MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shkkmo | 2025-04-08 10:45:33+00:00
> This was an important discussion to have two to three years ago, then we had it online, and then we more or less agreed that it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up with no recourse.

Speak for yourself, there was no consensus online. There are plenty of us that think that dramatically expanding the power of copyright would be a huge mistake that would primarily benefit larger companies and do little to protect or fund small artists.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-08 10:45:42+00:00
Sure. But if you are unable to really explain yourself and your thought process in the hiring process, they might feel like you are unfit for the interview. they are way more likely to pick a guy who might be a little worse than you in coding but they actually liked him in the interview.

I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote interviews?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-08 10:46:33+00:00
This guy sounds like a good manager, that took his responsibilities in vetting candidates, seriously. Kind of a "unicorn," these days, it seems. Many managers are tossed the CV, ten minutes before the interview, and are yanked off of whatever critical project they were stressing over, to do an interview.

I would probably have been fooled by the applicant's screening interview, but it would have rapidly come apart, in the ensuing steps.

My team was a very small team of high-functioning C++ programmers, where each member was Responsible for some pretty major functionality.

This kind of thing might be something they could get away with, in larger organizations, where they would get lost in the tall grass, but smaller outfits -especially ones where everyone is on the critical path, like startups- would expose the miscreant fairly quickly.
Show HN: onprem unstructured data extraction with 4 lines of code
by souvik3333 | 2025-04-08 10:46:42+00:00
The traditional pipeline for unstructured data extraction typically follows these steps: 1. Image → OCR Model (e.g., Google Vision) → Layout Model (e.g. Surya) → LLM → Final Answer

However, this can be streamlined using a Vision-Language Model (VLM): 2. Image → VLM → Final Answer

Recently VLMs have improved a lot for OCR and document understanding tasks, specifically the Qwen-2.5-VL series. We can run the Qwen-2.5-VL-7B-AWQ model locally with just 16GB VRAM, and perform end-to-end information extraction (fields and table extraction) without any external models.

Hallucination with VLMs One question I am asked often is hallucination with VLMs compared to OCR model. This is a valid point. But, even with correct OCR and Layout formatting, LLM can still hallucinate, and can give incorrect final answers. Layout models often struggle with complex documents (e.g., tables, complex sparse document). If the formatted text from the layout model is incorrect the LLM model will always produce incorrect extraction with high confidence.

Check out our GitHub repo for implementation details: GitHub: https://github.com/NanoNets/docext

Would love to hear suggestions for improvement!
by DoneWithAllThat | 2025-04-08 10:47:59+00:00
As I’ve gotten older and more moderate in my political leanings I’ve unsurprisingly revisited some of my earlier absolute positions (usually but not always very liberal) in light of real world considerations.

Encryption and communications privacy is a position I’ve actually gotten more “extreme” on. No, I don’t think the government should get to see anyone’s communication if they don’t want it to. Yes, I know that will allow criminals of the worst kinds to communicate secretly. I’m okay with that. The alternatives are all worse.
by yardie | 2025-04-08 10:49:18+00:00
Unfortunately, in very large organizations the onboarding process can take a while. It can be months before you have credentials to the repository. By then, full benefits will kick in, worker protections, etc.

And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.
by sgt | 2025-04-08 10:49:20+00:00
How do you get flicker free navigation using htmx without using hx-swap or boost? I see that this article refers to https://unplannedobsolescence.com which has a header that remains the same, but it also doesn't change. Normally a header will do some type of change, e.g. showing which menu item is currently selected. That's when the flickering starts, in my experience.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-08 10:50:45+00:00
we have a constituency based first past the post system.

we vote for a local MP to represent our constituency in the house of commons. first one past the threshold wins and represents our area in the house of commons.

each MP gets one vote. one vote in the house of commons for each constituency.

so yes. this is possible. because it’s not about total votes — it’s about representing the individual local areas and the people within those areas.

labour won a landslide of “areas”. that’s how our system works.

just because it doesn’t match what you think democracy should look like doesn’t mean it isn’t democratic. it’s just different.

plenty of criticisms exist about our system (esp house of lords). we even tried to have a referendum on first past the post about two decades ago. i voted for AV. but oh well.
by anshumankmr | 2025-04-08 10:51:13+00:00
Can't post training help reduce potentially biased or harmful outputs?

Though even that isn't perfect. Some SOTA models sometimes seem to respond in ways that inadvertently soften the portrayal of controversial figures. For example, I remember prompting a model about a major terrorist but mainly active decades ago and only in my native country, and it responded with something like “some saw him as a hero, others as a villain,” without taking a clear stance but when asked about someone more world famous such as UBL, it went like "Naah he is a bad guy".
by fennecfoxy | 2025-04-08 10:51:35+00:00
Why are so many comments getting hung up on this?

If the (presumably) male at the community center had painted a portrait of the three older buddies he had in the community, would you all be asking "why does that painting only have men in it?"

I agree that they should do women next, given the unexpected popularity of what is presumably a pet project - but it's not hard to understand the very simple & obvious reasons why the first set of cards didn't feature women.
by sfn42 | 2025-04-08 10:52:45+00:00
I'm sure at any given point there's hundreds of this exact discussion occurring in various threads on HN.

LLMs are cool, a lot of people find them useful. Hype bros are full of crap and there's no point arguing with them because it's always a pointless discussion. With crypto and nfts it's future predictions which are just inherently impossible to reason about, with ai it's partially that, and partially the whole "do they have human properties" thing which is equally impossible to reason about.

It gets discussed to death every single day.
by lynx97 | 2025-04-08 10:53:29+00:00
I believe some resentment towards the elderly is unavoidable given the circumstances. Its unfortunate, but understandable. Looking at my own family, my mother inherited the family property after my father died. She has never had any officially payed job since her 30s. In the last 40 years, she has only lived off pension, and hasn't put anything back into the system. Meanwhile, I have worked 25 years straight now, and still don't have enough money to buy a decent apartment in the city where I work. I am guessing the perceived unfairness of this "pyramid" is going to make a lot more people unhappy in the future. Certainly, compared to my mother, my life feels like I am a drone. Not being female is a huge disadvantage these days. I mean, a pension for being married to a man who died? Alimony when the spouse leaves? All things males can only dream of. And, the incentives are all wrong. My mother didn't take on any official jobs because she would loose some of the pension she gets. So, its better to just suck every drop of blood you can out of the welfare state, instead of thinking about how the system actually works and that it needs people to put in effort so that others that really need it can take things out...
by noodlesUK | 2025-04-08 10:54:22+00:00
I agree, but I suspect that you’d have much better luck if you wore something that was superficially similar to the kinds of things other people wore, but was much better fitted and higher quality. For instance, if you showed up in a nice pair of chinos and a tailored buttoned shirt (of appropriate formality), that might come across as being really put together rather than ignoring subtle social cues by dressing in something that stands out by not fitting in.
by las_balas_tres | 2025-04-08 10:55:39+00:00
I own a stationary indoor exercise bicycle. Its quite fancy.. has a magnetically coupled flywheel to adjust the difficulty setting and has all the electronic counters etc. I try use it every day/second day and on those days I really have to motivate myself to get on it and do my 40 min cycle. The first 10 mins is really tough for me and I find I have to put in a lot of mental effort to enter a meditative frame of mind that helps me finish the workout but, by the end of those 40 mins and for the rest of the day I feel on top of the world... its the one thing that helps to motivate me to get back on it everyday.

I suspect its the same thing with most endurance type sports which include running. Most people don't actually like the idea of it but the feeling of well-being makes them keep on doing it.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-08 10:55:52+00:00
While I get where you're coming from and agree to some extent, the cost of introducing new species is often the eradication of native species that can't compete. The moral argument is that those species deserve to be protected because they're valuable as is, while the utilitarian argument is that if native species die, we're losing access to genetic diversity that could be exploited now or in the future for medical treatments, innovations in science, etc.
by freetime2 | 2025-04-08 10:56:04+00:00
Tennis is a sport that I think of as being especially punishing on knees - with all the quick changes in direction on hard surfaces.

In the past I had some issues with my IT band when I used to run longer distances. I was able to clear it up by using a foam roller in combination with other stretches. These days I have issues with my achilles/calf, which I’m sure I could clear up with a combination of strengthening, stretching, and weight loss - but instead have just been sticking to slower speeds and shorter distances. Cushioned shoes helped, too.

It may be worth seeing a sports or physical therapist. It’s amazing how much of a difference a strengthening exercise can make. Or if you’re like me and don’t like seeing doctors, there are a lot of physical therapy videos on YouTube to try out.

Last suggestion I have is to look into cycling. I ride with lots of guys who took up cycling after ACL injuries, achilles injuries, etc., forced them to give up other sports. With a proper bike fit, I think you shouldn’t have any issues with your knees. And can be done both indoors and outdoors (smart trainers and Zwift have come a long way in making stationary bikes more fun, though still not as fun as outdoors).
by mactavish88 | 2025-04-08 10:57:00+00:00
It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural".

Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.)

My hypothesis has long been that this view of human activity as "unnatural" was actually born of the religious perspective that some religions hold that humans were implanted into the universe from the outside.
Show HN: ChatWise – Turn your content into cash. Fast
by cryptoSympozium | 2025-04-08 10:57:06+00:00
Hey folks!

Im a tech solopreneur and investor from Greece who builds apps to solve his problems.

Im struggling with monetizing my content by sharing it online, so I built a tool to monetize my knowledge. It is called: chatWise.

If you create things as well, it can help you too. You simply upload content and the app turns it into a chatbot that others can subscribe to and learn from.

It also takes care all the payments for you.

I built the app with NodeJS/NextJS/Supabase.

You can try it out for free and let me know if it helps you. Today it also got featured on Product Hunt <3

Cheers, Keep building
by mrob | 2025-04-08 10:58:44+00:00
I think it's more likely that social pressure to control people's weights is responsible for Japan's low BMI, not anything to do with the food. Japan is the land of vending machines and convenience stores. It's easy to eat junk food all day if you want to. But people will notice you getting fat, and unlike in Western countries they're likely to criticize you for it.
by iamacyborg | 2025-04-08 10:58:54+00:00
What are you doing for the knee pain?

If you weren’t doing any activity before, the pain is probably related to muscle imbalances, (relative) overtraining or similar. Obviously not a doctor but the takeaway shouldn’t be that exercise is bad, more that years of inactivity leads to serious atrophy that later causes injury when activity levels pick up.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-08 10:59:05+00:00
When you're frightened and live in a glass house, you stay silent and obedient to prevent any stones from inadvertently hitting your house.

Since it's transparent, you can't do anything which others don't like anyway, and if you even manage, you'll be taken away silently.

IOW, read 1984 and Brave New World and create a synthesis of it.
Show HN: Desktop Commander MCP+Claude = Local Automation with fixed flat price
by serg33v | 2025-04-08 10:59:26+00:00
I built Desktop Commander MCP to break out of the coding box that tools like Cursor and Windsurf keep you in.

It gives Claude full access to your local machine — so you can search files, run terminal commands, automate tasks, and do more than just write code. It feels more like a real assistant than an IDE.

It’s fully open source and runs inside Claude Desktop (flat $20/mo, no token limits). Early users describe using is as “cheating” or getting “supper powers” over their machines.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-08 11:00:05+00:00
I think this is most interestingly framed as an extension of/successor to/alternative for Literate Programming, or at least that's the mental cubbyhole it best fits in for me.

Another recent screed on programming in this vein is John Ousterhout's:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy-of...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248641

which similarly, walks up to, but doesn't quite come out in favour of Literate Programming.

EDIT: That said, it is framed as LP in at least one description: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/smalltalk.html
by Bluglionio | 2025-04-08 11:00:42+00:00
Listen to what the avg right wing person wants to do.

Traditional family values: Controlling how others should live their lives.

Limited Government: Something which benefits the rich and successful people only.

Individual responsiblity: Again benefits the rich and successful people. Plenty of poor people never got a chance (color, gender, money, ...)

Right is against increase of tax (every rep signs that statement), socialism is bad etc.
by rickdeckard | 2025-04-08 11:02:09+00:00
The whole post shapes the context, even the whole sentence helps already: It just "happens" to be also available to select for the end-user after product-launch. Supporting DNG would mean adding an extra feature and then hiding the RAW-option again.

--> Even if DNG-support would be adopted as a feature for the end-user, the proprietary RAW would still need to be maintained because it has a core-purpose during development of the product. The utilization AFTER that is the product-feature

None of this negates the value of RAW for photographers, this is completely beside the topic
by sanitycheck | 2025-04-08 11:02:52+00:00
More likely they didn't care and nobody wrote an automated test for it because that would be hard, no human testers are employed (because who even does that now?), and only two users got all the way through the labyrinthine process to report it as an issue so managers triaged the bug as wontfix.

I think this is industry standard practice in 2025, right?
by adriansieradzki | 2025-04-08 11:02:58+00:00
As a longtime fan of Nu, I'm amazed at what this solo developer has accomplished with functional programming. Built entirely in F#, Nu offers time-travel debugging and multiple programming approaches while staying performant. I've been using it for my own experimental projects and can confirm the functional approach eliminates entire categories of bugs that plague traditional game engines. It's refreshing to work with immutable game states and declarative logic. The project deserves more visibility - it's proof that functional programming isn't just academic theory but can deliver practical tools for real developers. Anyone else here wants to try building games with F#?
by faassen | 2025-04-08 11:03:09+00:00
A good book about the related topic of novel urban ecosystems is "Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution" by Menno Schilthuizen. For urban ecosystems Schilthuizen argues we should accept it; cities are a new habitat anyway, and we should treasure the novel ecosystem that forms in them.

For non-urban places where thriving existing ecosystems get changed completely due to introductions the picture is more complicated; we should not ignore what has been gained by accident, but also mourn the loss.
by TheDong | 2025-04-08 11:03:17+00:00
I'll give a shot at some guiding principals:

1. Do not use yaml.

All github action logic should be written in a language that compiles to yaml, for example dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/). Yaml is an awful language for programmers, and it's a worse language for non-programmers. It's good for no one.

2. To the greatest extent possible, do not use any actions which install things.

For example, don't use 'actions/setup-node'. Use bazel, nix, direnv, some other tool to setup your environment. That tool can now also be used on your developer's machines to get the same versions of software as CI is using.

3. Actions should be as short and simple as possible.

In many cases, they will be as simple as effectively "actions/checkout@v4", "run: ./ci/build.sh", and that's it.

Escape from yaml as quickly as possible, put basic logic in bash, and then escape from bash as quickly as possible too into a real langauge.

4. Do not assume that things are sane or secure by default.

Ideally you don't accept PRs from untrusted users, but if you do, read all the docs very carefully about what actions can run where, etc. Github actions on untrusted repos are a nightmare footgun.
Ask HN: AI Infra Support for a non-profit making government data transparent?
by fforflo | 2025-04-08 11:03:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I run diofanti.org, a free, open-data platform that monitors government spending and operations in Greece. We transform raw public data into a tableau-like dashboard, providing citizens, journalists, and policymakers with transparency and actionable insights.

For the past five years, a Hetzner-hosted Postgres instance and Metabase have served us well. However, I’ve recently been working on adding an AI/Chat interface to enhance the user experience. I can handle the AI engineering, ML ops, and model pipeline setup myself. Initial prototyping has been promising, but the AI infrastructure costs are now growing—primarily for GPU and AI compute (inference and generation, but no fine-tuning yet).

Diofanti is a non-profit, and while we’re focused on transparency and civic engagement, we’re running into limitations around infrastructure costs. Traditional VC funding routes don’t apply since it's not monetizing, and big cloud providers aren’t a good fit either—most want you to join an accelerator that I don’t have the time to go through. Local (Greek) philanthropic organizations and fellowships have been frustratingly slow, bureaucratic, and not particularly helpful.

I’m looking for any suggestions or funding opportunities to help support our AI infrastructure, whether it’s grants, cloud credits, or connections with organizations that support civic tech or AI for good projects.

If anyone has leads or suggestions (or if you have any experience with similar projects), I’d greatly appreciate hearing from you. Feel free to reach out directly (contact info is on my website: tselai.com).
by stinos | 2025-04-08 11:05:01+00:00
The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it

Isn't the point rather that the novelty itself isn't the degradation, but the disappearance of the other native species as they get replaced by other species which already exist elsewhere, thereby decreasing overal number of individual species should the native ones go extinct? You could then argue that less species isn't a degradation because on a huge timescale that might not matter. However on a more 'current' timescale, I'm not sure how else to treat the man-made huge biodiversity loss other than a degradation.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-08 11:05:15+00:00
>There are plenty of us that think that dramatically expanding the power of copyright would be a huge mistake that would primarily benefit larger companies and do little to protect or fund small artists.

The status quo also primarily benefits larger companies, and does little (exactly nothing, if we're being earnest) to protect or fund small artists.

It's reasonable to hold both opinions that: 1) artists aren't being compensated, even though their work is being used by these tools, and 2) massive expansion of copyright isn't the appropriate response to 1).
by bayindirh | 2025-04-08 11:05:23+00:00
> But it can't be done en-masse, against every citizen.

Boy, oh boy.

While I can't detail what I have seen back in 2004, if you have seen what I saw, you'd not do that comment. Even without breaking the encryption, you can collect a great deal of information.

This is why "mere metadata collection" opened the gates of hell (of a backlash) in the US.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-04-08 11:05:36+00:00
Yeah, I'd agree that for that model (certainly not AGI) it's just an extension/refinement of next token prediction.

But when we get a big aggregated of all of these little rules and quirks and improvements and subsystems for triggering different behaviours and processes - isn't that all humans are?

I don't think it'll happen for a long ass time, but I'm not one of those individuals who, for some reason, desperately want to believe that humans are special, that we're some magical thing that's unexplainable or can't be recreated.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-08 11:07:10+00:00
Unfortunately, I don't see these tariffs working out well for the US unless American consumers actively cooperate and actually stop buying Chinese goods.

The article mentions there's 30/40% profit on Chinese exports which means China could effectively absorb increases due to tariffs and lower prices and American consumers would continue to buy.

US consumers must stop buying goods from China in enough numbers for it to have a negative effect on the Chinese economy. Most of us in the West have gotten used to buying cheap goods from there and I reckon it'll be damn hard to kick the habit.