MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nodja | 2025-04-15 19:55:10+00:00
Dataset.

To train these models you need inputs and expected output. For text-image pairs there exists vast amounts of data (in the billions). The models are trained on text + noise to output a denoised image.

The dataset of sketch-image pairs are significantly smaller, but you can finetune an already trained text->image model using the smaller dataset by replacing the noise with a sketch, or anything else really, but the quality of the output of the finetuned model will highly depend on the base text->image model. You only need several thousand samples to create a decent (but not excellent) finetune.

You can even do it without finetuning the base model and training a separate network that applies on top of base text->image model weights, this allows you to have a model that essentially can wear many hats and do all kinds of image transformations without affecting the performance of the base model. These are called controlnets and are popular with the stable diffusion family of models, but the general technique can be applied to almost any model.
by Shog9 | 2025-04-15 19:55:15+00:00
Even before "online" was an option, folks were fleeing high prices in high rent districts for cheaper goods on the outskirts. Heck, I remember folks banding together to get in on bulk buys decades ago, when that was neither convenient nor quick. High rent will kill retail in an area no matter what; if online also gets you faster and easier, then who would choose anything else?
by os2warpman | 2025-04-15 19:55:40+00:00
Some of the earliest accounts of proto-IP laws date from Ancient Greece, with protections for new works (particularly recipes and plays?!?) being granted to their creators for a set period of time.

Then you have guilds, trade marks, potter's marks, royal warrants, etc... all "IP" protections of their days.

Would open-source license violations be possible to penalize if not for intellectual property laws?
by addled | 2025-04-15 19:56:20+00:00
Nice! I worked on something similar as an undergrad project years ago, setting up beams with different orbital angular momentum characteristics. Was a lot fun working in the lab. Sadly I didn’t have the focus/grit to finish writing a paper (sorry Dr. Singh). Side note, this was in 2007 and the folks in our optics lab would check the location of beams by grabbing from the stacks of ancient punchcards lying around and waving them next to the apparatus.

This paper has a pretty similar setup, but adds a spatial light modulator (like a DLP projector that can control phase as well as brightness).

What is wild to me is that the researchers here are able to create a beam where the angular moment changes as you move away.

Plus the really cool spiral patterns.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-15 19:56:35+00:00
not OP: not sure. I'm in California so things can go crazy for a whole other litany of reasons if any single claim of Newsom starts to blossom. It's going to be a crazy ride if no one cheecks Trump early enough.

I'm waiting it out for now. I'm "close" enough to communte to Los Angeles, but otherwise on the outskirts of the county as a whole. It's a weird place for any federal service to go out of their way to exploit.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-15 19:57:21+00:00
Welcome to the Internet.

Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".

For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).

Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.

As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.

Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.

And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.

[1]: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorshi...
by fifilura | 2025-04-15 19:57:38+00:00
> can't print money

But can they raise taxes?

> freedom of movement

EU also has freedom of movement, but vastly different social security systems.

Language is of course an extra barrier, but how much people will move is overrated. And maybe you could restrict supposed benefits to people who have lived there in a few years.

Obviously IANAL, but i am thinking - seems like you generally hate your government no matter who it is, so maybe states should be a bit more independent.
by mahjongmen | 2025-04-15 19:57:48+00:00
Hey All,

Thanks for engaging! Apologies for the delay but HN seems to have throttled my account from posting so I'm answering as fast as I can (or they will let me).

You're right in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow and Cohere could lay me off, fire me, or I could quit! All of these are possible statements, but the reason I don't want to publicly commit particularly on our policy on Open Sourcing our models if our business is a going concern or if we deprecate our models is as follows:

1) Cohere is not a going concern 2) I haven't thought about deprecating any of our embedding models because of the reason that simonw stated!

I wouldn't say I'm a Cohere employee playing PR - I'm responsible for all the search and embedding models and products at Cohere and I care deeply on how our users perceive, understand and user our models/products. I'm actually really excited that there is so much engagement this time around (a far cry from 2021 - when I started).

For reference in terms of policies: For our SaaS API, I wrote our model deprecation policy (https://docs.cohere.com/docs/deprecations) and had only deprecated our Rerank-v2.0 Models largely because they were stateless

Again - happy for all the engagement. Heard on the things we can improve on!
by olau | 2025-04-15 19:58:00+00:00
One thing that helped me was reading a book on good political discourse. It basically said what the GP said, that good discourse is about exploring the world. It also pointed out that vilification in its many forms is counterproductive. It undermines trust.

One of the examples used was of a party that I did not agree with - that most people didn't agree with. You'd see mainstream politicians declaring them to be bad people.

But the book pointed out that before this party existed, nobody was representing the people who were now voting for it. If you believe in democracy, how can you be disrespectful of representation?

Suppressing my value judgement also later helped me see that when the party got into a coalition and managed to get some of their politics put into law, some of those laws actually did help the rest of us, because they addressed issues that the other parties were not willing to address.
by dang | 2025-04-15 19:58:16+00:00
Recent and related:

Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684536 - April 2025 (1215 comments)

Federal Government's letter to Harvard demanding changes [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684386 - April 2025 (92 comments)
by mahjongmen | 2025-04-15 19:58:24+00:00
Hey Serjester Email me at elliott@cohere.ai, let's arrange time to chat. We did head to head evals with Voyage Large / Voyage Multimodal and I can share them with you if you are serious about moving your embeddings over. We tested configurations of top open-source, closed-source, multi-vector and single-dense embedding models but I can only choose so many to put on a graph and I'm not in the business of giving Voyage free advertising haha. I agree with you that there is some complexity on multi-modal reranking w.r.t to inference time speeds as well as data transfer / network latency costs. Happy to talk more :)
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-15 19:58:35+00:00
Becoming satisfactorily "right" to avoid accusations of left-wing bias means embracing simply made-up stories, as a matter of daily routine. You also have to dial up the culture war stuff and make it far more prominent, not dial it down, while slanting it much farther right-wing. This will usually involve some significant overlap with the "made-up stories" thing.

You also don't get to follow reasonable lines for follow up like, "hey, if all that 'fraud' we covered was real and the evidence was as clear and widespread as you said... now that you're in power, where are the investigations? Where are the indictments?" and repeat for a ton of other similar things where accusations fly with confidence when there are no stakes, but as soon as they're asked to put up or shut up, they... well, they don't even shut up, they keep talking about them, they just never do anything because it's all made-up and can't survive contact with reality.

You know, the kind of thing a responsible right-wing (or any-wing!) source that was taking them seriously and cared about the alleged problem would do. You mustn't do that.
by mahjongmen | 2025-04-15 19:59:36+00:00
Hey Luke, Our model does exceptionally well on text and images, and in particular, when text and images are mixed together. An example of where this works well would be in E-commerce where you may have a product title, description, and multiple images of the product. When combining that into a single payload using our inputs parameter we find that our model responds really well to adding more images (i.e. retrieval quality moves up as you add 1,2,3....N images). As you pointed out with Google's multimodal model, most jointly trained multimodal embedding models will suffer in the text modality. Amazon used to have a multimodal embedding model, which also took in a very small text payload. We're thinking about Audio / Video as well but nothing for Q2 at least....
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-15 19:59:48+00:00
> "yes I understand you're feeling A, B, C, but we're doing it anyway because X" and "I don't care, stop it, be quiet and do it"

And eventually, if necessary, you may have to break the filibuster: "I hear your concern, and I've tried to explain where I'm coming from with it, but you've rejected my reasoning. We are actually doing the thing though, and I've told you why. Get in the car please, now, or you will be grounded."

a.k.a. the dreaded assertion of authority that one hopes is never necessary, but will in fact occasionally be necessary, no matter how much one invests in a positive, nurturing, and emotionally safe environment. Being unable or unwilling to assume this role is to fail at parenting.
by searealist | 2025-04-15 20:00:07+00:00
The thing is, acceptance at these elite universities is _highly_ correlated with academic performance. It’s just that different racial groups are admitted in different ranges. You won’t find a single Asian at Harvard at or below the median Black SAT score. The range to be accepted as an Asian is also higher than Whites, which is higher than Latinos, which is higher than Blacks. How can you possibly explain this if it’s not a quota system based on race?
by emmanueloga_ | 2025-04-15 20:00:23+00:00
From my perspective, the article seems primarily focused on promoting React Server Components, so you could mention that at the very top. If that’s not the case, then a clearer outline of the article’s objectives would help. In technical writing, it’s generally better to make your argument explicit rather than leave it open to reader interpretation or including a "twist" at the end.

An outline doesn't have to be a compressed version, I think more like a map of the content, which tells me what to expect as I make progress through the article. You might consider using a structure like SCQA [1] or similar.

--

1: https://analytic-storytelling.com/scqa-what-is-it-how-does-i...
by dang | 2025-04-15 20:00:40+00:00
You've been posting a huge number of political, ideological and even religious flamewar comments to HN. If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you.

Actually you're already way over the line at which we'd ban an account (and yes, we do this regardless of what positions they're flaming for or against). But you've also posted good-for-HN comments, and your account has been here a while, so I'm going to give you a warning first. No more posts of this kind, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by abalone | 2025-04-15 20:00:54+00:00
I do, and they are notable for their lack of advancement of social housing, the number one solution internationally for affordable housing for all people. But you’re avoiding the thesis of the article which is that the core funders of the YIMBY movement are more broadly involved in right-leaning politics — not just fringe thinkers.

>What began as the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) project’s narrow focus on zoning reform evolved into a sweeping pro-growth, neoliberal, and socially moderate brand of politics. “Abundance!” now serves as a rallying cry for a new kind of Democrat: techno-optimistic, skeptical of government, and supportive of a welfare state only when it comes with harsh restrictions.

There was a time when progressive social housing and market rate development advocates were united against NIMBY zoning rules. But these more conservative forces have come to dominate Yimby (through enormous amounts of funding) and direct its ire more generally against progressives that see oligarchy, not just zoning, as the primary problem in our society.
by emptysongglass | 2025-04-15 20:01:27+00:00
If readers believe I am making false claims, please engage with me. I live in Denmark, as a Dane, and this is what I and any Dane who has bought goods from the US, has experienced directly.

The actual, lived experience is far different than whatever any bloc or country may claim (such as being in favor of free trade). The EU has always been economically protectionist, since its birth.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-15 20:02:02+00:00
>Do you honestly believe there have ever been _fair_ elections in America?

With a confidence level of some 99.9%+ of votes being legitimate, yes. with 155 million voters in 2024 nationals, that leaves a margin of about 155k illegitimate votes. Elections can be super close (see 2000), but any fraud that went undetected would not sway most American elections. At least not with this electoral college system.

>Do you honestly believe there will not be at least _some_ kind of election in 2028?

Yeah probably. I'm not even sure if Trump will get that far, though. we'll have to see how damning this SAVE act is on women first and if the courts strike this down in the next 18 months or so.

>Even if it's staged, form must be respected.

When has Trump ever done that? most other leaders I disagree with still did this. But not him.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-04-15 20:02:17+00:00
Offtopic, but I'm distracted by the opening example:

> After all, you don’t want to be building your iPhone app on literal iPhone hardware.

iPhones are impressively powerful, but you wouldn't know it from the software lockdown that Apple holds on it.

Example: https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-16-is-actual...

There's a reason people were clamoring for Apple to make ARM laptops/desktops for years before Apple finally committed.
by beloch | 2025-04-15 20:02:23+00:00
There's something of a parallel history for Radioshack up here in Canada.

Radioshack's were everywhere once upon a time. As things became less repairable and less repaired, the components racks gradually shrank and the stores pivoted to selling a variety of other electronic junk: video games, cell phones, toys, etc.. Their prices were consistently higher than the competition and what they stocked was frequently of low quality.

In the early 2000's the Canadian franchises were bought out, and re-branded as "The Source". I asked a store manager why they'd turned their back on such a well recognized brand for "The Source", and he told me that the Radioshack brand was indeed well known, but associated with junk and high prices. I couldn't argue with that. They kept selling the same stuff at the same prices and quickly earned the same reputation Radioshack had. By this point the components racks were long gone and they were no longer even a good place to find adapters, cables, etc.. Somehow, "The Source" stores continued to persist.

Last year, they closed a significant chunk of their stores and re-branded again as "Best Buy Express". I haven't bothered to go into one since this happened but, if they're selling Best Buy's stock at Best Buy prices, it should be a distinct improvement despite the loss of identity.

Back when Radioshack re-branded to "The Source" I felt like some piece of my childhood had been lost, but Radioshack had already ceased to be Radioshack by that point, in Canada at least. "The Source" was always one of the stores you just walked past. I doubt anyone will miss them.
by a2128 | 2025-04-15 20:02:50+00:00
> can you even install MS-Paint anymore? Or is it Paint3D now?

Paint3D, the successor to MSPaint, is now discontinued in favor of MSPaint, which doesn't support 3d but it now has Microsoft account sign-in and AI image generation that runs locally on your Snapdragon laptop's NPU but still requires you to be signed in and connected to the internet to generate images. Hope that clears things up
by hinkley | 2025-04-15 20:03:06+00:00
In the real world locks are meant to keep honest people honest and slow down the dishonest people until someone notices and stops them.

There’s a world where crypto could be sold the same way, but the sycophants drowned that out for long enough that we aren’t in the Trough Disillusionment now so much as the Trough of Open Mockery.
by nemothekid | 2025-04-15 20:03:17+00:00
If OP is above 30 - it's probably due to the frustration of trying to modularize GCC that led to the creation of LLVM in the first place. If OP is below 30, it's probably because he grew up in a world where most compiler research and design is done on LLVM and GCC is for grandpa.
by kbolino | 2025-04-15 20:03:18+00:00
This is misleading at best. The JVM only exposes multibyte values to ordinary applications in such a way that byte order doesn't matter. You can't break out a pointer and step through the bytes of a long field to see what order it's in, at least not without the unsafe memory APIs.

In practice, any real JVM implementation will simply use native byte order as much as possible. While bytecode and other data in class files is serialized in big endian order, it will be converted to native order whenever it's actually used. If you do pull out the unsafe APIs, you can see that e.g. values are little endian on x86(-64). The JVM would suffer from major performances issues if it tried to impose a byte order different from the underlying platform.
by hatthew | 2025-04-15 20:04:03+00:00
I guess part of my question is, are there any macrostates that are useful to us that can't be described using more abstract human-subjective terms? If a macrostate can be described using human terms, I'd say the state is somewhat ordered. And if a state can't be described using human terms, then wouldn't it be indistinguishable from "particle soup" and thus not a useful macrostate to talk about?
It's a Weird Time in Tech Hiring
by andrewstetsenko | 2025-04-15 20:04:50+00:00
Talented engineers apply to dozens of jobs and never hear back.

Hiring managers post openings and get flooded with unqualified applications.

It feels broken on both sides.

Why is this happening?

Here are a few things, but there are more:

1. Too many candidates, too few roles

Post-layoffs, the market is flooded — especially with mid- and senior-level engineers — making competition intense and hiring teams overwhelmed.

2. Applying is too easy

One-click applies and AI-written resumes mean companies get swamped with low-quality or irrelevant applications.

3. Job ads are now part of global competition

Hiring is no longer local — job ads attract applicants from all over the world, raising the volume but making it harder to identify the best local or relocation-ready talent.

So how do we fix it? Feel free to add your own recipes.

1. Improve your online presence

Make sure your LinkedIn and resume clearly reflect your skills, role, and value — don’t make hiring teams guess.

Write a tech blog, join podcasts, solve HackerRank challenges, contribute to open source — anything that helps show your expertise beyond just a job title.

2. Use referrals (even weak ones)

Even a loose connection can help you bypass the noise and get your profile seen.

3. Build your network before you need it

Stay active, share your work, and connect with people — opportunities often come from conversations, not applications.

With everything happening in the tech hiring lately - how are you navigating it all?
by tmiku | 2025-04-15 20:05:02+00:00
I feel like this shows up in any news article about resale markups of trendy merch - the highest-price listing gets the headline, regardless of if it ever sells. I get that these soft-news articles are more about driving traffic to the site than quality reporting, but I'm still surprised (and annoyed!) that these easily disprovable eye-grabbers are omnipresent in this class of story.

Edit: further example - come on, man https://www.delish.com/food-news/a64457108/trader-joes-mini-...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-15 20:05:06+00:00
The truest form of hacking was when you could fuck with public utilities using parts you got at Radio Shack. I wish I still had my DTMF dialer, it was so cool. Maybe kids today are buying parts to build GSM base stations. Maybe they'll bring back pirate radio, once all the analog radio bands have been replaced with digital. I just hope they get to experience that thrill and wonder at the power that hidden knowledge brings.
by aisenik | 2025-04-15 20:05:18+00:00
I think a clearly ideological actor leaving by choice after being ostracized for representing blatantly false and unscientific ideological claims is good, actually, and that providing this as an example is shifting your goalposts. For context, Carole Hooven is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing "think-tank," and an associate of notable transphobe Stephen Pinker. The personal costs of her self-created ostracization seem minimal (perhaps negative).

The statements that she made hinge on a supposed "strict sex binary," which relies upon forced ignorance and denial of the existence of intersex people. This is a weaponized claim used to gird the foundations of an ideology which has successfully sought to engage in human rights abuses, initially directed by this administration at denying children social acceptance and access to life-saving medical care as well as directly impugning the moral character of US military service members while attacking their access to life-saving medical care and discharging them from service. Simultaneously, Harvard has come under attack from the administration on a purely ideological and fascist basis. It seems like her critics were right to view her as a threat to science, human dignity, and the institution they mutually-represented.
by koolba | 2025-04-15 20:05:19+00:00
> If you believe in cash, does that mean you can't run to the courts if someone steals your cash? If your security proves insufficient to prevent a theft, that doesn't mean the theft was legal! It just means your security was insufficient.

Stealing someone’s private key and then using it to steal their assets is very different from exploiting edge cases of get rich quick schemes.