Yesterday I tried to read an article and google blocked me demanding I upload my driver’s license, passport, or other information to prove my age (I declined). What was that all about?

GoogleAI: The prompt for age verification is due to Google's new system, which uses AI to estimate users' ages to comply with a global push for online age-verification laws. This system may flag adult users as minors, restricting access to certain content until their age is confirmed with a government ID, credit card, or a selfie.

How Google's AI age verification works

• AI age estimation: Google's system analyzes user activity, such as search history and YouTube viewing habits, to estimate a user's age.

• Widespread enforcement: While initially affecting only a "small set" of users, this system is now rolling out more widely and affecting multiple Google services, including Search, YouTube, and the Google Play Store.

• Restricted content: When the AI flags an account as potentially belonging to someone underage, it applies the same restrictions as if the user had self-identified as a minor. This includes turning on SafeSearch and restricting access to mature content.

• Incorrect flagging: The system is not foolproof and has been known to incorrectly flag adult users, causing them to be locked out of content they previously accessed without issue.

Your options for age verification If your account was incorrectly flagged, you can verify your age using one of Google's approved methods:

• Government ID: Upload a photo of a government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport. Google states it stores these documents securely and deletes them after your age has been successfully verified.

• Credit card: Provide your credit card details to confirm your age. Any authorization is temporary and will be fully refunded.

• Selfie: Use a selfie-based verification service.

Privacy concerns and context

For users who are hesitant to provide private documents to a large tech company, this situation presents a privacy conflict. While it's Google's official process, providing personal information is a risk many users are unwilling to take.

This initiative is driven by pressure from lawmakers in various countries, including the U.S. and U.K., who are pushing for stricter age-verification measures to protect minors online. However, this is also a highly debated issue, with concerns raised about the impact on adult users' privacy and freedom of access to information.
by arendtio | 2025-10-25 00:21:22+00:00
You are comparing 'excellent implementations' with 'crappy tool'. Technically, both can be equally good.

I would not prefer email for multiple reasons:

- First, you always need an account to send one, and therefore have to decide which identity you want to attach to a communication. With a form, you sometimes can skip that decision. However, I suspect that in this case, this argument does not apply, because you probably have to attach an identity either way.

- However, email is one of the most unreliable protocols due to its poor solutions for handling spam. For example, if someone from outside my organisation tries to contact me, I can never be sure whether the email reaches me, due to various factors in spam detection. Sometimes an email is delivered to my mailbox, sometimes to the spam folder, and sometimes it just gets lost in transmission. I had even cases where I sent an email to two people in the same organization, and one would receive it and the other would not, even though they were using the same email server.
by fooker | 2025-10-25 00:21:53+00:00
There's an interesting question here.

Would a single human/entity learn more in ..say.. three million years or would short lived ones evolving over three million years and then ~20 years of education learn more?

The current AI tech cycle is focusing on the first, but we don't really know if there are benefits of both.

There's no obvious way to combine these yet.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-25 00:22:20+00:00
> And yes, I too have gadolinium retention in my joint. 3 MRIs. And no, was not told this was a complication... But I'm sure the papers I signed included weasel words to that effect.

The presence of the gadolinium is not a complication. At best, it is an unintended side effect whose clinical significance is not known.

A complication is an unexpected/non-routine, negative outcome. We now have learned that the deposition is something to expect. There is no new information around clinical changes that one can attribute to gadolinium.
by AvAn12 | 2025-10-25 00:22:45+00:00
Computers are already fast and efficient at multiplication - optimized long ago. Transformers are fast and efficient at working with sequences of tokens. Tools are not universal. A hammer is not a good violin bow. A MRI machine is not a good relational database. This extends to the natural world too. A zebra is not a good dairy animal. And a human poet may or may not be a good surgeon. It’s good to explore what things can do beyond their intrinsic nature - but expect to encounter limits eventually.
by flutas | 2025-10-25 00:22:53+00:00
IMO the implementation (for me at least) is ... terrible. Why reach for this when it's, at the end of the day, just the exact same as NDK work in C++ but in Swift.

You have to use Kotlin / Other UI setup anyways (or their fully-native example, use OpenGL to draw the screen[0]), and on top of that statically assign the package path and class name in the Swift code, while making it an external func in the kotlin code[1]. You then also get to deal with the annoyances that come up with native libs.

kotlin side: /* * A native method that is implemented by the 'helloswift' native library, * which is packaged with this application. */ external fun stringFromSwift(): String

swift side: @_cdecl("Java_org_example_helloswift_MainActivity_stringFromSwift")

[0]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-android-examples/blob/mai...

[1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-android-examples/tree/mai...
by rft | 2025-10-25 00:22:58+00:00
I don't have any links for assembled boards, but there seem to be some available [1]. You can find the PCB files here [2] including more documentation. The same page also has a Telegram group link to find people near you who might be able to help out.

I got my PCBs made via JLCPCB, but there are other options as well. Pay attention to select the correct PCB thickness, noted in the Readme. I fell into that trap and had to order again. Sourcing the USB port with the correct footprint was a bit annoying, I just ended up ordering a selection of kits with multiple variants from Aliexpress.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699184

[2] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter
by redwall_hp | 2025-10-25 00:23:00+00:00
Exactly...it's also not reasonable to be asked to prove a negative. "Prove it's safe" (equivalent to "prove there isn't any danger") is "prove there isn't a teapot orbiting Venus" territory.

Every procedure has some negligible risk, and doctors are trained to mitigate major risks to peoples' health with screenings, medications and surgeries that are of lesser risk than the alternative of inaction. "Safe" is a reasonable explanation for the vast majority of laymen they have to communicate with.
by adrianmonk | 2025-10-25 00:23:16+00:00
> every single natural gas water heater is connected to 120V power for the ignition circuit

Mine isn't. During a long power outage, I still had hot water.

I was a bit surprised the water heater was working since I was pretty sure it had an electronic control system. So I went and looked, and sure enough, it was electronic, and somehow the LED was flashing blue like normal!

It turns out the electronics are powered by a thermopile which is heated by the pilot light.
by halfcat | 2025-10-25 00:23:30+00:00
> How much time have you spent running a coding agent like Claude Code

I spent a month trying to get it to build ImGui apps in C++ and Python. I did ImGui because I wanted to try something that’s not totally mainstream. I cancelled before the second month.

It would essentially get stuck over and over and could never get itself out of the mud. In every case I had to either figure out what was wrong and explain it, or fix the code myself, which was mentally taxing after it makes a batch of changes and, because I don’t trust it, I have to sort of re-validate-from-scratch every time I need to dig it out of the mud.

In the end it wasn’t faster, and definitely wasn’t producing better quality. And I’m not particularly fast.

The best analogy I can come up with is it’s like the difference between building a SpaceX rocket, and making a cake that looks like a rocket. You probably think that’s absurd, no one would try to use a cake that looks like a rocket. But it’s a really good cake. It blows smoke and has a system of hydraulics and catapults that make it look like it’s taking off. And the current situation is, people look at the cake rocket and think, “it’s not perfect but it’s basically 70% there and we will figure out the rest before long”. Except you won’t. It’s a cake.

And then we point to the documentation, and tests it built as evidence it’s not cake. But those are cake too.

So then the question is, if you live in a simulation made of cake but it’s indistinguishable from reality, does it matter?
by cjensen | 2025-10-25 00:24:49+00:00
As someone with CKD and scheduled for an MRI, this was anxiety-inducing.

The Cleveland Clinic has a good overview[1]. Since there have been no reports of NSF in 15 years, I don't think it's rational to avoid MRIs based on gadolinium retention concerns.

[1] https://www.ormanager.com/briefs/study-mri-contrast-agent-ca...
by keernan | 2025-10-25 00:25:04+00:00
OP Here:

I posted because of the very obvious effort to remove anonymity from the internet. BTW, my post is a copy of my inquiry to Google AI and the AI response.

By way of context of the request:

I am from the USA. I do not recall the article. I didn't read it because there was no way I was going to provide the authentication Google demanded. I was using Chrome as the browser at the time. I was also logged into my Chrome account. I am 73 years old btw.

I found it interesting that a selfie was ok. There have been sites for several years now that will generate faces of imaginary people. I wonder if that will work.
by crote | 2025-10-25 00:25:06+00:00
> Laws remain in force until they are formally: * Struck down by a court as unconstitutional or otherwise invalid.

False. They are still in force - they have just become unenforceable. There's a crucial difference, as the US is currently finding out: as long as they are in the books, a Supreme Court decision can instantly render them enforceable again - even against the wishes of the population.

The proper thing to do would be to "garbage collect" unenforceable laws, but politicians are (understandably) hesitant to spend political capital on it when it doesn't provide any tangible return.
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-25 00:25:24+00:00
Remember: The season that you need heat is the season with the least sunshine. Solar is only cheap as you claim due to net metering; without pairing it with batteries or some other form of storage, you're pushing your heating cost on others by flooding the grid with electricity when it isn't needed.

Now, I will gladly point out that I have a roof of solar panels, and benefit from subsidies: It's important to understand that solar currently is unsustainable economically and will only be sustainable with more R&D on storage.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-25 00:26:10+00:00
The threat model described in TFA is that someone convinces your agent via prompt injection to exfiltrate secrets. The simple way to do this is to make an outbound network connection (posting with curl or something) but it’s absolutely possible to tell a model to exfiltrate in other ways. Including embedding the secret in a Unicode string that the code itself delivers to outside users when run. If we weren’t living in science fiction land I’d say “no way this works” but we (increasingly) do so of course it does.
by Animats | 2025-10-25 00:26:19+00:00
There are too many towns like that. No purpose, but still on life support.

Some years ago I was on a goth bulletin board, and a teenager was moaning about how his town sucked. Most of us thought teen angst. Then I looked up the stats on his town. Average age 55+. All factories closed. Primary revenue stream Social Security and various welfare programs. Most stores closed. High school still operating for a few students but teachers commute from elsewhere. The kid started to get advice on how to get out of that "Paper Girl" situation.

You're not obligated to go down with the ship.

Japan is much better at winding down towns. It helps that all infrastructure and education is supported by national taxes. Except for Tokyo and Osaka, everything is losing population. [1] 9 million empty houses.

[1] https://thedailyguardian.com/world/japan/japans-vanishing-fu...
by simonw | 2025-10-25 00:27:00+00:00
I agree that quoting a model's answer to someone else is bad form - you can get a model to say ANYTHING if you prompt it to, so a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation to try and prove a point is meaningless slop.

I find models vastly more useful than most technical books in my own work because I know how to feed in the right context and then ask them the right questions about it.

There isn't a book on earth that could answer the question "which remaining parts of my codebase still use the .permission_allowed() method and what edge-cases do they have that would prevent them from being upgraded to the new .allowed() mechanism"?
by shakna | 2025-10-25 00:28:14+00:00
It is underpinning, as it is the most frequently cited in the entire paper.

It is underpinning, as the claims in both introduction and conclusion are precipitate to it.

The correction:

> After personal communication with the radiologists the administered Gd-contained contrast agent was documented in the MR examination reports of the mentioned nine patients incompletely and inexactly as Gd–DTPA by themselves. There is solely one MR contrast agent used in the described observation period: Gd–DTPA–BMA. Therefore, all mentioned nine patients received Gd–DTPA–BMA and not Gd–DTPA.

Means that Gd-DTPA is irrelevant. Guess which is analysed here?
by fluoridation | 2025-10-25 00:28:16+00:00
>price is still extremely important and doesn't really factor into the definition of the best

Heh. Who says it doesn't?

>Taken to the extreme, Imagine [...]

Okay. Likewise, imagine a computer exactly like you've described, except it costs five cents and measures a cubic kilometer. Sure, there may be a couple people for whom operating such a gigantic machine is no problem, but the vast majority of the world will never use it. So the size of the computer also doesn't factor into whether it's "the best", right? And so on for any single property you care to name.

Yeah, no. The price is as much a part of a product as its physical shape. If Macs cost about the same as non-Macs, maybe they'd the most popular computers in the world, but they're not. And even in that case, they would not be the best. If, say, the program I need to run doesn't run on a Mac, the best computer for me would not be a Mac, it would be whatever computer is able to run it.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-25 00:29:15+00:00
> There's a big difference between perfection and "Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Now Lower Than Chance"[1]. I don't think their intentions are bad, but they are woefully incompetent at many basic things.

As it happens, the daily practice of medicine does not require interpretation of p-values. Indeed, medicine existed before the p-value.

The people who create studies that ultimately guide policy decisions are specialized (much like people who write GPU drivers are different from those who run inference)