MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-18 14:42:04+00:00
The statues were obviously carved by expert artists but these "specialists" would have us believe they were subsequently painted by half-assed amateurs. It fails the sniff test so badly, that trolling is a reasonable conclusion. You don't put that much effort into making something only then let some unskilled intern ruin it by covering up all your work with a flat coat of primer and leave it at that.
by metalman | 2025-12-18 14:42:24+00:00
looking at it from the absolute simplest of perspectives, money/time/effort, then the notion of a base, or primer layer that seals a surface and provides a non absorbant layer for the much more expensive coulor coat. primer bieng applied by aprentices and the finnish coat applied by specialists who would be very likely be useing ALL of the tricks of the trade to bring a statue to life, but then wejump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary, with everything from vegas type full primary coulors put on with a mop, and others that were master paintings done on 3d canvases, and still others who believd in.the purity of the "raw" sculpture
by mothballed | 2025-12-18 14:42:50+00:00
I wrote a long winded thing about my personal experience but deleted it because it was too personal and too depressing to think about.

The summary is that the risk of a CPS investigation of a kid playing or walking independently is probably 10-100x that of suffering a car accident. And the average car accident is way less traumatic than being ripped away from your family, tossed in a foster home, and feeling like your parents have abandoned you forever because they could not protect you from the state.
by scythe | 2025-12-18 14:43:14+00:00
I think there are basically two kinds of micromanagement that need to be distinguished. The first one is encouraging your child to do something which you think has direct benefits, like learning to swim, which is good exercise and prevents drowning. The second is encouraging your kid to do something because you expect indirect social benefits: either some admissions officer will be impressed by an applicant who plays the oboe or the child will socialize with "the right crowd" or something like that. It's the second kind that can become pernicious because it creates an opportunity for the parent's own status anxieties and prejudices to be projected onto the child, like "lacrosse players are smarter than basketball players" so you want the kid to play lacrosse and not basketball even though they are basically comparable activities and this is dismissive of the needs and capabilities of children to learn to navigate social environments and pressures for themselves.
by YC3498749387 | 2025-12-18 14:43:19+00:00
That doesn't sound correct. My understanding of the history is that Iran democratically elected a socialist who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields so they could keep the oil revenue inside their country instead of giving it away to BP and Exxon. The British orchestrated a coup to install the old monarchy (the Shah), who brought back the British extraction companies and harshly repressed Shia Muslims. Then in 1979 the Shia hardliners toppled the government in the Islamic Revolution which is where the current government originates from. The last real democratically elected president of Iran was the socialist one, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
by kube-system | 2025-12-18 14:43:21+00:00
Sure, ignorance of the law is not an excuse, but contracts are not law. In fact, the law requires a "meeting of the minds" as a required element of a contract. Although, the modern bar for this is extremely low, and courts will judge this based on manifestations of assent.

That being said, Vizio has a high paid legal department and is certainly not ignorant of the fact they ship third-party licensed software. They are simply ignoring it.

Courts would say "look you're professional organization well aware of software licensing landscape and you're using it, so you have agreed"
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-18 14:43:57+00:00
> But this can only be by comparison to something.

The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox. Safari was even behind the latest IE before the switch to Chromium by the way.

> the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.

You're misremembering, IE also kept improving its support for modern standards. The two main problems were that it was always behind (like Safari) and that it people were still using old versions because it was tied to Windows, like Safari with iOS. When people don't update their iPhone because they know it will become slow as hell as soon as you use the new iOS version on an old iPhone or just because they don't want their UI to change AGAIN, they're stuck on an old version of Safari.
Ask HN: How much more Antigravity do you get on paid plans?
by bluelightning2k | 2025-12-18 14:43:58+00:00
Annoyingly Google doesn't give any indication what you get for your money with the different plans.

Does anyone know ballpark what multiple of the existing rate-limits you get on any of the paid plans? E.g. is it closer to 2x or 10x the free tier?
by elias_t | 2025-12-18 14:44:00+00:00
> In 1950, there were 2.7 suicides per 100,000 15- to 19-year-olds. Today, there are 7.5 (though that’s down from a 1990s peak of 13.2).

Little typo, looking at the link it's 11.2 not 13.2. Someone knows why this peak?
by JohnFen | 2025-12-18 14:44:14+00:00
That fact makes me seriously doubt their claims of it being "privacy first". Perhaps Phreeli can be taken at their word about their own practices (but remember, we only have their word to go on with this), but T-Mobile is still handling the traffic, and they're not likely to be terribly concerned about user privacy.

Aside from their privacy claims, there doesn't really seem to be anything unusual in their offering. If you're the sort who wants/needs a burner phone, this offering doesn't reduce that need.

This whole article appears to be just a thinly-veiled advertisement.
by saidnooneever | 2025-12-18 14:44:19+00:00
HN works like this. you can post something and if people have something to say they can comment. if you make the title accurate its more appreciated than making it cool. if people like what you did it will 'take off'. i dont think there's much other than that which i think makes it appealing.

there might be people that try to get more out of it somehow, but i dont think it 'works like that'
by dkga | 2025-12-18 14:44:40+00:00
Yes, that is right. I didn't forget to mention it, just thought the Minas Gerais case was the most unique geologically as opposed to the far-too-common negative externality problem as is the agricultural excessive use of water + deforestation. But you are completely right. I actually live deep in the Cerrado region now, in Brasília, and I can see first-hand the negative effects of over exploration of water in the region.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-18 14:45:26+00:00
> I’ve certainly seen a sharp increase on execs calling BS on dev teams saying they need months to develop some basic thing.

Some of the teams I worked with in the years right before AI coding went mainstream had become really terrible about this. They would spend months forming committees, writing documents, getting sign-offs and approvals, creating Gantt charts, and having recurring meetings for the simplest requests.

Before I left, they were 3 months deep into meetings about setting up role based access control on a simple internal CRUD app with a couple thousand users. We needed about 2-3 roles. They were into pros and cons lists for every library and solution they found, with one of the front runners involving a lot of custom development for some reason.

Yet the entire problem could have been solved with 3 Boolean columns in the database for the 3 different roles. Any developer could have done it in an afternoon, but they were stuck in a mindset of making a big production out of the process.

I feel like LLMs are good at getting those easy solutions done. If the company really only needs a simple change, having an LLM break free from the molasses of devs who complicate everything is a breath of fresh air.

On the other hand, if the company had an actual complicated need with numerous and changing roles over time, the simple Boolean column approach would have been a bad idea. Having people who know when to use each solution is the real key.
by jasonlotito | 2025-12-18 14:45:28+00:00
The thing I think about is that, as far as the two major parties are concerned, they both support denying Americans the right to bear arms, and they both support gun control. The difference is that one party won't admit to it, making any debate difficult or impossible.

On the flip side, I feel like the two parties see things differently: One party is mostly about prevention, while the other side is predominantly about punishment.

> If it's actually a mental health crisis,

That's the scapegoat. It's an easy scapegoat because it blames others. And others are easy to hate. They aren't us. "They" are others. Yes, mental health is an issue, but it's not so much higher than in other nations to explain the much higher rate. It's a scapegoat because it's easy to say, "Wow, no normal person would do that, so they must be crazy." That sounds reasonable if you don't think about it for a moment.
by nicole_express | 2025-12-18 14:46:00+00:00
I mean, I kind of disagree with the assumption that bright colors immediately mean horrible; especially when we're comparing to a dirty ruin of a mosaic for the "real" color. That's probably gotten less saturated over time too.

But that aside, I do think the author has a point here. Many people don't know ancient statues were painted at all, an academic creates a reconstruction based off of the color traces that survive to show otherwise, but likely only the underlayer, then that gets dumbed down to "this is exactly how the statue looked to the Romans!" because that's counter-intuitive and therefore more likely to get attention. It's not just statues too, but in pretty much all popular media that derives from academic subjects.
by senordevnyc | 2025-12-18 14:46:12+00:00
I have a ten year old daughter in NYC, and I’m probably one of the types of parents who many here are castigating. I’m not ready for her to go out and explore the city on her own. Here’s what I worry about:

- cars: she’s not always the most present and aware, and it takes one mistake to ruin or end her life.

- bikes and scooters: less dangerous in some ways, but more ubiquitous and unpredictable than cars

- sexual harassment: she’s only ten, but sadly in some neighborhoods, that’s old enough that she’s likely to get hassled. That’s a sad fact of life she’ll have to deal with at some point, but I’m not ready yet

- bullying: I had several encounters with groups of older kids when I was off free-ranging as a kid

- subway: some deranged homeless person throws someone off the platform or stabs someone every week here

I could go on, but the bottom line is that the potential harm outweighs the potential benefit for me right now. In my mind there’s no right answer here, just pros and cons. Appealing to how things were a century ago, or even when I grew up, is pretty irrelevant. My daughter might mature a couple years later than I did, and I can live with that.

Also, I’m just pretty fundamentally unimpressed with most moral panics. “The Anxious Generation” seems like just the latest entry in a tradition stretching thousands of years where people worry about how the changes in society are ruining the next generation, and long for a return to how life was when they grew up. However, each generation somehow manages to figure it out.
by jerf | 2025-12-18 14:46:41+00:00
This would be a great time to use AI, because it is very good at style transfer. Feed it a lot of contemporary painted art, feed it the base-coat version of the sculpture, and ask it to style-transfer the paintings on to the sculpture. You'd likely get something very close, and for once we can use "The computer said it, I'm not responsible for it!" for the power of good, by making it so no human is responsible for the heinous crime of assuming something without historical evidence (no matter how sensible the assumption is).

(And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
by earthboundkid | 2025-12-18 14:46:50+00:00
Different field, but it drives me crazy that people talk about Chinese philosophy and insist on using Mandarin pinyin for it. Mandarin is language that evolved from Classical Chinese thousands of years later! There are other, equally valid contemporary derived pronunciations like Cantonese or even Japanese and Korean. The reason to use Mandarin is because it is the most widely spoken language derived from Classical Chinese, but it's 100% not how Confucius or any of them spoke!
by Zigurd | 2025-12-18 14:47:30+00:00
Nearly all police responses in the US are armed responses. Americans don't realize how dangerous that is. They recognize swatting as a crime, but don't realize that a Karen who lies to police in order to get them to bully someone they don't like is very dangerous. Comparable to aggressive driving and road rage. It needs to be prosecuted more often. By more often I mean more than zero.
by pcarroll | 2025-12-18 14:48:00+00:00
I'm the founder at Netrinos. It's a mesh VPN that connects your devices like they're on the same LAN using an overlay network. WireGuard under the hood, native OS firewalls for access control. Zero config. No port forwarding, no firewall rules. Most VPNs require too much fiddling. I wanted something where you install it, log in, and your devices just see each other. That's it. Pro tier is $1/user/month ($10 min) for teams. Personal use is free. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, NAT traversal, or anything else. HN readers get a 30-day trial with code HNPRO26: netrinos.com/pro?promocode=HNPRO26
by freedomben | 2025-12-18 14:48:08+00:00
Indeed. I work with governments all over the United States from federal, to states to counties, and even to larger cities. This is a consistent pattern I see as well. We have senior IT people who don't even know basics about firewall configuration. In one place, I waited 2 weeks for the IT person to figure out how to even get into the firewall configuration. Then they proceeded to completely screw it up in obvious ways, and then once we got the firewall completely configured, we could not get the app to work. It took another 2 weeks, and burned 40 hours of engineer time on our side, before somebody on their end realized that they had modified the wrong firewall!

I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.

Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.
by d-us-vb | 2025-12-18 14:48:49+00:00
I like this post. It reminds me of contemporary programming language research. There are precious few people actually doing interesting stuff in PL research these days that are actually trying to uncover new paradigms that aren't just the same old "we discovered how to do X in Y type system" or "novel technique to generate objects with blah blah constraints".

People doing actually interesting stuff can't get funding, so they have to lone-wolf their entire research or just give up and work on stuff that gets paid, people like

- Jonathan Edwards

- Allen Webster

- Brett Victor

All with seriously intriguing ideas that probably have potential, but nobody seems to want to actually dig in to the stuff. Fortunately, there are guys like Stephen Kell who are kind of doing it even in academia, but I think he's limited too towards working on the boring problems that get funding as well.
by wavemode | 2025-12-18 14:49:13+00:00
This is the passage you're citing:

> Consider this: if you get access to an IQ test weeks in advance, you could slowly work through all the problems and memorize the solutions. The test would then score you as a genius. This reveals what IQ tests actually measure. It’s not whether you can solve problems, but how fast you solve them.

You retort that "if you can work on it for a week, then it's no longer an IQ test", but that retort is one that the author would agree with. The author is simply making the argument that, what IQ measures is not necessarily the same kind of intelligence as what is necessary for success in the real world. He's not actually arguing that people should be allowed to take as long as they want on the test, he's simply using that hypothetical to illustrate "what IQ tests actually measure".
by BeetleB | 2025-12-18 14:49:22+00:00
> It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.

It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.

I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.

I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.

Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
by aylons | 2025-12-18 14:49:27+00:00
The archaeologists know that and say as much in TFA:

"The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.

How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?

This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’."
by bhouston | 2025-12-18 14:49:31+00:00
Huh? TAE is Google-backed btw.

Feels like "State Capitalism":

"TAE, backed by Alphabet’s Google and Chevron, the oil giant, is aiming to develop and sell next-generation neutral beam systems for fusion and related applications in a more cost-effective manner."

Another source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/dec/18/truth-social-m...
by jm4 | 2025-12-18 14:49:42+00:00
You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create.

The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool.

You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.
by fsloth | 2025-12-18 14:49:44+00:00
With the horrible version of the statues?

They just look ... bad.

While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.

So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.

But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.

So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.

You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.

You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
by owenthejumper | 2025-12-18 14:49:48+00:00
It's almost a rhetorical question, isn't it? Clearly, from both the original post, and this reporting, they are NOT safe to redeem.

In addition, it just re-emphasizes how tied we all are to these "digital lives". I used to do it without a blink, but now think twice before clicking "Login with Google/Apple".
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-18 14:49:53+00:00
Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card.

You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing.

Why Ebay built this idiotic weakness into their cards is beyond me.
by m4ck_ | 2025-12-18 14:50:36+00:00
Sorry about that! I apply to those jobs because you put out some insane requirements, and I assume you're not actually looking for a single SME with expertise across half a dozen distinct domains and a decade of experience in tech that hasn't existed for half that time.

Unless, you are actually hoping to find a full stack developer that can also serve as the principal engineer for your entire network, storage, VMware infra, plus support basically anything with cord all for ~$80-100k.

Normally when you get to the point of discussing things with a human, you find out what the actual job is. The job ad is almost always completely irrelevant to the actual job.