MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globnomulous | 2025-04-04 17:06:51+00:00
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)

Same. This is partly why SomaFM (esp. Space Station Soma, Drone Zone, and Mission Control) and soundtracks are my jam.

I think it's also partly why I can't stand Vivaldi or Hiromi. Vivaldi writes classical pop -- so heavy on melody that it may as well be choral. It's easy to sing, and sounds like song, so it gets stuck in the ear. Hiromi, in turn, plays the piano quite literally like she's singing (honestly, I think she's a musical acrobat with no feel for the piano as an instrument), which results in ear worms for the same reason.

Bill Evans, by contrast, is so chock full of harmonic complexity and color that it's physically impossible to sing along with him. I never tire of him. Same for Wayne Shorter and Bach, though for different reasons.

And I just realized that this is probably partly why I hate musical theater so fervently.
by scottlamb | 2025-04-04 17:06:59+00:00
Collapsing the top comment (by svara) in that thread is essentially instant for me, with Chrome 134.0.6998.166 on macOS.

The Javascript is surprisingly readable (not minimized, not using any framework). It looks like all the comments are peers according to the DOM structure. When it collapses a comment, it loops through all the following DOM siblings until returning to the same indent level (so all the semantic descendants) and hides them one-by-one. I could see why this could be a bit slow even though it isn't for me. I'm not really a frontend person so I don't know why they might have chosen this structure. One could imagine if the DOM structure were set up such that the comment's descendants were DOM descendants, it wouldn't have to do this at all. It could just use a CSS selector that would hide elements (and thus their descendants also) if their direct parent were collapsed.
by seadan83 | 2025-04-04 17:07:12+00:00
Missing is why laws fight so hard too, missing the opposite of what we have (in the west), namely blatant and rampant piracy. The other extreme is really bad, creators of any type pirated by organized crime. There was no video game nor movie market in eastern Europe for example, can't compete against large scale piracy.

Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.
Show HN: iglu – micro-journaling with on-device intelligence, for iOS
by rafaelBG | 2025-04-04 17:07:44+00:00
Hey Hacker News!

I've built an iOS app called iglu to make journaling easy and engaging.

Write short entries, make threads with them, search them by meaning, and revisit them through intelligent recommendations related to your recent writing — all that with on-device, non-generative AI. iglu is the most private journaling app out there.

We use on-device, non-generative AI to power:

• Semantic search. If you're looking for something you wrote but don't remember the exact words, you can describe the general theme or topic of the entry you're looking for, and iglu will find it for you — it understands the meaning of what you write!

• Intelligent recommendations. When you're not looking for anything specific or just want a feed to scroll through, check out the 'Explore' tab. You'll find recommendations of older entries that iglu thinks are related to what you've been writing recently. It's a fun and easy way to remember and revisit your life!

iglu protects and respects your privacy:

• No accounts. That's right; you won't have to sign up or tell us your name or e-mail. We don't collect any data. We have no idea who's using iglu.

• Everything runs on-device. We don't even have servers.

• iCloud backup. Your data only lives on your phone and your personal iCloud account (as an encrypted backup).

• Face ID locking. By default, iglu is locked behind Face ID.

I'm excited to get feedback and opinions from the community — please share your thoughts!

Cheers!

Rafa Guimarães
by freeone3000 | 2025-04-04 17:08:27+00:00
OpenCL and OpenGL are basically already scripting languages that you happen to type into a C compiler. The CUDA advantage was actually having meaningful types and compilation errors, without the intense boilerplate of Vulkan. But this is 100% a python-for-CUDA-C replacement on the GPU, for people who prefer a slightly different bracketing syntax.
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-04 17:08:44+00:00
That's not how it works, of course.

It's your FX-converted revenue, meaning, whatever currency you use converted to USD. The license doesn't bother to state this because they assume basic common sense on the part of the licensee.

If that's not enough, they have the backing of several decades of industry practice[1] and several centuries of law.

[1] For example, take a look at the Steam and Epic creator agreements, which also use USD for financial thresholds even though their stores operate in dozens of countries and accept dozens of currencies.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-04 17:09:05+00:00
What Allen did was write an 8080 emulator that ran on the -10. The 8080 is a simple CPU, so writing an emulator for it isn't hard.

https://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html

Then, their BASIC was debugged by running it on the emulator.

The genius was not the difficulty of doing that, it wasn't hard. The genius was the idea of writing an 8080 emulator. Wozniak, in comparison, wrote Apple code all by hand in assembler and then hand-assembled it to binary, a very tedious and error-prone method.

In the same time period, I worked at Aph, and we were developing code that ran on the 6800 and other microprocessors. We used full-fledged macro assemblers running on the PDP-11 to assemble the code into binary, and then download binary into an EPROM which was then inserted into the computer and run. Having a professional macro assembler and text editors on the -11 was an enormous productivity boost, with far fewer errors. (Dan O'Dowd wrote those assemblers.)

(I'm doing something similar with my efforts to write an AArch64 code generator. First I wrote a disassembler for it, testing it by generating AArch64 code via gcc, disassembling that with objdump and then comparing the results with my disassmbler. This helps enormously in verifying that the correct binary is being generated. Since there are thousands of instructions in the AArch64, this is a much scaled up version of the 8080.)
by jplusequalt | 2025-04-04 17:10:20+00:00
I think it's a fallacy to equate pessimistic outcomes with "realism"

>It is the same with Gen AI. We will either find a way to control an entity that rapidly becomes orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, or we won’t. We will either find a way to prevent the rich and powerful from controlling a Gen AI that can build and operate anything they need, including an army to protect them from everyone without a powerful Gen AI, or we won’t

Okay, you've laid out two paths here. What are *you* doing to influence the course we take? That's my point. Enumerating all the possible ways humanity faces extinction is nothing more than doomerism if you aren't taking any meaningful steps to lessen the likelihood any of them may occur.
by nine_k | 2025-04-04 17:11:53+00:00
Trump administration is branded as "Republican", even though Republican icons like Reagan would be appalled by it.

In the mind of most Americans, the opposition to the Republican party is the Democratic party, which has been comparably insane lately, only a different direction.

A real opposition that the US politics needs is a kind of "common sense party" or "real needs party", but the FPTP election system, and the coasts vs "flyover states" division pushed by the forces that benefit from the "us vs them" division (most political forces) work against that. Forces like Forward Party, that sort of seem to fit the bill, are tiny.

People don't go out to streets just because; they need well-formulated ideas, some local leaders that would organize it, groups of like-minded people (online at least) that let the ideas brew and steep, etc. All this is not in a great shape now.
by horsawlarway | 2025-04-04 17:12:32+00:00
Honestly, I'm still incredibly shocked at just how bad Python is on this front.

I'm plenty familiar with packaging solutions that are painful to work with, but the state of python was shocking when I hopped back in because of the available ML tooling.

UV seems to be at least somewhat better, but damn - watching pip literally download 20+ 800MB torch wheels over and over trying to resolve deps only to waste 25GB of bandwidth and finally completely fail after taking nearly an hour was absolutely staggering.
by tomp | 2025-04-04 17:12:48+00:00
No, the entire point of this article is that when you get to self-improving AI, it will become generally intelligent, then you can use that to solve robotics, medicine etc. (like a generally-intelligent baby can (eventually) solve how to move boxes, assemble cars, do experiments in labs etc. - nothing special about a human baby, it's just generally intelligent).
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-04 17:13:10+00:00
The point of looking at this from a technical perspective though is that the underlying tech doesn't actually work, and it's just a smoke and mirrors game built on marketing.

Like Theranos. And Nikola. And Fyre Festival. Etc.

Age is irrelevant, unless we're trying to tell youngsters that fraud is an acceptable means to get ahead in life. But then again given our current political environment maybe that is what we're trying to tell the next generation.

EDIT: the app now also just reads nutrition labels as a backstop. Nutrition labels already include the calorie data, so the app isn't doing anything there.
by jmull | 2025-04-04 17:13:53+00:00
Variable declared outside the loop construct lives outside the loop.

Variable declared inside the loop construct lives inside the loop.

Seems intuitive to me.

The complex thing here (and what seems to have confused the author) is the distinction between when the reference to the variable is captured vs. when the setTimeout() callback occurs.

Actually, this article shows what good shape Javascript is in. As it says, commonly deployed linters catch the really bad stuff, effectively deprecating those things.

Pretty much the rest of it to do with specific domains outside of javascript, like what actually is a character and IEEE floating point, or are rather out-of-the-way things like document.all and sparse arrays (not that people don't use sparse arrays, but it's entirely optional and if you're going to voluntarily go into that cave, I guess you must be happy to tangle with the bears living there.)
by zanecodes | 2025-04-04 17:14:02+00:00
Only if you didn't run `uv lock --script` [0] and commit the lockfile. If you don't want that second file sitting next to the script, you could instead specify an `exclude-newer` timestamp, and uv won't resolve any dependency versions newer than that.

It might be cool if uv ignored dependency versions newer than the script's last modified timestamp, but this behavior would probably need to be very explicit to avoid the situation where a working script is mysteriously broken by making an innocuous change which updates its last modified timestamp, causing uv to resolve a newer, incompatible dependency version.

[0] https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#locking-dependenci...
by Smeevy | 2025-04-04 17:14:17+00:00
Even more disingenuity. You are simultaneously defending cynical abuse of government systems and high-minded altruism.

>The nature of our political system is such that in the future, whether in 4 years or 12, the 'other side' will be in control and generally work to undo what the previous administration did. So most of the stuff being cancelled will, in some form or another, be rebooted in the future, even if only out of spite.

"Everybody is awful. Especially the people with whom I disagree."

>But personally I would question whether just giving things to people is truly helping them. For instance take the earlier NYTimes post talking about USAID providing AIDS medicine. If we truly care about Africa's AIDS issue, then why are we just providing medicine instead of helping them to building out manufacturing/labs in Africa, independently manned, and capable of independently producing generic medicine without foreign assistance?

Your argument is that we should industrialize Africa countries to make their own medicine rather than giving it to people who are literally dying? I suppose that orphans and grieving parents should take solace that there's a long term plan being discussed by people who have no intention of following through on it.

>Shouldn't the goal of truly benevolent aid to create a scenario where you will realistically no longer need to provide aid in the future? Of course if you teach a man to fish, that man's no longer dependent upon you. But if you just give a man a fish each day, he'll do whatever you demand to keep getting that fish, let alone when his life depends upon it.

That man should, of course, starve to death so your taxes are reduced by a fraction of a penny. We all know that Rwanda is just a week away from being a global manufacturing powerhouse anyway.
by tyzoid | 2025-04-04 17:14:47+00:00
The punishment needs to be commisserate with the crime, and dealt with through due process; to do otherwise is distinctly un-american (see 1st amendment on freedom of assembly, 4th amendment on freedoms from unreasonable state actions: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons[...] against unreasonable searches and seizures", and especially the 5th amendment: "[no person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law").

What we are seeing at Colombia University (as well as the country at large) is the continual abridgement of these rights. Note that for the fifth amendendment specifically, the constitution refers to any person, not just citizens. Those here legally are entitled to due process protections under the law.

The following argument relies on the following: (1) Universities historically have been the the catalysts of change through student protest. (2) Peaceful protest is a right of the people that shall not be abridged. (3) Public Universities (being government institutuions themselves; see campus police and jurisdiction) have a duty of care to protect their students.

With the above holding true, the argument against this being a "betrayal" falls facially flat, as it is a severe consequence that the university capitulated to, and had a duty to prevent. The arument boiled down to "they were being disruptive, so we should get rid of them," because the betrayal amounted to the jailing and deportations (or attempted deportations, in some cases) for the "crime" of being nonviolently disruptive in a public place.

Without articulating a legally rationed basis for a criminally sanctionable offense, an equivalent is threatening to jail and deport construction workers when they block a business entryway. In general, you do not have a right to be merely inconvienced by others in a public space.
by kube-system | 2025-04-04 17:14:50+00:00
It is routine practice for shareholders to sue when their leadership makes questionable decisions. Usually if you search "shareholder lawsuit [stupid thing company leadership did]" you will find results more often than not.

In this case, it's already happening:

https://electrek.co/2025/04/02/nyc-sue-tesla-over-elon-musk-...
by ttw44 | 2025-04-04 17:15:14+00:00
We are not overpopulated.

I hate the type of people that hammer the idea that society needs to double or triple the birthrate (Elon Musk), but as it currently stands, countries like South Korea, Japan, USA, China, and Germany risk extinction or economic collapse in 4-5 generations if the birth rate doesn't rise or the way we guarantee welfare doesn't change.
by whycome | 2025-04-04 17:15:19+00:00
> then putting years of effort into painting it.

Which efforts do we decide deserve compensation? We collectively create so many useful things. People come up with new words to describe a concept and when it's apt, it's widely adopted. That brilliant idea is the culmination of all the other work they've been putting in. But others get to use the word and benefit from it. Indigenous farmers put hundreds of years of effort into domesticating crops like tomatoes and corn and peppers. But those are just taken and spread. We have millions of teachers going above and beyond expectations. We have mothers and caregivers. We have comedians crafting jokes for comedy and they have no ability to protect those jokes. We have brilliant chefs creating recipes after years of work, experience, and effort and they too don't have protections.

> To claim they are indicates some kind of deep disrespect for your fellow human beings.

Nah. My comment comes from a deep respect for fellow humans. And a respect for all the efforts collectively made by a society for its common good.
by tiltowait | 2025-04-04 17:15:26+00:00
It definitely feels “heavy” on mobile Safari. The animation is buttery smooth, but the little space station thing doesn’t rotate as quickly as I feel it should based on my scroll velocity.

I feel like I’m alone in not liking it. The technical accomplishment is undeniably impressive, and the author deserves serious kudos for that, but I really wish websites wouldn’t do this sort of thing. It’s far less usable than just having some static tables.
by hinkley | 2025-04-04 17:15:44+00:00
Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it’s just paper. At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. And you stunt your growth (personal or organizational) if you try to pretend it isn’t the case.

The problem with intellectualizing is that it’s very good at employing itself to avoid all other options. If you get too old pretending otherwise, the road back is full of brambles and many would rather double down than accept it.

Once you understand this it’s easy to see the hollowness in what Rand offers, if it wasn’t already patently obvious to you before.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-04 17:15:44+00:00
At first glance it looks sprawly but then visiting there you realize most of those tract housing developments open up in the back to some walk and bike trail network, which remain sunny dry and mild much of winter (the real snow is in the mountains denver is frequently bone dry), and a good portion of the population is getting 50 days out of their epic or ikon pass plus engaging in some summer outdoor hobby.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-04 17:15:46+00:00
Holy bad faith bs from someone who pretends they're a straight shooter. “...the death toll.” What a trash response to Americans suffering.

So kind of you to volunteer that the poorest among us have nothing and should be happy about it.

You admit this is a $4k hit that Congress didn’t pass. Guess after all your talk here, you don’t actually believe in the Constitution or separation of powers just “I should be able to do what I want with power.”

$4k no biggie, right? From my experience, it just means when things wear out, they don’t get replaced. So shoes for kids get stretched to last longer. Car maintenance gets skipped. (You can judge a bad president by the number of broken-down cars on the side of the road.). It’s food not bought, medical/dental care skipped, rent coming up short.

The real death toll won’t be a one-time body count. It’ll be slow and quiet: worse health, more homelessness, more suicides. And for what? So we can LARP like we’re rebuilding American industry without giving businesses the capital, labor, or time to do it?

This isn’t strategy. It’s cruelty pretending to be policy.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-04-04 17:15:53+00:00
Had to look it up, that's great thanks:

> I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
by dannyobrien | 2025-04-04 17:16:04+00:00
I am also interested in this! I really want to know who is doing this scraping, and why are they doing it badly relative to search-engines? The argument that I've heard is that search engines have a vested interest in keeping sites up, whereas ML companies do not, but that seems a little too mechanistic -- some of the mistakes in load aren't good for the scrapers resources, as well as the scraped.

My working theory is that rather than the big AI companies, this is mainly a rash of Asmall I startups (globally) who don't know any better and are just writing poor tools, and also think that "unique data" gives them an advantage. So this is more about a flood of capital to (frankly) incompetent groups, that will empty out when the boom busts. But I can see the arguments on both sides. It would be great to know the facts!
by flessner | 2025-04-04 17:16:18+00:00
This may not be apparent to an english speaker as the language has a rather fixed set of words, but in German, where creating new words is common, the lack of linguistic creativity is obvious.

As an example, let's talk about "vibe coding" - It's a new term describing heavy LLM usage in programming, usually associated with Generation Z.

If I am asking an LLM to generate a German translation for "vibe coder" it comes up with the neutral "Vibe-Programmierer". When asking it to be more creative it came up with "Schwingungsschmied" ("vibration smith"?) - What?

I personally came up with the following words:

* Gefühlsprogrammierer ("A programmer, that focuses on intuition and feeling.")

* Freischnauzeprogrammierer ("Free-mouthed programmer - highlighting straightforwardness and the creative expression of vibe coding." - colloquial)

Interesstingly, LLMs can describe both these terms, they just can't create them naturally. I tested this on all major LLMs and the results were similar. Generating a picture of a "vibe coder" also highlights more of a moody atmosphere instead of the Generation Z aspects that are associated with it on social media nowadays.
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-04 17:16:28+00:00
That LLMs are by definition models of human speech and have no cognitive capabilities. There is no sound logic behind what LLMs spit out, and will stay that way because it merely mimics its training data. No amount of vague future transformers will transform away how the underlying technology works.

But let's say we have something more than an LLM, that still wouldn't make natural languages a good replacement for programming languages. This is because natural languages are, as the article mentions, imprecise. It just isn't a good tool. And no, transformers can't change how languages work. It can only "recontextualize," or as some people might call it, "hallucinate."