MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dathinab | 2025-12-18 14:07:45+00:00
this is simply not true

it was the EU which had stopped many similar unhinged attempts from the UK when the UK was still a member

similar it had been the EU which had shut down various other surveillance nonsense of the EU

you are basically pretending the EU is a person with one uniform opinion and goals

but it's like the opposite of it, like in a lot of way

it's a union of states, each having a vastly different goals and culture and non of them having a "single uniform opinion" either but (in most cases) a more complex political field then the US (on a federal level)

Furthermore the most influential organ of the EU when it comes to making changes is literally a composition of the elected leaders of the member states. So for most big controversial decisions the driving and directing force isn't "the EU" but but the various elected leaders of the member states. For EU citizens blaming "the EU" instead of blaming your own elected leaders is common, but pretty counter productive, as it's basically pretending you have no power to change things.

Furthermore in the EU you have an additional parliament which (in general) needs to ratify laws and two high courts which can (and in context of mass surveillance repeatedly have) shut down misguided "laws", including in many cases local attempts at mass surveillance laws.

So while some parts of the EU have consistently pushed for mass surveillance in recent years other parts also have consistently moved against it.

In general while the EU needs a lot more transparency and some more democratic processes in some aspects a lot (not all) of the "stories told to make the EU look dump/bad" have a lot of important context stripped from that (like e.g. that a lot of the current push for surveillance comes from the locally elected leaders not the EU parliament or some other abstract "the EU" thing, it's your own countries leader/lead party(1) which does or at least tolerates that shit).
by mopsi | 2025-12-18 14:07:48+00:00
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best

Perhaps they're simply the wrong people for this problem? I'd very much prefer to see how artists would approach painting the figures, instead of scientists and conservators. Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.

Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.
by sporp | 2025-12-18 14:08:05+00:00
I earned more than $500 a month once: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyoc/last-year-of-carbo...

This game was developed by my friends and I during college, then we Kickstarted a few years after.

Sales have dwindled since, but I still like the game. So much so that I turned it into a free web app. Still a WIP but it's maybe 75/80% there.

Play for free here, you will need to make an account: https://lastyearofcarbon.com

Buy a copy here, but you should play the game first to see if you like it: https://lyoc.shop
by dv_dt | 2025-12-18 14:08:18+00:00
I think there are a lot of different possibilities. As hinted to in the article, another is that the most evidence is left by pigments close to the raw surface isn't very well representative of the actual statue. If you're familiar with a lot of art processes - a base rough layer of paint is what is used to seal the raw surface and provide stable surface and rough background color sections for much more detailed painted features in following layers.
by gpjt | 2025-12-18 14:09:16+00:00
Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.
by staticassertion | 2025-12-18 14:09:21+00:00
Yeah, I don't know about other fields but the way "simple", "complex", "clever" are used in software is so backwards and inconsistent. These terms mean nothing in tech and we should excise them.

Much of what MacKinnon is referring to here would be seen as simple, complex, or clever by many people. He advocates for static languages but when he does so he talks about "useful" and "tradeoffs", which are radically better terms if you actually want to discuss these topics.

One case he talks about is an abstraction over Mongo, but then the queries were designed for mongo. Is that an issue of simple or complex? I have no idea, I'd say neither. The issue was that you abstracted away essential properties of your system.

TBH, despite the title, what he says is seemingly radically more about tradeoffs and actual concrete ways to write software - I didn't hear him talk that much about "simple" or "complex" and what he said were instead reasonable cases where things went right or wrong, or his more nuanced opinions on why certain techniques and technologies lead to better outcomes. Ultimately any productive conversation ends up that way, if you find yourself saying "simple" or "complex" a lot in a conversation then you're probably doing it wrong.
by lmeyerov | 2025-12-18 14:09:58+00:00
A few things

Table stakes for our bigger users:

- parity or improvement on perf, for both CPU & GPU mode

- better support for learning (fit->transform) so we can embed billion+ scale data

- expose inferred similarity edges so we can do interactive and human-optimized graph viz, vs overplotted scatterplots

New frontiers:

- alignment tooling is fascinating, as we increasingly want to re-fit->embed over time as our envs change and compare, eg, day-over-day analysis. This area is not well-defined yet common for anyone operational so seems ripe for innovation

- maybe better support for mixing input embeddings. This seems increasingly common in practice, and seems worth examining as special cases

Always happy to pair with folks in getting new plugins into the pygraphistry / graphistry community, so if/when ready, happy to help push a PR & demo through!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-18 14:10:02+00:00
The UK is not part of the EU, and its security services are barely affiliated with it. That all ended with Brexit.

It's absolutely hopeless at protecting citizens from foreign threats.

95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.

Compare with various authoritarian dictatorships where if the police turn up at your door you're unlikely to survive.

And - unlike the US - no one is hauling random British brown people off the streets and sending them to prison camps.

The UK does have a far-right party desperate to end judicial oversight and remove legal protections from torture, etc, by ending support for the ECHR.

There's currently a huge online campaign, funded in part with foreign money and supported by most of the British press (foreign billionaire owned...), to make their far-right dictatorship seem like a political inevitability.

It isn't. But they're trying really really hard to pretend otherwise.

Putin is also really, really pissed at the EU for taking Russian money and using it for defence and reparations.

But - you know - if you start a war because you're a grandiose psychopath, that's what happens.
by sph | 2025-12-18 14:10:05+00:00
Give yourself a window to check notifications and doomscroll. It's easier to tell yourself "I can wait another hour until my lunch break when distracting apps are allowed" rather than fighting the urge with no relief in sight.

Personally I have settled on keeping social media and notifications blocked until 2pm. Much easier than wishing and failing to be a productive machine for the entire day.
by tyleo | 2025-12-18 14:10:13+00:00
I think you need a balance. I’ve seen products fall apart due to high error rate.

I like to think of intentionalists—people who want to understand systems—and vibe coders—people who just want things to work on screen expediently.

I think success requires a balance of both. The current problem I see with AI is that it accelerates the vibe part more than the intentionalist part and throws the system out of balance.
by bluGill | 2025-12-18 14:10:18+00:00
That happened at my mom's school (back in the 1960s) until the school put all the kids on a bus and brought them to the local armory gym and made all student sit quietly (no talking) on the floor until the end of the school day. Once the bomb threat wasn't a way to get out of school on a nice day there was never another one.

I'm not sure how to apply that to this situation, but it is one every school should think about when students try things.
by Shocka1 | 2025-12-18 14:10:40+00:00
The word "super" is enough to make my red flags fly. As a millennial the word super is something that I remember only being used around the house, or between young friends. Fast forward to the last few years and the casual use of the word super, along with uptalk, is being used what seems like every other sentence in the professional setting. It's strange to me and immediately makes me think of the person using it as childish or otherwise not know what they are talking about. I'm not surprised about the "Super secure" app not being secure.
by DrScientist | 2025-12-18 14:10:42+00:00
There are lots of forms of 'don't care'. Don't care because:

- they have limited resources and they are prioritising something else,

- there is little realistic chance of getting a conviction.

- it's not one of their politically set department targets

- they fundamentally don't think it should be illegal - say historic blasphemy laws still on the books.

Is your main concern resources or enforceability, lack of political focus or some combination of all of the above?
by Geonode | 2025-12-18 14:10:50+00:00
I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away.

This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.

Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are simply looking at the paint that was left in the crevices.
by 9rx | 2025-12-18 14:11:28+00:00
> consider how many years of experience a "senior" is typically expected to have

That entirely depends on what the experience is towards. If it is something like farming where you only get to experience a different scenario once per year due to worldly constraints, then one would expect many years — decades, even — before considering someone "senior".

But when the domain allows experiencing a new scenario every handful of milliseconds, you can shorten that tremendously. In that case, a couple of years is more than enough time to become a "senior" even with only a modicum of attention given to it. If you haven't "seen it all" after a couple of years in that kind of environment, you're never going to become "senior" as you are hardly engaging with it at all.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-18 14:11:30+00:00
It's like this for most of the "vowelless" languages. Hebrew, for instance, still has alef and ayin, and depending on whose lessons you go with, they can be described as silent letters or vowels, or just sort of ignored because no one really wants to explain them. And if they're anything like our own alphabet, the answers have changed over the years as pronunciation itself may have changed. Dumb question for you... is Y a vowel?
by singularity2001 | 2025-12-18 14:11:59+00:00
Don't trust the pronunciation:

To quote the great egyptologist Frank Kammerzell:

“Da die Vokalisation ägyptischen Sprachmaterials aus vorkoptischer Zeit nicht annähernd vollständig zu rekonstruieren ist, hat es sich eingebürgert, eine künstlich konstruierte Hilfsaussprache zu benutzen, die keinerlei sprachhistorischen Eigenwert besitzt.

Selbst die in den allermeisten Fällen jegliche Authentizität entbehrende Aussprache einiger Zeichen als Vokale reichte nicht aus, zu bewirken, daß sich etwa in der Umschrift nur solche Lautfolgen ergäben, die von Gelehrten romanischer, slavischer, semitischer oder germanischer Zunge zwanglos hätten benutzt werden können.”

Since the vocalization of Egyptian linguistic material from pre-Coptic times is not nearly completely reconstructable, it has become common practice to create an artificial constructed auxiliary pronunciation that has no linguistic historically intrinsic value.

Even the pronunciation of some characters as vowels, which in the vast majority of cases lacks authenticity, was not sufficient to ensure that, for example, only those phonetic sequences would occur in the transcription that could have been used effortlessly by scholars of Romanesque, Slavic, Semitic or Germanic tongues.
by halfcat | 2025-12-18 14:12:42+00:00
Counterpoint to consider: In real life, you can just play a different game. Most people will choose to shoot from 3/4 court instead of running all the way to the other end, because they’re not interested in basketball.

Most people aren’t interested enough to work 100+ hours per week. But we wouldn’t say Elon isn’t better at work ”because he doesn’t even work a 40-hour work week”

It has a lot to do with interest. Michael Jordan isn’t a world class mathematician. Elon isn’t a world class father.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-18 14:13:17+00:00
Calling HN non-toxic is really a stretch. Toxicity here is more subtle, but still around.

Voting and novelty, they also exist with other, more problematic, platforms. I don't think simple voting really helps in maintaining the social health of a platform, a more complex system would probably more beneficial than a simple count.

But what really helps is good and fair moderation, and a suitable sized group. If it's too small, nothing much happens, if it's too big, you will be drowned in noise and grinded in too many differing opinions. And size also helps moderation.

But I don't think enforcing low limits are really helping here. It's just another simple mechanical solution, like voting. It's too much depending on the topic, thread and persons involved how big or small a limit should be. Some topics need many involved people, some people don't have always the time to pay full attention to something, but others could continue their part. Good discussions evolve naturally and also randomly, because you never know which expert is around and how much time they have on that day.

Also, you are saying social platform, but social also means meaningless chat, while it seems to aim for meaningful high quality interactions.

If you aim for high quality-discussions, then maybe it would be more feasible to improve extraction and presentation of meaningful parts. Like let humans and AI marking useful parts, AI constantly creating summaries and so on. Kinda like having the discussion on side, and a result like a "Wikipedia-article" on the other.
by RestartKernel | 2025-12-18 14:13:23+00:00
Just my two cents, but:

- In terms of data, this is nothing compared to any site serving a bunch of images. The compute would differ, but loading speed shouldn't be an issue if you can render the HTML first, and hydrate it after page load. This static HTML would then also serve as fallback when Javascript is disabled.

- For a quick demo, I doubt you will lose people by embedding an older version. Serving a version of a few months ago seems like 80% of the work, with 20% of the effort, in terms of deployment.

Anyhow, nice to see government funds put to a good cause!
by fsloth | 2025-12-18 14:13:29+00:00
I think the museums should hire trained academic artists to do best guess reproductions next to the garish ones.

The garish ones are _equally_ misleading.

Imagine you got a reproduction of a "five year old with finger paints" version of Mona Lisa and you were told this was made by a person considered a geniuous in his time and an artistic giant. What would make that think you of his patrons and him?
Show HN: SHM – Telemetry for self-hosted apps (no user tracking)
by benjy3379 | 2025-12-18 14:13:41+00:00
Hello HN,

I’m the author of SHM. I built this because I distribute self-hosted software and realized I was "flying blind"—I had no idea how many instances were running or which versions were active.

I didn't want to use Google Analytics (privacy issues) or heavy tools like Countly/PostHog (too complex for simple usage stats).

What makes SHM different: - Agnostic: You can send any JSON payload (e.g., {"pizzas_eaten": 10}). The dashboard adapts automatically to create columns and KPI cards, group data by application and offer graph view for time-series data. - Privacy-First: It verifies instance authenticity using Ed25519 signatures (generated on the client) rather than tracking user IP/fingerprints. - Zero-Config: It's a single Go binary with an embedded UI (AlpineJS + Tailwind). - Go & NodeJS SDK to easy implement client with authentication, crypt & send metrics.

It’s open source (AGPLv3 / MIT). I’d love to hear your feedback on the product, architecture...
by joncrane | 2025-12-18 14:14:29+00:00
I feel like there's a sweet spot of wealth that is generationally sustainable, which I would say is in the middle and upper-middle class brackets. Just like with any human activity, the amount of work required for the payoff has to be in the sweet spot. Too rich, and not enough work is required for the offspring to stay engaged enough to surmount the hurdles all human face. Too poor and the opportunities just aren't there.
by windex | 2025-12-18 14:14:31+00:00
Atleast in Europe there are some basic rules around data collection. In places like India, linkedin is a free for all vacuuming up resume data. I've seen the same jobs on linkedin appear for nearly 4 years with no changes and hundreds of people applying every week.

You cant flag it on linkedin either. I guess LinkedIn's business model likes the fake job postings.
by bluGill | 2025-12-18 14:14:46+00:00
That has been a common trope in gangster movies for ages. A violin case can easially hide a gun (depending on the gun of course, but you get to select this). You can find craftsmen in your gang who can make a violin case that also has a gun so it can even be opened an inspected by someone who doesn't know how to find the secret gun compartment, and it isn't hard to teach someone to play some simple songs on a violin thus giving a reason to carry a violin (you don't need to be good, just be able to show you have another lesson next week). I don't know if this works as well in the real world as movies, but it is plausible.
by strangescript | 2025-12-18 14:15:04+00:00
If your outlook is 10 years then for sure, its valid. I am not sure how you come to that conclusion logically though. At the beginning of the year we had 0 code agents. Now we have dozens, some are basically free, (of various degrees of quality, sure).

The last 2-3 months of releases have been an unprecedented whirlwind. Code writing will be solved by the end of 2026. Architecture, maybe not, but formatting issues isn't architecture.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-18 14:15:11+00:00
Yes, this is not clearly explained. The "pronunciation" is more like an indication about how to conventionally pronounce the transcribed text, and not a faithful description of the original pronunciation.

The letters said to be pronounced "ee" and "oo" above, are not the vowels I and U, but the consonants I and U, which in English are written Y and W, like in "yet" and "wet" (i.e. they correspond to Semitic yodh and waw).

So in Egyptian they were normally followed by a vowel, which is not written, so usually unknown. Thus the conventional pronunciation described in the article recommends that instead of replacing the unknown vowel with E, like for the other consonants, one should pronounce Y and W as vowels, i.e. as long I and U, which in English are typically written as EE and OO.

The sign recommended to be pronounced "ah" was some guttural consonant, perhaps like Semitic aleph or ayin. It was also followed by an unknown vowel, so pronouncing it as a vowel is just a convention.

The indications about how to pronounce the vowels of other languages in English always appear comic for the speakers of other languages written with the Latin alphabet, due to the great discrepancy between how vowels are written in English and in the other languages, where it is seldom necessary to give word examples in order to describe precisely which vowels are meant.

While the reason why Egyptian did not write the vowels is uncertain, this fact had a huge importance in the history of the world.

The Semitic alphabet has inherited this feature, together with its later variants, e.g. the Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets. Other writing systems derived from Semitic alphabets, i.e. the European and Indian writing systems, have introduced means for also writing the vowels, but on the base provided by the separate writing of consonants.

All the other writing systems that have been developed completely independent from the Egyptian writing system have been based on signs for syllables or for words, which has resulted in much more complex writing systems than those that have started from the small set of signs needed to write only the consonants.
by voxleone | 2025-12-18 14:16:08+00:00
I’m not a linguist, just an Ancient Egypt amateur geek, but it’s worth noting that hieroglyphs were the formal, monumental script—used on temples, tombs, statues, and religious texts. They’re beautifully drawn and symbolic, but slow to write (think carved calligraphy rather than everyday handwriting).

There were also cursive forms. Ancient Egyptian had three main writing systems used in different contexts: hieroglyphic (formal), hieratic (a handwritten cursive), and later demotic (even more simplified, for everyday administration and legal texts).
by revetkn | 2025-12-18 14:16:08+00:00
In my experience, LLMs are terrific for most translation tasks, but you still need a way to encode the data (rules for genders, cardinalities, ordinalities, ...) for storage on disk/database/etc. for 1. performance and 2. consistency/durability. So LLMs are a big part of the solution, but not the whole picture.
by poly2it | 2025-12-18 14:16:12+00:00
> Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.

Check out the Pirate party's stance on integrity and internet:

https://piratpartiet.se/sakpolitik/integritetspolitik/

https://piratpartiet.se/sakpolitik/natpolitik/
by fsloth | 2025-12-18 14:17:01+00:00
"many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject."

Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.

I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.

A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.

Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-12-18 14:17:19+00:00
Yeah, I've likewise always figured the reason these reconstructions ended up looking so awful is because paint is generally applied in layers (even to this day), so what they're likely reconstructing is the primer layer.

Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem.

[edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/medi...