MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by poidos | 2025-04-05 18:29:16+00:00
Glad to see this, been noodling on it for a long time. My crazy proposal is to make advertising illegal, in the US... by nationalizing Craigslist. USList or some such.

No more billboards, no more ads on TV or radio or podcasts or when you're on a plane or when you're in an Uber and they have that screen. No more ads in something you've already paid for a la newspapers.

You want to advertise to, say, all the people in Arkansas? You have to pay them directly to post your ad on Arkansas USList. Want to target further? Great, you have to pay the county to post on their board. Then, people that want to see your ads can go to their local board, filter by their interests, and maybe see your ad. Want to target all the electricians in a county? Their union runs a board and you can pay them.

Cities/counties/states/${localeType}s could opt to, say, issue an advertising dividend to their residents.

My definition of advertising is the unwanted stealing of your attention by someone who wants you to buy something. Or be aware of something you could buy. It takes you out of a context you have put yourself in, stealing your attention (and therefore your time, which is all we really have in this life).

My stupid USList idea flips this on its head by making it possible to only see ads when you want to.

Movie trailers when you're at the cinema are ads, sure. But they are ads that fit the context you've put yourself in. If you're at the theater, it makes sense for the playbill to list other shows. If you're at a restaurant, the list of specials, or a wine recommended by your server are both appropriate. Even a list of specials or deals in the window of a restaurant, as long as it isn't 100x100ft and illuminaated, is fine by me.

But an LED billboard distracting you with a 2-for-1 meal deal as you drive down the freeway is out of your context (and dangerous! and needlessly polluting!) When we consider the tracking and spying that has become possible thanks to online advertising companies like Google, Facebook, etc... it's scary. And entirely needless.

Like I said, I've been noodling on this for a while and am definitely the crazy anti-advertising guy in my circles. But once I point out the prevalence of ads and how it's like being kicked in the knees all day, I've found people seem to start getting it. I've done more than a few pihole + wireguard installs, UBlock origin + Sponsorblock installs, etc.

Fuck ads.
by danillonunes | 2025-04-05 18:29:18+00:00
It doesn't, but I have a gut feeling that it may impact the prices for new rents in some unexpected ways. For example, people who are living in a rent controlled place may be less likely to leave, this may impact the supply/demand ratio (relatively to the total) and affect the market. Also the apartment owners are aware of the rent control law and so they may try to increase the initial price to try to compensate for it.
by logicchains | 2025-04-05 18:29:36+00:00
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

No it wouldn't. If someone opens up a new restaurant a block away there's not going to be much word of mouth when it just opened, and even if they make a website, web search will prioritise the websites of existing restaurants because their domains have been around longer and have more inbound links.
by galangalalgol | 2025-04-05 18:29:37+00:00
People who pay for consumer research type services. "I want a general-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax that compiles to native code. It should be statically typed and supports both automatic (garbage collected) and manual memory management." One micro payment later I have a list of links and reviews. In this case the research is the product instead of me.
by georgelyon | 2025-04-05 18:29:38+00:00
The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product.

There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.
by hedayet | 2025-04-05 18:30:05+00:00
Theoretically: yes.

Realistically: no, you can’t stop big companies from advertising. Just having multiple shops bearing your logo gives you a level of brand recognition that’s hard to beat. Even if no one advertised, they’d still find ways to dominate the conversation and outshine competitors through sheer presence. You’re right that it becomes a kind of arms race, but in practice, trying to "opt out" often means falling behind.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-05 18:30:17+00:00
> I thought Ford was caught doing cute things to avoid the chicken tax by converting vans to trucks

Regulators don't take kindly to those kinds of shenanigans.

Ford had to pay $365M in fines [0] for that stunt (which is around 6% of their yearly net income - painful in a low margins industry like car manufacturing).

Volkswagen tried something similar in India as well and now needs to pay $2.5-3 Billion (17% of their year net income) as a result.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-p...
by timewizard | 2025-04-05 18:31:09+00:00
> So at this point it does not matter what you believe about LLMs: in general, to trust LeCun words is not a good idea.

One does not follow from the other. In particular I don't "trust" anyone who is trying to make money off this technology. There is way more marketing than honest science happening here.

> and o3 did huge progresses on ARC,

It also cost huge money. The cost increase to go from 75% to 85% was two orders of magnitude greater. This cost scaling is not sustainable. It also only showed progress on ARC1, which it was trained for, and did terribly on ARC2 which it was not trained for.

> Btw, other researchers that were in the LeCun side, changed side recently,

Which "side" researchers are on is the least useful piece of information available.
by branperr | 2025-04-05 18:31:25+00:00
Caesar cypher +7

Zv tf buklyzahukpun, ha slhza pu QZ dolyl P't mhtpsphy, pz aoha pa dvbsk il. Ylhzvu ilpun pz aoha Zla jhu lzzluaphssf il hu Hyyhf, dopjo pz h mbujavy: jvuza zlaThw = (zla) => (mu) => uld Zla(zla.rlfz().thw(mu))

Mvy vaoly shunbhnlz, P'k nblzz aopz klwlukz vu pm fvb jhu palyhal vu paz lsltluaz.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-05 18:31:27+00:00
>Roomba is exactly what happens when you make a good product, get a good lead and then fill the company with MBAs and think you'll coast along on name alone instead of innovations.

Same with the big German car brands. They put MBAs at the helm in the 90's who outsourced all their tech innovation development to suppliers to lower costs thinking their history, prestige and brand names alone will carry them into the future, and now the Chinese are out-innovating them.

Similar with Intel. When you reach that point it's often too late to turn it round as you're now a sclerotic bloated organization, full off people who coasted and failed upwards for decades and made sure to hire other people just like them.
by hedayet | 2025-04-05 18:31:29+00:00
> That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents.

That's a bit of a strawman argument.

> ...Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything.

I agree - some reform is necessary. The current system often exacerbates the imbalance, but completely dismissing advertising ignores its potential role in leveling the playing field for smaller players when done responsibly.
by djoldman | 2025-04-05 18:32:03+00:00
In the communications industry there are SOME fairly bright definitions:

- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content

- Public relations is when an entity, without paying, causes another entity to transmit content

- Public affairs is when an entity causes a governmental entity to consume specific content at minimum, up to possibly influencing decisions. It should go without saying that this is without paying as well, otherwise it's corruption/bribery
by kiicia | 2025-04-05 18:32:30+00:00
Ad business stopped to be necessary and started to be almost exclusively evil years ago. If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you, something is clearly wrong. 100 years ago ads were indeed ways of discovering products and services. But now ads are almost exclusively battlefields for more and more money paid for by consumers’ anxiety, wellbeing and health when ads are more and more dishonest and hostile.
by bofadeez | 2025-04-05 18:32:45+00:00
"Congress shall MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

What part of that are you confused by? You are making a brash claim that the writ of the state includes the ability to censor speech.

Your right to free speech is not granted by anyone. It's your natural right. It's not possible to separate this right from a human with a law.
by ninkendo | 2025-04-05 18:34:21+00:00
Fun experiment, try and benchmark a simple file download on a simple web server using rocket.rs (which also uses tokio and hyper, and has a built in fileserver type, so just a few lines of code) and compare it to a vanilla nginx config.

Here’s the rocket.rs source I used:

#[rocket::main] async fn main() -> Result<(), rocket::Error> { rocket::build() .mount("/", rocket::fs::FileServer::from("/tmp/test")) .ignite() .await? .launch() .await?; Ok(()) }

And do `mkdir /tmp/test && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/test/bigfile bs=1G count1` to create a 1G file, and run `time curl -o /dev/null localhost:8000/bigfile`.

My nginx config:

worker_processes auto; master_process off; pid /dev/null; events {} http { sendfile on; access_log /dev/stdout; error_log /dev/stderr; server { listen 8089; server_name localhost; root /tmp/test; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ =404; } } }

launched with `nginx -c "$(pwd)"/nginx.conf -g "daemon off;"`

The results for a 1GB file for me on an nvme ssd, averaged over 100 runs:

nginx: 150ms rocket: 4 seconds

Or roughly 25x slower. Release mode makes no difference.

You can definitely write slow code in rust if you’re naive about reading/writing between channels a few kilobytes at a time, which is what rocket does, vs using sendfile(2), like nginx does.

Edit: These numbers were from a few months ago... I tried it again by just pasting the above into a new project with `cargo init` and adding rocket and tokio to my deps, and it's now 2.3s in debug and 1.2s in release mode. It may have improved since a few months ago, but it's still 10x slower.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-05 18:34:25+00:00
I have not followed all of LeCun's past statements, but -

if the "core belief" is that the LLM architecture cannot be the way to AGI, that is more of an "educated bet", which does not get falsified when LLMs improve but still suggest their initial faults. If seeing that LLMs seem constrained in the "reactive system" as opposed to a sought "deliberative system" (or others would say "intuitive" vs "procedural" etc.) was an implicit part of the original "core belief", then it still stands in spite of other improvements.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-05 18:35:01+00:00
I’m not convinced by the argument that it shouldn’t be considered free speech. What exactly we mean by a private place… I dunno, but I definitely feel like I’m “going to” content, even if it is just digitally, when I’m on a phone. So, it doesn’t feel like they are invading my privacy. It is an annoying person in public, usually protected unless they are violent.

In terms of “let’s try this surprising new change in the laws,” I’d rather see it become illegal to collect a lot of information about people. Maybe we can consider what Facebook/Google and data brokers do something like stalking.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-05 18:35:31+00:00
You can learn all that stuff by doing and looking at other people’s design, it’s a bit niche to package that up into a ln advanced language design/compiler class, everyone is making different trade offs so are focusing on different things. There also isn’t really a market for more than a few highly trained language designers and implementers, and most wind up doing different things than what they were trained for.
Show HN: Convert a sprite sheet into a GIF with one click (open source)
by getToTheChopin | 2025-04-05 18:35:39+00:00
I built a free web tool that turns sprite sheets (often used for video game character animations) into GIFs.

Upload your spritesheet image, and then use the controls to set row / column count, frame duration, and image offset margins.

The tool then converts your sprite sheet into a GIF file.

Completely free and open source (MIT license).

Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/spritesheet-to-gif

Any suggestions or feedback would be much appreciated!
by mzajc | 2025-04-05 18:35:40+00:00
> Error 405 Slovenian users must use proxy.

The project sounds interesting, but I can't see what it's about because they've apparently blacklisted (?) my entire country.

ETA: Looks like this is just a news article. Perhaps linking the (less discriminatory) primary source would be a better idea: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/overt/gallery/
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-05 18:35:55+00:00
This exactly. My four-year-old i9 effectively does not work. It can't complete a single run without getting stuck on something, complaining about the container being full (it's not), complaining about the base being full (it's not), not being able to empty the container into the base (and making a huge racket with the repeated attempts), or many other things. If I fix one of the issues, it'll soon find something else to complain about.

After twenty years of owning robot vacuums, this is the worst one yet.

I switched to a Roborock a few months ago, and so far, this is genuinely the first robot vacuum I've owned that works 99% of the time. It barely ever gets stuck on things and requires very little maintenance. The maintenance it does require is easy to do and clearly explained.

Perhaps it'll start to break down in a year or so, but so far, so good.
by adiabatichottub | 2025-04-05 18:36:21+00:00
At first I scoffed at this idea, but then I had a tangential thought: what keeps me shopping at Amazon or ebay all the time instead of smaller retailers? It's not product quality or selection, that's for sure. It's mostly the friction of signing up for another site, entering my payment and shipping information, adjusting my mail filters, etc. What would really help would be complete automation of this process, where I click "Checkout", my browser goes through its workflow of asking me once if I approve, and a day or two later I get my product. So I guess if you had payment processing built into the user agent then you can have all the micro transactions you want.

So what's keeping this from being a reality?
by mc32 | 2025-04-05 18:36:25+00:00
If money exchanges hands. If you pay someone to distribute flyers, or you pay someone to run ads.

If you expect a this for that that benefits the giver. Like say a pharma offering free airfare and lodging to a medical conference if you talk up their product to patients.

There will be corner cases, obscure circumstances, unforeseen loopholes, etc., but this would be a good start.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-05 18:37:07+00:00
Pixels are well-supported in general. It helps that they're essentially Google's reference devices.

As for flashing over USB, any device can do that thanks to WebUSB. All a website needs to know are the device identifiers for ADB mode, recovery mode, and fastboot mode.

I'd say building an image capable of booting on the phone is much harder than altering the GrapheneOS installer to actually flash that image. The process is extremely similar for most devices.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-05 18:37:11+00:00
The ambiguity of these questions is a feature rather than a bug.

Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice before hawking their wares, which is exactly what we want if we intend to kill ads. The chilling effect is precisely the intention.

It’s the engineer’s curse to believe that airtight laws are automatically better, or that justice springs from mechanistic certainty. The world is fundamentally messy, and the sooner we accept its arbitrariness, the sooner we can get to an advertising-free world.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-04-05 18:37:12+00:00
The free samples are interesting. No one got mad because people offered cheese samples at the grocery store, because they're not forced to eat them. I dread passing by the perfume island when I go shopping because the vendors can be persistent, but IMO that is also not blatant advertising. Offering free samples of perfumes inside magazines also doesn't offend anyone, but that's clearly paid advertising and would be illegal.
by amarant | 2025-04-05 18:38:06+00:00
I had this idea before, but thinking about it, you very soon run into some pretty uncomfortable tradeoffs.

The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines.

Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?

You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?

I think it's a good idea, but it's gonna be quite tricky to implement well. And executing this idea poorly is potentially quite bad.

Getting it implemented at all is going to be hard: even well executed, this idea is going to have a huge impact on the economy, and people are not going to like that. This idea would be good for democracy, but ironically democracy is not good for this idea.
by stock_toaster | 2025-04-05 18:38:14+00:00
In addition to sibling commenters mentioning incentive-side (eg. paid to promote) considerations, I also propose both an "immersion" and/or "consent" component.

When you are dining, and are suggested food pairings -- I'm there to eat, so suggesting something food related from the same establishment, that may enhance my meal experience, makes sense and generally does not feel unduly interruptive. In a way, I consent to being offered additional interesting and available food items at that time and place. I would not find it acceptable if the waiter brought out a catalog and tried to sell me shoes or insurance.

In a similar way, I don't mind (and often even enjoy or appreciate) movie trailers at the beginning of movies. I'm there to watch a movie, and in a fairly non-interruptive way (before the start of the movie) I am presented with some other movies coming out soon. Nice. I consent to seeing them at the start of a movie, and they are relevant to the subject matter. I would certainly be irritated if they were hoisted upon me in the middle of the movie, or if they were about new cars coming out soon.

I have also at times been actively searching for something I need or want to purchase, but am unsure what exactly I am looking for or what are the best options. At that time I would certainly be more open and interested in seeing advertisements regarding the types of items I am interested in. I would "consent" to seeing interest based advertisements.

Summary: I do not enjoy being interrupted with advertisements completely unrelated to whatever activity I am taking part in. I only want to see them when it is related to what I am doing, AND when I consent to seeing them.
by lukan | 2025-04-05 18:39:05+00:00
I would start with obvious things, like banning distracting blinking advertisement next to roads and go further from there.

Rule of thumb, all aggressive unwanted information.

Clear? For sure not, like you said. But I am considering (rather dreaming) moving to La Palma, a vulcano island that banned all light advertisement (they did so, because of the observatories on top, but they are cool).

Still, a city without aggressive lights would be nice. Some lights are probably unavaidable in big cities, but light that is purposeful distracting, should be just banned.

And online is kind of a different beast, as we voluntarily go to the sites offering us information (but thank god and gorhill for adblockers)
by r3tr0 | 2025-04-05 18:39:43+00:00
I am the author of this blog post.

Napoleon Dynamite is one of my favorite movies. Same with Billy Madison and Austin Powers so that's what came to mind, they are classics.

I figured I had to put something in there so i wouldn't bore people to tears as it can get pretty dry pretty quickly talking about register allocation and low-level Linux kernel primitives.

Nonetheless, I hope you at least enjoyed it.
Show HN: I made an AI Platform that gamifies applying to jobs
by ironessence | 2025-04-05 18:39:48+00:00
Hi there! I've created ApplyNinja, a platform that uses AI to help jobseekers apply to jobs faster and better.

What differentiates ApplyNinja from the other "auto-apply" platforms is the trained AI model behind it. It learns from your resume and the jobs you apply to, and it provides better and better results.

Currently, it serves as a helper for the entire application process: - Track & Monitor job applications - Generates Resume suggestions and highlights the parts that are not so good - Auto-fixes and generates a new resume based on the suggestions - Creates Cover Letters based on your resume and the job description - Generates Company Insights, scraping user reviews from Glassdoor, Indeed etc. - Generates Salary Insights so jobseekers have a negotiation leverage - Generates Technical Interview Questions based on the Job Description

On top of all of this, it provides a gamified experience, because consistency is the key in applying to jobs.

Me and my friends are using it daily and manage to land approximately 5-10 interviews/month as Software Engineers.

I would really love any kind of feedback. Thank you very much!
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-05 18:39:59+00:00
I think you're still missing the distinction between "all mosquitoes" and "harmful mosquitoes". I don't think anyone is serious about eliminating mosquitoes that don't feed on humans at all, for instance. What's being proposed is more analogous to aliens eliminating particular types of lettuce because they have a lethal allergy. We would in fact be fine in this scenario, precisely because there are still other kinds of lettuce and other leafy greens. We might not like it, but we would be fine. I get the impression that the kinds of animals that eat mosquitoes are less picky, more in the "if it fits in my face, om nom nom" end of the spectrum.