MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cycomanic | 2025-04-01 20:25:11+00:00
> They should expect that particular incident to not affect their performance evaluation, since it was very much not their fault.

What do you mean not their fault? I've seen wrong parts delivered by suppliers, so yes responsibility of an engineer who puts together a circuit is definitely checking that the parts are correct.

> In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job properly:

>> The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault.

Again _never_ the equipment's fault? It wasn't the equipment it was a part. So maybe it was an issue of miscommunication? I find it hard to believe that the lab tech said it could never be the parts, considering how those things are handled in student labs, small parts break all the time.

Maybe, it's true and it was a crappy lab tech, maybe they could not imagine the part being broken, but I've seen the other side of the equation as well, when things don't work students often just throw their hands up and say "it doesn't work" without any of their own troubleshooting expecting the tutor/lab tech/professor to do the troubleshooting for them (quite literally, can you check that we wired everything correctly...).

In my experience this does not get accepted in industry. I acknowledge though what the other poster said, generally in industry incentives are different and someone would have intervened if a project gets held up for 8 weeks by a single person.

Regarding the story, I wonder what would have been an acceptable solution (apart from the lab tech possibly being more helpful?), I as a teacher would have excepted a report which would have given a detailed account of the troubleshooting steps etc. (but it needs to show that a real effort to find the cause, simply saying the lab tech couldn't help is not sufficient). Simply saying "it wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't just give you an A.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-01 20:26:14+00:00
Obviously this could turn into a very long conversation.

I'll just leave you with this considered analysis:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/01/why-marine-le-p...

Particularly:

> The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.

> The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
by bmicraft | 2025-04-01 20:26:49+00:00
It means USB Power Delivery and is a standard for negotiating custom-other-than-5V voltages from a USB Type-C power supply and communicating to the device how much current it is allowed to draw.

It's why you can charge your phone with your laptops power brick without anything exploding, and why most laptops can charge (very slowly) from pretty underpowered phone chargers now.
by instagib | 2025-04-01 20:27:05+00:00
My gripe is advertisements for shows I want to watch. I am watching season 1 of Silo on Apple and see season 2 advertised ruining my experience with spoilers.

Amazon ads suck a little less due to pre-roll ads and maybe one ad break in a movie. In a show multiple ad breaks ruining the experience also. I found out you can exit the ad, restart playing and get a 15 second ad instead of 30, 45, or 1 minute long ones. Ad gambling.

I know, sail the high seas, but sometimes I want zero maintenance or setup then click play and make the popcorn.
by jayturley | 2025-04-01 20:27:17+00:00
As an agency owner, we don't use these tools regularly but we have clients who do, and we support them. As far as the domains, they are a registrar like any other. You can transfer the domains away or to them like any other registrar. This means that the customer "owns" it for the period of time it is registered for with an accredited registrar. The web builder companies do not own it on your behalf.

There are no real SEO penalties, but as with any web property, you have to do the work to get all the SEO working as you want.

As far as benefits for developers, give me an open source tool any day that I can improve on, extend, or mess up with sketchy coding. These tools are meant for consumers to build their own sites for the most part. They represent the initial commodification of "get a website". They are more difficult and/or expensive to extend than a tool like WordPress, Laravel, Hugo, etc. And they are walled gardens, which means they are difficult to migrate away from.
by sjm-lbm | 2025-04-01 20:27:44+00:00
Since we're getting pretty far down the nerding-out-on-myst rabbit hole: the original version of realMyst, at least for Windows, had some bug that would cause it to immediately crash on any system with a multi-core CPU. At some point someone released a patched EXE that fixed it, I have no idea if gog and/or Steam ever released an official patched version.

Also, while talking about remakes: Riven got a remake last year, and it's fantastic. The sprit of the game is entirely intact, but they made changes to some puzzles that both make the experience fresh (for anyone that played the 90s version of Riven) and much less annoying (for any first time players). Can't recommend the Riven remake enough.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-01 20:27:49+00:00
> Debt is an obligation that requires one party, the debtor, to pay money borrowed or otherwise withheld from another party, the creditor.

> The term can also be used metaphorically to cover moral obligations and other interactions not based on a monetary value. For example, in Western cultures, a person who has been helped by a second person is sometimes said to owe a "debt of gratitude" to the second person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt

"debt" means owing something to someone. non-compounding debt is still debt. i don't pay back a "debt of gratitude" with compound interest. i also don't pay back friends I owe money to for a restaurant bill with compound interest, even though i was in debt with them when they covered my part of the bill.

compounding/non-compounding is fine. don't over-complicate it.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-01 20:28:57+00:00
Televisions, not just the cheap ones, became wholly unacceptable to me years ago because of the spying and this sort of crap.

I'm sick and tired of devices and software that I have to treat like an enemy, and I'm deeply saddened that I have to assume that all electronics and software are my enemy until proven otherwise anymore.

On the plus side, it means I save a lot of money by not buying electronic devices.
Show HN: Safe2PDF, a 100% local images-to-PDF tool, no uploads
by amosoraptor | 2025-04-01 20:29:43+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Safe2PDF, a browser-based offline-enabled images-to-PDF tool that never uploads your files anywhere. It runs 100% on your local machine, in your browser, using fully transparent open-source code. No cloud, no user trackers, no surveillance, no data collection. No ads either. Just a pure document conversion tool (images to pdf merger) that doesn't wasn't forged in the pits of hell.

Why? In March 2025, the FBI publicly warned that many free PDF converters are malware fronts (https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/denver/news/fbi...). They harvest personal data, inject spyware, impersonate trusted brands like Adobe and ruin lives.

I read the warning and laughed bitterly, because I’d already spent months trying to solve that exact problem. It started when I had to send documents to the government: sensitive, personal stuff for my wedding. I checked dozens of converters. They all sucked. They all uploaded my files. They all felt off. They smelled like phish.

They all promised my files get shortly thereafter deleted. But why? Why do I need to upload my files to some server in who knows where, when I know for a fact all this can ne done directly inside the browser, with pure JS? I’ve lived with crippling OCD my whole life. So when I say I couldn’t trust these sites with my files, I mean I literally couldn’t continue life until I solved the problem at the root.

So I set out to build my own tool. One that doesn’t even have a backend for file handling. One that never sees your documents. One you don't need to pay with money, or your privacy, or with your attention.

The code is transparent. You can upload up to 1,000 documents (images and PDFs) at a time; It's got live preview; No ads;

What it does: Combines multiple images into a single PDF 100% local. no files are ever uploaded Built with trusted libraries: PDF-lib, Alpine.js, Sortable Open source: https://github.com/amosWeiskopf/safe2pdf.js Uses Plausible, not Google Analytics, for anonymous analytics only Minimal frontend, no backend file handling at all Form submissions go to Supabase (rate-limited by Cloudflare)

Who it’s for: People who don’t trust "free" tools Users with sensitive files (IDs, medical docs, legal papers) People who want privacy without compromise Anyone who wants a simple tool that works without selling their data

I know this isn't some grand AI breakthrough, but it solves a real, sharp, surprisingly unaddressed problem. And it does it cleanly.

I'd love your thoughts, especially from devs who care about privacy, OSS, or local-first tools. And if you've ever had that moment where you hesitated to upload a file, you are the person I made this for.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy trying it. Amos
by cycomanic | 2025-04-01 20:30:05+00:00
I'm not asking what spam is, I'm well aware.

We are in a discussion about free speech absolutism. Somebody who says they are a free speech absolutist who supports spam filtering, needs to either justify why spam is not speech (which is my question, why would it not be speech), or acknowledge that they agree there are limits to free speech.

Or is your argument that if it is commerce it's not free speech? That would allow all commerce to be censored (and we just kick the can down the road, what is commerce).
by jerf | 2025-04-01 20:30:16+00:00
Yes: https://www.chessvariants.com/alphabet.html

My point not being that that is a link straight to the exact thing you've described, but that if you ask that site for all the variants it has with a blank search [1], the first 500 variants on file (give or take some administrative garbage) gets you the variants starting with a number and up to "Avalanche Chess" alphabetically... that is, you can't even get all the way through the As before the search bails out.

[1]: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php
by TheTylerGee | 2025-04-01 20:30:22+00:00
Tyler here, dev on cabinaudio.com

Super excited to be able to share our crazy idea/website with everyone here. Not too much to say about it other than: go try it out!

However, I thought it would be interesting to go into why this approach would work.

First of all, what are we doing? We’re trying to make different instruments sound like they are coming from different places in space. There are two ways we’re doing this: 1. Make instruments that are panned left vs right sound more spread out. This is making the soundstage of the headphones “wider”. 2. Make instruments that have more bass vs more treble sound more spread out. This is what’s new - we’re adding a “height” dimension of separation where higher pitched instruments (hi hats, cymbals) actually sound like they are coming from above you, while lower pitched instruments (kick drum, bass) sound like they are coming from below you.

What does this accomplish? It’s easier to hear each instrument when they are spatially separated. This technique also happens to make the instruments sound bigger. We like bigger. Just as it’s more engaging to watch a movie at a theater than on your phone, it’s more engaging to listen to music when it seems to fill more space (this is also why we like to listen to music louder - it actually sounds bigger).

Why does it work? Our spatial processing of sound is pretty primal. Evolutionarily, we needed hearing to avoid predators. To avoid predators, we needed to know where they were. So the main purpose of hearing is figuring out where sounds are coming from.

Only recently have we evolved to process language. In other words, the process for extracting meaning from sound came after the process for figuring out where sounds are coming from.

This means (and this is 100% my own crazy conjecture) that our brain localizes sounds before it tries to understand them. When we hear a mix of sounds, our brain spreads them out into space, and then tries to decode what they mean. So if two sounds are separated in space, it’s pretty easy to understand each sound. But if two sounds overlap in space, our brain has to do extra work to separate each sound - and has less processing power leftover to understand each sound. And (more crazy conjecture) I think that our enjoyment of music comes from understanding the patterns between sounds.

When we make it easier to hear and understand these patterns, we get more enjoyment from music - i.e. it sounds better.

How is this different from spatial audio? Size. By spreading out low and high frequencies, we don’t just separate instruments, but we stretch them out. They appear larger. For whatever reason, this is really engaging.

In my limited experience, spatial audio makes the instruments sound separated, but it also makes them sound small and washed out. It can be a cool effect, but its current state is so so so far from its potential. We’re absolutely planning to extend our work here into a spatial audio format, and are extremely excited about the possibilities.

I could write essays on this - happy to answer any questions!
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-01 20:31:11+00:00
The 32b sounds like it has some useful small tweakers. Tweaks to make output more human friendly, better mathematical reasoning, better fine-grained understanding. https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-vl-32b/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43464068

Qwen2.5-VL-72b was released two months ago (to little fanfare in submissions, i think, but some very enthusiastic comments such as rabid enthusiasm for handwriting recognition) already very interesting. Its actually one of the releases that kind of turned me on to AI, that broke through some of my skepticism & grumpiness. There's pretty good release notes detailing capabilities here; well done blog post. https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-vl/

One thing that really piqued my interest was Qwen HTML output, where it can provide bounding boxes in HTML format for its output. That really closes the loop interestingly to me, makes the output something I can imagine quickly building useful visual feedback around, or using the structured data from easily. I can't imagine an easier to use output format.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-01 20:31:33+00:00
> He talks all the time about how he hates wokeness and woke people.

Lol you realize I have eyes right? Did you even read this?

"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke." -- yeah, really oozes hate.

It's clear what this is: you find any hint of criticism for this pet issue heretical.
by slater | 2025-04-01 20:31:39+00:00
"Stephen Glenn Charles Hilton (born 25 August 1969) is an English and American political commentator, former political adviser, and contributor for Fox News Channel. He served as director of strategy for the British Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012. Hilton hosted The Next Revolution, a weekly current affairs show for Fox News from 2017 to 2023. He is a proponent of what he calls "positive populism" and a strong endorser of U.S. President Donald Trump."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Hilton
by plank | 2025-04-01 20:32:03+00:00
Have a complete different experience. As a physical major, did a famous Millikan's oil drop experiment. Am a terrible experimentalist (went on to do my PhD in theoretical physics), so we got a charge of about 1/3 of the charge of an electron. Now, as I did not get a Nobel prize, I did not actually measure the charge of a single quark, but still got good enough grades for this study.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-01 20:32:18+00:00
But using "likely" is obviously AI in this context, or at least it's really, really shitty reporting.

This is supposed to be a news article, not someone who's hypothesizing about something that could have been. I mean, it either required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge or it didn't - no guessing should be required. If the author doesn't know, they can do proper research or simply ask the subject.

FWIW this article didn't immediately scream AI to me either, until the commenter pointed out the use of "likely". When you think about it, it absolutely becomes a fingerprint of AI in this context - it's not just that "likely" anywhere means it's AI.
by don-code | 2025-04-01 20:32:47+00:00
I agree this seems overly principled to me.

I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a question like (not exactly this):

> What does the following code print?

> `printf("Hello, world!");`

If you responded with:

> Hello, world!

...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the question wrong.

If you responded with:

> "Hello, world!"

...which is actually not what that would print, you got the question right.

A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes. But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we denote strings by quotes.

This was something that we learned to do just for him - all strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other representations.

A better example of how this could go - and not one that had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the entrance exam for my college radio station:

> What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I got this question right by answering, "Ni!"

(edit: formatting)
by kollmar28 | 2025-04-01 20:34:24+00:00
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by quintes | 2025-04-01 20:34:27+00:00
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by kabdib | 2025-04-01 20:35:05+00:00
this happens in "real life" as well

i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate

turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely

1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips

yes, i am old :-)
by netsharc | 2025-04-01 20:35:29+00:00
Probably because they look like candy, and they're packaged with food a lot?

Even if not packaged with food, these sachects left on the table while unboxing, e.g. a pair of shoes, might entice kids... And it's just easier to print "DO NOT EAT" rather than have separate production lines for "for shoes" and "for food".

Although, from the description, it seems they're perfectly safe (because they're inert) to eat...
by jaredsilver | 2025-04-01 20:35:35+00:00
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