MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walterbell | 2025-04-25 04:46:28+00:00
I've not seen these points made elsewhere, but they are obvious once stated:

Battery percentage, Bluetooth connections, and light sensor data can be used to re-identify you after switching networks. Your new email, phone number, or payment method can be linked back to your old identity through data brokers, loyalty programs, and behavioral analysis. Data collectors don’t care who you are—they collect everything. If laws change, or you become notable.
by aggieNick02 | 2025-04-25 04:47:25+00:00
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.

I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.

After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
by bagacrap | 2025-04-25 04:47:49+00:00
You could also look at it from the perspective that they pay you fairly, and then profit from the leverage of the apparatus they place around you. IOW you have more impact working for them than you would have on your own. (Obviously that is true, or you would just go work on your own.)

It's not that your perspective is wrong per se, it's just a glass half empty way of experiencing life.
by Jimmc414 | 2025-04-25 04:48:05+00:00
> A black doctor treating a white female patient

4o had no problem with this instruction. [0]

Gemini Pro experimental 2.5 didn't either [1]

> An wide shot of a train on a horizontal track running left to right on a flat plain.

4o could not do this in 3 tries. Each time it was right to left.[0]

Gemini Pro experimental 2.5 missed it as well. [2]

[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/680b1185-ecf4-8001-b3b6-7b501e4589...

[1] https://g.co/gemini/share/b19b8541d962

[2] https://g.co/gemini/share/a0b2ef0062ed
by MelodyUwU | 2025-04-25 04:51:18+00:00
spoiler: i dont. i dont need to, simply. my bank can be accessed fully through the website, and that is how i use it. most services i have i use through email or some other form of interaction that does not require an app. i simply do not use these services, and thus i dont need to even have an app for them. if im lucky, it will work on waydroid, but i dont have a lot inside waydroid. so, yeah, it is easy for me as of now at least.
by asimpleusecase | 2025-04-25 04:51:40+00:00
The tarpit idea is very descriptive in hindsight. What makes something a tarpit is an idea that sounds cool on the surface and is accessible (don’t have to be one of a kind founder to do it) and when you talk to your friends and people who might be customers you get very positive feedback. So it all starts to feel like a slam dunk. However, if you are a VC you will have seen this exact idea or close variations in it a hundred times and they all flamed out to a zero. As the VC you have visibility into common failure modes ( not able to charge enough, no scaled market, not sticky enough, etc) what is hard from the founder side of things is all those issues and many more are common to almost any venture until you crack the problem and get market fit. So the tarpit concept is more a description of VC scare tissue than a fully operational definition for founders ,because a former tarpit can become a blue ocean of opportunity ( uncontested market) if some element of the equation changes ( technology shift, culture shift, deep founder insight etc)

So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit?

1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were. 2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation. 3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention.

But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-25 04:53:45+00:00
I regret to inform Jeff Bezos that a truck with a 5 foot bed is not a truck that will attract much interest from the F150/Silverado truck buying market. I'm sure there are suburban weekend warriors that will buy it, but it will compete with the Ford Maverick hybrid and crossover hybrids. The Maverick can be had new for$23K, so good luck in that market.
by senectus1 | 2025-04-25 04:55:22+00:00
>AI bullshit so that this stupid f*ing bubble pops and everyone can go back to thinking carefully

Its not going away. Its an elevator of low ability.

those with low skills or ability can make great use to elevate their skills and abilities.

Those with high skills and abilitities will not use it for much, but will notice that the skill gap between themselves and those with lower skills will get smaller, faster and with little effort. They're unlikely to match them, but it will level the playing field very quickly and with little effort exerted.
by ipnon | 2025-04-25 04:57:37+00:00
It seems to struggle to create music with a strong identity. It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits. But the thing about top 40 type music is that the best music is already in the Top 40. It remains to be seen if there is as strong a demand for a music chart filled with slop as there is demand for a music chart filled with pop tunes by celebrities.

I don't think audio files are the right output for deep learning music models. It'd be more useful to pro musicians to describe some parameters for synths, or describe a MIDI baseline, or describe tunings for a plugin and then have the model generate these, which can then be tweaked similar to how we now code with LLMs. But generating muddy, poorly mixed WAVs with purple prose lyrics is only an interesting deep learning demo at this point, not an advancement in music itself.
by boznz | 2025-04-25 04:57:40+00:00
I kind of like it, but re-use is the way to go, Problem is you get Tax credits for buying new EV but just a shit tonne of regulations and no money to convert your old truck; that was New Zealand five years ago. I really hope other countries have it easier as most older gas trucks are easy to convert to EV's at the end of their lives by a decent amateur.

I have a 1990 Hilux pickup working just fine as my daily driver, but it cost about US$20K to convert and with only 100KM range it is only effective as a second vehicle. Good news though is with a couple of future battery swaps it will only get better and should outlive me.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-25 04:57:42+00:00
Maybe, but then again, those systems are based on a systems language that the industry has spent 50 years mostly ignoring its design flaws, until governments decided it was about time to start taking liabilities in cybersecurity seriously.

Also I didn't came up with this myself, it is part of their marketing materials and white papers.

Finally, if it was worthless they would have probably dropped it by now.
by alissa_v | 2025-04-25 05:00:19+00:00
I agree with your point about usage defining value in OSS - popular projects gain recognition, contributions, and opportunities through their adoption in commercial applications.

The critical difference, though, is consent. OSS creators explicitly choose licenses permitting commercial use - they opt in to sharing their work. Many content creators never made such a choice for AI training.

The current AI training paradigm doesn't even have a true opt-out model - it simply assumes everything is available. The noAI tags are attempting to create an opt-out mechanism where none previously existed. Without enforcement or standards adoption, though, these signals don't seem to have the same weight as established open source licenses.

There's also a significant difference in attribution. OSS creators receive clear attribution even when their work is used commercially. For creators whose work trains AI models, their contribution is blended and anonymized with no recognition pathway.

The core question is whether creating this opt-out approach is sufficient, or if AI training should move toward an opt-in model more similar to how open source licensing works.
by fallinditch | 2025-04-25 05:06:31+00:00
I am interested in using AI-driven music composition tools in new ways, and Lyra 2 sounds impressive, but a) so far, using these tools leaves me feeling a little meh, and b) we are in between the before and after times right now, witnessing the transition to the world of AI content and we're definitely losing something.

Prompt: Hazy, fractured UK Garage, Bedroom Recording, Distorted and melancholic. Instrumental. A blend of fractured drum patterns, vocal samples that have been manipulated and haunting ambient textures, featuring heavy sub-bass, distorted synths, sparse melodic fragments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNog4qB-mHQ&t=5s&pp=2AEFkAIB
by Vortigaunt | 2025-04-25 05:07:40+00:00
If we were back in the 1930's would you be worrying about the rate[0] of people being diagnosed with left-handedness?[1]

[0]https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...

[1]https://archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
by sponaugle | 2025-04-25 05:08:03+00:00
"I wonder what this really means. Operating Expense = R&D + Marketing/Admin + Misc. stuffs."

True, but there is so much in the Marketing/Admin and Misc stuff at Intel. They make CPUs that they sell to OEMs. How can they possibly need the marketing staff they have. They do so many trade shows as well that are a waste.

The could layoff 25% of their staff and still have plenty of people to do the right things.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-25 05:09:08+00:00
Christianity. When Emperor Constantine converted Rome to Christianity, he began laying out various restrictions on the games including prohibiting it being used as a punishment or even as an option for criminals, forbade the branding of gladiators, and so forth. Emperor Honorius would then completely ban the games, which had already dwindled by then, in honor of the martyrdom of Saint Telemachus. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Telemachus
by degamad | 2025-04-25 05:09:56+00:00
I agree with you, but I think that there's one area of the argument that is worth figuring out how to strengthen.

> If we all invest in our employees then when they leave another company gets the rewards. That's still true when "we" are the "other company". You still benefit regardless. Under the condition that most companies (or rather at least the big companies) collude in this way. They have good reason to as coalitions maximize utility for all parties involved.

You are right that in a world where most companies collude in this manner, we all benefit.

However, in that world, a company that chooses not to contribute (by investing in inexperienced employees) also has access to the same benefits (trained employees).

Furthermore, they can use the money saved by not contributing to inflate the value of the trained employees (offering them higher pay), so they have an incentive to not contribute. This doubly deprives the rest of us of some of that benefit.

How do we adjust the incentives so that bad actors are not motivated to cheat the system?

(In case it seems like a familiar scenario, yes, this is similar to playing Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma with the rest of the world.)
by dmoy | 2025-04-25 05:10:21+00:00
I want a cheap ev with less than 150 miles of range for city use. With traffic here I'm literally never driving more than 100 miles a day, and virtually never driving more than 50 miles a day. I can charge at home, I don't care if it takes 12 hours.

But I'd want that car to be under $15k. That car doesn't exist, at least not in the US, so I'm still on an old ICE.

My current car is worth at most $5k, and I spend maybe $500/yr on gas.
by snailmailman | 2025-04-25 05:10:38+00:00
I'm very curious how they are managing "no screens". I thought all vehicles in the U.S. were required to have rear-view cameras for safety. I'm curious how they are getting around that.

Edit: I now see that the article speculates that maybe there's a screen in the rear-view window for this. But I can't find anything concrete.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-25 05:10:51+00:00
Agreed to some extent, but I don't think you'll have too long to wait before that comes to pass. It can't possibly be that hard to build a model that will disassemble a given song into its original tracks, like a Fourier transform that yields drums, strings, keyboards, and vocals rather than sines and cosines. Equally unlikely that such a model will be too large to run locally.

We will get some very cool tools -- and some very cool remixes - when that happens.
by wodenokoto | 2025-04-25 05:11:03+00:00
I think the background of the post is very well explained on the blog.

But I’m surprised to read you went from idea to posting each day. I had expected maybe a week of preparation before starting execution.

Regardless it’s a great post, regardless of wether one think there is too much typing or too many new features in modern Python or one is a lover of niche solutions to shorten code.
by johndough | 2025-04-25 05:12:10+00:00
Generative models can combine different concepts from the training data. For example, the training data might contain a single image of a new missile launcher at a military parade. The model can then generate an image of that missile launcher hiding in a bush, because it has internalized the general concept of things hiding in bushes, so it can apply it to new objects it has never seen hiding in bushes.
by namaria | 2025-04-25 05:13:17+00:00
There is no guarantee for you that by keeping your questions to yourself that no one else has published something similar. This is bad reasoning all the way through. The problem is in trying to use a question as a benchmark. The only way to really compare models is to create a set of tasks of increasing compositional complexity and running the models you want to compare through them. And you'd have to come up with a new body of tasks each time a new model is published.

Providers will always game benchmarks because they are a fixed target. If LLMs were developing general reasoning, that would be unnecessarily. The fact that providers do is evidence that there is no general reasoning, just second order overfitting (loss on token prediction does descend, but that doesn't prevent the 'reasoning loss' to be uncontrollable: cf. 'hallucinations').
by sirclueless | 2025-04-25 05:14:51+00:00
I don't think it's absurd at all. I think it is a practical principle that shows up all the time in collective action problems. For example, suppose hypothetically there were a bunch of business owners who operated under an authoritarian government which they believed was bad for business, but felt obliged to publicly support it anyways because opposing it could lead to retaliation, thus increasing its ability to stay in power.
by dyauspitr | 2025-04-25 05:15:49+00:00
Loading and unloading them and folding clothes makes it not good enough yet. There are so many things a humanoid robot could do around a house.

Laundry, dishes, picking up clutter, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces and dusting, pulling out weeds etc. I actually think we’re somewhat close to gettin g like that relatively soon.
by the_third_wave | 2025-04-25 05:16:07+00:00
The "news" brings you all the death you want, daily. If you want to try it out for yourself there's plenty of Antifa-type organisations to give it a go. If activism isn't your thing you can join a football (the real type, not that silly American game) hooligan tribe for your ritual combat urges. Still not your thing? Join a gang.

Gladiator 'games' were part of the 'panem et circensis' or 'bread and circuses/games' strategy to keep the populace from revolting against the powers that be. They've been replaced by the above, and more. If the silly plebs still seem to be restless there's always another crisis at hand to keep them down, from climate to COVID to whatever comes next.
by skissane | 2025-04-25 05:16:07+00:00
> Also I didn't came up with this myself, it is part of their marketing materials and white papers.

> Finally, if it was worthless they would have probably dropped it by now.

Companies love to "talk up" their products in marketing materials. It is far from uncommon for those materials to contain claims which, while not entirely false, aren't exactly true either – and I suspect that's what's happening here.

IBM does the same thing – listen to some IBM i person tell you how "advanced" their operating system is compared to everything else – sure, there's some theoretical truth to that, but in practical terms it is more true in the past than in the present
by thelaxiankey | 2025-04-25 05:16:18+00:00
I mean, for like, some ML research, sure. For certain, even most, aspects of electrical engineering, absolutely. But for biology? Absolutely not.

And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.

Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.
by alissa_v | 2025-04-25 05:16:19+00:00
Hey, I really hear the weight of what you're going through. Losing your father and then trying to navigate the brutal startup world on the West Coast with limited resources sounds incredibly tough, and the numbness you describe is a very real response to that kind of sustained pressure and grief.

It's easy for advice to sound like clichés, especially "talk to customers," but the struggle you're having to even find those conversations highlights a core challenge. Building a network, especially as an introvert, takes time and intentional effort. LinkedIn can be a numbers game, and a 3% response rate, while not zero, can feel disheartening when you're up against the clock.

Considering where you are financially and emotionally, and being honest about the traction so far, it might be worth seriously considering hardwaresofton's suggestion to put the startup on the back burner for now and find some stability with a contract or full-time role. This wouldn't be giving up on your tech experience or your entrepreneurial spirit, but rather hitting pause to address your immediate needs. That steady income could provide the breathing room to process your grief, recharge, and then revisit your startup with fresh eyes and a more stable foundation, or even pivot to a new idea with the lessons learned.

Think of it as gathering resources – both financial and emotional – for your next chapter, whatever that may be. The decade you've spent in tech is valuable, and finding a role that utilizes those skills while providing security could be a powerful step forward right now.

It's okay to feel lost and burned out. It's a natural reaction to what you've been through. Taking some pressure off yourself to "make it work" right now might actually be the most strategic move you can make for your long-term well-being and future success.
by ipaddr | 2025-04-25 05:16:24+00:00
The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.

No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

AI image and short video generation can create novelty and interest. But when the medium require more from the person like reading a book or watching a movie the level of AI acceptance goes down. We'll accept an AI generated email or ad copy but not an ai generated playlist and certainly not a deepfake of someone from reality. That's what people want from AI, a blending of real life into a fantasy generator but no one is offering that yet.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-25 05:16:35+00:00
I actually built a very crude python app that could generate basic melodies with MIDI. It can serve as a fun starting point if you want to remix common songs. But it wasn't a very fun project to set up. It's like this technology is out there but nobody really wants to develop it.

If I had to guess there are already a handful of fake record labels generating at tons of AI slop to just post on Spotify. Even if each song only gets something like two or three views over time they can still generate a modest amount of revenue. Oh wait Spotify has been caught doing that themselves
by namaria | 2025-04-25 05:17:40+00:00
A benchmark that can be gamed cannot be prevented from being gamed by 'security through obscurity'.

Besides this whole line of reasoning is preempted by the mathematical limits to computation and transformers anyway. There's plenty published about that.

Sharing questions that make LLM behave funny is (just) a game without end, there's no need to or point in "hoarding questions".
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-04-25 05:17:40+00:00
I've made a few tracks using Suno to scratch my own itch / desire for music that covers certain themes.

The best use of Suno for has been the ease with which you can generate diss tracks: I ask Gemini to make a diss track lyrics related to specific topics, and then I have Suno generate the actual track. It's very cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail.

Anyway, I hope I can get access, I think it would be fun to vibe some new music. Although this UI looks severely limited in what capabilities it provides. Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more? It would be cool if you could generate a song and then have it split into multiple tracks that you can remix and tweak independently. Maybe a section of track is pretty good but you want to switch out a specific instrument. Maybe describe what kind of beats you want to the tool and have it generate multiple potential interpretations, which you can start to combine and build up into a proper track. I think ideally I'd be able to describe what kind of mood or vibe I'm going for, without having to worry about any of the musical theory behind it, and the tool should generate what I want.
by isoprophlex | 2025-04-25 05:17:54+00:00
Every time I ask claude code to please fix this CSV import it starts to add several hundred lines of random modules, byzantine error handling, logging bullshit... with the pinnacle a 1240 line CRUD API when i asked it to add a CLI :/

I'm back to copying and pasting stuff into a chat window, so I have a bit more control over what those deranged, expensive busy beavers want to cook up.
by wavemode | 2025-04-25 05:19:47+00:00
> The sheer amount of observability data you can collect in wide events grows incredibly fast and most of it ends up never being read.

That just means you have to be smart about retention. You don't need permanent logs of every request that hits your application. (And, even if you do for some reason, archiving logs older than X days to colder, cheaper storage still probably makes sense.)