MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucb1e | 2025-04-23 22:55:54+00:00
Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves
by sanderjd | 2025-04-23 22:55:55+00:00
I didn't say it's petty! I said it's not relevant.

My question at the beginning of the thread was: Assuming people are using a particular pattern, where LLMs are used to parse prompts and route them to purpose-specific tools (which is what the thread I was replying in is about), is it actually a good use of LLMs to implement that routing layer, or mightn't we use a simpler implementation for the routing layer?

Your point seems more akin to questioning whether the entire concept of farming out to tools makes sense. Which is interesting, but just a different discussion.
by androng | 2025-04-23 22:56:22+00:00
Can it actually do something difficult like apply for jobs? So far I know of five or so websites that claim they can apply to jobs for you like sonara.ai and usemassive.com and Skyvern AI but when you try to actually use them all they can do is the one-page job applications and not the much more common Workday 10-page job applications with annoying "create an account" and annoying questions like "Do you have any relatives that work at Sony" and annoying "fill out all your work experience" where you have to click 50 times for one application. That's like half of all job applications. https://jobs.spectrum.com/job/-/-/4673/76746020384?utm_sourc...
by luckylion | 2025-04-23 22:56:24+00:00
Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and primarily directed at customers who seek to display status symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm not sure I agree.

But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth rooting for.
by planck_tonne | 2025-04-23 22:56:24+00:00
Just the other day I saw this idea/question on EE stackexchange:

"We have frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, phase modulation... But EM waves also have polarization. Can we do polarization modulation as well to transmit more information?"

So, a cocktail party idea.

IMO, this attitude of taking the known facts (in the example, modulation types, EM wave proprerties) and reasoning from them to obtain new conclusions and ideas (polarization modulation) is actually very commendable.

Thhis is how the pioneers first arrived at the ideas, after all, plain and simple. So we need this behavior to move forward.

Often, the only problem with the idea are missing facts: IIRC one of the answers why it didn't work was

"Polarization information gets lost in transmission due to multiple reflections"

So it's not like the layman could have foreseen this. Their theory is at least "self-consistent". And then, the only difference between them and the pioneer is that the pioneer came before, tried it, and found out it didn't work already.

But now consider:

"Big telecom is so dumb. Why don't they just do polarization modulation? Instant 2x internet speed"

The difference that makes this one bad IMO is the thought that, even though we've been doing radio for 100 years, nobody has thought of this idea before, that you came up with after taking EM 101.

It means arrogance, but IMO it also means ignorance: I like to think that having learned one field to some detail has given me appreciation for the hidden details other fields probably have...

P.S.: could not find the EE.SX question link. These are not exact quotes, I edited a little for rhetorical effect.

But let's engage it. I'm no RF expert so just cocktail party spitballing here. I'm not 100% convinced about the multiple reflection thing. I mean, couldn't you just do channel estimation with pilot waves or something like they do for AM? Also makes it work for mobile communications since random user antenna orientation for polarization is analogous to random user distance from transmitter. Also what about fixed links like parabolic dishes and geostationary satellites? Maybe the problem is that it's hard for the transmitter? I mean you can't just have 1 fixed amplifier, that does nothing but amplify, driving 1 fixed antenna if you want to change polarization right? I mean you'd have to have an electronically controlled antenna array or maybe have two amplifiers that ate driven in different ways. Either way this is fundamentally different from the basic transmitter architecture I have in my head where all modulation is done in baseband and then you just upconvert, filter, amplify.
by douglasisshiny | 2025-04-23 22:57:05+00:00
I'm not sure if you've been reading the news at all, but I would guess no? The most talked about has been USAID -- namely because they started with it, which is odd because it's one of the smallest government programs and Musk promised to cut $2 trillion -- wait, sorry $1 trillion -- wait, no, $150 Billion by 2026 -- wait, the actual amount is likely much smaller [1].

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contract...
by znpy | 2025-04-23 22:57:10+00:00
Probably not what you're looking for, but for me it was: dumping my now ex girlfriend, getting out of that one-way, toxic relationship and start focusing on myself. Like, making an explicit active effort to focus on myself.

I wish I had wasted less time on that relationship but better late than never I guess.

Being able to focus on myself allowed me to start sorting out some sides of my life, like getting back in a decent shape: I lost almost 9 kilograms (about 18 pounds, i think) over the last year (pure diet, no ozempic/semaglutide involved) and I now like myself when I see myself in the mirror.

I'm now slowly starting to look back to all those ideas, small and big, I had put away over the years.

Consequentially, another something I wonder why I didn't do sooner: having much, much higher standards in terms of women I give my attention to. I much prefer being on my own but at peace than spending time with somebody that makes me wish I was alone. I'm not a twenty-something anymore and I'm overall okay with being on my own (as in, not in a relationship) for a while.

Maybe one day I'll fall in love again, maybe not. So far I'm not really thinking about it, and it's going overall well.
by ariwilson | 2025-04-23 22:57:49+00:00
I'm a great user for this problem as I just got a 3D printer and I'm no good at modeling. I'm doing tutorials and printing a few things with TinkerCAD now, but my historic visualization sense is not great. I used SketchUp when I had a working Oculus Quest which was very cool but not sure how practical it is.

Unfortunately I tried to generate OpenSCAD a few times to make more complex things and it hasn't been a great experience. I just tried o3 with the prompt "create a cool case for a Pixel 6 Pro in openscad" and, even after a few attempts at fixing, still had a bunch of non-working parts with e.g. the USB-C port in the wrong place, missing or incorrect speaker holes, a design motif for the case not connected to the case, etc.

It reminds me of ChatGPT in late 2022 when it could generate code that worked for simple cases but anything mildly subtle it would randomly mess up. Maybe someone needs to finetune one of the more advanced models on some data / screenshots from Thingiverse or MakerWorld?
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-23 22:57:50+00:00
You say "Neither of these movements have any sense of self-awareness or American history"

And then, without a shred of irony, suggest that a progressive, non-white, woman, will be president soon.

The "pendulum swinging" theory that a lot of people are clinging to is nonsense. It presupposes that this hard right movement is a reaction to some previous left swing, and there will be a hard left swing.

But there is no previous left swing. There's been consistent rightward movement in the US since the Civil Rights Act. The republican party suffered after Nixon admitted to doing some crime and the republican party has taken every effort to ensure that would never happen again, and they have wildly succeeded.

Bush Jr suffered no punishment for explicitly waging illegal wars against sovereign nations. Trump received no punishment for blatant self-enrichment and the 170 republican house reps that voted to ignore the 2020 election did not face any punishment either. Reagan hasn't even had his legacy tarnished despite being pretty much solely responsible for the economic pain rural americans feel, ignoring the AIDS epidemic even after the committee he made told him how to improve the situation, destroyed our tax revenue, helped spur an every decade economic crisis, kneecapping any chance we had of preventing climate change from being a problem, and spent money we never had on boondoggles that never had a chance of success like SDI.

The people who insist DEI are a real problem will never vote for AOC. They've all lapped up the right wing propaganda with absolutely no self reflection, and believe "The left has gone too far" by..... investing the the country's infrastructure and not spending 24/7 screaming about the terrors of trans people.

The general public gets their opinion of democrats from right wing propaganda. People who historically would support democrats and explicitly support things democrats push for have chosen to get all their info from republicans.

It's not democrats passing bills that legislate who is allowed to use which bathroom, but it is somehow democrats that have "gone too far".
by michaelt | 2025-04-23 22:58:22+00:00
Sometimes, depending on the situation.

My company retains all e-mails for at least 5 years, for audit purposes. But if some troublemaker were to e-mail child porn to an employee, we'd need to remove that from the audit records, because the laws against possessing child porn don't have an exception for corporate audit records.

So there's essentially always some account with the power to erase things from the audit records.
by wubrr | 2025-04-23 22:58:40+00:00
> misunderstanding the importance of design

Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed.

> 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.

Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't.

I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.
by swagasaurus-rex | 2025-04-23 22:58:42+00:00
I think soft deletes using timestamptz are a good thing.

Deleting rows directly could mean you're breaking references. For example, say you have a product that the seller wants to delete. Well, what happens if customers have purchased that product? You still want it in the database, and you still want to fulfill the orders placed.

Your backend can selectively query for products, filter out deleted_at for any customer facing queries, but show all products when looking at purchase history.

There are times when deleting rows makes sense, but that's usually because you have a write-heavy table that needs clearing. Yes, soft-deletes requires being careful with WHERE statements filtering out deleted rows, but that's a feature not a bug.
by maebert | 2025-04-23 22:58:48+00:00
I agree that those both are very helpful metrics, but they are not a definition of intelligence.

yes, humans can learn to comprehend and speak language with magnitudes less examples than llms, however we also have very specific hardware for that evolved over millions of years — it's plausible that language acquisition in humans is more akin to fine-tuning in llms than training them from ground up. Either way, this metric is comparing apples to oranges when it comes to comparing real and artificial intelligence.

model collapse is a problem in ai that needs to be solved, and maybe it's even a necessary condition for true intelligence, though certainly not a sufficient one, and hence not an equivalent definition of intelligence either.
by skull8888888 | 2025-04-23 22:59:04+00:00
I'm pretty confident it can do it. Try it out and see for yourself. Just install the package, run cli and give it your prompt.

pip install lmnr-index playwright install chromium index run

Also try experimenting with different models. So far, Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best in terms of quality/speed. Claude 3.7 is also pretty good.
by frank_nitti | 2025-04-23 22:59:17+00:00
And the follies here seem to be many. I’m not following why this Marko guy would make a publicly-visible fork of a repo (though he seems to have deleted it since this story went big), and why they would openly request to have their accounts exempted from logging when they were apparently already privileged users.

I must be missing something here; surely the level of elite technical skill implicit in his résumé would preclude this kind of thing
by superkuh | 2025-04-23 22:59:37+00:00
All of this applies to using your browser and your browser automatically executes code from random sources. If this is your threat model then how are you even posting on HN? Shut down that insecure browser quickly. It is tens of thousands of times more likely to expose your personal data etc etc than nginx.

Running nginx isn't madness. Thinking nginx is more of a risk, or even comparable to, your normal daily browser behavior certainly is.

Go look up the last nginx RCE. I think you'll be in the 2000s for just bare nginx.
by pesus | 2025-04-23 23:01:14+00:00
Do you have any evidence or analysis of this beyond your comment calling it fake? Do you honestly believe getting rid of disease prevention and treatment for children will not result in a single death? Do you have any evidence it was a "slush fund" and not actually being used for disease prevention and treatment? Do you honestly believe that people upset over children dying are lying, and instead are all upset that they are no longer able to access a supposed "slush fund"?
by shekhar101 | 2025-04-23 23:02:01+00:00
Can you open up the options to use other model/versions, especially Gemini-2.5 pro experimental models available through aistudio? Would love to try this but gemini flash fails for even simple tasks. Example: I asked it to extract all the links from comment section of a hackernews comment section and it just scrolled all the way to the end and then nothing. Maybe pro models can do it better.
by sahila | 2025-04-23 23:03:01+00:00
So are you proposing that Google shouldn't allow other companies to install Android? What would Samsung, Motorola switch to and do app developers have to create apps targeting all of the different mobile OSes?

This seems like a far worst path than today, and to OP's point, though Google isn't perfect, they're doing better than their competitor in providing options. Pushing Google to only offer Android on their own phones is not a win for consumers.
by lesuorac | 2025-04-23 23:03:11+00:00
Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.

Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.

There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.
by xorcist | 2025-04-23 23:03:35+00:00
I have taken part in audits for several organizations over the years, and I can assure you that's not how audits are done at all.

In fact, should the auditor find there is a way for them to access sensitive data without it being logged, they will flag it immediately. That would be the case even under simple financial regulation.

There is absolutely the risk that the people you audit will lie to you or present you with false data. In practice that's not common, because they stand to at the very least lose their jobs. It could also be illegal. Not worth it.
by AssKoala | 2025-04-23 23:03:43+00:00
That's not accurate.

Generally, game console "debug" configurations aren't "true" debug like most people think of -- optimizations are still globally enabled, but the build generally has a number of debug systems enabled that naturally require the use of a devkit. Devkits, especially back then, generally had 2-3x as much memory as retail systems -- so you'd happily sacrifice framerate during feature development to have those systems enabled.

Debugging was (and still is) generally done on optimized builds and, once you know the general area of the problem, you simply disable optimizations for that file or subsystem if you can't pinpoint the issue in an optimized build.

The biggest performance hit, in general, comes from disabling optimizations in the compiler. I say "in general" because there are systems that might be used to find this kind of thing that DO make a game wholly unplayable, such as a stomp allocator. Of course, you wouldn't generally enable a stomp allocator across all your allocations unless you're desperate, so you could still have that enabled to find this kind of bug and end up with a playable game.

The more likely reason here is that no one noticed or cared. GTA:SA is 21 years old and this bug doesn't affect the Xbox or other versions.
by throwworhtthrow | 2025-04-23 23:05:28+00:00
> Setting aside legitimate (thats a matter of judgement)

By definition, a judge decides what's legitimate.

If DOGE expects their access to be blocked by a court judgement, and bum-rushes agencies to exfiltrate data ahead of the judgement, that's also criminal intent.

I am not sure what you are getting at. "Covert" isn't how I'd describe DOGE's actions. "Brazen" maybe?
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-04-23 23:05:50+00:00
The article discusses how that turns into an infinite loop and causes a hang.

When you subtract a small float from a very large float, the value doesn't change. This is because the "steps" between float values increase with the size of the value (i.e. floats have coarser resolution for larger magnitudes)

To see this in action, try running the following in a JavaScript interpreter:

console.log(1_000_000_000_000_000_000 - 1);
by int_19h | 2025-04-23 23:05:52+00:00
The "truthy" operator is bool(); the problem here is that empty strings are falsy.

For myself, I settled on these patterns for various kinds of tests:

# check for None if x is not None: ... # check for empty string if x != "": ... # check for empty collection other than string if not len(x): ...

In this last case I rely on 0 being falsy to make this idiom distinct from checking length for a specific value via equality. So that when I'm scanning the code later and I see "not len", I know right away it's an empty check specifically.

But, of course, this only works if you're doing it consistently. And since the language doesn't enforce it, and there's no idiomatic Python standard for it, the footgun remains...
by Zigurd | 2025-04-23 23:06:11+00:00
There are de-Googled phones based on AOSP, and not just in China.

Google used to be more permissive with OEM "customization" and the result was lots of Bad Product Differentiation. Phone OEMs suck at software.

Huawei has a phone OS not based on AOSP, but you can't easily get it in the US.

Making a coherent OS product that doesn't get horribly mutated by OEM licensees is not easy. Vide Windows bloatware.
by vFunct | 2025-04-23 23:07:04+00:00
Very few system fonts are any good. Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.

Additionally, very few system fonts include all the weights. Fonts aren't just come in a single weight. The font you use for a giant page-filling title is generally skinnier than the font used for a caption.

Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever, even for people that say they don't care about design.

Designers know you better than you know yourself.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-23 23:07:04+00:00
Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?

Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.
by shekhar101 | 2025-04-23 23:07:20+00:00
Yes it is, however API keys from aistudio only allows pro-experimental model. So if I select gemini-pro, I will see this: "Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview doesn't have a free quota tier. Please use Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental (models/gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25) instead". Can I choose exact model somewhere in the CLI?
by klik99 | 2025-04-23 23:07:23+00:00
This particular way of seeing MCP that the article describes came up a lot during the early voice assistant ways - and I guess amazon did kind of attempt an app store approach to giving alexa more capabilities. In theory I like it! But in practice most people won't be using any one integration enough to buy it - like why go through the hoops to buy a "plane ticket purchasing app" when you do it maybe 4 times a year. I just don't see it playing out the way the author describes
by oceansweep | 2025-04-23 23:07:31+00:00
Hey yes, I’m building exactly that.

https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw

I first built a POC in gradio and am now rebuilding it as a FastAPI app. The media processing endpoints work but I’m still tweaking media ingestion to allow for syncing to clients(idea is to allow for client-first design). The GitHub doesn’t show any of the recent changes, but if you check back in 2-3 weeks, I think I’ll have the API version pushed to the main branch.
by epolanski | 2025-04-23 23:08:05+00:00
I always wonder, why not write these games on top of a virtual machine like Carmack started doing in Quake, a usage he then later extended to quake 2 and 3 [1].

I'm ignorant about game development, virtual machines and system programming but from the little I understand it seems a sensible choice to make.

While there is an initial price to pay modeling 99% of the game to be implemented on a user-implemented stack seems a sensible approach to me.

[1] https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/qvm.php