MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-04 03:43:54+00:00
There are certainly legitimate cases where the placeholders come from a separate request. Most CRDTs and similar sync engines you don’t want to (and/or are not allowed to) store binary images directly inside them, so you need to store references to some other blob storage. But Blurhash is a simple short string (and LQIP here is a simple integer) and those store well in CRDTs and other sync engines, so you can pair that with your reference pointer (which might not even be a URL depending on your blob storage engine and its sync mechanics and authorization schemes and whatever else) and whatever other metadata you want/need to include like width/height or aspect ratio and alt/title/caption.

When the CRDT or document sync engine inevitably sync much faster than your blobs you have something to show in that placeholder. If the blob sync fails for some reason, you still have something to show more interesting than your browser’s old broken image logo under your “Sync is slow or broken” warning.

I think placeholders help a bunch in situations like that where your image fetch is a lot more complicated than a URL that you can add in a `src` attribute. It’s also really easy to get into situations where such blob fetching is complex: In cases where you have to respect user and/or tenant privacy and need complex OAuth flows. In cases where you need end-to-end photo encryption. In cases where you need peer-to-peer sync and only P2P sync because you’ve been mandated to reduce touch points and likelihood of accidentally storing photos at rest in middle layers. Situations like images of HIPAA data, PII, PIFI, etc.

On a static site with public (or cookie sessioned) images direct linked by URL, yeah the placeholders don’t do much other than check certain design boxes. There’s lots of other places images (and their metadata) come from, and placeholders are a useful fallback in the worst cases.
by nsonha | 2025-04-04 03:43:55+00:00
I find it hard to believe that when the AI generates crap code, there is absolutely nothing you can do (change the prompt, modify context, add examples) to make it do what you want. It has not been my experience either. I only use AI to make small modules and refactor instead of one-shoting.

Also I find "AI makes crap code so we should give it a bigger task" illogical.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-04 03:45:01+00:00
>> Well, tariffs are about as regressive as you can get

I don't know.

I used to be poor, maybe 60% of my income went to housing.

That wasn't imported.

My food was mostly sugar, wheat, corn, and high fructose corn syrup.

Also not imported.

Maybe the car. I had an older car that I worked on myself, but it was made in Japan.

That would be the main one.

The job I had back then is gone, I was a manual laborer and what I did for work in the early 1990's doesn't exist now, it has been automated away.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It was shitty work but I didn't have to talk to anyone. Are tariffs going to bring back shitty work for people like I used to be?

Whatever happened to all those losers of the year?
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-04 03:45:04+00:00
For which side?

Most examples boil down to common sense. Nobody is going to arrest a 14 year old for driving their dying parent to the hospital.

Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool.

There is a difference between law and morality, and humans will use the second to selectively enforce the former.
by awesome_dude | 2025-04-04 03:45:05+00:00
There are precisely three models for funding

Private - this includes funding by selling item(s), licensing work, and private equity

State

Charity - this includes volunteers, patrons, donations, sponsorships.

Charity relies on people willing to donate for the betterment of others.

State funding fails because of the political nature of the person holding the purse strings.

Licensing, copyright, physical sales are the only thing that artists have to sell.

You "patreon" style falls somewhere between closed source - you can only access if you buy your way behind the curtain, and charity, where creators have to rely on people donating so that their works can be seen by others (for free)
by overgard | 2025-04-04 03:45:47+00:00
Well I mean, nitpick, but Fentanyl is a useful medication in the right context. It's not inherently evil.

I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. I'm deeply concerned that our technocrats are running full speed at AGI with like zero plan for what happens if it "disrupts" 50% of jobs in a shockingly short period of time, or worse outcomes (theres some evidence the new tariff policies were generated with LLMs.. its probably already making policy. But it could be worse. What happens when bad actors start using these things to intentionally gaslight the population?)

But I actually think AI (not AGI) as an assistant can be helpful.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 03:47:02+00:00
>. Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid?

I've purchased books that were in the public domain and without copyright. I've paid for albums I could already legally listen to for free. I've paid for games and movies that were free to play and watch. I'm far from the only person who has or would.

The people who pirate the most are also the ones who spend the most money on the things they pirate. They are hardcore fans. They want official merch and special boxed sets. People want to give the creators of the things they love their money and often feel conflicted about having to give their cash to a far less worthy corporation in the process. There are people who love music but refuse to support the RIAA by buying albums.

There are proven ways to make profit in other ways like "pay what you want" or even "fund in advance" crowdsourced models. If copyright went away or, more ideally, were limited to a much shorter period of time (say 8-10 years) artists would continue to find fans and make money.
by userbinator | 2025-04-04 03:47:09+00:00
a little sprinkling is OK.

This isn't progressive enhancement, the page is completley unreadable without running JS. It rather irks me that someone who clearly knows about the basics of computing would do such a thing.

Also, can one do a TCP stack in 8 bits?

Yes. Lots of low-end IoT devices have an 8-bit MCU. Also, this:

https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki
by dcow | 2025-04-04 03:47:36+00:00
It strikes me that perhaps the prompts are not expansive or expressive enough. If you look at some of the prompts our new wave of prompt artists use to generate images in communities like midjourney, a single sentence doesn't cut it.

If AI is just compression, then decompressing a generic pop-culture-seeking prompt will yield a generic uninspired image.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-04 03:47:39+00:00
Humans think they can produce chain-of-reasoing, but it has been shown many times (and is self evident if you pay attention) that your brain is making decisions before you are aware of it.

If I ask you to think of a movie, go ahead, think of one.....whatever movie just came into your mind was not picked by you, it was served up to you from an abyss.
by geraldmcboing | 2025-04-04 03:49:07+00:00
I disagree re toil. The original idea that brings a creative work into existence is only a tiny part of how that work evolves with every step. For example absolutely no writer starts off writing their final draft. They write & through writing their ideas are clarified & new ideas form, that they did not previously have, all due to the 'toil' of writing the previous drafts. Skipping all the steps that are required to create significant work leads to shallow work born from instant gratification, exactly like the Ghibli slop. It's not 'gatekeeping' that something requires time & effort. All that Ghibli slop is already forgotten, despite saturating social media only a few days ago, because it so shallow. The story & characters & intent is what gives Ghibli films meaning & human resonance.
by bustling-noose | 2025-04-04 03:49:18+00:00
While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it.

What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.

Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.
by musicale | 2025-04-04 03:49:58+00:00
I don't consider stylistic imitation, or even outright copying or obvious copyright infringement, to be theft per se, since the original is not taken away.

But training automated systems on the works of human artists in order to create dirt cheap imitations at scale in their (formerly) distinctive style could certainly make it harder for active artists to find paid commissions.

Flooding the world with inferior imitations seems like it might have some negative consequences as well.
by progmetaldev | 2025-04-04 03:50:26+00:00
As someone who is very much into heavily distorted guitar with long feedback loops, I appreciate your comment (especially for the insight). I'm a huge fan of doom/stoner/sludge/psychedelic metal (and all variations of those), where distortion and feedback are often used to create sounds that are difficult to notate. Combined with progressive metal/rock, which is heavily reliant on that jazz/rock fusion, and you get entire genres built around the harmonics and odd sounds that show up from lots of distortion.

I feel that Sunn O))) - named after the amplifiers, are a great example of slow rhythm music that relies upon heavy distortion and feedback to create the atmosphere and primary sound of their music. This is just a modern band, but the experimentation and techniques go back to psychedelic and acid rock from the 1960's, and mostly center around Black Sabbath as "the" band that really created the prototype for the sound.

Monolord, Bongzilla, Acid King, Bongripper, REZN, and SLEEP are some great modern examples that fit what you've described.
by hobs | 2025-04-04 03:50:44+00:00
Every job I have worked, there's the rules, and the actual rules. The rules are what is written down, the actual rules is what is enforced.

If the company wants you out or considers you low value/high maintenance, they use the rules. If the company likes you, they use the actual rules. If you are on the promotion track, they use the actual rules.

Also, it turns out the actual rules actually have serious revisions as you go up the corporate ladder - things that would get you fired might not get your boss fired, and definitely wont get the CFO fired.
by godelski | 2025-04-04 03:51:36+00:00
There is already exemptions for research. Look at licensing around things like ImageNet. There's similar licensing around things like LAION and Common Crawl[0] It's also not legal to just scrape everything without paying. There's a reason the NYT sued OpenAI and then got a settlement. It's still illegal for Meta to torrent terabytes of textbooks too.

[0] https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use

> In this regard, you acknowledge that you may not rely on any Crawled Content created or accumulated by CC. CC strongly recommends that you obtain the advice of legal counsel before making any use, including commercial use, of the Service and/or the Crawled Content. BY USING THE CRAWLED CONTENT, YOU AGREE TO RESPECT THE COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER APPLICABLE RIGHTS OF THIRD PARTIES IN AND TO THE MATERIAL CONTAINED THEREIN.
by mmooss | 2025-04-04 03:51:45+00:00
How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.

My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product.

Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?
by avs733 | 2025-04-04 03:54:03+00:00
> but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education.

I see this a lot and it’s a concerningly reductive argument. Say what you want about a lot of colleges but when you talk about that mission you are talking about public colleges. Most have far lower endowments and most are very reasonably priced or free for instate students.

Georgia and California are great examples of this. The support for these institutions that used to come from states has gone down enormously while the cost of goods has gone up.

As a result it is not unreasonable to me for them to charge out of state and international students much much more. Georgia shouldn’t be subsidizing the college degrees of Alabamans, nor California of Arizonans.

All that to say the economics here are far more variable than people give much thought to and it’s easy to point at headline grabbing numbers that don’t reflect reality.

Schools rent the ones pressuring kids…their parents and society is.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-04 03:54:47+00:00
> You can't provide a service and also charge for it in the exact same instant.

Sometimes you can, and it's those cases that I'm thinking of.

But even when you can't, why not create the transaction up front and include the conditions under which it should or should not proceed at a later date? If you want a third party as a mediator, just in case, why not make that part of the transaction too? Why not ensure now, that the money you'll be paid later, actually exists and can't be spent on something else in the meantime?

So much becomes possible if both parties are on the same page yet neither had to build that page from scratch.

> How much waste are we talking about here?

Well there's all the business that doesn't happen because while I'm a bit curious about your service, I'm not curious enough to give you my credit card and trust your pinky-promise that you'll charge me like you said you would.

And then there's the business that doesn't happen because micropayments are required for the business model (many tiny credit card transactions being prohibitively expensive).

And then there's all the money that gets wasted when resolving disputes in court when mediators could've been bound to the transaction up front--mediators who are more familiar with the parties and the situations and who have access to a single source of truth about the nature of the disagreement rather than having to reconcile both versions of some "handshake agreement".

And then there's maintenance for all that billing pipeline code which is implemented over and over again--slightly differently by each company but rarely meaningfully so--which has to account for two worlds: one which creates debts, another which eliminates them, just to align the conjunction of those worlds to an arbitrary cadence (typically monthly) which has no correspondence with the product's usage. If you offload the accounting to public infra immediately, then you don't have to build and maintain infra which keeps both worlds in sync.

All told, I think it's quite a lot. As for the waste heat from bitcoin--yes, bitcoin is stone-age crypto. What we need for this probably doesn't exist yet.
by dvsfish | 2025-04-04 03:56:20+00:00
The engagement ring is a good example object, but I feel it serves the opposite argument better.

If engagement rings were as ubiquitous and easy to generate as Ghibli images have become, they would lose their value very quickly -- not even just in the monetary sense, but the sentimental value across the market would crash for this particular trinket. It wouldn't be about picking the right one anymore, it would be finding some other thing that better conveys status or love through scarcity.

If you have a 3d printer you'd know this feeling where abundance diminishes the value of something directly. Any pure plastic items you have are reduced to junk very quickly once you know you can basically have anything on a whim (exceptions for things with utility, however these are still printable). If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its place.

This isn't meant to come across as shallow in any way, its just classic supply and demand relating to non monetary value.
by mopsi | 2025-04-04 03:56:36+00:00
> But seeing as Zelensky has the power to end martial law at any time, he is single-handedly preventing Ukranian elections

He doesn't. The president of Ukraine can only propose the imposition or termination of martial law to the parliament. Nothing happens unless the parliament approves the proposal. In February, the Ukrainian parliament even adopted a resolution to remind the dumbasses calling Zelenskyy a dictator of this fact.

> All polling prior to the 2014 invasion showed that a significant majority would support annexation by Russia.

Support for joining Russia was 23% in a 2013 poll, down from 33% in 2011. The majority opinion (53%) was that Crimea should remain as it was, an autonomous region within Ukraine.

In your opinion, what should the status of Crimea be? 2013 2011 ----------------------------------------------------- ---- ---- Autonomy in Ukraine (as today) 53 49 Crimean Tatar autonomy within Ukraine 12 4 Common oblast of Ukraine 2 6 Crimea should be separated and given to Russia 23 33 Don't know 10 8
by sothatsit | 2025-04-04 03:59:02+00:00
> All this power! And yet!

You are completely ignoring the fact that you can provide so much more information to the LLMs to get what you want. If you truly want novel images, ChatGPT can absolutely provide them, but you have to provide a better starting point than "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".

If you just provide a teensy bit more information, the results dramatically change. Try out "An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". Or give it an input image to work with.

From just adding a couple words, ChatGPT produces an entirely new character. It's so easy to get it to produce novel images. It is so easy in fact, that it makes a lot of posts like this one feel like strawmen, intentionally providing so little information to the LLMs that the generic character is the only obvious output that you would expect.

Now, would it be better if it didn't default to these common movie tropes? Sure. But the fact that it can follow these tropes doesn't mean that it cannot also be used to produce entirely new images filled with your imagination as well. You just have to actually ask it for that.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 03:59:31+00:00
Like many of the disney movies that came from fairy tales the basic story of Snow White isn't copyrighted, but some elements you'd expect in a Snow White story were added by Disney and are protected. The biggest one is the names and personalities given to the seven dwarfs (happy, grumpy, doc, etc). If you made your own snow white movie and included those characters or had them singing "Heigh-Ho" you could expect to get sued into bankruptcy by disney lawyers.
Show HN: CopyKeypad – A custom iOS keyboard for reusable text snippets
by noteable | 2025-04-04 04:00:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I built CopyKeypad, a custom iOS keyboard that lets you store and reuse frequently used text snippets like AI prompts, TikTok hashtags, or personal info (address, phone number, etc.).

I created it because I got tired of copying the same prompt templates every day when working with ChatGPT, and constantly digging around for my address or contact details.

CopyKeypad runs as a full custom keyboard, works system-wide, and doesn't upload any user data. It's a very small, privacy-friendly productivity tool.

Features: - Unlimited custom text snippets - System-wide keyboard support on iOS - Local data storage (no tracking, no analytics) - Simple UI with search and quick insert

Would love to hear your feedback or thoughts. It's now available on the App Store: CopyKeypad

– iOS dev trying to scratch my own itch.
by dpifke | 2025-04-04 04:00:40+00:00
UPS in my area (South Dakota) is terrible, way worse than FedEx or USPS. They're so bad that I will choose a different retailer if possible if the only shipping option is UPS.

UPS has repeatedly lost packages, delivered things in crushed or shredded boxes, held packages for more than a week due to "local weather" (there was no rain or snow), made it impossible to pick up packages that are being held, and damaged my trees by backing into them after delivering to a neighbor's house.

USPS is fine in the summer, but they won't come all the way up my road if there's any snow or ice on the ground, so I had to get a PO box for regular mail.

FedEx is fantastic, I have never had any problems with them.

(We don't have DHL here.)

Edit to add: my wife works for a small online retailer that ships perishable goods nationwide from a distribution center in Missouri, and they exclusively use FedEx now. They canceled their contract with UPS due the cost of lost or delayed shipments. She says their FedEx experience has been significantly better.
by mmooss | 2025-04-04 04:00:44+00:00
> Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share.

> [0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

I searched the cite for the 'share', '10', '22', 'sold, 'sell', 'bought', 'buy', 'purchase', and found nothing. ?
by progmetaldev | 2025-04-04 04:00:48+00:00
I 100% agree with you, and don't set cron jobs/scheduled tasks this way. I only use this for displaying date/time to users.

With that said, I do appreciate the comment, and would have to make sure that if I run scheduled tasks in the future, they are run when the user wishes them to be completed based on when that user sets it to be completed (so would most likely not convert to UTC, and save the timezone with the date/time).
by blincoln | 2025-04-04 04:01:58+00:00
Definitely a missed opportunity that the article didn't discuss that obviously-derivative borrowing has been happening a lot longer than ML image generation has been around. And that borrowing is OK! Indiana Jones' appearance is very obviously based directly on Charlton Heston's character in Secret of the Incas, but the Spielberg/Lucas films are objectively better in every way than that source material.