MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rnhmjoj | 2025-12-16 14:38:03+00:00
> It's also amusing that people here claim Wayland is a security theater too while posting about flatpak being bad because it's vulnerable to x11 issues.

They both create an illusion of safety. We all know that X.org had no security model and it sucks. Wayland put restrictions that would make sense if the rest of the desktop ecosystem was made with security in mind, but it wasn't. I've heard way too many claims like "Wayland makes keyloggers impossible" that are technically true but irrelevant in the real world, because a desktop environment is not just Wayland.

Flatpack is also misleading and its sanboxing is just not great, regardless of the problem with X11.

> No security boundary can prevent bad permissions just like in android.

Good bringing this up: in Android the applications ask the user for permissions, in flatpak permissions are granted based on what the developed asked. That's just bad.
Show HN: CozySleep – baby sleep sounds app I built to solve my own problem
by uyendo | 2025-12-16 14:38:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I just shipped my second iOS app, CozySleep, a baby sleep sounds app.

I built it because my baby had trouble sleeping

The app includes: - White noise & fan sounds - Nature, womb, and gentle motion sounds - Smart timers with fade-out - Background playback - Fully offline support

It’s intentionally simple and focused on what parents actually need at 2am.

I’d love any feedback, especially from parents or fellow indie iOS devs.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745897667
by DecoPerson | 2025-12-16 14:38:13+00:00
Try Zed. Open-source (GPL+Apache), reliable, fast, not bloated at all, decently configurable, amazing remote-host support, Vim mode, AI stuff totally optional, extensions/lang-servers available for many languages, and... well overall I find it very neat and polished!

(I'm not associated with Zed, just a happy user looking to share the goodness.)
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-12-16 14:38:35+00:00
This study is validating a commonplace fMRI measure (change in blood-oxygenation-level-dependent or BOLD signal) by comparing it with a different MRI technique, one that uses a multiparametric quantitative BOLD model, a different model for BOLD derived from two separate MRI scans which measure two different kinds of signal (transverse relaxation rates), and then multiply/divide by a bunch of constants to get at a value.

I'm a software engineer in this field, and this is my layman-learns-a-bit-of-shop-talk understanding of it. Both of these techniques involve multiple layers of statistical assumptions, and multiple steps of "analysing" data, which in itself involves implicit assumptions, rules of thumb and other steps that have never sat well with me. A very basic example of this kind of multi-step data massaging is "does this signal look a bit rough? No worries, let's Gaussian-filter it".

A lot of my skepticism is due to ignorance, no doubt, and I'd probably be braver in making general claims from the image I get in the end if I was more educated in the actual biophysics of it. But my main point is that it is not at all obvious that you can simply claim "signal B shows that signal A doesn't correspond to actual brain activity", when it is quite arguable whether signal B really does measure the ground truth, or whether it is simply prone to different modelling errors.

In the paper itself, the authors say that it is limited by methodology, but because they don't have the device to get an independent measure of brain activation, they use quantitative MRI. They also say it's because of radiation exposure and blah blah, but the real reason is their uni can't afford a PET scanner for them to use.

"The gold standard for CBF and CMRO2 measurements is 15O PET; but this technique requires an on-site cyclotron, a sophisticated imaging setup and substantial experience in handling three different radiotracers (CBF, 15O-water; CBV, 15O-CO; OEF, 15O-gas) of short half-lives8,35. Furthermore, this invasive method poses certain risks to participants owing to the exposure to radioactivity and arterial sampling."
by boxed | 2025-12-16 14:38:52+00:00
I mean.. attempted interference for sure. But since Cuba is still communist, I don't think we should overplay the US' might. And given how South Korea and Japan looks today compared to North Korea, I would be hesitant to draw any clear moral lessons.

The habit to blame the US/Europe/Jews for everything bad in the world and give a total pass to any other ethnic/political group for their transgressions seems pretty lazy at best, and actively dangerous at worst.
Show HN: Misata – synthetic data engine using LLM and Vectorized NumPy
by rasinmuhammed | 2025-12-16 14:38:56+00:00
Hey HN, I’m the author.

I built Misata because existing tools (Faker, Mimesis) are great for random rows but terrible for relational or temporal integrity. I needed to generate data for a dashboard where "Timesheets" must happen after "Project Start Date," and I wanted to define these rules via natural language.

How it works: LLM Layer: Uses Groq/Llama-3.3 to parse a "story" into a JSON schema constraint config.

Simulation Layer: Uses Vectorized NumPy (no loops) to generate data. It builds a DAG of tables to ensure parent rows exist before child rows (referential integrity).

Performance: Generates ~250k rows/sec on my M1 Air.

It’s early alpha. The "Graph Reverse Engineering" (describe a chart -> get data) is experimental but working for simple curves.

pip install misata

I’d love feedback on the simulator.py architecture—I’m currently keeping data in-memory (Pandas) which hits a ceiling at ~10M rows. Thinking of moving to DuckDB for out-of-core generation next. Thoughts?
by mothballed | 2025-12-16 14:38:59+00:00
As a simplified and extreme example just for illustration, imagine a launderer going to a million gas stations and buying a $1 lottery ticket in cash from each one until they've got most the tickets.

When they win the lottery, one gas station reports the winnings of $800,000 on a $1 bet. Launderer reports earning $1 selling a Pokémon card, and $800,000 winning the lottery. Other gas stations and dirty income, unreported, as small losses dont require individual reporting.

End result is $800,000 clean on $1,000,000 of dirty money and only $1 has to be explained.

For casinos, it's likely something closer to buying chips under the reporting threshold, losing most of them, and keeping on until winning a longshot bet. Or just claiming they are a card counter or some nonsense as to how they keep it up. The fact they lose some money to the house is just the cost of doing business. The fact winnings are reported, desirable.
by atq2119 | 2025-12-16 14:39:23+00:00
Looks like a good write up, but I'd caution that some of the statements about memory models aren't completely accurate.

The terms relaxed, acquire, and release refer to how an atomic operation is ordered against other accesses to memory.

Counter to what the article states, a relaxed atomic is still atomic, meaning that it cannot tear and, for RMW atomic, no other access can go between the read and the write. But a relaxed atomic does not order other accesses, which can lead to unintuitive outcomes.

By contrast, once you've observed another thread's release store with an acquire load, you're guaranteed that your subsequent memory accesses "happen after" all of the other thread's accesses from before that release store -- which is what you'd intuitively expect, it's just that in modern systems (which are really highly distributed systems even on a single chip) there's a cost to establishing this kind of guarantee, which is why you can opt out of it with relaxed atomics if you know what you're doing.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-16 14:39:30+00:00
Individual fMRI is not a useful diagnostic tool for general conditions. There have been some clinics trying to push it (or SPECT) as a tool for diagnosing things like ADHD or chronic pain, but there is no scientific basis for this. The operator can basically crank up the noise and get some activity to show up, then tell the patient it’s a sign they have “ring of fire type ADHD” because they set the color pattern to reds and a circular pattern showed up at some point.
by mattmaroon | 2025-12-16 14:39:37+00:00
These are fair points and I get it, but the world of today is very different than the world of the early to mid 1900s. Lack of military is far from the only thing keeping Germany from attacking other European countries now. I feel reasonably confident that no matter how many tanks Germany builds, they won’t go rolling into France in my lifetime. What they may do is repel Russia (though even then, I am skeptical that any major nation will attack a NATO country.)
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-16 14:39:39+00:00
> in pure mathematics the order doesn't matter

I don't perceive that as an ordering issue. "Pure mathematics" has multiple division definitions, what we see here is the definition you use in class 1: integer division. The issue here is not associativity, it is that the inverse of an integer division is NOT integer multiplication, the inverse of division is the sum of multiplication and the modulo. Integer division is a information destroying operation.

> I wrote another example in other comment but I'll write again. [...]

Yes, this is because optimizing compilers are not optimizers in the mathematical sense, but heuristics and sets of folk wisdoms. This doesn't make them any less impressive.
by oldsklgdfth | 2025-12-16 14:39:44+00:00
The writings of Neil Postman. Specifically,

* "Amusing ourselves to death": visual media is fundamentally different from writing and that impacts society. As a medium it supports certain messages better than other, ex. emotion.

* "Technopoly": defines the difference between tool-using and technocratic societies and impacts it has on society.

* "The End of Education": what is the purpose of an education system.
by the_snooze | 2025-12-16 14:39:46+00:00
I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain.

Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player either who accidentally fell into this situation. We don't need to give trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt here.
by titzer | 2025-12-16 14:39:52+00:00
> Most old people in particular (sorry mom) have given up and resigned themselves to drift wherever their computing devices take them, because under the guise of convenience, everything is so hostile that there is no point trying to learn things, and dark patterns are everywhere. Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated, but at the same time trying to wrestle control from the parasites is an uphill battle that they expect to lose, with more frustration as a result.

I'm pretty cynical, but one ray of hope is that AI-assisted coding tools have really brought down the skill requirement for doing some daunting programming tasks. E.g. in my case, I have long avoided doing much web or UI programming because there's just so much to learn and so many deep rabbit holes to go down. But with AI tools I can get off the ground in seconds or minutes and all that gruddy HTML/JavaScript/CSS with bazillions of APIs that I could go spend time studying and tinkering with have already been digested by the AI. It spits out some crap that does the thing I mostly want. ChatGPT 5+ is pretty good at navigating all the Web APIs so it was able to generate some WebAudio mini apps to start working with. The code looks like crap, so I hit it with a stick and get it to reorganize the code a little and write some comments, and then I can dive in and do the rest myself. It's a starting point, a prototype. It got me over the activation energy hump, and now I'm not so reluctant to actually try things out.

But like I said, I'm cynical. Right now the AI tools haven't been overly enshittified to the point they only serve their masters. Pretty soon they will be, and in ways we can't yet imagine.
by binary132 | 2025-12-16 14:39:54+00:00
the problem is your framing of the problem, not the questions you posed. it seems to me like you’re assuming that the only metrics for risk and reward are profit and cost. let me put it this way: do you find there to be any intrinsic value to the invention of antibiotics, or is such a development only worth the money that it can make for its inventor / discoverer? do you think that the cost of developing such technologies is worth it even if it does not gain any material income?

Let’s also imagine the other side of the equation. Can you not imagine any penalty or cost other than bankruptcy? Let’s say you are forced to allocate $1 million per year to research. is the only cost function you can imagine based on the risk of default?
Show HN: Solving the ~95% legislative coverage gap using LLM's
by fokdelafons | 2025-12-16 14:39:59+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Jacek, the solo founder behind this project (Lustra).

The Problem: 95% of legislation goes unnoticed because raw legal texts are unreadable. Media coverage is optimized for outrage, not insight.

The Solution. I built a digital public infrastructure that:

1. Ingests & Sterilizes: Parses raw bills (PDF/XML) from US & PL APIs. Uses LLMs (Vertex AI, temp=0, strict JSON) to strip political spin.

2. Civic Algorithm: The main feed isn't sorted by an editorial board. It's sorted by user votes ("Shadow Parliament"). What the community cares about rises to the top.

3. Civic Projects: An incubator for citizen legislation. Users submit drafts (like our Human Preservation Act), which are vetted by AI scoring and displayed with visual parity alongside government bills.

Tech Stack:

Frontend: Flutter (Web & Mobile Monorepo),

Backend: Firebase + Google Cloud Run,

AI: Vertex AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash),

License: PolyForm Noncommercial — source is available for inspection, learning, and non-commercial civic use. Commercial use would require a separate agreement.

I am looking for contributors. I have the US and Poland live. EU, UK, FR, DE in pipeline, partially available. I need help building Data Adapters for other parliaments (the core logic is country-agnostic). If you want to help audit the code or add a country, check the repo. The goal is to complete the database as much as possible with current funding.

Live App: https://lustra.news

Repo: https://github.com/fokdelafons/lustra

Dev Log: https://lustrainitiative.substack.com
by suprjami | 2025-12-16 14:40:12+00:00
You want "Trust"?

Cut executive pay 75% back to what Brendan was getting paid, and invest that money in the company instead of lining your own pockets.

Ditch the AI crap that nobody wants or needs and focus on making a good browser and email application, and advertising them to increase user count.

Anything less than this is not trustworthy, it's just another lecherous MBA who is hastening the death of Mozilla.
by wink | 2025-12-16 14:40:13+00:00
Maybe an unpopular opinion but I especially find verb tenses to be the least important part of learning and having a conversation. People will get the meaning if it was in the past or the future if you know words like yesterday/last week/tomorrow/next week.

Of course this is just a stepping stone, but why try to duplicate (or more) everything when what you most need is proper sentence structure in the present tense and vocabulary.

Although maybe there are some languages where this is not true, not the ones I studied (briefly or not). But in my experience it is also true for people speaking bad German (talking mostly self-taught or from basic courses, not for white collar jobs with large amounts of written text) - perfectly understandable, just no tenses.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-16 14:40:39+00:00
What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make?

Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)
by Larrikin | 2025-12-16 14:40:42+00:00
Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally lost all trust.

The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not replacing, my usage.
by NalNezumi | 2025-12-16 14:40:46+00:00
My previous job was at a startup doing BMI, for research. For the first time I had the chance to work with expensive neural signal measurement tools (mainly EEG for us, but some teams used fMRI). and quickly did I learn how absolute horrible the signal to noise ratio (SNR) was in this field.

And how it was almost impossible to reproduce many published and well cited result. It was both exciting and jarring to talk with the neuroscientist, because they ofc knew about this and knew how to read the papers but the one doing more funding/business side ofc didn't really spend much time putting emphasis on that.

One of the team presented a accepted paper that basically used Deep Learning (Attention) to predict images that a person was thinking of, from the fMRI signals. When I asked "but DL is proven to be able to find pattern even in random noise, so how can you be sure this is not just overfitting to artefact?" and there wasn't really any answer to that (or rather the publication didn't take that in to account, although that can be experimentally determined). Still, a month later I saw tech explore or some tech news writing an article about it, something like "AI can now read your brain" and the 1984 implications yada yada.

So this is indeed something probably most practitioners, masters and PhD, realize relatively early.

So now that someone says "you know mindfulness is proven to change your brainwaves?" I always add my story "yes, but the study was done with EEG, so I don't trust the scientific backing of it" (but anecdotally, it helps me)
by oblio | 2025-12-16 14:40:59+00:00
There are a bunch, for example:

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

It had huge impact on world history: it indirectly lead to German unification, it possibly lead to both world wars in the form we know them, it probably impacted colonial wars and as a result the territory of many former colonies, and probably also not their current populations (by determining where colonists came from and how many of them).

I'm fairly sure there were a few very close battles during the East India Company conquest of India, especially in the period when Robert Clive was in charge.

Another one for Germany: after Wilhem I died at 90, his liberal son Frederick III died aged only 56, after a reign of just 99 days. So instead Germany had Wilhem II as the emperor, a conservative that wrecked all of Bismark's successful foreign policies.

Oh, Japan attacking Pearl Harbor/the US. If the Japanese Army faction would have won the internal struggle and had tried to attack the Soviets again in 1941, the USSR would have probably been toast and the US would have probably intervened only slowly and indecisively.

I can't really remember many others right now, but every country and every continent has had moments like these. A lot of them are sheer bad luck but a good chunk are just miscalculation.

History is full of what-ifs, a lot of them with huge implications for the world.
by jawilson2 | 2025-12-16 14:41:00+00:00
f is functional. MRIs are basically huge magnets used for imaging. When you apply a strong magnetic field, different tissue types and densities will react differently, and the MRI is basically measuring how those tissues react to the magnet. It is very good for imaging soft tissues, but not so much bone. Someone figured out that you can measure blood flow using the MRI, because blood cells react in a magnetic field, then "relax" at a known rate. Since we can measure blood flow, that is correlated with increased brain activity, i.e. since more neurons are firing, they require more energy, and therefore more blood. So, fMRI is using blood flow as a proxy for brain activity.
by wahern | 2025-12-16 14:41:40+00:00
Not anymore. Modularization is somewhat tangential, but for awhile Stallman did actively oppose rearchitecting GCC to better support non-free plugins and front-ends. But Stallman lost that battle years ago. AFAIU, the current state of GCC is the result of intentional technical choices (certain kinds of decoupling not as beneficial as people might think--Rust has often been stymied by lack of features in LLVM, i.e. defacto (semantic?) coupling), works in progress (decoupling ongoing), or lack of time or wherewithal to commit to certain major changes (decoupling too onerous).
by Spivak | 2025-12-16 14:42:06+00:00
I mean kinda yeah. Literally any program running as your user can connect to dbus, grab your secrets and slurp your home directory. Flatpak 'solves' this issue by putting the program in a sandbox that can't talk directly to dbus and proxies the messages with a filter.

The thing you need the kernel for is to attach meaningful identities to programs and restrict them without needing to sandbox them. And there is a ready made solution to this, one that dbus is already aware of and can use natively. But on systems where it's available a lot of users immediately disable it—SELinux.
by vel0city | 2025-12-16 14:42:20+00:00
I do agree, from the perspective of the total time to get the energy into the vehicle it is significantly more time, easily a bit over 2x as long for a "quick" road trip stop.

But take a look at it from another perspective. Its another 10-15min on a several hour road trip. On a 5hr road trip that's like 3-4% more time for the total time of the road trip, assuming you're definitely doing a fast stop on that 5 hour trip and not sending the kids through the bathroom and you're not stopping for a quick meal. Is adding 3% to your travel time really that significant?

And as pointed out, if you're having to get the family through the bathroom or stop for a quick bite (even just sandwiches in the parking lot, although I usually pull off to a rest stop when traveling in an ICE car when having a quick bite) its not even more time, its the same total time.

On the route I often drive for a road trip (between DFW and Houston), I'm normally going to stop for lunch or dinner anyways somewhere on the route. I just stop where there's a charger (a few good options), have a quick bite, and hit the road. I'd usually do that even with my gas cars even if I didn't need gas, normally stopping at one of the rest stops on the way to stretch my legs, have a quick snack, use the restroom, and continue on my way. On paper taking the EV adds something like 15 minutes or so to the trip (which my EV isn't really great for road trips compared to others: smaller battery AWD Mach-E) but in practice for how I road trip its practically the same.
by boxed | 2025-12-16 14:42:21+00:00
> [Sanctions] can and will be anticipated and countered, as Russia has shown.

How have they shown that? I think they've showed that they won't stop the war, but that's not at all the same as anticipating or countering the sanctions. Since they couldn't anticipate the war lasting longer than a week I think we can safely say they didn't anticipate having an ongoing war AND sanctions.