MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-24 01:07:38+00:00
>Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me

That's ideally why we elect proper representatives and have advocacy groups who can expend that energy. We don't do too much better there, spending a fee hours researching who will actually fight in our interest instead of enabling the armies of minor inconveniences to stack up.

Sad thing about the US is that it's a reactive country, not a preventative one. It really doesn't try to act on stuff until it's arguably too late.
by joegibbs | 2025-04-24 01:08:40+00:00
The quality is very good, it gets most of the details right. But the colours are always way too sepia toned, often so yellow that you can't get them out without a lot of effort. I'm using Imagen 3 for my game instead (I need hundreds of small unit icons in faux 3D style) as part of an automated workflow that cuts out the backgrounds, resizes, names the file correctly, adds certain colour adjustments and elements to the portrait. It makes more mistakes than gpt-image but I just have it set up to regenerate or touch each one up manually.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-24 01:08:52+00:00
It doesn't make sense to me that an administration that by and large has been throating Putin would do that to throw more shade on Russia.

I'm not saying they didn't do that, just that it's not in line with their support for Putin and Russia. Maybe as a false flag it give Putin the cover to crack down on hacking groups that don't throat him.
by grandempire | 2025-04-24 01:09:06+00:00
> which grabs areas

And outputs what? Just because the input is an area does not mean the output is an area.

What it if it outputs the peak of the distribution across the area?

> that are pretty square.

If we look at a camera sensor and do not see a uniform grid of packed area elements would that convince you?

I notice you haven’t shared any criticism of the point model - widely understood by the field.
by exclipy | 2025-04-24 01:10:20+00:00
I was working at Google in the mid 2010s when Larry Page was at the helm and company leadership still listened to employee voices. There were enough internal memes calling for an end to the "not now" pattern that leadership mandated from the top down to remove all instances of it throughout Google products, and indeed for a while, it was mostly gone.

Evidently, it is now back as strong as ever. Either the metrics tanked enough to reverse this policy, the new generation simply forgot, or they never intended it to be permanent policy and only temporarily implemented it to appease the original outcry.
by netsharc | 2025-04-24 01:11:13+00:00
I suppose grandparent comment is saying that a possible timeline is to send some people there today and finish building the rocket to pick them up and bring them back in say 5 years. A bit like the Boeing clusterfuck last year...

It'd also be cool to send an empty rocket with auto-landing capabilities and supplies way before the manned mission, and when those Mars visitors arrive, they can move the tech needed for survival (which would've been invented/improved in-between) to the return rocket.

But that all sounds like Kerbal scenarios rather than real life ones.
by esperent | 2025-04-24 01:11:34+00:00
> If you think the person you’re trying to communicate with would be offended by this (very likely in many cases!), then you probably shouldn’t be using AI to communicate with them in the first place

Email is mostly used in business. There are a huge number of routine emails that can be automated.

I type: AI, say no politely.

AI writes:

Hey Jane, thanks for reaching out to us about your discounted toilet paper supplies. We're satisfied with our current supplier but I'll get back to you if that changes.

Best, ...

Or I write: AI, ask for a sample

AI writes: Hi Jane, thanks for reaching out to us about your discounted toilet paper supplies. Could you send me a sample? What's your lead time and MOQ?

Etc.

Jane isn't gonna be offended if the email sounds impersonal, she's just gonna be glad that she can move on to the next step in her sales funnel without waiting a week. Hell, maybe Jane is an automation too, and then two human beings have been saved from the boring tasks of negotiating toilet paper sales.

As long as the end result is that my company ends up with decent quality toilet paper for a reasonable price, I do not care if all the communication happens between robots. And these kinds of communications are the entire working day for millions of human beings.
by mlsu | 2025-04-24 01:12:57+00:00
Insightful comment.

> And I agree that yes, the self improving machine actually exists. It's the living cell.

What I mean to say about this is that, while life is a self-improving machine, it is only self improving in the presence of the massive energy gradient provided by the Sun. It's a dissipative structure which is self-improving only when the gradient continues and only if the gradient is large enough. No sun, no life. It must be so, because "thing which is spontaneously self organizing in the absence of energy" is incompatible with the Second Law.

> Now, could I conceive of machines that left alone around some star and given enough time would be able to catch up to us?

They would, and they would achieve comparable complexity/"cleverness" to the human brain if and only if the gradient were large enough and lasted long enough. Our fossil fuel powered datacenters are not large enough, nor do they last long enough.

> The Universe has already solved the problem of intelligence.

Intelligence spontaneously emerged as a mechanism which dissipates energy across a gradient faster. Nothing more, nothing less. If one wants to argue that this means that GPT-4 is intelligent, that's a great argument, but it must also follow that GPT-4 is significantly less intelligent than human beings.

> What I think limits computers fundamentally are the limits to computation itself and more generally to formal systems, because computers are formal systems.

What limits computers fundamentally is energy. There is simply a minimum amount of energy required to flip a bit.

> Or create useful information that is out of the distribution of data previously available?

This is kind of the heart of what I'm getting at. In order for this to happen, it will need to interact with the world in a way that consumes energy. Either by us doing it to it (through training) or by it doing something autonomously. The most efficient way would be to make the computer into an agent which replicates itself and seeks to organize itself to consume more and more energy (how different would it be from life then...?). But even then it would not be able to surpass our cleverness. Not for another 3 billion years, give or take --depending on how much more efficient it can be at extracting energy from the sun.

What I'm saying is, a breakthrough would need to be an energy breakthrough. Not a computation breakthrough. Because both of us, human and GPT4, are computing machines. There is no fundamental difference.
by brailsafe | 2025-04-24 01:13:38+00:00
Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular typeface more or less important had it been something different?

When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree.

> I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.

This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense, but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why would high-end concerns be all that important anyway?

My opinion is that design is as important as the problems it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive typeface over another commodity typeface unless one evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already established because of the association with an existing identity that already uses it.

That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a debatable question how much one over another is worth or how important it is, much like art in general or other creative works.
by onecommentman | 2025-04-24 01:14:43+00:00
Well, if HN primarily and accurately reflects the mood of US workers and industries, and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/p...

then you’d expect a red shift in posts and responses.

If external agents want to manipulate HN opinion away from that right shift, then you’d expect posts, flagging, upvote/downvote, and posting patterns by such agents with an objective of achieving that.

I’ve seen evidence of both.

But these are all just bits on a screen…I try not to get too hung up on seeing rabbits in clouds. The HN community is a tiny slice of the US, much less the World. I try not to let any echo chamber distort the larger picture, so that I don’t make the same political errors in judgement that led to the recent Democrats performance failures in the last election.
by gorgoiler | 2025-04-24 01:15:07+00:00
Additionally, mutable fields will quite often benefit from having a separate edit table which records the old value, the new value, who changed it, and when. Your main table’s created and updated times can be a function of (or a complement to) the edit table.

It is tempting to supernormalize everything into the relations object(id, type) and edit(time, actor_id, object_id, key, value). This is getting dangerously and excitingly close to a graph database implemented in a relational database! Implement one at your peril — what you gain in schemaless freedom you also lose in terms of having the underlying database engine no longer enforcing consistency on your behalf.
by 13years | 2025-04-24 01:15:32+00:00
Take a look at this vision test - https://www.mindprison.cc/i/143785200/the-impossible-llm-vis...

It is an example that shows the difference between understanding and patterns. No model actually understands the most fundamental concept of length.

LLMs can seem to do almost anything for which there are sufficient patterns to train on. However, there aren't infinite patterns available to train on. So, edge cases are everywhere. Such as this one.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-24 01:16:04+00:00
> To illustrate this point, here's a simple demo of an AI email assistant that, if Gmail had shipped it, would actually save me a lot of time:

Glancing over this, I can't help thinking: "Almost none of this really requires all the work of inventing, training, and executing LLMs." There are much easier ways to match recipients or do broad topic-categories.

> You can think of the System Prompt as a function, the User Prompt as its input, and the model's response as its output:

IMO it's better to think of them as sequential paragraphs in a document, where the whole document is fed into an algorithm that tries to predict what else might follow them in a longer document.

So they're both inputs, they're just inputs which conflict with one-another, leading to a weirder final result.

> when an LLM agent is acting on my behalf I should be allowed to teach it how to do that by editing the System Prompt.

I agree that fixed prompts are terrible for making tools, since they're usually optimized for "makes a document that looks like a conversation that won't get us sued."

However even control over the system prompt won't save you from training data, which is not so easily secured or improved. For example, your final product could very well be discriminating against senders based on the ethnicity of their names or language dialects.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-04-24 01:16:19+00:00
It just doesn’t pass the smell test.

- Who decided to threaten the whistleblower and why?

- Who approved such an idiotic idea?

- Who determined his home address?

- Who flew the drone, timed to capture photos of the whistleblower while on his way to/from his home?

- Who took the drone photography, printed out the images, and wrote a threatening note?

- Who then took all that and physically posted it on his door?

That’s a very involved process, with substantial risk, with no realistic upside. None of the incentives are aligned with the behavior. It simply doesn’t make sense.

Applying Occam’s razor, it seems a lot more likely to be fabricated — that’s a scenario in which incentives actually align with the behavior.

In practice, that shouldn’t make a difference to the investigation; given the physical evidence, they should investigate in great detail the origin of the threat — regardless of whether it’s a hoax or real.
by pornel | 2025-04-24 01:17:40+00:00
We commonly use hardware like LCDs and printers that render a sharp transition between pixels without the Gibbs' phenomenon. CRT scanlines were close to an actual 1D signal (but not directly controlled by the pixels, which the video cards still tried to make square-ish), but AFAIK we've never had a display that is a 2D signal that we assume in image processing.

In signal processing you have a finite number of samples of an infinitely precise contiguous signal, but in image processing you have a discrete representation mapped to a discrete output. It's contiguous only when you choose to model it that way. Discrete → contiguous → discrete conversion is a useful tool in some cases, but it's not the whole story.

There are images designed for very specific hardware, like sprites for CRT monitors, or font glyphs rendered for LCD subpixels. More generally, nearly all bitmap graphics assumes that pixel alignment is meaningful (and that has been true even in the CRT era before the pixel grid could be aligned with the display's subpixels). Boxes and line widths, especially in GUIs, tend to be designed for integer multiples of pixels. Fonts have/had hinting for aligning to the pixel grid.

Lack of grid alignment, an equivalent of a phase shift that wouldn't matter in pure signal processing, is visually quite noticeable at resolutions where the hardware pixels are little squares to the naked eye.
by sfink | 2025-04-24 01:18:21+00:00
Incorrect. Making a chart in Sheets is mind-numbingly easy.

The problem comes (as you describe in a later post) if you don't just want a chart, but instead want a particular chart for a particular purpose. Not some weirdo crazy purpose, either; there are many ways to get into trouble trying to make minor adaptations.

Same thing with Material. It's great for making a bland clone of a thousand other interfaces, preferably one with only a handful of relevant interactables ("find the beige car" is hard when they're all beige). If you need to distinguish things that are different because they have a reason for being different -- say, labels and buttons -- well then you're SOL.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-24 01:22:21+00:00
DOGE was given a mandate by a President with unprecedented (hah) unitary power. They’re executing on that, roughly how you’d expect them to, given their instructions and the time and resources available to them.

I personally feel that they’re being reckless and sloppy, uncovering “waste” that is often simply an artefact of their hubris. In doing so, they’re risking exposing the internal systems of the government to outside attack.

This is the rough equivalent of the guards in a prison turning over everything in a cell looking for contraband.

It’s not nice. It’s rarely productive. It is also a tool of intimidation. That’s part of the point. The prisoner is not supposed to like it. They’re not invited politely to present what they want others to see. They’re humiliated and powerless. That’s what the MAGA and DOGE want.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-24 01:23:58+00:00
As a matter of US law:

- Font letterforms are not copyrightable. (Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294 (4th Cir. 1978) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltra_Corp._v._Ringer>)

- Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.)

- Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test.

- As a further twist, it appears likely that courts will hold that AI creations are themselves not copyrightable (original works of authorship), such that the product of any such project would itself be public domain. (See: <https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...>.)

The whole scenario appears to open the door to liberation of all fonts for which public letterforms are available. This would be an "AI hole" (analogous to the ... analogue hole) for escaping copyright. Whether this liberation would occur before foundries passed new protective legislation will be an interesting question.
by bobxmax | 2025-04-24 01:24:05+00:00
Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.

Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.

"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.
by Kirkman14 | 2025-04-24 01:24:22+00:00
Jewish cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87, and he is (rightly) being celebrated for “Dry Bones,” his great life’s work. But I would like to highlight his lesser-known legacy: as a tech innovator who tried to bring humor and humanity to the cold silicon world of computers in the 1980s.
by alganet | 2025-04-24 01:24:59+00:00
I know creative fan fiction has been tapped for free for a long time now. My "head" is already opened and was fed to myself many times over.

Nothing I say is actually legally binding, we all know I can't charge a price for it and there is nothing I can do. It is cute that you tried to make fun of it by thinking that by "unobtanium" was referring to myself.

It is even more cute that you think I had a secret love that I lost. What I lost is related to the feeling of love, but damn, you are so mistaken about what it is or what it means.
by tptacek | 2025-04-24 01:25:48+00:00
I don't want to get too deep into this because it doesn't matter to my point (you're also not entitled to eat truffled dishes any more than you're entitled to eat ortolans). But: set a document in one text face or another; it won't much matter at all to the experience of reading it (unless you pick a bad text face). Leave the truffle out of a risotto and you've made a different dish.

The important subtext of this thread is that, when we're talking about functional typesetting, the solutions space is pretty constrained. There aren't that many things you can do with a text face (vs. a display face). And you already have available to you extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces at a full range of weights.
by foxglacier | 2025-04-24 01:26:26+00:00
Good for you that you have that skill. Many people don't and it harms them when they're trying to communicate. Writing is full of hidden meaning that people will read between the lines even when it's not intended. I'm hopeless at controlling that so I don't want to be in control of it, I want a competent writer to help me. Writing is a fairly advanced skill - many people spend years at university basically learning how to write via essays.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-24 01:27:14+00:00
I don't think he sees it as North America, just... the US and people it competes against.

Which is certainly a way to see things, though not a particularly good one.

Honestly I see the treatment of Canada to be in the top three things that I er... "dislike"... him for. The other two are putting RFK Jr. in charge of HHS and the disrespect for court orders.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-24 01:29:49+00:00
I hated Elon Musk long before it was cool: I was a fan of Tesla in the early days, and when I read Musk's "super-secret master plan" for Tesla I thought "yeesh, the board chairman is an idiot, where did they find this bozo?" (I knew a bit about SpaceX but somehow didn't make the connection.)

That said, I was surprised to learn much later that, by all accounts, Elon Musk was a competent and resourceful leader in SpaceX's early days. Maybe these stories are just his personality cult in action, but I found it plausible. It appears he once knew his place as an engineering manager, without LARPing as a Chief Engineer (he didn't appoint himself to CTO until quite a bit later). I worked for a really good manager who didn't know how to code, but he knew a lot about software and was very good about pulling back on coding things vs pushing forward on software design. It seemed like Musk was similar at SpaceX.

Which is all to say that celebrity is a helluva drug. I don't think Musk was ever an especially "high-IQ individual," and his first marriage suggests he's always been a misogynistic loser. But being anointed "a real life Tony Stark!" seems to have destroyed his brain. Ketamine probably doesn't help.
by sfink | 2025-04-24 01:29:54+00:00
We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either.

Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors."

People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions.

UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say.

</rant>