MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanjayjc | 2025-11-26 06:30:37+00:00
Given how many pictures governments and corporations collect from public places, the GP's concern seems moot. I'll try to articulate my reasons as follows:

- In every authentication system (the airports' face scanning ones and others) there's a point at which a yes/no decision must be made: is this person authentic or is not?

- This yes/no "decision module" must base its determination solely on a series of bits presented to it by the image sensor.

- Every series of bits can be spoofed because the decision module can't tell whether the bits originated from a real image sensor or from a very convincing AI or elsewhere. The only exception to this is when the bits include a cryptographic signature, generated using a private key, securely embedded within the image sensor.

- The chance of such spoofing is minuscule if the sensor and the decision module coexist within a single piece of hardware that's tamper-proof. The decision module for airport face scanners can't be, given the large number of faces that must be queried. When such a decision module and its image sensor are separated by a network, possibilities for intrusion and spoofing can no longer be ignored.

- A helpful analogy is how we decry passwords stored as plain text in backend databases; after the inevitable compromise, these passwords get used to attack other systems. If backend systems store face data as a set of images (as I believe most do), how's that different in principle from storing passwords in a DB, in plain text?

- I'll grant that a careful designed system will allay my fears. The backend should store nothing but salted hashes and the image sensors must send only signed images of the subject.

- Stepping back, my ultimate concern with face authentication systems is that their technical details are opaque and they're used in situations where recourse is limited at best.
by menaerus | 2025-11-26 06:31:15+00:00
They don't sell their models to individuals only but also to companies with most likely different business and pricing models so that's an overly simplistic view of their business. YoY their spending increases, we can safely assume that one of the reasons is the growing user base.

Time will probably come when we won't be allowed to consume frontier models without paying anything, as we can today, and time will come when this $30 will most likely become double or triple the price.

Though the truth is that R&D around AI models, and especially their hosting (inference), is expensive and won't get any cheaper without significant algorithmic improvements. According to the history, my opinion is that we may very well be ~10 years from that moment.

EDIT: HSBC has just published some projections. From https://archive.ph/9b8Ae#selection-4079.38-4079.42

> Total consumer AI revenue will be $129bn by 2030

> Enterprise AI will be generating $386bn in annual revenue by 2030

> OpenAI’s rental costs will be a cumulative $792bn between the current year and 2030, rising to $1.4tn by 2033

> OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn

> Squaring the first total off against the second leaves a $207bn funding hole

So, yes, expensive (mind the rental costs only) ... but forseen to be penetrating into everything imagineable.
by user_7832 | 2025-11-26 06:31:34+00:00
You’re probably right for grandma or Katie, but CLIs are definitely an issue. I know it because they are an issue even for someone like me. And I’m someone who is fairly techy (heck, we’re on HN) and can read the docs/rtfm. I’m more comfortable flashing a kernel I’ve never heard the name of for the first time, than editing some arcane wayland settings.

Simple example, I wanted to customize my gestures in gnome. I installed another app for it on the recommendation of multiple stack overflow and Reddit threads.

I ended up losing the default gnome gestures, and even disabling the app didn’t help.

I only use my windows (10) ltsc installation now. (Where, fwiw, I do have an absolute *ton* of customization/“ricing” apps for everything from custom ux themes to taskbar tweaks. Amazingly, pretty much everything is stable.)
by echelon | 2025-11-26 06:32:17+00:00
> > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

This is interesting. If it had a limitation on reselling or a non-commercial / non-compete clause, it'd be almost perfect.

Today lots of companies come in and take open source software and "steal" the profits. (You could argue that theft is invalid since the license allows for this.) This makes it hard for the authors to build a durable business. Certainly difficult to build into a large-scale company.

Open source needs a better mechanism for authors to make money with what they create while still enabling user freedom to do what they want with the software - modify, reuse, publish changes, etc.

"Open core" is one strategy, but it feels like stepping around limitations in the license. Just spelling out "we want to make money in a defensible way" and giving user freedoms seems like a step in the right direction. More companies would probably opt to share their code if this happened.
by alwillis | 2025-11-26 06:33:31+00:00
Yes, the syntax takes a while to get used to; they were attempting to cover several different use cases.

You can use ASCII art to “draw” your layout if you want to, which is quite accessible [1].

[1]: “Grid: how grid-template-areas offer a visual solution for your code” — https://webkit.org/blog/17620/grid-how-grid-template-areas-o...
by cma | 2025-11-26 06:35:08+00:00
> and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like.

Maybe possible, but, for example, Musk's recent attempts at getting Grok to always bolster him had Grok bragging Musk could drink the most piss in the world if humanity's fate depended on it and would be the absolute best at eating shit if that was the challenge.
by kaufmae | 2025-11-26 06:35:18+00:00
This. Choose your destiny: 1. Take time to review the code, post it to the author with knowing that nobody and nothing is going to learn from it except for you doing his job for feeding new prompts 2. Take ownership of the branch and fix the AI code 3. Read through the code to get some learning out of it if possible, close the PR and write your own
by a_bonobo | 2025-11-26 06:35:58+00:00
>I find there is usually also some file juggling, parsing, [...]

I'd say I'm 50/50 Python/R for exactly this reason: I write Python code on HPC or a server to parse many, many files, then I get some kind of MB-scale summary data I analyse locally in R.

R is not good at looping over hundreds of files in the gigabytes, Python is not good at making pretty insights from the summary. A tool for every task.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-26 06:37:23+00:00
I think you've got it backwards: The current administration--and its 2016-2020 predecessor--have demonstrated they are exactly the type of "captain" that wrecks ships trying to play chicken with an incoming lighthouse.

Republicans already passed a budget giving ICE a crazy amount of taxpayer dollars, a subset of that being $45 billion-with-a-B directly earmarked for the creation of new "detention centers". If "economic reasons" were gonna stop them, it would have already happened.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
by joelthelion | 2025-11-26 06:37:31+00:00
> When do you expect that impact? I think the models seem smarter than their economic impact would imply.

> Yeah. This is one of the very confusing things about the models right now.

As someone who's been integrating "AI" and algorithms into people's workflows for twenty years, the answer is actually simple. It takes time to figure out how exactly to use these tools, and integrate them into existing tooling and workflows.

Even if the models don't get any smarter, just give it a few more years and we'll see a strong impact. We're just starting to figure things out.
by oivey | 2025-11-26 06:37:43+00:00
The most mind boggling number in this article to me was PeopleSoft claiming it would cost $500 million to make a payroll system for the Canadian government. That’s thousands of working years of software developers. It’s such a huge scale that it seems pretty clear the project should never start. PeopleSoft should have been dumped and the project’s scope massively reevaluated.
by roeles | 2025-11-26 06:38:22+00:00
Not saying you're wrong, but I wonder what is the differentiating factor for software? We can build huge things like airliners, massive bridges and buildings without starting small.

Incremental makes less sense to me when you want to go to mars. Would you propose to write the software for such a mission in an incremental fashion too?

Yet for software systems it is sometimes proposed as the best way.
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-26 06:39:10+00:00
Not GP, but the general idea is the skill to take a piece of code and understand what it does by reading the code itself (probably in an IDE that can help navigate it meaningfully), not relying on docs or explanations or anything else. Surprisingly few people are comfortable in doing this, and yet it's very common in any large software project that lots of parts of the code are undocumented and no one remembers the details of how they were written.
by wraptile | 2025-11-26 06:39:33+00:00
How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.

Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.

Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.
by degamad | 2025-11-26 06:40:34+00:00
> The tax office will bother you...

This is entirely jurisdiction specific, so I can't say for certain, but in almost every country I've looked into it for, there is a set of paperwork that an individual can use to independently invoice for work, without the effort of setting up an incorporated company. You will definitely need to record the income you received, and declare it on the relevant tax forms.

There is often a scale variance too - in Australia, "hobby" income is treated differently from "business" income. [0]

In Germany, there is the concept of the "Freien Berufen" ("liberal professions"), in which you can freelance without a company. [1]

> ... the client also will demand...

The client may also demand these things of you.

They are certainly capable of dealing with sole traders, and will have some services provided by people who do not have those things. (Your boss does not check if the receipt you submit for the new bookshelf for the office comes from a registered company or a sole trader carpenter.)

Depending on the scale of the services you are providing, they may prefer to deal with a registered entity, but for small one-off things, that may not be necessary.

If you are regularly working with large businesses who are funding your work, it's worth looking into the most effective tax and legal structures for you. But if you just need to send the occasional invoice off to someone who wants something quick done, it's useful to know what your options are.

One final thought - even when dealing with organisations who prefer to deal with registered businesses, you have options. You can choose to be employed by a company which does that on your behalf. Either a business which you have a good relationship with, and is willing to enter into a casual employment contract with you and bill for your services, or a dedicated contractor management company. Either way, you give up a percentage of what you bill, but in exchange, they take the paperwork and liability overhead.

[0] https://www.ato.gov.au/forms-and-instructions/trust-tax-retu...

[1] https://handbookgermany.de/en/self-employment
by disqard | 2025-11-26 06:41:11+00:00
It was a week-long silent meditation (Vipassana), focusing on "Mindful Awareness".

It was at a point in my life where I was able to do it (and I'm grateful), but I have a kid in kindergarten now, so it'd be hard to convince my wife that it's important enough that she should single-handedly manage for a week.

Overall, I think the major benefit for me, was that it bootstrapped this mental model:

* Our minds are constantly spawning processes, and "learning how to start + keep running a debug process" is an invaluable tool for gathering data.

* Once you've gathered a reasonable amount of data, you will start to spot patterns. One of the teachers at this retreat expressed it as "wisdom will arise"

I have a long way to go, but I'm grateful every day that I have this foundation.

In an ideal world, it'd be nice to do this again, to compare where I am today (IIRC, it's been ~8 years).

P.S. there were no substances included :)
by Surac | 2025-11-26 06:41:52+00:00
Please forgive me if I get something wrong. Not a native English speaker. The article boils it down to: all is a management failure. This is also my feeling after 35 years in software development. There are no such thing than a competent middle or upper management in software development. I see sometimes even devs being promoted and in an instant forget how software is made. In the other hand I see promotion of the most stupid dev. Al this leads to massive Missmanagements and hiding of problems to the upper managers. Even worse sometimes I see the best devs promoted only to watch them break because the toxin they get from there managers kills them
by adiabatty | 2025-11-26 06:42:30+00:00
Do you also have something like <link rel=alternate href=/atom.xml type=application/atom+xml> in your <head> element?

Things like this let me just throw homepages (or blog pages) at feed readers and they can discover all the different feeds available and I can pick one (although you really don't need more than one, generally).
by tpxl | 2025-11-26 06:42:41+00:00
> That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again

That is a feature (of the browser). The volume bar is selected so it takes up the controls for left/right (this is what a horizontal slider does I suppose). You can also select the volume button and mute/unmute with spacebar (spacebar does the action of the UI element, like click a button). You can tab around the buttons under the video to select options, etc. all with a keyboard. If a control doesn't support an action, it'll be propagated up to the parent, which leads to the jarring feeling that controls are inconsistent (and also the effects, left-right just adjusts the volume, up-down also plays an animation).

It's the usual low quality Google product, but it does make sense why it is so.
I bought a tiny Chrome extension 3 months ago and it's now my best acquisition
by mddanishyusuf | 2025-11-26 06:44:07+00:00
Three months ago, I bought a small Chrome extension that had been running quietly for about two years. It wasn't growing, but it had a small user base and some paying customers, so I saw potential.

Here are the numbers before I acquired it (over 2 years): – $5k total revenue – 372 licenses sold – Domain Rating: 0

Here are the numbers after 3 months under my ownership: – $18k revenue – 593 licenses sold – Domain Rating: 26

I didn't rewrite the whole product. Most of the impact came from fundamentals: improving onboarding, fixing a few bugs, adding missing features users had requested, tightening up pricing, and doing basic SEO and distribution work that hadn’t been done before.

My goal now is to evolve it into something closer to a productivity tool similar to Raycast, but built directly into the browser environment.

If anyone is interested, I'm happy to break down the acquisition process, what I changed, and what actually moved the needle.
Show HN: Aithings.dev – a directory for AI tools, resources, and communities
by rutagandasalim | 2025-11-26 06:44:55+00:00
I built aithings.dev to make it easier to find good AI stuff — not just tools, but also books, videos, tutorials, and communities worth joining.

The goal is to have one place where builders, learners, and founders can explore what’s happening in AI without endless scrolling or random links.

It’s still early, but it’s growing fast. There’s also a newsletter that curates the best new AI tools and resources every week.
by sgt | 2025-11-26 06:45:27+00:00
I tried this once a few years ago.. had half a dozen Samsung Android phones running an SSH daemon with some functionality that could be remotely accessed. However, what I learned is that phones generally don't like to run 24/7 as servers. They start giving you trouble after a while, never figured out why.

But I suspect it's just the "always on" nature and the battery. The usage pattern is just entirely different than having a phone in your pocket and using when you need it.

You're welcome to try though, maybe phones got more reliable.
by riggsdk | 2025-11-26 06:47:40+00:00
I think OpenStreeMap could benefit immensely from investing a bit in making self-hosted versions more approachable and on more platforms, especially now that vector-tiles are becoming increasingly used.

I would love to quickly install a small subset of the planet (say my home city or country) on a cheap webhost with a simple LAMP stack. Then have the map just use that server whenever it fits within the bounds of my subsets and then possibly fallback to other or the public servers if requesting data from outside.

Routing also seems like something that could technically be done (albeit less efficient than dedicated C++ implementations) on cheap servers but I guess it would require more work.

Rolling out map updates for all these self-hosted instances is a bit of another problem but I'm sure it can be done.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-11-26 06:48:15+00:00
I switch(ed) for simplicity and privacy. Haven't found any yet. Camino and Firefox used to be that; and the browser on ElementaryOS (which IIRC was just a cleaned Firefox but not sure). Not anymore. Stopped using ElementaryOS, and every other browser collectively decided to aspire for FUBAR.

Now I think I'll just keep switching until there's one decent browser left which hasn't been AIed.
by zzrrt | 2025-11-26 06:48:16+00:00
> Only if that connection object doesn’t support move — we’re 12 years of C++ standards past the arrival of move, and it still leaves its source in an indeterminate state.

I haven’t watched the streams he referred to, but… I am fairly certain the language itself says no such thing. You may be thinking of the standard library, which states that certain classes of moved-from objects have unspecified state. If you’re writing your own DB connection class, you can define moves to leave the object in whatever state you prefer, or disallow moves.

Admittedly it’s still a weird example IMO, because external factors can sever the connection while the object is in scope.
by sings | 2025-11-26 06:50:00+00:00
I agree. I occasionally turn to them to see if they work in a new setting, but find they never expose the features of a grid I would find useful. Everything must be manually placed, rather than allowing content to intelligently snap to multiple axes. Possibly I never have grasped some fundamental concept, possibly they are not suited to the sorts of layouts I usually work on. But more and more I feel they are designed to fulfil some purpose orthogonal to what I would need them to do.
by hapticmonkey | 2025-11-26 06:50:21+00:00
Remember when the Youtube app overrode the AppleTV screensavers, to show their own screensavers if Youtube was paused.

Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.
by Surac | 2025-11-26 06:51:35+00:00
I at the moment try to learn python as a hobby language. I use c c++ and c# to earn my money. MY biggest problem is finding good examples that are up to date. I spent a whole day learning that there a four (I think) ways to do formatting strings. This „bloat“ in syntax makes even a simple print very heavy to digest. I don’t even bother using v2 python only v3. Also using whitespaces to block things together sounds appealing but in reality you need to use editors that can indent and unindent whole blocks or I never get it right
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-26 06:53:59+00:00
> I feel that we've drifted from our original discussion about innovation. The Mac touchpad hardware/software is genuine innovation. Same for getting great sound into a small laptop, removing pixels from being a factor with high DPI retina displays, same for all-day battery, and same for the M chips. These are all things which change the way we do computing. And these examples are all things where nobody would prefer something worse.

I think this difference in perception is really the crux of it. My TL;DR would be that Apple really pushed the enveloppe for decades, until it mostly stopped doing so (the M chips are the last real advancement for me)

To go point by point:

> touchapds

Apple introducing decent touchpads was an innovation, it happened in 2006. From there they refined the formula, became the absolute best at making touchpads, and decided to leap to button-less touchpads in 2018. That was 7 years ago.

> retina

It was a huge leap in display management and technology. It happened in 2015, 10 years ago.

> all-day battery

The 2010 macbook pro touted 10h of battery life. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pro-u...

Current macbook evolved a lot from there, but given how Apple also touted "all day battery life" for the first watches, that milestone was in reach 15 years ago.

--- > [other manufacturers] do, in limited niches. And they also innovate, but they never make good implementations.

Apple's niche is also limited. It grew bigger than in the platinum macbook days, but even today I'd consider it a small part of the global market. DELL or Lenovo would be an example of an actual mainstream PC maker. Jobs would spit on their designs, but if we look at the numbers that's what a non niche maker looks like.

On whether an implementation is good or not is on the eye of the beholder, I think we can agree to disagree.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2025-11-26 06:54:03+00:00
The scheme described here maintains what I would call a replica, not backups. Files deleted from the source will be deleted from the replica at the next replication. That can be fine depending on the circumstances but is not what I would call a proper backup system.

A real backup system keeps deleted files for at least some period of time until they age out of the backups. That period may be shorter or longer but is an essential characteristic of a real backup system.

The author, and most readers, would probably be better off using any of a number of actual backup programs: borg, restic, hashbackup, tarsnap, others.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-26 06:54:32+00:00
> Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.

Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.

If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.