MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giantg2 | 2025-12-12 13:31:05+00:00
"I know what porn looks like. I know what children look like."

Do you though?

Some children look like adults (17 vs 18, etc). Some adults, look younger than they actually are. How do we tell the difference between porn and art, such as nude scenes in movies, or even ancient sculptures? It doesn't seem like an agent would be able to make these determinations without a significant amount of training, and likely added context about any images it processes.
by kesor | 2025-12-12 13:31:14+00:00
Diffusion models for images are already pretty much binary code generators. And we don't need to treat each bit individually, even in binary code there are whole segments that can be tokenized into a single token.

Regarding training, we have many binaries all around us, for many of them we also have the source code in whichever language. As a first step we can use the original source code and ask a third party model to explain what it does in English. Then use this English to train the binary programmer model. Eventually the binary programmer model can understand binaries directly and translate them to English for its own use, so with time, we might not even need binaries that have source code, we could narrate binaries directly.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-12-12 13:31:58+00:00
Isn't that the case for most ultra-rich CEOs? All of the CEOs of Microsoft apparently started off either building product or helping develop the business into something profitable. But at some point it doesn't really matter if you have the skills to be an individual contributor, a team leader, or even a vice president. The role of CEO mostly is to keep investors happy & secondarily to put the right people in the company together to make things happen.
Show HN: Beat Kanji – Rhythm Game for Learning Japanese Kanji (iOS)
by surrTurr | 2025-12-12 13:32:54+00:00
Hi HN!

Learning Kanji is really hard and so I built a game called "Beat Kanji" to make it more fun!

In the game you can:

- Practice Kanji strokes to the beat

- Massive Library: Over 2000 Kanji (N5-N1), plus Hiragana and Katakana.

- Instant Feedback: Get real-time scoring on every stroke you draw.

- Great Music: A variety of fun tracks to keep you in the flow.

- iPad Ready: Full Apple Pencil support for a natural writing experience.

The game is completely free and open source! Let me know what you think ^^

Links:

- [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/lv/app/beat-kanji/id6756133868)

- [GitHub](https://github.com/AlexW00/Beat-Kanji)
by zamadatix | 2025-12-12 13:33:02+00:00
I suppose it depends on how much else you want to see. E.g. the recent discussion on Australia's social media band for teens https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 has ~1500 comments covering nearly every possible angle I could have conceived and some positions I'm not sure I would have even been able to imagine. Focusing on about the kids is a popular position in threads like that, and one of the top 5 top level comments is even an example of "I care about the kids and don't want to discuss how it should be about these other things".
by djmips | 2025-12-12 13:34:18+00:00
This essay is not consistent. They ramble between company names Google ( which is a great name ) and tools like AWK which is not descriptive at all but a good name.

But I do share his pain with onboarding when I joined Humungous Entertainment the tools or systems were called Sputm, Phlegm, Mucus, SPIT. There might have been a Bile. :-)
by Neil44 | 2025-12-12 13:35:01+00:00
I messed around with our website trying url encoded hyperlinks etc but it was all escaped pretty well. I bet there's a lot of tricks out there for those with time on their hands. Why anyone would bother creating content when Google AI summary is effectively going to steal it to intercept your click is beyond me. So the whole issue will solve it's self when google has nothing to index except endless regurgitated slop and everyone finally logs off and goes outside.
by febusravenga | 2025-12-12 13:35:12+00:00
> they just had shitty railroad

The terrain is just hard railroad had do huge detour on this section

Look at map: https://mapy.com/en/turisticka?x=15.0703419&y=46.7076432&z=1...

Passes in those mountains are only ~1200m above valley level (~1650 abs). Yeah, perfectly ok to run railroad there.

Your autobahn climbs 600m on this section (to 1050m absolute) - it's way to high for railway to be effective.
by superkuh | 2025-12-12 13:35:15+00:00
In terms of compilation of programs Go is far, far easier than Rust. For Rust to compile a random Rust program on the internet one almost always has to have the absolutely latest out of repo compiler toolchain from curl rustup.whatever | sh. The normal 4 year release cycle is incompatible with rust development. For commercial use cases this doesn't matter. But for open source like the tor project it does.

That said, since they use Firefox this bridge has already been burned.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-12 13:35:37+00:00
>I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.

That's probably what I would do but that's also why the iphone beat the crap out of Nokia, because that example of what you did with the N900 is a 1% of 1% of what users would use their phones for back then, and Steve Jobs knew it so he won consumers over with a pleasant and simple UX that lacked features instead of piling on Power User features that nobody would use.

You're not gonna sell too many phone if your target userbase is those who know what BitTorrent is and how to use it on their Linux phone.

Such Power User focused niche devices are only financially viable for small companies to develop and sell, but you can't keep a company the size of Nokia in business by only catering to Linux phone enthusiasts.

Their demise was inevitable at that point no matter what they did.
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-12 13:36:07+00:00
Don't Rust and Go build to mostly-statically-compiled binaries? (With the exception of a link to libc.) (This isn't a rhetorical question, this is something I don't know a lot about

I'd imagine the biggest cultural reason is that many Rust developers were C developers who had a reason to find something better, but still scoff at garbage collection, large runtimes, etc. They probably have a lot more Rust expertise in their circle.

Another technical reason is that they were trying to replace their C code with Rust in bits and pieces before they went with a full rewrite. I don't know about Go, but this is something ergonomically doable in Rust.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-12 13:36:09+00:00
This is how client-server applications have been done for decades, it's basically only the browser that does the whole "big ole requests" thing.

The problem with API + frontend is:

1. You have two applications you have to ensure are always in sync and consistent.

2. Code is duplicated.

3. Velocity decreases because in order to implement almost anything, you need buy-in from the backend AND frontend team(s).

The idea of Blazor Server or Phoenix live view is "the server runs the show". There's now one source of truth, and you don't have to spend time making sure it's consistent.

I would say, really, 80% of bugs in web applications come from the client and server being out of sync. Even if you think about vulnerability like unauthorized access, it's usually just this. If you can eliminate those 80% or mitigate them, then that's huge.

Oh, and thats not even touching on the performance implications. APIs can be performant, but they usually aren't. Usually adding or editing an API is treated as such a high risk activity that people just don't do it - so instead they contort, like, 10 API calls together and discard 99% of the data to get the thing they want on the frontend.
by willvarfar | 2025-12-12 13:36:14+00:00
1 = no privacy from relay

2 = risk of collusion between relays

3 = goldilocks default

4 = ... actually, you have more attack surface and you are more susceptible to fingerprinting because everybody else is using 3, so you're timings etc help identify you

So the default is 3 and nobody ought change it! Use 3 like everybody else.

The exception is .onion sites. TOR actually deliberately defaults to 6 hops when accessing .oninon sites - 3 to protect you and 3 to project the site.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-12 13:36:24+00:00
Yes, and the Austrian route is mostly in that category under the Koralpe Massif rather then the very politically awkward Home Counties (NIMBY Central, and very rich NIMBYs at that).

Hence why tunneling does not necessarily mean a stunningly expensive project. We just hear about the HS2s and Big Digs because they reverberate for decades with all the legal battles.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-12-12 13:36:53+00:00
I can't really see how Altman is a sociopath? I think his current vision greatly exceeds the technical capabilities that OpenAI can ever build. OpenAI seems to have produced some genuinely interesting products on the other hand. But they aren't profitable at present and I don't see it happening.

Altman talks to the talk of a CEO who is going to build a company that can change the world. It's what investors want to hear. He seems to make as many attempts as possible to actually execute on that. I think most of those plans are unlikely to be as successful as desired. But this isn't Theranos level fraud, where what they are trying to build is obviously impossible.
by spi | 2025-12-12 13:37:23+00:00
Sorry I just opened that file now, and browsed through it very quickly, but my eye fell on the excerpt: ``` However, we did not observe any speedup by increasing the batch size from 65536 to 131072 for the first stage, thus, we restrict the batch size to 65536 for this stage. ``` which I think is more or less my point: increasing batch size essentially always helps, but the speedup reduces the more you push the batch size. Provided that your dataset is large enough, more batch size will always make you run a bit faster without sacrificing accuracy, but the speedup will be less and less as you increase the batch size, until you are anyway maxing out the power of your GPU and you can't see any measurable speedup anymore.
by rafaelmn | 2025-12-12 13:38:03+00:00
I constantly see top models (opus 4.5, gemini 3) get a stroke mid task - they will solve the problem correctly in one place, or have a correct solution that needs to be reapplied in context - and then completely miss the mark in another place. "Lack of intelligence" is very much a limiting factor. Gemini especially will get into random reasoning loops - reading thinking traces - it gets unhinged pretty fast.

Not to mention it's super easy to gaslight these models, just asserting something wrong with vaguely plausible explanation and you get no pushback or reasoning validation.

So I know you qualified your post with "for your use case", but personally I would very much like more intelligence from LLMs.
by tremon | 2025-12-12 13:39:08+00:00
it's all paid by us EU taxpayers anyway

That's simply not true, the EU subsidy budget is dwarfed by each country's national budget. From https://eubudget.europarl.europa.eu/en/how-it-works/ :

The EU budget [..] accounts annually for around 1% of the EU's GNI (gross national income), or around €160-180 billion. National public spending by EU countries averages nearly 50% of their respective GNI.
by everdrive | 2025-12-12 13:39:55+00:00
People are nuts, that's all there is to it. They're worried about thinness, but meanwhile buy phones that are so tall and wide they cannot actually fit in a pocket. There's no benefit whatsoever to the thinness, except that someone else's phone is thicker. And no, water damage is not a concern. You can absolutely build phones with a battery compartment that can safely be fully submerged in water.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-12 13:40:10+00:00
Honestly, it's stuff like the horrible typing experience, which makes me wonder, if I am somehow missing something fundamental when people are praising Apple for the UX. How on Earth can they possibly fuck up a basic phone feature like typing? I've been using iOS for a few years now and it's such a mess, absolutely not growing on me. Hardware doesn't matter, if you're locked in software hell.
by neuah | 2025-12-12 13:40:15+00:00
Using it in a specialized subfield of neuroscience, Gemini 3 w/ thinking is a huge leap forward in terms of knowledge and intelligence (with minimal hallucinations). I take it that the majority of people on here are software engineers. If you're evaluating it on writing boilerplate code, you probably have to squint to see differences between the (excellent) raw model performances. whereas in more niche edge cases there is more daylight between them.
by ubermonkey | 2025-12-12 13:40:26+00:00
Kinda peak HN crap to suggest I don't know how my own mail flow has worked.

Has the interface in Mail evolved since the early 2000s? Yes.

Does that constitute a material change, or even an adjustment, on my part? No.

Did I ever have to hack anything together to make this happen so smoothly for so long? Also no. ;)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-12 13:40:38+00:00
tar xvzf file.name

is always a valid command, whether file.name exists or not. When the file doesn't exist, tar will exit with status '2', apparently, but that has no bearing on the validity of the command.

Compare these two logs:

$ tar xvzf read.me tar (child): read.me: Cannot open: No such file or directory tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now tar: Child returned status 2 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now $ tar extract read.me tar: invalid option -- 'e' Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.

Do you really not understand the difference between "you told me to do something, but I can't" and "you just spouted some meaningless gibberish"?
by nostrademons | 2025-12-12 13:41:03+00:00
Knowing not so much about Tor but some about math: the number of nodes you need to compromise in order to de-anonymize a Tor user is exponential in the number of hops. Google says there are roughly 7000 Tor nodes, including 2000 guards (entry) and 1000 exit nodes. If you have a single hop, there's roughly a 1/1000 chance that you will connect to a single malicious node that can de-anonymize you, going up linearly with the number of nodes an attacker controls. If you have 3 hops, you have a 1 in 1000 * 7000 * 2000 = roughly 14 billion chance. 2 hops would give you 1 in 2 million, 4 hops would give you 1 in 1000 * 7000 * 7000 * 2000 = 98 trillion. In practical terms 1:14B is about the same as 1:98T (i.e. both are effectively zero), but 1:2M is a lot higher.
by Reubachi | 2025-12-12 13:41:45+00:00
Off topic but related to your comment,

Noraly/Itchy boots rubs me the wrong way far too often. Her content always **ends up being top notch and respectful**, but starts off with a sour taste after the title is "I should have never come here." and the content is a lovely journey......

Idk. This whole genre is: western person is achieving a "dream" life as a function of their birth and wealth status. Has a good time, seemed to enjoy the journey. But then pretends the trips are hampered by 1-2 (expected) events not normal for a westerner, and reflects that in the title for views.

I think the effect is more negative than not.
by vladms | 2025-12-12 13:42:09+00:00
A clear definition is definitively hard to come by, but I will share what I see as rather large issues that impact society: minimal spending per children for education to allow a good service for most (this will imply that smart kids are selected and become productive as opposed to drop out because they had nobody to learn from); reasonable health availability for children such that they can develop rather than being sick; sufficient food for children to support the first two (can't learn or be healthy if you are hungry).

Currently I know in many countries multiple measures/rules/policies that affect these 3 things in ways that I find damaging for the society overall on the long term. Companies complain they don't have work forces, governments complain the natality is low but there are many issues with raising a child. Financial incentives to parents do not seem to work (for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612)
by jeremy151 | 2025-12-12 13:42:16+00:00
My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity.

I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.

All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.
by stephen_g | 2025-12-12 13:42:22+00:00
“ In July 2013, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) agreed to voluntarily offer “default-on” adult content internet filters on all new and existing home network customers” [1]

OK, so the entire industry does opt everyone in to content filtering by default, just every single provider, without exception, does it “voluntarily”.

1. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07...
by spi | 2025-12-12 13:43:00+00:00
Sorry came a bit late to this reply. Interesting, well, nobody says it's a monotonic function :-) in the limit of _very_ large batches you of course are worse off, because you take a very large amount of computation before taking a single step, so if you stop after a fixed amount of time your model just didn't have the time to learn properly. So certainly there is a sweet spot somewhere.

I suppose, the real "function" is a bit more complicated because (1) If you put 2x more data through the same GPU with large enough memory, it will take less than 2x the time to compute (but certainly not 1x). (2) At some point, empirically, increasing batch size makes it _worse_ even if you ignore the additional runtime cost (i.e. stop after n gradient update steps, and not x seconds). To my knowledge, the accepted reason for that fact is that a bit of noise helps in regularizing learning, because overly smooth learning curves end up stagnating in local loss minima more easily. In truth, I think nobody exactly understand how deep learning models work :-)

And to your other question - sorry again for the late answer. Yes, `optimizer.zero_grad()` should always be called directly after `optimizer.step()`, therefore with gradient accumulation once every `n` steps (otherwise, you'd be zeroing out the gradients, so just throwing away all the compute you did in previous steps).
by lukan | 2025-12-12 13:43:09+00:00
Huh?

There is sometimes external funding from industry towards academia with a concrete research and there is internal (taxpayer/internal money) funding in academia. Both are not handed out freely.

There is basic research, not tied to any concrete practical problem, but there never is random research. Professors have some freedom, but have to answer. The type of academia you describe only exists as a wanted Utopia, not as reality.
by avianlyric | 2025-12-12 13:43:11+00:00
There are solutions to this. Look at how state ID on iOS is handled.

There’s an enrolment process where your identity is bound to your phone, and secured using biometrics.

When you need to prove age, the device can produce a signed token attesting to fact that your older than 21 etc. and your device is trusted to validate your identity using a biometric scan performed by your phone.

All of this is dependent on everyone trusting your phone to both validate your physical identity before signing something, and also not sharing anything it shouldn’t. But given you can already enroll US state ID on iOS, those problems are clearly solvable.
by neuralkoi | 2025-12-12 13:44:03+00:00
The author did an excellent job explaining what an evil maid attack is, but a very poor job of explaining how their proposal mitigates such attack.

I think the classic "Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice" [0] approach is simpler to understand and simpler to implement. It doesn't rely on any hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi or otherwise technology which can be more easily subject to scrutiny via Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

[0] https://dys2p.com/en/2021-12-tamper-evident-protection.html
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-12 13:44:45+00:00
The most important part of this news article:

"TechInsights has confirmed that SMIC's N+3 node, despite achieving impressive DUV multi-patterning implementation, encounters significant yield challenges, particularly due to the aggressively scaled metal pitch. As a result, the Huawei Kirin 9030 SoC is likely produced at an operating loss, with a significant portion of dies being discarded or used for downgraded chips."

So TSMC and friends have nothing to worry about (yet) since SMIC long hit the physical limits on what's possible to shrink using DUV.

However that's probably more than enough to ensure chips for China's strategic national security and defense needs.
by epolanski | 2025-12-12 13:44:49+00:00
Yeah, but then people started building bloated static websites with those libraries instead of using a saner template engine + javascript approach which is fast, easy to cache, debug, and has stellar performance and SEO.

Little it helped that even React developers were saying that it was the wrong tool for plenty use cases.

Worst of all?

The entire nuance of choosing the right tool for the job has been long lost on most developers. Even the comments I read on HN make me question where the engineering part of the job starts.
by superkuh | 2025-12-12 13:46:02+00:00
>Caffeine alters mood and causes euphoria.

It alters mood. It does not cause euphoria. But even if it did an addiction does not come from liking/enjoying something. Addiction comes from wanting something. Caffeine does not directly chemically alter the mechanisms of wanting (incentive salience) in the mammal brain. Drugs that directly manipulate wanting are the addictive ones.

Caffeine's mechanism of action is simply blocking the measurement of metabolic product build-up in the brain (adenosine) which is used internally for determining how tired one should be.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-12 13:46:05+00:00
> Yet, no one can actually tell us when, at what prices will it pop, and how long will it take the market to recover

... I mean, yeah, if you could reliably predict _those_, you wouldn't be _telling_ anyone, you'd be busy making billions on options.

"This will break, but we don't know exactly when" is not an unreasonable warning.

> but everyone knows it will go way higher than in the future than in 2025

Does everyone know that?

> People writing these articles think the AI bubble will burst stay down forever. They keep citing dotcom but conveniently leave out the fact that tech is far bigger now than in the peak of dotcom.

I mean, while that is true, it took a very long time (adjusted for inflation, the NASDAQ didn't recover until 2018), and most of the individual companies who were big then are now either gone or obscure (Sun's gone, Yahoo's basically gone, Cisco never recovered, Oracle arguably just about recovered, Amazon did very well). If you'd bought into the NASDAQ the day after dot-com went pop, well, you wouldn't have come out _great_; you'd have been far better off with the S&P500 or another broader index. If you'd bought into any of the dot-com darlings except for Amazon, you'd have been screwed.

And to be clear, not all bubbles recover. Railways never did, say.