MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nair0 | 2025-11-12 15:56:03+00:00
A couple of questions:

1. Which countries would this be focused on? I'm assuming the laws aren't the same everywhere so it might not be possible to take people to court from anywhere?

2. Would the attorney actually take the sender to court in case they don't settle? I'm assuming many smaller companies might just ignore the notice since they are not that trained legally and depending on amount maybe not even have the money to pay.

3. How would you assure users the extension isn't violating their privacy and reading personal emails as well? How do you prove only spam marked emails are ever sent over to you/given access to a real human?
by sivaraam | 2025-11-12 15:56:04+00:00
I suppose Raymond chen has shared enough insights for us to build a whole wiki out of it :-)

A couple of other related ones:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241007-00/?p=11...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241101-00/?p=11...
by mapt | 2025-11-12 15:56:10+00:00
I find critiques of palm oil accurate, but it begs the question - what is your preferred source of saturated dietary fat? You can do all sorts of things with vegetable oils from seeds/legumes, but you need saturated triglycerides for high melting point products like chocolate or to maximize the stability of deep-frying.

Maybe we could go back to artificially hydrogenated oils, but actually give a damn about food safety this time and work out an industrial process to separate trans fats?
by ConceptJunkie | 2025-11-12 15:56:35+00:00
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.

MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
by mnemonet | 2025-11-12 15:56:47+00:00
It's a great idea and challenging YouTube's monopoly is noble, but I don't see how the economics work out. The current pricing [1] charges $20/month for videos up to 20 minutes of video, which is reasonable but still far too expensive for most people to use.

It's a great first step, but I struggle to see who this would be used by. So far Bluesky seems to be the only decentralized platform that's broken into the mainstream, and it'll only be more difficult for the video market.

- [1]: https://micro.blog/about/pricing
by pessimizer | 2025-11-12 15:57:35+00:00
I'm sorry, but we've made a lot of conversations illegal and pretended like that was all right. I'm sure we've made advising people how to dodge paywalls illegal as part of DMCA and/or some anti-hacking law, or some other garbage. I'm also sure that you run an automated service that will advise and has advised people on how to dodge paywalls. Even if there are exceptions for individuals giving advice to friends, or people giving advice for free, you are neither of those: you are a profit-making paid corporation that is automating this process which may be illegal. You may be a hacking endorser, a hacking advisor, and a hacking tool.

Under those circumstances, why wouldn't NYT have a case? I advise everybody who employs some sort of DRM or online system that limits access to ask for every chat that every one of these companies has ever had with anyone. Why are they the only people who get to break copyright and hacking laws? Why are they the only people who get to have private conversations?

I might also check if any LLMs have ever endorsed terrorist points of view (or banned political parties) during a chat, because even though those points of view may be correct (depending on the organization), endorsing them may be illegal and make you subject to sanctions or arrest. If people can't just speak, certainly corporate LLMs shouldn't be able to.
by bitbuilder | 2025-11-12 15:57:42+00:00
>It's entirely possible they don't have the ability in house to resolve it.

I've started breathing a little easier about the possibilty of AI taking all our software engineering jobs after using Anthropic's dev tools.

If the people making the models and tools that are supposed to take all our jobs can't even fix their own issues in a dependable and expedient manner, then we're probably going to be ok for a bit.

This isn't a slight against Anthropic, I love their products and use them extensively. It's more a recognition of the fact that the more difficult aspects of engineering are still quite difficult, and in a way LLMs just don't seem well suited for.
by astrange | 2025-11-12 15:57:44+00:00
He seems stuck in the GOFAI development philosophy where they just decide humans have something called a "world model" because they said so, and then decide that if they just develop some random thing and call it a "world model" it'll create intelligence because it has the same name as the thing they made up.

And of course it doesn't work. Humans don't have world models. There's no such thing as a world model!
by noirscape | 2025-11-12 15:57:55+00:00
The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.

Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.

And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.

It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.
by cperciva | 2025-11-12 15:58:01+00:00
I run into this sort of bias all the time -- in the real world, not just in AI. I take my daughter to medical appointments, both for scheduling reasons (my wife's schedule is less flexible) and rapport reasons (I'm not that kind of doctor, but I know the terminology and medical professionals treat me far more as a peer), and I routinely get "oh we expected her mother" or "we always phone the mother to schedule followup appointments".

Is it so hard to understand that men can be parents too?
Show HN: Made a system tray calendar that syncs all your calendars
by alessandro-a | 2025-11-12 15:58:09+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm the creator of Calendar0, a menubar calendar for MacOS and Windows that I've been working on for the past few months.

The app is designed to make calendar management actually accessible without opening a browser every time you need to check your schedule.

One of Calendar0's main goals is to eliminate the constant context-switching between multiple calendar accounts and providers.

The latest update finally adds Apple Calendar support alongside Google and Microsoft 365, so you can now see all your calendars in a single unified view.

I also just shipped bulk operations: you can add buffers to multiple back-to-back meetings in seconds instead of manually editing each one.

Would love to have your feedback!
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-12 15:58:09+00:00
Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory if not accomplice to fraud.

Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-12 15:58:11+00:00
Yes, the Carboniferous Period! I learned about this a few years ago and was astonished.

> The world at beginning of the Carboniferous period was a humid, tropical place. Seasons, if any, were indistinct. The Carboniferous trees and plants resembled those that live in tropical and mildly temperate areas today. They grew in wetlands and were shallow-rooted. This, combined with their great height and ponderous weight, was a bad combination, because these enormous trees would regularly become uprooted and topple into the marshy ground, landing on other trees that preceded them.

> Here is where fate steps in. Although trees had evolved lignin and cellulose, no bacteria that could digest these woody substances had yet evolved. In fact, those bacteria would take another 60 million years to evolve. All this time huge trees kept growing, crashing into the swampy ground, and piling up on top of uncounted other trees, getting buried deeper and deeper into the ground. Over millions of years, subjected to the heat and pressure of deep burial, the carbon in these trees was converted into the fossil fuels we know and love today – coal, oil, and natural gas. All the fossil fuels we use were produced during this 60-million year period.

https://emagazine.com/carbon-in-trees/
by keyringlight | 2025-11-12 15:58:22+00:00
The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.

Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-12 15:58:28+00:00
I have been building applications on LLMs since GPT-3.

Thousands of hours of context engineering has shown me how LLMs will do their best to answer a question with insufficient context and can give all sorts of wrong answers. I've found that the way I prompt it and what information is in the context can heavily bias the way it responds when it doesn't have enough information to respond accurately.

You assume the bias is in the LLM itself, but I am very suspicious that the bias is actually in your system prompt and context engineering.

Are you willing to share the system prompt that led to this result that you're claiming is sexist LLM bias?

Edit: Oidar (child comment to this) did an A/B test with male names and it seems to have proven the bias is indeed in the LLM, and that my suspicion of it coming from the prompt+context was wrong. Kudos and thanks for taking the time.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-12 15:58:34+00:00
https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/

> We may use Personal Data for the following purposes: [...] To comply with legal obligations and to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our users, OpenAI, or third parties.

OpenAI outright says it will give your conversations to people like lawyers.

If you thought they wouldn't give it out to third parties, you not only have not read OpenAI's privacy policy, you've not read any privacy policy from a big tech company (because all of them are basically maximalist "your privacy is important, we'll share your data only with us and people who we deem worthy of it, which turns out to be everybody.")
by SparkBomb | 2025-11-12 15:58:42+00:00
> why is it surprising that people feel like showing their own politics with stickers when the government they live under currently deports random people, blows up boats based on vague accusations, tries to reform the country with Project2025, ..., do i have to go on?

I am in my early-40s. I remember when Obama was droning people abroad based on iffy intel. I remember when George Bush/Dick Cheney started a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which killed possibly millions (I heard all sorts of different numbers).

If I put a sticker on my laptop, it doesn't stop any of that happening. It doesn't bring back the people that killed in those wars. All it is trying to do is signal to other people that you have the "right opinions". It is a form of slacktivism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

> nice for you that you're able to ignore politics - you should maybe be aware that this is a privilege. lots of people would probably want to ignore politics, but instead they have to fear for their existence, dignity or way of life.

I am mature enough to understand that in the vast majority of circumstances I cannot affect in the outcome in any meaningful way.

Whether I ignore politics or not will have no effect on the outcome. I suggest you go back and watch old TV programs and documentaries. People were having the same discussions 20, 30 and some 50 years ago on the exact topics and making the same arguments, often they were word for word the same.

> "but not everyone on HN is american", well, other countries also have their fair share of political issues. and if you don't see them as issues, then again, you're just showing your own ignorance, privilege or both.

I choose to ignore the political issues in my country (the UK) as well. I can't do anything to solve the problems in the country.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-11-12 15:58:44+00:00
I have a pretty serious fear of needles, to the point that phlebotomists always ask me if I'm going to pass out (to which I always answer, "never have before, but maybe today's the day!")

Once, I had to give my spouse an injection, and I almost passed out and threw up, once when they took the cap off the syringe and accidentally poked themselves in the finger, and then when I actually had to administer the injection.

I know I'd get used to it, but there's a decent chance that if I had to give myself insulin shots, I'd just fucking die.
by pentakkusu | 2025-11-12 15:58:59+00:00
I for example develop my (black and white) films myself and leave them to hang dry uncut, then proceed to store them in a box. When I have the time, I "scan" them using a MILC on a tripod, a 3d printed holder and a LED backlight panel. Afterwards I cut the strips up and file them properly for long term archival. Many of us do it this way.
by hermitcrab | 2025-11-12 15:59:18+00:00
I am having issues with hypertension and purchased one of these:

https://hilo.com

You put on a cuff (supplied) to calibrate it, and then you wear a little gadget on your wrist. It takes frequent measurements throughout the day and night when it senses you aren't moving. It then syncs with your phone to store the results. Its a little pricey, but seems to work well[1]. And it avoids the faff of a pressure cuff[2] and 'white coat hypertension'.

[1] Apart from the option on the app to do a reading from your finger using your phone camera - which gives wildly different results to a cuff.

[2] You need to recalibrate it every month or so using the cuff.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-12 15:59:39+00:00
There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron, and I'm increasingly frustrated by it as time goes on.

on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding."

It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions.

The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.
Show HN: Morphex.ai – Marketplace for Specialized AI Agents
by legitcoders | 2025-11-12 16:00:32+00:00
Built a marketplace for AI agents that handle specific business tasks (content creation, lead gen, customer support, etc.) with recurring Stripe subscriptions.

Stack: Next.js 15, Firebase, Stripe, OpenAI API. Demo mode lets you try agents before buying.

Feedback welcome!
by sfn42 | 2025-11-12 16:01:19+00:00
Some of my coworkers are awesome. Super talented, super smart people.

But most developers are pretty bad. I see a lot of developers who hardly do any work at all, and many who do lots of work but it's all trash. Buggy, overcomplicated, untested, dumb pointless decisions.

Like my current project. Two guys started it - .NET backend, React frontend. Sure, fine. But let's use Azure functions for the backend instead of a regular web api. What. We asked them why, no reason. And their whole codebase was trash, I've deleted about 90% of the code that they had written and I'll delete the rest too.

I've also been in a team that had the problem I highlighted in the OP. 20 different apps, 10 different JS frameworks etc. Speaking as someone who worked on these apps, there was absolutely no reason to choose one JS framework over another. I could have made them all in React no problem, they're just websites, not much more than glorified PDFs. How you generate the html is irrelevant. And the code was mostly trash. Overcomplicated, buggy, untested etc.

I did struggle with this early in my career - am I just a narcissist? Everywhere I turn the code is just trash, maybe I'm the problem? But now I've worked with people who do good work. I've seen my own ideas work in practice. I know for a fact my judgement is good.

In university I was the one who helped everyone else. I was always ahead, while my peers could hardly keep up. When we graduated a lot of them would have struggled to solve fizzbuzz in 20 minutes, yet we all have the same degree. No wonder there's so much trash code around.
by GistNoesis | 2025-11-12 16:01:34+00:00
The theoretical maximum rate for 1B particle advection (Just doing p[] += v[]dt), is 1000GB/s / 24GB = 42 iteration per second. If you only have 100M you can have 10 times more iteration.

But that's without any rendering, and non interacting particles which are extremely boring unless you like fireworks. (You can add a term like v[] += gdt for free.) And you don't need to store colors for your particles if you can compute the colors from the particle number with a function.

Rasterizing is slower, because each pixel of the image might get touched by multiple particles (which mean concurrent accesses in the GPU to the same memory address which they don't like).

Obtaining the screen coordinates is just a matrix multiply, but rendering the particles in the correct depth order requires multiple pass, atomic operations, or z-sorting. Alternatively you can slice your point clouds, by mixing them up with a peak-shaped weight function around the desired depth value, and use an order independent reduction like sum, but memory accesses are still concurrent.

For the rasterizing, you can also use the space partitioning indices of the particle to render to a part of the screen independently without concurrent access problems. That's called "tile rendering". Each tile render the subset of particles which may fall in it. (There are plenty of literature in the Gaussian Splatting community).
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-11-12 16:01:37+00:00
Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? I’ve got some bad news.

Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
by Tade0 | 2025-11-12 16:01:42+00:00
> It comes to personal risk appetite, and risk benefit analysis.

What analysis when you don't even have a good estimate of the probabilities involved? Min-maxing on the other hand is a recipe for extinction as a species, so not a viable strategy.

> My claim in any case is it's better to have an AI spouse and child than being relegated to a mere bank account for an ex spouse that hates you.

How specifically is it better?
by solarexplorer | 2025-11-12 16:01:43+00:00
Yes, I think the conclusion was that it did improve performance on binaries that were not compiled with optimizations, but didn't generate enough gains on optimized binaries to set of the cost of re-compilation.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358438.349303

(this is not about x86 but PA-RISC, but the conclusions would likely be very similar...)