MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-02 18:40:17+00:00
Ambiguity is a feature for propaganda. If people project random hopes and fears onto buzzwords that gets them talking and serves sales well. In an imaginary world where people were highly educated and journalists honest and specific, new advances would be taken-up quickly by a small group of beneficiaries and everyone else would move on. The idea of software "agents" is of course nothing new. "Buzz" - AKA "the warm thrill of confusion and space-cadet glow" appeals primarily to the idea that "this changes everything!". The smoke and mirrors machine never sleeps.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-02 18:40:46+00:00
We don't know now what to curate for the future. We should preserve as much of everything we can - we don't know what will be important in 50, or 500 years.

Case in point: retrocomputing is my hobby. I buy, restore, preserve, and use old computers. Most of them are home computers, because business computers go directly from the office to the recycling facility or the landfill. Unless someone deliberately preserved, say, a Burroughs B-25 desktop, or the similar from Data General, they are gone.
by pmags | 2025-04-02 18:40:51+00:00
Of interest to those of you who are in the intersection set of modular synth nerds and programmers....

I've been eyeing the new Disting NT since it was released. A move towards greater openness is another point in it's favor, though the idea of writing C++ in my "music time" is admittedly not the first thing that comes to mind when I want to do something creative.
by jasonlotito | 2025-04-02 18:40:55+00:00
I disagree strongly with this. This is how we get into the state of political divisiveness that we are currently in. Discussing politics has always been a verboten topic with many families and friends, and now we are here where we think not talking about it is healthy.

Not discussing politics with friends is really indicative of the friendships you have. This is really an article about someone who has failed to discuss politics with "friends." As someone who routinely talks politics with friends (and we do NOT all agree with each other), it's a healthy experience. One where you can get a better understanding of people and their beliefs.

Stay in your bubble. But let's not pretend it's healthy or good.
by Lerc | 2025-04-02 18:41:17+00:00
It is a shame that people will downvote a thing that is expressing an honest opinion.

I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.

I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.

From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise that these are real people and there may be other things going on in their life.

I think there are some good things to learn from people who work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it. Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-02 18:41:21+00:00
By interacting with the positive aspects of the person and ignoring or disengaging from the political opinions I don't like. If they want to kill jews or whatever, they have the right to that opinion, doesn't bother me so long as I'm not obliged to partake. I might engage the view but if neither of us are benefitting from the conversation there is no point in continuing down that particular path.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-02 18:41:25+00:00
> hope you are not comparing those things - one trying to overthrow democracy and killed people, the other vandalism that damages cars

One can compare things without equating them. In this case, yes, I am comparing them. (In the end, both have—to date—been nothing more than destruction of property and trespassing. Getting killed being an idiot isn’t the same as killing people.)
by sdoering | 2025-04-02 18:41:26+00:00
> Amazon has become an unreliable company. Opaque return practices, overbilling and break of contract have become common.

It has? I have never had that experience. And I would say, that comes from quite strong customer protection laws in Germany. So I would say your legal system has enabled it to become that way. Because Amazon - in Germany and other markets with strong regulations - clearly is capable of performing very admirably. Even better than quite many competitors.

> Amazon has become an unreliable company. "The US has become an unreliable environment" might fit better.
by light_triad | 2025-04-02 18:41:39+00:00
Welcome to the Bay Area!

The big issue is a lot of people will believe what they want to believe. Most folks are not scientists - they start by assuming their conclusions and will choose the soothing moral and emotional rhetoric over evidence.

Trying to see the world objectively puts you in a category of outliers. The people you become friends with due to proximity in everyday life will not be outliers.
by sockaddr | 2025-04-02 18:42:10+00:00
This stuff literally works.

I know someone personally that while at a kid's soccer game said to me:

"Hey did you see that new engine Elon made? It runs on water and he's going to be putting it in all of his cars! He's also trying to mine H3 from the moon!"

Because I'm friends with this person and I like them I try to play dumb as to not be insulting and ask them to pull it up and show me. Once he does I say "oh that looks like it's AI generated" and he sort of agrees.

I don't think this person has a low IQ or anything, but I do consider them sort of ignorant (but not typical racist Trump supporter ignorant), just low-information.

We need to try to politely call this stuff out when our friends and family are being tricked because it is doing them (and us) real harm.
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-02 18:42:34+00:00
I like it. There's an easier answer to "why don't people move from tribe to view". It's because it's painful to question one's own beliefs, and that's how that change happens. In fact such a move appears masochistic to many, since it almost never pays to undermine loyalty in favor of principle.

I hypothesize that we're seeing the influence of the legal system on the public turbo-charged by Citizens United money. An attorney is paid to be a "zealous advocate" for their client. This means never spending effort on anything that might be against the client's interest. Self-reflection is stochastically against their interest, so why even risk it? Considering alternative views might be against your interest, so why risk it? Therefore, in this new zeitgeist, such behavior is not just perverse and painful, but even unethical and wrong.

The problem, of course, is that for this system of adversarial argument you need an impartial judge. In theory that would be the public, but it turns out flooding people's minds with unethical lawyer screed 24x7 turns more people into lawyers, not judges. "The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it." This could very well refer to the value of dignity, honor, integrity, fairness in debate, respect for one's opponents. These are always under assault, but in the last 10 years they have been decimated to the point people don't remember they ever held sway and young people don't know what politics was like when they did.
by bilekas | 2025-04-02 18:42:37+00:00
> Really the point I wanted to make was that your development and test environment should be the same as, or as close as possible to, your production environment.

I’m really glad to hear that actually, I think you did make that point but it was a bit overlooked with the other points.

About having better Dev environments I think you're also spot on, not just with infrastructure but also with support from other maybe more experienced developers who could identify these things early and knowledge share, for me at least that's one of the main development requirements, if you're not learning, you should be teaching.
by fatbird | 2025-04-02 18:43:16+00:00
The author has a huge blindspot: discussing politics with others where it's not a co-operative search for truth; instead it's an opportunity to let your friends explain themselves. Don't challenge them, ask them questions. Let them talk it out. Offer your own observations not as ways to change their minds but as an invitation to elaborate and explore.

You don't need to share your opinions in every conversation. You don't need to challenge another's beliefs that you disagree with or think are factually wrong. You can bond over listening to them. And they can invite you to share your thinking non-judgementally.
by yorwba | 2025-04-02 18:43:49+00:00
If you look closely, there's actually an increase of red, green, blue, etc. at the same time as the increase in black and white, and it's the brownish colors of undyed organic materials that are decreasing. (Or maybe they were originally dyed and the color faded over the last 200 years.)

Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synthetic color you want, including pure black and pure white.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-02 18:43:59+00:00
I'm really curious about this too! I don't know!

There's some comments I've run across saying Qwen2.5-VL's really good at handwriting recognition.

It'd also be interesting to see how Tesseract compares when trying to OCR more mixed text+graphic media. Some possible examples: high-design magazines with color backgrounds, TikTok posts, maps, cardboard hold-up signs at political gatherings.
by NickM | 2025-04-02 18:44:28+00:00
Yeah, this is a limitation, but generally if you have hard constraints like that to maintain, then yeah you probably should be using some sort of centralized transactional system to avoid e.g. booking the same hotel room to multiple people in the first place. Even with perfect conflict resolution, you don't want to tell someone their booking is confirmed and then later have to say "oh, sorry, never mind, somebody else booked that room and we just didn't check to verify that at the time."

But this isn't a problem specific to CRDTs, it's a limitation with any database that favors availability over consistency. And there are use cases that don't require these kinds of constraints where these limitations are more manageable.
by pbohun | 2025-04-02 18:44:48+00:00
Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.
by jerf | 2025-04-02 18:44:49+00:00
I don't converse about politics at all, because conversation is not generally amenable to anything other than some vague virtue signaling in all but the very best of circumstances. For instance, a basic rule of conversation is that unless you have a very good reason, once a conversation wanders away from a topic, you don't drag it back to the same topic. That's great for idly chatting and catching up with friends, and it's a rule for a good reason, but it's quite far from what any sort of thought or an interaction that might actually change my mind on some topic requires.

While I don't disagree that people are quite tribal, I would observe that determining that people are tribal based on conversations can be a bit misleading, because the conversational form is extremely biased towards expressing things that will be indistinguishable from "tribalism", since all you have time to do is basically to put a marker down on the broadest possible summary of your position before the conversation baton must move on. That is, even a hypothetical Vulcan who has gathered all the data, pondered the question deeply, and come to the only logical conclusion, is going to sound tribal in a conversation, because that's all a conversation can convey.[1] Sufficient information conveyance to actually demonstrate the deep pondering and examination of all the evidence is ipso facto a lecture, or at best, a Socratic dialog or an interview, neither of which is a conversation in this sense.

For better and worse (and rather a lot of each), this medium we're working in right now at least affords itself to complete thoughts. It has its own well-known pathologies, like the interminable flame wars descending off to the right endlessly as two people won't let something go, and many others, but at least it's possible to discuss serious matters in a format similar to this, based on writing in text that can be as long as it needs to be without anyone needing to interrupt to maintain basic social niceties. There's a reason the serious intellectual discourse has been happening in books and articles for centuries if not millennia now.

Note how conversationally gauche it would be for me to monopolize a conversation long enough to simply read this post, and by the standards of intellectual discourse this is a rather simple point.

[1]: In fact, most people will read the Vulcan as exceedingly tribal, because no amount of reciting snap counterarguments against the Vulcan's position will cause him/her to so much as budge an inch or even concede that "perhaps reasonable people could think that" or any other such concession. The snap counteragument was encountered a long time ago, and analyzed in the light of all the other data, and they have long ago come to their conclusions on it. If they can be moved, it will take a lot more. This is difficult to distinguish from a maximized tribalist in any reasonable period of time in a conversation.
by Balgair | 2025-04-02 18:44:54+00:00
Yeah, the impetus comes from the Ashley Madison hacks.

Like, you had thousands of men paying real money to chat with (terrible) bots. To me, that was the passing of the Turing Test. But I know of nearly no person that could possibly fall for that scam. Even family members deep in dementia knew it was a joke. Yet Ashely Madison made a ton of cash.

That, to me, was puzzling. How could it happen that people that are that foolish would be able to hold a job or pay taxes? It made no sense.

So, the (bad) pet theory that I eventually came up with is that human intelligence is a lot wider than we think it is.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-02 18:45:11+00:00
> The insidious nature of this question comes from the false representation as earnest, intellectual discourse. Many who ask it may truly believe they’re engaging earnestly, but their responses quickly reveal an angle more akin to religious police. ... Most vulnerable to this behavior are the intellectually honest + socially clueless, who engage in good faith, unaware of the pending social ambush.

My favorite thing about this enlightened centrist/individual thinker line to kick off with is it's almost universally used by people who have one or more abhorrent viewpoints in their back pocket, and the "social ambush" described here would be much better phrased as, well, disclosing what that is and just saving us all some time. I personally am deeply curious what beliefs Ashwin has been ambushed about.

If you have thoughts on how tax brackets should be constructed, or whether we should move to flat taxation, whether highway budgets should include beatification or whether that should be up to municipalities, what zoning restrictions are used for a given area, all that type of what should be politics, neither myself nor anyone I know would "ambush" you for those beliefs. Discussing and rounding out those kinds of issues is the foundation of how a Democracy works. We have to discuss them, and you should have opinions on at least a few of them, and you should share them! That's how it works. And for what it's worth, I can't fathom a situation I would ambush anyone over those sorts of issues. I might disagree, and I might ask for elaboration or perhaps suggest alternatives to what you want to do, but I wouldn't shame you for them.

If on the other hand you think horrible things that for some insane reason have gotten traction lately, like that putting tariffs on foreign goods is somehow going to bring back American manufacturing (it isn't), that some of your fellow citizens who might be gay, trans, both, or something else shouldn't enjoy a full set of rights under the law for whatever cockamamie reason you'd like to cite (they should), that children should be re-introduced to the labor market to bolster the amount of cheap labor available (they shouldn't), that the government should be doing genital inspections on children who want to play sports to make sure no one's "cheating" (stupid, horrifying, illegal in several ways) and I could go on, then yeah, you probably will find yourself socially ambushed. And you should be. That's how shaming works. That's what we have done to one another for thousands of years when we behave anti-socially: if you act anti-social, you are not going to have an easy time being social. That's, again, just how that works.

I of course don't wish that fate on anyone, I have been spurned from communities and it sucks! But I did survive that process and a number of those experiences, awful as they were at the time, shaped me into a better person overall with a more internally consistent and defensible belief system than the one I was indoctrinated into as a child.

And yeah, a lot of this is also just "political tribalism sucks!" Cosigned, 100%.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-02 18:45:27+00:00
Most people are unaware of how small that outlier group is.

Like there's an even bigger group of people who think they're scientific and unbiased and impartial but they actually aren't. That group is more likely the group you and I are in.

The group of actual objective people is so small that you may never meet a single person like this in your lifetime. That person may even be autistic.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-02 18:45:50+00:00
> But the system worked! Immigration and the economy consistently rank as voters’ two key issues

If immigration were the only thing this administration were doing we wouldn’t be having this debate.

The system isn’t working. We’re deterministically heading towards a world where we’re poorer and less secure based on policies (tariffs on Europe, Canada and Mexico) and people (Lutnick, Hegseth) that weren’t ever brought up in the election. Even if that had been campaigned on, the fact that the majority chooses stupid policies is an indictment of electoral politics. If the system “working” leads to its own destruction, it doesn’t work.
by fatbird | 2025-04-02 18:45:51+00:00
Elsewhere in this thread I've said that you can have non-judgemental, solicitous conversations with anyone, just to learn how they feel or think about something.

But I agree with parent that it's perfectly justifiable to draw lines that limit potential relationships. You're not obligated to welcome everyone or tolerate views in others that have unbearable consequences for yourself. Vote with your feet.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-02 18:46:08+00:00
> a congregation member asking "you believe in god, right?"

That's a very good analogy.

For some, believing in god or not doesn't matter much and they'll go to church mostly to make friends and be part of a community.

For others, being expected (or not) to believe in God is a no go, and losing friends/family holding these expectations will be a price to pay.

We all have our boundaries, and disagreements on some specific topics will be out of them. Cutting friends/family with incompatible stances is just one instance of that IMHO, be it political, religious or anything else that matters enough.
by daft_pink | 2025-04-02 18:46:12+00:00
I think essentially tolerating other peoples opinions and trying to understand where they are coming from is more useful than applying purity tests to your friends and family.

I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

I’ll be honest that I’m Jewish and certain posts about Palestine where friends or non Jewish family have specifically expressed values that I find anti-myself I have completely cut out of my life. (not all beliefs about pro Palestine are anti-semetic, but most are) But I believe that most views at the party level are just different priorities or different view points and tolerance is necessary, because they are not directly in conflict.
by blacklight | 2025-04-02 18:46:24+00:00
Of course, I'm not saying that one size fits all.

There are cases like media apps, camera apps, videogames, terminal emulators, clipboard managers etc. that won't become Web apps any time soon.

Either because they need to operate closer to the OS, or for performance expectation reasons.

But I've just had a quick scroll through the apps on my phone, and I can confidently say that 90% of them are basically HTTP clients that interact with an HTTP server.

And even those that do more could probably be wrapped into a WebAssembly artifact with comparable performance in a near future.

The reason why they are not PWAs, and why engineers are often expected to do triple work (iOS, Android, Web), and why there aren't more products released as PWAs, keeps eluding me.

Sure, you have to tell folks how the "Install/Add to home screen" process works from a mobile browser, but is it that really that much more friction compared to an App Store paradigm to justify the abuse of native apps that either reinvent the wheel multiple times, or are just unglorified Web browsers running an Electron app just to show you the discounts at the supermarket near your house?
by antisthenes | 2025-04-02 18:46:25+00:00
This is a good stance, but with a caveat.

I do have friends who are able to have nuanced views about politics/economics/AI, and generally high-level vague things that concern the entire human civilization.

But I also have friends that can't have those nuanced views, and when you try to engage in good faith discussion with them, they resort to tribalism and are not interested in finding nuance through reasoning.

With those I don't have any discussions about it.

If you are a friend - try to be someone from the first category. Don't engage in tribalism with your friends if you value them (unless your whole group is a bunch of bullies, in which case do whatever).
by lexibu007 | 2025-04-02 18:47:19+00:00
Location: USA (Nebraska) Remote: Yes, flexible timezone Willing to Relocate: Yes Technologies: C# (.NET Core), GraphQL, TypeScript, Angular, SQL, Azure Experience: 3 years as a full-stack software engineer Email: lexibu007 [at] gmail [dot] com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lexi-b-b13125158 Website: lexibu.com ⸻

About me: Hi I am a Full-stack engineer with 3 years of experience in C# (.NET Core), GraphQL, TypeScript, Angular, and SQL. Passionate about scalable apps, high-performance APIs, and clean code. Open to new tech and not limited to web apps. Let’s connect!