MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squeefers | 2025-12-12 13:15:14+00:00
when the guy is making sentences like "affirmation is often compiled through negation" you know hes just trying to sound clever. the entire premise of the article is bunk, we DO use these patterns in English. He also treats (in that wide eyed western admiration for the orient) the Chinese like a simple monoculture where everyone has the same speech patterns.
by dlubarov | 2025-12-12 13:16:04+00:00
It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.

> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.

It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.

What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.

Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.
by fwip | 2025-12-12 13:16:08+00:00
Exactly - they've been doing paint outs and composite shots forever! It doesn't feel fundamentally different to do it "on a computer," to me. They aren't using it to show off, just to make the scene look how you'd expect it to.

They've also been doing color grading forever - digital just makes it way cheaper and easier. Before, you'd have to do photochemical tricks to the film, and you would use different film for different vibes.

I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot, which leads to that design-by-committee feeling. That sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room' is the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like. But that's not really a failure of CGI itself - that's a failure of vision, right? If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.

I have watched the original Mad Max, and it was pretty alright. If I had watched it at the right age, I probably would have imprinted on it.
by JetSetWilly | 2025-12-12 13:16:36+00:00
It would be great to run this on a collection of interesting threads over different periods and not just one snapshot. For example, the thread from the day Trump got elected in 2016, the thread from the day of brexit and so on. Those are the times when people make many passionate predictions about how the future will play out, be good to see them retroactively scored.
by HolyLampshade | 2025-12-12 13:16:38+00:00
The issue here for me has always been about the difference between treating a symptom and treating the illness.

Excessive surveillance is necessary when you cannot convince people of the merits of your politics or morals on their own and need to use the power of the State to intimidate and control their access.

For the issue on minors, if you have a child (guilty here) you are obligated to actively raise and educate them on the nature of the world. For access to online interactions this doesn’t necessarily only mean active limits (as one might judge appropriate for the child), but also teaching them that people do not always have positive intent, and anonymity leads to lack of consequence, and consequently potentially antisocial behavior.

A person’s exposure to these issues are not limited to interactions online. We are taught to be suspicious of strangers offering candy from the back of panel vans. We are taught to look both ways when entering a roadway.

The people demanding the right to limit what people can say and who they can talk to do so under the guise of protecting children, but these tools are too prone to the potential for abuse. In the market of ideas it’s better (and arguably safer, if not significantly more challenging) to simply outcompete with your own.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2025-12-12 13:16:47+00:00
A group of men crossing the border into another country was (usually) automatically considered invaders if its size exceeded a certain number.

Eg Iberian Peninsula (Reconquista and later): Foreign parties >10 armed men could not cross without permission between christians and muslims.

Chinese frontier zones, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks etc all had similar rules. If you want to go back further, then Assyria, Egypt, Hittites, Greece had such limits.
by dtagames | 2025-12-12 13:17:43+00:00
I've also used iterative, interactive development for years and I agree, this is a big deal for Cursor.

It is interesting that it works with print debugging rather than breakpoints (as do I). It also points a way forward to finally be done with tools like Figma and Miro which can't roundtrip code; they only create artifacts for someone else to code up.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-12 13:18:54+00:00
Hear, hear! I'll add another:

"Age Verification is about suppressing the 'undesirable' for kids, but also for you". I.e. having to share your personal identity for that taboo (but legal and harmless) sex site (or whatever someone in power might not approve of) sure is going to make you think twice and may even kill many smaller instances withojt making them illegal outright.

It may not sound bad in a single example, but eventually there is something you like that is fine but gets added to the list.
by chrilleweb | 2025-12-12 13:18:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently built a small open source CLI tool that scans a codebase for environment variable issues (missing env vars, unused vars, framework-specific mistakes like Next.js / t3-env, etc.).

I’m not trying to grow users yet — I’m mainly looking for honest technical feedback: - Is the problem real? - Are there obvious flaws in the approach? - Could this be used in your workflow?

For people who’ve shipped OSS tools before: What worked best for you when gathering early feedback from experienced developers?

Thanks!
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-12 13:20:14+00:00
Yep, "Harmonograph" is a similar device but uses gravity and strictly compounding (out of phase and magnitude) sinusoidal motions.

My dad and I each built one when I was up visiting him in Alaska 40 years ago or so. It became a kind of engineering competition between us. I stuck to the traditional harmonograph with just two axis: one pendulum rocking the "platen" that held the paper, the other pendulum driving a pen back and forth at 90 degrees relative to the first pendulum.

My dad threw money at his and purchased a couple of universal joints meant for RC cars. He then created a three-pendulum contraption. Two pendulums on the pen (here is where the universal joints came in) gave it movement in both X and Y. A single pendulum with the paper platen on it had on its own kind of gimbal mount that allowed it to swing around—not restricted to just one axis of travel.

My harmonograph always decayed. And the patterns it produced reflected it. My dad's, due to sometimes additive, sometimes subtractive motion in X and Y could appear to decay, visually, but then the pattern could expand again.

Clearly he won the competition that summer.
by deafpolygon | 2025-12-12 13:21:09+00:00
You should preface this with some important information about what that does.

There are some trade-offs!

Changing that setting to 1 gives you weaker anonymity guarantees. Using multiple guards spreads your traffic across different IP addresses, making it harder for an adversary who controls a subset of the network to correlate your activity.

Reducing to a single guard concentrates all traffic through one point, increasing the chance that a hostile relay could observe a larger fraction of your streams...
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-12 13:21:34+00:00
> Or why didn't they just gregate?

Because that's not how the prepositions worked in Latin. E.g. "Marcus ex casa exit" ("Marcus went out of the house") requires both the "ex" preposition and the "ex-" prefix in the verb. Heck, even today similar things can happen in English: "they gathered together", that sentence has two instances of "gather" in it.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-12 13:21:49+00:00
Honk may be a better choice for something like this if you want to use a Fedi base: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

It’s already fairly antisocial by design, but if you disable fetching replies it can be a lightweight standalone microblog.

Demo: https://honk.tedunangst.com/
by HelloNurse | 2025-12-12 13:22:11+00:00
Why do you think the mentioned "color-centric" image processing operations deserve a specialized file format, rather than building and using a transient index in memory when it is useful? Do you have some special use case in mind?

Any interactive application, for instance, can be expected to render the image to the screen (repeatedly); any GPU use for texture mapping needs pixels sorted by location, regardless of whether pixel values are palette indices or explicit colours; many image processing tasks, like segmentation and drawing, need efficient access to pixels at arbitrary locations or near already processed locations.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-12 13:22:59+00:00
> it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey

Do you think no physical arm is done to an Apple tree for it to give fruits? You should read about fruit tree pruning then…

> But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.

Which we don't. So we're doing exactly the same thing to tree as we are doing to cow: abusing a natural process that's designed to help their babies.

> I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions.

There's no misconception about mushrooms.

> It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.

The problem is that there isn't an objective definition of “better”. As heterotrophs we can only survive by destroying other living thing. This is a curse we must live with.

Which living thing is fair game is fundamentally an arbitrary position driven by our subjective moral values. You have to draw a line, but there's no valid reason to say that the line must be drawn at the Animalia border rather than at the Tetrapod (which means fish are OK to eat). Most of the arguments that apply to the whole order of animals also apply to most multicellular beings anyway (including the existence of a pain-like mechanism).

You are free to have stronger emotional bonds with a fish or a bee than with a mushroom or a plant, but it's in no way more rational or objectively better than when most people refuse to eat dogs and horses but are fine with cows.
by johneth | 2025-12-12 13:23:12+00:00
I think, for many, the web should be free for humans.

When scraping was mainly used to build things like search indexes which are ultimately mutually beneficial to both the website owner and the search engine, and the scrapers were not abusive, nobody really had a problem.

But for generative AI training and access, with scrapers that DDoS everything in sight, and which ultimately cause visits to the websites to fall significantly and merely return a mangled copy of its content back to the user, scraping is a bad thing. It also doesn't help that the generative AI companies haven't paid most people for their training data.
by daveaiello | 2025-12-12 13:24:09+00:00
I just got a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and have been looking for a way to use for Live Translation of a language other than Spanish.

I don't feel like I 100% needed to hear the English translation, because the animation tells the story almost without words. But it was a bit more interesting to have my AirPods tell me bits of the words exchanged between the adults and the boy, leading into and out of the video.
by deaux | 2025-12-12 13:24:27+00:00
> The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.

Big Dig style clusterfuck is because the simplicity and cheapness you're talking about only apply to tunnels through mountains, less so to those underwater and definitely not to tunnels under big cities i.e. land that people live on, which comes with all the complexity.
by ben_w | 2025-12-12 13:24:27+00:00
That shouldn't be what causes this problems; if we can see it's wrong despite the low resolution, the AI isn't going to fully replace humans for all tasks involving this kind of thing.

That said, even with this kind of error rate an AI can speed *some* things up, because having a human whose sole job is to ask "is this AI correct?" is easier and cheaper than having one human for "do all these things by hand" followed by someone else whose sole job is to check "was this human output correct?" because a human who has been on a production line for 4 hours and is about ready for a break also makes a certain number of mistakes.

But at the same time, why use a really expensive general-purpose AI like this, instead of a dedicated image model for your domain? Special purpose AI are something you can train on a decent laptop, and once trained will run on a phone at perhaps 10fps give or take what the performance threshold is and how general you need it to be.

If you're in a factory and you're making a lot of some small widget or other (so, not a whole motherboard), having answers faster than the ping time to the LLM may be important all by itself.

And at this point, you can just ask the LLM to write the training setup for the image-to-bounding-box AI, and then you "just" need to feed in the example images.
by syberspace | 2025-12-12 13:25:13+00:00
There is, the Koralpe massif. Previously to get to Klagenfurt from Graz you first had to go north through a somewhat tight valley for about 50km before the train would turn to the south-west towards Klagenfurt, again tough alpine valleys, and with a lot of stops inbetween. The new route goes south/south-west immediatley, is very straight compared to the old route, and has at most 3 stops.
by Smaug123 | 2025-12-12 13:25:16+00:00
This is the paper in which Knuth and Plass define the bones of the layout algorithm behind TeX. The Knuth-Plass algorithm decides how wide spaces should be on each line and which choices of hyphenation out of some predefined set should be used to lay out a paragraph. It's super readable and generally quite joyful. Knuth describes TeX as a "labor of love", and it shines through that paper.
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-12 13:26:41+00:00
Complete rewrites have been done before. They're not impossible tasks. C to C++ (like with fish), C++ to Rust (fish again, Tor, etc), Java to C# (something I've seen), C# to C++ (evernote), Blender Game Engine to Godot (many small cases), Godot to Lumberyard (something I've seen), Unity to Godot (many small cases), etc. And there are all the myriad rewrites within the same language, or across major breaking changes (like Python 2 to Python 3).

I think "you should never do a full rewrite" is something of a reactionary response to the juvenile idea new devs and interns get every now and then. But sometimes, a rewrite really is a good idea.

But in this case, per the announcement ( https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-arti/ ), the reasons are pretty convincing. The major reasons are, unsurprisingly, all around memory safety.
by k310 | 2025-12-12 13:26:44+00:00
Thanks! It's puzzling that being so far from friends seems to limit both visits (only one outside of family) and electronic communications that just drop.

It's 50 miles to populated cities, friends, stores, and the V.A.

Presence is everything,it seems. I make plans to move to "civilization" (suburbs, my all but 10 years habitat) and then a wild sunrise or sunset happens, with mountain backdrop or a double rainbow with same. But my daughter sent a photo froma Hawaii trip, reminding me that these happen daily "elsewhere".

Think outside the box. Who isn't risk-averse. Last move, we toured affordable places, and visited Paradise CA before here. Nearby Chico had too few listings. After I chose this place instead, Paradise burned to the ground.

An interesting part of suburbs is that there are few or no deer, and they eat rose bushes like candy. I used to grow many, but can't here without massive double fencing. I do miss them.

Looking forward to a less "frontier" lifestyle, and building momentum. It's still a world of people ... somewhere.
by Brendinooo | 2025-12-12 13:26:51+00:00
I did ~100 chickens last year, and more like 85 this year.

12 weeks is incorrect, you can buy the same Cornish crosses that the big farms use. So they can be ready in as little as 6-7 weeks but I usually stretch it to 8 or 9; my time to process them is fixed so I might as well get a little bit more meat for my efforts.

I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold about 33 at a time.

So it’s an operation that needs to run for about half the year. If you time it right, you can work around vacations and stuff. Daily operations are actually pretty minimal in terms of time spent, but you do lose three weekends a year to process them if you don’t outsource that.

All of that to say: I’m not sure if I want to agree with your characterization. It’s less of a time commitment than you think. But there is a substantial cost to it all: capital costs are notable and the cost of feed and birds is such that you basically break even against high-end organic products for sale. You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it. I treat it as a “touch grass” hobby that kinda breaks even.

No real point, just excited to have something to say about this haha
by duskdozer | 2025-12-12 13:27:10+00:00
>HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas

I'm not sure I agree with this, though I suppose it depends on what one defines as "liberal."

>In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do.

I would say instead that it means that for a large part of the voting population, the ideas are not objectionable enough for them to vote differently or abstain. People are already voting in spite of the disconnect between the policies they support and the policies that actually get implemented [0]

[0] https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
by avianlyric | 2025-12-12 13:27:30+00:00
You’re making the assumption that inherently support the creation of Digital ID. I’ve not expressed support for it, I’m just highlighting that if someone is going to criticise it, they should at least understand it well enough to make useful, accurate, criticism.

Criticising ID for making it possible for 3rd parties to verify attributes is a ridiculous thing to do, because that’s the entire point of ID.

If someone wants to criticise the exact mechanism used to allow 3rd parties to verify attributes of someone’s ID, then they should be clear about what that mechanism is, and why it’s problematic. Otherwise it’s impossible to have a sensible discussion, and discuss the various pros and cons of different implementations.

At the end of the day it’s beyond clear we’re moving towards a world where governments and people expect the internet to work closer to how the real world works, with equivalent limitation such as age gating. Putting forward inaccurate, and hyperbolic arguments about arbitrary, indistinct risks associated forms of Digital ID ultimately does us all a huge disservice, because it creates the opportunity to dismiss all criticism as little more than hysterical whining by people uninterested in learning about the societal problems Digital ID is meant to deal with. Which ultimately means we’re removed from the entire discussion about alternative approaches to Digital ID, or implementations of Digital ID that are privacy preserving.

If we’re not involved in those discussions, and seen as creditable contributors to solving the underlying problem, then those pushing for more authoritarian approaches win the argument by default.
by uhdhr | 2025-12-12 13:28:24+00:00
You are correct that there are many examples of border control mechanisms, in different levels and ways. Maybe even usually the vast majority for many levels and ways.

Some nations, countries or groups, or other levels, did play with some of those mentioned ideas of less border control mechanisms in some ways or levels, also going back thousands of years.

Countries that were not successful with border control mechanisms, sometimes ceased to exist.

But there are many different levels and ways, and the whole topic is, to put it very mildly, extremely complex.
by Bender | 2025-12-12 13:28:41+00:00
Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler

Appropriate example, more than some may realize. Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were good friends. Walt would send him a real of cartoons every month. Adolf and his senior leaders would watch it at the resort in the Alps. One may still be able to find the silent films that one of his mistresses filmed showing them watching cartoons on the projector with his senior leaders. Adolf was big into art and appreciated the work Disney created. There was a project about 15 or so years ago to use computing power to figure out what Adolf was saying based on his muscle movements since she was filming from behind him at an angle. I can't remember what the project was called. I saw it on a TV program.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-12 13:29:36+00:00
I mean, see Brexit; there's a bit of a "what have the Romans ever done for us" aspect to a lot of euroscepticism. Some of the more Brexit-y regions were also amongst the poorest, and thus the largest beneficiaries of EU funding (eg https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/26/cornwall-fea...)

The idea is to show people the benefits of the EU, essentially. It is unclear how well it works.

Cornwall, say, had reason to feel hard done by; it was the second-poorest NUTS 3 region in Northern Europe. It's just that they were directing their ire at Europe, and not at the national government where it belonged. All but one of the ten poorest NUTS 3 regions in Northern Europe were in the UK pre-Brexit (along with the very richest NUTS 3 region, inner London), and there's a reason for that.

(Of course, the problem is now solved by Brexit; as the UK no longer participates in Eurostat, _none_ of the poorest regions in the Eurostat statistics are in the UK!)
by Aachen | 2025-12-12 13:30:05+00:00
I don't know about the AI thing or newsworthiness. The reason I upvoted the submission is this (not my comment, but someone else put it into words better than I could think of): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231908

> Very cute, and full of humorous touches. Worth sharing, for a change (when compared to the vast majority of ads).

It's not strictly within HN's scope of "what hackers find interesting" though. This'll have to be December's exception upvote
by bflesch | 2025-12-12 13:30:57+00:00
The bullet point stating that tripwire was built for "High-ranking officials in businesses/organizations" should be removed, because that group is very unlike the "Developers of critical software", "Investigative journalists", and "Attorneys with high-profile clients" which are also mentioned.

Everybody who had the pleasure to work with "high-ranking officials in businesses/organizations" knows that this group is the one who overrides many technically optimal decisions and thinks internal policies do not apply to them. Their lives are not affected if a device is compromised because they are financially stable and can just blame an intrusion on the IT team.