MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lammy | 2025-04-05 21:52:16+00:00
> The initial idea (2004-2005) was to build a Mac tablet computer based on touch screens.

There was lots of speculation about this starting in 2002 when “Inkwell” handwriting recognition showed up in Mac OS X Jagwire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh)

https://www.macworld.com/article/155597/wacom.html

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mac-os-x/0596004605/ch0...

And related patent filings go as far back as 2000: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7564995B1/en
by throwanem | 2025-04-05 21:52:24+00:00
A stored procedure and a prepared statement aren't the same, though. I'm not sure how persuasive an argument from how one is optimized is meant to be for the other.

My experience has long been that in almost every case where a "database performance" problem occurs while an ORM is in use, presumptively refactoring to eliminate the ORM almost immediately reveals the buried n+1 or other trivially pathological pattern which, if the ORM's implementor knows to try to avoid it, the ORM's interface typically is not sufficiently expressive to disambiguate in any case. (Fair do's: In the uncommon case where that interface is so expressive, one does usually find the implementation accounts for the case.)

Hence my earlier reference to the "Vietnam" paper, which dissects in extensive (if unfortunately mostly fruitless) detail the sunk cost fallacy at the heart of this problem.
by jzb | 2025-04-05 21:53:13+00:00
"But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out."

The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising.

It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.
by ipaddr | 2025-04-05 21:54:15+00:00
Probation only moves the activities underground. Not focusing on ad tech specifically but removing all advertising would mean finding other ways to get your message out which is advertising. The only way to stop it is to stop communication in form and function.

Limiting certain types of advertising or changing tax codes to not allow dedicating expensive could shape it in a way that meshes with society.

Trying to rein in the abuses you saw in the adtech world starts with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft being dissolved.
by vitus | 2025-04-05 21:55:04+00:00
I'm not saying that we have to keep using YouTube for this vision, but GP stated that there would be fewer YouTube channels (but not none!). In that scenario, what incentives are there to provide a video-sharing platform that is a net negative to operate?

I don't think that nationalizing such a service makes much sense either. What motivation does a government have to operate a service for global benefit (as opposed to just its citizens)? Surely we shouldn't want a US YouTube, a French YouTube, a Japanese YouTube, etc.

> Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.

Doesn't that run counter to the premise of banning advertising in the first place?
by slg | 2025-04-05 21:55:19+00:00
>It's not 'protesting' to blackball someone from a job.

Can you be specific here? What part isn't protesting? Should it be illegal to stand outside a business with a protest sign? What about organizing a boycott? Or even a decentralized and completely grassroots boycott? Should it be illegal to make the personal decision to not buy a company's product due to something said by one of their employees? Or would it be the company listening to protesters and firing the employee that should be illegal? What if the boycotts gain traction and it becomes the prudent financial decision to fire the employee? Does the company have an obligation to keep that employee forever even if it eventually leads to them going out of business?

>are resisting taking a step back and thinking about freedom of speech as an abstract principle or tenet.

Yes, that is what I have been trying to communicate to you. This principle you have of consequence free speech can only exist as a principle. Once it interacts with the complexities of the real world it becomes impossible to actually define, legislate, and enforce fairly. Your refusal to actually engage with my specific questions and examples suggests that you know this at least subconsciously. You don't want to say that protesting should be illegal, so instead you relabel it as "to blackball someone from a job". That relabeling makes it acceptable to be against it.
by otterley | 2025-04-05 21:55:32+00:00
I minored in Econ at a top tier university. There is indeed math you need to know to understand economics, but economics is not a branch of mathematics. There’s also behavioral understanding as well as practical knowledge.

I would advise you to kindly take the L here and please stop trying to weasel your way around being wrong. People make mistakes; it’s how they respond when being confronted with their errors that demonstrates their character.
by cyberax | 2025-04-05 21:55:44+00:00
Yeah. I have a bunch of code with bog-standard linear algebra classes (vec2, vec3, mat2, ...). No generics, no nothing. Just simple classes with operator overloading.

After the recent minor XCode upgrade, Swift can't deduce the type for an expression `((v2 * scalar1) * v3)`, I have to split `let tmp1=v2*scalar1` for it to work.

Like, wtf, Apple?
by sgarland | 2025-04-05 21:56:18+00:00
Some of this doesn’t make sense. If you have common settings that you always want enabled, like sql_mode, then set it on the server’s config, and stop wasting time doing so on every session.

If you do need some session-specific variables, use a connection pooler (you should anyway) that handles that. ProxySQL, for one, tracks the per-session variables that are set, so when a client requests a connection, it hands it one already set to its requested specification (if it’s available).

> The reason this is important is that whenever the write or the read fails, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you don’t know whether the query was executed on the server or not.

Yes, you definitely can know this in almost all cases. Did you receive a result? It succeeded. Did you receive a warning? It succeeded, but maybe read the warning. Did you receive an error? It did not succeed. Parse the error message to determine what went wrong, and if a retry makes sense. Did you receive nothing? Now, and only now, do you not know the state.

It blows my mind the number of devs who haven’t read the API specification for their RDBMS. There is a ton of useful information you can glean that’s often ignored.

> These statements also have a cost on the server side. Each statement requires some amount of memory in the database server. So you have to be careful not to create an unbounded amount of them, which for an ORM isn’t easy to enforce.

Which is why you can limit them. MySQL has a default of 16382; not sure about Postgres.

Also, to the complaint about them being session-scoped, this is yet another reason to use a connection pooler. They can often share them across connections. I know PgBouncer can.

Read. Application. Manuals.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-05 21:56:53+00:00
Many (most?) symmetric algorithms simply generate a stream of pseudo-random bits, which are then used to XOR the plaintext. This stream is deterministic, which means that the same key "in" will produce an identical bit-stream "out".

This means that if the same key is reused, and the plaintext is predictable, then you'll see patterns in the output. Those patterns can be used to figure out the key. Heck, you don't even need the key! Just register a bunch of distinct user names (or whatever you can control), and observe the change in the encrypted token. Eventually you can collect enough data to generate arbitrary tokens, or at least tokens with some useful values under your control. You can also exploit different error response codes, which is a common design fault because "decryption failure", "parser failure", and "access denied" tend to go through different code-paths and throw different exception types.

The solution is to mix in a block of random bits to break this determinism. This is the initialization vector (IV). The developers -- of course -- failed to do this and used a constant.

Even that is insufficient, because most encryption algorithms provide only confidentiality. They don't provide authenticity ("signing"), which is more important for tokens.

(An aside: authenticated encryption algorithms are starting to get popular, and these provide both at once efficiently.)

Essentially, it doesn't matter how "secure" an algorithm is, it won't achieve security if it is misused and applied for the wrong purpose.
by cauch | 2025-04-05 21:59:01+00:00
Thanks.

Would you say that it indeed means that if ads are banned, the money to support news, tv, youtube, ... will still be there? I would think that in fact, there would be even more money for news, tv, youtube, ... as the ad company will not take their cut of the money.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it, ad may also work in directing expenses that would have been done anyway. For example, if I have 10 companies A, B, C, D, ... all selling the same kind of product, then it is possible that 1000 persons that want that kind of product will all spend 100£, shared between the 10 companies. So, company A will receive 10000£. But if company A does some advertisement for a cost of 5000£, maybe people will still spend the same amount, but for their brand in majority, so the 1000 persons will still spend the same 100£, but company A will receive 20000£ because some people will buy A instead of B, C, D, ...
by collingreen | 2025-04-05 22:02:37+00:00
I think this is really important - 2A is about being able to arm a militia and only has value when a vast majority of the people are willing to put their life on the line against the military. It isn't magically an antidote to authoritarianism and it's a deep negative if too many of your neighbors don't like the look of you and don't believe in rights or the rule of law.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-05 22:02:54+00:00
This was in a single repo, but the problem is the same: There is an impedence mismatch between SQL queries and typical RPC APIs such that it becomes decidedly non-trivial to represent every possible arbitrary query "shape" that might occur in a report.

Picture the kind of queries that might be generated by something like an embedded Crystal Report or a Power BI report web control. You can get all sorts of group-by operators, top-n sorts, sums, min/max/avg, etc...
by sgarland | 2025-04-05 22:04:13+00:00
> Improved performance across every dimension we’ve tested, which we attribute to six improvements to the Hatchet architecture: range-based partitioning of time series tables, hash-based partitioning of task events (for updating task statuses), separating our monitoring tables from our queue, buffered reads and writes, switching all high-volume tables to use identity columns, and aggressive use of Postgres triggers.

Amazing what you can do when you read the manual, eh?

Seriously though, that’s awesome, and I’m very happy to see someone leaning hard into RDBMS features like triggers instead of shying away.
by mikestew | 2025-04-05 22:05:05+00:00
320x480 screen meant normal web pages wouldn't display properly

I’m not sure what you mean by that. The whole point of the demo was it rendered the New York Times website just as it rendered in desktop Safari. In contrast to, say, Windows Mobile which would butcher the rendering. If the touch targets were too small, well, through the wonders of multitouch, pinch to zoom in.

the web was unusable because it required rewriting every page since existing pages were unusable

You’re remembering a much different iPhone than I am. Are you sure not confusing it with WinMo 5/6? Because then we’d be in some agreement.
by autoexec | 2025-04-05 22:05:31+00:00
> I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.

It wasn't just the pachinko industry that tied the hands of Japanese government. It was the people too. It's a lot harder to ban something and keep it banned when everybody wants it. Thankfully, not many people want ads, but pachinko was popular enough that it makes sense to continue to let people do it. You're right about still getting a benefit. Even after carving out exceptions, banning gambling broadly otherwise is effective enough to solve a lot of the problems that unregulated gambling can cause.

I do think video game loot boxes are something that needs regulation. Not just because it is gambling, but because the games can be unfair and even adversarial. Casinos exploit and encourage adult gambling addicts but at least those games are required to be "fair" (no outright cheating) and they have to be honest about how unfair the odds against you are. A supposedly impartial third party goes around making sure casinos are following the rules. Video games don't have any of that and they're targeting children on top of it.
by anthk | 2025-04-05 22:05:31+00:00
What do I propose? FFS, I don't trust neither the leftist populists using sexism hysteria for its own profit nor the right wing 'everyone to the left it's either a Stalinist/Marxist/Terrorist'... for their own profit, too while they do tons of money laundering. And don't let me start on our Catholic Churches and lobbies.

So, get these lobbies out there right now.
by jzb | 2025-04-05 22:05:48+00:00
"This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise"

You seem to be assuming that, in the absence of advertising, the company will sell as much as it did before -- just with lower overhead costs -- rather than advertising driving more sales and possibly lowering costs because the company has more customers. For some items / things this may be true-ish. I'm going to buy paper towels because I need paper towels, and advertising has little influence on that -- except, maybe, which brand I buy. But I'm going to spill things, and my cats are going to keep barfing on the floor from time to time, so I'm going to need paper towels regardless. And I'm not going to buy a bunch of extra ones just because the ads are so good.

Don't get me started on soda advertising and such because the amount of money those companies spend on ads is mind-boggling and I don't think it moves the needle very much when it comes to Coke vs. Pepsi...

But, would I go see a movie without ads to promote it? Would I buy that t-shirt with a funny design if I didn't see it on a web site? Sign up for a SaaS offering if I don't see an ad for it somewhere?

If a SaaS lands 20% more customers because ads (and other forms of marketing) that's not necessarily going to mean I pay more for the SaaS because ads. It may very well mean that the prices stay lower because many of their costs are fixed and if they have 20% more paying customers, they can charge less to be competitive. If a publication has more subscribers because it advertises, it may not have to raise rates to stay / be profitable.

In some cases you may be correct -- landing customers via ads equals X% of my costs, so my prices reflect that. But it's not necessarily true.
by jongjong | 2025-04-05 22:06:07+00:00
It's a solid idea, and could even fall under 'anti-spam laws' with some additional clauses. There should be a daily or monthly limit on the max number of people that a person or entity can contact or send unsolicited content to... Maybe like 100 people per day on average. That's more than enough for anyone to make a living as a sales person.

Big tech has been mass-spamming us with unsolicited content for decades and driving monopolization, centralizing opportunities towards those who can talk the talk and away from those who can walk the walk. So we've been getting lower value for our money and also losing jobs/opportunities which has made it harder to earn money.

It's crazy that big tech is allowed to spam hundreds of millions of people with unsolicited content but if any individual did it on the same scale, they'd be in jail.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-05 22:06:54+00:00
Second iPhone, signed into another “family” iCloud account. If needed, sign into your normal account when you get to your hotel. Don’t have social media accounts on that phone, as they search them.

Android, ymmv may vary as different models, carriers and versions vary.

Lying to the police, being clever with stenography, etc is stupid.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-05 22:07:46+00:00
I browsed the first web site (https://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html) while at CERN in 1992.

I found it cool and then moved to something else. There are times I wonder why I was not more excited and I think it was because I could not see the potential if it goes worldwide. It did not seem "revolutionary" compared to other things you could see in terminals.
by collingreen | 2025-04-05 22:08:16+00:00
This is cool! Thanks for building it and sharing it. I think phone keyboards are simultaneously amazing that they work at all and also still need huge improvements. There was a moment in the early mobile app explosion where we had some cool experimental keyboards but they mostly fizzled out, were acquired and shut down, or didn't reach their potential (looking at you, keymunk). I still think about this space all the time but, like password managers, it requires such a vast amount of trust I think it's a hard business to get into.

Was hoping the LLM boom would help us get sane autocorrect to help bridge the gap but so far that hasn't happened either.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-04-05 22:09:10+00:00
> Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.

What does that mean? What's a service in this definition? Surely not in the normal definition of a "service", as in health care or tech? Like is a movie a service too?

Or do you just mean something you get for free because it's a show on their own channel? What if you had to pay for shows ala carte?
by Bud | 2025-04-05 22:09:27+00:00
The power loss is due to the fact that the power source is plutonium. Which decays over time. So, your lump of plutonium contains less and less plutonium over time, and thus generates less power. A more modern generator doesn't really change this basic fact; the power source would still likely be plutonium, and would have the same issue. But yes, you could send up a larger lump of plutonium so that your power budget started out larger and would remain adequate for a longer time.
by Johanx64 | 2025-04-05 22:09:39+00:00
> Experience and training makes you better at things. What can I say.

The orange has a degree in economics by the way (from a ivy league uni too). So you could say he has both the credentials, the experience and the training. You could even... dare I say... call him an expert.

Or you could just accept the obvious - any barely functioning middling brain can get credentials and become an "expert". And that they do. It is neither a competency nor an intellect filter.

Neither is there personal responsibility or real liability if they are wrong about their economic and other policies that lead to ruin (endless list of examples of this in past). Seen any heads on the pike lately? Yeah, me neither.

Nor are there incentives in place to think what's in other "common" peoples best interests. So why would they?

There's a long line of "expert economists", Paul Krugman among others who advocated for free-trade policies that directly led to nikefication, deindustrialization of US. Now they are nowhere to be seen to take the credit, woops!

The presumption that the credentialed ("expert") knows (or even cares frankly) what's in other common peoples best interest is completely baseless and extremely naive.

The credentialed "experts" being so incompetent and confidently wrong is what gave you the orange. Now orange is the "expert"! And you better listen!
by 1oooqooq | 2025-04-05 22:09:45+00:00
> Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.

it was just a gimmick in the end. yeah the city is cleaner, but i doubt there's even the slightest difference in sports betting in sao paulo vs places with outdoors, for example.

...and did the us forbid prescription drugs ads? thats literally all i see on daytime tv.
by madeofpalk | 2025-04-05 22:09:51+00:00
Exchange of value.

Websites tend to be okay with it because they accrue a benefit of Google’s crawling - they get traffic back. When websites don’t feel that Google keeps the traffic for themselves, websites tend to get upset https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/11/yelp_congress_google/

LLM training just takes and keeps all benefit to themselves. Wikipedia (or news site) get no traffic or anything back in return.
by OJFord | 2025-04-05 22:11:33+00:00
Ok. I'm still awaiting to hear how it's currently a situation of terrible crisis that the US would not want to sink to.

If there are any crises in my UK news, they're in the Ukraine, Israel, USA, and perhaps Greenland & Canada by extension. To the extent there's crisis in the UK that I'm aware of, it's the same USA-inflicted event that the rest of the world's dealing with too.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-05 22:11:34+00:00
Parent's point about ad being close to propaganda is key: people getting advertised at are often not the ones with the money.

For newspapers for instance, Exxon or Shell could be paying a lot more to have their brand painted in favorable light than the amount the newspaper readership could afford to pay in aggregate.

The same way Coca Cola's budget for advertising greenness is not matched by how many more sales they're expecting to make from these ads in any specific medium, but how much the company's bottling policy has to lose if public opinion changed too much. That's basically lobbying money.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-05 22:12:38+00:00
Oh yeah that trade can be positive sum is a given.

And that most trade is generally positive sum is also a quite reasonable take that we seem to share.

That said, even if a trade is positive for both parties, the surplus/profit of a trade might not be (and mathematically almost never is) 50/50.

In the example outlined 1B wheat for 1 computer chip might be positive for both countries, but everyone would agree that the exporter of 1 chip is getting the better end of the positive sum trade.
by reissbaker | 2025-04-05 22:12:55+00:00
There's no "RAG trickery" or vector search. They changed the way they encode positions such that in theory they're less sensitive to where the token appears in the string.

That's similar to how previous long-context models worked as well, although the earlier iterations didn't work particularly well, as most have noticed; technically the model "worked" with longer contexts, but it would definitely get dumber. Still too early to tell how this newer variant works, although I'd assume it's at least somewhat better.
Show HN: I built cartoon avatar maker app
by zuraOnNews | 2025-04-05 22:13:04+00:00
Hello guys, zura here, developer of the app, i made this app in a day, literally, launched the day after and surprisingly as a noname developer, ( i got 20 followers on X tho ) i got 100 + downloads on first 24 hours, since it was in trend i decide to join it and create my own version.

Thanks!!