MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-06 20:08:29+00:00
> The rules are too complex to start a business.

Not to mention the taxes, depending on where you live. When I actually went to register my side gig wedding photography business it was the most confusing mess I've ever had to slog through.

It's not clear, at all, what licenses you need because of the nature of the business. There's state, then there's also local/city licenses, and it's not clear on if you need one for every city you photograph at, or just one for the city you reside in (your business address). Some cities require it some don't.

Then the taxes here are also just as confusing. Different rates depending on the business activity. Session fee revenue is taxed differently than digital photo sales revenue, etc. Then sometimes the service itself is subject to sales tax, sometimes not, depending on how (and where) you deliver the photos matters too.

You can't be on the legal up and up without hiring an accountant and maybe an attorney to go through the process with you, which is definitely not something I wanted to do for a side gig.

It should not be this convoluted or difficult to legally open a business, especially under a certain amount of revenue per year. I'm not making millions here, we're talking less than 100k/year in gross revenue.

There's a reason most photographers here just....don't bother to register with the dept of revenue. Most don't get caught anyway so a lot of times its worth the risk to just..not pay the taxes.

None of that bureaucracy should exist for businesses under a certain size/under a certain revenue.
by rhelz | 2025-11-06 20:09:03+00:00
// How familiar re you with Texas? ///

How much time have you spent teaching high school?

// here their devices are locked inside the pouch with a magnetic key. //

Soo....what do they do if the kid just says, "I don't have a cell phone?" Which I guarantee 90% of them do. I'll tell you what they do--nothing. You can pass laws, you can spend money, but unless there is actual *enforcement* it's just kabuki.

// spent about $120,000 implementing the measure //

sigh Texas is hiring uncertified instructors to be teachers. Texas is increasing class sizes. There are schools operating without a library. Budgets are being cut in real terms. And they are cutting bus routes, so some students have no reliable way to get to school.

But yet, this school just had to pay $120k--and they bought absolutely no *enforcement*.

// Texas does not pass much of anything that could be grouped with "just to make people feel like their government is actually doing something". //

Sorry man, you've just been scammed.
by avidiax | 2025-11-06 20:09:04+00:00
Presumably, when these people bought their homes, they felt they'd be able to live with a relatively continuous sense of community, not feel forced to sell as a billionaire's compound encroached on them.

There's an assumption that these homeowners are getting bought out above market, but what's the market rate for a multi-million dollar home next to the perpetual construction and noise of a billionaire's fife, on a street where an increasing number of homes are being bought out and lay vacant? And why would the property team not negotiate any sale somewhat aggressively?
by riskable | 2025-11-06 20:09:06+00:00
Inflation might help the situation; by making microtransactions a more realistic prospect. However, what would really help would be to end Visa, MasterCard, and American Express's monopoly on payments—where they extract at least $0.30 out of every transaction.

I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then, you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (them)? $0.00001 (or something like that). That accounts for all the people they had working for them, the infrastructure, the servers, etc. It'd be even less today.

There's no reason for them to exist. The government should just setup a central bank transfer system with unlimited free transactions already. Or even better: Mandate that banks can't charge fees for transactions. Not to consumers or businesses! They already make enough money to more than make up for it (Source: I work for a bank and transaction fees are nothing but pure profit since there's basically zero cost associated with them).
by samtp | 2025-11-06 20:09:23+00:00
> I'm sure I've seen reports in the US of people burning postboxes around election time

Yeah that happened once in OR then got re-plastered all over the news dozens of times. I'm sure you can find way more incidents of intimidation, fighting, long lines and other issues for in-person voting. But individual incidents does not mean that there is anything wrong with a system that has worked for decades in multiple states.
by epistasis | 2025-11-06 20:09:51+00:00
> Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.

Small point of order, but it is the Senate that ratifies treaties and not presidents. The Senate is heavily biased to overrepresent rural areas, which tend to be very conservative, and only 40% of senators can stop any ratification. The ICC has been the subject of massive amounts of conspiracy theories and misinformation in conservative media, so there's approximately zero chance that it could ever be ratified, unless the Senate's structure was made more representative of the people of the US rather than a conspiracy-minded subset.

If the Senate was a democratic representation of the will of the US it would not be hard to ratify the treaty.
by 05 | 2025-11-06 20:10:29+00:00
ESP32 has inherent sleep issues and before their latest chip (c6 I think) 'deep sleep' was really a gpio- or rtc- triggered boot followed by a power off. Doesn't mean it's impossible to implement wifi sleep efficiently, but if you do the math anything wifi based won't work off cr2032 for even a year unless daily updates is all you need. Motion sensors are supposed to fire more often, and with much less latency that can be done via WiFi, so it doesn't really work for battery powered sensors in the general case. You could probably use ESPNow and a custom gateway node but at that point it's just another custom RF protocol and you're better off with something standard like 802.15.4 or BLE..
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-06 20:10:34+00:00
I mean the missing link here is can you make money with it. There are plenty of people out there for whom the "easy" work is something like building hyper-detailed models of obscure railway bridges, or painting 5,000 pictures of their cat, or tending their vegetable garden. But their ability to indulge in that is limited because they have to support themselves with some other kind of work.

I don't think the hard part is finding something to do that fulfills you and feels easy. The hard part is meeting your material needs while still having enough time and energy to do that stuff that fulfills you and feels easy.
by immibis | 2025-11-06 20:10:40+00:00
There's no canonical package manager or packaging convention for C and C++ libraries, since they predate that sort of thing. As a result, there's a lot more friction to using dependencies and people tend to use less of them. Common OS libraries are fair game, and there are some large widely used libraries like boost, but it's extremely unusual for a C or C++ project to pull in 20+ very small libraries. A chunk of functionality has to be quite big and useful before it overcomes the friction of making it a library.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-06 20:10:51+00:00
UBI covers more underfunded nondiscretionary personal spending that tends to have a marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of almost exactly 1 when used wisely. This means it funds necessary shit that might not have been funded and led to deleterious effects like malnutrition, stunted growth, and preventable disabilities.

Means testing and treating recipients like criminals places burdensome barriers in front of support (e.g., costs in time, money, energy, and emotional well-being) and often costs more to administer than the cost of the assistance itself when taken too far beyond deterring/eliminating obvious fraud.
by TheTaytay | 2025-11-06 20:11:16+00:00
Looks really cool. In reading through the FAQ, it says this: Q: "How are text features handled?" A: "In the local package version text features are encoded as categoricals without considering their semantic meaning. Our API automatically detects text features and includes their semantic meaning into our prediction. The local package version encodes text as numerical categories and does not include semantic meaning."

So that means that automatic embedding/semantic meaning is reserved for API use of TabPFN, right? Otherwise, if I use it locally, it's going to assign each of my distinct text values an arbitrary int, right?
by Tharre | 2025-11-06 20:11:39+00:00
As others have already mentioned, the bit banging part is mostly handled by the PIO, so you mostly just spend CPU cycles on 4b5b encoding and scrambling. The more immediate practical problem though is that this is transmit only, no receive.

Combined with RMII ethernet phys only costing around 30 cents even at single quantities definitely makes it just a fun project, though definitely an impressive one at that.
by signal11 | 2025-11-06 20:11:50+00:00
You’re entitled to your opinion. All I’ll say is that in the context of the bald fact (French has an older literary tradition than English) presented by a previous commenter, “understandable by modern speakers” is moving the goalposts. In my opinion of course.

Also

> something understandable by modern French speakers

The Song of Roland, used as an example in a previous comment, doesn’t qualify, and actually is yet another reason why this line of argument is pretty sad.
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-06 20:12:10+00:00
The Chinese are being pretty open about it and there's abundant footage. I do agree it's qualitatively different. The Chinese ations are also different in that they're being used to assert a territorial claim: China has been building artificial islands (by dumpin large piles of dirt) so it extend its territorial waters. So they always claim the other vessels are violating their boundaries. I presume this is being undertaken with a view to keeping the US and its proxies as far away from their coastal areas as possible in the future.
by srameshc | 2025-11-06 20:12:17+00:00
I like Parallel and been using it for tests but I am not sure about the terms.

> The materials displayed or performed or available on or through our website, including, but not limited to, text, graphics, data, articles, photos, images, illustrations and so forth (all of the foregoing, the “Content”) are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property laws. You promise to abide by all copyright notices, trademark rules, information, and restrictions contained in any Content you access through our website, and you won’t use, copy, reproduce, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, upload, display, license, sell, commercialize or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content not owned by you, (i) without the prior consent of the owner of that Content or (ii) in a way that violates someone else’s (including Parallel's) rights.
Show HN: I got Stability AI's small audio model into a consumer iOS app
by kilojules | 2025-11-06 20:12:43+00:00
I thought others might be interested in my experience getting Stability AI's stable-audio-open-small model working in a consumer-grade iOS app. Dealing with multiple model formats, conversion tooling and runtime frameworks complicated the endeavor.

I followed ARM's instructions for converting the stable-audio-open-small model to TensorFlow Lite. These instructions were Android-oriented but are applicable to iOS too.

The first issue I encountered was that Tensorflow Lite's Metal/GPU delegates don't seem to be able to run the three submodels, because many model operations are not supported. This left using the regular (cpu-bound) delegate using XNNPack to try and maximize performance. However, even with XNNPack enabled, the autoencoder model -- the final stage in the pipeline -- performed very poorly in terms of performance and memory usage. Its transient memory usage precluded running the app on older devices with less RAM.

To work around this, I used Apple's CoreML tools to convert just the original autoencoder pytorch model to a CoreML model. I was happy to find that this worked, and performance and memory usage improved significantly, enabling use on older devices. The size of the bundle was also reduced, but remains on the large side.

Although the model sometimes seems weak in some cases where high fidelity is expected, some of the outputs can be quite unusual and unexpected, which might be valuable for creative use-cases. Being able to share the audio clips as a ringtone is a terrific feature of iOS 26 (long overdue).

My app is called Diffuzion and is available in the App Store globally. Exporting audio is a premium feature gated by an in-app purchase, but you can use the promo code DIFFUZION4HN to get the functionality for free. This code is good until November 14th. I would appreciate feedback on possible improvements/features for the future. I have my own set of ideas, but you may have more compelling ones!
by red-iron-pine | 2025-11-06 20:13:41+00:00
the warehousing kids under 3 is a problem for the US since most mothers do not get any real time off or benefits. they get their 6 weeks then it's back to the mines.

which means you now have a ton of very very small children who need care. and in most cases these kids aren't doing much, just kinda laying there. the warehousing more or less happens after that, since it's a lot easier to pack em in.

you end up with 8 to 1 caretakers, and studies have shown that ain't great for the little ones.
by keybored | 2025-11-06 20:13:45+00:00
> Lack of autonomy is the most draining thing. ...

> Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.

Modern markets (capitalism) is the direct cause of the problem you describe. And if you think “big organizations” are the problem? The modern market system always tends towards larger corporations since they outcompete the small businesses.

> To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.

If this is the egalitarian idea of everyone being closer to a small business owner instead of many smaller businesses but most people still being employees, well that ideal is over a century out of date. It’s dead-end idealism.
by saurik | 2025-11-06 20:13:52+00:00
People put a lot of timeouts in code when there are humans in the loop that should handle the timeout. An outgoing socket (as is the case in this scenario) really should not have a timeout.

An incoming one might could have a timeout if there is no other way to garbage collect the connection, but, if at all possible, that should usually be in the higher layers, not the lower ones.

(Maybe read my other response to the person you responded to? I purposefully gave you a really short and matter-of-fact statement that fit into the discussion from the thread more broadly.)
by brazukadev | 2025-11-06 20:13:52+00:00
Acorda dessa alucinação rapaz, que loucura. Tá achando agora que do nada, sem saber nada de programação, você descobriu o segredo de como criar software profissionalmente? Não sei por que perdi meu tempo tentando dar um pouco de lucidez pra um conterraneo completamente perdido mas eu espero que você encontre alguma luz nessa insanidade.
by immibis | 2025-11-06 20:14:23+00:00
In languages without ambient I/O capabilities, it's not as hard as it sounds if you're used to languages with them. Suppose the only way you can write a file is if I give you a handle to that file - then I know you aren't going to write any other files. Of course, main() receives a handle from the OS to do everything.

If I want you to decode a JPEG, I pass you an input stream handle and you return an output memory buffer; because I didn't give you any other capabilities I know you can't do anything else. Apart from looping forever, presumably.

It still requires substantial discipline because the easiest way to write anything in this hypothetical language is to pass the do-everything handle to every function.

See also the WUFFS project: https://github.com/google/wuffs - where things like I/O simply do not exist in the language, and therefore, any WUFFS library is trustworthy. However, it's not a general-purpose language - it's designed for file format parsers only.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-11-06 20:15:21+00:00
> Deborah Turness tried to justify the doctored video and mangled timeline of the day by citing the US Congressional Committee on Trump’s role in the January 6th riots – the one which concluded he was involved in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the legal results of the 2020 election.

> Yet this was a Democrat-packed Committee, not an objective source of truth. I can see no justification for editing video clips so that a presidential candidate appears to say something he never did – and this defence did nothing to change my mind. I do urge the Board to pay particular attention to this matter.

Perhaps he could look into some of the subsequent criminal convictions or any of the other pillars of the effort?

Would have to see the video to determine if it was "doctored" or just a highlight reel. Don't really care to.
by NiloCK | 2025-11-06 20:15:24+00:00
I'd expect the same (fine tuning to be better than mere prompting) for most anything.

So a model is or is not "a reasoning model" according to the extent of a fine tune.

Are there specific benchmarks that compare models vs themselves with and without scratchpads? High with:without ratios being reasonier models?

Curious also how much a generalist model's one-shot responses degrade with reasoning post-training.
by evanjrowley | 2025-11-06 20:15:25+00:00
I appreciate your comment. I'm thrilled to learn that CryptPad is part of the openDesk solution.

>CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk.

https://blog.cryptpad.org/2025/01/28/CryptPad-Funding-Status...

Many more details in this blog post from XWiki: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-CryptPad-knowledge-managemen...
by eesmith | 2025-11-06 20:15:38+00:00
Define "preachy". Are you sure you aren't the one preaching the fun of burning coal and annoying people under the banner of "can't you take a joke"?

> Who said anything about riding a bicycle is preachy?

People burn coal while passing cyclists. Why? You yourself say that not all cyclists are preachy.

> In my case it was

Your accidental and short release of dark exhaust caused by driving an old vehicle does not fit the definition of burning coal. City busses where I lived in the 1980s emitted a lot of exhaust. That was simply bad emissions control, not rolling coal.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-11-06 20:15:47+00:00
They strike first, and then if there are any survivors, which there usually are not, they seem to release them to their home countries ( https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/politics/caribbean-boat-strik... ).

Now, you may ask "if these are criminal drug traffickers that need to be killed, why would we release survivors instead of arresting them and charging them with a crime?"
by angiolillo | 2025-11-06 20:15:52+00:00
Ha, somehow I'm not surprised.

I never worked on ASW or its replacements, but assuming they fixed the calculations in one of the newer swap curve functions I also wouldn't be surprised if some poor developer had to add a "compatibility mode" with the old calculation to avoid breaking someone's longitudinal analysis or satisfy some important user who prefers a stable calculation to a correct one.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-06 20:16:05+00:00
I was thinking of the extreme poverty and poor working conditions which are widespread in the US, but sure, the history of UK intervention in the Troubles isn't exactly a story of benevolence. No examples of torturing people to death came to mind though, are you thinking of some? The Five Techniques are torture, which is why they were banned before I was born, but the intent wasn't to torture people to death as I understand it - it's like "Enhanced Interrogation" in that you can tell idiots you're doing it to get information even though you're actually just a sadist. Even idiots understand that dead people can't tell you anything.
by superkuh | 2025-11-06 20:16:20+00:00
We already have laws against breaking into systems bypassing authorization systems. If they applied they'd be applied here. But they don't. Because in this situation we're talking about public websites and corporations being made you don't run their javascript.

As an aside, I do host a website from my desktop computer at home and you are free to access it! It's public. I intentionally put it on the public internet. I do not use a smart phone or the internet via phone.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-06 20:16:38+00:00
I don't know what the parent was referring to, but IMO "expert system" is one of the more accurate and insightful ways of describing LLMs.

An expert system is generically a system of declarative rules, capturing an expert's knowledge, that can be used to solve problems.

Traditionally expert systems are symbolic systems, representing the rules in a language such as Prolog, with these rules having been laboriously hand derived, but none of this seems core to the definition.

A pre-trained LLM can be considered as an expert system that captures the rules of auto-regressive language generation needed to predict the training data. These rules are represented by the weights of a transformer, and were learnt by SGD rather than hand coded, but so what?
by cal_dent | 2025-11-06 20:16:57+00:00
That’s true…but I do think people need to learn more that avoidance is a strategy too. The odds are too stacked against the average person to engage properly so just don’t. I don’t know. Sure there are certain unavoidable things but for a large part I think you can just choose to zone out of a lot of the consumerist world now
by th0ma5 | 2025-11-06 20:17:05+00:00
I spent a decade optimizing Python data science projects for a Fortune 100. I agree with the other sentiments that you can't really optimize Python itself because of these weird behaviors that seem to change the more you look at them... Mostly all of my optimization work was generic computer science stuff across the entire system and, in the data science world, this usually meant optimizing the database queries or the io throughput, or the overall shape of the kind of work that they were doing in order to parallelize it, or figure out how to simply do way less, etc. If someone actually came up to me with an actual problem with a Python code and it was the Python code that was not performing correctly, I would pretty immediately say let's use something else. I think the efforts to make a more efficient Python are really great, but I think the extreme utility of Python as a light glue to pull together lots of other things that are performing well in other computer languages is a widely recognized strength of the Python ecosystem.
by mlindner | 2025-11-06 20:17:16+00:00
They apparently got back together. Trump recently said of their relationship:

"I like Elon. I've always liked Elon." and "He's a nice guy. And he's a very capable guy. I've always liked him. He had a bad spell. He had a bad period. He had a bad moment. It was a stupid moment in his life. Very stupid. I'm sure he'd tell you that. But I like Elon and I suspect I'll always like him."
by twoodfin | 2025-11-06 20:17:22+00:00
The lesson, which we learned in the dot-com era and will likely learn again in the AI era, is that the benefits of step-change new infrastructure technology do not accrue in the long run to the infrastructure builders—the technology only creates the step-change if it finds its way to being a commodity!—but diffuses throughout the new, ultimately much larger, more productive economy as a whole.