MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xplt | 2025-04-14 20:41:09+00:00
> I’m assuming these days AWS is just fleecing the big companies who feel like there’s only one option.

My employer is a customer at a scale that AWS calls us strategic industry or something. Some years ago, the young engineer in me was all hyped about the range of serverless, managed services being very accessible in one place. Piecing together those resources felt very unixy. I bought into the coolness so much, I could hardly believe such tech was actually used in my industry.

I could've known better all along. Any of our solutions would work just as fine in an open-source stack. And in the bigger picture -I moved to a platform-focused role- it doesn't even matter that much. Two-thirds of our consumption is 24x7 EC2 on-demand. For sure, many projects in the company are wasting a lot by simply holding it wrong. But even if not, we're also left wondering

> Why would anyone pay the crazy high AWS prices?

and decided to do something about that.
by Animats | 2025-04-14 20:41:56+00:00
I'd really like to see a coherent strategy from somebody on rebuilding American manufacturing.

Bad ideas:

* Tax cuts for the rich will make it happen.[1]

* More tax cuts.[2]

* High tariffs with no plan.[3]

Semi-reasonable ideas:

* Clairmont study.[4]

* McKinsey study (2017).[5] Hasn't held up well.

Manufacturing is low-margin and requires stable markets. How to promote that? There are a lot of dull and boring businesses someone has to do.

Maybe tax policy should be set up to favor dividends over growth. That favors steadily profitable companies over growth companies.

[1] https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/01/24/the-golden-age-of-...

[2] https://nam.org/timmons-nam-members-meet-with-bessent-congre...

[3] https://x.com/cspan/status/1909639514861322433

[4] https://dc.claremont.org/restoring-american-manufacturing-a-...

[5] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/americas/making-i...
by polotics | 2025-04-14 20:42:17+00:00
So weak! No mention at all of the elephant in the room eg. resources- and cheap-energy depletion as a driving factor. Instead of thinking outside the box and looking at the physical world, Peter chooses to ramble on in the aquarium of his higher-ed teachers' thoughts with gigantic blinders and pretentious wordage. Embarassing. Finally, the completely unnecessary swipe at Yoga kind of gives the game away: this is unserious, unearned authority sitting at the center of a large halo-effect made of money.
Show HN: TimeSlate – A Free Pomodoro Focus Timer and Revision Planner, No Signup
by henrikdev | 2025-04-14 20:42:28+00:00
Hey! I just launched TimeSlate.app — a completely free web app to help students stay focused and organized with zero friction. No accounts, no ads, no subscription

What it does: - Pomodoro Timer - Task Manager – Tag tasks by subject, assign priorities, track progress. - Subjects - Revision Timetable – Block out your day visually with subject-based time blocks. - Dashboard – See time spent, tasks completed, Pomodoros per subject/day.

It’s built for students, self-learners, or really anyone trying to structure deep work time without distractions.

Why I made this: Every productivity app I tried either:

Wanted me to sign up before I could do anything,

Required a paid plan, or kept pushing their paid plan,

Or wasn’t flexible enough for how I like to plan my day.

All data is saved locally (via localStorage), and you can export it anytime.

Built with: React + Tailwind (shadcnui)

Would love your thoughts and feedback — and if you find it useful, that’s all I could hope for

https://timeslate.app

Thanks!
by moojacob | 2025-04-14 20:42:43+00:00
> Things are going to continue getting better, faster, and weirder.

I love this. Especially the weirder part. This tech can be useful in every crevice of society and we still have no idea what new creative use cases there are.

Who would’ve guessed phones and social media would cause mass protests because bystanders could record and distribute videos of the police?
by unclebucknasty | 2025-04-14 20:43:25+00:00
>You can certainly do it, in a true emergency. But you certainly don't want to make a habit of it.

Harvard's endowment returned 9.6% last year, growing the total by $2.5 billion. In the previous year, the endowment returned 2.9%, though the total endowment decreased as the gain was offset by contributions to operating expenses. [0]

In other words, Harvard already operates somewhat from their endowment, and can realize net endowment gains in spite of that.

[0] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/10/financial-report-fis...
by wnoise | 2025-04-14 20:43:32+00:00
I think I agree nearly 100% with this. The tricky part is always selective-enforcement:

> But if you criticize only Israel about some issue, and grant a free pass to everyone else on that same issue, that's when things become problematic.

I do believe that (a) in aggregate, Israel has far more vitriol directed towards it for any given action vs comparable actions by other nations. However I also believe (b) that there aren't actually any materially more significant penalties attached to them than other nations.

I also believe that (c) most of (a) is due to Israel having a higher salience. People get informed more about Israel's bad actions than comparable ones in other nations. When informed of comparable things, people are generally upset about those in similar amounts. Further (d) Other nations should get a lot more complaints about their bad behavior. Finally, (e) comparisons to other nations in these discussions is useless, because it's whataboutism. The bad behavior of Israel is indeed often bad, but saying someone else does it too isn't a good response unless you actually think the standard is wrong. That has to happen in another discussion.
by meew0 | 2025-04-14 20:43:34+00:00
Yes, in fact, most of the types of research I mentioned, where random people at hospitals do small trials on existing medications, is going to be partially government funded.

But care must be taken to avoid the tulip subsidies problem [1]: the barriers to drug approval are regulatory, not natural. If a drug regulatory agency sets high requirements for approval and another governmental agency must do expensive work to satisfy these requirements, there is a risk that costs go out of control without any real benefit.

Instead, my favoured solution would be to significantly relax regulatory requirements in cases like this where a drug has already been proven to be safe both in the original approval trials and in years of real-world use, such that when trials and meta-analyses exist that suffice to convince the medical establishment of a drug's safety and efficacy for a new indication, these would also be enough for the drug to gain approval for that indication.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...
by kiitos | 2025-04-14 20:43:37+00:00
> With MCP, we are also adding in <tool description> to that final prompt. Again, it seems we are agreed on that.

Interactions with a LLM are session-based, when you create a session there is some information sent over _once_ as part of that session construction, that information applies to all interactions made via that session. That initial data includes contextual information, like user preferences, model configuration as specified by your client, and MCP server definitions. When you type some stuff and hit enter that is a user prompt that may get hydrated with some additional stuff before it gets sent out, but it doesn't include any of that initial data stuff provided at the start of the session.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-14 20:43:55+00:00
> They tried to weasel around the verbal vs written order...

On numerous occasions (not just the one you mention), they did not obey the direct order by the time specified, meaning they directly disobeyed the court. For example, post-supreme-court-order, they were obliged to provide the lower court with a status update of the victim, and a list of things they've done so far to retrieve them. They directly violated that court order.

It's important to draw a bright, flashing distinction between:

1. Arguing that you think you should not have to comply with an order, but then complying if you don't receive a ruling in your favor in time.

2. Directly violating a court order, and then tossing out a cynical pretext as an excuse which hasn't been preapproved by the judge (they're called that for a reason).

Unless a stay is placed before the deadline, you must comply with every single court order, by the court-ordered deadline, no matter what you think.

At least, that's how it was before. Now the USA has crossed the Rubicon, with the government itself ignoring court orders at will, in order to imprison political enemies.

It was a decent liberal democracy while it lasted.
by bmink | 2025-04-14 20:44:00+00:00
I’m actually working on code for esp-idf / SSD1309 right now, a little bigger than the 1306. I went through a similar arc as OP.

I was actually surprised / disappointed by the poor quality of the drivers out there. If you instrument and log the bytes u8g2 sends to the device and how the buffer is sent, you see it’s pretty messy, inefficient and hacky. Seems like everyone copy+pasting everyone else’s code, without understanding fully.

So in the end I just decided to draw into a local buffer and then send that buffer in one single transaction to the display.

Once you figure out the data sheet it’s actually very easy to program these displays. For example, to test any SSDxxxx display, you need to send all of two bytes: 0xaf (display on), 0xa5 (all pixels on)

I am now looking at SSD1322, which is both grayscale and has enough internal RAM for two buffers for even smoother drawing (write into a non-displayed region of the RAM and then change the display offset)
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-14 20:44:02+00:00
I think "everyone" in this case means: people who knew the business and had an adversarial perception of Facebook's intentions. This was apparently not how the FTC thought at the time.

Hell, even I wasn't this cynical back in those days. I was shocked as late as 2018 when Facebook began using SMS phone numbers for advertising, something they'd promised not to do (for obvious reasons.) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-said-to-use-peoples-ph...
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-14 20:44:48+00:00
Some background on the publisher.

"Erec Smith, York College of Pennsylvania [is a] associate professor and co-founder of FreeBlackThought.com"

ref: https://www.bet.com/article/aw585y/black-thought-leaders-bla...

"Erec Smith is a research fellow at the Cato Institute"

ref: https://www.cato.org/people/erec-smith
by constantcrying | 2025-04-14 20:45:08+00:00
Their first example at https://www.clear.photo/en is absolutely terrible. I assume a showcase would show "good" results, but they display a complete failure.

- Incorrectly identifies areas for inpainting. You can see this with the figure, a lot of detail, not obscured by the watermark, is erased and then redrawn. This leads to a totally distorted look. The belt just disappears into nothing, the cloth just becomes a gradient, where a crisp line used to be.

- Low quality inpainting. Even the inpainting is done terribly. This looks like something done with some very simple diffusion based inpainting. Absolutely not state of the art.
by pqtyw | 2025-04-14 20:45:22+00:00
Things like:

"" Fibonacci's sequence (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) was discovered in Africa long before the Italian wrote it down, in the form of Ghanaian textile cloth and Egyptian temple design. (1) "" or: "" It is long believed calculus was discovered by Leibniz and Newton, however there is evidence of Indians having discovered the subject 300 years earlier in the Kerala School. (2) ""

Fun trivia I guess. Also inconsequential if Fibonacci, Leibniz, Newton made their discoveries independently since further developments were based on their work.

It's like saying that Ancient Greeks and not Newcomen or Watt "invented" the steam engine... Again, interesting piece of historical trivia but hardly has much to do with physics as a science.
by empath75 | 2025-04-14 20:45:40+00:00
> If we're calculating the entropy of dice rolls (where the outcome is the 'message'), and I know the dice are loaded but you don't, my entropy will be lower than yours.

That's got nothing to do with entropy being subjective. If 2 people are calculating any property and one of them is making a false assumption, they'll end up with a different (false) conclusion.
by spankalee | 2025-04-14 20:46:06+00:00
I think you're conflating cause and effect in several cases. TypeScript can't be thought of, and would never exist, independently from JavaScript like you're trying to do.

TypeScript wasn't created separate from JavaScript and then chose JavaScript as a backend. TypeScript only exists to perform build-time type checking of JavaScript. There wouldn't be a TypeScript that compiled to something else, because other languages already have their own type systems.

Runtime type-checking isn't part of TypeScript because 1) It isn't part of JavaScript, and TypeScript doesn't add runtime features anymore. 2) It'd be very expensive for simple types, 3) Complex types would be prohibitively expense as you have to both reify the types and perform deep structural checking.

WASM also is natively supported, and with newer extensions like reference types and GC, we're getting closer to the point where a DOM API could be defined. It'll still be a long while, but that's the long-term direction it's heading in. But even then, you would only see a TypeScript-to-WASM compiler[1] because there's already so much TypeScript out there, not because TypeScript is a particularly good language for that environment. A more static language would be a lot better for a WASM target.

[1]: Porfor is already such a compiler for JS and TS, but it does not do runtime type-checking: https://porffor.dev/
by archeantus | 2025-04-14 20:46:50+00:00
“GPT‑4.1 scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, improving by 21.4%abs over GPT‑4o and 26.6%abs over GPT‑4.5—making it a leading model for coding.”

4.1 is 26.6% better at coding than 4.5. Got it. Also…see the em dash
by anotherpaulg | 2025-04-14 20:47:29+00:00
Aider author here.

Based on some DMs with the Gemini team, they weren't aware that aider supports a "diff-fenced" edit format. And that it is specifically tuned to work well with Gemini models. So they didn't think to try it when they ran the aider benchmarks internally.

Beyond that, I spend significant energy tuning aider to work well with top models. That is in fact the entire reason for aider's benchmark suite: to quantitatively measure and improve how well aider works with LLMs.

Aider makes various adjustments to how it prompts and interacts with most every top model, to provide the very best possible AI coding results.
by bsder | 2025-04-14 20:47:52+00:00
> After you insure your cargo, you take the exact route the bureau provided, and if something happens due to road conditions, government pays your damages.

That is not how it works in Texas.

Yes, the state gives you a route. However, it is always the responsibility of the carrier to make sure that everything on the way has appropriate ratings and heights. If the state runs your 15' load under a 14' 6" bridge or runs your 80,000lb load over a 40,000lb rated bridge, it is incumbent upon the driver/carrier to not hit the bridge or collapse it.

I knew several of the people who used to work out these permits. If they missed something, sometimes a driver would have to back a load up (yes, in reverse as the load would be too big to turn around) for 20 or 30 miles to change routes. If you were on an unusual route, for some reason, the maps they used didn't always have the correct heights marked for every interchange.
by ekr____ | 2025-04-14 20:47:55+00:00
It actually is part of standard HTTP [0], just not part of commonly implemented HTTP.

The basic difference between SMTP and HTTP in this context is that email addresses do not contain enough information for the client to know whether it should be expecting encrypted transport or not (hence MTA-STS and SMTP/DANE [1]), so you need to negotiate it with STARTTLS or the like, whereas the https URL scheme tells the client to expect TLS, so there is no need to negotiate, you can just start in with the TLS ClientHello.

In general, it would be inadvisable at this point to try to switch hit between HTTP and HTTPS based on the initial packets from the client, because then you would need to ensure that there was no ambiguity. We use this trick to multiplex DTLS/SRTP/STUN and it's somewhat tricky to get right [2] and places limitations on what code points you can assign later. If you wanted to port multiplex, it would be better to do something like HTTP Upgrade, but at this point port 443 is so entrenched, that it's hard to see people changing.

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-6.7. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8461 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7672 [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7983
by surge | 2025-04-14 20:47:58+00:00
Reminds me of this piece:

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-intellectual-dark-web-is...

tldr; Public discussions carry too much risk if you discuss anything honestly, you get brigaded or doxed, or things are taken out of context or re-framed by someone based on their own biases of "what you really meant". So people have gone more towards sharing their views or having honest discussions in smaller more trusted groups.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-14 20:48:12+00:00
> 72% of combat-aged fatalities they have recorded were men

I don’t think this is the point in your favor that you think it is. “Combat-aged” excludes children and elderly, which are the most reprehensible deaths. And this means that over a quarter of combat-aged deaths were women. Women in this situation are quite unlikely to be combatants.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-14 20:48:15+00:00
I became 'less brave' when I had loved ones depending on me for things like not being homeless.

As an example, I once canned an interview I did with NPR (about the hosing crisis) on the off chance that my landlord might hear it, recognize me and be uncomfortable with it for whatever reason. Because unlikely stuff like that happens to me.

It was early in the housing crisis and we had beaten astronomical odds to find the rental we were in. Declining to renew the lease would have been a catastrophe for the six of us.
by KittenInABox | 2025-04-14 20:49:07+00:00
Harvard's admittance policy should not be up to the government outside of preventing discrimination along protected classes. If Harvard admits students that are bad consistently, and they turn out to be bad hires/professional connections, then Harvard the institution will lose its competitiveness with other schools for the best talent and previous alumni will pressure/complain that recent admittance policies are devaluing their degrees.
by elcritch | 2025-04-14 20:49:32+00:00
Cool project! Setting up a quick local HTML server can be annoying.

Alas it looks like it's web/electron based. :/ Downloading it and yep, 443.8 MB on MacOS. The Linux one is a bit better at 183.3 MB.

Electron really should get a kickback from disk manufacturers! ;)

Shameless plug, I've been working on a HTML inspired lightweight UI toolkit because I'm convinced we can make these sort of apps and they should only be ~10-20 MB [1] with nice syntax, animation, theming, etc. I'm finally making a suite of widgets. Maybe I can make a basic clone of this! Bet I could get in < 10MB. :)

1: https://github.com/elcritch/figuro
by sharkjacobs | 2025-04-14 20:49:47+00:00
> You're eligible for free daily usage on traffic shared with OpenAI through April 30, 2025. > Up to 1 million tokens per day across gpt-4.5-preview, gpt-4.1, gpt-4o and o1 > Up to 10 million tokens per day across gpt-4.1-mini, gpt-4.1-nano, gpt-4o-mini, o1-mini and o3-mini > Usage beyond these limits, as well as usage for other models, will be billed at standard rates. Some limitations apply.

I just found this option in https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/data-contr...

Is just this something I haven't noticed before? Or is this new?
by Kungfuturtle | 2025-04-14 20:50:00+00:00
This reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin's take on complexification, as laid out in his seminal book Le Phénomène humain. See e.g., this article[0] for a simple overview of the hypothesis. For further reading, I recommend the excellent new translation by Sarah Appleton-Weber, The Human Phenomenon[1].

[0] <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/%28SICI%2910...>

[1] <https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/...>
by throw1235435 | 2025-04-14 20:50:31+00:00
> Software will get automated, and it already is, people just havent figured it out yet

To be honest I think this is most AI labs (particularly the American ones) not-so-secret goal now, for a number of strong reasons. You can see it in this announcements, Anthrophic's recent Claude 3.7 announcement, OpenAI's first planned agent (SWE-Agent), etc etc. They have to justify their worth somehow and they see it as a potential path to do that. Remains to be seen how far they will get - I hope I'm wrong.

The reasons however for picking this path IMO are:

- Their usage statistics show coding as the main user: Anthrophic recently released their stats. Its become the main usage of these models, with other usages at best being novelty or conveniences for people in relative size. Without this market IMO the hype would of already fizzled awhile ago at best a novelty when looking at the rest of the user base size.

- They "smell blood" to disrupt and fear is very effective to promote their product: This IMO is the biggest one. Disrupting software looks to be an achievable goal, but it also is a goal that has high engagement compared to other use cases. No point solving something awesome if people don't care, or only care for awhile (e.g. meme image generation). You can see the developers on this site and elsewhere in fear. Fear is the best marketing tool ever and engagement can last years. It keeps people engaged and wanting to know more; and talking about how "they are cooked" almost to the exclusion of everything else (i.e. focusing on the threat). Nothing motivates you to know a product more than not being able to provide for yourself, your family, etc to the point that most other tech topics/innovations are being drowned out by AI announcements.

- Many of them are losing money and need a market to disrupt: Currently the existing use cases of a chat bot are not yet impressive enough (or haven't been till very recently) to justify the massive valuations of these companies. Its coding that is allowing them to bootstrap into other domains.

- It is a domain they understand: AI dev's know models, they understand the software process. It may be a complex domain requiring constant study, but they know it back to front. This makes it a good first case for disruption where the data, and the know how is already with the teams.

TL;DR: They are coming after you, because it is a big fruit that is easier to pick for them than other domains. Its also one that people will notice either out of excitement (CEO, VC's, Management, etc) or out of fear (tech workers, academics, other intellectual workers).