MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goldchainposse | 2025-04-14 04:57:02+00:00
I want to get enough time at $MEGACORP to have FU money. After that, my fear is a lot of smaller companies are working on thing even more boring, but with less scale. Gluing a domain-specific API to a few LLMs sounds boring. I got into tech because I liked learning it, but a lot of it is getting repetitive.
by latency-guy2 | 2025-04-14 04:57:10+00:00
I'm personally seeing quite terrible things on desktop, here is a snapshot of the homepage: https://i.imgur.com/VfNwqi7.png

Here is a snapshot of the post itself: https://i.imgur.com/61b7ADn.png

To note, I cannot click on any of the buttons in the top-right to control what I could or learn more about this person.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-14 04:57:39+00:00
So what if they do this though? Big so what? Americans are allowed to read any journal and any news, even those explicitly owned and edited by foreign adversaries that they want. This is a tried and true first amendment right. And I get that forcing China to divest TikTok isn't legally an act against the 1st Amendment, but functionally it is. Why can't Americans see a CCP-biased view of Palestine if they want to? If I want to watch CCP propaganda all day, or Press TV, or Russia Today, that's my right as an American. Part of the reason there's interest to see that at all and 0 interest in watching a CCP revisionist history of the Korean War is because Israel can only bomb so many WCK aid workers, Red Cross aid workers, ambulances with the sirens on, in full video, etc. before people become curious about why this isn't a big deal for our govt.
by woah | 2025-04-14 04:57:43+00:00
> US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball.

You're acting like the tariffs are a big conspiracy by the "private capitalists", but the "private capitalists" are the most opposed, if you look at the reaction of the market.

Not sure why you mentioned Bernie Sanders, but he has been one of the most pro-tariffs politicians in America for many decades. That's one of the reasons the left has been caught so flatfooted by this and seems to have no response: the policies they have supported forever have been shown to be disasterous.
by Validark | 2025-04-14 04:59:50+00:00
Pay was not mentioned in the article as a reason why they were sick to their stomach. This person was a part of a community and they were doing a lot of work they found meaningful, and then in an instant it was all ripped away. You can't imagine how that would suck? Even if this author was immediately handed a new job that pays more than Google, I still think it would hurt. They had goals, they had friends, they had purpose, they had fun, they had innovation, and now that's all gone. I think you're just angry at the author because they made a lot of money.
by joshu | 2025-04-14 05:00:21+00:00
yeah, unfortunately. i've been on a hunt to design a sort of video terminal system (local machine speaks VT100 or NAPLPS or some other videotext plus a way to run bits of code) and i was looking at the rosco + xosera video card as a way to build it, but discovered it's no longer made.

i saw somewhere that people were able to emulate a 68k mac just barely on an esp32 so maybe that's the way to go. it's cheap and sorta connected, at least.
by n2d4 | 2025-04-14 05:00:42+00:00
An understated benefit is that, if you have 4 year vesting, you can choose after year 1 or year 2 whether you want to stay.

Meaning, if the company's stock went up 2x after year 1, your salary has effectively doubled for years 2-4. If the stock went down -50% however, you just leave and get market salary somewhere else.

So, considering this, the expected value of $100 in stock options is actually more than $100.
by wizerno | 2025-04-14 05:01:03+00:00
Does anyone else miss the functionality of the Android WhatsApp widget [1] on iOS? Being able to read messages without sending read receipts via the widget is a great feature. The iOS notification 'peek' is a clumsy substitute.

Is this a fundamental limitation of iOS widgets/APIs, or just something WhatsApp hasn't implemented? Curious if others have found better ways to handle this on iPhone.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-use-the-WhatsApp-wid...
by Syntonicles | 2025-04-14 05:01:13+00:00
Thank you for the video, that was really interesting. I had no idea that brown was orange, and that makes me wonder how those darker colors are perceived by people with many more categories of colors in their minds. If simply naming brown makes it seem like a unique color, I imagine the abrupt switchover that I experienced watching that video would happen for more color-discerning people as well when they see "Dark Blue" or "Dark Purple" or "Dark Red".

Or... maybe you have be both discerning and naive in regards to it for the illusion to work.
by fitsumbelay | 2025-04-14 05:01:28+00:00
FYI ex-Googler/Nerdy.dev !== OP

was surprised to see this here tbh as its something that was posted to the author's (again, author, not OP) bluesky which made it maybe not _personal_ personal-news but ... I don't know ... way more personal than all up in HN I dunno ... shrugs ...
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-14 05:01:57+00:00
The most concerning part of the attack here seems to be the ability to hide arbitrary text in a simple text file using Unicode tricks such that GitHub doesn't actually show this text at all, per the authors. Couple this with the ability of LLMs to "execute" any instruction in the input set, regardless of such a weird encoding, and you've got a recipe for attacks.

However, I wouldn't put any fault here on the AIs themselves. It's the fact that you can hide data in a plain text file that is the root of the issue - the whole attack goes away once you fix that part.
by cyberax | 2025-04-14 05:02:08+00:00
I stopped using the official Tesla app entirely. It's so freaking sluggish and useless. They spent all their effort on drawing a toy car with shiny animations, and neglected everything else.

E.g. if I want to turn on the seat and wheel heaters, I click on it, and then I need to wait 3 seconds to see if it actually turned them on. Or maybe they were already on, and my click turned them off instead.

The service chat section is entirely useless, and was probably written by somebody drinking bong water. And you _have_ to use it. Tesla even sends you freaking text messages with just a link to the app instead of actual text of the updates.

And I once spent 20 minutes trying to find how I can remove a guest driver from my account. Turns out that there's a small gray button "Manage Drivers" at the very bottom of the screen, past the odometer data.

Sorry. But Tesla is as shitty as other automakers. Or even shittier, because other automakers don't force me to talk with their service centers solely through their crapps.
by roenxi | 2025-04-14 05:03:01+00:00
I added "Be really specific" to the prompt and on the second go got:

11. *The Art of Decay*: The Portrait's soul is tied to the painting, but what if the players could use the painting's power to accelerate the decay of The Portrait's physical form? This could involve using a powerful magical effect or finding a way to imbue the painting with a magical property that would accelerate the decay process.

in the brainstorm. I don't think it'd take a million years; it's got the concepts and it is trying to put them together with only 5 attempts so far; and that is only 2Gb of weights on a relatively cheap GPU.

As for coming up with an entire campaign that copys an idea from Wilde, well it depends and I'd agree that is a task that would want a human in the loop. It does seem difficult to do in one prompt - but I think a million years is wildly overestimating the novelty of the campaign you're describing. It is actually damn hard to come up with good, novel ideas and the odds are the LLMs have literally seen variants of the Dorian Grey idea 100 times.
by zinekeller | 2025-04-14 05:04:07+00:00
> These the same residential providers that people complain cut them off for torrenting?

Assume that you are in the shoes of Anubis users. Do you have a reasonable legal budget? No? From experience, most ISPs would not really respond unless either their network has become unstable as a consequence, or if legal advised them to cooperate. Realistically, at the time that they read your plea the activity has already died off (on their network), and the best that they can do is to give you the netflows to do your investigation.

> You think they wouldn't cut off customers who DDoS?

This is not your typical DDoS where the stability of the network links are affected (this is at the ISP level, not specifically your server), this is a very asymmetrical one where it seemingly blends out as normal browsing. Unless you have a reasonable legal budget, they would suggest to use RTBH (https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/security/intelligenc...) or a commercial filtering solution if need be. This even assumes that they're symphatetic to your pleas, at worst case you're dealing with state-backed ISPs that are known not to respond at all.
by Ayesh | 2025-04-14 05:05:30+00:00
Huge shout-out to the PHP Foundation for this.

Last year, it received close to 680K USD, and managed this security audit, sponsored 10 developers, and paid for various expenses. For a language that runs close to 75% of the web, it certainly deserves more funding.

Some of the recent initiatives from the Foundation (https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/03/31/transparency-and-i...) :

- All PHP versions now receive a total of 4 years of security updates; 2 bug fixes + 2 security, up from 3.

- PIE: A replacement for PECL, to easily install PHP extensions (C, C++ compiled, not PHP packages).

- The security audit.

(I'm one of the PHP Core team and a volunteer at the foundation, happy to answer any questions, but almost all of the work is public)
Show HN: I made an open-source tool to visualise and debug MQTT data
by packbacking | 2025-04-14 05:05:51+00:00
I recently open-sourced a tool that I've been working on for about a year.

Existing GUI tools for MQTT were either old and unmaintained or frustrating to use.

I started it as a way to play with Go, Wails (a Go app-building framework) and Svelte as an alternative to Electron. I'm happy to answer any questions about my experiences with these.

If you're an MQTT user I'd appreciate feedback!
by kcon | 2025-04-14 05:06:43+00:00
Thanks! The IFTTT widget can supposedly update within a few seconds of receiving the triggering email since this is a “real-time applet” (https://help.ifttt.com/hc/en-us/articles/4412435510171-What-...), but in practice it seems to update more on the order of several minutes after the scraping workflow runs.

I have been running the scraping workflow once per hour during waking hours the past week, but I reduced that recently because I was starting to feel nervous (but without any real evidence) that pinging the car too often could drain the 12V battery.

The scraping workflow takes between 2-3 minutes to run. You can view the history and duration of runs here if you’re curious: https://github.com/kevincon/nissan-leaf-widget-updater/actio...
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-14 05:07:00+00:00
> Everything that is physical is nothing but remixes and recombinations of a very small set of tokens.

We're not talking about "physical" with LLMs, we're talking about knowledge and creativity and reasoning, which are metaphysical.

The sum total of human knowledge cannot possibly be purely composed of remixes and recombinations, there has to be some baseline that humans invented for there to even be something to remix!
by jdminhbg | 2025-04-14 05:07:17+00:00
> and then I need to wait 3 seconds to see if it actually turned them on

If you want to unlock a Kia with the app, first you need to pay $15/month, and then you need to press and hold for one second the unlock button, after which you have a 30-50% chance of the unlock request going through. To let you know that it went through, you will receive an email. It's the most user-hostile app I still have on my phone.

So no, Tesla is not as shitty as other automakers. The bar is so much lower than you can imagine.
by subjectsigma | 2025-04-14 05:07:30+00:00
I noticed this movie is heavily gendered, I’ve watched it with female relatives / friends / girlfriends / etc. and they never seem to find it funny, whereas male friends all find it hilarious. Could be a coincidence, could not be. It’s interesting to me though because if it isn’t a coincidence, I can’t think of a good reason why. I’ve seen some comedies that were obviously catered to a specific demographic but Holy Grail isn’t that, so why the discrepancy?
by richardw | 2025-04-14 05:07:39+00:00
Yup 30+ year dev here. Tried Cursor for a bit and honestly most of the tokens burned were fighting with stupid code generation, and having it confidently push on. Just cancelled my sub today. Been working with Windsurf the last few weeks and it feels a little more controllable. However, what I tend to do is work on conceptual design, brainstorming etc with ChatGPT (o1/o3-mini-high) or Claude, then when I converge I bring the task to Windsurf for its slightly better view of the code and ability to execute across many files.
by pstuart | 2025-04-14 05:08:01+00:00
> then why does spacex have superior outputs?

* The dictate of fail fast and iterate quickly, along with simplification of mechanisms and ample compute power. * Not being mired in the bureaucracy of committees and government bodies to answer to

Yes, being enabled by a billionaire with a dream made a huge difference. But that's not a guarantee, as there's been 3 such billionaires and only one SpaceX.
by abdj8 | 2025-04-14 05:08:08+00:00
Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hour of announcement. The CEO detailed the process of selecting people. The severance was very generous (3-6 months pay) along with health and other benefits. The impacted employees were allowed to keep the laptop and any other assets they took from the company. They even paid the same severance to contractors.

After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.
by hatthew | 2025-04-14 05:09:08+00:00
Let's say you have a photo of a starry night sky, and a photo of a slightly brighter sky with no visible stars. If you do "fully accurate on average" dithering, the dithered output would be identical. But in that context, the difference between "sky with dots" and "sky without dots" is more important than the difference between "dark sky" and "very slightly less dark sky". In that context, I would say a dithering algorithm that discards the very slight error in shade in favor of better accuracy in texture is objectively better.

On that wikipedia page, compare Floyd–Steinberg vs Gradient-based. In my opinion, gradient-based better preserves detail in high-contrast areas (e.g. the eyelid), whereas FS better preserves detail in low-contrast areas (e.g. the jawline between the neck and the cheek).
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-14 05:09:30+00:00
The sad part to me is that there's not many online communities left that focus on helping sharing their knowledge with newcomers. I'm excluding discord doxxing generation communities here, because they are really unhelpful for newbies and the opposite of a safe learning environment for kids.

When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.

And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.

But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.

Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.

There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.

I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.

I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.
by hansvm | 2025-04-14 05:09:31+00:00
It's a neat idea. It's not too dissimilar in spirit from gradient boosting. The point about credit assignment is crucial, and that's the same reason most architectures and initialization methods are so convoluted nowadays.

I don't really like one of their premises and conclusions:

> that does not learn hierarchical representations

There's an implicit bias here that (a) traditional networks do learn hierarchial representations, (b) that's bad, and (c) this training method does not learn those. However, [a] is situational, and it's easy to construct datasets where a standard gradient-descent neural net will learn a different way, even with a reverse hierarchy. [b] is unproven and also doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense to me. [c], even in this paper where they make that claim, has no evidence and also doesn't seem likely to be true.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-04-14 05:10:44+00:00
> As for C++, there is nothing at that link that says you need a textbook to learn C++.

Sorry, it says that in their FAQ[0]. It also says "Should I learn C before I learn C++?" "Don’t bother." and proceeds to advertise a Stroustrup book[1].

[0]: https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/how-to-learn-cpp#start-learning

[1]: https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/how-to-learn-cpp#learning-c-not-...

> If you insist on learning C++ first, here is the first search result from DuckDuckGo when I search for "learn C++":

I don't insist on learning C++ and I even agree with you that C is better. But I have a problem with learning from non-authoritative sources, especially random websites and YouTube tutorials. I like to learn from official documentation. For C there appears to be no official documentation, and my intution tells me that, as nickpsecurity mentioned, the best way is to read the K&R book. But that brings us back to my original point that you have to buy a book.

> was the one true way (like you seem to have been with Rust)

I don't think there exists any one true way. It depends on what you do. For example I like Rust but I never really use it. I pretty much only use TypeScript.

> was the best thing ever (much like how you treat Rust)

I would actually prefer Zig over Rust but the former lacks a mature ecosystem.

> For example, they used a cron job to restart the daemon at midnight instead of adding a missing `freeaddrinfo()` call and calling `accept()` until EAGAIN is received before blocking in `sigwaitinfo()`.

This sounds like a kind of bug that would never happen in Rust because a library would handle that for you. You should be able to just use a networking library in C as well but for some reason C/C++ developers like to go as far as even implementing HTTP themselves.

> After learning C++...

Thanks for sharing your story. It's wholesome and I enjoyed reading.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-14 05:11:41+00:00
The poster above was claiming, in several posts, that the people at CERN and experimental particle physicists more broadly are being unfairly represented by claims that they are including possible new particles in the case for building the FCC. They even found an IEEE publication about it that (apparently) made no such claims and stuck to well motivated physics.

I was merely showing that there is nothing unfair about it, as all materials about the FCC, at least from CERN, come with beliefs about the chance that new particles could be found. Sure, they don't make hard claims that they will be found. But even these claims that they could be found are unfounded. It's just as likely that I'll spot a WIMP in my oven if I look carefully while it's pretty hot as WIMPs being found at the FCC. This speculation has no place in serious discussions about this level of spending and human effort.

If this were an abstract discussion at a panel and someone was asking "what are some speculations about what we could see at the FCC", it would be perfectly fine to go on about SUSY and dark matter detection and axions and whatever else. But this has no place whatsoever in official documents about the scientific purpose of allocating billions of euros to this project. It is blatant speculation to pad out an otherwise pretty thin motivation. It's like writing a proposal for a new build system at your company and including speculation that it might detect security vulnerabilities automatically, or it might reduce build times a hundred fold.
by 9rx | 2025-04-14 05:12:23+00:00
Traditionally,

Scripts are programs that carry out a specific task and then exit. If failure occurs, it is usually on the operator to fix the issue and run the script again. I agree that bash, AppleScript, Python, etc. are geared towards these types of programs.

Applications are programs with interfaces (not necessary graphical, but can be) that are used interactively. If failure occurs, the software usually works with the user to address the problem. It's not completely unheard of to use Go here, but I wouldn't call that its strength.

Systems are "forever"-running programs to provide foundational services other programs. If failure occurs, the software usually does its best to recover automatically. This is what Go was designed for – specifically in the area of server development. There are systems, like kernels, that Go wouldn't be well suited for, but the server niche was always explicit.

Your pet definitions are fine too – it is a perfectly valid take – but know that's not what anyone else is talking about.