skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One funny topic is "why did it take us so long to develop advanced neural networks?" Part of the current advance is about improving hardware performance but I'd imagine if you went back to the 1980s with the knowledge we have you could have gotten much more out of neural nets than we did then.

As for fixed point vs floating I got into an argument with a professor in grad school about it. I'd argue that floating point often gets used out of familiarity and convenience, if you look at fields such as signal processing it is very common to do algorithms like FFT in fixed point, it seems absurd that an activation in a neural net could range from (say) 10^-6 to 10^6 and have the first digit be meaningful the whole way. If everything was properly scaled and normalized you shouldn't need to waste bits on exponents but maybe when you have a complex network with a lot of layers that normalization is easier said than done.
I highly recommend the smarter every day Kodak factory tour series. It's really really cool: https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc
SMBs have roughly the same characteristics even when they do that.

That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs

Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty.

It is a fascinating read though.

So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.
Amazing

Two things I would add:

1. Use git and commit changes (very) frequently.

Often the AI makes a recommendation that looks good, but has consequences 4 or 5 changes later that you'll need to reckon with. You'll see this especially with web vs. mobile UI behaviours. Cursor isn't so good at reverting changes yet, and GIT has saved me a LOT of headache.

2. Collaborate with o1 to create a PRD and put it in the same folder as your specs.

This increases the likelihood Cursor's recommended changes comply with your intent, style and color guidelines and overall project direction.
So, the same thing as callbacks in Node.
For some reason, I was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t 50%, but you’re right this is mainly a fine for Apple and a nice payday for the legal team. Someone has to do the work and I’m sure it’s a lot of work, but I’m also sure they’re highly motivated and walking away with a profit too.

The problem is even class action lawsuits that payout a few thousand dollars per person doesn’t help the recipients much. In this case 30% more money to the people in the class won’t make any meaningful difference to them at all. If the lawyers were getting 0% instead of 30%, the payout would be almost $30, and $30/person isn’t helping the average iPhone user, nor making up for individual privacy violations. The vast majority of people getting the $20 will not have experienced accidental recording. The sum-total damages is the only thing that might motivate Apple to tighten security, but they probably already did it, and TBH I feel like Apple’s got a better record on privacy than almost all other big tech, so the $95M is perhaps pure punishment for past deeds.
> Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment

This is a serious story but this made me burst out laughing. Sorry, the PR agent for these heavily armed militias was unable to return my request for comments.
It's rather impressive that you can point to assumptions about identity and then conclude that racism comes from people having identity.
Volvo is one of the exceptions though. I have friends whose parents are Volvo-people. Their cars have been automatic since the 80ies.
> Although elevated panels may provide sufficient room for people and sheep, they complicate mechanized agriculture.

I'd like to hear more about this. Do you need specialized tractors, harvesters, etc to fit under the panels?
In the old days a country would use its military to conquer or subvert other countries to setup exploitative trading relationships.

For example the opium wars.

Nowadays the empire works via its currency that allows it to buy real goods and assets for something it can create for free with little constrain.

Of course the exploitive nature of the “exorbitant” privilege is controversial; and some economists would argue that it does not exist at all.
Whole Foods has superior quality pecorino, the one with the black crust.

The last 10% quality improvement is the hardest to achieve without good ingredients, even if you can make it work otherwise.
Used Meta AI to edit a selfie, now [they're] using my face on ads
You and I understand this. Heck, most of us on HN understand this.

When the media and companies with a financial interest in AI have been shouting from the rooftops that "AI is going to replicate humans very soon and all of your jobs will go bye-bye because this thing will do everything better than you", can we really be surprised when the broader populace looks at it that way?
Not open source? Not built with rust? Not an over-engineered fart app? HN won’t show you any love.
Sorry, I’m just bitter over dumb posts with 800 votes while most Show HNs representing moths or even years of people’s time being ignored.
Congrats on launching! It’s so hard to get stuff out the door as a solo founder, so kudos. The site looks great. Any reason why the product couldn’t be scaled outside of Argentina?
Stir.
Is the problem Canada and Mexico, or is it corporations and business elites exploiting loopholes and abusing the system? Manufacturing in Canada was destroyed by competition in China.

The root issue is the unchecked market power of businesses and the complete lack of repercussions for corporations and business elites that destroy industries, social systems, and deplete natural resources—without accountability for long-term consequences.
> “Of all of the commercial databases, Oracle is the least secure,” British security expert David Litchfield recently told Reuters. Which is a problem, both from a national security perspective or even a consumer confidence perspective. Because today, everybody uses Oracle databases.

The only good thing about it today is that the last sentence is no longer true and Oracle is considered a legacy technology.
Combining 15s interval whole-sky-camera photos to form a 4y spanning keogram
Apple at least has certainly emphasized photography (and video) a lot.

But that actually seems to be a very reasoned response to consumers asking themselves "Why should I upgrade my phone?" And over at least some timescale--maybe not every model--a better camera actually seems like a pretty reasonable answer for people who care.
No, I don’t. This is already the case in many neighborhoods in the USA and the sky isn’t falling in those places.

Also, I live in Germany half of the year, and there most of my neighbors don’t speak any English, and my neighborhood is fine. I don’t see the problem you are describing with your example.

If that’s your “extreme” example, I am curious what your day-to-day ones would be.

Perhaps it’s uncharitable but I am having a hard time seeing how this doesn’t alias to simple racism.
Did you even read the article?

Starting with the opening paragraph

> BURIED IN THE INNER workings of your laptop is a secret blueprint, dictating the set of instructions the computer can execute and serving as the interface between hardware and software. The instructions are immutable and hidden behind proprietary technology. But starting in 2025, you could buy a new and improved laptop whose secrets are known to all. That laptop will be fully customizable, with both hardware and software you’ll be able to be modified to fit your needs.

ending with the closing paragraph

> ”If we can open up even the chip design, then one day, even students at schools and universities can come into class and design their own chips, with open tools,” says Liang. “With openness, you can choose to build things yourself from zero.”
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592746
You're showcasing the "false equivalence" fallacy - you're comparing apples to oranges.

1) Autocracies are fundamentally unstable and need extreme violence to prevent dissent and dissolution. Autocrats basically steal from people at the bottom who in turn are less incentivized to give their best performance. Democracies are much more stable due to acceptance by most people who live in them and much more fair sharing of profits.

2) Due to their inherent instability, autocracies have a very high incentive to fake numbers.

With this background, I think your arguments are for the trash can.
Show HN: I Made an AI Podcaster That Reads 100 Business Books
Over Christmas break, I started tinkering with an idea, a simple experiment to pass the time. What if I could build an AI podcaster that reads 100 of the best business books, extracts the most interesting ideas, and turns them into short, actionable episodes?

It sounded fun, so I gave it a shot.

What I didn’t expect was how much it would blow my mind. This AI didn’t just regurgitate information—it captured the essence of each book with a clarity and focus that felt almost... human. Somehow, it managed to distill complex ideas into their simplest, most powerful forms. The kind of takeaways that stick with you, long after you’ve heard them.

I sat there, listening to the AI narrate its findings, and I couldn’t help but feel amazed... This was more than I thought I’d create in a weekend project. It captured a kind of value that felt almost too good to keep to myself.

So here it is: my AI podcaster experiment in action. And this is just the beginning—new episodes will be released every single week, diving deeper into the best ideas in entrepreneurship.

Check it out on Spotify: Founder's Coffee Break
Is there an OCR'd version of the provided paper?
You're right, it's not meant to be a positive outcome for you. It's meant to keep people on Facebook longer so more ad impressions can be delivered. In this case, eventually, conversationally.
It’s carbage, so if it gets caught, impounded and destroyed, I’m sure that’s all part of the fun of the experience.
Indeed, and cloudflare has also improved search engine effectiveness. If
I'm looking for the answer to a technical question and four out of the
top five hits are cloudflare captchas, the primary source is readily
identifiable.
I can't fathom how anyone thought this was a sensible thing.

It's so bad I have to wonder if there's a different angle here, maybe they think that releasing something so terribly bad will make it easier when they release something less comically bad? Idk.
More modern version: "A person from out of town with a briefcase".
>Effectively, both cases are Trust On First Use, but AllowedAPKSigningKeys moves the First Use boundary from "the first time you install the app" to "the first time F-Droid saw the app".

1. What you're describing would have to happen on the f-droid app, but the vulnerability seems to be on fdroidserver?

2. Even if this actually affected the f-droid app, what you described seems like a very modest increase in security. The attack this prevents (ie. a compromised server serving a backdoored apk with a different signature) would also raise all kinds of alarms from people who already have the app installed, so practically such an attack would be discovered relatively quickly.

>IzzyOnDroid (and, I believe, F-Droid) don't have their own upload UI or authentication, they poll the upstream repo periodically.

Doesn't f-droid perform the build themselves and sign the apk using their own keys? They might be pulling from the upstream repo, but that's in source form, and before apks are signed, so it's irrelevant.
Yes, you recall correctly.
Unfortunately, the book this was included in: _Computing: A Human Activity_

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4594604-computing

is out of print, as is _Concise survey of computer methods_ and rather pricey.

Oddly, _Knowing and the Mystique of Logic and Rules_ (which has an even lengthier title after a colon...) has four entries at Goodreads and is listed under "P. Naur" and is even pricier, quite expensive on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Mystique-Logic-Rules-Statemen...

even as an ebook.

It would be more influential if it was affordably in print....
Yes: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1ZDRiQdhr3Ngf5qP6

I'd not be surprised if this activity is quite limited in Singapore given that they have been under a tight microscope lately. Money laundering used to be their business but now they are rich and make money "legitimately" and within the "international" framework.
Or even a kind of greenhouse structure?
If you think that autocratic regimes enrich the common workers, I have a bridge to sell to you.
One thing about the iPhone microphone. I had a beautiful day the other day here with some light drizzle and the sea waves were rocking nicely it was a great sound and the beach was empty. Great feeling. I wanted to record this but I only had my iPhone - was just walking in the beach. So neither the default recording app of the iphone and neither any of the ones I tried, could capture the ocean waves or the sound of the drizzle. I had previously (intentionally) set out to the beach with the intent to capture audio and did so with my Laptop + external mic. My conclusion is that unfortunately that is the way it has to be, and that it's not possible to capture audio on a whim as is with photos.
Good to hear. I need to look up my Philosophy major friend who disagreed with me in 1985 and issue a formal "I told you so" notice ;)
> Is it just me, or are these two seemingly unrelated schools of computing converging on the exact same idea? You send messages to some target (ie, the file descriptor).

Seems to me that it's a matter of perspective, specifically about who you're sending messages to.

You can consider the message as being sent to the file (descriptor).

You can also consider it a message sent to the kernel, in which case the kernel is an actor and the file is a passive data abstraction.

Both are accurate and useful; which one makes more sense will depend on context and your own background.
thank you for writing this.

I cut my teeth on OS/2 in the early 90s, where using threads and processes to handle concurrent tasks was the recommended programming model. It was well-supported by the OS, with a comprehensive API for process/thread creation, deletion and inter-task communication. It was a very clear mental model: put each sequential sequence of operations in its own process/thread, and let the operating system deal with scheduling - including pausing tasks that were blocked on I/O.

My next encounter was Windows 3, with its event loop and cooperative multi-tasking. Whilst the new model was interesting, I was perplexed by needing to interleave my domain code with manual decisions on scheduling. It felt haphazard and unsatisfactory that the OS didn't handle scheduling for me. It made me appreciate more the benefits of OS-provided pre-emptive multi-tasking.

The contrast in models was stark. It seemed obvious that pre-emptive multi-tasking was so obviously better. And so it proved: NT bestowed it on Windows, and NeXT did the same for Mac.

Which brings us to today. I feel like I'm going through groundhog day with the renaissance of cooperative multi-tasking: promises, async/await and such. There's another topic today [0] that illustrates the challenges of attempting to performs actions concurrently in javascript. It brought back all the perplexion and haphazard scheduling decisions from my Windows 3 days.

As you note:

> Of course, context switching between different tasks is not free, and event loops have frequently been able to provide higher efficiency.

This is indeed true: having an OS or language runtime manage scheduling does incur an overhead. And, indeed, there are benchmarks [1] that can be interpreted as illustrating the performance benefits of cooperative over pre-emptive multitasking.

That may be true in isolation, but it inevitably places scheduling burden back on the application developer. Concurrent sequences of application domain operations - with the OS/runtime scheduling them - seems like a better division of responsibility.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592224

[1]: https://hez2010.github.io/async-runtimes-benchmarks-2024/tak...
Encryption backdoor debate done and dusted, former White House tech advisor says
I believe that many people in US are just pyromaniac firefighters that start fired to play hero extinguishing it. Racism is just one of the fires.

In my country (Eastern Europe) racism is approximately non-existent, but nobody was putting gas on fire for decades or more. I know a black guy that is quite famous around here, do you know what he never said? "I am a proud black person". He is a great person and people love him.
This is an interesting use case for LLMs. At first, I thought “why complete an MVP if you don’t have time to iterate it?”.

But MVPs are a good testbed for determining if something is worth iterating.

I build quick prototypes for validation and LLMs have really helped decrease the effort. Here is an example of a site which took me 2 weeks with help from ChatGPT. https://post.withlattice.com/

It was enough to get interior designers to start using it, provide feedback, and validate if it’s worth additional time investment.

My hypothesis is that 2025 will bring forth a lot of indie products which focus on doing one thing well and can be supported my a small or fractional team.

I look forward this break from VC funded and big tech consumer products!
NeuReality: A Server on a PCIe Card
Glad you asked. My cousin grew up in Toronto. He was joking the other day about it Canadians. “You can just shove them! Try it! They’ll probably apologize to you.” Those are Canadians. They’re people socialized according to customs that, among other things, prioritize public civility and turning the other cheek. (Might have something to do with the fact that founding Canadians were virtually all Christian, and that percolated into secular Canadian culture.)

My cousin is not Canadian. He’s an immigrant from a Muslim country. He’s “assimilated,” professionally successful, etc. Now, I don’t think he actually goes around shoving people. But we’re from an honor based society, so we are socialized to view that sort of passive behavior as weakness.
Guess what, race is an issue and the group identity you're seeing is a defense mechanism against many generations of intentional cultural eradication and appropriation.

We should not be in the business of telling other people which aspects of themselves they can and cannot identify with. Admonishing black identity is perpetuating this cultural eradication, and so it is not the neutral position you think it is.

That's all tangential from the topic at hand anyway. On-topic, Liv is a great example of the corporate appropriation of culture.
Technical knowledge and wisdom are two very different things. There is an excess of the former here, on this site, in this field, but a comical dearth of the latter.
Correct. But military spending only *grows* GDP if the money is invested properly. In, say, research/infrastructure/training, etc.

Malinvested money will pump GDP for a few years before growth stops and potentially reverses.
It's a very nice app!

Is it possible to parametrize the kind of news we want (politics/health, etc)
This hand wringing makes it sound like it doesn’t matter what the guy does, HN will find some reason to call it sour grapes.
Soldier in Tesla Blast Had PTSD and Feared U.S.'Collapse,' Officials Say
https://archive.is/QgI54
So many of our high prices are due to this "legalized racket" mechanism.
> Just ask your department head

That'd already be a lot more bureaucracy than I'd have expected.
Adding to what another user said here, when using LLMs for heavy prototyping, I also commit frequently and have a document outlining the opinions contained in the repo.

One thing I've also been doing now is I have a "template" to use for fullstack applications that's configured out-of-the-box with tech that I like, has linters and hooks set up, as well as is structured in a way that's natural to me. This makes it a lot more likely that the generated code will follow my preferred style. It's also not uncommon that on the first iteration I get some code that's not what I'd like to have in my codebase and I just say "refactor X in this and this way, see <file> for an example" at which point I mostly get code that I'm happy with.
You'd be surprised. Look up Jurong Island.
You missed the later part of the quote:

>But in either case, its still the same reproducible build, only the signature is different.

That means the attacker still has to compromise the source repo. If they don't and try to upload a backdoored apk, that would cause a mismatch with the reproducible build and be rejected. If you can compromise the source repo, you're already screwed regardless. Apk signature checks can't protect you against that.
There is freedom to run it in a track where the only person you can kill is yourself lol, definitely not on public roads where you can kill and maim other people (not to mention pollution, noise, etc).

If feel rules about cars are such an obvious example of "your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins" that I'm not sure if the comment I'm replying to is satire x)
Phone cameras have come a long way, no doubt, but DSLRs really do look amazing. Phones are winning because “the best camera is the one that’s with you”. Since people have the phone camera in their pocket all the time, they usually don’t bother to carry a separate bulky one except for special occasions.
Half of Internet traffic is bots. Half of webpages are written by bots. It's just the logical conclusion.
Why Bluesky Is Not Ready for Marketing
It's growing in our back garden which freezes solid every winter. In fact the crocus is very hardy - it grows on a path which we walk over every day.

(I still buy saffron in the shops.)
I'm kind of shocked Volvo was still making carbureted vehicles in 1993. That is very late to still be using carbs.
I think authenticity is usually connected to traditional techniques as well as a sense of originality. A clear example of the latter is the original Mona Lisa [1] and the Prado Mona Lisa [2]. While I think most people on the street would argue that the Prado is more beautiful than the original due to its better colour rendition, it is definitely not more authentic since it is a copy (and has undergone a much more dramatic restoration).

I wouldn't say watercolours are more or less authentic than oil paintings, but the two physical media are definitely more authentic than digital painting software which attempts to simulate watercolours and oil paints. One is a simulation, the other is the real thing.

There's also a more intangible aspect to authenticity, often termed authenticity of experience. For film photography, in the context of the article's report on growing film sales, the subject of the experience is the photographer's. Making a photograph with a film camera is a more authentic experience because it is more manual, more hands-on. There are, of course, late-model film cameras with highly sophisticated light meters and fully automatic exposure programs but those aren't what I am referring to.

I am talking about older film cameras such as Leicas or Hasselblads or even large format view cameras. The process of making a photograph with one of these tools is very mechanical, very deliberate, and very far from the software-driven "point & shoot" style of smartphone photography. In many ways, this physicality of process is analogous to the authenticity of experience people get from driving a car with a manual transmission. It makes them feel more connected to the process. It gives them a lot more control and freedom, while also giving them a lot of freedom to make mistakes.

Although we might think the latter a bug rather than a feature, when it comes to art the process of learning is all about making mistakes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado)