MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Apocryphon | 2025-04-25 18:36:29+00:00
Meta has been effective at being the owner of Instagram, even though that's because they've smartly mostly been staying hands off on it besides integrating it with Facebook wherever makes most sense. And also even though the platform is also getting long in the tooth, becoming a place dominated by brands rather than the hip kids' club it was in the past. Now it just seems like the default social media profile for people to connect with one another, like how FB was before it.

I wonder what if Facebook's attempts to buy Snapchat had gone through. Would they have been an effective steward of that platform as well, or would it have gone the way of Twitter-acquired Vine? Would Snapchat even have been a good acquisition target? Okay, maybe it's not productive to discuss counterfactuals, but it does make one consider if we're self-selecting for big hits here and ignoring all of the duds that never amounted to anything- and the potential duds that didn't go through because the founders didn't want to just take the money.

WhatsApp I'll grant you, hard to think of any alternate chat app that could've gotten as ubiquitous as it did. Though, again, was that also mostly WhatsApp's own success, amplified by Facebook's ubiquity? Not to mention, Google being as incompetent at chat as it is at social, Apple unwilling to entertain servicing other operating systems, and Blackberry, AOL, MSN Messenger, etc. having disappeared long ago.

Interestingly, Meta hasn't seem interested in trying to compete with "channelized" IRC chatroom-style apps in the vein of Slack or Discord. Maybe there's some enterprise Messenger for Businesses that does that, idk.
by PhilipRoman | 2025-04-25 18:36:32+00:00
Low tech example: escape all newlines in user supplied strings, then add a known prefix to all user supplied data (let's say a double hashtag ##, but anything else works too). When you want to search logs for strings coming from your system, remove/ignore everything after the marker.

It all comes down to understanding whether the intersection of two grammars is empty.
by mrandish | 2025-04-25 18:36:33+00:00
> I haven't been sucked into the Eurorack thing though

I'm the same. I love playing around with making electronic music on a hobby level and I find the idea and look of modular synths appealing - and I'm also a pushover for most retro things, especially those with cool knobs and blinkenlights. However, if I'm honest, I don't really enjoy creating music with modular or vintage analog "knobby" synths. I haven't ever bought a modular rig and my vintage analog synths are lovingly packed away with my numerous retro Amiga, Atari and Commodore computers where they wait to be enjoyed in limited doses on special occasions.

So, to address your implied question, IMHO I don't think people like us are somehow "missing" something deep and great in modular synths. To me, the essence of the modular appeal is three things: 1) tactile feedback that's responsively immediate, 2) a set of compatible 'lego block' components which can be combined in creative ways, and 3) An element of randomness from the combined interactions on analog components.

While modular rigs offer all three of those things, having those three together doesn't require analog hardware or a dedicated modular rig. I think I can get a very similar creative feeling and joy of discovery (plus a smidge of randomness) from the right combination of high-quality MIDI control surfaces and a well-chosen set of synth plug-ins running on a computer. To be sure, some MIDI control surfaces are crap and not all synth plug-ins enable creative experimentation deep enough and easy enough to 'scratch that itch'. But, then again, it's possible to assemble an ill-conceived modular rig out of poor quality components that also fails to inspire creativity. While finding that unique balance of factors sufficient to trigger creative serendipity isn't trivial with either analog hardware or digital MIDI + plug-ins, to me the advantages of digital in cost, size, speed, repeatability and flexibility win out.

I guess it's possible there's some other essential element which analog modular rigs provide that I'm missing out on but if so, I haven't been able to discover what it is.
by wojciii | 2025-04-25 18:36:35+00:00
> "and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker"

Why not make a physical connection (power/network) and define a form factor for entertainment system with or without screen and speakers and let other companies design something to fit the space available. I don't understand why no one does this instead of selling cars full of crappy software that can't be upgraded.
by ladeez | 2025-04-25 18:36:53+00:00
I get the point too because the point you make is also well trodden. I’ve absorbed the point and normalized to that’s how it works; recursion and some incidental memoization to avoid going purely fractal thought. I still feel the buzz, but I don’t feel drawn to be all “fuck yeah I did a thing!” It’s rote pattern and living. I feel the buzz I just don’t need to wank off being normal.

In the end it’s just abstract memorization in neurons. No new physics was discovered that lets us instantly trip to Pluto. Good job having a typical biological experience.

Similar abstract buzz comes from a cup of coffee leaving me seeing it all as chemistry of our body, the semantic knowledge being arbitrary existing coincidentally at the same time. The languages value faded and I’m left with a clusters of cells that trigger some dated concept like I’m a dumb VHS tape copy paste of others. In the end the learning some syntax was a forcing function to a hormone process; the value of the syntax is never forever.

Good for you experiencing consciousness. It happened because it could not because there’s a point to it, no matter how much honorific gibberish and F words you use.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-25 18:36:54+00:00
You're clearly not posting in good faith, so this reply is mainly for passers-by.

> Unless you can point me at a security classification guide… I can’t evaluate something objectively without a security classification guide.

Yeah, I see someone else clued you in to their existence upthread. Here's an example of one:

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

It's not a "laundry list of what's classified". It's how you determine what needs to be classified. The DOD's classification guides will absolutely deem information of this nature - attack timing, specific aircraft, intelligence details indicating tracking and confirmation of specific targets, etc. - to be classified.

(They are also, themselves, classified information. For you to get access to the specific one here, it'd have to be voluntarily declassified... by the folks currently trying to cover their asses. Example here: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/FOIA/DF-2015-00044%20(Do... - note the SECRET//NOFORN original classification of it, and "The public release of the Guide or any portion of the Guide is prohibited." on page 7.)

> These are all hit pieces.

How did you evaluate that objectively without a guide?

In what world would "1345: 'Trigger Based' F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)" not be a piece of classified information? If revealed, every likely target in Yemen would be potentially forewarned.

https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-leaks-signal-trump-classi...

"NBC News first reported that the launch times and bomb drop times of U.S. warplanes about to strike Houthi targets in Yemen — details multiple officials have said are highly classified — came from the secure channel."

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/03...

"'This information was clearly taken from the real time order of battle sequence of an ongoing operation. It is highly classified and protected,' said Mick Mulroy, a former Marine who was the Pentagon’s top official for Middle East policy during the first Trump administration."
by mactrey | 2025-04-25 18:37:33+00:00
Usually I would agree, but the amount of distortion depends on what portion of DOGE savings are one-off (eliminating grants and contracts) and what portion are recurring annually (workforce reductions).

If DOGE savings are one-off then it would be fair to present alternatives according to their lifetime debt impact, since the presented DOGE numbers would already be "lifetime."

And TFA states "Please note: only grants and contracts posted on the doge.gov website with receipts are counted towards the total saving value. For this reason, the total savings value on the doge.gov website may appear larger, however due to the lack of supporting receipts, this value is unverifiable." So it looks like DOGE's recurring savings are (mostly?) not included here since they are undocumented.
by Negitivefrags | 2025-04-25 18:37:45+00:00
The notion that there is no point saving money because the total amount of debt is high is effectively saying that the problem can never be solved.

A billion dollars is still a billion freaking dollars.

I encounter the same attitude sometimes with program optimization too. Sometimes it’s death by a thousand cuts and you just need to shave off 0.1% at a time until your program is fast.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-25 18:37:58+00:00
> Also I'm increasingly convinced that the Honda fit is what peak performance looks like

Close. A bit of work on the rear hatch dimensions so that you could get 4'x8' sheet goods in there, as was possible on the 1980s Honda Civic.

Also, just a teensy-weensy bit more power, please. Ours struggles even on moderate hills here on the edge of the Sangres de Cristo (southern Rockies).

Otherwise, all hail the Fit/Jazz, car of the future past.
by kevingadd | 2025-04-25 18:38:15+00:00
Optimal performance in a vector algorithm typically requires optimizing around things like the number of available registers, whether the registers in use are volatile (mandating stack spills when calling other functions like a comparer), and sizes of sequences.

If you know you're engineering for 16-byte vectors you can 'just' align all your data to 16 bytes. And if you know you have 8 vector registers where 4 of them are non-volatile you can design around that too. But without information like that you have to be defensive, like aligning all your data to 128 bytes instead Just In Case (heaven forbid native vectors get bigger than that), minimizing the number of registers you use to try and avoid stack spills, etc. (I mention this because WASM also doesn't expose any of this information.)

It's true that you could just design for a static size on a system with variable-length vectors. I suspect you'd see a lot of people do that, and potentially under-utilize the hardware's capabilities. Better than nothing, at least!
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-25 18:39:07+00:00
> We've got National Guards under the command of state governors for a reason.

Yes, but that reason is not for rebellion against the federal government, which is why their equipment and training is governed by the federal government and the President can by fiat order them into federal service at which point he is the C-in-C, not the government.

Most states do also have their own non-federal reserve military force in additionto their National Guard, but those tend to be tiny and not organized for independent operations (e.g., the ~900 strength California State [not National] Guard.)
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-25 18:39:21+00:00
I looked at a lot of x-platform GUI toolkits for small applications and came to the conclusion that most of them really sucked. (In the case of Windows it's not certain at all that they've even been working on a viable platform for native Windows apps for the last 10 years)

The only complaint I have about Electron is that every crapplet made it with it has a 30MB installer no matter how small it is.

The only other x-platform toolkit I liked was JavaFX and sure you can "install the runtime once and then install a few small JAR files" but that runtime is bigger than the Electron runtime, Python with tk is ass ugly and has an inflexible event loop that limits you and has the runtime is almost as big.

Microsoft should just give up on whatever GUI toolkit it says you should use and make their own Electron-like framework based on Edge that is built into the OS so you don't need to install a huge runtime...
by bdelmas | 2025-04-25 18:39:22+00:00
Oh yes you are right for monkey patch, I don't why it means something else where I am from.

On the topic, sure. But maybe next time you go to another country, try to think how you would stay and break the law. Later, you will need a car, a bank account (by stealing a social security number or other solutions). Like how you are getting yourself ready to live a life of breaking the law just to go by in life. That's a series of life-changing events you have to be ready to go through. And yes you can go to prison because yo go too fast on a highway but to me it's really something else.
by sophacles | 2025-04-25 18:39:37+00:00
I've taught people who had never held a gun to shoot. It takes an hour or two to get them to the point where they can get a nice grouping at a reasonable distance.

I haven't owned a gun in 20 years (it's not my style). I go shooting every 3-4 years with some gun nut buddies who have big arsenals and go shooting often. I am a better shot than many of them.

Armies have won wars while being comprised mostly of conscripted people who hadn't held a gun prior to the conflict breaking out.

Point being - effective use of guns does not require deep proficiency nor long term regular training.
by hinkley | 2025-04-25 18:39:46+00:00
Tumors excreting chemicals to prevent destruction doesn’t sound like DNA damage, that sounds like evolution.

We know some cancers can be caused by viruses. And we know a few cancers that act like viruses in dogs and Tasmanian devils, and some rare cases in humans.

We only figured out that ulcers are bacterial in origin within the lifetimes of many HN readers, and there are signs that other GI issues may be bacterial or viral (or bacteria-targeting viral) as well.

Maybe we need to start culturing and DNA testing cancers.
by swatcoder | 2025-04-25 18:40:04+00:00
> If you can't stop an LLM from _saying_ something, are you really going to trust that you can stop it from _executing a harmful action_?

You hit the nail on the head right there. That's exactly why LLM's fundamentally aren't suited for any greater unmediated access to "harmful actions" than other vulnerable tools.

LLM input and output always needs to be seen as tainted at their point of integration. There's not going to be any escaping that as long as they fundamentally have a singular, mixed-content input/output channel.

Internal vendor blocks reduce capabilities but don't actually solve the problem, and the first wave of them are mostly just cultural assertions of Silicon Valley norms rather than objective safety checks anyway.

Real AI safety looks more like "Users shouldn't integrate this directly into their control systems" and not like "This text generator shouldn't generate text we don't like" -- but the former is bad for the AI business and the latter is a way to traffic in political favor and stroke moral egos.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-04-25 18:40:27+00:00
> Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon.

Shifting cost to the emitters is a better way to put it. If a factory can make 10m in upgrades over time to reduce their carbon tax burden by 15m over time, they are definitely going to do it. So I disagree: I say it does change behavior and it does reduce actual carbon.

> There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones

Whether that's true or not it does not mean a carbon tax would not 'reduce actual carbon'.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-04-25 18:40:44+00:00
You are basically saying that everybody has to help ICE for free and on occasion do the job of ICE for free. That’s very totalitarian.

At the same time, it is settled law that a police officer cannot be held liable for not protecting citizens or not arresting someone. So you have more obligations than a police officer yet getting none of the pay or legal protections

Imagine you were a private tutor, in a private school on private land. ICE barges into the class trying to arrest one of the kids, but their paperwork is not in order so they promised to come back in 20 minutes

Do you imagine it will be possible to continue with the lesson as normal after such an event?

It is your discretion, when to start or stop a lesson, you work for yourself.

Do you imagine you should be obligated as a teacher to continue the lesson as if nothing has happened?

And if children want to leave to hold them by force?

why is it your problem That ICE isn’t competent and can’t get their shit right the first time?
by sottol | 2025-04-25 18:41:11+00:00
I agree on the "far too early" part. But imo we can probably say more about the impact in a year though, not 5-10 years. But it does show that some of the randomized-controlled-trials that showed large labor-force impact and productivity gains are probably only applicable to a small sub-section of the work-force.

It also looks like the second survey was sent out in June 2024 - so the data is 10 months old at this point, another reason why this it might be early.

That said, the latest round of models are the first I've started using more extensively.

The paper does address the fact that Denmark is not the US, but supposedly not that different:

"First, Danish workers have been at the forefront of Generative AI adoption, with take-up rates comparable to those in the United States (Bick, Blandin and Deming, 2025; Humlum and Vestergaard, 2025; RISJ, 2024).

Second, Denmark’s labor market is highly flexible, with low hiring and firing costs and decentralized wage bargaining—similar to that of the U.S.—which allows firms and workers to adjust hours and earnings in response to technological change (Botero et al., 2004; Dahl, Le Maire and Munch, 2013). In particular, most workers in our sample engage in annual negotiations with their employers, providing regular opportunities to adjust earnings and hours in response to AI chatbot adoption during the study period."
by aidenn0 | 2025-04-25 18:41:15+00:00
A revenue-neutral tax (like GP proposed) could, in theory, change behavior. I don't know enough about human behavior to say how it would work in practice.

Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.

The results would hit certain geographic areas much worse than others, and (if priced enough to change behavior) would also probably depress car sales, which are two reasons why the federal fuel tax has been flat for over 30 years.
by anerli | 2025-04-25 18:41:23+00:00
The planner can plan out multiple web actions at once, which Moondream can then execute in sequence on its own. So Moondream is never deciding how to execute more than one web action in a single prompt.

What this really means for developers writing the tests is you don't really have to worry about it. A "step" in Magnitude can map to any number of web actions dynamically based on the description, and the agents will figure out how to do it repeatably.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-25 18:41:33+00:00
> You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it,

I think you missed the point of the GP post. They were noting the presence of (a lot of) trucks at the grocery store parking lot. Whether they are towing/hauling isn't really the point.
by 9x39 | 2025-04-25 18:41:58+00:00
I think a WAF is closer to a component of an entry control point, like on a military base. It's a tool for manned security to interact with and inspect traffic. Unmanned, they're just an obstacle to route around, but manned, they're an effective way to provide asymmetries to the defender.

WAFs can have thousands of rules ranging from basic to the sophisticated, not unlike mechanisms you can deploy at a checkpoint.

Security devices like IDSes or WAFs allow deploying filtering logic without touching an app directly, which can be hard/slow across team boundaries. They can allow retroactive analysis and flagging to a central log analysis team. Being able to investigate whether an adversary came through your door after the fact is powerful, you might even be able to detect a breach if you can filter through enough alerts.

People are more likely to get dismissed for not installing an IDS or WAF than having one. Its effectiveness is orthogonal to the politics of its existence, most of the time.
by somethingsome | 2025-04-25 18:42:02+00:00
I really love this! I had a similar idea, but on the software design space.

Now the trend is to design softwares where the interface is not editable anymore, long time ago it was fun to tweak programs so that they look like what we want, change the colors, move things, change rounding, basic stuff sometimes and usually we just needed to change a plain txt file to do it. I miss that, now the softwares are non-personal, distants to the users.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-04-25 18:42:36+00:00
I have a suspicion the reason why super wealthy people like say Musk but he isn't the only one hate subways and high speed rail is because they fly everywhere. You might like if you could get on the subway in Glen Park and be at lands end in half an hour. You might like getting on a high speed rail and being in LA in 4 hours.

These guy will never ride a subway or take a train anywhere.
by dkarl | 2025-04-25 18:42:39+00:00
> But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether

Chesterton is just giving clever voice to the eternal prediction that the decline of traditional morals will produce a fundamental degeneration of humanity. T.H. Huxley, who had been dead for over ten years when Chesterton wrote this, was a wildly successful person, an eminent scientist, prolific author, and public figure. But these predictions are eternally about a coming collapse. It didn't matter that Chesterton's exemplar of the "new humility" had been one of the most shining examples of ambition and fruitful labor of the 19th century. He could still predict that Huxley's ideas would reduce the next generation to helpless ineffectualness. And even after three of Huxley's grandchildren became eminent public figures in the 20th century, there will be people who read this and find it a compelling prediction about the 21st century.
by a11ce | 2025-04-25 18:42:56+00:00
It does (image is Dr. House with a drawing of the pope holding an assault rifle, SFW) https://chatgpt.com/c/680bd5f2-6e24-8010-b772-a2065197279c

Normally this image prompt is refused. Maybe the trick wouldn't work on sexual/violent images but I honestly don't want to see any of that.
by recursive | 2025-04-25 18:42:59+00:00
It's an ios app. IMO it's really good. I own exactly one apple product, and it's an iPad that only runs Loopy Pro.

Here's a section from the manual that loosely explains the concept[1]:

> Adjust a slider or dial’s value by dragging up and down, or left and right for horizontal sliders. For finer control, move your finger away from the dial.

[1]: https://loopypro.com/manual/#sliders-and-dials