MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-10-07 19:52:39+00:00
> You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks

No -- that's an incredibly reductive summary, and the attitude you display here is, if left unchecked, exactly what will allow something equally ridiculous like ChatControl to pass eventually.

There has been plenty of previous debate when innovations like postal mail, telegraph traffic and phone calls were introduced. This debate has resulted in laws, jurisprudence, and corresponding operating procedures for law enforcement.

You may believe there are no legitimate reasons to intercept private communications, but the actual laws of the country you live in right now say otherwise, I guarantee you. You may not like that, and/or not believe in the rule of law anymore anyway, but I can't help you with that.

What I can hopefully convince you of, is that there needs to be some way to bring modern technology in line with existing laws, while avoiding "9/11"-style breakdowns of civil rights.
by ggm | 2025-10-07 19:53:06+00:00
No mention is made of how this compares to the thresholds. They just report in 3 buckets of high/medium/low but the measurements are given in parts per billion. The highest PPB is given for total phthalates = 6,092 ppb.

Ingestion warning limits are given in μg/day -so how do you do a conversion?

Phthalates are used as plasticisers so this is probably from associated piping, tubing, sealant in the extraction & bottling plant equipment.
Show HN: DictaFlow – Privacy-first voice dictation for Windows (hold-to-talk)
by ryanshrott | 2025-10-07 19:53:25+00:00
We built DictaFlow because we were frustrated with existing dictation tools that always run in the background and don't work well in code editors or remote desktops. DictaFlow is a lightweight, privacy-first speech-to-text tool for Windows that only listens when you hold down the activation key and inserts text when you release. It works in any application (including terminals, IDEs, VDI/Citrix sessions), does context-aware formatting for code, math, and natural language, and processes nothing when idle. We don't store audio or transcripts on our servers. There's a free tier as well as a paid plan.

We'd love feedback from the HN community on how it performs, any features you'd like, or issues you encounter.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-07 19:53:55+00:00
Yeah, I didn't think much of it at first but you pointing out that the 400-800kg is likely spread widely (if not evenly) across much of the earth's surface while the 30kg is landing in one spot, is an interesting point.

I wonder how much aluminum oxide we get though from disintegrating meteors and other impacts every day. Quick search suggests 50-100t of mass from meteors on average each day - similar total to the dust. Those might be more concentrated and analagous to the starlink satellites.
by butlike | 2025-10-07 19:54:05+00:00
Javascript ajax was getting out of hand. Everyone wanted SPAs but managing the state of each button was becoming extremely unwieldy. Thousands of jQuery/js lines, the submit button wouldn't toggle to enabled once disabled...stuff like that. React came along and had prop state per element on a page (as they rebranded it, components), which helped immensely in this department.

Edit: and yes, as you said, it came from Facebook, so it wasn't just a solo developer's grad project; it had a large amount of support right out of the gate.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-10-07 19:54:51+00:00
So you used an existing binary that hits the special kernel API to query the batteries. If you want to do it yourself (ex. to make your own graphical widget or something) then you have to hit that API yourself. And yes, sysfs is sort of an API too, but it's a simple, uniform API that in many cases can just be used via read() instead of needing to figure out some specialized interface.
by 0xblinq | 2025-10-07 19:54:59+00:00
Yes. It's also recommended to not use much of it and do almost everything else with turbo drive, or turbo frames, or with turbo streams, or with whichever convoluted magic you can do to avoid it until you can't anymore. Then you use Stimulus. Yes, I know it.

The fact people can't escape JavaScript doesn't stop people from being JS haters.
by teamechomode | 2025-10-07 19:55:06+00:00
We open-sourced Echo Mode, a lightweight middleware for reducing tone/persona drift in long-running LLM interactions.

It works as a finite-state protocol (Sync / Resonance / Insight / Calm), maintaining consistent conversational “state” across turns. Under the hood it tracks a Sync Score (think BLEU for tone) and uses EWMA drift detection + repair loops to restore consistency.

Written in TypeScript, works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and other APIs. The OSS version is free under Apache-2.0, and part of a larger system we’re developing at EchoMode.io to provide enterprise-grade tone stability.

GitHub: https://github.com/Seanhong0818/Echo-Mode

Would love feedback from others building long-context or multi-agent frameworks.
by NewUser76312 | 2025-10-07 19:55:12+00:00
That's a cool little robot, and I see the appeal, definitely as an educational toy. I don't think the fidelity is there for real autonomous research. But the bigger issue imo is that there's no way this should cost $2000.

You've got a $250 computer, some lidar+camera sensor for maybe $1-200, 6 servos, and cheap plastic. Plus you want to charge a $50/mo software subscription fee for some software product, whatever I guess that's beside the point.

No shade on the idea because low-cost robotics is an unsolved need for the future. But this current iteration is just not competing well with other alternatives. Perhaps this is more of a comment on what we can accomplish in the West vs what's possible in Asia.

Why would I not go for this guy for $1600, and attach an arm? https://www.unitree.com/go2

It's not an apples-to-apples product comparison, but you get the point. There's just so much more raw value offered per dollar elsewhere.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-07 19:55:24+00:00
You don't tend to see it because it's so small it gets buried and lumped in with a bunch of other costs, either capex or as operating costs (if modeled as a lease). It's ~1% of the total costs in most markets, so the only people who think it's worth mentioning are people advocating for nuclear power, since energy produced per acre is one of the only metrics where nuclear comes out on top.
by steve_gh | 2025-10-07 19:56:18+00:00
I have definitely found this. A few months ago I tested Claude coding a web task in Rails vs Flask. Claude did much better with Rails - I think the opinionated Rails conventions helped the AI. However, Claude didn't complete the ask in Rails. A couple of weeks ago I revisited a similar task with one of the latest AIs. It sailed through it in Rails (didn't try Flask).
by maxglute | 2025-10-07 19:56:24+00:00
50%+ of the world population is low to low middle income, and they're all going to want to increase emission by 4x for parity high income life styles. Realistically 8x since developing = catching up on infra build out, i.e. extremely emissions intensive fuckton of steel and concrete. IIRC 50% more than current consumption by 2050, i.e. consuming much more is basically locked in and that's based on presumption that developing countries are fucking inept and slow rolling development because they don't have a system to do a PRC modernization push otherwise we'd be looking at 200/300/400% increases in steel and concrete. Net zero is pipe dream, it's not going to happen. We can try to make the transition greener, but it's not going to be green. Ultimately, enviroment pilled brains need to remember, development/poverty reduction is going to be a net good that benefits far more people than climate change will fuck over / displace.
by uniqueuid | 2025-10-07 19:56:34+00:00
Nitpick:

1. Censorship in German constitutional law is only defined as the state pre-screening before publication. That's a very narrow area and rarely applies. Most people from an US legal tradition will consider censorship to include other things such as mandating removal of certain content after the fact, but that's different legal branches with different mechanisms (i.e. libel).

2. What Schulz is talking about in the second link definitely is state censorship (blocking a TV station), but it's not implemented by Germany but on the EU level. (Germany is still involved - complicated matter).

Finally we should appreciate that the US government's opinion on censorship seems to have pivoted quite a lot, so I would expect free speech maximalism to not remain a very popular position on the government level (even though many people may still support it, either naïvely or with robust arguments).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-07 19:56:46+00:00
You're probably right, but the law tends to have set ways of doing things.

Mental health restrictions are something that can be incredibly abused. The CIA and the NSA like to use "mental instability" as a way to discredit and sanction people that "stray off the reservation" -an awful term (why did they hire them in the first place, then, if they are so mentally unstable?). The Soviet Union was notorious for using it as a weapon against dissidents.

It is (and should be) very difficult to restrict the freedom of folks that have issues with mental health. I know of one chap, that I consider a close acquaintance, if not a friend, that is in very bad physical shape. He's about 400 pounds, can barely walk, if he falls down, he can't get back up, yet insists that he can live alone, with no assistance. If any one of us bring up the fact that he's basically a "dead man walking," he shuts us down, so we have to watch him do this to himself. I have asked social workers if there's anything we can do (we live in New York, which is quite a "nanny" state), and they say no. He's of sound mind (arguable), and no one can force him to have a home health aide, or put him in assisted living. He's quite likely to be found dead in his apartment, one day, and he seems fine with that.

But when someone wants to kill themselves, they very much could be a real danger to folks that don't want to go down with them -even if they swear they aren't. It's fairly important that the authorities have the power to intervene.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-07 19:56:54+00:00
Any mention of "HRM" is incomplete without this analysis:

https://arcprize.org/blog/hrm-analysis

This here looks like a stripped down version of HRM - possibly drawing on the ablation studies from this very analysis.

Worth noting that HRMs aren't generally applicable in the same way normal transformer LLMs are. Or, at least, no one has found a way to apply them to the typical generative AI tasks yet.

I'm still reading the paper, but I expect this version to be similar - it uses the same tasks as HRMs as examples. Possibly quite good at spatial reasoning tasks (ARC-AGI and ARC-AGI-2 are both spatial reasoning benchmarks), but it would have to be integrated into a larger more generally capable architecture to go past that.
by ryandvm | 2025-10-07 19:57:05+00:00
I feel like this would be a good use of "provocative compliance".

1. Create an open network of off-the-shelf cameras watching public roadways

2. Load up the database with license plate numbers of local politicians and/or law enforcement

3. Create a "Where is my senator?" web site that uses that data

4. Watch all hell break loose

5. Get distributed stalking without a warrant outlawed
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-07 19:57:18+00:00
That's more a reflection of your neighbors not wanting to deal with your door-to-door nuisance of a business. If you have people that want to buy food from you, exactly nothing will happen. Same deal with e.g. babysitting/day care. Exactly no one will care if you do it or if you casually offer it in conversation with a parent. People might get annoyed if you go door-to-door soliciting about it and interrupt their day.

Ability vs. legality is the point; these things in practice aren't that heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted, and in fact no one will check up on you or try to stop you at all unless you piss someone off by somehow turning it into an annoyance. I don't know why you'd even think to check whether most of the stuff you listed is legal.

Using car restrictions (which are obviously mostly anti-consumer, especially for EVs) as some justification for similar actions in phones is interesting, to say the least.
by p_ing | 2025-10-07 19:57:27+00:00
> ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat.

That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.

Pre-Wine, would you have argued that a software vendor is intentionally preventing their software from running on any non-Windows OS?

Or was it just that their audience wasn't on said non-Windows OS?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-07 19:57:49+00:00
> Federal law supersedes state law

It does. That doesn’t mean federal agents supersede state law.

California restricted civil arrests at its courts [1]. The Congress can pass a law superseding this. What ICE can’t unilaterally do, legally, is ignore it. They have, the same as they’ve ignored federal court orders.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
by k3nx | 2025-10-07 19:57:59+00:00
MSSQL server has a Linux build - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux...

If your CRUD apps are Winforms I had success with Wine, but you might want to try something else. I've heard good things about avaloniaui.net but never liked XAML so I haven't tried it.

Good luck!
Ask HN: How many of you now use AI over doctors
by wonderwonder | 2025-10-07 19:58:03+00:00
I have recently essentially ceased using doctors for most run of the mill items and instead turned to Ai to diagnose and recommend treatment and then purchased the medications from online pharmacies.

For example I order my own blood work. I decide what labs to order and interpret the results via chatGPT / Grok, etc. I then order medications via online pharmacies. Recently started taking High blood pressure medication all worked out with Ai and the results have been great.

I still use doctors for things I cannot such as colonoscopy, etc but for everything else I use Ai.

I just got frustrated at having to wait 6 - 8 weeks to see a doctor, get labs and then wait another 6 - 8 weeks to see them to review the labs when I can get the entire thing resolved myself in a week.

Anyone else do the same?
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-10-07 19:58:06+00:00
> proactive interception of mail, physical or electronic

Lawful interception is not proactive: it requires a judicial order to collect plaintext communications from/to specifically identified individuals (resident in the country demanding the interception), for a limited time and for a specific purpose.

ChatControl, which I strongly argue AGAINST would sort-of be what you describe. But: I. Am. Arguing. AGAINST. That.
by wafisher | 2025-10-07 19:58:13+00:00
MTA | Full-time | NYC | 3x/week in office (onsite)

We're hiring one engineering manager and one UX designer.

Our team works on all the (non-ad) screens in the subway, as well as two apps (TrainTime and the MTA app) and our website. We're a team of 20, mostly engineers, a few PMs and a designer. We operate like a startup within the MTA and are responsible for all customer-facing digital endpoints.

To apply EM: https://careers.mta.org/jobs/16696562-manager-product-develo... (ignore the job title and description, this is the EM role. You can mention that you found out about this opportunity through HN in a cover letter) Designer: https://mta.breezy.hr/p/7d405a5cafd6
by opo | 2025-10-07 19:58:28+00:00
It should be noted that those low costs for solar installations are not including consumer rooftop solar. The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations:

https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.

Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-07 19:58:49+00:00
it's pro-freedom until it's your gay nephew that tries to kill himself because his family bullied him into seeing an unlicensed "therapist". Queer kids who go to these centers are twice as likely as other queer kids to attempt suicide (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/lgb-suicide-ct-...). This isn't just another prong of the whole conservative "actually it's a violation of my rights any time someone tells me I can't violate your rights" thing, it's gonna result in dead kids.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-07 19:58:56+00:00
I think both Apple and Google should be able to set their own rules if they're just acting in self-interest. Some think they should be regulated due to being a duopoly, I disagree, but at the same time it's a reasonable argument to make.

Government crackdown is the scarier thing. It's suspicious seeing both "private" companies locking things down, while at the same time the US govt is increasingly making special threats and deals with big corps, and also Europe is trying to clamp down on encrypted messaging. So yeah the outcry over Android seems justified. Wouldn't be surprised if WEI comes back too.
by apeytavin | 2025-10-07 19:59:03+00:00
On BASIC: Yes it does require an internet connection and until we figure out how this works for you it will remain free of use!

It is required to run them, not to create them. And it's not about running "pick_up_socks", this one can already run on your robot. BASIC is required to chain it with other tasks such as navigating to another part of your house and then running another skill to drop the sock somewhere for example

Thank you for the remark, we will make it clearer in the docs

As a consequence: The robot does not necessarily require Internet to run, but if you want it to chain tasks while talking and using memory, yes it does.

As for the googly eyes, give me a minute...
by blackbear_ | 2025-10-07 19:59:08+00:00
Strang's Linear algebra and learning from data is extremely practical and focused on ML

https://math.mit.edu/~gs/learningfromdata/

Although if your goal is to learn ML you should probably focus on that first and foremost, then after a while you will see which concepts from linear algebra keep appearing (for example, singular value decomposition, positive definite matrices, etc) and work your way back from there
by JohnFen | 2025-10-07 19:59:28+00:00
> I suppose I own an emergency solar powered radio but if a hurricane happened. does that reallyt change anything?

When everything else is down, your cell phone doesn't work anymore, there is no internet, etc., then AM radio is going to be the next-to-last means available to get essential information about what's happening, where you should go, where you should avoid, what help is where, etc.

The last channel of information is going to be ham radio.

> Instead, we should deregulate AM radio. Make it free to use.

That would just mean that it wouldn't be very useful to anybody because the airwaves will be full of people trying to shout over each other.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-10-07 19:59:39+00:00
The market alone doesn’t work well with things like training that had feedback loops of several years. In German there is the term “Schweinezyklus”. It goes like this:

* companies complain about lack of trained workers

* more people start training

* after a few years companies complain about too many workers and don’t hire them

* people stop training

* companies complain about lack of trained workers

I was part of this in the 90s in mechanical engineering. When I started studying the job market was great. When I finished there were no jobs. Luckily I could jump to programming.

I think we are seeing the same with CS now. Too many people jumped into it.
by lukan | 2025-10-07 19:59:39+00:00
Ok, so you want to break Encryption by law demand. Because this is what this means. Or how exactly would it work, technically? Signal does not know the private key of the 2 parties. Signal would have to inject a infected update into the client .. which is also malware. I rather have just those on target devices with a warrant, instead of breaking all encryption.

Or would you go extreme and outlaw decentraliced encrypted communication alltogether?
by guilamu | 2025-10-07 19:59:42+00:00
Hello, thank you very much for your very insightful comment!

The cookie theft is also IMHO the most probable scenario. The malicious extension is the only thing that make sense to me.

log out all devices: done

rotate password and 2FA: done

switch to a hardware key/WebAuthn: not done yet

audit browser extensions: done (I'm using only what I think are very "secure" ones: Bypass Paywalls Clean, Control Panel for Twitter , Correcteur d'orthographe et reformulateur — LanguageTool , Google Images Restored, I still don't care about cookies, Keepa - Amazon Price Tracker, Reddit Enhancement Suite, SingleFile , uBlock Origin , Voir image (https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage)

scan the box: done

revoke any third‑party app access tied to Reddit: there are none

Anyhow, thank again!
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-07 19:59:54+00:00
You're saying these laws exist, they actively restrict our devices and our freedoms, but it's okay because they're complaint-driven (aka snitching).

That's worse, not better. Freedom by definition isn't subject to the whims of my neighbors.

---

Edit, posting too fast, because I can't reply directly: What you are advocating for is a police state. Think about it:

1. Laws should be intentionally overbroad: Make everything illegal, then only enforce when something goes wrong

2. Competence is determined retroactively: You only find out if you were "allowed" to do something after a disaster

3. Rights depend on outcomes: You had the right to wire that outlet... unless it sparked, then retroactively you didn't

4. Selective enforcement is good, actually: Laws that could be used against anyone but usually aren't are fine

This is nonsense.
by shawntan | 2025-10-07 20:00:01+00:00
That analysis provided a very non-abrasive wording of their evaluation of HRM and its contributions. The comparison with a recursive / universal transformer on the same settings is telling.

"These results suggest that the performance on ARC-AGI is not an effect of the HRM architecture. While it does provide a small benefit, a replacement baseline transformer in the HRM training pipeline achieves comparable performance."
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-10-07 20:00:01+00:00
I could be wrong but I think the parent comment's point isn't that no one cares, but that the scale of the issue—today and spanning far into the future—isn't presently regarded by people in a proportional manner.

So, people care, but not as much as it seems like they should.

The parent also used the phrase "care more"; they aren't saying people don't care at all, so they acknowledge that people can care about more than one thing at a time.