MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Traditional Japanese colors in a browser extension
by y-a | 2025-04-23 13:29:38+00:00
Hi HN. I made a Chrome extension[1] that generates color palettes using traditional Japanese colors[2] based on any color you input.

These colors have been a bit of a recent obsession of mine, ever since I came across a company[3] that publishes a free color reference including traditional sets for Japan, China, and France, while on a walk.

Since then, I’ve acquired several books on the topic, had conversations with people who have been interested in this for far longer than I have, and received a grant from Adobe[4] — which I recommend applying for if you’re working on something creative.

The colors were historically used in textiles and different sources list different colors. Some include modern additions while others are more conservative.

I’ve been using the app daily for user interfaces and various creative projects. My hope is that you might get some use out of it too.

Here’s what the output looks like for Y Combinator’s orange:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VICRkO_7Z1B05KnnzF0c...

It’s nighttime for me so if you have any questions, I’ll be answering in the morning.

[1] https://irorgb.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_colors_of_Japan [3] https://www.dic-graphics.co.jp/en/products/dcguide/index.htm... [4] https://developer.adobe.com/fund-for-design/
by bluGill | 2025-04-23 13:29:59+00:00
If you have 100M I'll create a company to setup and maintain infrastructure. Though depending on your size I might need more money to maintain yours. Setting up the company isn't hard.

What is hard is doing it today. It will take a year just to figure out the various custom configurations you need to get a majority of users switched over without issue, and there will be a long tail weird cases that will go on for years before everything is done. This isn't unusual - the simpler case of switching my college campus from Coke to Pepsi took over a month and there both vendors cooperated in making it a smooth switch (Coke does not want to burn bridges as this happens all the time and they want to be back again next time the contract comes up - right now Microsoft doesn't have that incentive)
by zitterbewegung | 2025-04-23 13:30:08+00:00
I think that when Apple pivoted to "Apple Silicon" or basically the M series chips they realized that they should pivot to video games also. Once iOS supported an App Store it came out of the gates organically with people making video games for the platform . Unfortunately they never really followed through with helping game developers or any meaningful QC regarding monetization so you have a lot of good games and a whole lot of bad games. Also, Warframe when they made a switch port they figured out they could make an iOS port which really caught on in Japan.
by _hl_ | 2025-04-23 13:31:17+00:00
Hey, I’m acutely in the market (considering moving away from Google)

2 Qs:

1. How does OpenCage correctness/completeness compare to Google Maps API, especially in rural and industrial regions where you have addresses like “AcmeCo Industries, 234-XY Unit C, Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai”? I’d like to confidently query the most precise location that still matches/contains my query.

2. Do you support querying by business names? Google’s geocoding doesn’t return the business name in the result (that’s a separate API), but it does use business names to resolve queries.
by e3bc54b2 | 2025-04-23 13:31:21+00:00
Those 'nice' parts of the google are feeding the 'evil' advertisement business. Now more than anything, the reason google's ad business is so rich specifically because they (and only they) know everything about most of the denizens to farm them efficiently and thus demand a premium. Take their feed away and the ad business livestock will suddenly be lot more docile.
by apatheticonion | 2025-04-23 13:31:55+00:00
but also WSL2 doesn't add anything of value to the development experience on Windows that wasn't already possible with a VM.

For my use cases, I just want to target unix-like APIs and use bash-isms so I can reuse my build scripts and tooling. I don't really care if the binary format I consume or compile to is different to Linux - as long as my development experience is identical across MacOS, Windows and Linux.

A thin layer on top of Windows that mimics Linux so I can run bash _properly_ is all I really need.

The closest I've come is using Msys2 with zsh and uutils and it is so close but there are still cases where it simply doesn't work. WSL1 was pretty close but it falls short by needing remote development tools and having isolated storage/poor performance interacting with host storage.

WSL2 is DOA for me, I just hand roll my own Linux VM and call it a day.
by taylodl | 2025-04-23 13:32:01+00:00
Has your paper been peer-reviewed by your own computer science department? As an undergraduate, you're much more likely to get their attention and consideration than you are to get the attention and consideration of experts who don't know you and have no association with you. If your paper looks good, your computer science department will know the next steps in getting it circulated and guide the process.
by blakesterz | 2025-04-23 13:32:27+00:00
Very cool. I first setup my blog way back in the 90s and wrote the HTML by hand and used FTP to get it on the server. Then moved to phpslash and slashcode, Drupal and then Wordpress. Probably something else in there too. This setup feels much closer to how I was doing it in the 90s in some ways. It kind of feels like we've come full circle!
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-23 13:32:31+00:00
CSS got it right by making pixels a relative unit. Meters are absolute. You cannot express pixels in meters. Because they are relative units.

If you have a high resolution screen the a CSS pixel is typically be 4 actual display pixels (2x2) instead of just 1. And if you change the zoom level, the amount of display pixels might actually change in fractional ways. The unit only makes sense in relation to what's around it. If you render vector graphics or fonts, pixels are used as relative units. On a high resolution screen it will actually use those extra display pixels.

If you want to show something that's exactly 5cm on a laptop or phone screen, you need to know the dimensions of the screen and figure out how many pixels you need per cm to scale things correctly. Css has some absolute units but they only work as expected for print media typically.
by thesuitonym | 2025-04-23 13:32:38+00:00
That's hilarious. It sounds like you know, but for anyone who doesn't, it's actually the opposite. BSD variants are derived from Unix--that's where the BSD comes from, it was the Berkley Software Distribution of Unix tools, that later implemented the rest of Unix so universities could use the same software without having to worry about licensing from Bell Labs.

Linux is something else entirely, a student's project to make a MINIX compatible kernel, usually packaged with the GNU operating system, which like BSD aimed to be Unix compatible, but notably is not Unix (It's right there in the name: GNU's Not Unix).
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-23 13:32:46+00:00
I find this hard to believe. Every country has various conditions and scenarios where the leader is granted god-like powers. ex: In Canada Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time ever during covid. My understanding is that it was intended for 9/11-type actions, not protesters who should have been arrested weeks earlier. What country are you in?
by rietta | 2025-04-23 13:32:51+00:00
I appreciate you sharing your perspective here.

Please do not read too much into this as me trying to control our kids beyond normal parenting and making sure they learn to grow up to be strong, confident, and caring for others. They do have age appropriate access to the Internet and an iPad with modern educational games on it as well.

There is disagreement among bible believing Christians about Genesis. I remember clearly reading it for myself as a child and realizing that the day counting did not start until the third verse. It starts out saying in God created the universe and everything in it in verse 1 without reference to a time frame. It's worth looking up Hugh Ross videos as he presents on this stuff in a way very different from the young earth creationists. There is a Northern Irish professor by the name of John Lennox who gives a very good lecture too. I presume that many here are well versed with many of the high quality secular professors, so I specifically wanted to point out two who are coming from a Christian point of view. Not everyone fully subscribes to Bishop's dating methods.

I too was very exposed to that idea but I was not restricted from reading science or anything I wanted.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-04-23 13:33:02+00:00
Can't deny that some EU politicians (mostly conservative ones, surprise, surprise) have a hidden agenda behind it.

The statement that gov & businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without American software is easy to disprove. Just look at how easy the Chinese or the Russians could shed or avoid their dependency on crappy Microsoft or expensive US cloud providers. The problem is just that many European politicians are so technically inept they believe it themselves.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-23 13:33:22+00:00
After smoking in bars was banned, my brother and I noted how run-down and dreary the places we hung out looked. We just hadn't been able to see it before through the haze.

I always hated the smoke and the way your hair and clothes would still reek of it the next morning. Now, on the rare occasions I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, it's nostalgic and almost smells good.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-23 13:33:43+00:00
These are horrendously difficult questions, though a partial answer to 2) is that labor (with "Baumol" training costs factored in) was so cheap up till the early 60s that high schoolers were easily competitive with college grads..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#Education

Easier question to answer:

Why is it so hard to scale payouts to craftspeople (designers, writers, musicians, YouTubers, actors even.)

Even easier question to answer:

Why is the exchange rate of social status to USD so inelastic
by glitchc | 2025-04-23 13:33:52+00:00
This is written from a rather narrow perspective (of signal processing) and is clearly wrong in other contexts. For an image sensor designer, gate length, photosensitive area and pixel pitch are all real-valued measurements. That pixels are laid out on a grid simply reflects the ease of constructing electronic circuits this way. Alternative arrangements are possible, Sigma's depth pixels being one commercial example.
by jongjong | 2025-04-23 13:33:56+00:00
WTF. I had the exact same idea. Why buy Chrome when Chromium is open source and there are existing successful forks (e.g. Brave browser) which managed to do it... Why pay $100 million for something you can have for free? It's not like Open AI would struggle to find users for their new browser... They could just advertise it "Download our new GPT Browser" on their website above the chat window.
by edwardjxli | 2025-04-23 13:34:26+00:00
Extra stuff like type checking and annotations are definitely not the reason why python became that popular and widely adapted and used, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add and use them.

To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted.

Case in point, the python-opencv (https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python) library has basically no types and it's an absolute pain to work with.

BTW thats a really good SO thread, thanks for linking it!
by vunderba | 2025-04-23 13:34:34+00:00
I have a very similar setup, but I went a step further by writing a custom Obsidian plugin that handles compressing assets / transforming frontmatter / pushing the bundle up to my Github blog repo.

Github has an automated action that then uses Pelican (a python based static site generator) to convert to HTML and deploys it to my VPS where it is served by Caddy.

Makes it very easy to have a WYSIWYG interface, the blog pages look basically identical to Obsidian.

https://mordenstar.com/blog/obsidian-to-pelican-exporter

Pelican static site generator:

https://github.com/getpelican/pelican
by x187463 | 2025-04-23 13:34:57+00:00
> Which means these LLM architectures will not be producing groundbreaking novel theories in science and technology.

Is it not possible that new theories and breakthroughs could result from this so-called statistical pattern matching? The information necessary could be present in the training data and the relationship simply never before considered by a human.

We may not be on a path to AGI, but it seems premature to claim LLMs are fundamentally incapable of such contributions to knowledge.

In fact, it seems that these AI labs are leaning in such a direction. Keep producing better LLMs until the LLM can make contributions that drive the field forward.
by btown | 2025-04-23 13:35:01+00:00
While I shudder at the privacy implications of some of those buyers, there's a really ironic concept here: Google always had a conflict of interest between giving the user agency in their browser, and making ads unblockable (namely, its own). Under different stewardship, we might see a shift towards the user in the ad-blocking wars.

After all, the new buyer gets value out of your loyalty in using their browser to view more pages than ever before, so that it can use that data to train its LLMs! People bouncing from pages due to ads just gets in the way. We will have freedom from online advertising, for the low, low cost of a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk-managed panopticon!
by neither_color | 2025-04-23 13:35:02+00:00
The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I want to search for very specific things that are variants of hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )
by mackman | 2025-04-23 13:35:05+00:00
CORE only works on kernels that support BTF. This post introduces one workaround which is to generate BTF data for kernels without it. That's still only half the problem though. You also need to write your eBPF program so every kernel verifier passes it, even though every kernel's eBPF verifier has different bugs, capabilities, and complexity limits. I maintain a large eBPF program that supports 4.14 through 6.14. We implemented our own version of CORE before CORE really existed. In reality, it's a lot more work than "compile once run everywhere."
Show HN: Tokenkit – Convert LLMs to new tokenizers (incl byte-level Llama/Gemma)
by bminixhofer | 2025-04-23 13:35:34+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve been working on transferring LLMs across tokenizers using a new method called ALM (details in our paper [1]). It distills a model trained with one tokenizer into a version using another, enabling things like converting subword models into byte-level ones much more effectively than what was possible before.

To make this easy to use, I released tokenkit, a library implementing ALM and other tokenizer transfer methods: https://github.com/bminixhofer/tokenkit.

As a demo, I used ALM to create two byte-level instruction-tuned models:

- https://huggingface.co/benjamin/Gemma2-2B-IT-Byte

- https://huggingface.co/benjamin/Llama3-2-3B-IT-Byte

Even though the distillation phase is very short (just 1.2B bytes ≈ 330M subword tokens), the models perform competitively (for example 57.0% MMLU of the byte-level Llama vs. 62.4% MMLU of the original Llama3-3B-Instruct).

This approach opens up an interesting direction: we can potentially keep subword tokenization for pretraining (to still squeeze as much text into the model in as little time as possible), but then change to a more user-friendly tokenization afterwards.

These models aren’t yet optimized for efficiency, but if you would add self-speculative decoding plus a BLT/DTP-style hierarchical architecture and/or linearized attention, they might also be able to replace subword-based models when speed matters.

If you're interested in training your own models, the guide on tokenizer transfer via tokenkit [2] should make it easy. The model cards of the transfers above also contain the exact command used to train them. I’ve been training on fairly limited hardware, so effective transfer is possible even in a (near) consumer-grade setup.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20083

[2]: https://github.com/bminixhofer/tokenkit/blob/main/docs/token...
by timerol | 2025-04-23 13:35:35+00:00
This example illustrates potential confusion around non-square pixels. 5 football fields long makes perfect sense, but I'm not sure if 2 football fields wide means "twice the width of a football field" or "width equaling twice the length of a football field". I would lean towards the latter in colloquial usage, which means that the area is definitely not the same as the area of 10 football fields
by tossandthrow | 2025-04-23 13:36:05+00:00
Of cause that is a reason for more taxation.

There are 2 types of taxes: Those we charge for revenue and those we charge for behavior.

We don't charge income tax to deter people from working. We charge income tax because we really need money to fund stuff.

If you can not raise enough money, because companies / individuals are optimizing their tax, then you change it such that the budget holds.

... Oh well, I reckon if you are in the US you just keep borrowing. In that case, sorry about my reasoning.
by exabrial | 2025-04-23 13:36:30+00:00
I used to donate to the Homebrew project and actually liked it, until it's enshitification a few years ago.

* excessive superflurious animations? hell yeah

* emojis everywhere? of course!

* forced updates on by default

* breaking updates? thanks your problem noob. Try to keep up.

* versioning? lol, this isn't NASA

* backwards compatibility? Lol. come on, we redesigned the standard, the right way, the 5th time this time.

Its easy to criticize open source when you're not contributing, but thats why I sent my dollars over there, as I couldn't donate my time. Frustrating.
by iamleppert | 2025-04-23 13:36:45+00:00
The frameworks never care to show about what the debugging experience is like. When my code fails in an unusual way (or usual) way, am I going to have to crawl up the ass of some framework? Will I be knee deep in some crazy stack race that was run from an event loop, that hides my original event or action and forces me to retreat back to the stone ages of console.log statements? Do sourcemaps even work? Hell, have you even tried to debug your own thing? What's that like?
Show HN: Text Battle – AI-simulated fights, daily leagues (Elo Ranking)
by sungchi | 2025-04-23 13:36:59+00:00
I built Text Battle, a lightweight web game where you:

- Write a character prompt in ≤ 100 chars (e.g. "A sarcastic cyber-ninja with a plasma katana").

- Earn Elo and appear in daily or unlimited-season leagues.

Feedback I’m looking for:

- Whether the 60 s cooldown feels fair vs. annoying.

- Balance of Elo gains between free and paid matches.

- I added micro-transactions because LLM costs are non-trivial; any tips on model/infra optimization to keep it free-to-play are welcome.

URL: https://plan9.kr/battle

Auth: Email, Google, Supabase Anonymous Sign-Ins

Source / tech stack: React + Supabase + Gemini API

Thanks in advance—happy to answer questions!
by bluGill | 2025-04-23 13:37:41+00:00
They do not have to be workflow identical. They just need to be equivalent. I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time. However if the new workflow is worse (slower, worse results, or other such negatives) that will be found out.

Now it will take power users several years to learn all the tricks of the new workflow and that is productivity lost in the short term. This alone may not be worth the cost. If the new workflow is better though it will be worth it.
by RobinL | 2025-04-23 13:37:52+00:00
My experience is also that (in the uk at least) it can't be done accurately with openstreetmap data.

For context, I've tried it! I've been working on a free library for geocoding UK addresses quickly and accurately. It comes with the caveat that you need access to the dataset of all addresses you're geocoding against - which could be your own list, or a commercial product like addressbase: https://github.com/robinL/uk_address_matcher/
by crowcroft | 2025-04-23 13:37:59+00:00
Totally agree. I think the only option here would be separating the company into multiple companies. This seems to be the direction the Meta case is more likely to go in.

Eg. Google could become, Google Search (and AI), YouTube, and an independent ad tech company with the remnants of DoubleClick (maybe Google Ads moves into this group as well and has deals with the other two entities).
by lupusreal | 2025-04-23 13:38:10+00:00
Diefenbaker canceled the arrow saying that interceptors were no longer needed (Canada subsequently bought interceptors from America, because they did in fact remain relevant.). At the same time he was digging out a massive bunker outside of Ottawa so that the Canadian government could survive the rest of Canada being vaporized. Some real Doctor Strangelove shit IMHO.

The so called "Deifenbunker" is now a museum open to the public. Pretty interesting, being in it feels like being in a ship.
by freyfogle | 2025-04-23 13:38:13+00:00
Hi,

Great. The only real answer is you should sign up for a free trial (takes 2 min, requires just an email address) and test with your actual input data. Which language are you working in? We have SDKs for almost all (30+) and detailed tutorials for many: https://opencagedata.com/sdks

You can also test manually on our demo page: https://opencagedata.com/demo

You can do a lot to help us by formatting the input data well: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-format-your-geocoding...

re: company names, it is a real challenge as they introduce a lot of noise.

Please can you follow up by email with specific questions: support @ opencagedata.com

I hope we have the chance to work with you
by piltdownman | 2025-04-23 13:38:46+00:00
// but the language as taught in schools and universities is quite different from the varieties spoken inside Gaelic-speaking communities (gaeltachta) by a very small number of people

There's only 3 regional dialects of Irish - Connacht, Munster and Ulster - and all three dialects are tested at Aural level in the School leavers Exam. There's very little difference between them bar pronunciation and some common phrases.

The vast vast majority of daily Irish speakers would speak Connacht Irish - i.e. Connemara Irish - due to spending time in the Colaiste Gaeilge during the summer holidays; effectively state-subsidised Irish language Summer Camps. It's also the predominant dialect on TG4 - the Irish language TV station.

Wales has a massively larger proportion of native speakers of Welsh daily, but this is due to the lack of colonial history attempting to wipe out the language, and the far more multi-cultural make-up of Ireland.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-23 13:39:08+00:00
This is not quite correct. The Emergencies Act was preceded by the War Measures Act which was used during WWI and WWII as well as during the "October Crisis"[1].

But yes, the intent is for events that threaten the nation, not protests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis