MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andyolivers | 2025-04-12 22:44:41+00:00
I'm seeing that most of you guys like to rant. This is just a place to review chatbots and customer support. The purpose is trying to improve CS itself and the UX of some websites we tend to use nowadays. Don't you get sick of trying to use chatbots that don't work? Are you not fed up of calling calling CS hotlines and spending loads of money on it?
by ang_cire | 2025-04-12 22:46:18+00:00
> This article is from yesterday.

The accusation that Palestinian voices were suppressed by social media companies has been being made for years. It's not a new revelation.

> or the Israeli government

Israel is the originator of the requests, not the one who is being accused of improperly complying (Meta), so why would they help or respond at all?

> it's possible that some of the material is things that cannot be publicized

Even the kinds of images you describe can be shown censored, in order to show the content being present without revealing sensitive material.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-04-12 22:48:00+00:00
Right about here[1] the hand motions of both characters have the same misapplied smoothing. Ignore the clipping through the table, watch the character tap the side of his head, it's got the same weird slow-down before touching the temple. Same for most of the other motions, they don't accelerate correctly.

[1] https://youtu.be/tEed88squbc?si=9IAjNHxWjQ44KoPT&t=350
Ask HN: What do you personally pay for privacy?
by jdbohrman | 2025-04-12 22:49:07+00:00
I've been thinking about this heavily lately and it's been killing me because on one hand I see a side of the internet like r/privacy, which both snubs their nose at any advertising and data collecting while also shunning paid E2EE applications. Then on another side, I see people constantly ask for things like E2EE versions of Discord, which obvious won't be feasible until something like MLS is scalable, but I just can't wrap my head around where the middle ground is for users who both desire privacy, and know that that it costs money to develop software that people want to use. It feels like a lot of people on r/privacy want to have their cake and eat it too, and I'm curious what this community things about privacy as a business model. I refuse to believe statements on that sub like "What's wrong with Signal" should be the end of the discussion because there's a whole realm of applications the could benefit from E2EE and decentralization that aren't just generic messengers for 1:1 and small groups.
by ramraj07 | 2025-04-12 22:49:32+00:00
A pull request in my workplace is an actual feature/enhancement/bug-fix. That many PRs means I shipped that many features or enhancements.

I suppose you don't know what a PR is because you likely still work in an environment without modern version control, probably just now migrating your rants from vim vs emacs to crapping on vibe coding.

In my experience, AI today is an intelligence multiplier. A lot of folks just need to look back at the zero they keep multiplying and getting zero back to understand why they don't get the hype.
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-12 22:52:09+00:00
> While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace *HLSL* or *GLSL*. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include *CUDA* and *OpenCL*.

Are CUDA and OpenCL really "better alternatives" to HLSL and GLSL?

CUDA and OpenCL are compute languages; HLSL and GLSL and shader languages. And while one can theoretically do compute in a shader (and we used to!) or shaders in a compute language, I think it's dishonest to claim that CUDA is intended as an updated alternative to GLSL. It's simply apples and oranges.
by coldblues | 2025-04-12 22:52:33+00:00
I still feel like Roam Research did it best. Conor was truly a pioneer in the digital note taking field. I still miss the times when all of it was new, it was so exciting and everything felt revolutionary. A lot of Roam users are still using it even though the pricing hasn't changed a bit and neither has the design, but I don't think there's anything better even now. Zettelkasten is severely underrated and misunderstood. Notion and Evernote are disgusting, and PARA is a nonsensical grift. If you need more context regarding that, I recommend reading Conor's Twitter threads and watching interviews and livestreams featuring him.
by edanm | 2025-04-12 22:52:36+00:00
> Jewish people were unsafe because of antisemites and antisemitism, not because they lacked an ethnostate.

1. Unfortunately, antisemitism is alive and well.

2. It is an unfortunate reality that Jews in particular have been persecuted throughout history. But I think it's true that most people want a state of their own, to protect them and to live in the way that they want to live. This is the source of most modern countries/states - some ethnicity with on some specific land deciding to turn it into their state.

The only reason Jews were different was because they were ethnically cleansed by the Roman empire from their own land, and dispersed across the entire Jewish diaspora. This made their situation worse than most ethnicities, made them even more in need of a land to call their own.

> The diaspora also deserves safety, with or without an Israel.

Of course. Everyone deserves safety. I wish everyone got what they deserved.

But we don't get rid of the police force because "no one deserves to be murdered". The world doesn't run just on what people deserves.
by sysrestartusr | 2025-04-12 22:52:59+00:00
so we are completely ignoring the science, now, ey?

someone always has more data. 50 years for you might be a lot but someone else will tell you they are gone faster than you think.

a) doomers are just buffs, superficial or nerdy.

b) never forget that due to how the web and social hierarchies are build, some people have an ugly information flow, are constantly lied to, and bots flood their feeds with the worst shit just because they had a bit of moment, once.

some people are stilled told EV's are shit, buy a diesel. they are told so by some sort of "authority". or: "don't get a credit for "solar" if you don't have half the money right away" ( even though you'd start to save/make money after 10 years but you don't know math and that person is some sort of "authority" )

the world is full of mostly sub-average competence in positions or with the status of some sort of "authority" and these sub-average competent people, some of them saved and domesticated dogs, absolutely need others to have it worse then them so they will feed them lies whenever those people need advice. and these dogs usually work in collectives.

truthy information flow is imperative but even the German state media slaps incomplete or outright misinformation into their audience brains' all the freaking time. it's ugly, especially if you read and watch news from a bunch of international and national sources, which is why the educated youth stopped caring long ago and gladly joins Ponzi narratives ... written and played by people who rely on misinformation, polarization and some sort of ... "show" ... it's boring until the future arrives and there's nothing but obedience and or confusion and or drugs to cope with either or both.

critical thinking is a dying idea, a skill soon extinct. defense mechanisms against it are hard-wired into languages and schools of thought ... the whole "just doin' my job" thing got outta hand because a bunch of other people were sabotaged just doing their jobs ... but someone makes you feel cool, or luxury does ... and that's that.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-12 22:53:00+00:00
>I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.

OK? That's fine. I don't think I ever claimed you were a WAU

>And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty.

So you are not a weekly active user then. Maybe not even a monthly active one.

>Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service.

Maybe[1], but you didn't. And I doubt your wife needs a new logo every week so again not a weekly active user.

>ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators)but have no essential need for whatsoever.

You visit the same exact meme generator or finance site every week? If so, then that site is pretty important to you. If not, then again you're not a weekly active user to it.

If you visit a (but not the same) meme generator every week then clearly creating memes is important to you because I've never visited one in my life.

>And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

There are well funded alternatives to Google Search too but how many use anything else? Rarely does any valuable niche have no competition.

>It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

Yeah it is and so far, you've not actually said anything to indicate the contrary.

[1]ChatGPT had an image generation update recently that made it capable of doing things other services can't. Good chance you could not in fact do what you did (to the same satisfaction) elsewhere. But that's beside my point.
by susam | 2025-04-12 22:53:29+00:00
Linked in this article is VileR's excellent website <https://int10h.org/>. In fact, it is linked 8 times in this article. If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend following those links. VileR's site is probably the best resource we have today that preserves the various PC OEM fonts from a bygone technological era -- an era that lives on in the memories of those of us who first encountered these machines early in life.

I'm genuinely in awe of the time and effort VileR has poured into recovering each font, and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction, and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent countless hours there comparing different OEM fonts, and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!
by raziel2701 | 2025-04-12 22:53:41+00:00
Why is this work important? To me it just feels so distant from my reality. At the core of this, is there an answer to the "who cares?" attitude?

Because if the answer is that we might incidentally create new useful technology in the build up of a new collider, why not just diversify the investment and put that money into a bunch of smaller projects? Hedge your bets sort of thing.

Why support this and not allocate more into high temperature superconductivity for example? I don't understand what is the justification that entitles such a large amount of money to a singular project.
by fathermarz | 2025-04-12 22:54:08+00:00
Honestly wrapping code in a front end is enough of an “app” experience that people don’t care as long as it brings value. Perfect case I ran into last week, I had to convert a legacy .pst outlook file to .eml for new outlook. Only a handful of these tools exist and I picked the one that had a front end and a nice looking installer. $110 to that company for something I will likely never use again.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-04-12 22:54:20+00:00
This is just a blanket excuse to call things fascist when they aren't. Want regulations? Care about your community? Think that the US should be run on popular vote rather than the electoral college? You're a fascist because fascists are anti-free market, love their country, and are populist. Sure, those are very extreme versions of the above, but fascism doesn't appear overnight, now does it?
by ncruces | 2025-04-12 22:54:29+00:00
Why does it need to be either/or? I make do almost the entire week without a car. Schools within walking distance, then mass transit to work.

So what if I own and use a small family car, to go shopping and take the kids places?

Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

My neighborhood is a real life 15min city, and most people of all ages choose to walk. We don't need to prevent families from owning a car and taking it grocery shopping once a week.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-12 22:54:47+00:00
> Would namespaces, lexical scoping, etc be better? Almost definitely. But it would be a marginal improvement, a difference in degree not kind.

That's the thing - it probably would not be.

IMO, the key things that allow Emacs to succeed and last, while being somewhat unique in how it "routinely flouts every single software engineering "best practice"", are not merely conceptual, but cultural or even philosophical. The most fundamental of those, IMO, is that Emacs is ultimately owned by users, who are treated as intelligent partners in the relationship. Everything is designed with extensibility in mind. There's no hard boundary between "core developers", "third-party extension developers" and "end-users" - everyone can be any of them, including all three, at any time.

Maximizing extensibility and interoperability, not demanding "users" to coordinate with "developers" and ask for permission, not chasing user growth (it's all Free Software), expecting that everyone is a responsible adult, encouraging users to make Emacs "their own" - all that leads to an approach that goes the opposite to standard software development practice, because the standard practice is built around entirely opposite assumptions.
by loudmax | 2025-04-12 22:54:54+00:00
The term for this is extortion.

The last time tariffs were this high, it led to rampant corruption as companies would pay off customs officers. This was one of the reasons for switching to an income tax. For the current administration this possibility counts as a major opportunity to generate personal wealth.

But this isn't the only reason for the policy. For someone who is at heart a coward, bullying and brandishing raw power over others is its own reward. That reason enough for the policy, and damn the consequences for the nation.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-12 22:55:55+00:00
This is exactly the situation unfolding with JetBrains right now. They've lost all touch with their professional enthusiast core and have gone hell-bent on acquiring new users at the cost of alienating a big chunk of their core. I don't think it's going to go well for them, they don't have the chops to compete with Microsoft like they're presently trying to do.
by ranyume | 2025-04-12 22:56:10+00:00
I'm not sure why you say it's a scandal. The author worked with the publishing company from the start, and from the start the intention was to "unveil" the truth to make an impact.

> And those words aren’t his either. They came from two AI platforms (still unnamed).

According to interviews, he used AI platforms in a very specific way that couldn't be called "vibe philosophizing". It seems he treated the AI as a mirror instead of a system that would give him answers. I'm waiting for an extended interview this sunday, but if I understand it right he used AI as a tool for self-reflection and self-questioning.
by kristopolous | 2025-04-12 22:56:28+00:00
If that was the case there'd be more coherency. There's these days where multiple people are asked a question, each answer is a shocking departure from policy and they all contradict and then an administrator comes out and is like "you're going to bring mining the global supply for rare earth minerals to Ohio?! Geology does not support you my good man".

So not even cynicism is supported by the evidence.

I mean they're also pillaging of course. Incompetent And malice. Both are possible
by qingcharles | 2025-04-12 22:58:12+00:00
I'm more optimistic about this. I've worked adjacent to this space too. You clearly have way more experience than me, and I bow to your judgment.

On the outpainting, I think in the documentary you can see some "bones" of one of the off-screen characters in a window, so it looks like they have some sort of adaption perhaps to manually animate or constrain the AI model.

The last film I've seen in an ultra-wide like this was the original 3-wide version of How The West Was Won, which I actually really enjoyed. I think it's important to remember that most of the important action is constrained the center and the edges are really just to fill-in your field of view. At least, that's how this should work.
by gafferongames | 2025-04-12 22:58:35+00:00
In my experience providing detailed information in a response in the comment section on this particular topic (game development and networking) in hacker news comments simply creates more surface area for nitpicking and arguing in response, so I keep to short responses and rebuttals.

In the future, I don't feel that writing anything more here on this topic is a worthwhile use of my time.
by somat | 2025-04-12 22:58:51+00:00
For my personal projects I am drifting towards the simple side. More and more I try to stick with a simple single level key value configuration.

But if you do require a complex configuration, I think it is beneficial to both yourself and your users to invest in a openbsd style parse.y like solution rather than just shovel the usual json or yaml slop.

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr...

By which I mean it does not have to be yacc, but taking the time to think about the language of your configurations improves the ui dramaticly.
by gyomu | 2025-04-12 22:59:40+00:00
If you’re confused about what this is - it’s to prevent AI scraping.

> Anubis uses a proof-of-work challenge to ensure that clients are using a modern browser and are able to calculate SHA-256 checksums

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/design/how-anubis-works

This is pretty cool, I have a project or two that might benefit from it.
by paulcole | 2025-04-12 22:59:54+00:00
Like I said, litany of excuses.

If you really don’t like cars, you’ll find a way to minimize use of them.

If you really don’t mind cars that much you’ll make up stories about how if buses and trains and bike lanes were more attractive then people would use them more.

I guarantee that if every American city had an ideal bus and train system, people would still find excuses and reasons to justify driving their cars.
by eschaton | 2025-04-12 22:59:55+00:00
It’s pretty interesting how Amiga and Atari ST followed Macintosh down a bad path of having large amounts of the OS in ROM, which may have made some sense when a single few-hundred-kilobyte floppy was the only storage most users would have, but made a lot less sense just a few years later when the ROM OS needed lots of patches and everyone had some sort of fixed disk to boot from.
by Animats | 2025-04-12 23:00:00+00:00
Since last night, anyway. The people who make shipping work are frantically trying to keep up. One of the biggest customs brokers posts updates twice a day on weekdays. Last update 4 PM Friday, so they haven't caught the biggest reversal. If tariff rates change while in transit, the bond paid before the item was shipped may now be insufficient. So the container goes into storage (where?) until Customs and Border Protection gets paid. Some recipients don't have the cash to pay. Low-end resellers who order on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, for example.

Port operators hate this. Unwanted containers clog up the portside sorting and storage systems. Eventually the containers are either sent back or auctioned off by CBP, like this stuff.[1]

Some shippers outside the US have stopped shipping to the US until this settles. This includes all the major laptop makers - Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc.[2] Nobody wants to be caught with a container in transit, a big customs bill due on receipt, and storage charges. That will recover once the rates are stable for a few weeks. Probably.

Customs and Border Protection is trying to keep up. Sometimes you have to pay more because Trump raised tariffs. Sometimes you can get a credit back because Trump dropped tariffs. Those are all exception transactions, with extra paperwork and delays.

Where's the Flexport guy from YC? He should be able to explain all this.

Consumer version: expect to see some empty shelves, rejected orders, and higher prices for the next few weeks.

[1] https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/auctions/catalog/id/167

[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/107504-trump-tariffs-force-maj...
by Mawr | 2025-04-12 23:00:24+00:00
A really light car would either have to be limited to a very low speed or be terribly unsafe in case of a crash. Since lightness implies small size, it would also not have other desirable properties of cars, like their ability to carry passengers and cargo.

That said, there might be something to it:

1. The "bicycle that's more like a car" angle: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H0jtCfdvwH4, https://youtu.be/9B0eXmbrBIo?t=30

2. The "car that's more like a bicycle" angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ly7JjqEb0
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-12 23:00:55+00:00
Firstly it’s not an appeal to nature fallacy to accurately describe how a product of nature works, secondly it’s the peak of lazy online discussion to name a fallacy and leave as though it means something. Fallacies can be applied to tons of good arguments and along with the fallacy, you need to explain why the point itself being made is fallacious.

It’s a philosophical concept not a trap card.
by Swizec | 2025-04-12 23:01:34+00:00
> But developers need to go in with their eyes open when it comes to adopting these throw-away libraries and frameworks.

For contrast: My entire company is less than 4 years old and any code from 6 months ago feels old because things (in a business requirements sense) change so fast. Zod lasting 3 years is fine.

Although I do wish v4 came a little sooner because we just started using Zod a few months ago.
by 0_____0 | 2025-04-12 23:01:53+00:00
Thanks for this detailed comment. I don't have your expertise but I have noticed that there is some inverse correlation between "unique visual spectacle" and good storytelling. E.g. Avatar II, which was visually quite striking but left me feeling like I watched a SIGGRAPH demo... with all that budget, they definitely could have afforded better writing, so I suspect there's some weird interaction between the graphic spectacle niche of film and the desirability of narrative quality for the film to perform well
by pclmulqdq | 2025-04-12 23:02:28+00:00
As far as I know, there isn't much theory behind the "important work" being done here, just "let's smash stuff at higher energy and see what shakes out." Science is supposed to go the other way. You are supposed to have a theory or a set of theories and then use experiments to test them. If this experiment can falsify the standard model in a meaningful way, that's cool, but it's a lot better if it can actually prove something else. Still, it's not clear that the something else is worth the massive expense and effort.

Do we have $X00 billion worth of theories to test here?
by golly_ned | 2025-04-12 23:02:36+00:00
I’ve consistently failed to make writing elisp net positive for me for basically anything. I use it as a configuration language, and even then, for functions longer than a few lines, it’s still a lot of coding for very little benefit. I just can’t find things to improve in such a way that it’ll actually be worth writing elisp code for, especially compared to other tools (like a quick Python script or even a bash one-liner), or things within Emacs. What are the things you’ve written in elisp that have helped you?