MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by plapsley | 2025-12-27 16:53:30+00:00
Hey Fogus! A few links or resources you might enjoy:

* Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing, 1945: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nootd1945.pdf

* General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service, 1930: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/gspts1930.pdf

* (Book) Engineering and Operations in the Bell System, 1984: https://bitsavers.org/communications/westernElectric/books/E...

* (Shameless plug) My book on the history of phone phreaking, Exploding the Phone, which has a lot of stuff on Engressia in it: https://explodingthephone.com/

Also, there is a documentary film coming up at Sundance about Engressia! https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fad21a5535277... Very excited to see it!
by dizzled | 2025-12-27 16:54:37+00:00
Also curious about Shelley, their LLM agent. Turns out it makes requests to a proxy for https://fireworks.ai APIs via http://169.254.169.254/gateway/llm, such as:

POST /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions HTTP/1.1
Host: 169.254.169.254
User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
Content-Length: 491
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Bearer implicit
Content-Type: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip

{"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Generate a short, descriptive slug (2-6 words, lowercase, hyphen-separated) for a conversation that starts with this user message:\n\nhello\n\nThe slug should:\n- Be concise and descriptive\n- Use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens\n- Capture the main topic or intent\n- Be suitable as a filename or URL path\n\nRespond with only the slug, nothing else."}],"max_tokens":8192}
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-27 16:55:01+00:00
The problem is that there’s double dipping and profiteering. The prison company gets paid by the government for the same it costs the government to house prisoners and then contracts out the prison labor to private companies for basically pure profit. Private prisons’ ability to sell slave labor is a perverse system. The government doing so is at least marginally less but still exploitative in that it robs prisoners of their humanity and feeling like they’re part of the social fabric. Pay them a living wage for that effort and they start to learn that there’s respect and reward that come from being integrated in society.
by firasd | 2025-12-27 16:55:07+00:00
These Stockfish multipv (multi-principal-variation) outputs show something interesting that contradicts the standard chess narrative of two of the most famous games.

For more info on 'sham sacrifices', check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_(chess)#Sham_sacrifi... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Spielmann
by while_true_ | 2025-12-27 16:55:18+00:00
I think the sweet spot for ARM SBCs are smaller, less powerful and cheaper for headless IOT edge cases. I use a couple of them that way when I need LAN connectivity, either by ethernet or wifi, and things wired to GPIO pins. I don't need a powerful CPU or lots of RAM for that. The SBC makers are caught up in a horsepower race and I just shrug, it's not for me.
by matt-p | 2025-12-27 16:55:20+00:00
I’m speaking mainly within the context of telecom field splicing - the numbers I mentioned are typical for that application in my experience. You’re only sending on the order of 5 mW down a fiber, so none of those high-power concerns apply. Obviously, different networks have different thresholds: if you’re building a greenfield, low-latency long-haul route, you want to minimize loss and it’s reasonable to spend the extra time and use higher-end equipment. For FTTH, with something like a 30 dB overall budget, nobody really cares whether a splice is 0.03 dB or 0.1 dB.
by qwerty456127 | 2025-12-27 16:55:41+00:00
Indeed. QNX is the coolest OS I ever seen and Photon felt the coolest desktop environment. Although I like XFCE in the Linux context (more than e.g. GNOME), I am sad to see it replaced Photon on QNX. Photon just looked and felt so lovely and came with a visual C++ builder making GUI apps development so nice.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-27 16:56:04+00:00
> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.

The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.

To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-12-27 16:56:11+00:00
not scripting per se - yes that is part of it typically, with windows based ERPs, you get scripting for close to free if you can 'drop into' other stuff, like VB, or if your ERP leverages the COM interfaces, has an ODBC or even a straight SQL backend, yes there are many approaches. It's really - how does the scripting interact with the system

What i am talking about is more simple

1. user defined actions.
2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete)
2. user defined fields on core data tables
3. user defined tables

You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)
by programjames | 2025-12-27 16:56:41+00:00
Here are three reasons you want to be able to calculate the volume change for arbitrary parallelpipeds:

- If det M = 0, then M is not invertible. Knowing this is useful for all kinds of reasons. It means you cannot solve an equation like Mx = b by taking the inverse ("dividing") on both sides, x = M \ b. It means you can find the eigenvalues of a matrix by rearranging Mx = λx <--> (M-λI)x = 0 <--> det M-λI = 0, which is a polynomial equation.

- Rotations are volume-preserving, so the rotation group can be expressed as the matrices where det M = 1 (well, the component connected to the identity). This is useful for theoretical physics, where they're playing around with such groups and need representations they can do things with.

- In information theory, the differential entropy (or average amount of bits it takes to describe a particular point in a continuous probability distribution) increases if you spread out the distribution, and decreases if you squeeze it together by exactly log |det M| for a linear transformation. A nonlinear transformation can be linearized with its gradient. This is useful for image compression (and thus generation) with normalizing flow neural networks.
by spacechild1 | 2025-12-27 16:57:07+00:00
> You keep asking me to appeal to authority.

I don't. I just asked to do some research instead of indulging in wild speculation.

> because that’s the world he’s familiar with and that’s the world he has most power.

Again, just baseless speculation. Rob had a very prolific where he worked on foundational technologies like programming language design. He is now retired. What kind of power would he be afraid to lose?

Would you at least consider the possibility that his concerns might be sincere?
by bdangubic | 2025-12-27 16:57:10+00:00
Cause what you are doing is sensationalism and exaggeration. “Abuses are routine” - back this up with actual numbers vs. making a crazy blanket statement like that cause you saw 13 clickbait articles in December.

You are 100% right, we have been (not so) gradually losing our rights and Trump et al isn’t really lighting any bonfires, the country has been burning for decades… it is just that the current fires are broadcasted to a wider audience with minute-by-minute play-by-play. and while most people are falling for this shit again (see 2016-2020) the current admin is lining their pockets (which is the one and only goal they have…)
by moralestapia | 2025-12-27 16:57:15+00:00
Thanks for highlighting this.

There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air, and often even work stolen from others.

It's sad, but I think our generation is partly to blame since, we demanded that from them.

It must suck to lose your whole life and personality just to appease the meritocratic golem.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-27 16:57:50+00:00
Jia Tan has entered the chat. (Jia Tan was the alias used by the group that backdoored XZ utils by becoming a maintainer)

My other comment in this thread has more details, but in my experience it’s more common to encounter projects that don’t want new maintainers or forks. They’re happy with the status quo with their name at the top but also don’t want to let go of control or see competing forks created.
by mothballed | 2025-12-27 16:58:00+00:00
The farm bill makes 'hemp' anything with below 0.3% THC legal. For this reason, we have a LOT of testing on the THC content of cannabis, since it is required to sell and manufacture. As it turns out, naturally cannabis quite commonly has >0.3% THC even before heating or activation of THCa.

Any human-like animal with our receptors eating a large amount would get high as fuck, cooked or not. A ruminant eating pounds of the stuff raw, would not be that different from a human consuming an ounce of baked pot.
by shagie | 2025-12-27 16:58:21+00:00
> Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users’ mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday.

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-legis...

> Legislation S4505/A5346, under the chapter amendment, requires social media platforms that offer addictive feeds, auto play or infinite scroll to post warning labels on their platforms.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S4505

§ 1520. DEFINITIONS. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS ARTICLE, THE FOLLOWING
TERMS SHALL HAVE THE FOLLOWING MEANINGS:
1. "ADDICTIVE FEED" SHALL MEAN AS DEFINED IN SUBDIVISION ONE OF
SECTION FIFTEEN HUNDRED OF THIS CHAPTER.
2. "ADDICTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM" SHALL MEAN A WEBSITE, ONLINE
SERVICE, ONLINE APPLICATION, OR MOBILE APPLICATION THAT PRIMARILY SERVES
AS A MEDIUM FOR COVERED USERS TO INTERACT WITH MEDIA GENERATED BY OTHER
USERS AND WHICH OFFERS OR PROVIDES COVERED USERS AN ADDICTIVE FEED, PUSH
NOTIFICATIONS, AUTOPLAY, INFINITE SCROLL, AND/OR LIKE COUNTS AS A
SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE SERVICES PROVIDED BY SUCH WEBSITE, ONLINE
SERVICE, ONLINE APPLICATION, OR MOBILE APPLICATION. "ADDICTIVE SOCIAL
MEDIA PLATFORM" SHALL NOT INCLUDE ANY SUCH SERVICE OR APPLICATION WHICH
THE ATTORNEY GENERAL DETERMINES OFFERS THE FEATURES DESCRIBED HEREIN FOR
A VALID PURPOSE UNRELATED TO PROLONGING USE OF SUCH PLATFORM.

...

7. "LIKE COUNTS" SHALL MEAN THE QUANTIFICATION AND PUBLIC DISPLAY OF
POSITIVE VOTES, SUCH AS BUT NOT LIMITED TO THOSE EXPRESSED VIA A HEART
OR THUMBS-UP ICON, ATTACHED TO A PIECE OF MEDIA GENERATED BY A COVERED
USER.

(note that there is no public display of positive votes on HN)

HN doesn't have push notifications, autoplay, infinite scroll, or like counts.

"Addictive feed" is poorly defined.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-27 16:59:31+00:00
Not sure if they support US etc., but this is a very cool tool:

www.salesviewer.com

They are analyzing your website data and telling you very much about the visitor. (I guess they are also doing some fancy AI stuff in the background, like connecing/syncing with linkedIn for known static-IPs etc.)

Give it a try!
Show HN: Net Sentinel – Network Monitoring with a Pseudo-Code Engine
by CaptianFluffy | 2025-12-27 16:59:33+00:00
Net Sentinel is a network monitoring tool with a custom pseudo-code engine for defining checks.

It allows users to build packet-level probes, HTTP requests, parsing rules, and metrics without writing full programs. The goal is flexible monitoring for game servers, APIs, and custom protocols.

Early release (v0.1.0). Looking for feedback on the engine design and use cases.
by itisme_b | 2025-12-27 17:00:03+00:00
‫بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِیمِ قُلۡ هُوَ ٱللَّهُ أَحَدٌ﴿ ١ ﴾‬ ‫ٱللَّهُ ٱلصَّمَدُ﴿ ٢ ﴾‬ ‫لَمۡ یَلِدۡ وَلَمۡ یُولَدۡ﴿ ٣ ﴾‬ ‫وَلَمۡ یَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدُۢ﴿ ٤ ﴾‬

:
Say, ‘He is God the One
God the eternal
He begot no one nor was He begotten
No one is comparable to Him’

Al-Ikhlāṣ, Ayah 1 - Al-Ikhlāṣ, Ayah 4
by zeroCalories | 2025-12-27 17:00:34+00:00
I did find that troubling too. I can see the logic of a short lived / well funded project using nextjs, but for something like this that's meant to be a simple form that needs to be reliable, easy to maintain, and long lived, my first thought would be to make a classic restful MPA. Introduction of a complex frontend framework like next seems like it would lead to more headaches than it's worth. Had similar thoughts about the Azur vendor lockin. I seriously doubt they had the traffic to justify needing something like Azur functions and batch processing. I'd love to hear some more justification for why they choose this stack, and if they considered any alternatives first.
by dbcpp | 2025-12-27 17:01:03+00:00
Quite a large bubble. The burden of proof for demonstrating the enormous economic value LLMs are providing really is yours. Sure, there are anecdotal benefits to using LLMs, but we haven't seen any evidence that in aggregate businesses across America are benefitting. Other than AI companies, the stock market isn't even doing well. Are businesses that us AI generating significantly higher profits? I haven't seen any evidence of it yet.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-27 17:01:16+00:00
This has direct implications for my axiomatic prompting research (https://osf.io/pcx2d). We found that providing LLMs with explicit classification axioms improved LEDGAR accuracy by 10 to 22 percentage points across 7/8 models. But axioms add substantial tokens to the prompt.

The question I can't currently answer: how much of the benefit comes from the semantic content of the axioms versus the repetition/emphasis effect this paper identifies?

I'm running an ablation study with a critical condition: shuffled axioms (same tokens, randomized order). If shuffled matches structured axioms, the content doesn't matter. If structured axioms win, semantic structure genuinely helps beyond repetition.

I'll add this experiment to the parent project on OSF. Curious whether others working on knowledge injection techniques have similar confounds to untangle.
by Muromec | 2025-12-27 17:01:21+00:00
It is more or less like wifi problem on laptops, but multiplied by the number of chips. In a way it's more of a lunux problem than arm problem.

At some point the "good" boards get enough support and the situation slowly improves.

We reached the state where you dont need to spec-check the laptop if you want to run linux on it, the same will happen to arm sbc I hope.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-27 17:02:02+00:00
It’s not a question of black and white thinking. If a business took $20,000 from me, and prosecutors told me that they could get the full $20,000 back but instead they’re going to set some of it on fire and only get $10,000, I’d have some serious questions.

Maybe answerable ones, if the deterrence theory works out! But I don’t understand who it is that’s supposed to be getting punished or deterred. The owners are losing the business anyway, what do they care if you put the assets to productive use or not?
by jonas21 | 2025-12-27 17:02:12+00:00
The code is licensed [1] under the "Apple MIT" license [2], which is considered open-source. The weights are under a different, more restrictive, license. This is mentioned at the bottom of the README.

[1] https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp/blob/main/LICENSE

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/Apple_MIT_License
by throw-12-16 | 2025-12-27 17:02:35+00:00
You are conflating America being racist as hell with the establishment of the surveillance state post-9/11, which was largely focused on Arabs.

America has been a racist cesspool for hundreds of years, but since 2001 it has also become a highly advanced surveillance state that has militarized its own police force.

You may not like it, but this has been developing for 25 years and has just now started to (barely) affect white people.
by wvbdmp | 2025-12-27 17:02:49+00:00
Sure, but digging up 13 year old stuff still smacks of intention and I generally find it distasteful. What good-faith reading should we apply to this submission? It’s not like Torvalds is going around sweet-talking people into give him money or votes or attention or whatever, in which case I might see some merit in “exposing” him.
by skydhash | 2025-12-27 17:02:50+00:00
If you take the set of possible ffmpeg invocations, it's very huge. Yes, it's possible to create some kind of wrapper that serve some common cases. And there are many of such wrappers or alternative tools like Xld (macOS) or Handbrake. But when you do need to use ffmpeg, that means that such wrapper is unfit for some reason or another. And in that case, it's not that much of an effort to read the manual which is very comprehensive.

It's the same with video viewers or music players. Often the default app of the OS is enough and they are very intuitive. But sometimes you need a bit more control and that's when using something like vlc or mpv which their extensive filter capabilities (which requires to have the doc at hand) is mandatory.

ffmpeg interface is ok for what it does. Any of your suggestion would be complex to implement if it aims to support the whole feature set of ffmpeg.
by mindslight | 2025-12-27 17:03:01+00:00
The problem is that the system incentivizes incompetence. The mechanics who are paid a skilled wage, take their time, and double check to make sure they are not missing anything show up as big red problems on the beancounters' spreadsheets and get optimized away.

The system can make up for this in other ways like repeatability of processes, redundancy, etc. Which is why commercial aviation is safer than general aviation, and also why I specifically worded my comment as being about the same model of plane - ie if instead of building your own experimental-class kit plane, you hired it out to a liability-limiting company hiring minimum-wage workers to follow the directions. I'm guessing such a thing is illegal per FAA regs, but that kind of proves my point.

For another example, have you experienced the medical system lately? Doctors are generally smart people, but that intelligence is squandered by having their attention smashed into 10 minute chunks, with the entire rest of the system revolving around blame passing - the end result is a lot of smart and well-meaning people ending up grossly incompetent through emergent effects. I would much rather be able to go to a doctor and trust whatever answers they gave me rather than having to do my own independent research and advocacy to drive the process. But that is not how the system we have works.
Ask HN: Thoughts on US drone industry after Chinese production ban
by guywithahat | 2025-12-27 17:03:20+00:00
So as you may or may not know, over the past year the Trump admin has been moving to ban Chinese drone sales in the US, and is finally pulling the trigger and banning them (with more information to come). FCC Chair: https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/2003179047438762084

This means you won't be able to import new drone models from Chinese companies like DJI or Autel. Is anyone trying to take advantage of this? It seems like there's about to be a huge shakeup in the consumer and professional drone market yet nobody is talking about it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, and especially if anyone is working on a company associated with this ban (one which either produces drones or is going to move towards the consumer market).

NYT: https://archive.ph/Bvrhb

WaPo: https://archive.ph/Lxdbu

Epoch Times: https://archive.ph/XhAjm
by boplicity | 2025-12-27 17:03:49+00:00
Research says, apparently, that Prop 65 has actually been affective.

> The researchers analyzed concentrations of 11 chemicals placed on the Proposition 65 warning list and monitored by the CDC between 1999 and 2016. They included several types of phthalates, chemicals used to make plastics flexible; chloroform, a toxic byproduct from disinfecting water with chlorine; and toluene, a hazardous substance found in vehicle exhaust.

> They found that the majority of samples had significantly lower concentrations of these chemicals after their listing. But the levels didn’t just decline in California, they fell nationwide. [1]

Unfortunately, the NIH website [2] where the study is hosted is no longer operational. I don't think certain people want to support scientific inquiry. Maybe someone else can find the study text?

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-11/study-d...

[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP13956
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-27 17:04:05+00:00
Yeah the lockdowns have really damaged my mental health. And the mask mandates even more so due to ancient trauma (where I nearly suffocated and have very bad associations with breathing that feels obstructed). But that's a very personal reason that I understand couldn't be accommodated for back in those days.

I don't know if it was worth it or necessary but tbh I just try to forget the whole phase ever happened. For me it was a few lost life years and I'm still trying to get back to where I was mentally.

I do feel those things were really overlooked back in the day. But I'm also glad I'm not the one making such decisions which can't be easy.

The only thing I have an outspoken opinion about were the curfews we had here. Meaning the available time for things like shopping was more compressed and thus the shops were a lot busier than normal which was super counterproductive. And it didn't stop partygoers because they simply slept over.
by dcrazy | 2025-12-27 17:04:21+00:00
Given the Safari team has been the major driving force behind support for wide gamut in web browsers (for the very obvious reason that all Apple devices ship with wide-gamut displays), I am extremely suspicious of the author’s assertion that Safari is ignoring an embedded ICC profile while Chrome and Firefox are doing the right thing.

I think it’s far more likely that whatever chain of open-source image modification tools the author is using has written out pixel values in a different colorspace than the one named in the embedded ICC profile.

But if the author is absolutely confident in their analysis, they are welcome to file a bug report: https://bugs.webkit.org/