MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-09 17:23:58+00:00
Good filters make good communities. Back in the good ol' days of the internet, access to the internet in of itself was a decent filter: you had to want to be online, you needed to be somewhat technical, or at least willing to grapple with technical problems, and you needed to actively seek out communities online which aligned with your interests, and there was little financial motivation to do so in bad faith. As the barrier to entry to the internet writ large dropped to near zero, communities that were built around the bygone era's natural filtering suffered. Communities must now establish filters proactively.

Ultimately, you need to choose: does your community prioritize its short-term health, or ease of access? If a community never lets anyone in, then it withers and dies eventually, but in the meantime the community can be extremely high-trust. That's what happened to fraternal orders like the Oddfellows and the Free Masons post-Vietnam. If the community has zero barrier to entry, you end up with Twitter: a teeming mass of low-trust members screaming into the void.

The happy medium is allowing in new members just as fast as you can build trust and community cohesion. University clubs are a good example of this: at a massive turnover rate of 25% per year, they need to form processes to not just recruit that many people, but integrate that big of a chunk of their community without destroying the high-trust environment. That's how you end up with the ritualized "rushing" process.
by teraflop | 2026-02-09 17:24:09+00:00
Because the color of the sky is determined by a shifting mixture of wavelengths, not a single shifting wavelength.

Basically, the scattering process that "remove" blue from the spectrum also removes green, albeit to a lesser extent. There are some greenish and yellowish wavelengths in the sunset sky, but they're dominated by red, so the overall color appears red or orange.

In order for the sky to look noticeably green, there would have to be something that scattered reds and blues, without significantly absorbing green.

If you try to interpolate between sky-blue and orange using graphics software, the result depends on what "color space" you're using. If your software interpolates based on hue, you might see green (or purple) in the middle. But that's not physically realistic.

A realistic model is to interpolate each wavelength of the continuous spectrum separately. Interpolating in RGB color space is a crude approximation to this. And if you try the experiment, you'll see that the midpoint between sky-blue and orange is a kind of muddy brown, not green.
by achllle | 2026-02-09 17:24:33+00:00
- A stair lift for stuff, not people. Retrofits onto any stairs and self-locks without damaging the stairs or blocking the path. Allows you to bring groceries, laundry, senior dogs up and down stairs with the push of a button. Currently can pull 50lbs.

- A bracelet with tiny camera that's pointed at your hand palm and transmits pictures of the stuff you're holding and where you've put it down locally to your phone. Pictures are sent to a quantized CLIP which allows you to search for anything you've lost without needing to attach an airtag to it. Works decently well and is great for 'power losers' like those with ADHD-I. Has a privacy slider and nothing goes to the cloud.

Would love to hear from anyone interested > hi @ hitch-home dot com
by mindslight | 2026-02-09 17:24:39+00:00
"Recreational high" has nothing to do with it. Medicare part D is literally referred to as "prescription drug plan".

If people have the same denial about anti-depressants, then my critique applies as well. But an allowance for the need to bootstrap would seem to apply more, plus the generally more complex mechanisms and nuanced effects making it harder to judge the effects for yourself.
by yanhangyhy | 2026-02-09 17:24:59+00:00
i belive Marx has the answer..

> I don't think protesting trump fixes that. If anything, it emboldens him. "Oh you don't want me to stop hitting you? You mean like this hit (punches you in the face) or this one (punches you in the stomach)? Ok, so not the face?" [Proceeds to punch you in the stomach]

i like this part very much.
Show HN: Dictée Vocale – Privacy-first French voice-to-text in-browser
by digi_wares | 2026-02-09 17:25:19+00:00
Hey HN!

I built https://dicteevocale.xyz - a French-language voice-to-text tool that runs entirely in your browser using the Web Speech API.

## What it is:
- Real-time speech transcription in French (and 100+ other languages)
- Zero server-side processing - everything happens locally
- No login, no tracking, no data collection
- Works offline once loaded (PWA-ready)

## Why I built it:
I noticed most voice-to-text tools are English-first, and French speakers (280M+ globally) deserve a privacy-focused tool in their language. After launching VoiceToTextOnline.com, I realized the French market was underserved.

## Tech stack:
- Next.js 14 (static export)
- Web Speech API (browser-native, no AI needed)
- Tailwind for styling
- Deployed on Vercel
- No backend, no database

## Challenges:
- Getting indexed by Google/Bing (new domain, .xyz TLD has "trust gap" in France)
- Balancing SEO optimization with clean UX
- Making the Web Speech API work consistently across browsers (Firefox is still problematic)

## What I'd love feedback on:
1. Does the French messaging resonate? (I'm not a native speaker)
2. Is the "privacy-first" positioning clear enough for French/European users?
3. Any tips for ranking a .xyz domain in France vs .fr?
4. Should I add more features or keep it simple?

Try it out and let me know what you think! Happy to answer questions about the tech or the satellite strategy.

GitHub repo is private for now, but I'm considering open-sourcing the satellite site template if there's interest.
by avidiax | 2026-02-09 17:26:34+00:00
> Early clock - keeps time anywhere between 0 and 10 minutes fast. For those who like to set their watch ahead to avoid being late. This clock keeps you from trying to "compensate," because you never know how early it is at the moment.

That's pretty genius for many ADHD-type folks. Only problem is a modern household has many clocks in view, so you'd need to commit to just not setting them.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-09 17:26:55+00:00
Well, to be fair, we've already been there, for many years (dependency hell). In those cases, LLMs are likely to actually improve things.

For myself, I like to know what's going on, to a certain extent, but appreciate abstraction.

I am also aware that people like me, probably don't make commercial sense, but that's already been the case for quite some time.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-09 17:27:03+00:00
Why are you lost in the argument? The point I am making is, that it would be great to have both. HK as part of China, no longer a UK colony, but also having freedoms remain intact. Shouldn't be too hard to grasp. Furthermore, I am saying, that economically how HK has been handled does not make much sense, and that ideology was at play.

Giving back HK might have been the only sensible move back then, and it might have bought HKers time and avoided a more open conflict, that wouldn't have ended well for HK.

At least Wikipedia disagrees with your sentiment, that HK was never part of China. Well, technically you said "PRC", maybe even intentionally, and you could take some weird position of claiming, that nothing inside China is part of China, because it was a different entity before PRC. But then so do many countries all over the world lose any claim to their territory. Germany, after second world war, France after French revolution, most prominently the US, after its founding ... Historically, HK was a grab of land by the UK. Granted, they built something nice up there, but only after the despicable acts they committed historically in the region. If we get into what the UK did historically in the region, it will not lead to a moral high ground.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-09 17:27:05+00:00
> It looks like these cameras are infrared and intended to see gestures from the wearer.

I had an APV for a while, controlling it with just gestures was sweet. If they're looking to bring those kinds of gestures to other Apple devices via AirPods (i.e. beyond just bringing more gestures to the AirPods), I'm intrigued.
by adolph | 2026-02-09 17:27:11+00:00
Suggested reading: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" [0]

Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious, philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1] and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus of Torvalds there to save them with git.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague
by photonic37 | 2026-02-09 17:27:11+00:00
Your intuition isn’t far off; there is an angle where the weight of green relative to the sum over wavelengths sees a local maximum. But it doesn’t dominate. In that transition zone, there is still an overlapping, transitioning abundance of redder and bluer wavelengths, adding with the green. Consequently, you see red, going into a red+green transition (== oranges, yellows), go into into a green+blue transition (== cyan), which already has few photons relative to the red and yellow zones, so it’s a dark/weak cyan, before it blends into the darker blue of the night sky.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-09 17:27:14+00:00
Wiretapping predates all of these sort of arguments. Wiretapping was invented at basically the same time that telephones themselves were and was underway for decades before the law even began to take note; the first major legal development in this regard was the Supreme Court saying cops could do it without a warrant in 1928 (they already had been the entire time.)
by alephnerd | 2026-02-09 17:27:58+00:00
SG's value-add was as a door into China (and India and ASEAN). China has strict capital controls so it makes FDI risky.

During the 1990s when there were open questions about HK's status, a lot of the business community (and at least 10% of HKers) immigrated to SG to operate there.

During the 2000s, the PRC made some good faith attempts at assuaging investor sentiment in HK, and that slowed the business and financial services outflow from HK to SG as HK had added linkages to Mainland China that SG would never have.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-09 17:28:06+00:00
> supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles

I think this one is particularly important. IIRC, it's usually phrased something like "if the USA sends aircraft carriers across the pacific, then China has an unsinkable aircraft carrier 80 miles away: the mainland". It's a huge home turf advantage.

The USA seems to have a very low appetite for helping allies against bullies at present too. And no appetite for taking US soldier casualties.
by budududuroiu | 2026-02-09 17:28:08+00:00
TIL detention without trial is a thing in Singapore [^1], ministers love to brag about increasing the severity of detention without trial [^2], and that the longest someone was held in detention without trial in Singapore was 23+9 years [^3]. That person was never charged.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Temporary_Provis...

[^2]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/my-views-on-...

[^3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh
by Zigurd | 2026-02-09 17:28:10+00:00
Many years ago I wrote a functional spec for lawful intercept in a 3G data node. It was based on a spec for a different product, so it contained a lot of institutional knowledge of how lawful intercept works.

A key element of the design of lawful intercept is not to trust the company running the network. Otherwise employees of that company would become targets for organized crime influence, among what are probably a few other considerations. The network operator isn't told about intercepts, and the relatively low rate of traffic intercept, the node has to support up to 3% of traffic intercepted, at least that was the spec at the time, makes it relatively easy for that traffic to be hidden from network management tools. It's not supposed to show up in your logs or network management reporting.

Intercepts originate on LI consoles operated by law enforcement agencies. This sounds pretty good so far. Until a hacker breaks into an LI console. Now that hacker can acquire traffic with pinpoint accuracy, undetected by design.

I have always been skeptical of claims that network operators have eliminated salt typhoon from their networks. I do not believe they know when the exploit began. Nor can they tell if their networks are truly free of salt typhoon activity. There are multiple vendors of LI console software. It's a standardized interoperable protocol to set up intercepts. So there's no one neck to wring.
by Sharlin | 2026-02-09 17:28:14+00:00
Not just butterflies, birds too! But what selection pressure drove the evolution of these structural colors? Presumably signaling, the opposite of muted, camouflaging colors.

Also, as many might know, blue eyes are the result of a lack of pigment (eumelanin). The iris is translucent, but Rayleigh scattering preferentially backscatters blue photons. Green eyes have some pigment, making them a mix of brown and blue.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-09 17:28:14+00:00
>Yeah I think Basterds is probably the most undeniably great [Tarantino film], even if it's not my favourite.

Well-said.

>...on a rewatch [it] can go from hated to loved

I typically don't rewatch movies for at least five years — this is enough time for life experiences to change media interpretations. Yet I listen to the same tracklist of catchy MP3 earworms, on repeat.

Songs are motivational background energy (for me), and skipping a track isn't nearly as hard as bailing out of two hours invested in a cozy full-length film.
by cbondurant | 2026-02-09 17:28:54+00:00
If imposition was something for this site to add, I'd recommend doing it through LaTeX with the pdfpages package[1]. You generate the pdf normally, then re-lay it out using a second latex file dedicated to just doing the imposition. It's how I've done all of my imposition so far, and its more than powerful enough to do the kind of simple page layout that you would want to do with a home printer.

Maybe more complex layout might be needed if you happened to have a printer that could handle like, A0 size paper, or continuous rolls, which would give more flexibility in terms of the number of ways you could fit your pages onto the stock material. for the hobbyist though? More than good enough.

1: https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfpages?lang=en
by yxhuvud | 2026-02-09 17:28:58+00:00
"static inline", the best way of getting people doing bindings in other languages to dislike your library (macros are just as bad, FWIW).

I really wish someone on the C language/compiler/linker level took a real look at the problem and actually tried to solve it in a way that isn't a pain to deal with for people that integrate with the code.
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-02-09 17:29:20+00:00
The more stable/secure a monopoly is in its position the less incentive it has to deliver high quality services.

If a company can build a monopoly (or oligopoly) in multiple markets, it can then use these monopolies to build stability for them all. For example, Google uses ads on the Google Search homepage to build a browser near-monopoly and uses Chrome to push people to use Google Search homepage. Both markets have to be attacked simultaneously by competitors to have a fighting chance.
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-09 17:29:30+00:00
> his writing did not appear impolite to me

I learnt something from this thread.

That, respectfulness and politeness are more from intentions/actions than from speech alone. Politeness of language without any respect for the actual function of that speech is pointless. Indeed, that this what the LLMs are trained for. Form over function. And many humans get fooled by it and are also clueless like the person dropping the steaming turd of a PR.
by dragontamer | 2026-02-09 17:29:35+00:00
As in: the 1.5nm or 1.8nm GPUs will use less power and therefore can actually be plugged in.

We are power constrained. The GPUs of this generation can't even be plugged in yet because of these power constraints.

When power is a problem, getting lower power GPUs in is a priority. The 1.8nm and 1.5nm next generation is already in production, and will likely launch before these massive GPU stockpiles are used.

And then what? Why plug in last generations crap when the next generation is shipping?

--------

Todays GPUs have to actually launch and be deployed while they are useful. Otherwise they could fully be obsolete and lose significant value.
by steveruizok | 2026-02-09 17:29:41+00:00
Author here. tldraw is not an open source project. It used to be but we switched to a commercial license for our v2 in 2023. The old v1 is still available under MIT; and I try to put as much as we can under MIT license where it makes sense, but the core needs to be licensed in a way that allows us to sell it. We've always been majority source available and still accept community contributions, even though the default is to close external PRs. I care about OSS. I wish the economics of it made sense for us.

> Think about it: when/if this company grows to a larger size, if they can’t handle AI slop from contributors how can they handle AI slop from a large employee base?

god help us
by staplung | 2026-02-09 17:29:43+00:00
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until...

"""
“I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

“Could you be more specific?”

I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and . . .

“Could you be more specific?”

An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy…
"""
by zigazou | 2026-02-09 17:30:00+00:00
Hi!

I’m working on:

- DietPDF ( https://github.com/Zigazou/dietpdf-haskell ) an intensive PDF optimizer which tries to reduce PDF size as best as it can while preserving visual quality. It relies on a lot of tricks to achieve this goal (minification, precision reduction, deletion of superfluous operations, concatenations, filter combination etc.). At the present moment, I'm trying to implement CCITT Fax encoding/decoding.
by bingohbangoh | 2026-02-09 17:30:08+00:00
Many people in silicon valley truly Believe that AI will take over everything. Therefore, this is the last chance to get in so you better be working really really hard.

There's a palpable desperation that makes this wave different from mobile or cloud. It's not about making things better so much as its about not being left behind.

I'm not sure of the reason for this shift. It has a lot of overlap with the grindset culture you see on Twitter where people caution against taking breaks because your (mostly imaginary) competition may catch up with you.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-09 17:30:22+00:00
Yea, so what is the base rate of botched surgeries?

So if the base rate is 1 out of 100 botched, and with whatever this AI stuff they are using is 3 out of 100, eh, that doesn't look good.

But if base rate is 1 out of 100 botched and 1 out of 100 with AI is botched this is a tempest in a teapot just trying to use AI outrage to get you mad without thinking.
by garciansmith | 2026-02-09 17:31:11+00:00
I find that view to be reductive and correspond to simplistic stereotypes of the European Middle Ages (e.g., calling them the "Dark Ages"). It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views, then blames the fact that their values are different then ours all on their religious beliefs (which, too, were varied).

This is not to say that tons of material was not lost, or only preserved in other places (e.g., Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East), but it ignores the learning and innovations of the medieval period (scientific, legal, theological, etc.), and of course the fact that so many classical texts were only preserved because of those monks copying them down.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-09 17:31:22+00:00
> I have had wanted to access the filesystem via JavaScript, just as I do via ruby or python

There are some (limited) ways to do so now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

As for (1) vs (2), it’s not really an issue of JavaScript at all. The main question is, do you want to build something that runs in a browser? If you’re building a web app, you’ll have to use the sandboxed APIs (and probably JavaScript). If you don’t care about the runtime, yeah, you can use Node or Bun or Deno (or use another language altogether).
by cope123 | 2026-02-09 17:31:26+00:00
Most online tools that remove EXIF metadata require uploading images to a server, which feels a bit ironic for a privacy-related task.

I’m curious how people here think about client-side approaches for this kind of problem: performance limits, browser APIs, edge cases with large images, and whether users actually trust “runs in your browser” claims.

Link: https://exif-cleaner.com/
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-09 17:31:26+00:00
Minimal changes have occurred to the concept of “antitrust” since its inception as a form of societal justice against corporations, at least per my understanding.

I doubt policymakers in the early 1900s could have predicted the impact of technology and globalization on the corporate landscape, especially vis a vis “vertical integration”.

Personally, I think vertical integration is a pretty big blind spot in laws and policies that are meant to ensure that consumers are not negatively impacted by anticompetitive corporate practices. Sure, “competition” may exist, but the market activity often shifts meaningfully in a direction that is harmful consumers once the biggest players swallow another piece of the supply chain (or product concept), and not just their competitors.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-09 17:31:37+00:00
> Young people in Taiwan are less supportive of reintegration with the mainland than ever before.

Well, go figure, if you run military "exercises" at the doorstep of your neighbor, people are not gonna like you very much, duh. But there was a time before more recent escalations, when lots of young Taiwanese people did not think too badly about being part of China. That's why I said that the smartest move would be (or would have been) to continue an approach of soft power and development, to rival life in Taiwan. Give the people comfort and high living standard, and they are less likely to dislike you.