MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lurk2 | 2025-04-04 11:35:42+00:00
> The reformation is more closely related to "westenrism" than the Greeks or Romans who laid some of the philosophical groundwork.

I can see where you're getting this, but I would disagree. Western civilization is inseparable from the Greeks and Romans. What you are describing sounds more like a particular development that occurred in Northern Europe which resulted in a radical re-engineering of social structures, ultimately culminating in parliamentary democracy. I don't know enough of the history well enough to determine whether this happened because of the reformation, a scientific revolution, economic changes, or whatever other reason we could come up with, but I do understand the trend that you're talking about. Today we would broadly associate it with Anglo-American liberal democracy. The issue I took with your comment was that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that "the West" is predicated on these values, since historically speaking they are comparatively new.

There is some scholarship that tries to make this argument (e.g. I can remember reading an article many years ago which tried to argue that western civilization originates in the Near East after the adoption of massed-infantry by the Hittites), but the more of it that I read, the more convinced I became that it was simply an attempt to view history through the lens of contemporary attitudes (e.g. of Anglo-American liberal democracy being the culmination of all historical development).

> I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.

I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, but you may be interested to know that there is a considerable tradition which rejects this conclusion in the reactionaries. Some element of the tradition rejects the premise of human rights entirely, but others are rooted in a far more critical reading of power and how it (ostensibly) must operate. Most people who have read into these issues will be familiar with the reactionaries who reject human rights as a principle, but very few are even aware of the sort who reject the prescriptions of the sort of governance you are describing while (at least nominally) sharing its aims re: justice and freedom.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-04-04 11:36:28+00:00
From the Wikipedia OKRs linked from the Wikipedia article that is the source of the Ars article:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

> Key result FA2.1: Generate 5,000,000 views from short-form video content across all owned channels by the end of H1.

Wikipedia is actively saying it should pivot to short-form video to engage young people...
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-04 11:37:13+00:00
The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use this if you own a small company or work for government / non-profit.

Most average human's (including myself) can't use the source code in any way:

> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
by croes | 2025-04-04 11:37:43+00:00
He suggested infestation with bird flu which would kill 80% of the infected birds and creates the risk pf s new pandemic.

He employed the guy who faked the vaccines cause autism study to research vaccine safety.

He favors Vitamin A over vaccines for measles treatment.

Worked out great

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43574847
by blitzar | 2025-04-04 11:37:48+00:00
Talking about grindsets, ARR, DAU and getting up at 4:30am may be seen as good content for a twitter thread, but most grown adults cringe when they read copy and pasted fortune cookie wisdom memes.

I would agree, talking about actual human stuff related to an actually interesting topic was a wasted oportunity. Nobody actually cares what the numbers on the app are, least of all admissions officers.
by glenjamin | 2025-04-04 11:38:23+00:00
Complaining about the for loop behaviour seems odd. Variables declared in the expression section of the loop are scoped to the loop body - this is generally reasonable and the least likely to produce errors.

Notably, Go initially decided to stick with the C-style approach and have the scope be outside the loop, and has since decided that the tiny performance improvement this provides isn't worth the many many times it's tripped people up, and has changed the semantics in recent versions: https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview
by kelnos | 2025-04-04 11:38:30+00:00
Swartz was acting to make locked-up information (information derived from research largely paid for with tax dollars) free, because he believed it was an injustice to charge people for it.

Stanley was hacking Paypal and defacing other people's forums and websites, for the lulz.

While I think it's safe to say both committed crimes, I'm a lot more sympathetic to Swartz than to Stanley. Anonymous is a bit more grey: they perhaps exposed things that needed to be exposed, but they were often indiscriminate and hurt people in the process.

This isn't politics or hypocrisy; it's thinking critically about different circumstances and applying common-sense ethics and morality.
by staticelf | 2025-04-04 11:38:48+00:00
Well, Yes. But users today are used to everything being saved remotely, especially on a website. I think customers would be very angry if suddenly their data were gone because a sync didn't go through and data were lost because they cleaned their cache on perhaps another site that then affected all sites.

People do have higher expectations on software than they used to have. There are also other issues with syncable states than the OP wrote about. Just imagine that you upgrade your api, you will have to be very backwards compatible for a long time or force users to update their web apps when they come online again.

It's easy to mess up service workers and it's possible to put stuff in a state which is almost unable to recover from unless the users affected clear their cache and then risk losing all of their data. Stuff like that can't happen with a normal web app.

While all of these things are certainly possible, I also do think that the development time is longer. You will have a hard time to compete with businesses that don't care about local first stuff since they can pump out features in a higher rate than you can because you have to care about states in a much deeper sense.

It makes sense for some apps to be local first, but not really for that many imho.
Show HN: VNDB MCP Server – Connect Claude AI to the Visual Novel Database
by TANABE | 2025-04-04 11:39:07+00:00
Show HN: VNDB MCP Server - Connect Claude AI to the Visual Novel Database

I built a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that allows Claude AI to interact with the Visual Novel Database (VNDB) API. With this integration, users can search for visual novels and get detailed information directly through Claude.

Key features: - Search visual novels by title, tags, or other criteria - Retrieve comprehensive details about specific VNs - Query optimization through built-in caching functionality

I'm actively looking for feedback on this project!

GitHub: https://github.com/TANABEDAIGAKU/vndb-mcp
by jl6 | 2025-04-04 11:39:58+00:00
> And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.

For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true. Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever. Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.
by chuckadams | 2025-04-04 11:40:06+00:00
Since I started using Prettier, I've moved permanently into the no-semicolons camp. Prettier catches ASI hazards and inserts semicolons where needed, and I've never seen it fail. Whichever camp you're in though, put it in your linter, don't leave it to chance. React code is full of array destructuring, that particular hazard is prone to bite you if you ignore it (tho it's still a little contrived if your usual style is avoiding mutable variables).
by kouteiheika | 2025-04-04 11:40:26+00:00
Unit tests which test random inputs across different sizes (e.g. with different number of heads, head sizes, embedding dimensions, etc.) and compare two different implementations' output to each other (e.g. attention implemented manually in an eager fashion vs a bunch of accelerated attention libraries).

Also more integration-like tests where I take an already pretrained model, load it using an established library (e.g. Huggingface Transformers) and I also load the very same checkpoint into my reimplementation (where I vary the implementation, e.g. swap the attention implementation) and compare the outputs. Funnily enough, I recently even found a bug in HF's Transformers this way when I updated to a newer version and my previously matching output was not matching anymore.
by latexr | 2025-04-04 11:41:24+00:00
Patently not true. Pokémon Go, for example, wouldn’t fit several of the points.

> The inevitable, dehumanising consequence of it.

> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.

> Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it.

> A thousand no’s, but ‘yes’ when shareholders start clamouring for it.

> A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.

> Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.
by rikafurude21 | 2025-04-04 11:41:35+00:00
I gave up with all modern Remote desktop and switched back to vnc and its been working flawlessly. I use tailscale to make the vnc ports accessible to my private network and I'm able to just connect via tightvnc. Remote desktop was only ever complicated because you had to open ports and make your machines accesible online, and with tailscale solving that whole mess for me its as simple as connect to this ip and its done. Thats all the paid options ever took care for you, the core functionality hasnt been changed in forever, unless i guess you care about extreme low latency which products like parsec offer.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-04-04 11:41:49+00:00
It is 2025. I go to a random store and buy a laptop. It comes with Windows. I put on a pendrive of a Linux distribution that claims to be secure boot compatible. I reboot. It doesn't work -- it goes straight into Windows.

I see the BIOS offers a boot menu -- "press F12 during boot to select boot device", it clearly says during POST. I press F12. I choose the USB Sandisk whatever pendrive where my Linux distribution is. It doesn't work -- it still boots straight into Windows. There's no error message whatsoever, it just goes into Windows.

I continue to peruse the BIOS. I find an option to wipe the internal storage. I do it. There is no Windows anymore. I plug in the pendrive and reboot the system. It doesn't work -- it goes straight into a BIOS setup page called "Recovery". It offers me to do hardware diagnostics, as if I had a broken laptop screen or something. Not once it mentions anything about there having been a secure boot failure.

What is this if not blocking people from installing Linux ? All of this used to frigging work. I would put the pendrive and it would boot Linux no questions asked. Or at worst I would need to hold some key while booting. Or in worst case situation I could use _frigging Windows itself_ to boot from a difference device on next boot (they STILL offer this). It. Used. To. Work.

At the end and by pure luck I find out that, like many other computers sold today, and as per the "recommendation" of Microsoft, this computer does not have the "Microsoft UEFI CA key" enabled by default. It is completely logical that I have to enable something about Microsoft UEFI on my BIOS to allow Linux to boot. Completely logical.

Ah, and I get a million warnings while doing that, clearly saying that "This will reduce the security of my computer". I got less warnings when I wiped the disks than when I enabled the MS UEFI CA. Seriously. Don't even think of trying to disable Secure Boot . Your will lose your data faster than if you literally sanitize your disks. Apparently.

And worst of it, the poor distributions that are "Secure Boot" compatible needed to _castrate_ themselves in order for MS to sign them. For example, Suse doesn't support friggin' _hibernation_ anymore. No more NVIDIA drivers. No more loading kernel modules. "Root" is no longer "root" if you boot with Secure Boot. Lockdown is mandatory despite the fact that Linus himself said it was a stupid dumb move to tie Lockdown to Secure Boot status. It happened anyway. That is the power of MS.

And despite the mandatory castrating, MS still goes and ALTERS THE DEAL, since now Secure Boot devices ANYWAY STILL NO LONGER BOOT LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS BY DEFAULT.

Call this whatever you want. I call it Secure Boot working as intended. And that is the problem.
by api | 2025-04-04 11:41:53+00:00
You’re talking about individual piracy. I’m talking about huge scale corporate piracy, which is already happening (laundered through AI algorithms and other ways) and would happen a lot more if copyright vanished.

Part of what muddies the water here too is that copyright lasts too long. Companies like Disney lobbied for this successfully. It should have a time horizon of maybe 25 years, 50 at most.
by axegon_ | 2025-04-04 11:42:16+00:00
You basically just described rebellious youth, which we have all been at some point in our lives. And this statement is complete and utter bs. The problem is that comrade muskov is not a technical person, he is just a "marketing strategist" (quotation marks since I don't want to offend people who actually know what they are doing). Here's the painful truth: most governments have appalling security practices and it's a miracle that the world still exists. Finding vulnerabilities or leaks is not a hard task and it only requires patience - there are dozens of such examples in my own country alone and the only reason no one has sounded the alarm is because two things are going to happen: media scandal for 2 days, then everyone will forget about it and the second thing that will happen is that whoever rings the alarm will be dragged in by security agencies for years to get questioned about what they were looking for and they will not accept "I know you are morons and I don't trust you with handling my data in a service that is completely open to the general public". "Run-ins with the law" has nothing to do with talent and if anything, it's the absence of a talent if that resulted in "run-ins with the law". That is a clear indication that the people involved have no idea what they are doing and just managed to connect two simple dots after a "complete 2 hour hacking crash course - FREE, pls subscribe for more". The simple fact is that musk has no goddamn clue about what he is doing or talking about: "the government does not run relational databases". Right comrade, cause precisely the usa spending service which you are referring to is not a django app using psql: https://github.com/fedspendingtransparency/usaspending-api/b...
by brookst | 2025-04-04 11:42:19+00:00
I like your formulation but I find point 1 unconvincing. Does it still hold if you paint from a reference image beside the easel? Or projected into the canvas? Or if it’s not a “real” painter but a low-wage laborer? Two of them side by side? A hundred of them?

Where I’m going is I don’t think it makes sense for the moral / legal acceptability of a in image to depend on the mechanical means which created it. I think we have to judge based on the image itself. If the human-generated version and AI-generated version both show the same level of interpretation when viewed, I don’t think point 1 supports treating them differently.

And, as you say, point 2 is mostly congruent, but I have to point out that LLMs are not merely compressed versions of the training material, but instead generalized learnings based on the training data.

ML “neurons” may function differently than our own, and transformer architecture is likely different from the way we think, but the learning of generalized patterns plus details sufficient to reconstitute specific instances seems pretty similar.

Think about painting Indiana Jones; I’ll bet you could paint the handle of the whip in great detail. But it’s likely that’s because you remember a specific image of his whip handle; it’s because you know what whip handles look like in general. ML models work similarly (at some level of abstraction).

I’m left unconvinced that there is anything substantially different about human and AI generated art, and also that we can only judge IP position of either based on the work itself.
by freetime2 | 2025-04-04 11:42:26+00:00
> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.

Except it’s not rubbish out. The output is astoundingly good - something I would have considered science fiction a few years ago.

It’s not perfect. But as a tool in certain contexts, it is already proving its worth. And it’s only going to get better.

Sorry that you’re sick of it, but I think this tech is here to stay.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-04 11:42:45+00:00
For backend work, I'd recommend giving C# a look. Syntactically similar to TypeScript[0] but for any serious work, having runtime types and some of the facilities of .NET (e.g. Roslyn, expression trees, Entity Framework Core, threads, etc.) is really nice.

I recently moved from a C# backend startup to a TS backend startup and the lack of runtime types is a real friction point I feel every day with how the code has to be written (e.g. end up writing a lot of Zod; other projects have different and varying types of drudgery with regards to meta-typing for runtime)

[0] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/
by rcxdude | 2025-04-04 11:43:03+00:00
I think this about wayland vs X11, where the wayland protocol is local only and remote access generally involves sending pixels as opposed to draw commands around (which, unless you have a very good network connection, is usually the better option anyway, pretty much every time I tried to use X11 over the network it was unusably slow. Wayland also doesn't exclude being able to have remote windows as opposed to a whole remote desktop using pixel-slinging, but I don't know if any actual implementations support that).
by tekla | 2025-04-04 11:43:26+00:00
It's because a good majority of these schools have thousands of applicants who might as well be perfect across the board grade and test scores wise, so its either they flip a coin, or choose some other standard.

The tests need to be harder, but people would complain.

I didn't study for the ACT at all (literally went in without knowing anything about it) and got a 35. It's a trivial exam.
by vixen99 | 2025-04-04 11:44:04+00:00
Technically we're subjects but the King has zero executive powers. His soft powers are perhaps another topic. Point being we're in effect, citizens and subject to the (very variable) laws of the country like any other country. Currently freedom of expression in the UK is highly problematic but that's a temporary issue with the current administration. No subjects or citizens in any country are ever free as in free beer. So I suppose you're correct.
by throw0101b | 2025-04-04 11:44:53+00:00
> The t-shirt metaphor is completely unjust - there is no value there for national security nor strategic autonomy.

And yet tariffs were put on countries where clothes are generally manufactured and imported into the US from, which is why companies like Nike got walloped on the stock market.

> The reality is that the US is not the ultimate global hegemon anymore and therefore offshoring industries cannot simply be viewed through an economic lens.

Trump et al put a 37% import tariff on Botswana. What national security interest is served by that?

Israel got a 17% tariff place on it, but Iran is part of the general 10% tariff list. If these are about national security, why does Israel have a higher number than Iran?

There are valid reasons for tariffs:

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good

The universal tariffs that have been acted don't seem to have been done for those reasons.
by seec | 2025-04-04 11:45:26+00:00
Another common problem with Numbers is the low performance as row count grow and calculations complexity rise.

It can make some very pretty sheets but don't count on it if you have needs for something like pivot tables (which it doesn't have natively).

I think Apple is fucking everyone with those apps. They are not good enough for serious work but decent enough that people will use them; all to get a built-in lock in because of course it only runs on Macs...
by adrian_b | 2025-04-04 11:45:28+00:00
As another poster already said, providing namespaces is just one of the functions of modules, the other being encapsulation, i.e. the interface of a module typically exports only a small subset of the internal symbols, the rest being protected from external accesses.

While a function may have local variables that are protected from external accesses, a module can export not only multiple functions, but any other kinds of symbols, e.g. data types or templates, while also being able to keep private any kind of symbol.

In languages like C, which have separate compilation, but without modules, you can partition code in files, then choose for each symbol whether to be public or not, but with modules you can handle groups of related symbols simultaneously, in a simpler way, which also documents the structure of the program.

Moreover, with a well-implemented module system, compilation can be much faster than when using inefficient tricks for specifying the interfaces, like header file textual inclusion.
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-04 11:45:42+00:00
> Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.) For example, binary trees are always faster than splay trees for workaday problems.

-- Rob Pike, Notes on Programming in C, 1989[0]

Generally speaking, I feel that the bureaucracy involved in a programming project should be proportional to the scale of the project itself. If the 'getting started' tutorial for your programming language demands that I choose a package name for my Hello World program, you fucked up.

[0] https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/pikestyle
by krisoft | 2025-04-04 11:45:58+00:00
Had a friend who came to me with the same idea. In challenge of the idea I sent a picture of some chopped cucumbers and tomatoes, and an other picture with the same chopped vegetables drizzled with a copious amount of olive oil. I asked if they can tell which one is which. The difference was hundreds of calories and you could not tell which one is which (least of all how much oil there is on the one with the oil.)

That of course feels like a "weird" edge case, but it illustrates the general problem that butter/oil/sugars can pack a lot of calories and have no or almost no visual signature.
by KillenBoek | 2025-04-04 11:46:11+00:00
I could not agree more, but you put it up much more eloquent than I did.

I miss VCR rentals, my cassette player and the magic of my first XT computer with MFM disks. I miss the apple //c and hopping online just to check for some information. I miss the craftsmanship of all those self made websites where you kept a list of URL’s. I miss the points where people put stuff on the internet just to share and what they made and were proud of it. I miss the trips with friends to the arcade hall where we would take turns on operation wolf. E-Mailing the friend you made during the holidays and be able to send pictures was some kind of magic.

I truely hate what the internet has become. A centralized corporate greed machine that exploits people and squeezes them for maximum profits. People are more interested in likes and retweets than in genuine contact.

I am getting old… grumpy… bitter because the thing I loved was taken from me.