MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-23 17:24:41+00:00
Personally I am disappointed with Instagram's web interface. I find it a lot more pleasant to upload photos using either Mastodon (unfunded) or Bluesky (shoestring budget) It doesn't come across like an industry leading product in 2025, rather it looks like it looked with Facebook bought it.

To be fair I shoot with a Sony α7 and develop with DxO so I don't need the filters or crop tool. I independently came to the conclusion that I like making physical prints in a 4x5 aspect ratio (everybody makes 4″x6″ cards, if I am shooting with a crazy small aperture, developing to compensate for that, and color grading to make it look like a photo from an old book shouldn't I have a brand aspect ratio?)

From a recommendation engineering perspective I have mixed feelings about Instagram. The onboarding feed is hand curated and brilliant, as it should be. For certain kinds of content, its habit of putting older stuff into your feed is probably great and helps match the chronology of posters and viewers. On the other hand, student organizations at Cornell often use Instagram as their official communications mechanism about events and there are many things problematic about that, not least that Instagram just sent me a notification about a message dated 4/5 (18 days ago) about how they were selling the last of the dragon day T-shirts they had left over. [1] It's bad enough that I get notifications about cringey blond girls who supposedly want to follow me, but getting spammed with notifications about events that already passed ruins its value as a "be aware about events" platform which it isn't meant to be but that people use it as.

And of course there is the quality/cringe problem. I get followed by endless girls who have the same blond hair in the same hairstyle with the same makeup and the same slinky dress who stand by the squat rack in the same gym. To be fair, there is one of those who shows up at Crunch, but I hear that people in Ukraine, Russia and Myanmar use photos of that kind of girl in catfishing. In real life a girl like that has never taken an interest me and on other platforms maybe 5% of the the people who take an interest in me are that girl, on Instagram it is 50%. Cringe!

It adds up to "we're number one, why try harder". The Economist ran an article in Meta's defense that says with all the problems of social media we don't need more platforms, but behind it all is the problem of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

without a credible threat of exit, platforms like that are just going to get worse, not better.

[1] In this case Facebook might have made the world better by pushing that content onto Facebook which has more structured data and can do a better job of handling notification about real-world events.
by tripti_mishra | 2025-04-23 17:24:56+00:00
Honestly, I was just so over the nonstop ETL and data wrangling grind. I just wanted to build stuff that actually shows results and not waste half my day setting up pipelines. That’s how I ended up using Moose in one of my prototypes. It’s been awesome seeing it cut through the noise and let me skip the annoying setup so I can get straight to building features that actually matter. Cool stuff - cheers!
by WuxiFingerHold | 2025-04-23 17:24:57+00:00
Vue has a large ecosystem. A lot of very good component libs like PrimeVue, Vuetify, Quasar, NuxtUI, ElementUi ...

I have used agGrid and eCharts with Svelte. Doesn't get any simpler. With Solid, Vue and Svelte you can integrate vanilla JS libs easily.

I tend to use Svelte without component lib or DaisyUI. After all, those libs are technical debt. Also, the native HTML 5 elements / browser APIs are pretty complete these days (dialog, popover, ...). If I was to chose one I'd probably go with Vue and PrimeVue.
by elefanten | 2025-04-23 17:25:08+00:00
Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.

Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.

So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
by phtrivier | 2025-04-23 17:25:26+00:00
Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)

> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles

What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?

I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).

It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.

But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.

However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.

In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.

None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".

However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.

The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

[2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...
by nradov | 2025-04-23 17:25:32+00:00
Technically they didn't take your tax return, they seized the income tax refund you thought you were owed. A tax return is the 1040 (or similar) form you file with the IRS.

Regardless of debt collection issues, as a taxpayer it's best to set your withholding so that you don't get a tax refund. A refund essentially means you were giving the government an interest free loan.
by moolcool | 2025-04-23 17:25:43+00:00
> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent

I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.

I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-04-23 17:26:10+00:00
No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.

Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.

Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.

The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-23 17:26:37+00:00
Because (as far as I know) that's not the case for most other languages. It's an interesting (and certainly not necessarily "wrong") way to program when you aren't sure about how to write something. Python has something similar, that I will occasionally utilize for this purpose, but it doesn't show documentation (as far as I know) or anything like that while it sounds like gchi has functionality kind of like CLI tools' "--help"?

With C#, intellisense takes the role of gchi and does pop up say the valid methods and properties of a class, and iirc includes documentation text.

So it's less about that haskell has "coding help" built in and more about how that's presented to and interacted by the developer.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-23 17:26:40+00:00
Humans can be deceptive, but it is usually deliberate. We can also honestly make things up and present them as fact but it is not that common, we usually say that we don't know. And generally, lying is harder for us than telling the truth, in the sense that making a consistent but false narrative requires effort.

For LLMs, making stuff up is the default, one can argue that it is all they do, it just happens to be the truth most of the times.

And AFAIK, what I would call the "real" Turing test hasn't been shattered by far. The idea is that the interrogator and the human subject are both experts and collaborate against the computer. They can't cheat by exchanging secrets, but anything else is fair game.

I think it is important because the Turing test has already been "won" by primitive algorithms acting clueless to interrogators who were not aware of the trick. For me, this is not really a measure of computer intelligence, more like a measure of how clever the chatbot designers were at tricking unsuspecting people.
by feoren | 2025-04-23 17:26:40+00:00
> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea.

A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.

And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.

You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
by srean | 2025-04-23 17:26:41+00:00
Depending on what you want to accomplish, wavelet basis can be an excellent choice. The best basis functions are task specific. For photography shearlet basis maybe even more appropriate.

Let me give a simple example. Say one wants to reflect 2D points along a line at 42 degrees. It's eminently doable in canonical basis but it's quite messy. Instead one can work off a different (rotated) basis such that that 42 degree line is now the x-axis. Now reflection is trivial. However the post reflection coordinates are in the new basis, so you invert the basis transformation to get your answer in the canonical basis.

For solving linear ODE with fixed coefficients you have a similiar situation where you transform to Laplace transform basis. In this basis the coefficient Matrix is a diagonal matrix, so it's trivial to solve. Then transform back (not always easy).

For de-noising tasks you need a basis where noise and signal have drastically different coefficients when expressed in such basis. Then it's easy to knock out the offending parts.

Harmonic functions are smooth and have the 'averaging' property. If you know beforehand that your desired unknown function is smooth in a similar way, Harmonic functions (for the corresponding smoothness measuring linear operator - the Laplacian operator) is indeed a very good choice.

As a counterexample if you want to denoise a photograph but retain edges, then Fourier is not very convenient because both edges as well as noise have 'high frequency' heavy representation. If you throw out high frequency components, the edge pixels are going to be collateral damage. The problem is that in this basis, edges and noise look the same. Shearlets, curvelets will do better here.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-04-23 17:26:46+00:00
Nitpicking: What you're describing is called a "variable ratio reinforcement schedule", and is considered to be the most effective form of operant conditioning.

However, it's not even remotely "like crack". Crack is really really really really fun, period, no "just enough of the time" about it. The reason people get hooked on crack is because it's guaranteed to be fun.

If I had to choose a substance that most closely mirrored variable ratio reinforcement conditioning, it'd probably be ketamine.
by inemesitaffia | 2025-04-23 17:26:49+00:00
People who want to join the church prefer Latin Mass which he's opposed to.

His proclamation on blessing LGBT people caused a rift with the Church in Africa (remember why we have Anglicans as part of the Catholic Church?) threatening an area that's seeing church growth.

He's also had his mouth closed about the killings of Catholics in Africa and Asia by extremists.
by FadreWulf | 2025-04-23 17:26:49+00:00
I Appreciate that, but I encourage you to read the full report and public document, there’s plenty there to start with and I would Happy to answer questions. And I don't intend to debate hypotheticals outside real-world context. My work is open for anyone to review and is results driven. If you have specific questions after reviewing the paper, I’m all ears.
by bredren | 2025-04-23 17:27:25+00:00
In the 80s you could "vibe code" by copying lines of basic out of a magazine and then change values to play.

If you didn't care about learning *how* the program worked you wouldn't learn. Many people did not, but some did.

The same happened on stack overflow, where you could copy paste random solutions or go to the docs often linked from the solution and learn *why* it worked. Many people did not, some did.

The doom and gloom around vibe coding is a proxy for FUD around generative AI mixed with some misplaced sage-like nostalgia.

People who want to learn to program will still learn to program. Only they have way better tools to do so and could progress in capability much faster.

To me, this post getting upvoted is a strangely implies there's no professional SWE gate-keeping to the generative AI coding assistance Luddism, only a shared sense of authenticity.

I suspect these posts get attention from people who have not put in the work to learn how to use generative AI for their hard SWE problems and so presume it is mostly enabling crap because they have yet to study it enough to make it do better than that in their own workstreams.

If you're in the older set, maybe you remember what it was like to get drivers working for DOS on your new CD ROM and how much you put into that effort. Put that effort into using gen ai and you may stop seeing it only as a thing that biz will use to destroy the SWE profession.
by baby | 2025-04-23 17:27:34+00:00
In America free speech is always limited to what "I find acceptable". There's an infinite number of things that lots of Americans will find unacceptable. Swearing is beeped/censored everywhere (even on youtube), songs release "explicit" and "clean" versions, nipples are blurred on TV, some words you can't say even in an educational or karaoke setting (N-word, R-word, etc.)
by palsecam | 2025-04-23 17:27:34+00:00
> My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.

FTR, Bruce Schneier (famed cryptologist) is advocating for such an approach:

We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors’ voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again. — https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/ais-and-robot...
by amarant | 2025-04-23 17:27:42+00:00
I'm not convinced the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?)

Haven't really tried vibe coding myself yet, but I'm tempted to give it a go. I imagine stuff like integrating external API's could be really handy, looking through external documentation and creating the correct calls to the correct endpoints is always a huge timesink. Seems like AI should be able to make short work of such tasks
by hello_computer | 2025-04-23 17:27:53+00:00
EU has almost 450M people. USA had the thing on lockdown for decades with < 340M people. Japan made a hell of a showing in the 80s with < 124M. Europe has the human capital. It is foolish not to use it.

There are other considerations outside of globohomo quantifiables—like workforce development, domestic know-how, self-sufficiency, robustness to supply chain failures & geopolitical upheavals… Basically, the Taleb stuff.
by astrobe_ | 2025-04-23 17:27:54+00:00
It is ambiguous, that's the trick. One can interpret "..." as '"any number of 9s", and in this interpretation the equation is false. But the teacher will eventually ask, "what about an infinite number of 9s"? Bam! brilliant introduction to series and convergence.

The correct notations to express exactly what one means feature the infinity symbol [1] - but if you use them, well, of course the students will see the trap.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity#Real_analysis
by mrtksn | 2025-04-23 17:27:56+00:00
Imagine a major streaming service: Subscription through Apple 30USD/Month or 25USD/Month if you do it through this one click fintech app.

The fintech app can even pay the streaming service for every customer they bring.

So for the users who already have the fintech app its a no-brainer, click once and get a free coffee each month. For those who don't have the app already it can push them to create an account as they see it on every app as a cheaper alternative. In Europe at least, even traditional banks are able to create a new customer account through a few steps in the in the app. It's usually just about entering your name, taking a photo of your ID and then scanning your face by looking left and right on the camera. You can have a grace period to add the funds for the subscription.

Banks already pay a lot of money for new customers, its pretty common in some places to offer interest-free loans or give cashbacks when you create a bank account through the app. They can partner with those services to offer months of free use or upgrades and then suddenly the value for the trouble of a few click and a scan goes up substantially.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-23 17:28:08+00:00
I am not sure, but it uses phasar. It wasn't one shotted and took like 5-6 attempts,mainly it didn't know how to start the game because the logic to start the game ie. the other player has 0 nodes left is true at the beginning as well/ also it had problems with giving turns player wise.

I wanted it to be a single html to be plug and play as well maybe by embedding the phasarjs script code into html as well.

I just wanted to show it to guys
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-23 17:28:26+00:00
> And the code changes were pure waste too.

Yes, I said so as well. Though it's also important that the code changes are likely to be the thing that reveals that the feature is misunderstood/badly specified. Lots of people can take a working feature and tell you if it addresses their problem. Much fewer can look at a set of unit tests and tell you the same.

> However, if it turned out it was the right thing and you didnt write a test you've just made it much harder to change that code in the future without breaking something. The cost of code changes went up.

Very much debatable. If the code needs to change because requirements themselves change in the future, the tests that are validating the old requirements are not helpful. And many kinds of refactoring also break most kinds of unit tests too.

From my experience, unit tests are most useful for testing regression cases, and for validating certain constrained and well defined parts of the code, like implementations of an algorithm. They're much less useful for testing regular business logic - integration tests are a much better solution for those.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-23 17:28:31+00:00
100 years optimistically?

We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.

We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.

It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
by sandworm101 | 2025-04-23 17:28:59+00:00
No mention of the spies. No mention of how the overall design of the arrow is eerrily similar to the later mig-25, a unique design in soviet aviation. There is a reason the foxbat and foxhound dont look like any other soviet aircraft, but do look very similar to the arrow and f-15. Arrow was cancelled because america saw what was happening.

For those who dont see it: the arrow has a rectangular "box" body, so do the mig25/31 and f-15. Most multiengine fighters have cigar shapes (f18, f111) or "tunnels" such as the su-27/35/34/57, f-14 and even the sr-71. The box shape was new in the arrow but can arguably be seen today in the US 22 and 35.

Article with a good pic showing the design consideration is still a thing today: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/102446/why-does...
by aylmao | 2025-04-23 17:29:05+00:00
+1. Software developers has long leveraged "someone else" writing code for their projects— be that "someone else" another human, via libraries, platforms, frameworks, etc. Or a computer, using codegen tools, compilers, etc. Sometimes it's to save tediousness, sometimes to save time, sometimes to leverage better code than one could've written.

I think AI is best when used in this same way of thinking— not a tool that should handle all the coding for you, but as a very powerful codegen tool that you can leverage in many parts of your project.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-23 17:29:10+00:00
Of course I don't expect to wax poetic about the finer technical details of an implementation- what I mean is he tends to get frustrated at the technical limitations, but has no interest in understanding those technical limitations so that he might curb his expectations and align them more with reality.

Example: I wrote an ETL pipeline that processes "hundreds of millions" of records. It takes several hours to run (on my goddamn desktop computer). He doesn't understand why it takes "so long", and doesn't want to understand why. Also little interest/desire in paying for server compute that might get it done faster.