MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixelesque | 2025-11-23 19:59:21+00:00
Not exactly what parent poster was saying (I think?), but absorption and scattering coefficients for volume handling together with the Mean Free Path is very wavelength-specific, so using spectral rendering for that (and hair as well, although that's normally handled via special BSDFs) generally models volume scattering more accurately (if you model the properties correctly).

Very helpful for things like skin, and light diffusion through skin with brute-force (i.e. Woodcock tracking) volume light transport.
by butz | 2025-11-23 20:00:47+00:00
Is it possible to "just sync some files" to Proton Drive in user space without root access? As a paying Proton Mail customer I am annoyed about situation with Proton Drive and non-existing official support for Linux. On the other hand, they will probably drop some kind of electron wrapper of few hundred megabytes, and that won't be useful either. What about alternatives? Should I just use Filen instead?
by DrSAR | 2025-11-23 20:00:52+00:00
Not sure I agree with 'appearance [...] is much worse'.

Given the choice between a class room of first years who believe (in themselves and) an appearance of calculus knowledge or a room of scared undergrads that recoil from any calculus-inspired argument they 'have never learnt it properly', I'll take the former. I can work with that much more easily. Sure, some things might break - but what's the worst that can happen?

We'll sort out the rigour later while we patch the bruises of overextending some analogies.
by markus_zhang | 2025-11-23 20:01:23+00:00
I use all three and I have to say Windows shitifize itself by adding too much ads, but if you can remove those than it’s a better experience than MacOS.

Someone else on HN has a line that I agree with:”Apple makes the OS apps mundane so that people can write replacements and sell those in App Store where Apple has a fat share”.
Show HN: Real-time freelancer marketplace with per-second billing
by ufvy | 2025-11-23 20:01:24+00:00
Hi HN! I'm launching Gigs.Quest, a platform where startups can hire freelancers instantly through live video rooms.

Problem: Traditional freelancing platforms are slow. You post a job, wait for proposals, interview candidates, negotiate rates, then finally start work. For quick tasks, this is overkill.

Solution: Create a room, describe what you need, and qualified talent joins live within 5-12 minutes. Collaborate via HD video and screen sharing. Pay per second ($0.02/sec = $72/hr). All sessions recorded.

Why this works: • For startups: Get immediate help without hiring overhead • For freelancers: Monetize expertise without bidding/proposals • Trust: All sessions recorded, transparent earnings, Stripe-backed payments

Real use cases from beta: • Debugging production outage (saved 3 hours vs hiring process) • Quick design mockup review (12 min session, $14 cost) • Architecture consultation for new feature (45 min, $54)

Tech details: • Pre-authorization holds that scale (start at $5, double at 80% usage) • LiveKit for video infrastructure • Convex for real-time database • Stripe Connect for instant payouts

Challenges I'm working on: 1. Quality control (how to prevent low-quality participants?) 2. Discovery (how do freelancers find rooms?) 3. Pricing (is $72/hr the right rate?)

I'd love feedback from both sides of the marketplace. What am I missing?

Live at: https://gigs.quest
by shakna | 2025-11-23 20:02:14+00:00
The rewrite started in 2017.

Fears about refactoring introducing bugs are fine and valid - but after eight years, haven't really happened. Seems the extensive test suite did its job.

This isn't a case of Python 2 v 3. Packages weren't broken en masse. The API remained stable.

If anything, the rewrite has proved that it is mature. Because they could perform a refactor without breaking everyone's everyday.
by jabberwhookie | 2025-11-23 20:02:25+00:00
Being held back is the point.. WYSIWYM is a better ideal than more fonts, but it still tends towards trouble. It is hard enough to get engineers to write and maintain small amounts of correct comments without adding boilerplate metadata. I think everyone on this site is familiar with gripes against Jira but they are supposed to take a brain holiday when evaluating documentation mediums? Who is going to make sure previous and next topic are correct after the addition of a new topic? The great thing about absent fields is that they don't end up with bad content.
by Root_Denied | 2025-11-23 20:02:26+00:00
Unironically it might actually be 2025.

In the last 18 months we've seen a lot of maturation in various linux distros trying to make them "out of the box" usable by people who are not all that technical. More GUI utilities, better stability, compatibility layers for gaming driving adoption, and dead simple setup.

Valve has been doing a lot of the work driving adoption from gamers with Proton, PulseAudio is suddenly way more functional and compatible, working Nvidia GPU drivers (565+), and immutable spins on distros have all made it so that linux overall is more approachable than ever.

I think we'll look back at 2025 and see it as the inflection point where suddenly linux became a viable alternative to Apple/Microsoft in a way it wasn't before, driven in part by development targeting a new demographic along with the spotlight on both the technical and consumer issues with OSX/Windows (such as patches bricking hardware, attempting to crowbar AI into everything, and antagonizing their customer base with things like subscriptions and data harvesting).
by gruez | 2025-11-23 20:02:48+00:00
>It means the key is around in plain text in the memory of ssh or ssh-agent. Which means it's extractable by an attacker. An exportable key does all the signing inside the secure enclave and never exposes the decrypted key to OS memory.

But malware can just tell the secure enclave to export the key? Yes, they'll have to write new code to do that, but it's not particularly hard (it's 1 line code from your example above), and it's security through obscurity.
by teendifferent | 2025-11-23 20:03:31+00:00
I miss the era of deep learning where we actually diagnosed failure modes instead of just scaling compute.

I spent the weekend auditing ViT vs. CNN decision boundaries using a custom perturbation pipeline. I bypassed the standard LIME segmentation (Quickshift produces too much high-variance noise) and injected a custom SLIC pipeline to force semantic superpixels.

The results show that "Clever Hans" is still very much an issue.

Spurious Correlations: The ViT predicted "Jeep" (p=0.99) purely by overfitting on the muddy terrain texture. The attention map showed it ignored the vehicle geometry entirely.

Hallucinations: EfficientNet hallucinated a "toaster" solely because it detected a white counter + flowers context.

Accuracy metrics are masking the fact that our models are just exploiting dataset biases. Full write-up on the surrogate loss implementation and visual audits here.
by tlobes | 2025-11-23 20:03:33+00:00
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

HN has seen this quote many times; tech workers willfully or naively ignore the harm their contributions cause as long as the life changing paychecks keep coming, letting them pretend that they are too far removed from the damage to be responsible.

Then comes the classic post “I’m leaving FAANG, so brave of me <quiet-part>funded entirely by the same extraction and harm I once insisted I didn’t see.</quiet-part>"
by stinos | 2025-11-23 20:03:37+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).

There's quite a lot of research in this direction (stimulation, be it ultrasound or otherwise) to tackle exactly things you mention. Not completely sure but probably stimulators to suppress epilepsy are the most common. It has been proven in animal research stimulating the right area induces visual stimuli - IIRC this has been tested and confirmed in humans as well, i.e., make people see again. And there's more going on.

In the end: everything in the brain is electrical current. Meaning that in theory stimulating the right bits can do pretty much everything.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-23 20:04:33+00:00
> one of those not-actually-a-judge decisionmakers

With all the hubbub these days of those same decision-makers writing "warrants", I consciously try to reframe them as "memos." (Ex: "I have a memo for your arrest.")

Sure, it may not be a term of art for executive-branch bureaucrats... but it's way less misleading for the public that associates "warrant" with a much weightier process.

It also underscores the absurd recklessness of ICE flunkies ramming cars and pointing guns into people's faces while hunting for what are often civil infractions. Not felonies, not misdemeanors, but the equivalent of parking tickets.
by green7ea | 2025-11-23 20:04:34+00:00
> it's still the best OS by a mile

I'm not so sure about that, modern Linux is pretty good — I was able to configure it to fit my needs much better than I could a mac. It's also free of dark patterns (looking at Windows).

If you're willing and able to configure Linux, I would say that, for some people, it's much better than a mac.
by Arathorn | 2025-11-23 20:04:59+00:00
Speaking as project lead for Matrix, the protocol does currently expose more metadata to the server than it should. Specifically, the main issues are:

* no sealed-sender (but see the OP on why this is not a panacea)

* server can see which users are in which rooms

* plaintext room names & topics (so serverside search can work)

* aggregations (metadata around reactions, edits, replies, threads - ie who reacted to what and with what emoji)

We’ve been working away improving this - for instance MSC3414 defines a way to encrypt key/value events like the above, and an implementation landed this summer. Similarly per-room user ids are planned too. However, it’s not trivial to get right, and we are underresourced so the work is going slower than we’d like. Also, decentralisation at least means the metadata doesn’t pool in some centralised place (as signal’s traffic footprint does, for instance). If you run your own server, then the threat may be acceptable.
by watwut | 2025-11-23 20:05:40+00:00
> the narrative will morph into something like these were cowboys doing unauthorized things at Musk's behest

They just knowingly broke the law. They are not saying "omg, I thought I am doing fully legal thing". They are saying "omg, the mafia boss does not have interest or power to protect me anymore after I broke the law for him". And they are saying it very very literally:

> the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came.

This is not about "narrative changing". This is them working for crime boss, knowingly and now finding out crime boss does not care anymore.
by dahart | 2025-11-23 20:06:08+00:00
I’m not sure carrying wavelength or spectral info changes anything with respect to order of transparency.

It seems like OIT is kind of a misnomer when people are talking about deferred compositing. Storing data and sorting later isn’t exactly order independent, you still have to compute the color contributions in depth order, since transparency is fundamentally non-commutative, right?

The main benefit of spectral transparency is what happens with multiple different transparent colors… you can get out a different color than you get when using RGB or any 3 fixed primaries while computing the transmission color.
by tyfon | 2025-11-23 20:06:11+00:00
In Europe we have the PSD2 open banking [1] directive which essentially gives developers a standard api access to banking operations on behalf of a user.

It is a requirement for banks to implement this and the FSA will be on your neck if you are not compliant with the standard.

[1] https://finance.ec.europa.eu/regulation-and-supervision/fina...
by throw4847285 | 2025-11-23 20:06:28+00:00
I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.
by vidarh | 2025-11-23 20:06:29+00:00
MCP has already drastically lost utility already thanks to skills - for most things it is easier to just hand the model a CLI that it can run.

I'd imagine the same thing will happen here: It will prove more flexible to not push the model (and user) towards a UI that may not match what the user is trying to accomplish.

To me this seems like something I categorically don't want unless it is purely advisory.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-23 20:06:34+00:00
That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate.

I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently.

But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset.

Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases).

A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care.

We’re seeing quite a bit of that stuff, nowadays.
by HumanOstrich | 2025-11-23 20:07:04+00:00
I don't think you know what you're talking about. That looks like the setting you would change specifically on the Wikipedia site. There would be additional code and CSS behind the scenes to enable that functionality. For example, where is the color palette defined?

The discussion is about site owners making light/dark mode configurable. Your first reply reads like you're saying that Wikipedia has an article for how to implement configurable light/dark mode on a site. I now think maybe you just meant "Here's how to change the setting on Wikipedia, it's so easy!" which still misses the point and is not easy for most people.

Maybe if you link to the Wikipedia page you're talking about that would help. I can only find variables like the above in documentation about templates and themes. That wouldn't be helpful anywhere outside of Wikipedia.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-23 20:07:13+00:00
Wow! Man, an insider with these kinds of concerns isn't exactly exonerating or excusing themselves with such a testimony. Whistle-blowing to any relevant authority as hard as possible seems like the bare minimum? And if there's no governing agency to pass the responsibility over to, I think you gotta quietly approach the first customer (or victim) with these concerns if not a newspaper
by laurencerowe | 2025-11-23 20:07:23+00:00
> When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense.

That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.

This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.

Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.
by ranger_danger | 2025-11-23 20:07:47+00:00
> the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly dropping off.

Please don't assume everyone's usecase is the same as yours. I would pay dearly to have an unreliable but FAST connection just to get away from my 6Mbps DSL.
by somat | 2025-11-23 20:08:20+00:00
Wow, The Burroughs large system had special instructions explicitly for efficient algol use. You could almost say it was algol hardware. but algol 60 not 68.

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

There is a large system emulator that runs in a browser, I did not get any algol written but I did have way to much fun going through the boot sequence.

https://www.phkimpel.us/B5500/webUI/B5500Console.html
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-23 20:08:45+00:00
Its clearly unfair if only the little fish get punished while the big fish don't.

OTOH, in practical terms, you can't have big fish without little fish supporting them, so if you drive up the perceived cost of being a little fish, you make it harder for future would-be big fish even without the (obviously preferable) direct accountability for them, so its better than nothing.

(EDIT: originally had some both incorrect and unnecessarily indirect "former/latter" references, replaced with more direct language.)
by 35fbe7d3d5b9 | 2025-11-23 20:09:25+00:00
I am reminded of the troubles my parents experienced with their phone service when I was a kid. We lived out in the country, and every time it rained the lines would pick up horrific static. It was too much to have a voice conversation, let alone support the (slow) dial up Internet we used.

A multitude of technicians came out and apologetically said there was a problem somewhere in a line, but they couldn’t get approval to really dig in because there just weren’t enough complaints - they theorized there was just one broken line somewhere in a bundle that water would seep in to, and we drew the short straw.

Finally, one technician very quietly suggested that my parents go to the phonebook and call the state public utilities regulation commission. I still remember that their number was found on the one blue page in the telephone book.

Within a few business days, there were half a dozen lineman out stringing new lines, and a supervisor apologizing to my parents, promising the issue would be fixed that day, and giving his direct line to them with the instructions to call if they ever had phone trouble again.

My dad generally distrusts the government, but still marvels at that response to this day.
Show HN: Simple Headless CMS for Firestore and Storage (Built with Svelte)
by ortwic | 2025-11-23 20:09:25+00:00
Hi @all,

For my other project I needed a way to get data in Firestore. There is FireCMS or Flamelink, but I was very unhappy with those solutions.

So I decided to built my own headless CMS. It's very minimal and lightweight. It uses a simplified version of the FireCMS data models and can derive them from existing data. However, handling sub-collections, editing content, and managing storage content is easier.

It's a SPA with PWA support written in Svelte 4 and runs fully in the browser (no backend). Metadata models is stored directly in your Firestore (as __schema). For now they can be edited as JSON only.

If you want to play around, you can use the firebase emulator suite too.

More infos at github or check out the online live demo: https://fl-cms.web.app

Important note: ATM it's released as a MVP. Working with it possible but not all eventualities are implemented yet since the other projects must go on too.
by llbbdd | 2025-11-23 20:10:15+00:00
I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effort and money involved, OSX is the worst at it. Somewhere greater than 5 workspaces, each managing a fairly small amount of work, it lags like crazy on a powerful machine (M2, 64GB RAM). Gnome will just hang until the workspace has "finished" switching. Windows will switch quickly but will flash every app white until it reloads whatever context it needs to show me the right pixels. I know that workspaces exist somewhere in no man's land between "normal people" (what's a workspace?) and "power users" (who have thirty context-specific keyboard shortcuts for their desktop layout) but it's insane how badly they (anecdotally) perform across platforms. Not that your experiment isn't valuable, I certainly appreciate literally any amount of effort going into this problem, but I do wonder if I'm doing something specific to trigger the problems I'm seeing.
by NvrBeenToAus | 2025-11-23 20:10:21+00:00
Main contractor is Accenture Australia per this: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-05/true-cost-of-bureau-o...

>The ABC understands the government awarded business management company Accenture Australia a $78 million contract to develop the new website's content management system (CMS).
by nobodyandproud | 2025-11-23 20:11:21+00:00
> the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford

It’s out of touch because it’s not merely a “tough” question.

It’s not a well-defined question and it may not be quantifiable.

It’s a terrible lens to view through, but financially speaking creating or extending your family is a major risk.

The easy questions: What does it even mean to say one has more children than one can afford? What standard is being used to decide when someone has gone past affordability?

The harder or impossible questions, and these are critically important: What factors play into the financial risk of having or extending a family? And can each factor be quantified?

I suspect the answer is no, because few or no private insurer is in business guaranteeing long-term employment terms.

Finally: Even if the probabilities can be accurately quantified, what risk threshold can we establish as responsible vs irresponsible?

And the burden is on the claim maker to establish that it’s possible, because as far as I know life in a market economy is a bit too messy to forecast in this manner.

If this inspires you or someone else to try, I wish you all the best and with my blessing.
by xp84 | 2025-11-23 20:11:22+00:00
Not to mention that as soon as the IDF pulled out, Hamas immediately started dragging Palestinians out into the streets and publicly executing them for “collaboration” crimes real or imagined. The #1 killer of Palestinians is Hamas itself.

It’s pure cowardice that they fight the way they do, mixing all their military equipment with civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools, and they rely on propagandizing gullible Western liberals (as well as anti-semites) to get support for their murderous cause.

There is no way to fight them that doesn’t endanger civilians. And there’s no way for Israeli Jews to continue breathing without fighting Hamas. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is living in a fantasy.
by dspillett | 2025-11-23 20:11:44+00:00
I can't read the article as it seems hugged to death and not archived elsewhere yet, but if this is the case I'm thinking about, he wrote everything and used a TTS system to read it as him.

Normally I'm relatively anti-generative-AI, but I don't see a big problem with this one. TTS has been used for a long time, just less convincingly so, often in work situations. Many people with disabilities that affect their verbal ability do it so they can communicate in a way that feels less impersonal than in written form - if everyone else using TTS normalises this sort of thing more than it'll be a boost for those users.

My only concern here is that TTS systems based on generative tech have been known to hallucinate slight changes to the text they are reading. In legal contexts small changes in wording can have significant impact, so I hope he checks the output in detail, or has someone else do so, after it is produced before giving it to anyone else…