MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by x187463 | 2025-04-08 10:07:49+00:00
This is a before/after moment for image generation. A simple example is the background images on a ton of (mediocre) music youtube channels. They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. I bet all of that disappears over the next few months.

On another note, and perhaps others are feeling similarly, but I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff, LLMs included. If, ten years ago, you told me I would have access to tools like this, I'm sure I would have responded with a never ending stream of ideas and excitement. But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day.

Maybe it's the unreliability on all fronts, I don't know. I ask a lot of programming questions and appreciate some of the autocomplete in vscode, but I know I'm not anywhere close to taking full advantage of what these systems can do.
by vladms | 2025-04-08 10:08:00+00:00
The field exploded though, both in terms of complexity and of number of people involved. I know many engineers that can do from compiler optimizations to web apps. I also know "programmers" that don't want to learn a new library because it stresses them.

Lots of tech we currently rely on is built under FOSS model (thinking web stuff, mobile stuff, os stuff, data center stuff). Of course you must choose to use it, but I find nowadays using Linux daily on desktop as easy as using Windows or MacOS. 20 years ago you had to fight drivers, file formats, browser issues, media formats, lack of software (I mean we run many Windows video-games on Linux without issues, how cool is that?!)

I did not check piracy lately because I find FOSS alternatives (or I can afford to buy some stuff).
by AlecSchueler | 2025-04-08 10:08:18+00:00
> He doesn’t mean everything he says or does in a direct way, much of it is for effect. When he drops massive tariffs on everyone at once, it’s intended to force people to the table to negotiate with an uncomfortable starting position for them.

We understand that. That's why it sounds stupid. It's breaking trust and relationships in favour of showmanship. "Forcing" your allies to negotiate from "uncomfortable starting positions" is a terrible strategy longterm and will encourage them all to make plans to decentre you as much as possible.
by ljm | 2025-04-08 10:09:07+00:00
I wouldn't say uncharitable, just that the best-intentioned version is pretty naïve, especially in the current political climate where every effort to bring that kind of inclusivity and open-mindedness to the table is being actively regressed.

For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove unconscious bias from these decisions as much as possible, because they genuinely want to find the most capable person for the job regardless of their personal preferences, there's still a whole world out there where that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.
by enoch2090 | 2025-04-08 10:11:03+00:00
Played with the demo a bit and I got confused.

1. The chat context is always provided, and that introduces a bit of uncertainty - when the chat history mentioned something the model is always inclined to connect with it.

2. When I tried to set each context to an empty string, the model doesn't show any evidence of remembering concepts. I told it 5 times that I love cats, and when asked about its favorite animal, its output remains "honeybee" and "octopus".
by alexpetros | 2025-04-08 10:11:12+00:00
Hi, author here. The full quote is: "In my opinion, most websites should be using htmx for either:", and then I list two cases where I think htmx is appropriate.

In context, it's clear that I'm not saying "everyone should use htmx," but rather "if you are using htmx, here is how I recommend you do it."

As for the shiny object concern, I have a talk (which you can also find on this blog) called "Building the Hundred-Year Web Service", that dives into that question.
by graemep | 2025-04-08 10:11:48+00:00
Yes, detective work is possible. So are technological extensions to it. For example investigators being allowed (maybe requiring a warrant, or other appropriate controls) to crack the devices for people under investigation.

In fact, things like forcing Apple to backdoor its encryption will not be effective against any but stupid criminals (I admit many criminals are stupid, but the stupid ones are not the most dangerous ones). Once it is known that this can be done, smart criminals will just use other means of communication.

The aim of this is not to help investigate serious crime, it is mass surveillance to deal with things like what the British government has called "legal but harmful speech", or things like "non-crime hate incidents" or minor offences that would not justify putting money into investigations, or civil matters.

I have in mind the way the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act was used to catch people doing things such as not picking up their dog's poo or lying about where they lived to get their kids into a better school.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-08 10:12:07+00:00
Heh ,I actually once added a bug like that too. Angular has "redirect" routes (path matches with redirect to a new path).

I didn't realize that this will make the back button effective unusable, because the redirected url will still be in the history unless you manually redirect with a bare component. Hence whenever someone used back, the redirect pushed them back to the route they just left. I just used it as I came from a backend perspective, where redirects are fine as there is a delay between the request and the redirect, giving the user the time to just double press back... Obviously not so with a JS redirect.

I believe that continues to be an angular Anti-Feature to date.(Just checked, they still have it in their docs - without the ability to surpress the redirected history entry as far as I can see)
by kolektiv | 2025-04-08 10:12:26+00:00
It is amazing how quickly a simple, traditional, "collection of pages" type website actually works if you don't do annoying things to slow it down. Most websites would be absolutely fine if a) HTTP was used reasonably well to set things like cache headers, and so (as mentioned in the article) and b) if a load of user-irrelevant stuff like tracking and advertising code wasn't thrown in as well. A simple page with standard HTML, passably optimised assets where needed, and only the JS needed for actual functionality, should be almost instant on most modern connections.
by afzal_ali | 2025-04-08 10:13:02+00:00
Location: Lahore, Pakistan Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Ruby on Rails | React js | Typescript | PHP Laravel | MySQL | Psql | AWS

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q6IQrVH3llpEqX0CRt_YzN08_Jf...

Email: afzalali2728@gmail.com
by harry8 | 2025-04-08 10:13:11+00:00
Every single action, including Telnet, including typing help, the nc command, was suggested by the audience with Tridgell prompting with a minimal “how are we going to find out…”

A bk client was hacked by the audience in 2 minutes.

It was the most devastating take down I’ve ever seen of the attacks. Linus later said the “git” wasn’t Tridgell at all, but in fact Linus himself.

I think that was the only lca Linus missed for a few years either side.
by gambiting | 2025-04-08 10:13:37+00:00
>>But that is a backdoor!

...is it? That's a weird definition if I've ever heard one - backdoor to me is a normally hidden functionality that can be triggered if you know the secret, so for example adding a secret universal key that unlocks every drive - that would be a backdoor. And that's a dangerous one, because if it leaks out then all criminals of the world can now decrypt your drives.

With the way MS does it, Bitlocker could be the most secure encryption on the planet, unbreakable by any quantum computer, and yet if they have a copy of the key then the law enforcement can obtain it if needed - that's not a backdoor, not any more than giving your parents copy of your house key is an exploit on your home security.

>>but having a system where the US can secretly crack all UK comms is .. not ideal.

No, of course not, I agree with you there.

>>Given the tendency of UK ministers to use Whatsapp for private government communications, should we allow the US to have a backdoor into all of that via Meta?

Well, they shouldn't be using WhatsApp in the first place, given that they don't control the underlying technology. A backdoor might already exist and they wouldn't even know about it.
by derelicta | 2025-04-08 10:14:14+00:00
The sino-vietnamese was a ridiculous mistake for the socialist project, that I agree with. But this wasn't an imperial war.

When I mentioned modern China, I referred to the PRC, so after (most of its) national reunification.

I fail to see how anti-terrorist repression in Xinjiang is akin to any form of imperialism. Otherwise they wouldn't celebrate those cultures on TV and during huge national events. This applies to Mongolia too.

If the situation in China was similar to the genocide in Palestine, then those cultures and their people would be suppressed and not supported nor promoted.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-04-08 10:14:17+00:00
> However certain regulations aren’t job-specific and work like tax, e.g. if you look at notary costs related to registration of business in Germany.

This is not that. You’re making it sound like every business has to jump through all of these hoops as a matter of doing business. You know how to not be bound by GDPR? Don’t bother storing sketchy cookie data or PII. The plumber in your example could just… not do that and not have to worry about compliance. It’s only but for the plumber choosing to store that data that they opt to be bound by the regulation. It’s not a requirement for them to operate. If the business feels like they need to store the nuclear waste, then I need to know that they are storing it properly. They could just not take in and store the nuclear waste and then there’s no compliance burden. 9 times out of 10 they don’t need it to transact their business anyway, and the tenth business probably only exists but for the sketchy data.

In the end we have arrived at the same conclusion: probably the regulation itself, the baby, has some dirty bath water. Any regulatory framework of any significant complexity does, especially a landmark first of its kind in scope regulation in the world. So we should not toss both out. We should try to get rid of just the bath water.

With above said, the plumber is not absolved here. Why did they need to store my PII again? I very much value the fact that they have to think about and answer that question. So whatever improvement should just streamline that process and not get rid of it.
by Retr0id | 2025-04-08 10:14:57+00:00
I had a reasonable intuition for how the "old" method works, but I still don't grok this new approach.

"in multimodal image generation, images are created in the same way that LLMs create text, a token at a time"

Is there some way to visualise these "image tokens", in the same way I can view tokenized text?
by exe34 | 2025-04-08 10:15:13+00:00
can you just ask them before the interview? "is it okay to wear a suit, or do you guys have a stick up your..."?

I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about, and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go into the office, so I really don't care about the suit either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess if the job isn't about mindreading.
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-08 10:16:23+00:00
> English speakers often do care about the connotation of "propaganda" as something deceptive or manipulative

I know they do. If you read again, you'll notice that my point was not that they don't care about the negative connotations of the word "propaganda". It was that having a separate one for "advertisement" serves as a way to accept the latter as benign.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-08 10:17:43+00:00
Paper assets are only meaningful because an army or police force says they are meaningful.

If police and militaries disappeared overnight, then stocks would have no value. Guns would have value and food would have value. Ability to produce these things have value, but paper and whats on it has no value. Moving physical objects has value.

In war, all of these things on paper don't matter compared to physical reality and how it is crafted.

So investing creates a dependence on the American enforcement system which would not enforce in china's favor in case of a war. In some ways investing in a foreign country weakens your own sovereignty and it definitely weakens sovereignty as Putin or Xi would define it.
by klaussilveira | 2025-04-08 10:18:04+00:00
TrenchBroom caused a renaissance in Quake 1 mapping community, bringing tons of new mappers:

https://www.quaddicted.com/

As well as dumptruck_ds tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gONePWocbqA&list=PLgDKRPte5Y...
by guiriduro | 2025-04-08 10:18:11+00:00
The only healthy "middle-ground" with secure communication is fully secure, non-negotiable. The fact that some criminal enterprises can use it and aren't trivially exposed to random searches/fishing trips isn't worth abandoning that principle. Normal effective human policing, collecting physical and digital forensic evidence (once through the secure pipe), whistleblowers etc are all sufficient by themselves, but are expensive and require officers not to be lazy. And politicians hoping to trawl for 'thought crimes' and politically expedient criminalisation of free speech becomes much harder and more expensive if secrets are secure, again: just as it should be.
by muzani | 2025-04-08 10:18:29+00:00
I was thinking Grab, back when they were called MyTeksi. Honestly the reason I don't answer these questions is that it's just so hard to dig up this info. It feels like genealogy, which is fine for curiosity, but I can't tell which of these questions are just being contentious.

Best I can get this this link from 7 years ago: https://vulcanpost.com/624177/malaysia-memorable-startup-fun...

And it was about their investments from ~17 years ago. These things are slow.
by mohi-kalantari | 2025-04-08 10:19:13+00:00
I'm also using chatgpt with its search enabled or perplexity for searching almost anything. Way more accurate and to the point.

I feel like the google search will become obsolete in a short time and they have to make big changes to their UX and search engine.

Although I guess most of its user base are still relying on the old ways so changing it right now has huge impacts on older users.
by cess11 | 2025-04-08 10:19:16+00:00
I have an LLM synthesised HTML file that links in a remote tailwind.css and contains no script tags or any JS at all. It contains a lot of class="bg-cover bg-center h-screen" and class="text-3xl font-bold text-gray-800 mb-4" that I don't really understand, and this file renders just fine in a web browser.

Where do you expect that compiler to come into this? Or is it me that doesn't understand Tailwind and this is actually not Tailwind, just some random CSS with the same name that a compressed database puked up for me?
by Ringz | 2025-04-08 10:20:08+00:00
> The idea here is that the website still has a sound URL structure, which is managed by the core browser functionality, while interactivity is carefully layered on top, with targeted updates.

It’s a long time since I have to work with websites. JQuery was the hot stuff back then. But we didn’t used it. It was all HTML and a Java backend. This sentence implies that right now basic stuff isn’t managed by the browser (but by React, Vue and so on?) which seems to be simply wrong.
by m11a | 2025-04-08 10:20:33+00:00
> Do we suppose they will just create a backdoor to allow _some_ bots in?

That, and maybe they will as CF seem quite big on MCP.[0] Or people just bypass the bot detection. It's already not terribly difficult to do; people in the sneaker bot and ticket scalping communities have long had bypasses for all the major companies.

I mean, we can all imagine bad use-cases of bots, but there's also the pros: the internet wastes loads of human time. I still remember needing to browse marketplaces real estate listings with terrible search and notification functionality to find a flat... shudders. Unbelievable amount of hours wasted.

If fewer people are able to build bots that can index a larger number of sites and give better searching capabilities, for instance, where sites are unable to provide this, I'm personally all for it. For many sites, it's that they lack the in-house development expertise and probably they wouldn't even mind.

[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/model-context-proto... etc
by like_any_other | 2025-04-08 10:20:57+00:00
> untouchable

Surveillance of even just one participant in these communication networks will give the police access to everything they see. And technology massively helps police in this surveillance - hidden microphones (or a laser reading vibrations off a window), cameras, and telescopic lenses and drones can reveal the contents of a screen, the password being typed, every word said out loud. The device can even be fitted with a hardware backdoor, or sabotaged, and its replacement intercepted and backdoored, as the NSA did.

But it can't be done en-masse, against every citizen.

That mere encryption makes communication immune from surveillance, or that there is anything remotely approaching the "going dark" problem, is a naked lie by the surveillance state to scare us into giving away even the tiny scraps of privacy we have left. The truth is law enforcement has far greater abilities to surveil even people trying to hide (to say nothing of the data they get from people sharing their thoughts and social networks on Facebook, or carrying phones with them that let the phone company triangulate them at any moment) than at any point in history. In light of that, we should be talking about further limiting their authority, not increasing it.
by card_zero | 2025-04-08 10:22:17+00:00
Looking at the example where the coffee table is swapped, I notice every time the image is reprocessed it mutates, based on the previous iteration, and objects become more bizarre each time, like chinese whispers.

* The weird-ass basket decoration on the table originally has some big chain links (maybe anchor chain, to keep the theme with the beach painting). By the third version, they're leathery and are merging with the basket.

* The candelabra light on the wall, with branch decorations, turns into a sort of skinny minimalist gold stag head, and then just a branch.

* The small table in the background gradually loses one of its three legs, and ends up defying gravity.

* The freaky green lamps in the window become at first more regular, then turn into topiary.

* Making the carpet less faded turns up the saturation on everything else, too, including the wood the table is made from.
by kookamamie | 2025-04-08 10:22:44+00:00
It kind of is - although, with a twist.

I think most things done currently with the frontend "frameworks", could be achieved with standard HTML5+JS, without any "build steps" or other bloat involved.

This said, there is a case for building on a commonly used mature platform, such as React, to speed up the development cycle and in order not inventing the wheel again.
by graemep | 2025-04-08 10:23:01+00:00
> Wasn't CSS invented so we didn't have to write every html element "its blue, centered text and bold font" yet people willingly choose to use class="items-center font-bold text-blue-600" and running it through a compiler.

Tailwind is far from the first framework to require it. Bootstrap has things like .center and its entire basis are layout classes for the grid. its responsive by default, but not semantic.

I think CSS has failed because people want far more control on appearance (for branding and aesthetics) than the people devising it anticipated.

The motivation for semantic markup has also reduced because people write much less HTML. You might have some markup in what you edit, but the layout and base styles are usually generated by a system (e.g. a CMS). Even most people serving static files use a site generator.
by cess11 | 2025-04-08 10:23:39+00:00
If all your frontend code lives in component files then it is quite nice that all the styling is also local to those components so you don't end up with horrors in unexpected places because you changed a line in a CSS file.

Since it's already in component files you can use the templating already present in that context to fill in values from colour schemes and so on, without the hazards of cascading.
by gambiting | 2025-04-08 10:24:01+00:00
Well, I disagree that it's useless - my front door still keeps my home secure even though my sister has a copy of the key.

I want my devices to be secure from thieves who might steal them, and I want my communications to be secure from someone intercepting internet traffic at various locations I might visit - that is still achieved in that scenario, even if MS/Apple hold the copy of the key. That doesn't make the encryption useless - just ineffective if your attack vector is defending yourself against state-level actors.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-08 10:24:28+00:00
> The results are not as good as a professional designer could create but are an impressive first prototype.

I like to look at how far we've come since the early days of Stable Diffusion. It was fascinating to play with it back then, but it quickly became apparent that it was "generic" and not suited for "real work" because it lacked consistency, text capabilities, fingers! and so on... Looking at these results now, I'm amazed at the quality, consistency and ease of use. Gone are the days of doing alchemy on words and adding a bunch of "in the style of Rutkovsky, golden hour, hd, 4k, pretty please ..." at the end of prompts.
by unruffled4079 | 2025-04-08 10:24:52+00:00
Would you be able to explain how

> A lot of Jewish and Israeli people are taught [that non-jewish people worldwide are thinly hiding a goal of eradication] from a young age

this works? I'm not Jewish or Israeli, and would like to understand whether it's taught through religion or culture. And what "eradication" means in this context.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-04-08 10:24:54+00:00
The problem is that the cats out of the bag when it comes to encryption.

Let’s just say we can wave a magic wand and make every phone manufacturer include a way that allows only lawful decryption with court orders and the like.

What stops the criminals spinning up their own service that doesn’t? Sure you could make such services illegal, but when has something being illegal stopped criminals from doing it?

All backdoors do is weaken security for everyone else while those who really want secure communications/ storage for their ill gotten gains will still find a way.

Refusing to decrypt is already a crime in the UK (iirc up to 2 years, 5 if the underlying suspicion is terror related).

Fighting encryption in my opinion is like treating the symptoms not the root cause of the problem.
by jwr | 2025-04-08 10:25:08+00:00
I find the discussion here somewhat amusing, because I am on another level of disbelief when looking at the state of things in the npm world.

Most people ask "why ship bun (whatever that is), why not just be an npm module".

I am baffled as to why we have forgotten the lost art of spitting out something from a build and then using that thing. As in, "make" producing a CSS file. Or a JavaScript file. Or multiple files. Why does npmness have to force itself into every nook and cranny of our software and consume it all?

In my webapp I use several small CSS and JavaScript libraries, and for building those I use docker containers. The npm horrors live in the docker containers, I try not to look in there, but whatever happens there, a bunch of css and js files come out. Reproducibly. Reliably. And things don't break if there is a headwind or a tailwind (ahem) today on the internet.