MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-15 21:40:59+00:00
You based this off of nothing: "he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador."

"I don't find it to be credible"

I explained why it could easily be that the many coming from El Salvador when MS13 was heavily active could in fact be making this legitimate claim. It's a small world with social media. Yes, local MS13 that didn't get paid can catch when someone is back in the country. These are very sophisticated/organized gangs at higher level (at least according to the current US administration).

Nothing you said here negates that.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-15 21:41:06+00:00
Piracy is the opposite of unethical, because information wants to be free. IP rights holders had their NAP violated - and society is better off for it.

The reason it's "against the wishes" of folks in a JAV video is because of the legal risk it opens them up to from the Japanese government - not because the actors/actresses "don't consent to viewers seeing their uncensored body".

Note that I am NOT talking about distribution of non consensual deepfakes. Obviously that's abhorrent.
by bluGill | 2025-04-15 21:41:13+00:00
You are missing something: quantity. A toilet brush itself is low value, but the US needs 30 million per year (this is a guess, but it seems reasonable enough - every person buys one every 10 years, which seems right based on how long they last. I am likely off, but probably not by an order of magnitude so let us use that number for discussion unless/until someone really wants to find a better number). If you can make/sell a million brushes per year with a gross profit of $1 on each that is a million dollars, if labor and the machines are amortize to $.50 each you net profit is then $500k/year - many small company CEOs would be happy with that.

You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important point is low value production is always about volume.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-04-15 21:41:25+00:00
Great article but I was really put off by this bit, which aside from being very condescending, simply isn't true and reveals a lack of appreciation for the innovation that I would have thought someone posting about target triples and compilers would have appreciated:

> Why the Windows people invented a whole other ABI instead of making things clean and simple like Apple did with Rosetta on ARM MacBooks? I have no idea, but http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm contains various excuses, none of which I am impressed by. My read is that their compiler org was just worse at life than Apple’s, which is not surprising, since Apple does compilers better than anyone else in the business.

I was already familiar with ARM64EC from reading about its development from Microsoft over the past years but had not come across the emulators.com link before - it's a stupendous (long) read and well worth the time if you are interested in lower-level shenanigans. The truth is that Microsoft's ARM64EC solution is a hundred times more brilliant and a thousand times better for backwards (and forwards) compatibility than Rosetta on macOS, which gave the user a far inferior experience than native code, executed (sometimes far) slower, prevented interop between legacy and modern code, left app devs having to do a full port to move to use newer tech (or even just have a UI that matched the rest of the system), and was always intended as a merely transitional bit of tech to last the few years it took for native x86 apps to be developed and take the place (usurp) of old ppc ones.

Microsoft's solution has none of these drawbacks (except the noted lack of AVX support), doesn't require every app to be 2x or 3x as large as a sacrifice to the fat binaries hack, offers a much more elegant solution for developers to migrate their code (piecemeal or otherwise) to a new platform where they don't know if it will be worth their time/money to invest in a full rewrite, lets users use all the apps they love, and maintains Microsoft's very much well-earned legacy for backwards compatibility.

When you run an app for Windows 2000 on Windows 11 (x86 or ARM), you don't see the old Windows 2000 aesthetic (and if you do, there's an easy way for users to opt into newer theming rather than requiring the developer to do something about it) and you aren't stuck with bugs from 30 years ago that were long since patched by the vendor many OS releases ago.
by DougMerritt | 2025-04-15 21:41:33+00:00
It's not that you're utterly wrong; some transformations are irreversible, or close to. Multiplying each pixel's value by 0, assuming the result is exactly 0, is a particularly clear example.

But others are reversible because the information is not lost.

The details vary per transformation, and sometimes it depends on the transformation having been an imperfectly implemented one. Other times it's just that data is moved around and reduced by some reversible multiplicative factor. And so on.
by csa | 2025-04-15 21:42:10+00:00
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.

Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?

If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?

As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-15 21:42:23+00:00
>can be perfectly good, depending on your needs.

This gives the error to the calling process though. In some sense that means it is handled.

I don't think I disagree though, but I think my point still stands. If you do not think about at what point your errors are actually resolved then your program does not have proper error handling. If you unwrap in the middle of your code, you have to accept that crashing there is a possibility, even from an error far away.
Notion's Lies Sunsetting Skiff Mail
by notioned | 2025-04-15 21:42:34+00:00
With the announcement of "Notion Mail", here's a reminder that after Notion acquired Skiff Mail in early 2024, their entire product line was sunset and, despite promising[1][2] email forwarding and support would remain functional until 2025 for trapped users that couldn't immediately access their accounts, both turned out to be complete lies. Their support through support@skiff.org was shut off[3] not long after the fake promise, responding only with automated acknowledgements to even refund requests.

Forwarding was also effectively shut off around the same time thanks to Notion's willful negligence maintaining Skiff's certificates[4], pulling the rug out from under users needing mails forwarded from inaccessible Skiff email accounts.

To add insult to injury, Notion's support through team@makenotion.com for months responded with incoherent, AI-generated nonsense while the sunset deadline drew closer until eventually expiring. Their official subreddit[5] also proved useless.

1. https://skiff.com/data-migration 2. https://archive.ph/fbGFX, https://archive.ph/OXKmp 3. https://old.reddit.com/r/skiffmail/comments/1g3gqgy/skiff_support 4. https://old.reddit.com/r/skiffmail/comments/1h2ob1g/forwarding_error_response 5. https://old.reddit.com/r/skiff
by xp84 | 2025-04-15 21:42:51+00:00
(i'm not GP but...)

You've cited policy which blocks prosecution of sitting Presidents -- but that didn't necessarily enjoin eventual justice from being served after his term(s) end. However the outcome of Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) appears to not just block prosecution but grant immunity, meaning what would normally be a crime ceases to even be a crime.

That ruling appears to draw a nearly complete shield of immunity around Presidents for any crimes done as 'official acts,' and nearly everything can be claimed to be an 'official act' especially given how vaguely-scoped much Presidential power has become. I consider it pretty unlikely that we'll ever see a former President even be charged with a crime if Congress doesn't explicitly repudiate this ruling with an actual law.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States#:~:text...
by OutOfHere | 2025-04-15 21:43:13+00:00
Let me put it this way. If lots of random citizens start getting picked up on the street and get disappeared by sending them permanently and without a trial to the gulag, I will dissolve all my assets and leave the country. It could take me a whole year, but I will do it. During this period, I will minimize attention and travel. The writing will be in the wall, but it's not there yet. US citizens remain unaffected for now.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-15 21:43:19+00:00
> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.

Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.

There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.

Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
by torginus | 2025-04-15 21:43:24+00:00
Sites are surprisingly cheap to run all things considered - I remember asking the owner of an fairly prominent aerospace enthusiast forum (one of the biggest on the internet) how much he spends on hosting - he told me he hosts on a Linux box on DigitalOcean that runs phpBB, and he spends about $50/month for the whole website - not a crazy amount even for a hobbyist.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-15 21:43:56+00:00
> There have been copyright office rulings saying that ML model output is not copyrightable

Source? If you're referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, I would argue that is an incorrect assessment.

> The court held that the Copyright Act requires all eligible works to be authored by a human being. Since Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine, a non-human entity, as the sole author, the application was correctly denied. The court did not address the argument that the Constitution requires human authorship, nor did it consider Dr. Thaler's claim that he is the author by virtue of creating and using the Creativity Machine, as this argument was waived before the agency.

If someone had instead argued that they themselves were the author by means of instructing an LLM to generate the output based on a prompt they made up, plus the influence of prior art (the pretrained data), which you could also argue is not only what he probably did anyway (but argued it poorly), but in a way is also how humans make art themselves... that would be a much more interesting decision IMO.
by hifikuno | 2025-04-15 21:44:07+00:00
I love line scan cameras. Wikipedia has an awesome photo of a tram taken with a line scan camera on the relevant wiki page[1].

I've just moved to a house with a train line track out front. I want to see if I can use a normal camera to emulate a line scan camera. I have tried with a few random YouTube videos I found [2].

I think the biggest issue I face is that there simply isn't the frame rate in most camera's to get a nicely detailed line scan effect.

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-scan_camera

[2]: https://writing.leafs.quest/programming-fun/line-scanner
by kenjackson | 2025-04-15 21:44:44+00:00
I don't think this is true. First, I don't think the SAT data exists for Harvard broken down in this way (if you have it, please link it). Furthermore, there were Asian students accepted in the 2nd and 3rd decile -- this is below the average for African American students almost certainly. So, I find your claim very likely to be false.

Now if you said that admissions has favored African American students in the Affirmative Action era over Asian students then I'd agree. But Affirmative Action is also over per last year's Supreme Court decision.
by nailer | 2025-04-15 21:45:37+00:00
> But there is no legal basis for the government to tell a private university who it should hire, fire, promote, or admit on ideological grounds.

That's true. Harvard can absolutely continue to hire for, advocate for, and grade for a single political viewpoint, provided it does not take federal funding.

They can also continue to racially discriminate as title IX only applies to organizations that take federal funding.

Harvard should also lose their current non-profit status per Bob Jones University v. U.S. (1983) if they continue to racially discriminate.
by tptacek | 2025-04-15 21:45:43+00:00
This thread is dignifying a debate that was decisively resolved over 15 years ago. MITM is a superset of the eavesdropper adversary and is the threat model TLS is designed to risk.

It's worth pointing out that MITM is also the dominant practical threat on the Internet: you're far more likely to face a MITM attacker, even from a state-sponsored adversary, than you are a fiber tap. Obviously, TLS deals with both adversaries. But altering the security affordances of TLS to get a configuration of the protocol that only deals with the fiber tap is pretty silly.
by OutOfHere | 2025-04-15 21:45:57+00:00
If this starts happening to too many random citizens, I will see the writing on the wall. I will begin immediately to dissolve all my assets, send them to crypto and or foreign bank accounts, and move out of the country. Their war is not my war. It will take me a whole year, but I will do it. I don't know where I will go.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-15 21:45:59+00:00
> just that we need good jobs for people who are not able to handle more complex jobs

If manufacturing becomes more efficient at using labor from automation that seems like that would lower the number of available jobs wouldn't it?

Unless consumption grows with the increase in output so that more factories are needed to meet the demand?

If you need 1000 cars and automation takes it down to 10 people from 100 people before, where are those 90 other people to get jobs?

Unless you grow the need for cars to 10000.

Simplification I know, but I am confused at how manufacturing is supposed to endlessly support a large "less-complex task" labor supply while simultaneously providing a good standard of living?
by dylan604 | 2025-04-15 21:46:01+00:00
Wow. This one will go down in the history books as yet another example of AI hype outpacing AI capability.

FTFY

Also see every single genAI PR release showing obvious uncanny valley image (hands with more than expected number of fingers). See Apple's propaganda videos vs actual abilities. There are plenty of other (all???) PR examples where the product does not do what is advertised on the tin.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-15 21:46:07+00:00
In most cases it would just be added like all other code as if it was proper/allowed until someone brought a civil suit with enough evidence to claim they had no permission to use the code AND it somehow damaged them, which could be quite difficult and prohibitively expensive.

So I would argue in most cases people will get away with it. We must remember that the only person's opinion that matters on what's actually illegal or not is a judge's.
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-15 21:46:08+00:00
Laser retro-propulsion seems interesting for landing space-mined materials on earth. The obvious (to me) way to do that is to wrap the mined material in a vague lifting-body shape of metal or maybe just slag, thick enough that after it ablates away there's still enough to be economical (to be clear there's at least a couple major options: high value payload wrapped in low-value vehicle, or big aerodynamic blob of low-mid value material, with more options in between). But if you have a big laser you can shine at it to slow it down, maybe you could get away with a lot less sacrificial material.
Show HN: Torque – A lightweight meta-assembler for any processor
by benbridle | 2025-04-15 21:46:45+00:00
Hello everyone, I've been working on this project for the past few months.

Torque is a meta-assembler: instead of having an instruction set built into the assembler, you use macros to build up a small language that decribes an instruction set and then you use that to write your program. It's designed to work for any microcontroller/processor architecture, you build from the bit level upwards so there aren't any assumptions around word widths, instruction formats, or endianness.

I created Torque initially to write programs for a PIC microcontroller, after running into difficulties with the official assembler. I've also used it to write programs for the Z80 processor inside an old TRS-80 computer.

Let me know if you try it out or have any questions!
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-15 21:47:11+00:00
That is true history, in my understanding, but it's not related.

Chris Lattner offered to donate the copyright of LLVM to the FSF at one point: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

He even wrote some patches: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg01112.html

However, due to Stallman's... idiosyncratic email setup, he missed this: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

> I am stunned to see that we had this offer.

> Now, based on hindsight, I wish we had accepted it.

Note this email is in 2015, ten years after the initial one.
by ajb | 2025-04-15 21:47:50+00:00
I'm not a lawyer either, but I suspect the technical structure is not determinative. Contract law has certain features. These technical constructs purport to enable contracts to be written and executed such that subsequently the courts cannot but find that what the code did is final and there is no possible legal reconsideration. Clearly, this is the prior expectation of the parties, but whether it is the case under all circumstances is a function of contract law (and other applicable law) not the technical constructs. The code is not what will finally be determinative.

To give an analogy, it's like writing code in a high level language and saying that it will prevent side channels such as spectre. But such side channels are a function of the hardware, not the high level language. The hardware in defi is ultimately the law, not the servers.
by Ocerge | 2025-04-15 21:48:09+00:00
Making friends at work over the past 10 years. I know HN loves (in general, anyway) the transactional nature of work done as remotely as possible, but the more human side of work has benefited me in spades moreso than any technical work. Whether this is deserved or not is up to you, but in the end, for the most part, we aren't doing much more than tying various libraries together. Who you know if much more important than what you know.
by jsrober | 2025-04-15 21:48:09+00:00
I thought the same thing until I listened to this podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQNe7nSgcrw

I can see how in some organizations/bureaucracies that you have to destroy it before you can have any hope of fixing it.

When there are a significant number of people in an organization trying to stop progress, it's impossible for change to happen.
by grafmax | 2025-04-15 21:48:12+00:00
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).

As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
by mottosso | 2025-04-15 21:48:17+00:00
I was nodding the whole time until I got to this comment. This is the one that is unusual to me, because it would be my fault and the person informing me is just doing their job; well or not. They have no opinion about me nor should I of them. The whole transaction would be effortless if not for having emotions mixed in, I think those are best saved for personal relationships.
by kbolino | 2025-04-15 21:48:21+00:00
Also anecdotal, but it seems that RadioShack in that era was a particularly awful place to work. I applied around that time (might have been that exact year, or else it was 07-08). I was weeded out by the online personality test. My dad was friends with the store manager and he said "your son doesn't really have what we're looking for". Mind you, this would have been my 3rd or 4th retail job by that point, and I had references. I knew they did commission sales, and I had no experience in that, but I also wasn't the kind of person to upsell crap the customer didn't need. I'm glad I didn't get the job.
by rvz | 2025-04-15 21:48:50+00:00
Slack was a similar thing. IPO'd at 10 million users with 400M in revenue but got destroyed by Microsoft thanks to Teams.

Cursor is at a worse position and at greater risk of ending up like Slack very quickly and Microsoft will do the exact same thing they did to Slack.

This time by extinguishing (EEE) them by racing prices of VSCode + Copilot close to zero, until it is free.

The best thing Cursor should do is for OpenAI to buy them at a $10B valuation.
by dang | 2025-04-15 21:50:13+00:00
Oops, I hear you! Well, maybe the explanation is helpful to others who are worrying about the moderation side.

But of course there's no rhyme or reason to "users" either, since that's really just a statistical cloud (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
by geerlingguy | 2025-04-15 21:50:22+00:00
I have, I was going to go for a more extreme example but couldn't find one quickly on their channel.

It's not perfect, by any means, but you can get intelligible speech from a pretty terrible recording at least. Adobe has their AI assist tool too, it works pretty well though I've found it can't isolate a speaker when there are a lot of other people talking nearby.
by blululu | 2025-04-15 21:50:35+00:00
Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire. The reason that Central European scientists fled to America (and not Britain) is because the United States had the scientific, engineering and industrial base to absorb them. Consider some of the major scientific breakthroughs to come out of the US leading up to and coming out of the war: Nylon, Teflon, Synthetic Rubber, Penicillin, Solid State Transistors, Microwave Communication, Information Theory, a Vaccine for Polio... These all would have happened with or without the war and the migration of German scientists (though adding John von Neumann to the mix probably helped move things along).
by Alupis | 2025-04-15 21:50:36+00:00
What does a ticket price have to do with wiping your phone at a border?

I did some fact checking on your ticket prices - you are quoting ultra-budget carriers that are normally in that price range. Normal tickets are $1200+, as you would expect.

There's plenty going on right now that you don't need to make stuff up to back up your narrative. Use something real...