MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akoboldfrying | 2025-10-05 10:58:31+00:00
Who has an incentive to provide a Solid server? Not big social media companies, who want the personal information that Solid attempts to withhold. I don't think anyone is prepared to offer a convenient, high quality Solid-based social media experience to everyone for free, because that costs a lot of money. And if you know anything about human nature, it will have to be convenient and completely free in order to have a chance of capturing any mindshare outside of weird tech nerd circles.

> the platforms should be asking us what kinds of data they may copy from our servers, and only with strictly temporary allowances.

Until practical homomorphic encryption arrives, I don't see how this temporariness can be enforced. If we rely on promises or regulation instead of the technical ability to enforce this, how is that any better than today's social media companies promising not to do anything bad with the data they have on us?
by cornholio | 2025-10-05 10:58:44+00:00
Interesting. The drawbacks you describe seem to be limitations of the sensor and image processing technology available almost 30 years ago.

For example, my Epson inkjet printer can do about 10ppm at it's lowest print quality, so it can mechanically move and scan a page against the printhead every 6 seconds; a 1Mpx sensor with a 60Hz frame rate will generate 360Mpx in 6 seconds. Even if you throw away 50% of the data (overlap areas, next page load, motion or optical blur at the edges etc.), that's still enough data for a ~1400 dpi raw resolution of an A4 page at the fastest speed. If you are willing to go slower, the resolutions the system could achieve seem outside the range of any flatbed.

Of course, you would need e very beefy image processor to handle the multiple Gbps raw video data and process in real time down to the final scan image, but the actual corrections seem very achievable with modern algorithms.

Outside of the cost of the image processor, another showstopper I can see is motion blur on the sensor, stopping the heavy printhead from its inertia, so that you can have a still image, will kill your total scan speed. But perhaps you can just pulse the LED, or a gas discharge lamp, and impress the sensor with near instantaneous flashes of light.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-05 10:59:33+00:00
Triples are fantastic for information retrieval, but I think if there's any takeaway from the unexpected success of LLMs it's that AI researchers historically undervalued language as such. Early symbolic approaches to AI retrospectively appear torn between reverence towards and hatred of language: on the one hand, a sensible skeptical doubt that language is within reach of software systems; on the other, a belief in the inadequacy of language in the unambiguous representation of knowledge. This paper just seems to confirm that, at least at the training level, the "problem of hallucinations" is not to be resolved by regression back to the various proposals to separate knowledge from its linguistic representation.

Again, this isn't to demonize symbolic AI or to say the answer isn't in the fusion of LLMs with knowledge graphs etc, but I think we now at least know that language is certainly within reach of software and that linguistic representations of knowledge are information-dense in ways we didn't previously anticipate.
by nis0s | 2025-10-05 11:01:10+00:00
People who work in defense in any country are neither fascists nor Nazis (whatever that means in that country), necessarily.

But for obvious reasons it’s advantageous for external agents to make the young or talented of a given country avoid or hate working in such places if those external agents are playing by some realpolitik framework. The more you steal from a player’s ranks, the better it is for you.

It doesn’t help that often politicians (in any country) are prone to the kinds of flaws which make it harder to justify why someone should join the military, or work in defense. It also doesn’t help that the core philosophy, or idealistic viewpoint, of a country is often overridden by a history of rash decision making by inept or corrupt politicians. Note that any number of propaganda tools are also used to paint people as inept or corrupt, depending on the narrative that it serves.

And it’s particularly okay right now to decry the defensive or offensive ambitions of Western nations using any number of terms one can acquire from a first-year polsci. course.

But it’s no secret that once countries who currently don’t have appreciable military capability, like many Latin American or African countries, build some kind of military might of their own, then the discourse will shift to include terms like “peace through strength”, “national sovereignty”, “deterrence theory“, or whatever else will then help form a self-serving narrative just as using terms like “fascist”, “Nazi”, or “Military-Industrial complex” does so now.

People who get swayed by emotional appeals, or other psychological tools developed to tease out empathetic or sympathetic responses through the use of loaded terms, are often well-meaning, and useful pawns in a game far beyond their control or understanding.

The best response in such cases is to be indifferent and neutral. You don’t know who you’re really supporting, or what they gain out of it. People who openly state their allegiances to a country are more trustworthy than someone who states their allegiance to an ideal (“pacifism”), or ideology (“libertarian”).
by 1659447091 | 2025-10-05 11:01:24+00:00
If the root problem is greed how is making that distinction not useful in real life?

What does the type of gambling matter? If we focus on the core issues: greed and money problems -- over trying to "protect" [my emphasis] others from the bad gambling -- we end up helping them with adjacent greed/money problems. Labeling outside things as the problem is the problem. Help the people learn to master the inner compulsion towards these things (and other skills to help pull themselves out of dire situations); the rest is just trying to find an enemy to blame because helping others in a real way is hard.
by diggan | 2025-10-05 11:01:41+00:00
Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people, it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.

And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a win regardless.
by blixt | 2025-10-05 11:03:57+00:00
From what I can tell the new context editing and memory APIs are essentially formalization of common patterns:

Context editing: Replace tool call results in message history (i.e replace a file output with an indicator that it’s no longer available).

Memory: Give LLM access to read and write .md files like a virtual file system

I feel like these formalizations of tools are on the path towards managing message history on the server, which means better vendor lock in, but not necessarily a big boon to the user of the API (well, bandwidth and latency will improve). I see the ChatGPT Responses API going a similar path, and together these changes will make it harder to swap transparently between providers, something I enjoy having the ability to do.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-05 11:05:12+00:00
LPDDR5 is "low power DDR5". The difference between that and ordinary DDR5 isn't that it's faster, it's that it runs at a lower voltage to save power in battery-operated devices. DDR5-6400 DIMMs were available for desktop systems around the same time as Apple. Servers are more conservative about timings for reliability reasons, the same as they use ECC memory and Apple doesn't. Moreover, while Apple was soldering their memory, Dell was shipping systems using CAMM with LPDDR5 that isn't soldered, and there are now systems from multiple vendors with CAMM2 and LPDDR5X.

Existing servers typically have 12 channels per socket, but they also have two DIMMs per channel, so you could double the number of channels per socket without taking up any more space for slots. You could also use CAMM which takes up less space.

They don't currently use more than 12 channels per socket even though they could because that's enough to not be a constraint for most common workloads, more channels increase costs, and people with workloads that need more can get systems with more sockets. Apple only uses more because they're using the same memory for the GPU and that is often constrained by memory bandwidth.
by benjiro | 2025-10-05 11:05:26+00:00
> It's a code violation, not insurance fraud.

I think nobody mentioned about insurance fraud. There is a difference between a accidental mistake, not knowing what your doing, and knowing that your bypassing regulation willingly.

This type of installation needs to be reported to the insurance company. Remember, coverage applies to the state of your vehicle/home/property. If you DIY your own power source, the insurance company when informed about it, may drop your coverage.

If they know about the installation, its much harder for them to deny a claim. But a hidden installation like that, is a factor in claim denying.

And we are kind of ignoring the whole "your not just putting yourself at risk but also all the other people" issue".
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-10-05 11:06:13+00:00
I down-leveled my homelab due to energy costs.

It now only consists of a Intel n100 with a big SSD and 32GB RAM running Proxmox. These China TopTon-boxed with their 5x Intel i226-IV network cards are great and can be passively cooled.

Every night the Proxmox makes a backup onto a Raspberry Pi which runs the Proxmox Backup Server.
by blixt | 2025-10-05 11:07:40+00:00
Yes we had the same issue with our coding agent. We found that instead of replacing large tool results in the context it was sometimes better to have two agents, one long lived with smaller tool results produced by another short lived agent that would actually be the one to read and edit large chunks. The downside of this is you always have to manage the balance of which agent gets what context, and you also increase latency and cost a bit (slightly less reuse of prompt cache)
by diggan | 2025-10-05 11:10:10+00:00
> Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.

I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.

But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.
by card_zero | 2025-10-05 11:11:06+00:00
Is that a solution to a problem, or just a change in social mores? It solves the problem of people being dangerous with guns, by stopping them having guns. Same as with legs. Most crimes and dangerous actions are facilitated by the use of legs, so further harm reduction could be carried out by cutting everybody's legs off. And personally I'd support that, I never liked walking much anyway and it annoys me when people have busy lifestyles, but the plan won't get widespread support because it's against customary expectations. People enjoy, and expect to maintain, the use of their legs: they claim it's important.
by buran77 | 2025-10-05 11:12:26+00:00
> the cameras weren't going to do any meaningful harm in Oak Park

> a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing

That sums up tptacek's "argumentation". It can be used to justify just about any type of surveillance. I mean does breaking E2EE and monitoring every communication really do any meaningful harm in Oak Park?

It really brings into focus how people who were raised in "good times" just can't wrap their heads around how easily the cookie can crumble into "bad times", and how people who found moderate success in their field believe they can now control everything. The kind of hubris that overrides any history lesson, or boiling frog fable.

And don't even get me started on what self-proclaimed "reasonable people" believe about other topics.

Contrast with the counter-arguments of what lies behind the curtain, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476100

It was a good way to bring someone down a couple of (dozen) notches in my eyes. Not that it matters, this won't do any meaningful harm in Oak Park.
Show HN: I made an OSS tool to remove Sora 2 Watermark in less than 72h released
by kuberwastaken | 2025-10-05 11:13:00+00:00
being on platforms like Instagram and Twitter for the past few days, I've noticed how many non-technical and mostly old people just assume the video is real despite the watermark Sora 2 generations have.

Think what would happen if there was no watermark? This is the reason that this project exists. It's not to abuse the great initiative by OpenAI to put logos onto every generation (though temporarily there's also an easy way to bypass that which I wouldn't cover), it's to hopefully encourage them to be harsher and more obvious with it in some form.

Sweeta is an AI-powered watermark removal tool specifically designed for SORA 2 video generations. It Uses advanced inpainting models (LaMA) and intelligent detection algorithms, it can seamlessly remove watermarks while (mostly) preserving the original image quality.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-05 11:16:04+00:00
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.

So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-05 11:17:06+00:00
That's been featured several times on HN.

I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."

It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.

Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.

If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.

But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.

Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.

Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-10-05 11:18:06+00:00
Mbox is not that easy to process, especially if 1986 time span is taken into account. There is base64 encoding. There is "=" encoding, don't recall whats its name. "Equals" encoding. There are several character encodings if 1986 time span is taken into account, and each character encoding will be encrypted by equals signs. There was KOI8-R. KOI8-R was on BSD and Linux servers, but desktops had cp1251, so 1251 entered e-mail eventually, via e-mail clients autoconfigured to desktop encoding, or via webmail interfaces autoconfigured to web encoding which could likely be cp1251 and not likely koi8-r. Then utf-8 came in.
by bionsystem | 2025-10-05 11:18:40+00:00
That's what I want to do as well, Pis running a vpn and some wake-on-lan scripts for a couple of old boxes (I will probably run SmartOS on those). Anything to share about your setup ? (blogs/gits that you wrote or followed)

I also got some cloud credits from my employer, but a bit paranoïd about putting my data there (although most of it isn't sensitive).
by qwertox | 2025-10-05 11:18:42+00:00
I wish every instruction and response had a enable/disable checkbox so that I can disable parts of the conversation in such a way that it is excluded from the context.

Let's say I submit or let it create a piece of code, and we're working on improving it. At some point I want to consider the piece of code to be significantly better that what I had initially, so all those initial interactions containing old code could be removed from the context.

I like how Google AI Studio allows one to delete sections and they are then no longer part of the context. Not possible in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, I think there one can only delete the last response.

Maybe even AI could suggest which parts to disable.
by diggan | 2025-10-05 11:19:39+00:00
> The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name

Well, either that or someone else hosting their identity (see did:plc), which seems to be the part you say should exist?

Probably DNS is the most decentralized centralized system we have available today that most people can actually use, unless I'm missing some obviously better way of doing the same thing?
by mdrzn | 2025-10-05 11:20:13+00:00
Turning these two css settings off improved the UI/UX of the blog a thousand times:

pre { margin: 2rem 0 !important; padding: 1rem !important; }

Each code block has such giant padding and margins that you can only read 3 lines of text in a viewport.

Also, I would suggest installing Webmin/Virtualmin which takes care of a lot of issues like deploying new subdomains or new users.
by fluidcruft | 2025-10-05 11:20:57+00:00
I agree about this. It's very difficult to figure out. In fact my working theory is IT has banned it as much as they can (we get strange and difficult to interpret pronouncements about permission to use LLM).

Windows 11 in general pushes so much unwanted crap at us in ways that we can't control that it's reasonable to assume IT can't make the icons go away if they wanted to. And investing time building a workflow that disappears when IT has finally figured out how to nuke it (if that's the intent) isn't worth the risk.

For reference I work at a hospital so generally IT is extremely sensitive about potential breaches and leaks. In general the policy is we are allowed to use LLM. The organization is on Azure but I can't even find anyone in IT to tell me if we are even allowed to use Power platform (which is also in this weird state of letting you build things but they don't actually work). CoPilot is there ... ish. It's just not very powerful at all.
by phaser | 2025-10-05 11:20:57+00:00
This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning. There are two new developments since then that are very scary. The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or directly eliminate the right to private communication over the Internet.

Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the word dystopian falls short.
by Simulacra | 2025-10-05 11:21:44+00:00
A theoretical contrapositive: would Apple allow an app that allowed people to track anti-ice police? Antifa?

Clearly, they would not, and cannot have an app that tracks a protected class, but what about an app that told people that antifa was nearby?

I see the logic in tracking government officials, but I think it cuts both ways and maybe neither should be allowed.

Of course the same argument could be made for Waze, but I don't know where you draw the line without blowback to others. I think there is a line, I just don't know where it is.

Motives? Perceived danger?
by justinclift | 2025-10-05 11:22:04+00:00
> Consider that in all of human history nothing significant has hit us

While that's true for human history, some of the previous err... "rules of the earth" (specifically ~65 million years ago) might have opinions about whether they should have attempted stopping that big rock from hitting them. ;)

Of course, that's leaving aside that they didn't appear to have a civilisation, nor be aware of the big rock approaching before it happened, etc.
by delusional | 2025-10-05 11:24:22+00:00
Yep.

This "vulnerability" is actually just a standard warning to not run untrusted software on your machine. In this case the attacker can leverage a commandline program to read your unlocked password vault, but without that he'd still be able to steal any user owned files on your machine and access your bank through your browser to steal your money.

"It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway."
by WillAdams | 2025-10-05 11:24:28+00:00
There was a concern about folks losing the separate transformer, and a perception that a single device was better.

One interesting solution to this space was GRiD making their battery and power supply the same size and form-factor --- when one was working at a desk, to save space the battery could be removed and placed in a separate charger, while the cord from the power supply to the computer was removed, and it was then placed in the battery compartment and connected to the wall, powering the device.
by dillydogg | 2025-10-05 11:24:31+00:00
EDIT: Sorry, this came across rude, I feel poorly about the tone. I think I'll leave it up as is for posterity's sake but I agree there is a lot we don't know about these conditions.

They have been sequenced pretty thoroughly without identifying an organism. H. pylori and bacteria in biofilms can be detected this way. In the case of asbestos, it seems clear that it is the asbestos particles and not an organism.

As for the tumor microbiome hypothesis, I just find it hard to take a study seriously that suggests that human cancers harbor thermophilic bacteria found in deep sea vents.

I try to support my views by the data we have available, and I think these are currently the most well supported models.
by MASNeo | 2025-10-05 11:24:50+00:00
That’s nailing it really well: “willfully ignoring” is precisely what’s happening all around me. Me talking about small focused AI models, there you have everyone raving about AGI. Energy use and privacy issues of cloud vs local inference discussions end on how awesome the power of GPUs are and the jobs too. GPU backed finance with depreciation schedules past useful life seems OK for anyone chasing some short term gain. Even the job market is troubled, you can hardly tell a relevant candidate from an irrelevant one because everyone is an AI expert these days - hallucinations seem to make lying more casual.

It’s pretty clear to me there is a collective desire to ignore the problems to sell more GPU, close the next round, get that high paying AI job.

Part of me wishes humans would show the same dedication to fight climate change…