MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theamk | 2025-12-16 15:53:19+00:00
Such a nice design on server-side.. and yet on the client side, it uses system address book - something that Google backs up on the server, and many carriers back up too, and many apps (like Whatsapp) save it too.

"Hey, _we_ don't store your contacts, we are good! Instead you have to manage them yourself, and in process share your presumably "secure" Signal contact list with Apple, Google, Facebook phone carriers and everyone else. But it's not on our servers, so we don't care"
by ashleyn | 2025-12-16 15:53:24+00:00
It would be nice if health insurance were, well, insurance, and not some bastard mix of cost sharing and collective bargaining. The closest you get to "catastrophic only" insurance is an obamacare bronze and/or a high deductible plan with an HSA. Same service, same networks, but you pay less premiums and thus keep what you don't spend.

Health catastrophes are more likely than you may think, so I would suggest a HDHP+HSA at the very least. It's very difficult to self insure against a cancer diagnosis that may blow a million dollars in a year.

I'm a fairly high net worth individual with a high deductible plan. Setting aside the deductible amount in savings (often, tax free with the HSA) and keeping it every year you have good health is OP.
by awei | 2025-12-16 15:53:24+00:00
I see how useful a universal UI language working across platforms is, but when I look at some examples from this protocol, I have the feeling it will eventually converge to what we already have, html. Instead of making all platforms support this new universal markup language, why not make them support html, which some already do, and which llms are already trained on.

Some examples from the documentation: { "id": "settings-tabs", "component": { "Tabs": { "tabItems": [ {"title": {"literalString": "General"}, "child": "general-settings"}, {"title": {"literalString": "Privacy"}, "child": "privacy-settings"}, {"title": {"literalString": "Advanced"}, "child": "advanced-settings"} ] } } }

{ "id": "email-input", "component": { "TextField": { "label": {"literalString": "Email Address"}, "text": {"path": "/user/email"}, "textFieldType": "shortText" } } }
by giraffe_lady | 2025-12-16 15:53:36+00:00
He's one of the best font developers working right now, he has a couple that I consider pretty much flawless examples within their categories.

Which is pretty funny because he's one of the typographers that is best known for his actual typography, ie information about arranging text on a plane, vs twiddling with letter design which is what most people think of with typography.
by fwipsy | 2025-12-16 15:53:42+00:00
This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")

Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.
by terminalshort | 2025-12-16 15:54:17+00:00
> you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X

Well you don't, and no tech company can force you to.

> you must change X in your life or else fall behind

This is not forced on you by tech companies, but by the rest of society adopting that tech because they want to. Things change as technology advances. Your feeling of entitlement that you should not have to make any change that you don't want to is ridiculous.
by alnwlsn | 2025-12-16 15:54:26+00:00
As my family's computer guy, my dad complains to me about this. And there's no satisfactory answer I can give him. My mom told me last year she is "done learning new technology" which seems like a fair goal but maybe not a choice one can make.

You ever see those "dementia simulator" videos where the camera spins around and suddenly all the grocery store aisles are different? That's what it must be like to be less tech literate.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-16 15:54:40+00:00
Many reasons, and yes, basically, that is one of them.

Ekstrom, A. (2010). How and when the fMRI BOLD signal relates to underlying neural activity: The danger in dissociation. Brain Research Reviews, 62(2), 233–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresrev.2009.12.004, https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cluster=642045057386053841...
by kruffalon | 2025-12-16 15:54:43+00:00
> Optimal play to reduce the search space in both follow the same general pattern - the next check should satisfy all previous feedback

Thank you! I might look into this once I break my current streak of the localised wordle clone I'm playing now.

I always try to use as many different bits for the first few rounds...

But then again, maybe I'm not so good at these kinds of games as I think.
by davidw | 2025-12-16 15:54:48+00:00
I feel like it's time for a new direction in tech. Open source was a lot of fun (because I was young), but then it sort of became the default for a lot of infrastructure. I liked PG's take on startups and some cool ones came out of that era. But now the whole thing is collapsing on itself and "Silicon Valley" is broadly becoming disliked if not reviled by a lot of people, with cartoonish figures like Musk, or Joe Lonsdale calling for public hangings. The sense of wonder and innovation feels gone to me. It's still out there somewhere, though, I think, and it'd be nice to recover some of that. LLM's owned by megacorps aren't really where it's at for me - I want to see small teams in garages making something new and fun.
by pksebben | 2025-12-16 15:54:56+00:00
It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but there was a time not so long ago when such things were ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding, and things kind of went to pot.

In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.
by komali2 | 2025-12-16 15:55:02+00:00
> My initial response was to point out that somehow Trump has quelled the rush of migrants without new legislation as a reference against what Biden's administration seemed not to be able to do

It is good that Biden did not flagrantly violate the constitution as well as remove due process, black bagging people in the streets and invading cities with military personnel that were not wanted, in order to accomplish his goal of distracting people from their diminishing material conditions by blaming Mexicans.

Can you illustrate the actual problem caused by immigration to the USA, undocumented or otherwise? Because none of the promised improvements through violent deportation have resulted: no decrease in unemployment, no decrease in costs, no decrease in crime. Quite the opposite, actually. So at what point do you acknowledge the obvious, that this was culture war nonsense?
by vegadw | 2025-12-16 15:55:24+00:00
It didn't augment your skills, it replaced skills you lack. If I generate art using DallE or Stable Diffusion, then edit in Krita/Photoshop/etc. it doesn't suddenly cover up the fact that I was unable to draw/paint/photograph the initial concept. It didn't augment my skills, it replaced them. If you generate "music" like that, it's not augmenting your poetry that you wish to use as lyrics - which may or may not be of good quality in it's own right - it replaced your ability to make music with it.

Computers are meant to be tools to expand our capabilities. You didn't do that. You replaced them. You didn't ride a bike, you called an Uber because you never learned to drive, or you were too lazy to do it for this use.

AI can augment skills by allowing for creative expressions - be it with AI stem separation, neural-network based distortion effects, etc. But the difference is those are tools to be used together with other tools to craft a thing. A tool can be fully automated - but then, if it is, you are no longer a artist. No more than someone that knows how to operate a CNC machine but not design the parts.

This is hard for some people to understand, especially those with an engineering or programming background, but there is a point to philosophy. Innate, valuable knowledge in how a thing was produced. If I find a stone arrow head buried under the dirt on land I know was once used for hunting by native Americans, that arrow head has intrinsic value to me because of its origin. Because I know it wasn't made as a replica and because I found it. There is a sliding scale, shades of gray here. An arrow head I had verified was actually old but which I did not find is still more valuable than one I know is a replica. Similarly, you can, I agree, slowly un-taint an AI work with enough input, but not fully. Similarly, if an digital artist painted something by hand then had StableDiffusion inpaint a small region as part of their process, that still bothers many, adds a taint of that tool to it because they did not take the time to do what the tool has done and mentally weigh each pixel and each line.

By using Suno, you're firmly in the "This was generated for me" side of that line for most people, certainly most musicians. That isn't riding a bike. That's not stretching your muscles or feeling the burn of the creative process. It's throwing a hundred dice, leaving the 6's up, and throwing again until they're all 6's. Sure, you have input, but I hardly see it as impressive. You're just a reverse centaur: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11...
by grokx | 2025-12-16 15:55:26+00:00
When I studied compiler theory, a large part of the compilation involved a lexical analyser (e.g. `flex`) and a syntax analyser (e.g. `bison`), that would produce an internal representation of the input code (the AST), used to generate the compiled files.

It seems that the terminology as evolved, as we speak more broadly of frontends and backends.

So, I'm wondering if Bison and Flex (or equivalent tools) are still in use by the modern compilers? Or are they built directly in GCC, LLVM, ...?
by thenthenthen | 2025-12-16 15:55:36+00:00
Few points:

1. NFC is catching on in China (with Alipay), even face scanning for payments.

2. I would not say it is frictionless. Especially for foreigners (and the ~200 USD per day limit...just to name an example).

3. Translate in Alipay is there, but useless in restaurants (Yummy Duck Shit Tea!).

4. No mention of Wechat?

5. 'The rules' very much apply to Alipay and Alibaba, where is Jack Ma ;)

6. This is not 'the web'.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-16 15:55:36+00:00
Frequent risk of sudden violent murder. And, like, credible relatively-high risk, not the “well a person might be murdered at any time, too”. Like fictional humans in a slasher-movie universe.

The “pleasant lies” mostly involve pretending about meaning, and avoiding thinking about huge scales. That’s the lovecraftian bit. Large-scale reality dwarfs and overwhelms us. We eke out sanity by ignoring it, by even being able to forget about or never thoughtfully engage with it.

My point is just that I largely agree with the other poster on the “nature of nature” as it were, but still find insight in the quoted passages. I don’t think they demand we regard nature as particularly safe or easy, for them to work.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-16 15:55:39+00:00
Medicare should cover prenatal, neonatal and pediatric care for all American children. Frame it as a pro-birther initiative.

And sure, give parents a total opt out when it comes to vaccination. Just because they're dumbfucks doesn't mean their kid need run a fever into brain-cooking temperatures out of fear of an ER bill.
by lab700xdev | 2025-12-16 15:55:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working with ML infrastructure for a while and realized there’s a gap in the security posture: we scan our requirements.txt for vulnerabilities, but blindly trust the 5GB binary model files (.pt) we download from Hugging Face.

Most developers don't realize that standard PyTorch files are just Zip archives containing Python Pickle bytecode. When you run torch.load(), the unpickler executes that bytecode. This allows for arbitrary code execution (RCE) inside the model file itself - what security researchers call a "Pickle Bomb."

I built AIsbom (AI Software Bill of Materials) to solve this without needing a full sandbox.

How it works: 1. It inspects the binary structure of artifacts (PyTorch, Pickle, Safetensors) without loading weights into RAM. 2. For PyTorch/Pickles, it uses static analysis (via pickletools) to disassemble the opcode stream. 3. It looks for GLOBAL or STACK_GLOBAL instructions referencing dangerous modules like os.system, subprocess, or socket. 4. It outputs a CycloneDX v1.6 JSON SBOM compatible with enterprise tools like Dependency-Track. 5. It also parses .safetensors headers to flag "Non-Commercial" (CC-BY-NC) licenses, which often slip into production undetected.

It’s open source (Apache 2.0) and written in Python/Typer. Repo: https://github.com/Lab700xOrg/aisbom Live Demo (Web Viewer): https://aisbom.io

Why I built a scanner? https://dev.to/labdev_c81554ba3d4ae28317/pytorch-models-are-...

I’d love feedback on the detection logic (specifically safety.py) or if anyone has edge cases of weird Pickle protocols that break the disassembler.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-16 15:55:48+00:00
A practical formula:

1) Identify coordination failures that lock us into bad equilibria, e.g. it's impossible to defect from the online ads model without losing access to a valuable social graph

2) Look for leverage that rewrites the payoffs for a coalition rather than for one individual: right-to-repair laws, open protocols, interoperable standards, fiduciary duty, reputation systems, etc.

3) Accept that heroic non-participation is not enough. You must engineer a new Schelling point[1] that makes a better alternative the obvious move for a self-interested majority

TLDR, think in terms of the algebra of incentives, not in terms of squeaky wheelism and moral exhortation

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
by munificent | 2025-12-16 15:56:06+00:00
Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person.

I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers.

If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.
by chasil | 2025-12-16 15:56:30+00:00
The normal answer that I have heard to the performance problems in the conversion from scp to sftp is to use rsync.

The design of sftp is such that it cannot exploit "TCP sliding windows" to maximize bandwidth on high-latency connections. Thus, the migration from scp to sftp has involved a performance loss, which is well-known.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2010/12/08/making-sftp-transfers...

The rsync question is not a workable answer, as OpenBSD has reimplemented the rsync protocol in a new codebase:

https://www.openrsync.org/

An attempt to combine the BSD-licensed rsync with OpenSSH would likely see it stripped out of GPL-focused implementations, where the original GPL release has long standing.

It would be more straightforward to design a new SFTP implementation that implements sliding windows.

I understand (but have not measured) that forcibly reverting to the original scp protocol will also raise performance in high-latency conditions. This does introduce an attack surface, should not be the default transfer tool, and demands thoughtful care.

https://lwn.net/Articles/835962/
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-16 15:56:49+00:00
It's the n-th iteration of "maybe this will work ... nope that didn't work either".

The core value for Firefox users using Firefox is that it's a no-nonsense browser that protects you from ads, obnoxious popups, cooky hoarding social networks looking to sell your data, etc.

AI is not a core browser feature. Nobody is waiting for a Mozilla sanctioned or hosted AI model. Some AI companies are building their own browsers. Given how OpenAI has stopped talking about theirs, you might conclude it is not that successful though. Google is vaguely threatening to add some Gemini stuff to Chrome (not Chromium). The point here is that all the AI browsers are Chromium based.

That points to a problem in Firefox: it's a monolith that is hard to use as the basis for specialized applications that use it as the application runtime. That would be the core problem to fix for Mozilla. Not just cherry picking a particular application and doing a "me too" version of that without any obvious added value whatsoever. Which is what Mozilla is doing here and why it is obviously doomed to fail. Again.

For some reason, Mozilla ceded the whole bespoke application on top of the browser market to Chromium and Electron, even though the starting point of Mozilla was actually to be a generic application platform with things like Xul. Xul kind of flopped but otherwise it was the right move.

Instead of chasing this AI stuff without a coherent plan, which is what this looks like, that would be a more coherent plan.
by prmph | 2025-12-16 15:56:58+00:00
Hell no, the amount of problems caused by people half-assing everything they do is enormous. The write fails to take onto account that the question of just how much effort us required is often highly subjective. It's more a matter of values than anything objective.

How well do you care about something to figure out just how well you could possibly do, when doing better matters in outcomes?

Taking the advice of TFA to heart confirms an attitude of never really caring to do anything well.

Of course, for many things, it is probably not productive to spend too much effort on it.
by ocschwar | 2025-12-16 15:57:14+00:00
The value you get from the health care system isn't just from the services they provide when/if you need them.

It's from the system existing and being ready to help you.

We're not talking about widgets, onions, haircuts, or pork bellies here. You can't opt out of the system existing. And you can't opt out of the horrific consequences if the system doesn't exist.

So it's a bit silly to talk about health care like it's something that has a free market.
Would you pay for a tool that executes LLM code to verify it?
by ZOdex | 2025-12-16 15:57:31+00:00
m building a wrapper that queries GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, then executes their code in a sandbox to catch hallucinations.

Is the latency (30s) worth the certainty? Or do you prefer speed?

I'm running manual tests for people today if anyone wants to try it.
by gyulajaradi | 2025-12-16 15:58:04+00:00
I wrote this after observing repeated failures in patient-facing health systems, where AI interacts with patients before any clinician is involved.

The issue is not model accuracy, but how human input is distorted by fear, uncertainty, omission, and narrative framing — and how current systems treat that input as neutral data.

The article argues that without a cognitive layer that handles distortion, uncertainty, and meaning formation at the input level, health AI systems will continue to fail in structurally predictable ways.

If you’ve encountered these kinds of cracks in real systems — noticed them, worked around them, or sensed them without being able to locate the source — I’d be curious how they’ve shown up in your work.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-16 15:58:34+00:00
It is in fact even difficult to compare the same person on the same fMRI machine (and especially in developmental contexts).

Herting, M. M., Gautam, P., Chen, Z., Mezher, A., & Vetter, N. C. (2018). Test-retest reliability of longitudinal task-based fMRI: Implications for developmental studies. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 33, 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2017.07.001
by hysan | 2025-12-16 15:58:45+00:00
> However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.

You know the saying “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”? Mozilla is well beyond a count of 2 for me and I assume everyone else who is generally pessimistic about every new plea for giving Firefox another chance. While I understand the angle you’re coming from, I think this argument will read as disrespectful to those who have given Firefox multiple chances.

Actions speak louder than words. I think that Mozilla has to make multiple moves in the right direction before this type of plea can be made.
by gmd63 | 2025-12-16 15:58:53+00:00
The greatest challenge facing humanity is building a culture where we are liberated to cooperate toward the greatest goals without fear of another selfish individual or group taking advantage to our detriment.

Yes, the mathematicians will tell you it's "inevitable" that people will cheat and "enshittify". But if you take statistical samplings of the universe from an outsider's perspective, you would think it would be impossible for life to exist. Our whole existence is built on disregard for the inevitable.

Reducing humanity to a bunch of game-theory optimizing automatons will be a sure-fire way to fail The Great Filter, as nobody can possibly understand and mathematically articulate the larger games at stake that we haven't even discovered.
by Ajakks | 2025-12-16 15:59:47+00:00
I think you misunderstood science today.

Scientists only do safe experiments that will 100% verify the findings they are paid to attain.

Nobody will do peers review of whatever study unless its controversial- in which case they will come out of the woodwork to "discover" how correct/not THAT wrong their peers were/are still.

It is nonsense that we consider what comes from such a system to be "knowledge" - Modern science is many things, faithless science validating experimental theory -> that is not a real thing.
Show HN: Ducktape – a tiny HTTP/2 wrapper around DuckDB's Appender API
by williamhaw | 2025-12-16 16:00:11+00:00
Hi HN! I’m an engineer at Artie where we do real-time data replication.

We were adding MotherDuck as a destination and the first version just used DuckDB’s Go driver directly. It worked great on my machine… until we wired it into our Transfer service (https://github.com/artie-labs/transfer).

Because the driver requires CGO, our cross-compiles to amd64 and arm64 started failing, we lost our easy static binaries, and our Docker images had to pull in C toolchains and system libraries just to support one dependency. We tried isolating the CGO bits in a separate module, but it still caused CI failures and forced us to rewrite chunks of our build pipeline. At that point it was clear we didn’t want CGO anywhere near our main service.

So I built ducktape: a tiny standalone microservice that wraps DuckDB’s Appender API behind HTTP/2 streams. Clients stream NDJSON over HTTP/2, and ducktape appends directly into DuckDB on the other side. No CGO in the main codebase, and we keep our cross-platform, pure-Go build story.

The overhead was surprisingly low in benchmarks: ~757 MiB/sec over HTTP/2 vs ~848 MiB/sec in-process — about 90% of native performance but over the network.

ducktape is open source and MIT licensed: https://github.com/artie-labs/ducktape

I’d love feedback, especially if you’ve tackled CGO isolation differently or have ideas to squeeze out more performance!