skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They’re committed to making money and keeping power. The fossil fuel industry, and to a lesser extent the automobile industry, made enormous amounts of money by being allowed to ignore externalities and they would like it to continue.

There’s also a broader concern of feeling threatened by strong organizations which do not answer to them. For example, big tech companies may not oppose climate change mitigation but they do feel threatened by stronger regulatory frameworks and might support the same politicians for that reason.

As one example of how this can lead to some non-obvious relationships, in the late 2000s there was a smear campaign trying to argue that banning DDT had caused millions of deaths from malaria (this relied on dodgy math and studiously ignoring the pesticide resistance becoming common in the 1950s), arguing that environmentalists and public health agencies should be responsible for those deaths. This wasn’t funded by a company which made DDT, but apparently by the tobacco companies who were trying to discredit the public health agencies cutting into their sales in Africa. If you look at period discussion, some of the “experts” making these claims also work in climate change denial.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080517020543/http://www.prospe...
In practice most of those APIs are also gated behind a user's informed consent to e.g. enable access to a webcam or some other sensitive kind of I/O. I'd argue that the HTTPS delivery side of the requirements is superfluous theater pushed by "HTTPS Everywhere" ideologues and doesn't actually enhance the real security and privacy benefits already afforded by requiring manual user interaction.
Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies
Hi HN! Today I'm launching OpenTimes, a free database of roughly 150 billion pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between United States Census geographies. In addition to letting you visualize travel isochrones on the homepage, OpenTimes also lets you download massive amounts of travel time data for free and with no limits.

The primary goal here is to enable research and fill a gap I noticed in the open-source spatial ecosystem. Researchers (social scientists, economists, etc.) use large travel time matrices to quantify things like access to healthcare, but they often end up paying Google or Esri for the necessary data. By pre-calculating times between commonly-used research geographies (i.e. Census) and then making those times easily accessible via SQL, I hope to make large-scale accessibility research cheaper and simpler.

Some technical bits that may be of interest to HN folks:

- The entire OpenTimes backend is just static Parquet files on R2. There's no RDBMS or running service. The whole thing costs about $10/month to host and is free to serve.

- All travel times were calculated by pre-building the inputs (OSM, OSRM networks) and then distributing the compute over hundreds of GitHub Actions jobs.

- The query/SQL layer uses a setup I haven't seen before: a single DuckDB database file with views that point to static Parquet files via HTTP.

Finally, the driving times are optimistic since they don't (yet) account for traffic. This is something I hope to work on in the near future. Enjoy!
It's called the second-chance pool.

Interesting posts that don't get a lot of attention go into the pool, and are re-injected to the (lower part of the) front page. Timestamps (of the post & the comments) get updated when this happens.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
Questions That Force Digital Agencies to Face Their Digital Sins
Discussion (179 points, 20 days ago, 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176553
My industry is currently going through something of a dotcom burst moment.

I've been in the aid/non-profit sector for fifteen or so years now. Just past forty. Quit my last job in the second half of last year, was a very bad time to do so.

I'm European, but USAID going in the shredder has taken a huge cut out of budgets. The Brits have followed suit, and belts are being tightened in Europe as defence spending becomes a priority.

Layoffs galore, no one big has gone under yet, but the cheque is in the post. A difficult and stressful time to be unemployed.

Been feeling like a change, but at this point in my life I'm not seeing myself integrating well into the corporate world.

I'm appreciating the stories here. Any thoughts and words from the wise on my situation from survivors of the 2000s?
'AI doctors'are transforming China's healthcare landscape
Yeah, I’ll never suffer another Republican speaking about “law and order” or upholding the Constitution again when they’ve so clearly and so reliably failed to do so.
You mean that Microsoft BOUGHT GitHub , like they did with Skype and many other things.
> Kidding aside, I thought the purpose of Rust was for safety but the keyword unsafe is sprinkled liberally throughout this library. At what point does it really stop mattering if this is C or Rust?

Kidding aside the 150-comment Unsafe Rust subthread was inevitable.
I didn't know this form exists - sounds ideal for a project I had in mind. Thanks for posting!
My theory: zero sum game mentality. Lowering the status of others increases your own.
I was curious how this works - it's using the Python standard library disassembler: https://docs.python.org/3/library/dis.html

for instruction in dis.get_instructions(code):
...

Code here: https://github.com/tillahoffmann/localscope/blob/092392d5bdb...
I've got files going back to 1991. They started on floppy and moved to various formats like hard drives, QIC-80 tape, PD optical media, CD-R, DVD-R, and now back to hard drives.

I don't depend on any media format working forever like tape. New LTO tape drives are so expensive and used drives only support small sized tapes so I stick with hard drives.

3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, and 1 offsite.

Verify all the files by checksum twice a year.

You can over complicate it if you want but when you script things it just means a couple of commands once a week.
I'm not really sure what you mean. It saves me time to ask Claude Code to clone a file for me and repurpose it for a new tool compared to doing it all manually. And iterating on it can also be faster because I can tell it what transformations to make to the file and it tends to be faster than doing those transformations myself.

I still do a bit of manual post-processing but the end-to-end latency is a lot lower than if I had done all of the processing that manually.

Another relatively common pattern for me is to do a certain transformation manually once and then tell Claude Code to repeat it on all of the related tools. It does a good job at that too. I don't even have to manually tab through each file in my editor, or come up with some cursed find and replace pattern, or anything like that. It's just more time-efficient for me.

Note that I don't use an LLM to save mental effort. It's purely for saving time. People who try to use an LLM to save mental effort are usually using it wrong. You still need to know what you're doing in order to properly tell the LLM to do that.
Severance Is an Allegory for Returning to the Office After Working from Home
It doesn't, that's the joke. Yet pushing FUD has become the norm when an unfriendly country creates a clearly superior product.

Just like the whole TikTok ban -- TikTok didn't have any additional access or privileges than any other smartphone app, and used the exact same telemetry/analytics as FB, Instagram, etc.. and yet, the spyware/malware angle was pushed heavily.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but on this case isn't this a tautology?

Since investing 100% in a single stock makes one a speculator, not investor, then by definition no investor invests 100% in a single stock.
This has generally been the case, but a system language like Rust has access to optimisations that C simply won't have due to the compiler having so much more information (e.g. being able to skip run time array size checks because the compiler was able to prove out of bounds access cannot occur).
How good/bad would it be to have a poor man's tape archival, using standard cassette tapes (C90, C120, etc)?

For example, using something like ggwave [1]. I guess that would last way more than 5 years (although the data density is rather poor).

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/ggwave
These are handful of handpicked twitter posts that are almost 3 years old, including the page itself.

https://github.com/ghuntley/isdotnetopen

The website doesn't even explain what they mean by open.

Nor they explain why they think .NET is not open source.
You may like my next blog post.
Here is an example for data-efficient vision transformers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12511

Vision transformers have a more flexible hypothesis space, but they tend to have worse sample complexity than convolutional networks which have a strong architectural inductive bias. A "soft inductive bias" would be something like what this paper does where they have a special scheme for initializing vision transformers. So schemes like initialization that encourage the model to find the right solution without excessively constraining it would be a soft preference for simpler solutions.
Firefox has a "reader view" which works well for things like that.
The High Heel Problem
Show HN: Download Facebook Videos and Images by Removing the "OOK" from the URL
If you search the forums, they have capacity scaling issues once more than a few people in a region are using it and suffer degradation in bad weather.

I’m not saying it’s a terrible service but it’s slower and less scalable than fiber and if you are talking large scale deployments that will matter.
Kind of. I was saying that "our MAGA supporting members are brigading any story that puts the limited operation in a bad light" is an accusation of bad faith by the downvoters. Such an accusation is in fact the kind of thing where you should shut up until you have evidence.

"Assume good faith" is part of the site guidelines, after all.

> Flagging is not a solution for seeing stories you are not interested in. Downvoting is.

For comments. For stories, flagging is all you can do.

Also note that I am not the downvoter of these stories. I just don't think that everyone who does can be lumped into your "MAGA supporting" category.
So many questions:

- why a no side-effects function on a database can be used to get lateral access to the whole database instance

- why do you need to validate strings on the database itself and not on the client anyway, heck why are there no type safe way of doing it

- why would you want to execute shell commands from the database itself

- Even if there's a real use case for executing commands like that why is it enabled by default on a regular connection to the database without you specifying a THIS_IS_REALLY_DANGEROUS_BUT_I_PINKY_PROMISE_I_KNOW_WHAT_IM_DOING flag to the connection handshake.

It's not always PHP but there are some kirks that are shrugged off on PHP that makes me really concerned about the reliability of projects coded with it.
>was to play really nice with companies like Apple and Samsung etc, they could actually maintain their moat.

This gets in the way of maximizing quarterly earnings. The issue would be price fluctuations which means some quarters will be lower and some will be higher, and it may not average out the same year to year relative to what investors usually expect.

Management therefore lacks incentives to play well with others, and thus they don't
I think a good alternative is Tauri 2.0. With this new version, you can even distribute on Android and iOS.
It’s similar to Electron. It uses Rust (or JS) for APIs and JavaScript for the frontend.
a 3yr old is actually far more similar to AI than an adult. 3 year olds have extremely limited context windows. They will almost immediately forget what happened even 20-30 seconds ago when you play a game like memory with them, and they rarely remember what they ate for breakfast or lunch or basically any previous event from the same day.

When a 3 year old says "I love you" it is not at all clear that they understand what that means. They frequently mimic phrases they hear/basically statistical next word guessing and obviously don't understand the meaning of what they are saying.

You can even mimic an inner voice for them like Deepseek does for thinking through a problem with a 3 year old and it massively helps them to solve problems.

AI largely acts like a 3 year old with a massive corpus of text floating around in their head compared to the much smaller corpus a 3 year old has.
Voice Devtools: Compare closed source and open source speech-to-speech models
Development is cheap when the backward compatibility target is IE10. You can safely ignore any CSS fanciness from post-2010.

This is still useful for web designers, even if it doesn't make it into a business website (most websites are created to sell something and target the lowest common denominator browser-wise).
Which is a fancy name for a low-pass filter?
Before or after their device, data and communication is compromised?
I learned about the breach a few days ago but I didn't know that you could "adopt" an emoji: https://aac.unicode.org/sponsors

That's a neat tidbit.
> When would someone ever want a binary file that's not zip, SQLite, or version controllable text?

It feels like there’s an infinite number of answers to this, but to choose one: when choosing the format to allow memory mapping makes some operations simpler or more performant?
I’d quite like good software to be squarely within their area of expertise
The other thing I recall tying those two periods together was enthusiasts saying, in the face of an obvious bubble, "Well, things are different this time."

My glib summation of those two events:

- Dotcom boom deregulated (in the social and technological sense as much as the legal) investing (e.g. the rise of day-trading).

- 2000s housing bubble (pre-GFC) deregulated home-buying (subprime adjustable-rate mortgages).

Perhaps our parting assessment of the ZIRP era will be it cut to the chase and deregulated gambling.
https://pshapira.net/2024/03/31/delving-into-delve/
You can get an atom echo for $13, if that helps: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voi...
In some ways it is surprising, but the examples you gave are only currently straightforward because of massive investment over many years by thousands of people. If you wanted to build chatGPT from scratch I'm sure it would be pretty hard, so it doesn't seem so unreasonable that you might pay someone if you care about keeping your data around for extended periods of time.
Big Tech funds Trump.

Trump wages global trade wars resulting in the decimation of Big Tech.

Big Tech is no longer Big.
That works, it makes it possible to watch the video now. :-)

The only thing that had me stumped was that to add a subscription one needs to press enter, I don't recall if that was the behavior before.

Appreciate all the changes!
> right up until they're not

In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.
This is mentioned in the article.

There's an old presentation from Google where they mentioned that they were the only ones who read back their tapes to make sure they work.
Presumably nostalgia —- I’m certainly feeling it!
LTO tape tech has gotten into pretty nutty territory - in order to achieve its density and speed. It wasn't "easy". So, so far away from C90 technology.
Considering the only apparent difference between the two is method of control and people love complaining about voice analysis miscomprehending I doubt there is much distance between those two terms in most consumers minds. I think in general marketing loves slapping "smart" in front of other nouns and it's usually received a lot worse than they expect to the point where most consumers ignore it as much as other fluff terms like "Next Gen".
The Pain That Is GitHub Actions
Why must that prevent backup from an Apple Configurator MDM-supervised device that is paired to an admin Macbook, with MDM policy to prevent mobile pairing with any other Macbook? There is a full cryptographic chain to verify the supervising device, which already has full MDM policy control of the mobile device. What security is being added by preventing that authorized supervisor from doing a forensic backup?
> The three things that any value investor values in stocks - Great management, good reinvestment of capital and a really wide moat.

I’ve read a lot about value investing and I’m afraid that your statement is an oversimplification. Chuck Ackre for example is similar to you with his three legged stool, but Peter Lynch has another approach, and Buffett has another slightly different approach. There are as many strategies as there are value investors.
Not even a wink or a nudge about why they renamed: https://rocq-prover.org/about#Name
LINQ alone is unmatched.
Exactly. They have invented something old.
Styled-components as a project is in "maintenance mode"
Electric 1.0 Released
I've thought about the "hundreds of years" problem on and off for a while (for some yet to be determined future time capsule project), and I figure that about all we know for sure that will work is:

- engraved/stamped into a material (stone tablets, Edison cylinders, shellac 78s, vinyl, voyager golden record(maybe))

- paper, inked (books) or punched (cards, tape)

- photography; microfiche/microfilm (GitHub Arctic Code Vault), lithography?

I actually looked into what it might take to "print" an archival grade microfilm somewhat recently - there might be a couple options to send out and have one made but 99.99% of all the results are to go the other way, scanning microfilm to make digital copies. This is all at the hobbyist grade cheapness scale mind you, but it seems weird that a pencil drawing I did in 2nd grade has a better chance of lasting a few hundred years than any of my digital stuff.
Ask HN: All my posts are flagged because I said China is dictator:(
I have an LTO-6 tape drive. It works fine, but it is a pain in the ass to set up on Linux. It only connects via SAS, you need to load a lot of arcane kernel modules, the logs are non-standardized and often misleading, and the entire interface is command line based.

I don't mind living in the command line and I don't even mind fighting to get everything up, but I don't see most people putting up with it. It's also a huge pain to get working with a laptop, since I don't think most laptops have a SAS connector, so you have to use an eGPU case with a Host Bus Adapter, which is its own share of headaches.
Excited to see this live. Seven years since the last major release went live they reckon.

Which new features look most interesting to you?
My particular favorite is "AI" companies who are hiring, and are looking for 'expertise with OpenAI APIs'.

They aren't AI companies. They're OpenAI wrappers. If you're an AI company, why would you not be building AI? Why claim you're building AI?

Humans have such an infinite capacity to lie to themselves
Heads up, at least on macOS Safari all the header-ish text is a dark grey color. Pretty poor contrast (even to my non-disabled eyes!). Definitely doesn't look intended.
Honestly, I think you’re going to run into UPL problems, and that residential renters typically have no power to negotiate lease terms.
Media-based sleep hygiene education for professional female footballers
My takeaway is that for personal/SMB use you have to use the cloud.
I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that. I’ve only been using Home Assistant for a few months, but off the top of my head I reckon I could do that with an automation. The catch is that you may have to set that automation up yourself (either in the UI Or with YAML), and it's less user friendly than an alexa is out of the box. But if you're happy to tinker, as most folks on here are, then the world is your oyster..

This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...
>Beyond Trust did their due diligence by properly calling a sanitization method on the user’s string input using it in a PostgreSQL query.

This is not due diligence. In band messaging of user controlled data has been proven to be bad for security and this is not the first time "escaping" user controlled data for SQL has been done incorrectly.
What is your process for automating this checksum twice a year? Does it give you a text file dump with the absolute paths of all files that fail checksum for inspection? How often does this failure happen for you?
That little note half way through this that said "The Svalbard archipelago is where I spent the summer of 1969 doing a geological survey" made me want to know more about the author - and WOW they have had a fascinating career: https://blog.dshr.org/p/blog-page.html

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal
3.2% is just whole milk.
They probably also learned a great deal about people based on the passwords they chose. p: 1D0nk3yP3n3trat0r
Show HN: TikTok Video Download,Without Watermark. Fast
The TikTok download service saves videos without any watermark or loss of quality. you can also download videos on website https://download-tik.com
They already have UPL problems, whether they realize it or not.
Rain fade is sort of a solved problem in microwave comms [1]. Earlier than that, it was predictable.

Laser comms aren’t going to be useful in Houston. They’ll probably be a game changer for swarms of drones at altitude, anything in space and the sorts of arid, weather-stable places we like to build data centres.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade
I just use llama for that, it's free and os.
Importantly, though, LLMs do not take the embeddings as input during training; they take the tokens and learn the embeddings as part of the training.

Specifically all Transformer-based models; older models used things like word2vec or elmo, but all current LLMs train their embeddings from scratch.
> how is it bad behavior to say you’ll issue a takedown notice if your copyright material is republished?

Which copyrighted material is TFA republishing?

And where's the takedown notice? So far, there only seems to be an attempt of emotional blackmail ("take this down or we'll have to deprioritize our accessibility efforts").

> They make a software to help libraries lend ebooks for free.

Free to the library (?), but not free to the reader. (Readers indirectly pay for it via certification fees paid by the ereader vendor.)

It might well be the lesser evil compared to Kindle (closed ecosystem) and Adobe Digital Editions (words cannot describe the pain), but it's still a DRM scheme and as such restricts reading hardware/software choice, so I can see how its mere existence upsets people.
What’s the second level analysis here? We know it’s not really necessary or helpful for the ostensible reason (far cheaper/more reliable ways of capturing entropy) — so we conclude it’s a marketing gimmick. Yet for the gimmick to work they have to pretend it’s useful. They’re not fooling themselves or anyone else, though.

So what’s really going on?

Is it:

- it IS somehow a good return on investment??

- marketing had a budget and didn’t know how else to spend it, and no one wanted to be the unpleasant person and say how it’s all a silly waste of money?

- they are making a tonne of money and no one really cares, so we’ll just spend it on fun cool stuff as long as there’s a plausibleish story to go with it?

- fits with a broader global company branding concept that leadership seems to like, so there’s just the momentum to keep it going (and see points above)?

I can’t figure it out. I agree it’s cool! Just the make believe puzzles me a little. I’ve not worked at a big corp like this and just have to understand what’s actually happening.
Photoshop is a stretch.. that's more like MS paint in terms of feature parity.