MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2026-02-23 17:10:03+00:00
I suspect this is an example of us seeing history through a mdoern lens and making false assumptions. For example, the idea that a nation project or an empire is genetically homogenous is a relatively modern concept. The truth is that empires incorporated various ethnic groups and those ethnic groups survived for long periods of time.

The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.

The British Empire spanned the globe.

In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.

Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
by sowbug | 2026-02-23 17:10:17+00:00
At least one person in the support thread paid for a year and appears to have had it all forfeited, not refunded. If you're OK with that, then I urge you to reconsider. There is a big difference between contract, civil, and criminal law. People who break contracts aren't criminals. Sprawling corporations do not need yet more power, beyond the might they already have, to act like private police forces.
by nee1r | 2026-02-23 17:10:27+00:00
Hey guys! I’m Neel, been holed up in our south park office for the past year working on model training. excited to share our research!

This is a preview of a very different type of computer use model—we train on the internet. Specifically we have 11 million hours of computer video stored on our storage cluster (previously shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438496 !) and the model can work in 30 FPS. Since we match the fundamental form factor of computer-use, we can get our model to do CAD, browse websites, and even drive a car using arrow keys. I’m super excited to see what our model can do as we scale more, it's a fun frontier to work on (not language models :) ).

The team and I will be online responding to the comments, so drop any questions.
by Stico2026 | 2026-02-23 17:10:29+00:00
That kind of experience — a legit non-profit suddenly losing access to donation funds with only canned responses — unfortunately isn’t as rare as it should be.

From a payments perspective, what Stripe (and other processors) are really doing when they shut down accounts or hold balances isn’t just enforcing “policy” — it’s enforcing capital underwriting and automated risk models. Even nonprofits with perfect histories can get flagged because:

Donation flows sometimes resemble suspicious patterns (many small charges, repeated cards, international IPs, ad-driven volume spikes).

Automated systems don’t differentiate “charity” vs “commerce” — they see liability exposure.

Processors underwrite your future risk based on transaction shape and growth, not just past performance.

The result is exactly what’s happened here: funds are held because the system projects possible future chargebacks and liabilities — not because they’ve proven fraud. That’s a hard lesson a lot of founders and non-profits learn too late.

One of the biggest blind spots for organizations is that they focus only on headline fees (“2.9% + $0.30”) and never look at the real cost of risk exposure or account stability. Worst-case cost isn’t just fees — it’s cash flow interruption like you’re seeing.

A good way to start thinking about this earlier — whether you stick with Stripe/PayPal or explore alternatives — is to quantify your true effective processing cost (blended rate, refunds, chargebacks, reserves, hold exposure). There are some tools that help visualize that instead of just the sticker rate, which can be a useful framing when talking to processors or evaluating alternatives: https://effectiveratecalculator.com/

Feel free to share more about your volume and donation flow — patterns like many micro-donations from ads vs recurring donors tend to get flagged more often even when completely legitimate, and understanding that can help frame what processors actually see on their risk engines.
by creamyhorror | 2026-02-23 17:10:33+00:00
> given existing Fedi culture, plus how expensive it can be to produce and how the RoI is basically zero, i don't think we're going to see much native to Fedi.

Yeah, actual adoption will require getting the actual people to come onboard who want to entertain/influence others, plus the viewers (two-sided market problem). When weighing that against network effects of the big players, the chances look a little slim.

Probably need another more low-effort or attractive angle to grow the Fediverse, tbh.
by amluto | 2026-02-23 17:10:42+00:00
Even ignoring the general absurdity of this: no, Tesla’s chips would not be good options. The entire nominal power budget of Perseverance is 110W. It cannot run a Tesla chip unless it discharges a battery to do so, and there is no benefit to doing short unsustainable bursts of calculation instead of slower, more efficient calculation. If you want to propose some ridiculous repurposing of tech from a cool company, it might be a better idea to stick a MacBook [0] on the rover.

Realistically, if Perseverance wanted an off-the-shelf “AI” chip, something from the Jetson series would make more sense.

[0] Air, not Pro. The Pro’s fan would perform to spec on Mars :)
Show HN: Irpapers – Visual embeddings vs. OCR trade-offs in scientific PDFs
by pvpv | 2026-02-23 17:10:50+00:00
Hey HN, we are releasing IRPAPERS to answer a highly pragmatic question: when building a RAG pipeline over PDFs, should you OCR the text or just embed the raw page images?

Processing PDFs in production usually involves stringing together brittle OCR heuristics. While recent multimodal embeddings (like ColModernVBERT or ColPali) allow you to skip OCR entirely and retrieve directly from visual layouts, we wanted to measure if the computational overhead is actually worth the utility.

The short answer: Transformer-based image pipelines won't be perfect for every use-case, but they fix exactly what OCR breaks.

Here is what we found benchmarking 3,230 pages of dense scientific literature:

Complementary Bottlenecks: Text representations (BM25 + dense vectors) are highly efficient for exact lexical constraints (e.g., finding a specific acronym like "HyDE"). Conversely, image embeddings shine on spatial architecture diagrams and t-SNE plots where OCR serialization just turns into structural garbage.

Multimodal Hybrid Search: Because these failure modes are almost perfectly orthogonal, fusing the two signals gives you the best performance out of the box. By combining them, we pushed top-1 recall to 49% (beating text alone at 46%).

The Memory Constraint: Late-interaction image embeddings produce thousands of vectors per page, creating a massive storage bottleneck. To address this need, we evaluate MUVERA encoding. Under the hood, this compresses multi-vector representations into a single fixed-dimensional encoding via SimHash, allowing you to use standard HNSW indexing without the paralyzing memory overhead.

In practice, if you are building a RAG workflow today, text-based context still provides higher downstream utility for the actual generation step (0.82 vs 0.71 alignment). Instead of picking one modality and dealing with its blind spots, start with hybrid text search as a sensible default, and inject multi-vector image embeddings to catch the visual edge-cases.

We’ve open-sourced the benchmark and the evaluation recipes:

Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17687
IRPAPERS dataset on HuggingFace at huggingface.co/weaviate/IRPAPERS and GitHub
at github.com/weaviate/IRPAPERS

Our experimental code is also available on GitHub at
github.com/weaviate/query-agent-benchmarking

Happy to answer any questions about the evaluation pipeline, the cold start problem of visual benchmarks, or the specific retrieval trade-offs we saw.
by codeulike | 2026-02-23 17:11:01+00:00
This is fascinating because I remember this era when Microwave ovens were a new thing and my parents got one, along with a glossy cookbook with a roast chicken on the front. All of that 'roasting things in the microwave' gor quietly forgotten about in the late 80s, along with the idea that CDs were 'indestructible'.

But somehow modern microwaves always have a button on the front with a picture of a roast chicken. Why are microwave UIs so delusional? Just need power %age and time.

Microwaves are good for making porridge (oatmeal) though. And I've had some success with scrambled eggs, if you get the method right results are very consistent.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-23 17:11:01+00:00
Your ISP will cut your account when you saturate the upstream pipe 24/7 for weeks on end... which will only happen if you host video.

And your home insurance will not know/care if you're operating a desktop-sized computer or even a single server (it is perfectly fine and expected a developer might bring an actual server home for troubleshooting). Home insurance only cares if you're running dozens of them.
by thrance | 2026-02-23 17:11:09+00:00
> With capitalism we have the power to control our economic outcomes (to a large extent). Work more; earn more.

Go tell that to the slave laborers in the global South that made the clothes you are currently wearing. These people work way harder than me and make way less. Truth is, capital earns more than labor under Capitalism. It is absolutely not a fair system for the vast majority of humanity, and should be improved upon.

But otherwise, I agree with your take on UBI.
by mghackerlady | 2026-02-23 17:11:13+00:00
16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-23 17:11:21+00:00
Having been trained to listen to the hum of the magnetron for several reasons (among them: it affects how popcorn pops and if you are in lunch room setting with a complete mixture of models you have to listen to know which sort of microwave you "lucked" into that day and adapt to its challenges to avoid burning popcorn) it takes a surprising amount of time for even a good one to spin up to full speed as much as a quarter second. As microwaves age or get cheaper some of them take a full wall clock second or two. Some of the cheap models even lie to you and don't start their own timers until after the magnetron hits full speed.

Something that becomes more apparent the more you listen (but also if you actually pay attention to diagrams of how a microwave works): the magnetron is a spinning thing with its inertia. Even if you immediately cut power to it, it still spins on its own for some amount of time. Given how much energy and wall clock time it takes to spin up to full speed, it shouldn't be surprised it needs similar wall clock time, if not energy to full stop.

But also, yeah the door pull sensor is a classic analog latch detector that has a slower sensing time than a button would by its very nature (and trying to avoid false positives from a loose/vibrating door). It's an easy thing to cut corners on and some sensors are worse than others.

(And also, safety certifications include a margin of error that it still "generally regarded as safe", what's a few extra microwaves escaping into your body among friends as long as it isn't full power?)
by wat10000 | 2026-02-23 17:11:39+00:00
There are some jobs where the outcome is the point, and others where having a person actually do a thing is the point. Priest is very much the latter sort of job.

Forget about AI for a moment and let's consider a more mundane tool, like an industrial robot. Is it OK to use a robot to perform some step in assembling a car? Certainly. How about programming that robot to perform Communion? Not so much. Not because using a robot to do things is inherently immoral, but because the human priest is supposed to be an integral component of Communion, it's not just a matter of transporting a cracker and some liquid into people's mouths by whatever means you choose.
by foobiekr | 2026-02-23 17:11:44+00:00
There is always a risk of things like this. For example, to make my winecap bed, I had to get a bunch of woodchips. There is no way woodchips that one will buy in bulk are not contaminated with the spores of other wood-eating fungus.

What you learn is how to positively identify the mushrooms you intend to produce/eat. It doesn't take long. I've only had alien mushrooms show up once.
by intrikate | 2026-02-23 17:12:03+00:00
I mean, yeah, sure if you view having to go to the store as a negative, then you would prefer to order online and have it brought to you.

After years (my whole adolescent and adult life, more or less) of online shopping, I find that it's actually quite refreshing to go to the store, find the product I need, and purchase it. I have it immediately, I got to handle a demo unit and get a feel for it. If I need to return it, I go back to the same store and get my money back the same day.

There are pros and cons to both, for sure, but these days I find I'm valuing the offline experience more and more.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-23 17:12:08+00:00
In some ways they are.

For a bit of time I worked offshore for a company in the US. That was pure cost cutting, I was making probably around 5x-10x less than someone with similar skills in the US.

After a while I landed a job that required me to migrate to a different country. I actually make more here than the average salary for a local engineer.

I don't know many machinists that are hired from halfway across the globe, relocation costs included, to make more than the average machinist in the destination country.
by Darshan009 | 2026-02-23 17:12:16+00:00
This is a genuinely interesting problem. Real time authenticity is going to matter a lot as synthetic signals get better.

I have experience building low latency backend and AI inference systems in Python and C++, including streaming pipelines and optimized model serving at scale. I have worked on sub 100ms inference systems and tuned LLM pipelines for throughput and reliability in production.

Very comfortable shipping MVPs fast, working async, and handling real time performance tradeoffs. Would love to connect and learn more.

darshangvaghasiya0@gmail.com
by dns_snek | 2026-02-23 17:12:51+00:00
> The problem is that the owners of these disruptive technologies must be convinced to do something that does not come naturally to them: share. Taxes in the US amount to less than 26% of GDP, 8 percentage points less than the OECD average. Capital taxation amounts to just over 2% of GDP. These numbers will have to go much higher, since people will no longer have wages to live on and will rely more heavily on government largesse.

The tone of this article is really frustrating, the author is seemingly living in a self-imposed box in which capital has an inalienable right to rule the world. "owners must be convinced to share" - No sir, they're not kings, nor were they elected into any position, and we don't have to "convince" them of anything.

We need to have a thorough discussion about what a future without human labor should look like, and whether we really want to live in a dystopia when the only thing preventing us from living in a utopia is the ego of a few rich assholes.

One way or another they will lose their kingdoms because they don't actually have an inalienable right to control the world's resources. They only had these ownership rights because they were [thought to be] good for society as a whole. In a robotic AI future that's no longer the case and those rights will no longer exist.

The only question is whether this transition will be peaceful or extremely violent.
by free_bip | 2026-02-23 17:12:55+00:00
What exactly is "the system that protects the copyright" in this case? I think the most reasonable answer is "there is no such system."

The RLHF the companies did to make copyrighted material extraction more difficult did not introduce any sort of "copyright protection system," it just modified the weights to make it less likely to occur during normal use.

In other words, IMO for it to qualify as a copyright protection system it would have to actively check for copyrighted materials in the outputs. Any such system would likely also bypassable (e.g "output in rot13").
by papaly1983 | 2026-02-23 17:13:12+00:00
I'm Marco the Keybee Keyboard creator. Thank you really really a lot for your comments. Now Keybee keyboard is totally free and open source so all your ideas and suggestions migth be available one day.
Btw I just wanted to make typing more natural and comfortable, I really struggle with qwerty on touches. (ps: written with keybee keyboard of course).
by achierius | 2026-02-23 17:13:12+00:00
> authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please

But he's not talking about an arbitrary faith. He's talking about faith in the capacity of priests -- clearly a relevant subject. And there are, indeed, _preambula fidei_ here: that the priest was taught in seminary, that the priest was approved by the Church, that the priest (through the bishop who ordained them) participates in a line of apostolic succession going back to Jesus, etc.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-23 17:13:13+00:00
I feel like this is common in most (at least western) empires. Vikings from Sweden would take over territory as far as Poland or even Italy and recruit new soldiers. Eventually some of them would end up in warrior style graves. What's actually more interesting in my mind is that they didn't bring people back, and so the gene pool in Sweden remained more or less unchanged
by buran77 | 2026-02-23 17:13:25+00:00
> No foreign superpower barged into the Civil Rights

The presumably US Civil Right movement wasn't happening in an authoritarian state. There's no question that non-violent protest works differently in democratic or well functioning countries. But what's the value of this comparison in practice? Under an authoritarian regime would you recommend writing letters to your representative just because this has been known to work in democratic countries?

> or the Indian independence movement

At least this example is on point. But one good example doesn't generally validate a theory. Look no further than the Syrian civil war you mentioned in your previous comment which required trillions of dollars worth of foreign military intervention. Or the countless failed protests and uprisings all around the world.

> The article makes no blanket statements

It's presented as a "recipe" of sorts, a scenario that flows naturally to the expected and described conclusion when it's anything but. Where's the data to back up such a claim, even if later qualified with a weak "of course it doesn't work all the time"? Any evidence that it works most of the time? A significant even if minor part of the time? Does critical thinking have to take a step back in favor of wishful thinking just because the latter gives you the feels while the former the chills?
by clemvonstengel | 2026-02-23 17:13:42+00:00
I rly liked the point about ctrl-c only being able to be labelled retrocausally. I do think that with enough past context you should be able to know what was copied - in some sense the past does encode the future - but also an agentic decision is precisely the kind where the future is more informative than the past for reconstructing that decision.

It does make me wonder if you should have the inverse dynamics model split into specifically retrocausal and causal. You kind of do this already with the inverse and forward dynamics model, but the idea of a model that knows only
about the future training in a feedback loop with a model that knows only about the past is kind of interesting.

I think you could just do a clever masking regime in your diffusion model to achieve the same effect without a whole architecture change.
by vlowther | 2026-02-23 17:13:44+00:00
If the performance charts are to be believed, this has uniformly worse performance in fetching and iterating over items than a boring old b-tree, which makes it a total nonstarter for most workloads I care about.

It is also sort of ironic that one of the key performance callouts is a lack of pointer chasing, but the Go implementation is a slice that contains other slices without making sure they are using the same backing array, which is just pointer chasing under the hood. I have not examined the code closely, but it is also probably what let them get rid of the black array as a performance optimization.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 17:13:50+00:00
> Even if you instruct the model "don't do X" or "do X this way"—you cannot rely on the model following that instruction.

Why not? I can definitively fire of two prompts to the same model and harness, and one include "don't do X" and the other doesn't, and I get what I expect, one didn't try to avoid doing X, and the other did. Is that not your experience using LLMs?
by mghackerlady | 2026-02-23 17:13:56+00:00
I think they should. Theres a fine line between beneficial and detrimental. I had a 3DS growing up and could browse the web with its very gimped browser, and I think something like that is actually very good for a child (able to access the internet and view simple and informative sites while being too limited to access social media and the like)
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 17:14:00+00:00
The anti-bot stuff mentioned upthread is real, but at this scale per-domain politeness queuing also becomes a genuine headache. You end up needing to track crawl-delay directives per domain, rate-limit your outbound queues by host, and handle DNS TTL properly to avoid hammering a CDN edge that's mapping thousands of domains to the same IPs. Most crawlers that work fine at 100M pages break somewhere in that machinery at 1B+.
by shimman | 2026-02-23 17:14:14+00:00
It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components? Very few dev jobs require critical knowledge, even then that can mostly be learned on the job.

So yeah it seems like these companies that rely on massive corporate welfare + the backing of the US government don't want to pony up and pay their fair share.

Why should the government provide utilities to you or public education or firefighters or a legal system for you? What are you doing to make your end of the societal bargain copasetic?

You come across as greedy, people know you're insanely greedy. Why do you continue to be greedy and not help the community? The community is literally on the cusp of inflicting a massive amount of damage and let's not act like this administration won't start going after H1B workers once it becomes marketed as taking well paying jobs away from Americans who are struggling to pay their bills. You can even play it to garner more Congressional support by telling big tech to start relocating jobs into red/competitive districts or they will start taking revoking their H1B workers visas.

It's a powder keg situation and you want to shovel more gun powder around the keg rather than deescalate.
by nee1r | 2026-02-23 17:14:15+00:00
good question! we use exponential binning (map the mouse movements onto a plane with exponentially increasing tick marks https://si.inc/fdm1/exponential_binning.webp) but tried a bunch of other methods (linear creates too many tokens for the model to learn well). Polar coordinates seem like a better solution but empirically didn't work well because the tokens got too coarse too fast.