MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by uconnectlol | 2025-04-18 15:54:17+00:00
discord is shit, poorly designed software, with all the most obnoxious poor security decisions (like requiring phone calls), with poor political decisions on top as well as spying. probably one of the worst pieces of software to ever exist. all it has is momentum. it's like pop music where a million people make bands and one wins the fame lottery.

it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.

they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.

instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)
by cs702 | 2025-04-18 15:54:29+00:00
Great find! Thank you for sharing the OP on HN.

There's no evidence that "Agua Tofana" ever existed, and yet, for centuries, Europeans widely believed it was real, and widely feared it as a colorless, odorless, tasteless, undetectable, gradual-acting poison that could be added to anyone's food. Unscrupulous salespeople, as always, found clever ways to package and sell fake Agua Tofana -- similar to the fake snake-oil sold as "medicine" in the 18th and 19th centuries. The capacity of human beings to believe in things for which there is no evidence never ceases to amaze me.
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-18 15:54:54+00:00
> When the Nazi ideology was widespread, of course it permeated into every domain of the society.

One of the architects of that ideology was Carl Schmitt, who formulated the concept of the Totalstaat or "total state" as a state that did exactly what you say: permeated into every domain of society. He considered a state "total" when it was co-extensive with the entirety of its people's endeavors, co-opting or liquidating any alternative authority such as media, academia, or church. This was a novel concept at the time, especially after the swing to liberal (small and restrained) republics in the late eighteenth century. As a novel concept, the total permeation of the Nazi state into academia and the rest of the spheres of non-governmental authority would have been far from obvious at the time to observers of prior governments, but it was also the intent.

The Nazis were not the only ones to adopt an illiberal, totalitarian stance: the twentieth century saw a huge growth in government authority and its permeation through other parts of human life, like academia, in regimes that rejected other aspects of the Nazi ideology. The Soviet Union comes to mind as an example: the government coopted authorities like academia and liquidated others like churches in order to pervade as far as possible every aspect of society.

The fact that it seems obvious in retrospect that Nazi ideology would permeate academia and every domain of society shows how successful the concept of a Totalstaat was, even in an age that looks back with horror upon the Nazis. The way to counter the spread of government is to put strong limits on government, keeping it out of academia, the media, religion, and so forth completely, with no government funding for any of them. If academia requires government funding, the government of the day will always control academia.
by gsaines | 2025-04-18 15:55:59+00:00
Where are they planning to go if you mind me asking? My brother is considering moving to Canada, but he's already living in Ohio, so that wouldn't be a huge move in absolute geographical terms. Another friend is in the process of moving to Spain, but there really doesn't seem to be a particularly safe place.

Most nations appear to have their own brand of populist hard-right political leaders at the moment and I've cautioned people that unless they know a lot about where they are moving to, they are likely to just be exchanging one scary regime for another and taking on outsider immigrant status in that new society.

I'm genuinely curious about this, no sarcasm of cynicism here.
by Desafinado | 2025-04-18 15:56:09+00:00
In an ideal world we'd be able to switch careers and do different things over the course of our lives, but money reigns supreme.

I think what you're experiencing is normal. An entire lifetime doing the same thing for almost all of your time is going to get tedious eventually. I'm about there myself, I realize I'm in the best possible world but my passion has fizzled out.
by metalman | 2025-04-18 15:56:29+00:00
I think it is a mistake not to cut the top off the egg and just look inside as ancient egg shell has no value after it drys out and the visual information may be unique,so off with its top, and then take samples of the "liquid" and the inner shell lining, if it's present, and then see if there is any remaining structure of an embryo or the egg as laid.
by Filligree | 2025-04-18 15:56:53+00:00
They’re not wrong. The tension is that on average, dark-skinned folk have lower merit — because of racism in the past that limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents.

Among a number of other reasons. Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were unequal in the past, and that causes inequitable results in the present?

One might, for instance, attempt to make up for it with targeted education. It’s a pity that the US educational system is such a disaster.
by heywoods | 2025-04-18 15:56:58+00:00
Your intuition regarding the shift from vertical to horizontal integration is spot on!

Sam Altman, in a recent Stratechery interview, detailed parts of OpenAI's future strategy that align with your prediction — a persistent, personalized AI. He envisions users interacting with OpenAI not just through core products but also across other applications.

Altman described a key part of the strategy: "...we have this idea that you sign in with your OpenAI account to anybody else that wants to integrate the API, and you can take your bundle of credits and your customized model and everything else anywhere you want to go".

This system aims to create a portable AI experience and by virtue, would usurp the vertical software business model that has historically dominated the software economy. A horizontal play, that sits in the middle collecting their tidy sum of the pot will require a very compelling argument. That would require a low barrier to integrate for developers coupled with a value-add proposition that is meaningful and not possible for anyone other than the largest technology companies.

As you know, it’s sort of the Wild West of tech right now. OpenAI is looking to find a territory in the AI landscape and make their stake now, and I think this is the correct strategy. We have seen what being the first to market with a great product can do for the longevity and growth of tech companies - especially the consumer markets. They have the name recognition, forever embedded in the lexicon of the internet, and a great product vision that will lead to critical mass adoption that and what awaits them is the coveted moat, at least in the consumer market, that AI companies have been struggling to find out in the Wild West of AI.

Altman mentioned wanting users to "be able to sign in with your personal AI that's gotten to know you over your life". This sign-in would ideally carry "your memory and who you are and your preferences and all that sort of thing" across different integrated services.

The OpenAI SSO login will be the Trojan horse and later on the app developers will either be incentivized by OpenAI or compelled to integrate their products because of the compelling value proposition it would bring to bare with an integrated personalized AI assistant, complete with its memory and preferences.

Lastly, I suspect this is one of the driving motivations to become a consumer hardware company as there is little to no chance that current players (Apple, Google, Meta) would allow the same 1st party access to their internal API’s would be a requirement for what Altman has laid out for OpenAI moving forward.
by jplusequalt | 2025-04-18 15:58:28+00:00
>Even AAA games these days happily run on GC languages.

Which games are these? Are you referring to games written in Unity where the game logic is scripted in C#? Or are you referring to Minecraft Java Edition?

I seriously doubt you would get close to the same performance in a modern AAA title running in a Java/C# based engine.
by ashvardanian | 2025-04-18 15:58:36+00:00
I wish I'd had a short answer :)

For years, I've had a hope to build it in the form of an open-core project: open-source SotA solutions for Storage, Compute, and AI Modeling built bottom up. You can imagine the financial & time burden of building something like that with all the weird optimizations and coding practices listed above.

A few years in, with millions spent out of my pocket, without any venture support or revenue, I've decided to change gears and focus on a few niche workloads until some of the Unum tools become industry standards for something. USearch was precisely that, a toy Vector Search engine that would still, hopefully, be 10x better than alternatives, in one way or another: <https://www.unum.cloud/blog/2023-11-07-scaling-vector-search...>.

Now, ScyllaDB (through Rust SDK) and YugaByte (through C++ SDK) are the most recent DBMSs to announce features built on USearch, joining the ranks of many other tech products leveraging some of those optimizations, and I was playing around with different open-source growth & governance ideas last year, looking for way to organize more collaborative environment among our upstream users, rather than competitive — no major releases, just occasional patches here and there.

It was an interesting period, but now I'm again deep in the "CUDA-GDB" land, and the next major release to come is precisely around Full-Text Search in StringZilla <https://github.com/ashvardanian/stringzilla>, and will be integrated into both USearch <https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch> and somewhere else ;)
by collingreen | 2025-04-18 15:59:18+00:00
My understanding is atheism is not believing in a deity (a - without, theism - belief in deity) and agnosticism is about not knowing (sometimes not knowing if it's possible to know). It gets messy because plenty of folks play games with the words like "clearly I don't believe the major, self-contradicting religions but maybe there is some deity out there somehow that had an influence beyond 'natural processes'" or that Einstein quote about calling the beauty of physics and the universe "god".

Similar to what you said about me, I think you're perhaps putting faith/religious dogma and spirituality/holding things sacred in the same boat. I think having awe or wonder or a feeling of being part of something bigger is again orthogonal to belief in a particular god. I don't even think religion is the dividing line here - religion and ritual exists all over without an overarching deity.

I liked the underlying idea to what you said about motivation to explain away religious experience as physiological process; I think there is something interesting there. I expect this is a result of what people already believe, not a cause, but I like the concept of how people take in new information and default to directing it to "knowable, let's figure it out" or some version of "unknowable".

tl;dr - not believing in a god seems separate from spirituality and religious experience. Theist and atheist are extremely high level (and one dimensional) labels and there is a LOT of diverse (and overlapping) belief and experience under each.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-04-18 15:59:27+00:00
Neat, but you probably don't need this. Just compile a regular POSIX program and embed it into the kernel image with initramfs or initrd, or drop it alongside the kernel on the UEFI partition (if you're in a x86 environment). You might want busybox or your own init process to start up your program and monitor it.
by SilasX | 2025-04-18 15:59:54+00:00
That's an unfair reading of my comment.

For one thing, I was replying to your own attempt to do a programmer style legalism, of "welp, you instantiated a copy, therefore it must be copyright infringement, case closed". I was already basing that on the principle you're now appealing to, to say that that isolated fact alone doesn't settle the matter (which is a much lower bar than the broader point that, all things considered, generative AI isn't infringement).

It's great that you recognize that programmer-style legalisms don't work in the law! It just wish you'd had that insight in mind when making your original comment.

Second, to the extent that I endorsed the general argument (generative AI not infringing), I wasn't claiming that the point worked because of some mechanistic technicality, but because of the very broad trend of accepting internal copies for a wide range of saleable data products. That is, in fact, how analogical reasoning works in law: courts compare the case at hand to similar ones.

Is any one point definitive? Of course not. But brushing off all analogies is unjustified deflection. If you think there are more pressing considerations that override the pattern I've pointed to -- like why the "intent, impact, etc" matter here -- great! I'm happy to have that conversation. But you can't just gesture at "legal rigor is hard" as if that's some kind of counterargument.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-18 16:00:06+00:00
Monopoly is a real word with a real meaning. It doesn't matter what any kind of judge "decides", he does not have the authority to change the meanings of words according to his humors. Google might be doing anti-competitive or fraudulent actions, but let's use the proper terms in the proper places.

Just like there is a difference between theft, burglary and robbery.
by Analemma_ | 2025-04-18 16:00:41+00:00
I'm going to fling that response right back at you. "Enshittification" is not a generic term for "update I don't like", it describes a specific dynamic that happens when a company inserts itself as a middleman into a two-sided market. arXiv could get worse in other ways, but enshittification in particular can't happen to it, that's a category error.

I think you should offer better thoughts instead of mad-libbing in buzzwords where they don't apply. Enshittification is actually a useful concept, and I don't want it to go the way of "FUD", which had a similar trajectory in the later years of Slashdot where people just reduced it to a useless catch-all phrase whenever Microsoft said anything about anything.
by amadeo_warden | 2025-04-18 16:00:52+00:00
Research preview released under MIT license.

This CLI wraps any STD/IO local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in a thin docker container for improved monitoring and security.

We built it to help clarify our thinking over what our MCP strategy should and give the best advice to our customers on theirs.

More deets here: https://blog.openint.dev/sane-local-mcp/
Show HN: PowerShellGPT Voice Controlled AI Agent Automates Windows and the Web
by techinterests | 2025-04-18 16:00:54+00:00
I built PowerShellGPT, a native Windows app that connects large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, and even local models like LM Studio) directly to PowerShell and a live embedded browser, enabling full voice or text-controlled automation of both your system and the web.

Unlike traditional chat interfaces, PowerShellGPT doesn’t just generate code—it executes it, watches the results, and loops that feedback back to the model for error correction or follow-up actions. It acts more like an autonomous agent than a passive chatbot.

Core Features: Natural Language to Execution Loop: AI generates PowerShell or JavaScript, executes it, sees the result, and corrects itself if needed.

Voice Recognition: Use voice commands in over 80 languages to control your system or web browser.

@PowerShellGPT@ and @JsGPT@ Tags: Triggers live execution in embedded PowerShell and browser environments.

Agent Bridge: Enables multiple named AI agents to communicate and delegate tasks to each other.

Keyword Commands: Create templates like “email [KEYWORD] to Karen” or “search Google for [KEYWORD]” and fill them in with your voice.

Chain & Wait Commands: Link multiple actions together and add delays between them like: search YouTube for music and then wait 5 seconds and then play the first result

Voice Activated Automation: Detect faces, trigger system events, play media, fill out forms—entirely hands-free.

Cross-language Support: Generate and run Python, Node.js, Ruby, or C# files using natural language via a system I call MACFARI ("Make A Code File And Run It").

Use Cases: System automation and scripting with no typing

Web task automation with dynamic JavaScript injection

Creating AI-powered assistants that collaborate via voice

Accessibility-friendly computing via full voice control

The app runs as a lightweight Delphi GUI with two embedded browsers: one for AI, one for execution. All AI-to-execution communication happens via tag parsing and a secure permission system. You can toggle access prompts, enable/disable looping protection, and modify wake word settings.

https://youtube.com/@PowerShellGPT

Would love feedback, ideas, or feature requests. I'm especially curious what you’d build with it—or how you'd break it.

Thanks for checking it out!
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-18 16:01:04+00:00
Anna's Archive is at 43M Books and 98M Papers [1]. The book total is nearly double what Google has.

Google's scanning project basically stalled after the legal battle. It's a very fascinating read [2].

[1] https://annas-archive.org/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170719004247/https://www.theat...
by freejazz | 2025-04-18 16:01:13+00:00
Juries are allowed to infer intent. They do not need an explicit statement admitting it.

To be honest, I find it very weird that you quoted that part and had the response you did as if you knew what you were talking about. By your logic, intent would essentially be impossible to prove in just about any circumstance. Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
by jack101311 | 2025-04-18 16:01:16+00:00
Actually, EinkBro's Reader mode is using Mozilla's readability.js. I've actually been using EinkBro for over four years. One of the main reasons I want to develop Eink Mode is to achieve true pagination, where text and images aren't cut off at the edge of the screen. EinkBro's approach involves scrolling a fixed distance by tapping page turn zones on the screen (just like pressing the space bar when using a desktop) , and it removes the scrolling animation using "jumping" by a 'scrollHeight' amount. However, this still has the issue of potential content cutoff.
by dabbz | 2025-04-18 16:01:22+00:00
If you hit `a` in the search results page it'll take you to a chat interface to better grok the AI in a conversational format. Not exactly the same as perplexity still, but more ChatGPT akin. There's also a continue in assistant button at the bottom of the summary results to chat more with the query.

You can also go straight to the view by visiting `/assistant` and typing your query in there.

I still think preplexity has the AI search stuff down better, but getting both a "legacy style" search AND AI search, Kagi has better value to me imo.
by msarnoff | 2025-04-18 16:02:26+00:00
I’ve done C++ on a Cortex-M0+ with 8KB of flash. Code size is a big issue. You have to disable a bunch of stuff (no exceptions, nothing that does dynamic allocation) but you can still use classes, virtual methods, templates, constexpr, etc. These are all things that are a pain to do in C and usually require a bunch of gross macros.
by khuey | 2025-04-18 16:02:26+00:00
> If GCP is helping, stay tuned for a blog post from google some time around the completion of the migration with a title like "Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming.

"Google pays to run an enormous intellectual resource in exchange for a self-congratulatory blogpost" seems like a perfectly acceptable outcome for society here.
by mindslight | 2025-04-18 16:03:32+00:00
> unlikely, given that the U.S. has been among the per-capita richest countries in the world for almost its entire existence

Sure, but currently the wealth of the US depends on maintaining the world's reserve currency. As I said, the reliance on international interdependence could be untangled, but it would require a team of surgeons rather than a gang of butchers. The gang of butchers will merely destroy what we do have, leaving us with a broken society.

As far as the general argument about culture, I was using an example somewhere in the realm of what you were talking about to demonstrate how foreign cultures don't automatically inject themselves into US culture. You're straight up ignoring the many hurdles between being a college student and becoming a member of the "US elite".

I will also point out (and I generally hate arguments that start this way, but you dredged up the context), that WASP culture was most certainly not the only culture in the US at the time. So the appeal wasn't to the "American public at large" but rather to the subset that "mattered" to swing votes - the idea of some singular overarching culture was an illusion promulgated by broadcast mass media, and that illusion has now been shattered. That sea change has certainly upset a lot of people, but you can't claim it resulted from something as simple as student visas.
by jlarocco | 2025-04-18 16:04:16+00:00
Having worked at a fully remote company before (and during) COVID, I'm surprised so many companies have stuck with it for so long.

IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc.

Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.
by conductr | 2025-04-18 16:04:24+00:00
There's a whole section of the article titled "DEI'ing inside" where they explain some tactics that fit the bill. Of course nobody said the phrase "DEI purge", that's the author summarizing it for a headline. I'm not really taking a stand on whether it's accurate or click/rage-bait, just saying this is standard writing style to summarize things into themes and it appears they have the content to back it up in the article, it shouldn't need to be a direct quote.