MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-11 12:39:40+00:00
> if they care to try

You need to have that "if" reviewed by a regulatory body - with how much load you make it bear.

The issue isn't that 99 users out of 100 are actually retarded and incapable of doing a thing. The issue is that they don't want to. And wouldn't want to. And you would need multiple generational leaps in mind control technology to change that at scale.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-11 12:40:01+00:00
Yeah. OTOH, the clickbait seems confined to the title & subtitle on this one. By the 4th para, the story has admitted that "called on" is just noise in the SpaceX-fan bubbleverse. And that the chance of it being technically optimal is ~0.0000% - even if the CCP was somehow utterly blind to the optics of such a "rescue".
by nuuuwan | 2025-11-11 12:40:35+00:00
COLOMBO TRAFFIC INDEX

#Colombo’s roads often feel unpredictable, but what if we could turn that chaos into insight?

The Colombo Traffic Index (#CTI) will aim to do just that, creating a single number that represents how traffic is flowing across the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) area at any given moment.

MEDIUM: https://medium.com/on-technology/the-colombo-traffic-index-c...

SUBSTACK: https://open.substack.com/pub/nuuuwan/p/the-colombo-traffic-...

#SriLanka
by eviks | 2025-11-11 12:40:37+00:00
> thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages

That's a shoddy job of de-Googling, a thorough job would have seamless redirection to whatever current calendar service you use.

> I’m not going to tell you where to move your stuf

But that's the most important stuff!!! Don't leave poor users dry with an impractical advice that will lead them missing important meetings
by mathieu4v | 2025-11-11 12:40:41+00:00
I found this bit very revealing:

> Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued.

Another glimpse into the "mind" of a tech corporation allowing itself full freedom to profit from the vast body of human work available online, while explicitly declining any societal responsibility at all. It's the user's fault, he wrote an illegal prompt! We're only providing the "technology"!
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-11 12:40:43+00:00
> If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta.

Ads are not just a switch one can turn on. Firstly, you need to build a decent ad serving/targeting/pacing engine. Secondly (and more importantly) you need to hire a shed ton of sales people (in many, many geos) and then ramp them all up (difficult if you're building the product at the same time).

And then you need to keep at it for 3-5 years minimum before you'll finally get the bigger/more conservative brands/agencies/etc to buy in properly.

At that point, you'll make decent money, after accounting for all of the costs. I'm not sure that you'll make enough money, but it would definitely stanch their bleeding a little.

tl;dr if they haven't already built this ad product, it's unlikely to make a material difference before 2030.
Google, the worst search engine to ever exist in all universes for all time
by b112 | 2025-11-11 12:40:57+00:00
It's become beyond terrible. The aliasing is ridiculous now. Responses are abysmal. Normal search is utterly and completely useless for me.

The only way to even hope to get a result is via 'web' search. I never, ever get a hit on what I want otherwise.

And the aliasing? It's like trying to get grandpa with a hearing aid to understand what you're asking for. "Huh?" "Huh?", replies Google, with inane wrong results.

No, Google, searching for 'textile' is not the same as 'text'. Searching for 'ascii' is not the same as 'unicode'. I get this every single search. I had these two in the last 15 minutes. Google even bolds terms like "text editor" in its output, when I search for textile. No Grandpa, I said "textile"!

Why? Why do you think anyone ever at any time and place in any universe or any situation would want some alias of what they asked for? Do you go to a restaurant, and ask for 'steak', and end up with pork? A salad with romaine lettuce, and a plate with iceburg shows upon your table?

No one, ever, at any time ever wants something different than what they ask for, unless they already use generic terms. "A salad", instead of "A salad with romaine lettuce".

No, it's not spam and sites trying to game Google. Quotes and web search immediately resolve the issue.

And dropping search terms! We're not even talking about "OK, there's nothing left to find, so let's give results with missing search terms".

Nope. Missing term results are right at the top. Even if quotes are used, sometimes.

This all makes Google useless. It's junk. It's garbage. I used to be Google's Number 1 supporter, but the caliber and quality of what Google does today in search, is pathetic. So basically:

- I have to use web always (click on a tab for every search)

- I have to put quotes around every single search term

- I still have to deal with missing terms

And here's the awesome kicker.

If I use an add-on via firefox to default to web only? I immediately get captchas. Others have noticed this, even if it's editing their default search engine to include udm whatever. EG, it's not the plugin.

It's Google applying a negative score if you default to that, causing some to hit some limit where captchas trigger.

No Google, trying to get around your horrid and terrible and ridiculous and inane and moronic and lame and stupid and absurd and useless and pathetic default search by using 'web' isn't spammy.

Note: this submission has been edited after I calmed down a bit, removing inflammatory and excessive language. Yeah. Google has made me their enemy with their endless deluge of stupid.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-11 12:41:08+00:00
I think this is because of the protestant work ethic + probability/statistics instead of deterministic chaos.

Deterministic chaos in the sense of "fixed, non-random rules producing outcomes that are unpredictable in the long term due to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions".

A life lottery of initial conditions and then it plays out via deterministic chaos is just such an unacceptable idea to the modern protestant self conception.

Instead we will continue to pretend the harder you work the luckier you get because at least then we have some free will in the situation.

Buffet is a great example and has made this point practically. Won the life lottery to not have been born in the year 1400 and the idea of buying 6 packs of coke to sell to my friends for a profit as a little boy is just not in my nature, again because of my initial conditions.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-11 12:42:33+00:00
> it's 200,000 people

I think a lot of objections are really about scale. Corporate structure solves a lot of coordination problems; the other widely used structure, partnership, scales much less well. Partnership structured businesses tend to be small (exception: John Lewis and Partners, a UK retailer with over 80,000 partners).

Most of the objections to corporations are really the same as objections to the hyper-wealthy, where the corporation effectively acts as a sock puppet for the personal views of its management. Citizens United is just a symptom of that. The use of the WaPo as a personal mouthpiece for Bezos is another, but not really affected by the ruling.

There are lots of ways out of that if America wanted, but there's significant factions which don't because they want the status quo or a more regressive version. See all the Voting Rights Act litigation.
by lysace | 2025-11-11 12:42:35+00:00
We find the usual types in the signatory list:

Assistant Professor of Sustainability Lecturer in Critical Intersectional Perspectives on AI Professor of History and Anthropology Assistant Professor of Gender and Diversity in AI Professor of English Language and Literature

(From https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251110_Scie... - to be fair I cherrypicked these.)
by tremon | 2025-11-11 12:42:57+00:00
I started ripping before FLAC was a thing, and my first albums are all in 256k CBR mp3. I've never seen a big reason to re-do them. Yes, the files have gone through LAME's acoustic filter so they don't match the original bit-for-bit, but I mostly can't tell the difference. There have been a few times when I got annoyed by audio quality issues, but it's been 50/50 that it turned out those were also on the cd, so either a deliberate choice or a mistake during mastering.

As others say, there is an issue with compounding losses when you transcode mp3 to vorbis or opus, but I've never needed to do that -- and when I export, it's to move the files to lower-quality devices anyway.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-11-11 12:43:16+00:00
With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible, but I'm not quite sure that's the case. Lots of other games didn't do that.

And with the second version of the GBA SP and the GB Micro, colors were very saturated. Particularly on the SP. If anything, cranking up the saturation on an emulator would get you closer to how things looked on those models, while heavily desaturating would get you closer to the look on earlier models.
by sachin97317 | 2025-11-11 12:43:31+00:00
I built TokiForge — a tiny (3 KB) runtime theming and design-token engine that works with React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and vanilla JS.

It lets you:

Switch themes instantly at runtime

Share tokens across frameworks

Use type-safe JSON tokens

Open-source, TypeScript-first, and framework-agnostic. Would love feedback or contributions.

GitHub → https://github.com/TokiForge/tokiforge
by jojobas | 2025-11-11 12:44:32+00:00
Scarcity wasn't the only reason, there was also poverty. A qualified engineer with 10 years of experience would need to save all his salary for a few years. Very few people could afford cars from their official salary.

The USSR was robbing people of the fruits of their labour to make stupid amounts of tanks, incite guerillas all over the world and build useless railroads to nowhere.
by stavros | 2025-11-11 12:44:33+00:00
Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract:

> The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly with perceived quality.

Is this just saying that it's ok if doodles aren't good, but the closer you get to the finished work, the better it has to be? If your audience can't understand what the hell you're talking about for simple ideas, you've gone too far.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-11 12:44:35+00:00
> Expect “made by a human” to soon be a tag associated with premium brands and customer experiences.

I went to a grammar school and I write in mostly pretty high-quality sentences with a bit of British English colloquialism. I spell well, spend time thinking about what I am saying and try to speak clearly, etc.

I've always tried to be kind about people making errors but I am currently retraining my mind to see spelling mistakes and grammar errors as inherent authenticity. Because one thing ChatGPT and its ilk cannot do -- I guess architecturally —- is act convincingly like those who misspell, accidentally coin new eggcorns, accidentally use malapropisms, or use novel but terrible grammar.

And you're right: IMO the rage against the cultural damage AI will do is only just beginning, and I don't think people have clocked on to the fact that economic havoc is built-in, success or failure.

The web/AI/software-tech industry will be loathed even more than it is now (and this loathing is increasingly justified)
by rmoriz | 2025-11-11 12:46:08+00:00
While I partially understand (but not support) the hate against AI due to possible plagiarism and "low effort generation" of works, think about the whole process: If model providers will be liable for generating output, that resembles lyrics or very short texts that fall under copyright laws, they will just change their business model.

E.g. why offering lame chat agents as a service, when you can keep the value generation in-house. E.g. have a strategy board that identifies possible use cases for your model, then spin off a company that just does agentic coding, music generation. Just cut off the end users/public form the model access, and flood the market with AI generated apps/content/works yourself (or with selected partners). Then have a lawyer checking right before publishing.

So this court decision may turn everything worse? I don't know.
by port11 | 2025-11-11 12:46:28+00:00
Okay, secure E2EE backups we've more or less perfected for a while. There's good F/LOSS solutions for that. And if you're willing to pay a bit, thinks like Backblaze come to mind. In other areas it's true that open-source stuff is less polished, but not backups. I mean, a few months back Apple had a regression where they were un-deleting people's photos, that's pretty nasty.
by rob_c | 2025-11-11 12:46:47+00:00
yes, and they're totally not fighting on multiple fronts against central govt, those in the areas they're trying to run deciding that the civil service can now be a political arm of the left or from having to boot the actual racists in sheep's clothing from the party. I'm not defending any party here, I'm even highlighting some of reforms worse issues. But you have to admit it's not apples and oranges when comparing their performance so far with a cushy little on-the-Thames millionaires cul-de-sac.
by riazrizvi | 2025-11-11 12:46:50+00:00
AI slop is like 90’s websites and desktop publishing - there’s a novelty for AI-newbie-creators driving them to churn out lazy crap, while being oblivious to how it lands with strangers.

Tastes will mature, society will more vocally mock this crap, and we’ll stop seeing the sloppier stuff come out of reputable locations.
by thangalin | 2025-11-11 12:46:56+00:00
#show strong: set text(fill: blue) Join us for a David Lynch double feature with *Mulholland Drive* and *Inland Empire* next Tuesday at 8:15 PM.

I didn't realize Typst mixes content and presentation. Presumably, Typst allows including styles from external sources, much like the HTML/CSS split?

ConTeXt has also been making strides in creating accessible PDF files:

* https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2024/talks/hans+mikael/con...

* https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Input_and_compilation/Accessi...
Show HN: A tool to estimate how long your script/speech will take to read aloud
by pandaupup | 2025-11-11 12:47:51+00:00
Hi: I built WordToTime.org, a free browser-tool that helps you convert word-counts, character-counts or page-counts into estimated time for speaking, reading, voice-over or audiobook delivery (all processed locally in your browser).

Why I built it When working on talks, podcasts or video scripts, I kept asking: “How many minutes will it take to read this aloud?” Simple word-to-time tools exist but often ignore realistic pause modelling, language differences, or character/ page-based inputs. This tool addresses those gaps.

Key features

Paste text or input count → estimate duration (HH:MM:SS) for various delivery modes

Select mode (speech / silent reading / voice-over / audiobook) + WPM

Local processing only: your text never leaves your device; no upload or server-storage. (See our privacy policy) WordToTime.org

Useful for content creators, educators, presenters, authors, voice-over artists

Why you might find it interesting

Lightweight front-end engine with configurable pacing and language presets

Bridges the gap between raw word-count and actual delivery time

Embeddable future widget/API planned for script-tools, editor integrations

Would love to hear your feedback:

What delivery modes do you use (live talk vs video vs voice-over)?

What WPM or character-per-minute benchmarks do you personally track?

Any features you wish such timing tools had?

Thanks for checking it out!
by Guru5029 | 2025-11-11 12:47:51+00:00
A code review tool that validate your code against coding standards, security , perfromance and even ensuring your requirement coverage before merge.

Detailed review, Inline Posting, Quick Fixes,DORA metrics dashbaord for engineering health.

We support 15+ languagues - use your own LLM for analysis and get 80% faster UAT cycle. Trusted by enterprise clients and we already outclass our competitors in review depth and providing insights.

Try Sniffr.ai now
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-11-11 12:47:58+00:00
I've always wondered about why those little gadgets don't come with metal encasings bonded to the chip with a thermal pad, or putty out of the factory. Be it brushed aluminum, copper, or another alloy. Brushed, anodized, or with fins for 'heavy duty (outdoor/industrial?)' use(which you could clean with a brush, if need be).

There should be a market/demand for that, when people are paying fantasy prices for gamified crap, yes?
by pjc50 | 2025-11-11 12:48:03+00:00
They aren't! They're subject to licensing!

https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/rap-genius-deserv... (2013)

Long ago the first site I remember to do this was lyrics.ch, which was long since shut down by litigation. I'm not endorsing the status quo here, but if the licensing system exists it is obviously unfair to exempt parties from it simply because they're too big to comply.
by eviks | 2025-11-11 12:49:04+00:00
> One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.

> The other’s fake noise

But since there is no such thing as the real thing, it could just as well match one of the many real noise patterns in one of the many real things floating around, or a real thing at a different point in time with more/less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the difference, thus...

> It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference

Not really, it doesn't make sense to care about identical noise you can't tell apart. Of course, plenty people care about all kind of nonsense, so that won't stop those folks, but let's not pretentd there is some 'real physics' involved
by avar | 2025-11-11 12:49:46+00:00
I tried setting that up, but now the trucker's union is refusing to talk to me, citing concerns that the platters will all spin up due to road vibration, derailing the truck in a ditch due to the cumulative gyroscopic forces.

They remain unconvinced that chatGPT has told me it "should be fine", and have inquired as to whether I don't have better things to do than trying to win increasingly obscure and contrived arguments on HN. Please advise.
by mattmaroon | 2025-11-11 12:49:56+00:00
That’s just propaganda. If we didn’t have due process, Donald Trump would be in jail. Or, if you think he’s the reason we lost it, half the Biden administration would. The idea that the legal system has somehow melted down in the last nine months is just scaremongering.

Norms are being violated, for sure, and the courts are being pushed to determine the bounds of the law. I won’t say I’m a fan of most of it, but it’s a far cry from lack of freedom.

I don’t know what your country is, so I can’t respond, but if you can be locked up over a social media post (assuming reasonable exemptions like direct incitement to violence) you’re not free. You just have been told you are.

The keystone freedom is free speech and almost nowhere else truly has it. It’s a spectrum for sure, and Europe is a lot closer than, say, China, but we’re the far extreme.

Any good outcomes also come from that same freedom of speech. It’s a double-edged sword, for sure. You have to take your anti-vax movement along with your Wikipedia.
by port11 | 2025-11-11 12:50:21+00:00
Calendars are a tough issue, I'm not sure what I'd recommend. My partner's on Outlook so many of the OSS options won't work for sharing our calendars.

I can move her entirely to the family server, but even I'm confused. There's too many Calendar servers with different features, and all with a generally terrible UI. Once I finally settle for one of the server options, I'd have to get her using whatever calendar agent is good on Android, but that's another 20+ options to look at.

Sometimes the bazaar is quite confusing and overwhelming.
by bmacho | 2025-11-11 12:50:39+00:00
You are right, Git for Windows is by random people. I don't know why I was so sure that it was a Microsoft product.

> Possible. But then when they are content with both the kernel and the userspace, why should they switch at all?

A lot of developer tools only work on Linux. That's why they provide WSL2, a Linux kernel.
by riazrizvi | 2025-11-11 12:50:43+00:00
Nah. It’s so easy for OpenAI to modify their output. I’m already seeing them restrict news article re-generation by newspaper name. They do it to reduce liability. There’s also a big copyright infringement case coming up in the USA this year, and being able to point to responsiveness to complaints will be a key part of their legal defense I bet.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-11 12:51:14+00:00
Conversely, last week we had Spain being willing to cut off Cloudflare (!) to protect football match royalties.

> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace.

Counter-argument: can any country's government justify allowing its population and businesses to become completely dependent on an overseas company which does not comply with its laws? (For Americans, think "China" in this case)
by kragen | 2025-11-11 12:51:30+00:00
Scarcity is not some kind of minor detail; it's damned near the whole story. Logistics win wars. Scarce weapons usually lose wars against abundant weapons. That doesn't always happen—the Zulus' abundant spears and arrows were no match for the Maxim gun's somewhat less abundant cartridges, and neither a pitchfork nor a handgun will do you much good against a tank—but it does usually happen.

When scarce weapons can defeat abundant weapons, and it's not because of range, it's usually because of precision. Drones are great at precision. 3 mortar rounds falling within 30 meters of your target trench are still ten times less deadly than a single FPV drone you can pilot straight into it.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-11 12:51:49+00:00
It’s really amazing how some Blu-ray do in fact manage to be net-worse than early dvd or even vhs, but it’s true.

An infamous case is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show. The Blu-ray (edit: and streaming copies) went back to the film source, which is good, but… that meant losing the color grading and digital effects, because the final show wasn’t printed to film. Not only did they get lazy recreating the effects, they don’t seem to have done scene-by-scene color grading at all. This radically alters the color-mood of many scenes, but worse, it harms the legibility of the show, because lots of scenes were shot day-for-night and fixed in post, but now those just look like they’re daytime, so it’s often hard to tell when a scene is supposed to be taking place, which matters a lot in any show or film but kinda extra-matters in one with fucking vampires.

The result is that even a recorded-from-broadcast VHS is arguably far superior to the blu ray for its colors, which is an astounding level of failure.

(There are other problems with things like some kind of ill-advised auto-cropping seeming to have been applied and turning some wide shots into close-ups, removing context the viewer is intended to have and making scenes confusing, but the colors alone are such a failure that a poor VHS broadcast recording is still arguably better just on those grounds)