MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imgdetect | 2025-04-30 01:53:53+00:00
Hey HN

I recently launched an iOS app called ImgDetect — a lightweight tool that helps users detect whether an image is AI-generated (deepfake or synthetic) in just a few seconds. With the growing use of tools like Midjourney, DALL·E, and Stable Diffusion, I felt there was a need for a simple, privacy-focused mobile solution.

How it works:

Combines artifact analysis with deep learning-based pattern detection

Works offline with no data stored

Designed for journalists, content creators, and everyday users

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ai-image-detector-imgdetect/id...

What I need help with:

What are effective, non-paid channels to grow early traction for niche utility apps like this?

Any suggestions on alternative monetization strategies for freemium tools?

Has anyone experimented with cross-promoting through newsletters, open-source tools, or communities?

Happy to share more about the tech stack or data model if anyone’s curious. Appreciate your thoughts and suggestions!

Thanks — ImgDetect dev
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-30 01:54:04+00:00
It's still an example of a lever.

He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
by imgdetect | 2025-04-30 01:54:47+00:00
Thanks for checking out the post!

A few additional details I didn’t fit in the main post:

The app currently supports JPEG/PNG images and can detect common generative signatures from models like Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, and Midjourney.

We're experimenting with a small batch upload feature for journalists to verify multiple images at once.

I'm a solo developer, so all feedback and ideas are super appreciated.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-30 01:54:56+00:00
What part of oligarch is hard to translate into sufficient amount of evidence that does not require me to prove that 1000 million dollars might result in an ability to wield influence that a a simple individual like meself would consider mildly outsized? At this point it is like gravity. You don't have to believe it. It is just is.
by godelski | 2025-04-30 01:54:58+00:00
IDK what SEO mills and all that have to do with any of this. What other people do doesn't matter. It's something is bad then it doesn't make it not bad because other people do it and do it worse. There's no logic in that framing.

I'm not sure who you think is a fool, me or you. But either way, I don't find your rhetoric acceptable. I explained why I think the title significantly diverges from the content of the article. You're welcome to disagree but that argument will have nothing to do with SEO mills. It's insulting you'd think I'd accept such a silly retort. We're not comparing here, we're categorizing.
by amoshebb | 2025-04-30 01:55:34+00:00
This “if cars were synced all would be well” fantasy assumes that the limited gains from scrunching won’t be a rounding error compared to the nearly unlimited additional trips that robots with infinite patience could start making.

Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”
by walterbell | 2025-04-30 01:58:07+00:00
https://archive.is/4f3Qe

2020, https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-untold-story-of-t...

> This telling of the HBC starts in London, the epicentre of the British Empire. It starts there because although the story of the HBC is a Canadian story, it’s a transnational one, too. It’s the story of an English company claiming and helping to colonize huge swathes of North America, inhabited by sovereign Indigenous nations. From London parlours to Cree communities to the U.S. Senate, it’s a story that connects Canadian history to world history — to the demands of European consumers, the decisions of English officials, the aspirations of Scottish traders and the futures of diverse Indigenous Peoples... the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company is a global story for our global era.

1670-2025 timeline, https://storeys.com/hudsons-bay-company-history-timeline/
by huimang | 2025-04-30 02:00:09+00:00
Every human learns a language from birth; there's no inherent reason why learning a second one "can't be for everyone".

The thing is that it requires a lot of time and studying. At least 30 mins per day is the bare minimum, but 1-3 is much better for results.

I don't personally feel like language learning is easier for me than other people. I just focused on putting the time and studying in diligently over many years.
by ggm | 2025-04-30 02:01:05+00:00
It never made much sense to me. How statistically "an hour" came out, probably relates to overall survivability at the time it was loosely defined, and with improvements to care, it's now clearer how many prior "they didn't survive" might have, given more immediate care.

Richard Holmes worked from the tallies WW1 Surgeons had to complete, documenting how battlefield dressing stations and rear echelon surgery worked in those days and it was pretty awful. But there are remarkable tales of resilience and survival right the way back to Waterloo.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-04-30 02:02:25+00:00
In the [exec][1] family of POSIX functions, if the command path doesn't contain a slash, then it's looked up in the PATH.

> If the file argument contains a slash character, the file argument shall be used as the pathname for this file. Otherwise, the path prefix for this file is obtained by a search of the directories passed as the environment variable PATH [...]

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/ex...
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-04-30 02:05:31+00:00
I hate peoples unrealistic expectations of AI but also find Bing CoPilot to be really useful.

Instead of structuring a Google query in an attempt to find a relevant page filled with ads, I just ask Copilot and it gives a fully digested answer that satisfied my question.

What surprises me is that it needs very little context.

If I ask ‘ Linux "sort" command line for sorting the third column containing integers’, it replies with “ sort -k3,3n filename” along with explanations and extensions for tab separated columns.
by atrus | 2025-04-30 02:08:12+00:00
We really need models that produce intermediate files. A .blend, a whole godot project, an actual krita/psd file.

Things like this product such cool things....all the way up until you need to move a specific tree half a meter to the left, and then you're either stuck in some prompt/seed hell or have to open an abomination of a file in an editor.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-30 02:08:27+00:00
The title is nonsense. PATH is the name of an environment variable (a Real Thing(TM)) which lists a set of directories to search for an executable. It is used by shells (including those running on Linux) to locate an executable when the full path to the executable is not supplied by the user.

This is needed because the exece()/execve() [2] kernel system call is unaware of things like environment variables so it will not have any idea how or where to execute a program 'cat' unless it is given the full path to 'cat', so the shell has to look it up (again if the user doesn't pass the full path). It's the same on every POSIX system and the original UNIXes. It's been this way for at least 50 years. (edit 60 years, it's from Multics [1])

Kids today really need to learn the fundamentals of computer operating systems. Or do that boring old-person thing we did before StackOverflow, and read all the manual pages, which tell you all this [3] [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(variable) [2] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/execve.2.html [3] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dash.1.html [4] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/intro.1.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/intro.2.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/man-pages.7.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/standards.7.html
by megous | 2025-04-30 02:08:34+00:00
Hacking here seems to have been done by others.

Anyway, speaking of hacking... check out what pocketbook creators themselves did with some of the older pocketbook models. They managed to drive eInk display panel from a normal RGB LCD interface, because they used a SoC (A13) without eInk interface. One of the weirder things I saw during my reverse-engineering adventures. :D
by V99 | 2025-04-30 02:08:41+00:00
True... `strace bash -c cat` would give more the series of stat calls they're intending to see:

newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, ".", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0700, st_size=4096, ...}, 0) = 0

newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/local/sbin/cat", 0x7fffcec2f3b8, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/local/bin/cat", 0x7fffcec2f3b8, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/sbin/cat", 0x7fffcec2f3b8, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/bin/cat", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=68536, ...}, 0) = 0
by harimau777 | 2025-04-30 02:08:46+00:00
Martial arts are not solely collections of techniques. They also contain important cultural elements, historical context, social relationships, moral standards, etc. Even at the practical level, a significant portion of what separates different styles of martial arts is not just their techniques but also their mentality.

All of that would be extremely difficult to capture via AI.

The older and more experienced I get, the more I've come to believe that the non-technical aspects of the martial arts are essential and neglecting them can produce negative consequences.
by kajecounterhack | 2025-04-30 02:09:09+00:00
> They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.

Full agreement here. AVs are great for last-mile transit.

> horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains

This is where we disagree. The whole point of AV TaaS is that they can go where bus lanes and trains can't. Last mile transportation.

I also wouldn't say they do "jack shit" for traffic in the sense that they reduce the need for parking, and reduce accidents which are the source of a lot of unpredictable congestion.

Surely there are tradeoffs. They indirectly incentivize sprawl and taking more taxi rides overall. And I get the tire residue argument (especially since AV fleets are mostly electric with high torque generating more tire wear). But is tire noise really a fair complaint? They're just going where cars already go and tires are engineered pretty well to minimize noise...
by esafak | 2025-04-30 02:09:13+00:00
Thiel speaks from the perspective of the monopolist, pithily condensed to 'competition is for losers'. Any product involves a set of trade-offs, and decisions. It is not a law of nature that the monopoly product makes trade-offs everyone, or even anyone, is happy with: people could identify ways the product could be improved. But under a monopoly they can't vote with their wallets. Consider Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. They were, realistically speaking, the only game in town. What efficiency did their monopoly help achieve, and why did it justify the stifling of choice? Maximizing efficiency is a more tenable argument when the product is undifferentiated, which is not the case in technology.
by mmooss | 2025-04-30 02:10:08+00:00
That hypothesis goes back to Trump's first election. I think it appeals to fears and stereotypes that working-class white people are fundamentally racist and don't care about democracy and freedom, which is why it makes a strong impression - people remember it and repeat it. IIRC, the data from the elections doesn't support it (but I don't have the data).

I think Trump's real powerbase is a wealthy elite, including those who have great influence over the business world and, most critically, over the flow of information, including on Facebook, Instagram, and X.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-30 02:11:15+00:00
Google is turning into Alta Vista right before our eyes!

I have replaced Google with Perplexity. It backs up every answer with links, so I find it to be more trustable than ChatGPT.

Perplexity also keeps their index current, so you're not getting answers from the world as it existed 10 months ago. (ChatGPT says its knowledge cutoff is June 2024, Perplexity says its search index includes results up to April 29, 2025, and to prove it, it gives me the latest news.)
by TZubiri | 2025-04-30 02:11:19+00:00
I understand that they are products from different genereations, but there's also a incumbent/contender effect. Google's main goal isn't to grow or provide the best quality, but to monetize, while ChatGPT is early in its lifespan and focuses on losing money to gain users, and doesn't monetize a lot yet (no ads, at-cost or at-loss subscriptions).

Another effect is that Google has already been targetted for a lot of abuse, with SEO, backlinks, etc.. ChatGPT did not yet have many successful attempts at manipulating the essence of the mechanism to advertise by third parties.

Finally, ChatGPT is designed to parasite off of the Web/Google, it shows the important information without the organic ads. If a law firm puts out information on the law and real estate regulations, Google shows the info, but also the whole website for the law firm and the logo and motto and navbar with other info and Call To Actions. ChatGPT cuts all that out.

So while I don't deny that there is a technological advancement, there is a major component to quality here that is just based of n+1 white-label parasitism.
by vitus | 2025-04-30 02:12:03+00:00
> There's literally no machine on Earth today that can deal with that (as a single file, I mean).

Oh? Certainly not in RAM, but 4 PiB is about 125x 36TiB drives (or 188x 24TiB drives). (You can go bigger if you want to shell out tens of thousands per 100TB SSD, at which point you "only" need 45 of those drives.)

These are numbers such that a purpose-built server with enough SAS expanders could easily fit that within a single rack, for less than $100k (based on the list price of an Exos X24 before even considering any bulk discounts).
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-30 02:12:08+00:00
> confirmed that “up to 77.5% of passwords,” created this way can be “cracked using a 30% common-word dictionary subset.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this mean that up to 77.5% of passwords known to be exactly three words can be cracked using a 30% common-word dictionary subset?
by _heimdall | 2025-04-30 02:12:15+00:00
Judging which party had power by outcomes is much more effective than only consider political seats. Going back at least to the beginning of Obama the major changes pushed through have heavily favored Democratic policies rather than Republican.

Gay marriage, reversing don't ask don't tell, and the ACA are all policies that the Republicans were very opposed to. The overturning of Roe v Wade is the only major Republican win I can think of (maybe I missed some), though that is a decades old fight and one that in my opinion Democrats setup for failure by never pushing it passed a single supreme court ruling.

Political power follows culture, and for the recent past the majority public opinion has generally supported Democratic policies over Republican ones. That's changed.

The last time the parties flipped was in the 70s and 80s. I was only alive for the tail end of that and paying no attention to politics, but my understanding is that the pattern was generally the same. At that time they flipped names as well, many democrats of the era moved over to the republican party. Maybe we'll see that again in the near future, but for now it seems like both parties are happier to keep the same brands while switch many view points (big business vs workers, state rights issues, limits on the executive branch, etc)
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-30 02:12:45+00:00
On Linux the main boundary between user space and kernel is quite clear: the system call layer. It is stable and well documented.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

System libraries like glibc are not part of the kernel, they are just components that can be replaced.

I wrote an article about it:

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls

I even asked Greg Kroah-Hartman about it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/fx5e4v/im_greg_kroah...

> So we rely on different libc projects to provide this, and work with them when needed.

> This ends up being more flexible as there are different needs from a libc, and for us to "pick one" wouldn't always be fair.

> And yes, you can just use a "nolibc" type implementation of you like.

> I know I do that for new syscalls when working on them, there's nothing stopping anyone else from doing that as well.

You can trash the entire GNU system and rewrite it all in Rust or Lisp if you wanted. It doesn't have to be some POSIX-like thing either, it could be whatever you wanted it to be. It doesn't need to have things like PATH. You could write a static freestanding application and boot Linux directly into it.

Nobody does stuff like this it's a lifetime of work. But it could be done.
by rayiner | 2025-04-30 02:13:54+00:00
> To the greatest extent possible, it should not be value-based. Politics is value-based, and it has priority over economics when it comes to making decisions. But if your politics is "we need more manufacturing in the US" then you should listen to economists in pursuit of that goal.

I agree with this completely. But I think most economists simply disagree with this goal and aren’t thinking of ways to advance the goal. So we’re stuck with tariffs, which at least is something we have used in the past to support industry.

I would posit that this attitude is at the root of a lot of the distrust of and consternation at experts. If people say: “we want a society with more manufacturing/fewer immigrants/etc.,” the expert response is “you’re stupid to want that.” They’re not thinking of ways to leverage their expertise in service of those outcomes.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-04-30 02:14:21+00:00
I did this today and Grok led me to make an embarrassingly wrong comment (Grok stated "Rust and Java, like C/C++ mentioned by Sebastian Aaltonen, leave argument evaluation order unspecified" - I now know this is wrong and both are strict left-to-right). ChatGPT gets it correct. But I think we're still in the "check the references" stage.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-30 02:14:42+00:00
> Some democrats only realized it 8 months ago

This is some wild revisionist history. Democrats have been sounding off about Musk for years. He endorsed Trump way back in 2020. Nobody is learning anything new about him. On the contrary, everyone is dug in with how they feel about him because it's too late to do anything about it, so they might as well pretend everything is fine.
by tzs | 2025-04-30 02:14:49+00:00
Note that if your hybrid is a plug-in hybrid then you might get the best of both worlds.

On long road trips you get the fast re-energizing of a gas car.

For regular use if your plug in every night there is a good chance you can do most of your driving in EV mode. Current plug-in hybrids often have EV mode ranges of 40+ miles.

This is what someone I know with a RAV4 Prime reports. They plug in at night and it seems to mostly use the battery. It does sometime use the ICE but it is infrequently enough that they have only had to put more gas in every few months.
by fuoqi | 2025-04-30 02:14:52+00:00
>we adjust for inflation

Using a very debatable inflation metric (e.g. should deflationary technological advancements in electronics manufacturing boost the "real GDP" metric?), which is quite muted (even with the post-COVID spike!) on top of that because of the "exorbitant privilege".

>that's not how it works

Suuuure. The recent examples of collusion between banks, the government, and the central bank to quickly increase amount of base money is not outright "money printing", just benign "quantitative easing", nothing to see here.

>crowding out

This works only when government engages in "fair" and competitive debt issuance. But we see a different picture, government bonds are counted as bank reserves and even worse banks do not even have to apply the mark-to-market accounting rules for them in some cases. And everyone knows that the Fed immediately will ride to the rescue on the first sign of trouble in the bond market as was done during not-QE.

>reckless fiscal policy alone doesn't "manipulate the GPD values"

Alone? No. But it certainly boosts GDP (both real and nominal) in the near term and makes the economy look better than it really is. It's the same story as in China where they had massive "infrastructure investments" to artificially stimulate the economy and make GDP numbers look good. We can see in the real time how it unravels.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-30 02:15:02+00:00
> > Using Google during rounds is technically cheating - I’m unsure about visiting domains you find during the rounds though. It certainly violates the spirit of the game, but it also shows the models are smart enough to use whatever information they can to win

Going off of the source article here, the author at least wasn't clear on whether the rules only prevent using google or if visiting any website is against the rules.

And either way, my point was that the person defining the rules to the LLM was ambiguous. The potential risk of misalignment isn't that a perfect set of rules can't be defined, its that the rules we do define will always be incomplete.
by timoth3y | 2025-04-30 02:18:03+00:00
Even though I understand LLMs penchant for hallucination, I tend to trust them more than I should when I am busy and/or dealing with "non-critical" information.

I'm wondering if ChatGPT (and similar products) will mimic social media as a vector of misinformation and confirmation bias.

LMMs are very clearly not that today, but social media didn't start out anything like the cesspool it has become.

There are a great many ways that being the trusted source of customized, personalized truth can be monetized, but I think very few would be good for society.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-04-30 02:19:02+00:00
> Doing real development work, i.e. compiling, testing, debugging, is very cumbersome in a remote environment.

it really isn’t? Of course it depends on the ecosystem. But for jvm for example you literally just expose your debugging port 5005 out of the container and boom step through, and other live debugging works just as well as outside of the container. And as of course you allude to, if you’re native you are facing a “works on my machine” problem unless you are all in on a hermetic and reproducible solution like bazel or nix. And chances are unless you are having that crack team of 10xers that a good hunk of your dev user base are going to struggle with the complexity and general ecosystem issues with these two solutions.

You’ve probably seen the worst world where people do containers wrong. And a lot of people do them wrong. But it’s pretty easy to learn how to do them right. Someone can study multi stage docker builds for half a day and write perfectly fast, cached first containerized builds. Proper buildkit cached local containers are extremely fast.

There’s other ways of course, each with their own tradeoffs. You can do everything in nix, and now you are spending your time fighting with nix. You can do everything in bazel and now you are spending time fighting with bazel. In the end your stuff is gonna go into a container anyway (for most people). You still need to understand the container technology because of that. so why not both reduce your toolchain sprawl and simultaneously recreate that exact environment on the local machine?