MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prof_hibschman | 2025-04-15 15:09:46+00:00
I worked on a similar large social platform with shadow-bans and more strict auto-bans, we had <10% of accounts with "uncommon" usage patterns from paid-user farms, bots, and power-users. The platform prefers a user who sees ads, has rich tracking data, stays logged in, has clean analytics, has persistent caches. Their view is that if you're technical enough to trigger a bot-ban, you're technical enough overcome a ban and make a new account, after all there are 900 million other "normal"ish users with higher ARPU.

To avoid auto-bans, emulate the preferred "dumb" user:

- Use the default app

- Avoid VPN/Proxy (AWS-hosted VPN exits are blocked on Reddit, appeals ignored)

- Avoid analytics-blockers in adblock/pi-hole/dns

- Avoid chrome plugins that scrape (shopping, reviews, media downloaders)

- Limit incognito usage, keep your new-login count low

- Limit deleting / cache-clearing mobile app

- Limit new logins on many devices/browsers/profiles on the same IP

- Limit cmd+clicking 10+ posts in the background (triggers bot-like flag)

- Start new accounts slowly, don't over-do it the first month

To avoid report-bans / moderator-bans / strikes:

- Avoid posting screenshots / URL embeds unless common for the subreddit

- Always add flare (tags) to new posts, many subs auto-mod no-flare posts

- Be careful what you say on "brand" subs like r/Comcast_Xfinity, r/unitedairlines, r/NFL. They hire "brand managers" to use reddit, and if the brand doesn't like it, they can report your posts towards a ban.
by neogodless | 2025-04-15 15:09:48+00:00
Even this article can't get it right.

https://www.inc.com/chris-morris/why-elon-musk-doge-savings-...

It was originally $2 trillion.

EDIT: Missed this earlier. Still think you should lead with the original claim to highlight the disparity!

> When he was Mr. Trump’s most prominent supporter on the campaign trail, he said he could cut $2 trillion from a federal budget of about $7 trillion. After Mr. Trump was elected and Mr. Musk’s group began its work, Mr. Musk lowered that goal to $1 trillion.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-15 15:09:55+00:00
>Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work better for workers.

Seemingly, this is going to magically happen? Where are the programs to make sure this does happen? Erecting tariffs is one thing, but having an actual plan and executing on said plan is another. So far, all I see is rising prices and looming threats of job cuts due to slow downs which stem from increased costs, and there is nothing coming to buffer that.

Let alone, the investment capital isn't moving in this direction. As of this writing, the general posture of the Republican donor class is 'wait and see how long the tariffs last' not 'lets invest in American industry again'

>Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.

Emphasis mine. Do you believe that the modern Republican party is pro union? Do you really think they won't undermine organized labor even if jobs come back in some form? Even though the modern Democratic party have a spotty history on labor issues, the Republicans have shown for 40 years to be the anti labor party. They rarely - if ever - pass legislation that is pro labor. This administration isn't proving to be different in that regard either, and it wasn't different the first time around.

>I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland.

So did I. Hallowed home town and all. One of the poorest in the state I grew up. You know what else never happened? Sustained public policy to help these areas. There were largely no programs to help transition workers from one industry to another. We don't have comprehensive safety nets and retraining / re-education programs for workers. We lack all of that. Why aren't we starting by implementing those programs? Its rather wishful thinking that bringing manufacturing back to the US, that it will end up in these same areas to begin with, because manufacturing is very different than it used to be. I doubt most of these areas would be good places to re-build manufacturing capacity in the US. What manufacturing is done here is already concentrated in the South which precludes huge chunks of the traditional rust belt.
by joelio182 | 2025-04-15 15:09:56+00:00
Really cool to see more tooling making self-supervised learning usable on real-world datasets. Domain shift is a recurring pain, especially when labels are limited—so being able to pretrain directly on unlabeled data is a big deal. Also great to see it open-sourced under AGPL. Have you tried LightlyTrain on any more niche domains, like satellite or industrial inspection data? Would be interesting to see how it performs outside the usual benchmarks. Nice work!
by pc86 | 2025-04-15 15:10:06+00:00
Nobody, not even the ATF, is claiming he bought the guns illegally. They're claiming he was illegally "engaged in the business of" dealing weapons because he didn't have an federal firearms license. Prior to 2022 he wouldn't even be on the ATF's radar but "with the principal objective of livelihood and profit" was amended to remove "livelihood."

This is the form you fill out when you purchase a gun[0]. Please let me know where on this form you "promise not to resell" a firearm you purchase.

Straw purchases are illegal. Reselling firearms is not.

[0] https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-trans...
by xbmcuser | 2025-04-15 15:10:07+00:00
Hmm how is it different in the US do you not get back in the sales tax that you paid for your input. Here the middle man pay tax on the buying price and then collects on the sell price. Then has to pay the government minus what they paid as input sale tax. So all increments on the price gets taxed till the end user. But the tax itself is not taxed again.
How are high-performers building family culture while building companies?
by gregneuf | 2025-04-15 15:10:18+00:00
My wife and I are both in venture and raising three young kids. We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how little is shared publicly about what it actually looks like to build something ambitious and raise a family with intention.

We’re starting a project exploring how high-performers—especially couples who work together or run businesses—create family culture while growing professionally. We don’t have a specific output yet, just following the thread and talking to thoughtful people walking a similar path.

If this resonates with you, we’d love to connect—either to chat or just swap thoughts. Also curious if anyone’s come across resources, books, or threads on this topic. It feels underexplored.
by SR2Z | 2025-04-15 15:10:20+00:00
> Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.

People repeat this a lot, but it's obviously not true. Google Photos is recent, really good, and had more than a billion users really quickly. Waymo is like a decade away from eating the entire urban taxi market. Gemini is the best LLM for writing code right now. I guess you could call these "rare exceptions" but I don't think that's a useful way to describe them.

Hell, even YouTube improves every year by leaps and bounds from both a revenue/profit standpoint, AND from a creator support standpoint.

Google deserves to be heckled mercilessly for how easy engineers have it there and how eager it is to kill off products, but suggesting that it's a dying company coasting on ad money is just totally wrong.
by bluGill | 2025-04-15 15:10:22+00:00
Robot drones probably are something the US should do. Access to US farms is useful for anyone making agriculture products. Remembers these drones are part of the supply chain for food, and so doing them in the US makes the supply chain closer. You want the ag drones made in small city, not Silicone valley. However your might write the software in Silicone valley - that is where you will find a supply of people who can do that - some of those people will then be making regular trips to the factory though to learn how it works.
by isusmelj | 2025-04-15 15:10:25+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Igor, co-founder of Lightly AI (https://www.lightly.ai/).

We just released LightlyTrain, a new open-source Python package (AGPL-3.0, free for research and educational purpose) for self-supervised pretraining of computer vision models: https://github.com/lightly-ai/lightly-train

Standard vision models pretrained on generic datasets like ImageNet or COCO often underperform on specific domains (e.g., medical, agriculture, autonomous driving). Fine-tuning helps, but performance is limited, and getting enough labeled data is expensive and slow.

LightlyTrain uses self-supervised learning (SSL) to pretrain models directly on your own unlabeled images or videos. This adapts the model to your specific visual domain before fine-tuning, leading to significantly better performance with less labeled data.

Key Features:

- No Labels Needed: Pretrain using your existing unlabeled image data.

- Better Performance: Consistently outperforms training from scratch and ImageNet-pretrained weights, especially in low-data regimes and domain-specific tasks (benchmarks in README/blog). We see gains across detection, classification, and segmentation.

- Domain Adaptation: Tailor models to your specific industry (manufacturing, healthcare, retail, etc.).

- Supports Popular Models: Works out-of-the-box with YOLO (v5-v12), RT-DETR, ResNet, ViTs, etc., integrating with frameworks like Ultralytics, TIMM, Torchvision.

- Easy to Use & Scalable: Simple pip install, minimal code to start, scales to millions of images, runs fully on-premise (single/multi-GPU). We built this because while SSL research is mature, making it easily accessible and effective for industry computer vision teams was hard. LightlyTrain aims to bridge that gap.

We’ve benchmarked it on COCO, BDD100K (driving), DeepLesion (medical), and DeepWeeds (agriculture), showing strong improvements over baselines (details in the repo/blog post linked below). For example, on COCO with only 10% labels, LightlyTrain pretraining boosted YOLOv8-s mAP by +14% over ImageNet weights and +34% over no pretraining.

- GitHub Repo: https://github.com/lightly-ai/lightly-train

- Docs: https://docs.lightly.ai/train

- Detailed Blog Post/Benchmarks: https://www.lightly.ai/blog/introducing-lightly-train

- Quick Demo Video: https://youtu.be/5Lmry1k_cA8

We’re here to answer any questions! Happy to discuss the tech, benchmarks, or use cases. Commercial licenses are also available for businesses needing different terms.
by rpcope1 | 2025-04-15 15:10:30+00:00
No, I had the exact same thoughts. I personally find it crazy to think that you'd buy something (that isn't an explicit perishable or consumable) and intentionally buy something shoddy or discard it after only a few weeks.

With regards to clothing, I'm kind of glad the market for cheap shit from sweatshops is getting a beating, as I'm tired of seeing fewer and fewer legitimately durable clothing items. We need more union shops like Carhartt's (which only makes a few things anymore) building nice durable clothing. God knows a good pure cotton duck jacket or pants are both better for the environment (no petroleum products for synthetic materials and longer life) and frankly a better investment when they last years or at least months under the hardest abuse.
by chermi | 2025-04-15 15:10:37+00:00
What?!

Nvidia is valuably precisely because the software, which is also why AMD is not so valuable. CUDA matters a lot (though that might become less true soon). And Nvidia's CUDA/software forward thinking most certainly predated AGI FOMO and that is the CAUSE of them doing so well with this "AI boom".

It's also not wildly overvalued, purely on a forward PE basis.*

I do wonder about the LLM focus, specifically whether we're designing hardware too much for LLM at the cost of other ML/scientific computing workflows, especially the focus on low precision ops.

But.. 1) I don't know how a company like Nvidia could feasibly not focus on designing for LLM in the midst of this craziness and not be sued by shareholders for negligence or something 2) they're able to roll out new architectures with great improvements, especially in memory, on a 2 year cycle! I obviously don't know the counterfactual, but I think without the LLM craze, the hypothetical generation of GPU/compute chips would be behind where they are now.

I think it's possible AMD is undervalued. I've been hoping forever they'd somehow catch up on software. They do very well in server business, and if Intel continues fucking up as much as they have been, AMD will own CPU/servers. I also think what deepseek has done may convince people it's worth it programming closer to the hardware, somewhat weakening Nvidias software moat.

*Of course, it's possible I'm not discounting enough for the geopolitical risk.
by 9rx | 2025-04-15 15:10:37+00:00
> If you’re not changing your mind, it’s likely you’re not actually having an argument

If you've made up your mind (even if, theoretically, it could be changed) why would you have an argument about it in the first place? Discussing the already settled is rather boring. Unless one is grandstanding for some other purpose, people move on once they've made up their mind. They don't keep exploring the same ideas over and over and over again once they've settled.

Argument is there to explore that to which you have not yet made a mind. Your mind won't change because there is no basis on which to change from.
by crowcroft | 2025-04-15 15:11:00+00:00
Advertising on the whole is not recession proof[1], although in the last two dips Google showed growth in ad revenue[2], and Meta was relatively stable[3].

The first thing that gets cut is 'new channels' and experiments (read: channels that have bad measurable ROI). Pinterest, X, Snap.

After that it's the most 'wasteful' brand spending/high cost per reach broadcast media that gets cut. Cinema, local TV, and increasingly nationwide TV.

Then when the economy comes back to growth there's a broader recalibration of budgets.

Because Google search has a very simple, easy to understand impact on sales they actually grew faster in recessions. Then when the recession ends brands don't see any reason to cut that spending.

1 - https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu... 2- https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... 3 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
by im3w1l | 2025-04-15 15:11:05+00:00
So here is an amusing thought experiment I thought of at one point.

Imagine a very high resolution screen. Say a billion by a billion pixels. Each of them can be white, gray or black. What is the lowest entropy possible? Each of the pixels has the same color. How does the screen look? Gray. What is the highest entropy possible? Each pixel has a random color. How does it look from a distance? Gray again.

What does this mean? I have no idea. Maybe nothing.

Also sorry for writing two top level comments, but I just really care about this topic
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-15 15:11:22+00:00
The vast majority of humans have better things to do with their life than figure out how to secure their personal network.

Sure. But this doesn't have to be an either/or choice.

It's possible to make it easy for those willing to surrender all privacy and control without making it impossible for those who don't.

Example: Amcrest cameras are just fine with being restricted to the local network. If you ask nicely and order direct, they'll even give you a discount.

https://amcrest.com/
by jeffbee | 2025-04-15 15:11:28+00:00
I know I have repeatedly emphasized this fundamental problem in various conversations lately, but it is a fatal flaw of our system of laws, which is stupid and broken and exists only in former English colonies. Under our hallowed and majestic system, a person has to gain standing to ask the court for relief, which often means the easily foreseeable bad thing has to have already happened to them.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-15 15:11:28+00:00
> rooting for the USG to remain the calcified, corrupt, bloated, and morally bankrupt

So it’s better to make it less efficient and more expensive? I know two people who were DOGE’d and asked to come back. Both are getting 4x what they earned before as contractors.

Cutting USAID was probably the only coldly efficient thing DOGE has done. Everything else has just been stupid and ineffective.
by skifreevictim | 2025-04-15 15:11:55+00:00
For all of its many flaws and the boatload of trouble that has come of it, I still ultimately believe that 4chan is unfairly maligned.

I can't deny that the majority of the website's culture has been tainted by idpol bickering ever since /pol/ was added to it, but I'm always going to appreciate 4chan for being a place where I can write ostensibly anonymous posts and talk with other likeminded people about anything and everything. When you have a funny, good faith conversation with someone else on a website that gives you no incentive whatsoever to have one, it feels good.

Soyjak.st is unfortunately nothing like that. It is a website about itself, and itself is a parody of post-2014 rightwing 4chan meme slop culture. It is earnestly what most people believe the entirety of 4chan to be.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-15 15:11:59+00:00
Tan is not especially conservative; he, like others, has witnessed a failure to address those social issues turn SF into a dump. There is a great difference between noticing the same objective problems as some Trump supporters - which are nigh impossible not to if one does live in SF - and supporting the same solutions. There is also a difference between the same underlying values and worldview and being willing to consider some of those solutions because the progressive options have spectacularly failed.

PG is not someone I'd consider remotely right-wing. I periodically see tweets of his surface and he seems strongly opposed to the current administration.
by XorNot | 2025-04-15 15:12:04+00:00
A lot of the war stuff gets framed in very odd terms. If you want a local defence industry then pay for it. Enforce component sovereignty requirements... Which everyone already does. Then actually react to reports which call out the gaps and pay to close them.

This bizzare "we'll bring back manufacturing and be ready all the time" thing seems to imagine you'll just turn the local widget maker over to knocking out high temperature stealth composites for hypersonic missiles real quick.

Which is of course the story of a lot of American manufacturing: it's hard to get a hobby run of PCBs because all the PCB makers are optimized for large orders for defence procurement (and the clearance, supply line and stuff requirements that brings).
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-15 15:12:38+00:00
Of course. I remember reading transcripts of Cristopher Poole cooperating in court during a trial. He used to straight up tell users he would fully cooperate with authorities if required. Nobody there is in the business of going to jail.

You're anonymous to other users. Unless you're behind seven proxies, connecting your posts to your real identity is as simple as correlating 4chan logs with ISP logs. Usually that requires court orders so it tends to happen in response to real offenses. Insulting each other with slurs isn't enough for a court order so it's fine. Chances are the NSA knows all your posts regardless.
by ziml77 | 2025-04-15 15:12:40+00:00
It only shows what people are buying, not what they want to buy. Cheap crap might sell a ton because it's cheap and listed at the top of the search results. Which then feeds into it being kept at the top of the search results. A lot of times if the item is cheap enough people don't bother with returns and rather just throw the item out, something that will go completely unseen by the metrics.

Ratings are also not very helpful because they are manipulated in a variety of ways. Things like bots/mechanical turks, putting offers in the package to give people money back if they rate the item 5 stars, or hijacking a well rated product listing by changing it later or taking advantage of item variants system.

So, I very much don't trust any of their data myself.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-15 15:12:52+00:00
The tribunal states that one of his infractions was publishing a letter he received telling him to stop dissenting.

> Also why would a conspiracy forbid people to talk about something

It's not a conspiracy if there's no attempt to keep it secret, is it?

The fact that some conspiracies are sometimes detected due to mistakes or whistleblowers doesn't mean their attempts at secrecy were useless. Presumably there are conspiracies that are never detected, but even if they are, secrecy and intimidation tactics still have value to the conspirators. Look at this very thread: it's full of people baffled that anyone might not trust their doctor. But if doctors are being forced to toe the line and not reveal that they're being so forced, then you aren't trusting a doctor, you're trusting someone in the licensing authority or public health agencies - very different.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-15 15:12:59+00:00
You started out by saying 99% of web code is IO, then casually dropped down to 70-80%, as if that was the same thing. 20-30% of a huge codebase is still a significant amount.

I've never said IO is irrelevant to web applications. But that in my experience, those 20-30% or whatever can be important, complex and time intensive (the Word generation was actually one od the most time consuming parts of the last application I worked on) enough that fencing them off from the side effecting code in some way can pay off (one way to do this without going fully PFP is outlined here: https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2025/fp_lessons_purity/#fp-pur...).

> First one looks like meta programming. IO. You are programming something else.

I don't understand what you're saying. I was working on a document management system whose contents were stored in tree structures. These structures routinely had to be transformed into other structures. That's a very algorithmic task where the IO can be fenced off very easily (and should be fenced off if only for the sake of easier unit testing). This was literally one of the most common things happening in the codebase.

> Chatbots are high IO.

in the sense that every useful program has IO. Otherwise, there's a whole bunch of transformations and intent recognition and skill dispatch and what not that happens between the request and the response, and that can happen entirely in memory on one machine (it can also be offloaded wholly or in part to an external service like Amazon Lex, it depends on the use case, but even in the case where we used Lex we ran a bunch of manual transforms on the output for postprocessing).

> The modern day method of coding these servers is to be non blocking as much as possible.

Recent developments (e.g. virtual threads coming to Java) seem to indicate otherwise. Blocking code and non-blocking code are both valid for different types of scenarios. And offloading tasks asynchronously to a task runner doesn't mean that the code running those tasks doesn't have to be written.

---

I really do think we've just worked on very different types of applications, and I just reiterate my point from above (and from the blogpost): There are enough use cases where clearly fencing off IO from algorithmic code pays off. If it doesn't for your use case, then don't do it.