MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by behringer | 2025-10-19 16:30:57+00:00
It's harder than that, because your ears have their own frequency response that can only be measured by your consciousness.

I've found a lot of enjoyment in equalizing as best you can with hardware, and then doing the finishing touches against your ears.

Take a frequency generator, I use a web one, and play a tone that matches your eq knob, and work your way through making sure all the tones are at the same volume. You'll have to do this a few times.

You might be surprised at how good it will sound. Especially the upper ranges which will usually be far too low if you only calibrated with mics and hardware and not your wetware.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-19 16:31:02+00:00
We've observed what happens when you cave to Trump and his goons: they will want more and turn on you anyway. ABC settled and paid Trump $16M just for his FCC chair to later threaten their license over Jimmy Kimmel's comments. I'm glad these universities have a spine and aren't signing onto this attempt at an authoritarian takeover of higher education.
by mjr00 | 2025-10-19 16:31:13+00:00
tbh none of this sounds like "senior engineer" qualities, and leans more toward "working at larger companies/in larger teams." From my perspective at startups/SMBs:

> “I’ll Just Fix It”

Yes please. Diving into unfamiliar areas of code and being able to fix problems outside of your wheelhouse is critically important. This doesn't mean stepping on people's toes or subverting processes e.g. design/code review, but just being willing to take ownership and not just shrug and say "not my problem".

> You’re expected to build fences.

Again, this is a big business thing and not a senior engineer thing. As a senior engineer in a team of 250 there are more barriers, but a senior engineer in a team of 20? You shouldn't be building very many fences.

> Working Nights and Weekends

This is a cultural thing that comes from the top. Goes beyond the scope of just senior engineers but I'll say that in my experience, if you're at a startup nobody is going to complain about you working nights and weekends. Again, this is a "large company" thing where slow and steady is more important than fast results.

> Asking a Lot of Questions

Dumb. I mean yes, if you're a senior engineer and asking questions like "what's a for loop" you'll raise eyebrows, but all of the best engineers (and managers for that matter) I worked with at Amazon etc all asked questions. In fact asking questions--extremely pointed and insightful questions--was basically all Jassy did in AWS meetings when I was there.

Anyway this article is mainly crap, IMO.
Show HN: Browser-based PDF form fields detection (YOLO-based)
by nip | 2025-10-19 16:31:52+00:00
Hey HN!

Last week, Joe Barrow released CommonForms [1], a set of open models for automatically detecting form fields in PDFs.

He trained two models, FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L, on a dataset of 55k documents. You can read more about his approach in the arXiv paper [2].

As someone who's been searching for reliable models to auto-detect form fields (one of the last hard problems in PDF form filling), I was seriously impressed by the quality of these models. I wanted to give them the attention and distribution they deserve, so I created a fully browser-based implementation that handles both detection and field addition.

My implementation relies on his models and onnx runtime web + some post-processing. I plan on publishing a small browser library to encapsulate it in the coming days to make it easier to deploy anywhere (currently you'd have to fork / copy my code)

Happy to answer any questions about the browser-based implementation!

Questions about the models themselves should be directed to Joe, who I believe is also on HN [3]

[1] https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jbarrow
by Jordan-117 | 2025-10-19 16:32:45+00:00
Not that much of a difference tbh. If one traditional machine allows one worker to do the work of twenty in half the time, that's still a big net loss in those jobs, even if it technically creates one.

The real issue is that AI/robotics are machines that can theoretically replace any job -- at a certain point, there's nowhere for people to reskill to. The fact that it's been most disruptive in fields that have always been seen as immune to automation kind of underscores that point.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-19 16:32:46+00:00
> No short-circuit protection?

That’s the first thing I noticed too. You can buy a 277VAC/60VDC 7A DIN rail miniature circuit breaker that can handle 7,500 amps of fault current for $20 [0] there’s no excuse other than ignorance for the lack of overcurrent protection. I only know how to use a calculator to figure out AC fault current but that should be enough to handle a solar panel.

It does mention an optional thermal switch and optional thermal fuse, my sauna stove definitely has a thermal switch and I’d include one if I was building this thing too.

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/phoenix-contact/1...
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-19 16:33:11+00:00
My reading of history is that human society is able to adjust to small changes like this over long periods of time as young people choose alternate paths looking at what changes are likely on the horizon. Rapid changes frequently lead to destabilization of adults who are unwilling or unable to retrain which then also screws up their next generation who start off on an economic back foot and a worldview of despair and decrepitude.

Not the AI company’s fault per se, but generally the US government does a very poor job of creating a safety net either intentionally, ineptitude or indifference.

By the way, attacks were also leveled against Chinese and Japanese California workers who were viewed as stealing the jobs of other “Americans”. So this viewpoint and tradition of behavior and capitalism is very long in US history.
by OptionOfT | 2025-10-19 16:33:31+00:00
Fabrics have gotten a lot thinner, and thus develop holes a lot more quickly.

I have t-shirts from 2010 which are faded but have 0 holes. Whereas t-shirts I bought half a year ago have holes in them.

Also, you mentioning the inability to repair stuff at home makes me sad. My mom, 72 year old, repaired my nephew's jacket the other day. Brand new zipper.

The machine in that PDF you shared makes me feel YKK is going in the direction of Apple. They supply the parts and the manufacturing device.

You do something they don't like? Sewing machine turns off.
by paperpunk | 2025-10-19 16:33:41+00:00
I feel like I could very easily write this list in the opposite direction.

1. I'll just fix it – as a junior you can get away with not working on something unless you're told to. As a senior you're expected to take ownership. Cut through organisational malaise. See a thorny bug not being solved because it sits slightly across team boundaries? Fix it.

2. Working nights and weekends – as a junior you can expect to just turn up during your work hours and nobody will bat an eyelid. As a senior sometimes you'll have to make sacrifices. Stay on late to deal with that incident. Monitor a vendor migration over the weekend.

3. Asking a lot of questions – as a junior you can get away with being shy and avoidant. As a senior you're going to need to push through the discomfort and ask the important questions, challenge people, and have gotten over your fear of looking stupid to ensure you always have the right information.

4. Being "Extra" Helpful – as a junior you can very much just focus on your project work. As a senior you're expected to find impact beyond what is given to you in JIRA tickets. You need to review other PRs, manage other projects, unblock team members questions. Your job is beyond just closing tickets now.

5. Loud enthusiasm – as a junior you are not likely to have the political capital to get your org to take a risk on a new framework, language, tool. As a senior you are expected to have the experience to be able to take those risks when they are appropriate for the situation.

It's true though that you need be thoughtful about whether your behaviour is what is valued in your job. Regardless of seniority, different managers, different companies can value traits that other companies punish, and visa versa. You can really suffer if you're not aware of what it is your managers actually want from you.
by ivape | 2025-10-19 16:35:50+00:00
That’s fine. I understand. I have a ridiculous belief that the universe is finally here to free us from work. AI is absurd, and magical, and if it does what we think it can, then the paradigm will shift. We as custodians of the transition have to work diligently to make sure this paradigm shift is not perverted by forces that want to reenable the prior way (which was that, whatever can be reasonably had to live, be wrapped in a scalping structure where one side can extract additional value).

One of the ways this shift will have momentum is that children today are going to be born into the light. They will live decades without the concept of having to make decisions around the scarcity of work and resources. They will not have the same values and viewpoints on society that, we, legacy components of the system, are currently engulfed by.

Our generation will be the last to join all other prior generations, in the boat of economic slavery, and it will be allowed to drift and sail away from port for the final time. It was a long journey, generations and generation were involved. Lots of thieving and abuse, good riddance.
by seanhunter | 2025-10-19 16:36:25+00:00
Totally agree. In addition, one of his examples (Mars Pathfinder) has absolutely nothing to do with functional programming or simplifying assumptions of any kind. The mars pathfinder problem was caused by a priority inversion on a mutex - exactly the sort of thing that all programmers rightly consider hard and that things like software transactional memory in FP would prevent. Here’s the famous email “What Really Happened on Mars?” which was written by the a pathfinder software engineer and explains the issue

https://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hd...

Even by the standards of substack TFA is an extraordinarily poor blogpost.
by SapporoChris | 2025-10-19 16:36:34+00:00
The summer shade makes sense, but a tree without leaves in the winter does not provide more sunlight than no tree at all.

We could also talk about the potential for the roots of the tree crawling under the foundation and wrecking it or the tree itself falling on the roof of the house.

But it is a very nice quote if you don't think too much about it.
Ask HN: I have a CS degree but taught for 5 years– how can I get back into tech?
by padzochambers | 2025-10-19 16:37:38+00:00
I’m 28 (m) and have a Computer Science degree under my belt. A few years after graduating, I pursued a teaching degree because it came with a great tax-free incentive. Now I’ve realised I want to use my original degree and get back into tech.

I’d really appreciate advice from people currently working in the field — what would you recommend for someone who has a CS degree but no professional experience beyond teaching?

Apologies if this type of post isn't suited for the HN - will delete if so.
by estearum | 2025-10-19 16:38:01+00:00
Judges can order all sorts of things they deem are reasonably necessary to enforce their rulings or the law. Injunctive relief can take a huge variety of things so long as it's narrow and directly applicable to the case before them.

You'd be hard pressed to find "wear bodycameras" to be an out of scope form of relief for a case about police brutality, dishonesty in court, and lack of accountability.

You clearly haven't spent much time around courtrooms if you think judges can only create orders that are "follow the law as already written." It's an obviously silly idea when you actually write it out.
by lproven | 2025-10-19 16:38:03+00:00
> So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison

Can do.

> especially if they prefer WordStar.

I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi.

Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research.

WordStar is a CP/M tool which became for a while took that dominance to DOS.

It ran on affordable standalone microcomputers you owned and didn't have to share with anyone else.

What they share is that they are designed for keyboards before things like cursor keys, Insert/Overtype, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End were added. They do not assume theys; they expect just letters, a few shift/meta/ctrl type keys, and nothing else.

So, they redefine all these functions with letters and letter combinations.

So, cryptic, idiosyncratic, hard to learn, but once you learned, fast and powerful. Touch-typists loved them, because your fingers stayed on the home row and you never needed to reach off the alpha-block and into the extra keys. (The ones that are a different colour on the classic IBM Model F and Model M keyboard.)

Vi is the Unix flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those from universities and research and maybe big rich corporations.

WordStar is the DOS flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those who bought or built their own computers and installed and ran their own software on inexpensive machines.

In its time, WS keys were everywhere in DOS. The cracks started showing when WordPerfect took the DOS wordprocessing crown, with its even weirder function-key driven UI, which really favoured the Model F layout (f-keys down the side) and contained built-in copy protection in the form of colourful keyboard templates.

Then IBM CUA came along and mostly swept that away. I was there and using DOS then and I much prefer CUA.

Same functional role, but different commercial markets.
by card_zero | 2025-10-19 16:39:29+00:00
Redesigned to attach to the fabric in a different way, I think.

Usually the teeth are attached somehow to the fabric strip. I think the strip has a ridge at the edge where the teeth go, and the teeth are clamped over that ridge to hold them in place. Then the fabric strip is easy to sew onto a garment. It looks like the new design has only the ridge, hence it's called a string, and is hard to sew onto a garment.
by pembrook | 2025-10-19 16:39:58+00:00
Am I the only one who thinks this is just cringe?

I definitely think AI companies marketing claims deserve mockery...but this isn't even good/interesting/smart satire??

It feels like we've fully completed the transition to Reddit here, with its emotional and contradictory high school political zeal (being both progressive and anti-progress at the same time) dominating the narrative.

Something about upvote-based communities is not holding up well in the current climate.

If humans have regressed enough intellectually where they are praising this as "Brilliant social commentary" then we absolutely SHOULD be replaced by AI.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-19 16:41:18+00:00
The judge is angry here because the US government indicated it agreed to these conditions during the oral hearing on the order, and is now arguing that it doesn't need to abide by what it orally agreed to because it's not in the written order.

Other episodes like that, not to mention the pattern of the US government outright fabricating stuff in its legal writings, make it clear that the Trump administration is openly contemptuous of the court's authority, and the DoJ by extension has that its primary policy now. The government's lawyers are finally being treated with the respect normally accorded to those contemptuous of the court's authority.
by epwr | 2025-10-19 16:42:11+00:00
That is not true. State laws cannot interfere with the work of federal law enforcement, but can require certain behaviours.

Eg. States set speed limits. A federal LEO can break these when required for their duties (eg. chasing a suspect), but only when required (eg. if they are late for a meeting, they still have to obey traffic laws).

Body cameras do not seem to directly interfere with an LEO’s duty, unless “avoiding accountability” is literally their duty.
by warent | 2025-10-19 16:42:15+00:00
You’re right and validating the point.

A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked:

So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income.

Humans being forced to trade time for survival, money, and the enrichment of the elite, is a bug. We are socially conditioned to believe it’s a feature and the purpose.

Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expression

Edit: tone
by patagurbon | 2025-10-19 16:42:26+00:00
It does seem fairly arbitrary. It’s not a list of schools with big labs, since Hopkins or Berkeley aren’t there. It doesn’t seem to be private vs state schools, it’s not Ivy League or blue state only.

One potential reason to select a diverse set would be to point to a few who may be forced to accept by their state governments as examples to paint the refusers in a negative light.
by nostrademons | 2025-10-19 16:43:17+00:00
That's a hard argument to make as long as the relevant antitrust authorities are diligent about mergers & acquisitions.

Batteries are not a differentiated product. They're basically completely defined by 3 numbers: capacity (in watt-hours), power delivery (watts), and weight. Once those are optimized (which is the process going on now), the chemistry, construction, and manufacturing of batteries is basically a solved problem. Any barriers to entry are purely in the technology and manufacturing. About 200 years of industrial history shows that these are not durable barriers to entry: eventually, technology and know-how diffuses, and knowledge of how to make even very complex machines becomes a commodity. (See eg: power looms, memory chips, hard disks, agriculture, TVs, automobiles, drones.)

Durable competitive advantages usually take the form of either a.) complex consumer interface, eg. with software or CPUs b.) network effects, eg. telecommunications, payment networks, software again, utilities or c.) regulations, eg. payment again, airplane manufacturing, healthcare, and shortly software. These are industries where factors outside the company in question ensure that there will only be one or at most a small set of companies in the market.

When you have a commodity product, the only route to extractive profits is to form a cartel and lobby governments or consumers to believe the cartel is in their interests, eg. with oil or diamonds. But this is a hard sell because the cartel is not in their interests. You can generally only fool people for a decade or two before they decide they've had enough and legislate your monopoly out of existence.

People tend to overindex on the software industry when it comes to "maximizing profits" because that has been the big story of the 2010s, ignoring that Big Tech very carefully implemented every play in the "build a monopoly" playbook to get there, and that millions of indie software developers actually do not make a very good living because their products are commodities.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-19 16:43:46+00:00
Yes it is true. Once again, look at the data. Where is this 5% shrink? Do not listen to discredited people who have an axe to grind. Every single claim that Brexit affected the British economy turns out to be false when checked.

The Goldman Sachs claim is no different. It's full of flatly untrue statements about public data, rather incredibly.

They say: "The UK has significantly underperformed other advanced economies since the 2016 EU referendum"

Actual data: UK growth has tracked that of France and Germany. So which "other advanced economies" are they comparing against? The answer is we don't know because their paper compared the UK against synthetic countries that don't exist and they didn't reveal their method. If you want to see the effects of leaving the EU, you need to look at trends and compare against other (western) EU countries. Not a secret list of fictional countries that appear to be the result of playing games with the data until it fits what the author wanted.

They also say "UK goods trade has ‘declined significantly’ and has ‘underperformed other advanced economies by roughly 15%’ since the referendum." Goods trade is down 2% since 2016 which is not "significant", as the UK is specialized in services. Trade in general has grown strongly. Measured annually, using Chained Volume Measures (CVM) total UK trade was 11% higher in 2023 than in 2016. Trade with EU vs ROW continued on its long term trend, also unaffected by Brexit.

Their paper is just wrong in so many ways. There's a more detailed writeup here:

https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/goldman-sachs-wrong-on...

HN tends to have a lot of trouble with this idea that the institutions are all systematically lying about this issue because of what it says about our society, credentialing and so on. But the data is public. You just have to look it up instead of trusting "experts".
by renewiltord | 2025-10-19 16:44:14+00:00
As usual most journalists are garbage LLM rewriters of other text by some source journalists who have also only heard it from someone else. You can tell because they cannot link the case or anything.

It must be related to this recent case

It is further ORDERED that all Federal Agents who are conducting immigration enforcement operations in the Northern District of Illinois, excepting those who do not wear a uniform or other distinguishing clothing or equipment in the regular performance of their official duties or are engaged in undercover operations in the regular performance of their official duties, that are currently equipped and trained with body-worn cameras (“BWCs”) shall activate them when engaged in enforcement activity unless exempted by CBP, ICE, or DHS policy.

a. The definitions of “body worn cameras” shall be as defined in DHS Policy Statement: Body Worn Camera: Audio/video/digital recording equipment combined into a single unit and typically worn on clothing or otherwise secured to a person, e.g., affixed to the outside of the carrier/tactical vest facing forward. DHS Policy Statement 045-07

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71559589/66/chicago-hea...

And here’s the policy statement https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/23_0522_opa_...

A good journalist would have found out these things and then shared them and an exceptional one would have told us if there are subsequent policies of the DHS that have changed the BWC procedure. And they could perhaps explain why the DHS cannot simply change the policy instead of fighting in court.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-19 16:44:45+00:00
Yes so lets go ahead and burn the entire internet so your kids, specifically, don't see boobies or something.

The reality is that it is YOUR responsibility to control what your kids see. If you fail, I do not care. They are not my kids. Not only do I not care, nobody cares.

You can absolutely lock your kids down and make sure they get no internet access. I know because I grew up without internet. Everything is very much in reach. Do that, or don't, again I don't care.

My mobile carrier blocks porn. I know because I'm an adult and sometimes I want to watch porn, and I have to use a VPN.

What you should do is call up whoever you are giving money to for internet and ask them about blocking. If they tell you they don't offer that product, then you, as a consumer, should cancel your subscription and go to another carrier.
by henearkr | 2025-10-19 16:45:22+00:00
(Edited: as the Rebble project just uses the Pebble app)

On Android, should I give a try to GadgetBridge, which seems both more open but way less official, instead of the Pebble app?

And by the way, why not make the Pebble app open source? I don't see any compelling reason.