MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-23 23:51:45+00:00
I don't use the Smart features and instead use a $30 Amazon Fire TV stick (for streaming services) and a Raspberry Pi (for torrents).

This has the major advantage that if the streaming hardware is ever obsoleted for any reason (ie, Netflix decides my TV is too old to support a compression codec they want to switch to), I only have to buy a new media player for $30 and not a whole new TV.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-23 23:51:49+00:00
> The Pennsylvania High Court recently ruled that the Pennsylvania local police don't need a warrant to access your search history. Clearly, those protections have already been violated.

Absolutely. And to keep court-sanctioned violations from getting challenged, a state can utilize a number of tactics to shroud the methods in secrecy. This makes it very difficult for the violated to show standing in a challenge.

The state has nearly every possible advantage in leveraging gov power against the public.
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-23 23:51:54+00:00
> The interpretation of existing jurisprudence is that age limits on the free exercise of rights is Constitutional in many circumstances regardless of if such limits are not explicitly in the Constitution. This is a simple observation of the current state of reality.

> Those age limits are arbitrary and the justification can sometimes be nebulous but they clearly exist in the US.

I mean, kind of, I guess?

States make their own age-related rules. The states are part of the US. So technically sure, you're right. In practice, you're very wrong.
by srschreiber | 2025-12-23 23:51:56+00:00
This DSL provides functions to perform basic actions such as:
- mouse movement (using bezier curves)
- image recognition (template matching + OCR)
- input handling

wrapped in an easy to use language that leverages many different Python libraries like opencv, pyautogui, pynput etc. It uses Lark as the parser and Python for evaluation. It works on mac, linux, and windows. It has a primitive debugger (I plan on implementing DAP later on) and REPL interactive mode.

It has a vs code extension "Macroni Language Support" and can be downloaded via pip install macroni.

I made this as an excuse to learn a bit about DSL's, AST's, EBNF etc and I just learn better by doing, hopefully someone finds this interesting. This is still a very early version and I plan to iterate on it.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-23 23:52:25+00:00
These days even regular cars are getting quite good at it. A couple cars ago I owned a 2018 Camaro SS 1LE. One day I was out dorking around on some twisty rural backroads -- and no, I do not break the lane markings, there are some limits to my madness -- and happened to glance down and notice that I was getting to the point where I was entering tight corners at 80 mph. That car had phenomenal handling, especially at that price point, but it scared me. The amount of potential energy that is being held in check between the suspension, tires, and road is pretty ridiculous at that pace. An unexpected patch of gravel on the road, an animal darting out, or some other asshat coming the other direction who is over the lane divider, and your odds of dying are remarkably high.

I settled for a much more sedate pace after that. And decided to focus on buying slower fun cars that aren't so inherently capable. Harder to get them up into that area of the physics equation where one unexpected variable becomes life threatening.
by thoughtpeddler | 2025-12-23 23:53:45+00:00
The author is reasoning through analogies, which can sometimes be helpful, but it's not applicable in this case. This is a thought-provoking post, but unlikely to be an accurate map of the future. I can use the same analogies to come to entirely different conclusions about the nature of knowledge work in 10-20 years. I have fallen for this trap myself: trying to reason about AI through the lens of the smartphone revolution, or the cloud era, etc. I don't think it fully holds up. Sometimes there are entirely new paradigms that create new worlds, and we have to navigate through the fog to get to a more intelligible side.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-23 23:54:07+00:00
Do you ever really want this? I don't recall wanting this. But you can still get this: just list the ${base_ref}..${deb_ref} commit ranges, select the commit you want, and diff the `git show` of the selected commits. It helps here to keep the commit synopsis the same.

E.g.,

c0=$(git log --oneline ${base_ref0}..${deb_ref0} |
grep "^[^ ] The subject in question" |
cut -d' ' -f1)
c1=$(git log --oneline ${base_ref1}..${deb_ref1} |
grep "^[^ ] The subject in question" |
cut -d' ' -f1)
if [[ -z $c0 || -z $c1 ]]; then
echo "Error: commits not found"
else
diff -ubw <(git show $c0) <(git show c1)
fi

See also the above commentary about Gerrit and commit IDs.

(Honestly I don't need commit IDs. What happens if I eventually split a commit in a patch series into two? Which one, if either, gets the old commit ID? So I just don't bother.)
by cxr | 2025-12-23 23:55:50+00:00
This is an "all else being equal" argument except without saying so explicitly, and it falls apart if that doesn't hold.

Your claim is that no matter whether dependencies' source code is acquired by git-clone or npm-install, then everything related to this attack unfolds exactly the same as it did in the timeline where we live. But as I said in my first comment in this thread the effect of going along with The NPM Way changes how people interact with third-party code.

My contention is that in the universe where dependencies get checked into version control, this is one package that (assuming it ever got created at all) would have been less successful in conscripting others to choose it as a dependency, and that wrt the remaining instances if any where it was approved to be checked in, the question of what effect the mere act of checking it into version control and the fact of its existing there has on its being discovered sooner is non-zero.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-23 23:55:58+00:00
I don't expect the manufacturers to change.

I do expect people to change though.

How is it that it's been well known that smart TVs will show ads and spy on you for over 10 years, and yet people are still connecting their TVs to their WiFi rather than get a separate dedicated streaming device?

I just don't get it. How are people still surprised to find their TV is spying and will show ads?
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-23 23:57:32+00:00
Running an LLM locally means you never have to worry about how many tokens you've used, and also it allows for a lot of low latency interactions on smaller models that can run quickly.

I don't see why consumer hardware won't evolve to run more LLMs locally. It is a nice goal to strive for, which consumer hardware makers have been missing for a decade now. It is definitely achievable, especially if you just care about inference.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-23 23:57:54+00:00
> The interpretation of existing jurisprudence is that age limits on the free exercise of rights is Constitutional in many circumstances regardless of if such limits are not explicitly in the Constitution.

This is explicitly the case with voting rights, but other than that? While there a contextual limits where age may be a factor as to whether the context applies (e.g., some of the linitations that are permitted in public schools), I can't think of any explicit Constitutional right where the courts have allowed application of a direct age limit to the right itself. Can you explain specifically what you are referring to here?
by pietz | 2025-12-23 23:59:32+00:00
Weirdly, I find a higher signal to noise in this analogy than looking at benchmarks these days.

If you let your inner fanboy rest for a moment you realize Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, and GPT 5.2 are all amazing. If two of them disappeared tomorrow, my AI assisted productiveness wouldn't change.

The 3% difference on benchmark X doesn't mean anything anymore. It's probably more helpful to compare them on character traits instead of numbers.

My one word to describe Claude would be "pleasant". It's just so nice to communicate with. GPT/Codex would be the "thorough". It finds and thinks of stuff the others don't. For Gemini 3, the jury is still out. It might be the smart kid on the block that's still a bit rough around the edges, but given that it's a preview things might change soon.
by upofadown | 2025-12-23 23:59:39+00:00
My understanding is that there was a language fork after 5.1. One thing was a complete reworking of how math works. It used to be just floating point for everything but the new idea was to make it like Python 3. So most operations are float/integer with some weird exceptions.

As with any language fork there will be some who stay and others who switch to the new thing. Often a fork will drive people away from a particular language as in my case.
by austinjp | 2025-12-23 23:59:41+00:00
I see another similar comment, but I have an explicit question. Does the following from the README hold any water at all, legally?

> I am not responsible for your use of this tool. ... By using this tool you claim all legal liability for any documents you create with it.

Without a detailed and carefully worded license, does this confer any protection whatsoever?

Having asked that, I'm not sure what protection would be needed. Could a victim of abuse of this tool (or similar) seek some sort of take-down of the tool? It seems unlikely but I'm curious about the scenario.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-24 00:00:01+00:00
A politician in the US requires immense resources to run any campaign. That means rich people control who gets to be a politician.

Fixing this would require both public funding of campaigns, and immense limits to campaigns. Certain people, ignorant or malicious, will pitch an insane fit about trying to do that.

It doesn't matter how much certain politicians "suck" because the way the system is built, your choices are a guy who is awful but will implement some of what you want, or a guy who is fucking bonkers and will destroy our country, and this is true regardless of your political affiliation.

Even Bernie sucks the political party money teat. Because being the most popular senator isn't a reliable enough way to get elected!

Our politicians spend more time on the job calling rich people and begging for cash than they do actually voting on or discussing legislation.

This will only continue to get worse because the rich people are fully in control, and it benefits them to keep pushing the cost of a campaign higher, as the richer of the rich benefit from boxing out the "just" very rich.

Any change requires serious moves to unseat the current supreme court.

Currently, populism is much more effective for extremely regressive and outright hateful politicians than extremely progressive ones though, so expect things to get much much worse.

FDR was only elected and provided the actual power to make changes after 30% of the country was jobless, and an entire generation had been raised in horrific fiscal policy, and lived in a world where a hard worker for 50 years died in the ditch because we had no retirement program or way of feeding people who no longer work.

If we do literally everything right and the very angry and stupid people suddenly put aside their hatred of "others" for long enough to actually vote for a good idea, we might see improvements in 30 years.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-24 00:00:12+00:00
It's more chinese now than it ever was American, but it's certainly not an absolute thing. Thanks to the global supply chain, it's a big complicated spectrum compounded by a bunch of "it depends". If you don't want to dwell in that pedantry, don't blame you (though I am easily nerd-sniped by discussions of logistics), but without that, that essentially leaves us with "Who owns it" and "Where is it Headquartered." There's also "what are the demographics of their employees" to see if there's a strong representation of a single country ID, but that information isn't always readily available.
by thwarted | 2025-12-24 00:00:28+00:00
My understanding of what you say is true, and NASA is a common example of high value cultural and economic outcomes for the pittance the US government budgets/allocates for it.

O'Rourke's take is an interesting read; it is commentary that is meant to be more humorous and entertaining than political, I think he excelled at that in the entirety of Parliament of Whores. It was published in 1991 in a different political climate. He does admit he's doing this for fun, that the takes he express are mostly uninformed about the nature of many of these government departments and programs, and takes a (traditional) conservative (high level, and ahem, naive) view of many government programs. For example, additional quotes from that PoW chapter:

> Training and employment is properly the concern of trainees and employers: $5.7 billion.

> Insurance companies should gladly pay for consumer and occupational health and safety: $1.5 billion.

> If unemployment insurance is really insurance, it ought to at least break even: $18.6 billion.

I shared this for the Circumcision Precept bit; the portions of the quote surrounding that were context.
Show HN: We built a native bridge to make WebRTC calls reliable in hybrid apps
by Mincirkel | 2025-12-24 00:00:55+00:00
Hi HN,

We kept running into unstable WebRTC call flows in hybrid apps:
permission prompts, app lifecycle issues, and notification → call transitions breaking.

Instead of stacking more workarounds on top of the browser, we moved the critical call flow into a native layer and exposed it through a custom JS ↔ native bridge.

This allows an incoming notification to reliably open an accept/decline UI and transition directly into a live audio/video call.

It currently powers MinCirkel (a closed family network), but the bridge itself turned out to be the real asset.

I’m mainly looking for feedback, similar experiences, or teams that have struggled with WebRTC reliability in hybrid environments.

Happy to answer technical questions.
by robkop | 2025-12-24 00:01:56+00:00
For those curious about the "consistent principle of law" here - SCOTUS wrestled with nearly exactly this question in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton earlier this year, and effectively emboldened more of these laws.

Previously the Fifth Circuit had relied heavily on Ginsberg v. New York (1968) to justify rational basis review. But Ginsberg was a narrow scope - it held that minors don't have the same First Amendment rights as adults to access "obscene as to minors" material. It wasn't about burdens on adults at all. Later precedent (Ashcroft, Sable, Reno, Playboy) consistently applied strict scrutiny when laws burdened adults' access to protected speech, even when aimed at protecting minors.

In Paxton the majority split the difference and applied intermediate scrutiny - a lower bar than strict - claiming the burden on adults is merely "incidental." Kagan had a dissent worth reading, arguing this departs from precedent even if the majority won't frame it that way. You could call it "overturning" or "distinguishing" depending on how charitable you're feeling.

The oral arguments are worth watching if you want to understand how to grapple with these questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckoCJthJEqQ

On 1A: The core concern isn't that age-gating exists - it's that mandatory identification to access legal speech creates chilling effects and surveillance risks that don't exist when you flash an ID at a liquor store.

Note: IANAL but do enjoy reading many SC transcripts
by thangalin | 2025-12-24 00:02:31+00:00
https://www.argeliuslabs.com/deep-research-on-pdf-redaction-...

> Information Leaking from Redaction Marks: Even when content is properly removed, the redaction marks themselves can leak some information if not done carefully. For example, if you have a black box exactly covering a word, the length of that black box gives a clue to the word’s length (and potentially its identity).

Does X-ray employ glyph spacing attacks and try to exploit font metric leaks?
New UK home-maintenance membership (waitlist open)
by mykelcodes | 2025-12-24 00:02:40+00:00
A friend and I are working on a platform called Stichomes, launching Spring 2026. It’s a homeowner membership in the UK aimed at simplifying maintenance rather than one-off call-outs.

Got a waitlist open (with an early sign-up discount):
https://stichomes.com
by FridayoLeary | 2025-12-24 00:02:42+00:00
Of course there is. Freedom is a pretty fundamental human right. We don't mind taking it away from some people, sometimes permanently. Then of course the death penalty is a thing.

Now organised abuse, or even not taking steps to prevent such abuse is accepted to be a bad thing by most of society so that shouldn't happen. But my concern isn't directed in any way towards violent gangsters that held an entire country hostage.
by roenxi | 2025-12-24 00:02:49+00:00
Unfortunately it is a bit more subtle than that though:

(1) Questions reveal a lot about someone's state of mind, particularly if there are a lot of them. If someone is actually struggling and doesn't maintain a vague silence, the people around them will figure it out even faster. Arguably not a bad thing, hiding things is a weak strategy.

(2) There is a certain type of middle manager who fears clarity, because clarity leads to accountability and at some level they have identified that as a threat to their careers. It is prudent to be very careful what sort of questions to ask that manager - "what does that abbreviation stand for?" is fine, "what is the exact problem here and what do you want the solution to look like?" or "I don't understand, can you get into the details of why you think that?" can be unexpectedly controversial.

So there is a superpower in having zero shame in asking questions, but the real trick of it is being able to identify the set of inoffensive, basic questions that will move a project along. There is a large class of technically-reasonable-politically-imprudent questions that an inexperienced engineer might ask to their detriment. I've never been afraid of asking questions but if the mindset behind the question isn't fairly polished then there can be backlash and a most people learn to avoid questions rather than getting good at being mentally flexible.
by GeekyBear | 2025-12-24 00:02:50+00:00
The government doesn't have a compelling state interest in preventing you from downloading any app (a weather app, for instance) unless you provide your government ID first.

> In U.S. constitutional law, when a law infringes upon a fundamental constitutional right, the court may apply the strict scrutiny standard. Strict scrutiny holds the challenged law as presumptively invalid unless the government can demonstrate that the law or regulation is necessary to achieve a "compelling state interest". The government must also demonstrate that the law is "narrowly tailored" to achieve that compelling purpose, and that it uses the "least restrictive means" to achieve that purpose. Failure to meet this standard will result in striking the law as unconstitutional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
by gerdesj | 2025-12-24 00:03:36+00:00
In general people like to answer questions - it makes them/us feel mildly superior - hopefully in a good and positive way. You have to use some judgement on how to approach and engage.

Depending on who you are engaging with, a packet of Hobnobs (other socially acceptable bribes are available) might be needed or perhaps waiting until after lunch.

Now, your next mission is getting something done by making someone else think it was their idea in the first place. It might sound counter-intuitive: "How does that benefit me, they get the credit". Crack that conundrum and you will advance to the next level.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-24 00:05:35+00:00
> The other challenge is that in the modern era the houses, papers, and effects of most people have been partially signed off to corporate entities

There are two issues here, each harms us on it's own and both are intertwined toward our detriment.

The first is the deeply problematic 3rd Party Doctrine with established that we lose our rights when a 3rd party has control over our private content/information. What few stipulations there are in the precedent are routinely ignored or twisted by the courts (ex:voluntarily given). This allows governments to wholly ignore the 4th amendment altogether.

The second is the utter lack of meaningful, well written privacy laws that should exist to protect individuals from corporate misuse and exploitation of our personal and private data.

And even worse than Governments willfully violating our privacy rights (thanks to countless courts) and worse than corporations ceaseless leveraging our personal data against us - is that both (of every size) now openly collaborate to violate our privacy in every possible way they can.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-24 00:06:02+00:00
> 1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity.

Wow, what a load of bullshit. I bet you also think the human eye can't see more than 30 fps?

If you're sitting 15+ feet away from your screen, yeah, you can't tell the difference. But for most people, with their eyes only being 2-3 feet away from their monitor, the difference is absolutely noticeable.

> HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

HDR is an absolute game-changer, for sure. Ray-tracing is as well, especially once you learn to notice the artifacts created by shortcuts required to get reflections in raster-based rendering. It's like bad kerning. Something you never noticed before will suddenly stick out like a sore thumb and will bother the hell out of you.
by shkkmo | 2025-12-24 00:06:39+00:00
> None of my house, papers, or effects are owned by anyone but myself.

Do you self host your own email? No? Those are "papers" that your email hosting provider can consent to providing law enforcement access to without a warrant.

Do you use search engines? Your search history is in the same boat with the search engine company.

Don't use a VPN? All of your internet traffic is in the same boat with your ISP

You use a VPN? All your internet traffic is in the same boat with the VPN.

The list goes on and on. It is almost certainly true that some company has private information about you that they can turn over without a warrant.
by voxelghost | 2025-12-24 00:06:59+00:00
Author answered below, but dithering techniques like these were common on old computers like the C64 and others, due to the limited ammount of graphics colors available ( 16 colors on C64 if I remember correctly), plus there were usually limitations on how many colors you could use within one 8x8 block , commonly 2 - 1 foreground , and one background color. C64 had a multicolor mode with 1 background, and 3 forground color. But that was still just 4 colors (out of 16 available ) usuable for each 8x8 character block. However switching to multicolor mode took you from high resolution ( 200x320 px) to low res ( 200x160 px) - and yes thats for the entire screen (25 x 40 chars)
by jmward01 | 2025-12-24 00:07:54+00:00
Hmmm.. The more I think about this the more any font kerning is likely a major leak for redaction. Even if the boxes have randomness applied to them, the words around a blacked out area have exact positioning that constrains the text within so that only certain letter/space combinations could fit between them. With a little knowledge of the rendering algorithm and some educated guessing about the text a bruit force search may be able to do a very credible job of discovering the actual text. This isn't my field. Anyone out there that has actually worked on this problem?