MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigiain | 2026-01-10 01:38:19+00:00
I have proposed elsewhere that for companies like Flock doing surveillance of the public, it should be legally required for every company executive and board member to have their cameras, ALPR systems, audio surveillance, drone systems, etc - installed outside their homes and along their routes to work and along their routes to their children's schools and their spouses workplaces - and all of that data be publicly accessible. And I'd suggest the same goes for senior management at decision makers at every town and police department and private company that signs a contract with them.

"For their own safety", as they'd have us believe.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
by recursive | 2026-01-10 01:38:45+00:00
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.

I've never seen this pressure.

> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.

It's like I live in an entirely different world.

Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
by gcanyon | 2026-01-10 01:39:07+00:00
I see others expressing this point, but I'll add my two cents: this essay really bothered me.

1. The writer describes hitchhiking to work every day, presumably for months or years. He doesn't describe in any way how he paid back that kindness, either to the people he rode with directly, or just by paying it forward.

2. The writer describes traveling in Asia for 8 years, and many of the instances of kindness he describe imply very strongly that he intentionally put himself at risk, where others were faced with the choice to help him or let him suffer consequences. It's one thing to get caught in a rip current and need assistance; it's another entirely to swim out past where you are safe, and then wait for someone to rescue you -- and to do that repeatedly for eight years. Further, it is obvious from the language used that he was traveling rough by choice, with the privilege and economic security of his background, and yet repeatedly accepting -- I would argue demanding -- the help of people from a poorer background than himself. He was cosplaying poverty and repeatedly being assisted by people living it for real.

3. The backyard idea seems similarly pushy. He says he was never turned away, not once. So he believes that no one, given an actual free choice, would rather not have a stranger camp in their backyard. He ignores the possibility that people would feel uncomfortable about rejecting someone presenting as having no place to stay, and rather believes that everyone he asked woke up that day thinking about how happy they'd be to do a favor for a stranger. And he couches the whole process as him doing them a favor.

4. He lists multiple instances where people less well-off than him went to great lengths to help him, without ever thinking about why they might feel obligated, and through it all admitting that not only doesn't he engage in such kindness himself, he can't imagine that he would.

5. And through it all he characterizes what he very nearly describes as him pushing himself on people as "willingness to be helped" -- as some sort of saintliness.

And of course each of these people only saw him once, for a short while. Reading this essay we see how it is a pattern: how he is essentially a traveling con man, moving from mark to mark, letting each of them believe that he just happens to need help this one time, so they put good out into the universe. But in reality he is taking, taking, taking, abusing the world's willingness to help -- if everyone did what he did, the world would swiftly become a meaner, poorer place.
Show HN: Viidx – AI video generation with Reference-to-Video and Frame control
by qinggeng | 2026-01-10 01:39:50+00:00
Hello HN,

I’m the founder of Viidx (https://viidx.com).

I built this platform to create a unified interface for the latest AI video generation models, so you don't have to juggle multiple subscriptions or complex setups just to experiment with video AI.

Key features available right now:

- Multi-Model Support: Switch between models like Seedance 1.5 Pro, Veo 3.1, and Sora 2 to compare results directly.

- Advanced Control: Beyond simple text-to-video, we support "Frames to Video" (control start/end frames) and "Reference to Video" (using video input for motion/style control).

- Specialized Workflows: The interface allows for precise aspect ratio selection and credit management across different backends.

This is an early release. My goal is to aggregate the best models as they come out and build a "Swiss Army Knife" for AI video creation. We are actively adding more features and models based on user feedback.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the generation quality and specifically how the "Reference to Video" workflow feels for your use cases.

Link: https://viidx.com
by zahlman | 2026-01-10 01:40:15+00:00
For those who like the idea but don't want to use someone else's bandwidth for it: the PyPI API is described across several PEPs and documented on-site (https://docs.pypi.org/api/); and a mirroring tool is implemented under PyPA stewardship (https://pypi.org/project/bandersnatch/).

But at the individual project level this definitely isn't new. Aside from the examples cited in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46561197, another fairly obvious example of a compiled binary hosted on PyPI is... uv.
by jrs235 | 2026-01-10 01:40:54+00:00
The Legal Concept: Barnes v. Felix (2025)

This is the most critical recent "code" development. In May 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Barnes v. Felix that courts must look at the "totality of circumstances" leading up to a shooting.

The Rule: If an officer recklessly steps in front of a vehicle (creating the danger themselves), a court can now rule that their subsequent use of force was unreasonable because they "precipitated" the threat.

Impact: This case effectively ended the "moment of threat" defense, where officers used to argue, "It doesn't matter how I got in front of the car; I shot because it was about to hit me." Now, the law says: "If you put yourself there unnecessarily, you are liable."
by kayson | 2026-01-10 01:41:30+00:00
We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.

In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
by irl_zebra | 2026-01-10 01:41:38+00:00
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-10 01:42:50+00:00
Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then?

Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked. But that's all I could find. Otherwise you have to load MD files in some kind of editor and "preview" them. NO! I just want to double-click on the file and READ it, with the formatting applied. Why is that so hard?
by ahartmetz | 2026-01-10 01:43:17+00:00
No really, they are pretty decent. I stopped running an old PC for router and firewall after I got a Fritzbox. It can traffic-shape, forward ports, configure fixed IP addresses and DNS names, provide limited guest access to the WiFi, analyze the WiFi spectrum (and show a graph) to choose uncongested channels, and do a whole bunch of things that I don't use but which are conceivably useful like VPN server, file server and such.
by bickfordb | 2026-01-10 01:43:30+00:00
The US needs a model for stronger state and regional authorities that plan and implement mass transit and zoning. In California in particular, cities and counties have consistently bungled planning, locking entire communities into single family housing with low height maximums, ceded walkable downtowns to freeway strip malls dominated by a handful of national retailers, and few updates to mass transit since BART was built in the 1970s. The example of the North Bay NIMBYs blocking BART expansion sticks out to me in particular.
by amluto | 2026-01-10 01:43:51+00:00
If you consider the statement that perfect play by both sides in checked results in a draw to be the statement of a theorem, then the proof is 237GB compressed :) And verifying it requires quite a lot of computation.

https://www.science.org/cms/asset/7f2147df-b2f1-4748-9e98-1a...
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-10 01:44:02+00:00
Blind people are no less capable of throwing stones, and you only have the flight advantage if the ground is potentially-treacherous (e.g. unmanaged forest, scrubland) or you're that much faster. Any inhabited area will have been engineered to be safe for people to navigate – and it will not be lit well at night, where your reliance on vision will put you at a skill disadvantage.

The main advantage in an urban combat environment, I think, would be the ability to detect quiet people at a distance. Not needing to see makes it easier to hide yourself from visual inspection, but why would anyone develop this skill if nobody can see? Then, if the only person to practice with is the enemy you're trying to hide from… Also, you'd be able to dodge projectiles by watching the person throwing them, who might not telegraph their throws audibly, but would probably do so visually. This would let you defeat a single ranged opponent, possibly two – though I doubt your ability to dodge the rocks from three people at once for long enough to take one down.

But what do you gain from winning fights against small numbers of people? (I doubt very much you could win against a group of 30 or 40 opponents, with only sight as your advantage.) You would run out of food, shelter would be hard to come by, and every theft of resources would risk defeat: and one defeat against a society means it's over. Either you're killed, imprisoned, or they decide to do something else with you, presumably depending how much of a menace you've been. Your only options are to attempt a self-sufficient lifestyle (which you probably won't survive for long), to flee somewhere they haven't heard of your deeds, or to put yourself at the mercy of the justice system (and hope it isn't too retributive).
by charcircuit | 2026-01-10 01:44:24+00:00
>you're restricted from computing on your own device if you wish to participate in the society.

You are restricted from hiding that you tampered with apps from servers that ask for it. You can still do whatever computing you want on your device. The fact that an app required for society has to run in a secure vm, doesn't take away from all that you can do with the rest of your system.

>That's not how it works.

Please take a charitable interpretation. What you are saying is what I meant. The app is using the secure kernel instead of an unsecured one you may have for extra computing freedom.

>I don't understand what you're talking about here.

I'm talking about adopting the approach Windows is taking but on Android. Allowing both insecure and secure virtual machines running on the same host, seamlessly integrated so the user can't tell.

>You're not going to pass this attestation process inside a VM

Yes, you are. Android VMs are designed to be isolated which means that you could have one VM that is fully trusted, and one that isn't. So you can do all your crazy things in the insecure vm while simultaneously having another secure vm available for apps that need it. The hypervisor ensures that this would be secure.
by dang | 2026-01-10 01:44:46+00:00
Since we asked you to stop hounding another user in this manner and you've continued to do it repeatedly, I've banned the account. This is not what Hacker News is for, and you've done it almost 50 times (!), almost 30 of which have been after we first asked you to stop. That is extreme, and totally unacceptable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456850

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726957

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110805

(You've also been breaking the site guidelines in plenty of other places - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521516, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395646. This is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.)
by DiscourseFan | 2026-01-10 01:44:56+00:00
It requires constant feedback, critical evaluation, and checks. This is not AGI, its cognitive augmentation. One that is collective, one that will accelerate human abilities far beyond what the academic establishment is currently capable of, but that is still fundamentally organic. I don't see a problem with this--AGI advocates treat machine intelligence like some sort of God that will smite non-believers and reward the faithful. This is what we tell children so that they won't shit their beds at night, otherwise they get a spanking. The real world is not composed of rewards and punishments.
Google AI generating regular expressions = fail
by prirun | 2026-01-10 01:44:58+00:00
Prompt: what is the optimum python regular expression to match the words foo, fooxcale, and fooyscale

I meant to say fooxscale, but had a typo. Turned out to be interesting after all.

According to their AI:

"The optimum Python regular expression to match the words foo, fooxcale, and fooyscale as whole words is \bfoo(?:x|y)?cale\b|\bfoo\b"

That actually matches foocale (wrong), foo, fooxcale and fooycale (wrong), and doesn't match fooyscale as requested.

I have to give them credit though: their AI did give me good advice the other day about an SQLite GLOB query that was not using an index in my program but did use it when I typed the query in by hand. I worked on it for about 30 minutes, then asked. Turns out that if you use a ? parameter for GLOB, SQLite can't tell whether it starts with a wildcard or not, so never uses the index. To make it use the index, you have to string splice the parameter value (after SQL quoting of course) rather that use the ? for parameter substitution. I was pretty amazed it answered that exactly right and gave me the hint about doing the splice, and warning about injection attacks.

I also think it'd be a good idea if SQLite did this test inside the VM program it generates rather than at compile time, generating code to both use the index and not use it and choosing based on the runtime test of the first character. It confused me severely.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-10 01:45:34+00:00
Man the US is the last giant standing. If the capitalists lose there, its game over. Before the events of the last few years I thought that maybe ultimately they were going to run to Israel or China if they lost the US. Both places are on shaky ground so probably not. If the US falls to Democratic Socialism, we could have a European style system across the entire western world. I hope to see it in my life.

Maybe that will be the lasting impact of Millenials and Gen Z: being a transition generation that finally kills this "unchecked capitalism" virus for enough time for humans to enter the next era successfully.

China may be a giant but those demographic issues will catch up to them so its really just the US thats the issue.
by MadnessASAP | 2026-01-10 01:45:51+00:00
What did you use for closed loop guidance? If you aren't aware of it NASA has a lovely paper called UPFG "Unified Powered Flight Guidance" [1] used for the space shuttle. This was implemented and made more universal for KSP (of course) by Przemysław "Noiredd" Dolata as PEGAS "Powered Explicit Guidance Ascent System" [2]

If it's your thing you could try implementing it and getting a single continuous burn to final orbit.

Awesome work BTW!

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19740004402

[2] https://github.com/Noiredd/PEGAS

Edit: I now see it's on your roadmap, so I guess it is your thing.
by mjevans | 2026-01-10 01:46:04+00:00
Given the utter lack of enforcement on actual nuisances (noise / burning violations, 'eyesore' / private property abuse via trash / abandoned things / unsanctioned business actives in residential zones, petty theft prevention / enforcement) and the aggressive enforcement on any revenue generation laws that target citizens who will responsibly pay?

I anticipate the apathy to continue, and the bill to be passed along as some form of regressive tax.
Used Abused to I don't exist they own me. me
by NewUSAisReal | 2026-01-10 01:46:40+00:00
What is the correct way to tell all USA New America is Real and we all are being left out of a better world.
My patent was denied by United States when presented with Ford Motor Company in the 80's.Then stolen by CIA to spy on anyone illegally. My partner at Ford respectfully had it patented in Japan to protect my creation. I now own all the facts to any instance and can prove it. Don't ask. I have to say Trump head shot didn't miss originally. Don't ask.Does the government have the right to take stock a 5 year old bought saying it was inside trading when all they did was ask how I knew to buy. I said my friend told me to spend my candy money on paper this day. Needless to say they didn't ask my friends name. Now that Im wiser and older I'm aware this friend had been dead for years when he informed me of this.Tell me what to do.
by roenxi | 2026-01-10 01:46:45+00:00
You're looking for the practical answer, but philosophically it isn't possible to translate an informal statement into a formal one 'correctly'. It is informal, ie, vaguely specified. The only certain questions are if the formal axioms and results are interesting which is independent of the informal formalisation and that can only be established by inspecting the the proof independently of the informal spec.
by crossroadsguy | 2026-01-10 01:46:56+00:00
> People usually don't compile their browsers from source anyway

As opposed to say compiling their messaging apps, ride hailing apps, camera apps… from source?

As about something further suggested —

Or is it that people usually monitor their phone’s and laptop’s networks analyse and end point traffic?

I don’t think that happens “usually” either.

It would be really helpful to scrutinise this browser also the same way we do others and not factor in how much happiness and glee kagi search has filled with its hn users right when the subscription amounts get charged every month. Shall we keep the two separate?
by evanjrowley | 2026-01-10 01:46:57+00:00
I've had many exercise regimens throughout my life but never has it ever helped me with mental health in any way.

Exercise has always been a mental drain for me. A day when I go to the gym is a day when I give up mental capacity that could have been used for something else. I'll be less effective at work and less organized at home. It's like my IQ's dropped by double digits.

I drink enough water and electrolytes, in case anybody's wondering.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-01-10 01:47:22+00:00
"the more interesting capability revealed by these events is the ability to rapidly write and rewrite new versions of a text as needed, even if one was not the original author of the argument." From the Tao thread. The ability to quickly iterate on research is a big change because "This is sharp contrast to existing practice where....large-scale reworking of the paper often avoided due both to the work required and the large possibility of introducing new errors."
by ogogmad | 2026-01-10 01:47:38+00:00
I don't think it's just the sheer number of symbols. It's also the fact that the symbol τ means "turn". So you can say "quarter-turn" instead of π/2.

I'm not sure why that point gets lost in these discussions. And personally, I think of mathematical concepts as not being subjective. So, I get weirdly bothered by the offset in the Gamma function.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-10 01:47:57+00:00
Eh, the things Markdown was made to compete with were also text. Including, you know, plain text. Sure, there were people out there doing README.RTF or README.DOC that annoyed us all -- nevermind those README.PDF monsters -- but just as frequently it was README.TXT or READ.ME (or README.DOC was in plain text). And GameFAQs and newsgroups got pretty far with plain text and ASCII graphics.

The problem is that people want to use a web browser to display their documents, they want rich documents, and web browsers are awful at displaying text they don't understand the structure for. And <code> tags look consistently awful when read back, which is why we so strongly prefer syntax highlighting when we read XML or HTML.

Really, the big competition was BBCode, whose main problem is that it's too much like HTML, and Wikitext, whose main problem was that it's too bare-bones and domain-specific. The big advantages of Markdown are:

1. It's simply more readable. It pulls from how people were naturally formatting plain-text documents meant to be read as plain text rather than pulling from markup languages, so it more closely matches how people want to write documents in plain text. That makes the document easy to read while you're writing it. Asterisks for highlighting is an old convention, so were dashes and asterisks for bullets. Really, it made the asterisk an English punctuation mark for emphasis, which I think it genuinely is now.

2. It was easy to parse and short, which made it popular with Web 2.0 social media. It got picked up by Slashdot, Reddit, and Stack Overflow as "good enough" and "better than BBCode" for user generated content. Nobody liked using WYSIWYG editor boxes then, either. They were slow, buggy, and were often Flash-based before HTML5. They needed plain text formatting options, and BBCode was both annoyingly unnatural to type (just like HTML tags) and a little inflexible.

And nobody wanted to repeat MySpace and just let users use HTML. That was a horrible idea (Samy, XSS, etc.).
by hirsin | 2026-01-10 01:48:09+00:00
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.

At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.

Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.

It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
by yallpendantools | 2026-01-10 01:48:42+00:00
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/15530 for those interested to check/chime in.

yt-dlp was also the first application that came to my mind. I got my fingers crossed for this integration. It was interesting to learn how to hijack my own cookies but, nonetheless, rather uncomfortable to say the least.