MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-04-12 13:34:46+00:00
I do not know what kind of Linux UI you have seen, but the problem mentioned by you is certainly not universal.

I have never seen it, but it may exist, because there are many kinds of Linux UI that I do not use, e.g. Gnome.

That said, I have seen many Linux GUI applications that are ugly, at least by default, but many of them can be reconfigured to be beautiful enough.

I have never been content with the default appearance of any Linux distribution, but the good ones can be customized to look completely different and better than Windows, especially if you replace all default fonts with some high-quality fonts.
by notdarkyet | 2025-04-12 13:35:24+00:00
Sure great hit me with these but take a look at one of the top comments:

"Remember, kids, Clinton got a blowjob and Obama wore a beige jacket."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661781

So you are going to post this in retaliation and not take a look at how useless this comment is?
by cynical_german | 2025-04-12 13:35:51+00:00
what a weird take to me... C has DECADES of high quality teaching material in form of books, university courses, plenty of which is freely available with a bit of searching.

And, if we discount the fact that "buying" a book is such a big hurdle, even more high quality academic text books and papers to boost; anything from embedded on the weirdest platforms, basic parsing, writing compilers, language design, high performance computing, teaching of algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, whatever!

edit: I even forgot to name operating system design plus game programming ; and of course accompanying libraries, compilers & build systems to cover all of those areas and use cases! edit2: networking, signal processing, automotive, learning about industry protocols and devices of any sort... if you explore computer science using C as your main language you are in the biggest candy store in the world with regards to what it is you want to learn about or do or implement...
by rnvannatta | 2025-04-12 13:36:19+00:00
It's not really that simple, barycentric coordinate access is relatively recent. It's asking the rasterizer for information and transforming that information into barycentric coordinates, and the correspondence of barycentric coordinates to vertices is unstable without further hardware support or further shader trickery. In the case of AMD gpus, it's only RDNA2 and later that have hardware support for stable barycentrics.

And you're right that this has been thought of. There are other approaches for bilinearly interpolating quads that have been historically used, but they require passing extra data through the vertex shader and thus often splitting vertices.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-12 13:36:23+00:00
> To preserve records of that fraud and protect victims of the identity theft, the U.S. Labor Department encouraged state agencies that administer unemployment benefits to create “pseudo claim” records — in effect, to tie real cases of fraud in their data to make-believe people. The implausibility of the records was the point. Agencies were seeking a way to keep track of fraud claims while detaching them from the identities of innocent people who might one day apply for unemployment benefits themselves.

Essentially, they found a bunch of soft deleted records.
by simion314 | 2025-04-12 13:36:50+00:00
>I do what plenty of other HN users do - I use a 3rd party service that notifies me when someone replies to any of my posts.

But do you get notified when I chat with Bob about Israel? Or get a notification when someone says something bad about Israel?

OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing civilian including children a war crime. Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again) is not a war crime . The assholes denied it until video evidence was shown. (very , very shitty behaviour, the same like Ruzzian bots claiming the Azerbaijan airplane was downed by birds and still denying until today that it was Ruzzia).

This is other clue to detect a paid bot, denies evidence until their Mistry pof Invazions confirm it with a spin why it was not them or it was a excusable .
by aunty_helen | 2025-04-12 13:37:08+00:00
I just wish they would stop trying to use their models to help keep their terrible cloud business alive.

Currently my teams building 2-3 systems based on Gemini, but trying to walk a client through setting up a gcp account and provision the model for video is a horrible experience. Chat et al would break their own backs trying to give you an api key fast enough, not google. Here’s a comically bad process with several layers of permissions that nobody asked for.

The irony of using ChatGPT to walk through setting up Gemini for a client was a highlight for me this week.
by mtkd | 2025-04-12 13:37:30+00:00
It's deeper than the security issue

You could have two different packages in a build doing similar things -- one uses less memory but is slower to compute than the other -- so used selectively by scenario from previous experience in production

If someone unfamiliar with the build makes a change and the assistant swaps the package used in the change -- which goes unnoticed as the package itself is already visible and the naming is only slightly different, it's easy to see how surprises can happen

(I've seen o3 do this every time the prompt was re-run in this situation)
by willtemperley | 2025-04-12 13:37:40+00:00
There is a huge difference between guaranteeing algorithmic security of an endpoint, e.g. getting authentication correct, and anticipating every security issue that often has nothing to do with developer code. The former is possible, the latter is not. I understand the author here not wishing to deal with the websocket upgrade process - I would be surprised if there aren’t zero-days lurking there somewhere.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-12 13:38:55+00:00
> No, because the achievement, the mastery behind it is not obliterated in the next few years, by the upcoming iterations of newer smartwatches.

Just like a Casio F-91W, or the $50 mechanical Swatch.

> It's a piece of art

Yes, that's the only argument really, it's a good looking wearable piece of art. It won't last longer than a waterproof gshock, it isn't more precise than a $5 quartz watch, &c.
by keybored | 2025-04-12 13:39:25+00:00
I have no other gear than polemic on the topic of AI-for-code-generation so ignore this comment if you don’t like that.

I think people in software envy real-engineering too much. Software development is what it is. If it does not live up to that bar then so be it. But AI-for-code-generation (“AI” for short now) really drops any kind of pretense. I got into software because it was supposed to be analytic, even kind of a priori. And deterministic. What even is AI right now? It melds the very high tech and probabilistic (AI tech) with the low tech of code generation (which is deterministic by itself but not with AI). That’s a regression both in terms of craftmanship (code generation) and so-called engineering (deterministic). I was looking forward to higher-level software development: more declarative (better programming languages and other things), more tool-assisted (tests, verification), more deterministic and controlled (Nix?), and less process redundancies (e.g. less redundancies in manual/automated testing, verification, review, auditing). Instead we are mining the hard work of the past three decades and spitting out things that have the mandatory label “this might be anything, verify it yourself”. We aren’t making higher-level tools—we[1] are making a taller tower with less support beams, until the tower reaches so high that the wind can topple it at any moment.

The above was just for AI-for-code-generation. AI could perhaps be used to create genuinely higher level processes. A solid structure with better support. But that’s not the current trajectory/hype.

[1] ChatGPT em-dash alert. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43498204
by murtio | 2025-04-12 13:39:52+00:00
All creative content-based products face a similar fate once they receive VC money or go public. In both cases, it places pressure on them to grow at a rate that is not sustainable for creative content. This is one of the main reasons why Ed Catmull of Pixar backed selling the company to Disney. He realized that even if Pixar produces a blockbuster every year and is a profitable company, the fact that it's publicly traded will require them to always deliver increasing growth year-over-year. Selling to Disney helped shield them from the fate that has befallen many other studios.
by netrus | 2025-04-12 13:40:37+00:00
It's important to be precise because everything is not the same. In the German case the ruling was not because someone posted a critical meme, but because it was not entirely obvious the picture was edited (as in: you and I can immediately see the photo was edited, but some people will not recognize the edit). I do not agree with the ruling, but as a citizen I am happy that in Germany we still care if claims are true or not (and try to prevent people from lying).
by vel0city | 2025-04-12 13:40:47+00:00
That, and while Sony had all these big groups they often didn't play nice with each other. Look at how they failed to make Minidisc into any useful data platforms with PCs, largely because MD's were consumer devices and not personal computers so they were pretty much only seen as music hardware.

Even on the few Vaios that had MD drives on them, they're pretty much just an external MD player permanently glued to the device instead of being a full and deeply integrated PC component.
by DisjointedHunt | 2025-04-12 13:40:49+00:00
So have you sat in a Tesla with the latest hardware or . . .

I don't understand this attitude in the technology industry. If you want to hold such a strong opinion on something, at least take the initiative to research what you're talking about.

Teslas __today__ are at or better than Waymo at autonomy. They are launching tests in June. There are popular accounts who have experienced this alpha at the "We, Robot" autonomy event earlier last year and follow on interviews with Lars and Franz, (Head of Vehicle Engineering and Head of Design)
Show HN: Open WhatsApp without saving contacts
by phemartin | 2025-04-12 13:41:47+00:00
I’ve always hated saving one-time contacts just to send a single WhatsApp message.

URLs like `wa.me` works, but you need to edit text to remove parenthesis and dashes.

So, I made this tool so you can just paste a number and open WhatsApp.

I hope you like it (:
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-12 13:42:04+00:00
There were several reasons why "expert system" were rejected in the 1980s including competition with programmable calculators and spreadsheets and no correct paradigm for reasoning with uncertainty but the one most quoted was that the creation of that kind of database is not cost-effective.

I spent about 10 years working (sometimes for myself, sometimes for employers, sometimes part time, sometimes as a software developer sometimes as a business developer) on the problem of turning a mass of text into facts into text to solve problems like:

- Doctors write copious medical notes from which facts would be useful for themselves, payers, researchers, regulators.

- An accounting or legal firm may need to scan vast numbers of documents and extract facts for a audit or lawsuit

- An aerospace manufacturer has a vast database of documentation and maintenance notes (even from the teams at the airports) that it needs to keep on top of

- A fashion retailer wants to keep track of social media chatter to understand how it connects and fails to connect with customers and answer questions like "should we endorse sports star A or B?"

- Police and soldiers chat with each other over XMPP chat about encounters with "the other" which again are rich with entities, attributes, events, etc.

Tasks like this need an interactive system but you face the problem that people have an upper limit of 2000 or so simple decisions [1] in a sustainable day. The problem is large but it is not "boil the ocean" because you can set requirements for what gets extracted and use the techniques of statistical quality control as in Deming to know accuracy is in bounds.

You can give people tools to tag things in bulk, you can apply rules, you can give the people tools to create the rules. I worked on RNN and CNN based models, SVM, logistic, autoencoder and other models and before BERT they all sucked. If you have the interactive framework you can put encoder or decoder LLMs in and it is a revolution that makes systems like that much cheaper to develop and run for better effects.

[1] hot dog/not hot dog
by latexr | 2025-04-12 13:42:13+00:00
If you think the comment is useless and doesn’t contribute to the conversation, downvote it (and flag it if it is particularly egregious). That’s why those features exist.

But complaining that HN is becoming Reddit is (as demonstrated by the links) a tired, repetitive, and incorrect complaint that creates noise and does not advance the discussion. Which is why the guidelines ask you to not do it.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-12 13:42:36+00:00
So what benefit do we derive as a society from deciding that the capability for copyright infringement is in and of itself infringement? What do we gain by overturning the current protections the law (or society) currently has for technologies like xerox machines, VHS tapes, blank CDs and DVDs, media ripping tools, and site scraping tools? Open source digital media encoding, blank media, site scraping tools and bit-torrent enable copyright infringement on a massive scale to the tune of millions or more dollars in losses every year if you believe the media companies. And yet, I would argue as a society we would be worse off without those tools. In fact, I'd even argue that as a society we'd be worse off without some degree of tolerated copyright infringement. How many pieces of interesting media have been "saved" from the dust bin of history and preserved for future generations by people committing copyright infringement for their own purposes? Things like early seasons of Dr Who or other TV shows that were taped over and so the only extant copies are from people's home collections taped off the TV. The "De-specialized" editions of Star Wars are probably the most high quality and true to the original cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy that exist, and they are unequivocally pure copyright infringement.

Or consider the youtube video "Fan.tasia"[1]. That is a collection of unlicensed video clips, combined with another individual's work which itself is a collection of unlicensed audio clips mashed together into a amalgamation of sight and sound to produce something new and I would argue original, but very clearly also full of copyright infringement and facilitated by a bunch of technologies that enable doing infringement at scale. It is (IMO) far more obviously copyright infringement than anything an AI model is. Yet I would argue a world in which that media and the technologies that enable it were made illegal, or heavily restricted to only the people that could afford to license all of the things that went into it from the people who created all the original works, would be a worse world for us all. The ability to easily commit copyright infringement at scale enabled the production of new and interesting art that would not have existed otherwise, and almost certainly built skills (like editing and mixing) for the people involved. That, to me, is more valuable to society than ensuring that all the artists and studios whose work went into that media got whatever fractions of a penny they lost from having their works infringed.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6xk4W6N20&pp=ygUJZmFuLnRhc...
by api | 2025-04-12 13:43:04+00:00
It reminds me of the articles you see from time to time about how someone successfully moved millions of rows of data in the cloud for less than a hundred dollars or some such absurdity.

It'd be hilarious if it weren't so deeply discouraging and tragic.

You might have heard of Eroom's Law, which is Moore's Law backwards. It states that software bloat will soak up all gains from Moore's Law.

Well, with cloud we now have a whole industry with an economic incentive to put Eroom's Law into practice, since cloud makes more money the more inefficient things can become. So to do what a simple local app could do in a minute must now be done across five different services with microservice backends, etc.
by jruohonen | 2025-04-12 13:43:43+00:00
> It would be useful to have different levels of restrictions for various modules within a single process, which I don’t think pledge can do.

Sure: the idea could be improved a lot. And then there is the maintenance burden. Here, perhaps a step forward would be if every package author would provide a "pledge" (or whatever you want to call the idea) instead of others trying to figure out what capabilities are needed. Then you could also audit whether a "pledge" holds in reality.
by Hackbraten | 2025-04-12 13:44:46+00:00
> the statistical model can miss the hidden rules that were a part of the thinking that went into the content that was used for training.

Makes sense. Hidden rules such as, "recommending a package works only if I know the package actually exists and I’m at least somewhat familiar with it."

Now that I think about it, this is pretty similar to cargo-culting.
Show HN: I made a faster, mobile-friendly interface for Wiktionary
by sha-3 | 2025-04-12 13:45:11+00:00
Wiktionary is probably the most comprehensive dictionary available, but I've often found the official website a bit overwhelming, especially on my phone. When I just want a quick definition, Wiktionary frequently starts with a long Etymology section.

This is my attempt to address that. Kwiktionary prioritizes definitions first, like a traditional dictionary. It's designed with smaller screens in mind and aims for a clean UI.

The frontend is a Next.js app (using Material UI). The definitions are served by an API I wrote using FastAPI, currently running on a e2-micro instance (let's see how long that little server holds up under load!).

A key challenge was the unstructured nature of Wiktionary. The data extraction was handled by the excellent wiktextract[0].

Source code: https://github.com/jake-anto/kwiktionary

[0]: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract
by netsharc | 2025-04-12 13:45:33+00:00
I do admit the existence of insanely moronic arguments that are sometimes made. "As a woman you have to vote for Hillary because she's a woman.". What a dumb argument, that's still identity politics. If the choice was between someone like female Sarah Palin that wants government control of women's bodies, because she thinks the Bible should trump the constitution vs. a man who would respect the separation of church and state (e.g. the catholic Biden who nevertheless supported Roe v. Wade), would a woman have to still be obliged to vote for Palin?
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-12 13:45:52+00:00
There's this macrocycle of fatigue related to Godwins law for, what, 30 years of online discourse.

The undeniable long term trend during this period has been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process, legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and majority minority slowly building a core base of manipulatable populism.

Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil on national television with no pushback or consequences beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot) was a crystallizing moment.

This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins law style hyperbole.

The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But the fact that the only functional political bulwark against trump is the second by second ticker of financial health of the oligarchs is really depressing.
by jmpman | 2025-04-12 13:47:24+00:00
Or when the phone detects questionable content and decides to? I was sitting on my couch, next to my son when I sent the message. We were both connected to the WiFi. Sure, I’ve had messages sent via SMS before, typically when I’m on a plane and just lose 5G connectivity - but never on my couch before. Just seemed like a strange coincidence which made me realize that could be a viable attack pattern against a population.
by basch | 2025-04-12 13:47:55+00:00
"I think the unambiguous answer to this question is that the act of training is viewing and analysis, not copying. There is no particular copy of the work (or any copyrightable elements) stored in the model. While some models are capable of producing work similar to their inputs, this isn’t their intended function, and that ability is instead an effect of their general utility. Models use input work as the subject of analysis, but they only “keep” the understanding created, not the original work."

The author just seems to have decided the answer and worked backwards. When in reality this is very much a ship of theseus type problem. At what point does a compressed jpeg not become the original image but a transformation? The same thing applies. If i ask a model to recite frankenstein and it largely does, is that not a lossy compression of the original. Would the author argue an mp3 isnt a copy of a song because all the information isnt there?

Calling it "training" instead of compression lets the author play semantic games.
Ask HN : How do you visualize and manage your team's hybrid workflows?
by splimeproject | 2025-04-12 13:48:54+00:00
Hey HN — especially those managing larger systems or teams. I’m working on a lightweight tool for building computational graphs (think flexible DAGs), where each node can be a function in any language (Python, Go, Rust, Node, etc.), a CLI tool, or even a full project. The idea is to make complex pipelines easier to reason about through clear visualization — and to allow swapping or updating individual nodes without breaking the whole flow. It’s designed to run locally, without depending on heavy cloud infrastructure. Would something like this make sense in your stack? Curious how you’re handling multi-language workflows today.
by blagie | 2025-04-12 13:49:23+00:00
I asked AI to complete an AGPL code file I wrote a decade ago. It did a pretty good job. What came out wasn't 100% identical, but clearly a paraphrased copy of my original.

Even if we accept the house-of-cards of shaky arguments this essay is built on, even just for the sake of argument, where Open AI breaks my copyright is by having a computer "memorize" my work. That's a form of copy.

If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation. If I can paraphrase it, ditto. If I encode it in a different format (e.g. bits on magnetic media, or weights in a model), it still includes a duplicate.

On the face of it, OpenAI, Hugging Face, Anthropic, Google, and all other companies are breaking copyright law as written.

Usually, when reality and law diverge, law eventually shifts; not reality. Personally, I'm not a big fan of copyright law as written. We should have a discussion of what it should look like. That's a big discussion. I'll make a few claims:

- We no longer need to encourage technological progress; it's moving fast enough. If anything, slowing it down makes sense.

- "Fair use" is increasingly vague in an era where I can use AI to take your picture, tweak it, and reproduce an altered version in seconds

- Transparency is increasingly important as technology defines the world around us. If the TikTok algorithm controls elections, and Google analyzes my data, it's important I know what those are.

That's the bigger discussion to have.