MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwern | 2025-04-23 23:31:58+00:00
This also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients separately in Russian Cosmism.

Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion.

This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was.

You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...
by Keyu_Chen | 2025-04-23 23:32:07+00:00
When I worked as a MLE Compliance org at my last employer, I found teammates struggling a lot with manually reviewing documents data such as proof of Identity, proof of Address and so on. The use case is to cross-check the evidence submitted by users with the information on file and to verify the users' identity. This inspires me to believe there needs to be a tool that can help tap the value from such unstructured data. I created Revelio to dig the value out of unstructured data and starting with a PDF extraction use case. Currently at the validation phase and it would be great if you guys can share your thoughts!
by JeremyHerrman | 2025-04-23 23:32:15+00:00
favorite quote from this article:

"The tone of the draft isn't the only problem. The email I'd have written is actually shorter than the original prompt, which means I spent more time asking Gemini for help than I would have if I'd just written the draft myself. Remarkably, the Gmail team has shipped a product that perfectly captures the experience of managing an underperforming employee."
by shipp02 | 2025-04-23 23:32:21+00:00
>actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future

I think this is called techno-utopianism. The "leaders" in technology have been doing this ever since the industrial revolution.

People sold the idea that street lights would fix "public morals" and eliminate crime.

Also see the progress trap and professor Simon Penny's work and what he calls the end of the anthropocene.
by namaria | 2025-04-23 23:32:37+00:00
> It's fine to have a hobby horse!

> I didn't say it's petty!

You did.

And I already showed you made a claim that LLM was AI and that you agree that you were thinking of something akin to expert systems. When I explained why I think this is a signal that we are headed to another AI winter you started deflecting.

I am done with this conversation.
by freeopinion | 2025-04-23 23:32:49+00:00
> Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.

I know this is obvious, but the battery doesn't have to go in the glasses. When the glasses are just a wireless monitor, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for belttop computers. Obviously, the glasses still need some power, but the battery can be very small, comparatively. Put the weight and heat into something with a mobile phone form factor.

Apple Watch -> $250

iPhone 16 Pro Max -> $1200

iVirt -> $2400

iVirt LTE -> $3200

iGlass -> $600

Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-23 23:34:09+00:00
Needlessly polarizing. I love coding since 12 years old (so more than 30 years at this point) but most work tasks I'm given are fairly boring and uninteresting and don't move almost any science or knowledge forward.

Delegating part of that to an LLM so I can code the stuff I love is a big win for my motivation and is making me doing the work tasks with a bit more desire and pleasure.

Please don't forget that most of us out there can't code for money anything that their heart wants. If you can, I'd be happy for you (and envious) but please understand that's also a fairly privileged life you'd be having in that case.
by phkahler | 2025-04-23 23:36:07+00:00
>> I have come across a significant number of non engineers wanting to do, what ultimately involves some basic CAD modelling.

I very much want Solvespace to be the tool for those people. It's very easy to learn and do the basics. But some of the bugs still need to get fixed (failures tend to be big problems for new users because without experience its hard to explain what's going wrong or a workaround) and we need a darn chamfer and fillet tool.
by kevingadd | 2025-04-23 23:36:20+00:00
The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:

1. Public Domain Fonts

2. Fonts that cost money

The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.

As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.

Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)

Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.

Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
by ziddoap | 2025-04-23 23:36:58+00:00
>You are being selective in your quotation:

Rich, coming from the person who left the sentence about logs out of their comment and then said "No where in the complaint does it allege anyone asked for an audit-less account".

>Go ahead, read it again please. You have the experience to understand what this means.

Do you get some sort of weird satisfaction out of being ridiculously condescending? Do you think it makes your argument stronger? Are you just an angry person?

>This very clearly means we aren't using the normal account-creation process which itself creates logs of account creation.

You think they requested no logs about account creation, but are cool with the logging after? What on earth would the purpose of that request be?

The request was not stated in a way that implies a point-in-time request to turn off logs solely for account creation. (And, again, that would be a completely nonsense request that accomplishes literally nothing).

Anyways, I have no interest in getting into it with someone that has to throw in little personal jabs in every comment. You can believe that the DOGE team only wanted the account creation to be exempt from logs but wanted the logs turned on immediately afterwards for god knows what reason.
by rockemsockem | 2025-04-23 23:37:21+00:00
Good: 1. The account-level below that doesn't have access to certain stuff and just happened to have untraceable stuff 2. They just said "give me the highest level of access" and didn't investigate what that meant 3. Can't think of a good third atm

Bad: 1. They want to do nefarious things untraceably 2, 3. I think 1. covers pretty much everything.

Personally, if I'm put in charge of overhauling a system I don't want to waste my time waiting on approvals for BS, I just want to be given the highest level of access I can be given to get on with work.

I'm not saying this is fine, but the information here is basically a random list of things that happened and it doesn't really tell a nefarious story to my eyes.
by marktolson | 2025-04-23 23:37:31+00:00
I like the idea but I don't get this at all. Shouldn't the speed change based on the mainsail trim relative to the heading? I pointed the boat dead downwind, eased the mainsail all the way out and the speed is 0 kn. I can't even see the value for the trim, just speed, but you get speed from correctly trimmed sails.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-23 23:37:55+00:00
For the record, none of those are objectively "better". You and I may think they're better. Lots, lots, as in billions of people, couldn't care less:

> Open source Android vs. closed iOS

Almost no one outside specific tech circles cares, and even if they understood what it meant, still wouldn't care.

> Install apps from any source on Android vs. total restriction on iOS

That's one of the primary reasons I suggest that my relatives buy iPhones. I have older family who would absolutely install an APK from hackerz.ru if they got a phishing email claiming they won the Facebook Lottery and that's how they claim the prize. For that matter, I'm glad my bank has to publish their app through the App Store, because otherwise they'd almost certainly be hosting it on sketchysounding.bankservices.biz if no one made them.

The walled garden is an enormous advantage for a huge chunk of the world. I understand why it's a PITA for others. I'd love to install unsanctioned software from GitHub on my iPhone, but I'll happily accept that tradeoff in exchange for my uncle not being able to install "Real Actual Gmail.apk" from god knows where.

> Switch default app for browser (and many other things!) vs. No choice but Safari tech on iOS

I might agree with that, although part of me is glad that there's at least one major platform that Chrome hasn't taken over.

> Easy switch of search provider in Chrome vs. countless dark patterns pushing Edge and Bing on Windows

Five years ago, I'd have agreed. Today Chrome seems like the King of Dark Patterns because it can get away with it. It's the one single app on my Mac that makes me specially configure cmd-Q to quit it. Manifest v3. Web Integrity API. Etc., etc., etc. Google does this because they can. They haven't been the better actor in ages.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-23 23:38:09+00:00
You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So of course you do two layers: record modifiers and transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical 'c' somewhere with all the other letters.

... But you already have that data structure: it's the font file itself.

(Possibly worth noting here also is that historically, Adobe owned both the PDF format and the file format for most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to just reuse code they already owned here instead of reinventing a wheel).
by immibis | 2025-04-23 23:38:13+00:00
No, like the rest of these power games it should be worrying. It's not about whether it's actually a tariff or not - it's not about objective truth. It's about getting the orange guy to do things that are beneficial for Mr Sugarhill's money pile. It might or might not work in this particular instance, but it should be very concerning that this sort of thing is the way to get money now.

Mr Sugarhill's ploy is presumably to get Mr Mango enraged about the tariffs so he tariffs them back 200%, and they back down to avoid the 200% tariffs.
by mythrowaway49 | 2025-04-23 23:38:19+00:00
this part of the whistleblower complaint seem way worse:

" On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers. "
by nsriv | 2025-04-23 23:39:40+00:00
I love this about RSS too, but I think the internet has generally trained us to be afraid of ephemerality and preyed upon FOMO. The desire for ephemerality has led to permanent platforms subsuming the idea of controlled ephemerality, like IG stories and status messages. Plus, it seems like the level of context can be controlled by the creator, like a space for permanent links on the board vs a series of rambles that get wiped away daily. The narrative explanation of the protocol seemed to dive into this a bit more.
by ivape | 2025-04-23 23:40:30+00:00
I understand that but she is pretty much in the mold of Hilary at this point (career politician). It's bartender to straight Congressional aid or something like that and I believe straight to national politics. So, by 27 she is already in the stratosphere (earlier even, in terms of being in the circuit) and no longer down to earth. Talk about going to mars. She's supposed to represent the Bronx, and I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx. You need to get robbed in the Bronx a few times before representing it lol.

I don't know, for both the politicians and CEOs, I sort of wonder like when do you get to say "okay I got enough out of regular life to now manage regular life for others"?. Thirty? Fourty? Fifty? So Elon is 55, but we see that simply being fifty is not enough. I'm open to having the wrong line of thinking here.
by smithkl42 | 2025-04-23 23:41:27+00:00
In C#-land, we just have it as a standard that ~every table inherits from `ITrackable`, and we wrote a little EF plugin to automatically update the appropriate columns.

public interface ITrackable { DateTime CreatedOn {get; set;} DateTime ModifiedOn {get; set;} }

Saves so much time and hassle.
by sleepyguy | 2025-04-23 23:41:54+00:00
It just goes to show how stupid Trump and his supporters are. He for starting a trade war and having to eat shit and his supporters for thinking he was one of them because he is a moron.

China should maintain the tariffs on the USA, even if Trump eliminates the Chinese tariffs. This administration needs to be taught a good lesson and they need to eat their shit sandwich.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-23 23:42:15+00:00
Templates are semi-accidentally Turing-complete. They were intended for writing compile-time-generic, run-time-concrete functions and types - but it turned out you could use them, along with the overload resolution mechanisms, to compute things. The Turing-completeness involves recursive use.

Computing things using templates is not intuitive. Many of us have gotten used to it - but that's because that's all we had for many years. It's a different sub-language within C++. As constexpr capabilities widen, we can avoid "tortuted" templates and can just write our compile-time checks and figurings in plain C++ - more or less.

Sometimes, enhanced language features in C++ allow us to actually throw away and forget about other existing features, or at least - complex and brittle idioms using existing features. Like SFINAE :-)
by immibis | 2025-04-23 23:42:57+00:00
That would probably work if it wasn't already such an established business model. The grocery store hires a bouncer to not let me in unless he can take a picture of my ID? Fine... I'll go across the street.

But since it already is established that the Internet works this way, all grocery stores in town are already doing this. I might not want to but I still have to. Moreover, it's been firmly impressed upon everyone that they have to show ID to enter a grocery store, so if I created a new one that didn't, people would just continue going to their closest one anyway. To improve this situation, something more drastic than free competition is needed (if that could work, it already would have).
by lupusreal | 2025-04-23 23:42:59+00:00
Canada never needed a fighter-bomber, and it is a matter of historical record that they did continue to need aircraft for the interception of Soviet bombers, plainly evidenced by Canada purchasing aircraft specifically for that purpose. Those aircraft were not built to be dedicated interceptors but that role is all Canada ever needed and used them for. They would have been better served by aircraft built for it.

The Soviet ICBM threat was not relevant until many years after the Arrow was canceled; if you knew that before I told you, then I wonder why you even brought it up? Because Diefenbaker did? Diefenbaker was an idiot. Taking his excuses at face value is extremely dumb.

BTW if you actually wargame it out with realistic scenarios (accounting for the existence of AWACS and the probability of interceptors being in the air already), cold war US Navy interceptors easily get kills on Bears before they get their shots off, and can intercept the ASMs themselves as well. What makes or breaks it is the number of missiles brought to the engagement by both sides. It is by absolutely no means a sure thing for the Soviet bombers, I have no idea where you got such a stupid idea from.
by TOGoS | 2025-04-23 23:43:23+00:00
Every time I hear about D it sounds awesome. I actually used it to prototype an image collage-composing algorithm which I then rewrote in Scala[1], and the D version might have been nicer to write.

The only reason I didn't write more stuff in D was that the stack traces from my programs were pretty much useless. Maybe I was supposed to set a --better-stack-traces flag when I compiled it or something idk.

[1] One of the algorithms used by https://github.com/TOGoS/PicGrid
by keeda | 2025-04-23 23:43:50+00:00
> Open source Android vs. closed iOS

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

This article lays out in painstaking detail in one place most of the criticisms about Android you'll find in this comment thread.

And this was published in 2018! That Google still maintains "a better actor" aura despite all that we know now is the greatest trick they ever pulled.
by derektank | 2025-04-23 23:43:54+00:00
Most rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I think criticizing someone as uncreative simply because they're not selling off all their equity to go pursue some other venture is way off
Ask HN: Any reliable AI-detectors for images?
by RandomBacon | 2025-04-23 23:44:30+00:00
I know "A.I." text detectors are not accurate, and while "A.I." image detection probably isn't foolproof either, I'm wondering if maybe there is any website that is more accurate than just flipping a coin.

I have four pictures of a single person, two of which I believe are modified by "A.I."

I found six different online detectors that I could upload the images to for the websites to test. Three of the websites matched my suspicions, and the other three did not.

One of the images looks obvious to me (shoulder doesn't match up with arm when hair seperates the two). The other picture shows rough skin on the person's arm and forehead, but their chest looks very smooth.

One of the websites which I think is accurate with this small sample, even lists what model is suspected to be used (Mid journey and Stable Diffusion) in my case.
by twoodfin | 2025-04-23 23:44:35+00:00
I interned with the AppCompat team shortly before the release of Windows XP, which was huge for them as it was the first Windows for consumers on the NT kernel.

IIRC, they had a significant lab and tons of infrastructure for exercising and identifying compatibility issues in thousands of popular and less popular software packages. It all got distilled into a huge database of app fingerprints and corresponding compatibility shims to be applied at runtime.
by shaunofthedev | 2025-04-23 23:45:30+00:00
The perils of UI design wagging the horse.

I like the heuristics described here. However if these things aren't making it into a product spec where appropriate, then I smell some dysfunction that goes beyond what's being stored by default.

Product need (expressed as spec, design, etc) should highlight the failure cases where we would expect fields like these to be surfaced.

I'd hope that any given buisness shouldn't need someone with production database access on hand to inform as to why/when/how 'thing' was deleted. Really we'd want the user (be it 'boss' or someone else) to be able to access that information in a controlled manner.

"What information do we need when something goes wrong?". Ask it. Drill it. Ask it again.

That said, if you can't get those things, this seems a fine way to be pragmatic.
by groby_b | 2025-04-23 23:45:55+00:00
It's a beautiful goal, but like so many things on the Internet, it wants a social change and hopes to achieve it via a technological solution that rejects most of the things people want from their Internet. And neither nostalgia nor technology will fix social issues.

If I were to put it in a quip, I'd say "Doesn't support cat pictures, dead".

If you truly want to fix what's broken about the Internet (and there's so much!) you will need to engage with why it's broken, why those forces shaped it the way they did, and how you will address those forces in your new proposals. You will need to think about why people would want to change their behavior.

I mean, don't get me wrong - it's still a very cool experiment & art project, from the builder perspective. But like most art projects, it will only reach a small audience.
by m463 | 2025-04-23 23:46:12+00:00
When I read this, I sort of resist the idea.

Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin:

"Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans."

https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html