MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-04-15 02:12:14+00:00
Meta doesn't bother me too much.

I'm more concerned with YouTube owning all of social video. Movies are on a dozen streamers. Social stuff is on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X. But video essays, independent animation, educational content, cultural critiques, music, video podcasts, trailers, gameplay, research, news - anything long form, serious, interesting - it's all trapped on YouTube as the only distribution platform. And they'll keep getting bigger with no possible alternative due to network effects.

I'm even more concerned with Amazon being a conglomerate [1] that is in online sales, hyperscaler infrastructure, consumer hardware, home automation systems, grocery stores, medicine, primary care, and movie production. And that they can leverage these synergies in grossly unfair ways.

I'm most concerned that the Apple / Google duopoly in mobile, web, and search has entrenched these two players across the vast majority of online transactions, interactions, and computational device usages. They collect margin on everything. They own your devices, they own search, they own the web, they own the apps, they have to be paid off to rank your business, have to be paid off to collect money, they regulate what you can do with your apps and websites, etc. etc. You jump through their hoops. This is their internet.

[1] Especially given the fact that Amazon can subsidize their efforts in these areas from profits in other business units and out-compete viable businesses in those markets. They can offer goods for free with an existing subscription and advertise far and wide across their retail website, plastered on their packaging, and emblazoned on the side of their delivery vehicles. Lord of the Rings got an 80 million dollar advertising package for free, whereas Bong Joon Ho's far more deserving film got next to nothing.
by int_19h | 2025-04-15 02:12:47+00:00
It's not that the career change makes them not care about people. It's that it's practically impossible to get into upper management without eating others. People who don't embrace their sociopathic tendencies don't make it - they get out-competed by those who do. The very occasional exception just proves the rule, and usually doesn't last in any case because once they get to that point, they still have to compete to remain there.
by dhosek | 2025-04-15 02:13:25+00:00
I think it’s the latter for me. We had a 1960s Reader’s Digest atlas when I was a kid that gave me countless hours of entertainment examining the various maps of the world and the regions within it (there were also maps showing continental drift, a new(!) idea at the time, the paths of the 15th–16th century explorers and I forget what else. The endpapers were reproductions of a 16th century world map.
by nashashmi | 2025-04-15 02:14:17+00:00
Except homeland has been Egypt before it was Palestine. And Jews lived in both places peacefully after the Arabs established peace.

Antisemitism is not what you want to make it out to be. It is as much a hatred against Arabs as it is against Jews, as Zionist Christians want to fill the land with Jews just so the end of the world is near, without any consideration for what happens to the Arab natives of the region.
by OutOfHere | 2025-04-15 02:14:43+00:00
In this particular case, I believe the judicial branch is ignoring an agreement with a foreign country to never send anyone back. I truly believe the executive branch to be powerless at this point to undo their mistake. Neither branch holds power over a foreign country. Just admitting the mistake was a positive step, which means they do care at least a little bit to not repeat it.

Imagine for a moment that the judicial branch orders the executive branch to get Iran to release some American prisoners. The ruling to return the El Salvadorian is well-intentioned but even more absurd, considering the person is a citizen of El Salvador.
by BEST_IPTV | 2025-04-15 02:14:46+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo dev / small team working on a streaming platform called Yadrop. It's designed to offer a clean, fast, and affordable way to access live TV and global content without the bloat or complexity of traditional systems. Key Features:

Supports HD/4K streaming with minimal buffering Built to be lightweight and mobile-friendly Runs on a scalable backend (we're currently testing server loads and balancing algorithms) Designed with privacy and performance in mind Works across devices (smart TVs, mobile, browsers)

This started as a personal project to build a better streaming experience for friends/family, and it's grown into something more serious.

We're looking for:

Feedback on the tech stack Suggestions for improving UX/load balancing Ideas for scaling or integrations (e.g., voice assistants, smart homes)

This is still early-stage but very functional. DM me if you’re curious or want to try it.

Happy to answer any questions — and I really appreciate this community's feedback!
by teleforce | 2025-04-15 02:15:01+00:00
>Harvard’s endowment was $53.2 billion in 2024, according to a financial report from the university.

$2.2B freeze probably will not effect much for Harvard but for the other universities they probably have to bent down.

It's a shame this happen to Harvard who just announced of full scholarship for undergraduate students [1].

[1] Harvard will be free for students whose families make $100,000 or less:

https://health.wusf.usf.edu/2025-03-17/harvard-will-be-free-...
by voidhorse | 2025-04-15 02:15:09+00:00
I'm in the same boat.

At a broader level, I've been thinking recently about how biased our late-stage view of "intelligence" is—it's so anchored on specifically digital representation at this point. I think this stuff will get better. I also think we'll reach a turning point at which the sheer amount of content being generated (slop or not) leads to a total system breakdown and larger collectives of people will (re)discover the merits of analog living and more varietied forms of knowledge than just "linguistically mediated and available in the network".

I also think about the "dark spots" in the LLM space and how its duals tendencies to (a) present the mean, and (b) to dilute/reduce once sophisticated, interactive learning to skimming of summaries (the point the OP makes about the cheapening of "deep" and "research") will in fact usher in a sort of second dark age for humanity.

I was reading a bit of philosophy of science recently (Wartofsky) that argues that much of our building of theoretical knowledge happens through interaction—I worry that, as we increasingly mediate our building of thoughts and representations through "summary gist of the pasts" we diminish this crucial interactive component, and will ultimately be the worse for it.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-15 02:15:13+00:00
> The power of the purse can be taken back by Congress.

Given that the executive branch is ignoring judicial branch rulings, and is ignoring legislation, what makes you think they won't ignore more legislation?

When it comes to boots on the ground, donald and elmu's doge crew made sure they are the ones controlling the systems which control the flow of the money, thus they are the ones controlling the money.
by ack_complete | 2025-04-15 02:15:13+00:00
The problem is that the proposed programming model is even more of a mess than the 816. In 816 native mode, switching register widths just involves a REP/SEP instruction. But with the proposed 832, handling byte and word data would sometimes require a multi-instruction sequence involving XFE. That's pretty painful, especially in interrupt handlers where the 816 already suffers long delays trying to preserve and restore state with the M/X modes.

With the 816, you can sometimes avoid switching with sequences like AND #$00FF. But with the 832, that could involve AND #$000000FF, which is more expensive, especially with the data bus still being 8 bit. It would have been better to repurpose the WDM opcode for a prefix or another switching instruction.

On top of that, the 65832 datasheet is dated March 1990. For comparison, the 80486 was launched in 1989, the 68040 in 1990, and the ARM6 in 1992. This design already looked clunky compared to the 68008, much less what its contemporaries would have been.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-04-15 02:15:21+00:00
If I give a school 20 million yearly to research a specific form of cancer, and I find out that they instead used that money to upgrade the plumbing in their dormitories and spent nothing on cancer research, I would not give them 20 million ever again.

Sure, due to funding cuts students will suffer with slowly degrading infrastructure and will need to do plumbing fixes at some point. But that doesn't mean people who give them money for one purpose are happy with it being used for another purpose.
by imgabe | 2025-04-15 02:15:34+00:00
No, it's not a lie that the administration said universities should hire and admit students based on merit. The administration's letter is linked from the university's statement. You can go read it. It's the very first two points.

It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
Show HN: jobswithgpt.com – A simple job search + analysis
by sp1982 | 2025-04-15 02:15:44+00:00
I built jobswithgpt.com as a side project to learn RAG etc to make job hunting less painful. It uses LLMs to extract, index and simplify search across thousands of listings.

No signup needed for basic search. If you are on iOS, make sure to hit "go" on keywords to save. Would love feedback on the UX or any bugs you notice!

Also available as custom GPT @ https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67fc0d86a5a88191aa5cb21f99f6b9e8-job...
by triceratops | 2025-04-15 02:15:51+00:00
If the asset appreciates faster than the interest rate there's never a need to sell. If the interest rate is lower than the capital gains tax rate, paying the interest is cheaper than paying taxes.

UHNW individuals can borrow until they die. Their assets pass to their heirs with a stepped up cost basis. The heirs can liquidate whatever's needed to pay off the loan and incur no tax.

Normal people can't do this. If I die owing money, my creditors will take it out of my estate before it passes to my heirs. UHNW estates can be structured differently and creditors can accommodate different payment terms (get paid second) because they know the money's there, and it saves taxes.

You can also read: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...

I might have gotten some things wrong. Or maybe the poster has.
by nrmitchi | 2025-04-15 02:16:23+00:00
My understanding is that a large part of endowments comes from large (really, huge) donations.

If I was to donate 9 (or 10) figures to an institution, I would want to make sure it is used to support what I want it to support (cancer research, scholarships, libraries, etc), rather than be used as a general slush fund.

It's not entirely about what the organization wants, but also what the donators/sponsors want.
by alganet | 2025-04-15 02:16:48+00:00
Most times I used it (other than testing how smart it is) were encyclopedic prompts. "tell me about ..." kind of stuff.

For that, I discovered local kiwix dumps of wikipedia and wikitionary from different years to be better, more informative and with more privacy.

Maybe some day there will be a really simple reproducible free (as in GPL) model that does just that. Then I would use it very often, despite not being as powerful as the commercial ones.

Copilot for coding is not bad, but it is too slow for me. I also feel it _wants_ to program in a certain way that sometimes actually gets in the way of my creative process. It's good for companies, when all workers must follow the same style. My coding thing (what I really do for passion, not money) is to come up with new unexpected stuff, so it doesn't suit me very well.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-15 02:17:00+00:00
I don't think so. There is an argument for -individuals- buying too much electronics and they should revisit that, but it's not anyone's business other those people. Tanking the economy and destroying lives "just becuz consumers" is a really really bad way to run the country. Just giving back and going back to horse and buggy while China eats your lunch is not a good thing, because soon you will be making "cheap trinkets" for them
by jcranmer | 2025-04-15 02:20:23+00:00
Most of my knowledge about FPGAs come from ex-FPGA people, so take this with a grain of salt:

First off, clock rates on an FPGA run at about a tenth that of CPUs, which means you need a 10× parallelism speedup just to break-even, which can be a pretty tall order, even for a lot of embarrassingly parallel problems.

(This one is probably a little bit garbled) My understanding is that the design of FPGAs is such that they're intrinsically worse at getting you FLOP/memory bandwidth number than other designs, which also gives you a cap on expected perf boosts.

The programming model is also famously bad. FPGAs are notorious for taking forever to compile--and the end result of waiting half an hour or more might simply be "oops, your kernel is too large." Also, to a degree, a lot of the benefits of FPGA are in being able to, say, do a 4-bit computation instead of having to waste the logic on a full 8-bits, which means your code also needs to be tailored quite heavily for an FPGA, which makes it less accessible for most programmers.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-15 02:20:51+00:00
While I agree with this, if you read the letter of demands from the administration I don't think Harvard had any choice. I think the letter was much more egregious than what the Columbia demands were (at least from what I read about the Colombia demands). I think if Harvard had acquiesed it wouldn't have much reason to exist anymore, and I say this as a Harvard alum who took plenty of issue with the direction of the university in recent years.

In contrast, most of the demands I read for Columbia, except for the one about putting the Middle Eastern studies department under some sort of "conservatorship", seemed relatively reasonable to me if they hadn't come from the barrel of a gun and from an administration who has clearly defined any criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinians as anti-Semitism.
by devilbunny | 2025-04-15 02:20:52+00:00
> the more you travel, the longer you live, the more you discover things that you didn't need

Thing is, you don’t know what you need until you’ve done this. I have taken a two-week trip out of a carry-on suitcase. You will need laundry service at some point if you want to be presentable in public, but there are companies selling clothes that are designed to wash and dry quickly even with hand soap and a sink, but you have to know they exist and be able to afford a not-cheap new set of clothing.

But I have done this because I started minimalism with trips to places where I knew I could buy whatever I needed within an hour if I forgot something. Do several of those and notice what you don’t use, pulling it off the list unless it’s a rarely-used-and-important-but-not-replaceable-quickly item. Like my contact lenses, which are always a special order. I keep a few in every item of luggage I own. I carry a spare phone, because if my phone dies outside the US or Canada (as my Nexus 6P did) it’s not trivial to get a replacement with US frequencies, and with eSIMs not trivial to swap into something new while still being on my US number (needed for work). I would have to find WiFi first.

And yes, my backup phone has the apps for my service and my wife’s. As soon as I have WiFi, I can be going in ten minutes. It’s currently running a backup of my phone that I update before every trip, but I back hers up too, and while it might take an hour or two to restore and get working again, it can be done easily.
by Dibby053 | 2025-04-15 02:22:00+00:00
Can you share more about your particular setup? I use a pretty vanilla setup of Doom emacs on Linux, and while I really wish to give exwm a try my experience with emacs has been too unstable so far. E.g. it sometimes crashes when it gets an I/O error trying to write a file (which happens when a USB drive is removed by accident). A more common annoyance is the entire program freezing while waiting for plugins that should be asynchronous, like Tramp or some LSP servers.
by k4rli | 2025-04-15 02:22:03+00:00
Proper jeans aren't really washed more than once a month or at all. Especially every day. They also will last for years therefore buying 1-3 pairs a year means your wardrobe will have plenty.

Maybe local production will get cheaper once more people start keeping their money in local communities. Sending it to China is just awful for your country/region and kills local businesses.

Disclaimer: from Europe so I don't care about USA at all. It's still having the same effect here
by alganet | 2025-04-15 02:22:28+00:00
You know what would be interesting?

Seeding a skeptic profile ("I am like this and that and I distrust LLMs...") to a prompt and asking what would be that profile opinion about using LLMs, then posting the generated text on HN to watch who goes for a "me too" response.

I guess we humans need to be more aware of confirmation bias, which will lead to a slight increase in all kinds of skepticism for who does it, which is good after all.
by npvrite | 2025-04-15 02:22:30+00:00
Man that's a lot of fiat.

So anyway Trump's former AG Bill Barr's father hired Epstein with no degree to a college profession at Dalton. His father also wrote a science fiction book about the rich sexually exploiting poors which Epstein just so happened to copy.

And then Epstein tapes come out and he says he was best friends for 10 years with orange... I mean Trump. PDF FILE IN THE WHITE HOUSE of representatives official website. Yes that last sentence was a play on words. LOL

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU08/20250227/117951/HHRG...
by clbrmbr | 2025-04-15 02:23:23+00:00
The deprecation of GPT-4.5 makes me sad. It's an amazing model with great world-knowledge and subtly. It KNOWS THINGS that, on a quick experiment, 4.1 just does not. 4.5 could tell me what I would see from a random street corner in New Jersey, or how to use minor features of my niche API (well, almost), and it could write remarkably. But 4.1 doesn't hold a candle to it. Please, continue to charge me $150/1M tokens. Sometimes you need a Big Model. Tells me it was costing more than $150/1M to serve (!).
by imgabe | 2025-04-15 02:23:41+00:00
The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and then instead advocate for terrorist groups that are hostile to the interests of the US and its allies. No, that isn't the same. Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government? Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
by bufferoverflow | 2025-04-15 02:24:30+00:00
I used to buy a lot from Temu. Till I got a product that fell apart after three months. I tried to leave a bad review, but Temu wouldn't allow it. If you're trying to leave 3 star rating or below, they redirect you to customer service. But since customer service only dealt with items under 45 days (as far as I remember), they would just tell me something like "too bad, you're out of luck".

So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.

This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
by joshvm | 2025-04-15 02:25:14+00:00
Virtually all forums (and their ancestral mailing lists) default to chronological order. A good comparison is perhaps the difference between comment-driven and discussion-driven sites, if there's a technical name for that?

HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.
by eGQjxkKF6fif | 2025-04-15 02:25:38+00:00
? Meta owning Instagram and Facebook is the monopoly. Owning things that BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of users use because you want to own them and control them so others don't, that's the monopoly.

Innovation can't happen without Facebook's say-so, that's the monopoly, and over way too many people.
by usl | 2025-04-15 02:26:19+00:00
Hey HN,

I built something I wish I had years ago.

USL (Universal Scripting Language) is a symbolic syntax system that lets you write logic once, and output that logic into 111+ real programming languages — Python, Rust, C++, JS, Java, Go, etc.

Upload a .usl file into the hosted app → choose any language(s) → download a .zip of the real code.

It supports:

Symbolic logic for print, assign, function, loop, if, etc.

Custom syntax templates for each language

A web app with multiselect UI + ZIP bundling

Gumroad option to support or unlock everything ($5)

App + Source: https://townsendatomics.gumroad.com/l/usl

I’d love your thoughts on:

How it could be more useful for devs/teachers

Any language you'd want added

Whether this belongs as a CLI tool, VS Code plugin, or playground next

Happy to answer anything or collab. Thanks for reading!
by jcranmer | 2025-04-15 02:27:13+00:00
I think they have tried to improve the software for FPGAs--FPGA backends are part of their oneAPI software stack, for example. And when I was in grad school, Intel was definitely doing courses on building for FPGAs using OpenCL (I remember seeing some of their materials, but I don't know much about them otehr than they existed).

As to why it didn't work, well, I'm not plugged into this space to have a high degree of certainty, but my best guess is "FPGAs just aren't that useful for that many things."
by paxys | 2025-04-15 02:27:31+00:00
None of this is new. "AI" has been doing antivirus, spam detection, search rankings, bot detection, DDoS protection and everything else they have mentioned for at least 20 years now, probably longer. AI didn't suddenly show up and start blocking your website. In fact the "AI" you see in the news these days (LLMs) has nothing to do with any of this.
by mattnewton | 2025-04-15 02:27:51+00:00
I worked on a similar system at Google for gboard, the Google branded android keyboard that we called “federated analytics” - it worked with device-to-device communication and invertable bloom lookup tables. I’m still not super sure how the Apple system works after reading it, but I don’t see ant mention of using data structures like that, instead they are polling the devices themselves it seems? Does anyone else have more insight to the mechanics, because that seems super inefficient?

https://research.google/blog/improving-gboard-language-model...
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-15 02:28:06+00:00
Read through it because the previous startup I was at also decided to fold despite some very, very good tech.

Some similarities here realizing that even with a very useful product, it would never be a venture scale business which is very sad as a builder when you have a great product.

With 3 years of runway though, it feels like they gave up too soon.