MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CalChris | 2025-04-16 00:28:48+00:00
I think it's more correct to say the CCP allied with the KMT during WWII, or rather during their Second Sino-Japanese War. We made contact with Mao's CCP but the vast amount of supply + support with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.

My point was that the Viet Minh were people we could work with. We had worked with them during WWII. And by extension, we work with them now. The Vietnamese have a constant fear of being colonized by China. So we don't have to worry about that. Instead we literally forced them to ally with Russia.

Dulles, Johnson, Nixon, ... and that crew were short sighted and stupid, but certain. The Vietnam War was cast as anti-communism to a gullible American public. But the Vietnamese don't see it that way and today it isn't that way.

Now, the US Navy makes port calls in Cam Ranh Bay. There has been no change of regime in Vietnam.

Yeah, Ho Chi Minh was at Paris but not Potsdam. He'd have been great to work with. He even worked in the United States for General Motors. He knew us well.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-16 00:29:45+00:00
An interesting use for AI right now would be using it as a gatekeeping filter, selecting social media for quality based on customisable definitions of quality.

Using it as a filter instead of a generator would provide information about which content has real social value, which content doesn't, and what the many dimensions of "value" are.

The current maximalist "Use AI to generate as much as possible" trend is the opposite of social intelligence.
by dang | 2025-04-16 00:30:15+00:00
It's explained in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) how, and why, we do that (see "What's the relationship between YC and HN?")

It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.

For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:

Launch HN: mrge.io (YC X25) – Cursor for code review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692476 - April 2025 (89 comments)

One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-16 00:30:15+00:00
But if we zoom out, there is an end to this. We run out of poor people to be migrants eventually, right? I don't just mean as the USA, or any country, but as the Earth.

How do we solve the issue of the end state, where all economies have reached our current level of advancement?

I assume we solve it, or we go extinct, and that would be an odd reason to do so after millions of years, wouldn't it?
by MarkSweep | 2025-04-16 00:30:20+00:00
> suspending threads in your own process is kind of necessary for e.g. many GC algorithms

True. Maybe the more precise rule is “only suspend threads for a short amount of time and don’t acquire any locks while doing it”?

The way the .NET runtime follows this rule is it only suspends threads for a very short time. After suspending, the thread is immediately resumed if it not running managed code (in a random native library or syscall). If the thread is running managed code, the thread is hijacked by replacing either the instruction pointer or the return address with a the address of a function that will wait for the GC to finish. The thread is then immediately resumed. See the details here:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/core...

> Now imagine multiple of those runtimes running in the same process.

Can that possibly reliably work? Sounds messy.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-16 00:31:01+00:00
Can you show me how that would work?

It's trivial to put arbitrary files into sections:

objcopy --add-section program.files.1=file.1.dat \ --add-section program.files.2=file.2.dat \ program program+files

The problem is the program.files.* sections do not get mapped in by a LOAD segment. I ended up having to write my own tool to patch in a LOAD segment into the segments table because objcopy does not have the ability to do it.

Even asked a Stack Overflow question about this two years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/q/77468641

The only answer I got told me to simply read the sections into memory via /proc/self/exe or edit the segments table and make it so that the LOAD segments cover the whole file. I eventually figured out ways to add LOAD segments to the table. By that point I didn't need sections anymore, just a custom segment type.
by za3faran | 2025-04-16 00:32:45+00:00
This "argument" again. I swear it's always the same trite copy-pasted ones. This is not open for debate - there is mass starvation, there are war crimes, the ICC is after the heads of the mafia. There are many, many documentaries about the horrors that have befallen Gaza for many years now, including by anti zionist jews.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-16 00:33:16+00:00
China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.

Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.

I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.

(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)
by plorkyeran | 2025-04-16 00:34:20+00:00
iPhones have terrible heat dispersion compared to even a fanless computer like a macbook air. You get a few minutes at full load before thermal throttling kicks in, so you could do the occasional build of your iPhone app on an iPhone but it'd be pretty terrible as a development platform.

At work we had some benchmarking suites that ran on physical devices and even with significant effort put into cooling them they spent more time sleeping waiting to cool off than actually running the benchmarks.
by fzeroracer | 2025-04-16 00:34:36+00:00
> What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?

Do you wonder why Canada has been issuing travel warnings for people travelling to the US? Or why they've been treating the US as a hostile power given that the current admin has threatened to invade Canada and make it the 51st state? All of which are leading to a massive drop in tourism to the US?
by tasn | 2025-04-16 00:34:48+00:00
> I suggest you learn more about the conflict from different perspectives if you think the claim of genocide is "weak".

I do my best to learn about it from different perspectives. As for the genocide claim: I think it has been argued a lot online so no need to rehash it here.

> Criticism of your country's extensive human rights abuses is not antisemitism.

I disagree with the statement, though that's not the statement that he made. He made a statement about "Israeli control of western politics" which is just a tired trope. At least a hundred years old (see Wikipedia), but probably much older than that.

> You are representing your country very poorly with this post.

I was thinking twice before posting this, as I figured I'd be attacked for it. Though sometimes you have to call a spade a spade, and the Elder's of Zion nonsense had to be called out.
by pyfon | 2025-04-16 00:34:49+00:00
There are a few of these already. Is this a land grab play, i.e. with investment get the big accounts then all the compliance ticks then dominate?

AI or conventional bots for PRs are neat though. Where I work we have loads of them checking all sorts of criteria. Most are rules based. E.g. someone from this list must review if this folder changes. Kinda annoying when getting the PR in but overall great for quality control. We are using an LLM AI for commenting on potential issues too. (Sorry I don't have any influence to help them to consider yours)
by jonathanhefner | 2025-04-16 00:34:51+00:00
RSC is indeed very cool. It also serves as a superior serialization format compared to JSON. For example, it can roundtrip basic types such as `Date` and `Map` with no extra effort.

One thing I would like to see more focus on in React is returning components from server functions. Right now, using server functions for data fetching is discouraged, but I think it has some compelling use cases. It is especially useful when you have components that need to fetch data dynamically, but you don't want the fetch / data tied to the URL, as it would be with a typical server component. For example, when fetching suggestions for a typeahead text input.

(Self-promotion) I prototyped an API for consuming such components in an idiomatic way: https://github.com/jonathanhefner/next-remote-components. You can see a demo: https://next-remote-components.vercel.app/.

To prove the idea is viable beyond Next.js, I also ported it to the Waku framework (https://github.com/jonathanhefner/twofold-remote-components) and the Twofold framework (https://github.com/jonathanhefner/twofold-remote-components).

I would love to see something like it integrated into React proper.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-16 00:35:35+00:00
The model isn’t given away for free as a punishment, they agreed that the model and everything it produces is free as part of the terms and conditions. If they don’t think it is mutually beneficial, they don’t have to use the site.

If they don’t like the contract, they can try and get it invalidated, but at least it will be a distributed problem for them.
by defrost | 2025-04-16 00:36:14+00:00
Democracy is a spectrum and the US system is but one poor flawed example.

Despite the founders being anti-party politics and wanting a spectrum of representatives each representing a block of the broader population and hammering out consensual deals that most can live with, the US has devolved into a two party system in which neither party especially represents 50% of the population despite both butting up against the median of actual voters.

This is the doom spiral of iterative FPTP and Hotelling's 'law'.

Other democracies have many parties, larger parties mixed with smaller parties, greater voter engagement, various forms of proportional voting systems (there are several), etc.

US democracy is just one example of many global democracies.
by film42 | 2025-04-16 00:36:55+00:00
Having written several pg txn poolers, I like the implementation. I also love your simple branding and I think this could make a fantastic product for enterprise customers. However, my biggest concern as a buyer is longevity. PgCat (another popular pooler in rust) will likely lose funding shortly. Meanwhile, PgBouncer is battle tested, small in scope, and is starting to get consistent new contribution.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-16 00:37:01+00:00
Speaking of the meta-realm, I've always wondered how messages in forum flamewars always seemed to gravitate toward a very specific pattern:

<personal insult>

<the point>

<bait to continue flaming>

You see this pattern all over the Internet. For example, from that bodybuilding.com thread:

Are you retarded? [personal insult] Maybe you should look at a calander, I didn't double count sunday, my two weeks started and ended on sunday, exactly 14 days. [the point] What don't you understand? [bait to continue flaming]
by Sytten | 2025-04-16 00:37:42+00:00
I feel I am missing something with the approach of those routers. If I am doing cursor pagination over a couple million rows with some ordering this will pull in a huge number of data from each server and then perform it in memory at the router level if I understand correctly.

The neon approach of decoupling storage from processing but keeping the processing a query local to one server seems better to me, but I am maybe missing something.
by bearjaws | 2025-04-16 00:37:49+00:00
Why is a fine even an acceptable resolution?

Previously the FTC had been running such that, if it could not prove an acquisition was bad it would approve it.

In this case, back in 2012 Instagram was small, didn't charge money, and not considered a competitor to Facebook.

Well, we sure as hell know now it was a bad idea. Harmed consumer privacy, removed other competitors, and expanded the network effect of then Facebook.

And before anyone says "oh what about YouTube, X, TikTok, competitors" - Yes they should all be split off from their parent companies too.
by AlexanderTheGr8 | 2025-04-16 00:38:06+00:00
I followed this case when it happened. It was $16M at the time, not sure how it became $65M now. I suppose it doesn't matter - any number above $100k probably grants the same punishment*

Interesting side-note : the people he took/stole from - they offered him 10% if he returned the rest. He said no in a tweet trolling them.

Contrary to the opinions in this thread, I think he was smart to run away. Remember that he did this from Canada, not the US. Countries don't have the same extradition treaties with Canada that they do with US.

If he had stayed, he would almost certainly be convicted. No court can possibly understand "code is law". Courts' job is only to interpret the law, not make the law. And the law was not written for crypto. You cannot fit a square in a circle without distortion.

What I think would have happened is the courts, rather than introducing novel precedent, would have preferred to just rely on existing case law and declare him a criminal.

Another interesting side-note : the judge presiding the case made a public comment asking the guy to come back to Canada promising him a fair trial. The guy didn't show up - maybe he didn't receive the message.

Overall, even with the benefit of hindsight, we still can't be sure if he was smart to exploit this or not. Forced to live in a few countries but with a lot of money.

* It's because (1) laws were designed when numbers were lower (no one had $16M to steal); (2) humans can't visualize big numbers (individually, $16M is just as big as $65M in my head)
by skilbjo | 2025-04-16 00:38:28+00:00
pretty interesting discovery if that was the hack.

do you know what the legal implications are for this?

if the company that owns 4chan finds the identity of the attacker, could they sue him in civil court? or do they send whatever logs they have to the FBI and the FBI would initiate a criminal prosecution? also what is the criminal act here? is it accessing their systems, or is it posting the data that they found "through unauthorised means" on a public channel like twitter? does the "computer fraud and abuse act" apply?

like if you found this exploit, and sent it to the company in good faith (ie a "good hacker"), are you free from prosecution? and what is the grey area, like if you found this exploit and then just sat on it for a while (let's say you didn't report it to the company, but let's also say you didn't abuse it, ie leak private data to twitter)
by Grimblewald | 2025-04-16 00:38:43+00:00
I really hope not, because I really hate how JS has fucked the internet. Just look at how shit the experience on www.reddit.com vs old.reddit.com is. Old uses a lot of JS now, which has made the experience a touch worse, but it still mostly serves a static HTML page. It loads quickly, renders quickly, and lets me do useful preference based things on my end.

I hate what JS has done to the internet, and I think it plays a heavy hand in the internets enshitification.
by fzeroracer | 2025-04-16 00:39:31+00:00
The Trump admin is literally withdrawing ADA guidance without replacement. And as part of his executive orders they consider accessibility as part of the whole phrase (DEIA) [1] and are working to gut any DEIA programs. So you're factually wrong.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-01...
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-16 00:40:11+00:00
> “We haven’t been shy about explaining why it doesn’t make sense for the FTC to bring a case to trial that requires it to prove something every 17-year-old in America knows is absurd—that Instagram doesn’t compete with TikTok,” she said.

In this hypothetical scenario:

1. Instagram competes with TikTok, winning a minority share of the market.

2. The government decrees that TikTok is anathema and expels them from the market.

3. The government sues Instagram for having a supermajority share of the remaining market.

I feel like there should be a form of estoppel preventing the argument.
by deanCommie | 2025-04-16 00:40:19+00:00
I don't understand why you're arguing with everyone in the comments. The premise was that enthusiasts drove public opinion. I was one of those enthusiasts. I got everyone I know to switch to Chrome. Why?

1. It opened instantly. The others hung.

2. People can't conceive of this now but in that era if a rogue website started going crazy with Javascript it would CRASH THE ENTIRE BROWSER. In chrome it only killed the one tab. That sandboxing was game-changing for the state of the internet back then.

3. It could handle an obscene amount of tabs. The others couldn't.

4. 3 enabled a new mode that essentially didn't exist before - "reopen tabs". Tabbed browsing existed in Firefox but each tab was still so heavy to reopen that essentially nobody would expect to reopen their last tabs. With chrome the default was to reopen where you stopped.

5. Its built-in popup blocker actually worked. Yes, pop-up blockers existed before. And yet websites still found a way to work around it. Chrome's just worked. I don't know why they could do it but others couldn't, but at worst it would pop up a new tab next to your existing one. For others internet browsing was still an experience that ended closing a browser window with "oh shit there's been a porn popup window in the background this entire time". Not so with Chrome.

NONE of this came from marketing. ALL of this became apparent within seconds-to-minutes of using it. I only had to lead my friends and family to it, once they started using it they never ent back.
by Animats | 2025-04-16 00:40:45+00:00
These machines have been around for a while. There are at least nine companies selling them.[1] This started in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have much cheap labor.

There's a competing approach - robotic rotary milking.[2] Rotary milkers (giant turntables with cows on them) have been around for decades, and are becoming more automated, down from four people to one.

All this stuff works fine. So there's a huge milk glut.

[1] https://roboticsbiz.com/top-9-best-robotic-milking-machines/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxhE53G3CUM
by FiniteField | 2025-04-16 00:41:09+00:00
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.

The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
by mk_stjames | 2025-04-16 00:41:21+00:00
To add, all the new audio models (partially) use diffusion methods that are exactly the same methods as used on images - the audio generation can be thought of as an image generation of a spectrogram of an audio file.

For early experiments people literally took Stable Diffusion and fine tuned it on labelled spectrograms of music snippets, then used the fine tuned model to generate new images of spectrograms guided by text, and then took those images and turned them back into audio via re-synthesis of that spectral image to a .wav.

Riffusion was one of the first to experiment with this, 2 years ago now: https://github.com/riffusion/riffusion-hobby

The more advanced music generators out now I believe have more of a 'stems' approach and a larger processing pipeline to increase fidelity and add tracking vocal capability but the underlying idea is the same.

Any adversarial attack to hide information in the spectrograph to fool the model into categorizing the track as something it is not isn't different than the image adversarial attacks which have been found to have ways to be mitigated.

Various forms of filtering for inaudible spectral information coupled with methods that destroy and re-synthesize/randomize phase information would likely break this poisoning attack.
by favflam | 2025-04-16 00:42:47+00:00
The dollar was strong, interest rates low, inflation rate competitively low (compare with other countries).

The deficit just means the US government should collect more taxes and cut spending. Efficiency efforts should have gone towards neutering nimbys.

Now with Republicans in power, we can expect tax revenue to take a huge hit, and economic recession, and the deficit to blow out.

In the last 25 years, Republicans have consistently taken positive trends in gdp, unemployment, and deficits and tanked the economy.
by rglover | 2025-04-16 00:44:17+00:00
I speculated a ways back [1] that this was why Elon Musk bought Twitter. Not to "control the discourse" but to get unfettered access to real, live human thought that you can train an AI against.

My guess is OpenAI has hit limits with "produced" content (e.g., books, blog posts, etc) and think they can fill in the gaps in the LLMs ability to "think" by leveraging raw, unpolished social data (and the social graph).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397703