MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2025-04-15 19:26:46+00:00
> I live in NYC now, and fortunately we still have Micro Center which is still fun, though I do worry that it might go the way of Fry's Electronics soon enough.

When Fry's died during (not because of) the pandemic, basically half the comments on articles were "oh no, what about Micro Center?" to which the immediate response was invariably "they're all completely packed" (partially due to the pandemic meaning everyone wanted better computer gear for WFH). During the height of the GPU shortage, it was often said that your best chance of getting a GPU was going to the nearest Micro Center. On all of my more recent trips, Micro Center has seemed to do pretty strong business.

Somehow, Micro Center does seem to have found a strong niche that makes it survive as a brick-and-mortar store in an increasingly online store (hell, Micro Center's website is pretty notorious for looking like a 90's webstore). Part of that is probably knowledgeable salespeople (something Fry's was known for lacking). And I think there's also a savvy psychological rationale behind its expansion policy--its stores always come across as just a bit too small, and its locations too few, but the flip side is that you don't have cavernous spaces you need to fill (like Fry's did).
by vient | 2025-04-15 19:26:47+00:00
> Kalimba, VE

> No idea what this is, and Google won’t help me.

Seems that Kalimba is a DSP, originally by CSR and now by Qualcomm. CSR8640 is using it, for example https://www.qualcomm.com/products/internet-of-things/consume...

VE is harder to find with such short name.
by volkk | 2025-04-15 19:26:57+00:00
this is semi-relevant -- and I do love how technically amazing this all is, but a massive caveat for someone who's been dabbling hard in this space, (images+video) -- I cannot emphasize enough how draining text-2-<whatever> is. even when a result comes out that's kind of cool, I feel nothing because it wasn't really me who did it.

I would say 97% of the time, the results are not what I want (and of course that's the case, it's just textual input) and so I change the text slightly, and a whole new thing comes out that is once again incorrect, and then I sit there for 5minutes while some new slop churns out of the slop factory. All of this back and forth drains not only my wallet/credits, but my patience and my soul. I really don't know how these "tools" are ever supposed to help creatives, short of generating short form ad content that few people really only want to work on anyway. So far the only products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet spam companies.

The closest thing that I've bumped into that actually feels like it empowers artists is https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion that plugs into Krita and uses a combination of img2img with masking and txt2img. A slightly more rewarding feedback loop
by rwmj | 2025-04-15 19:27:19+00:00
> It shows up as well in modern parenting guidance, including long term studies claiming that parents who prioritize validation over correction produce children who end up not just more mature, confident, and self-assured, but also with much better adult relationships to those parents.

Self-reported "studies" probably. It's highly unlikely this could be tested in any rigorous way. (Not to mention the problem with what "mature, confident, and self-assured" actually means)
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-15 19:27:30+00:00
> We've seen most retail stores fail to convert from a physical to mixed physical+online format.

For a while, people were sure Barnes and Noble was doomed, but recently they've done a big turnaround, even opening new stores. Anecdotally, the ones I've been to in recent years do seem nicer and more attractive than previously. Maybe there's a lesson in how they were able to stay alive.
by chrisandchris | 2025-04-15 19:27:50+00:00
> The former varies in length and form; the latter is concise and consistent.

IMHO, even though the latter is shorter, I did not get why it's that much better. I think in some ways, shorter is not better at all.

I try to follow these rules when writing commit messages, and had wuite good experience with them: - in the first line, name the changed subsystem/component and then a short description of what changed - follow with a list of bummet points about key changes and their reasoning, especially if something was renamed/moved/... - always reference a ticket, a comment of a ticket, or some other reference

If I re-read the commit message, I want to be able to know (or have at least an idea and to know where to look further) _why_ the code is at it is.
by jajko | 2025-04-15 19:28:09+00:00
Ads work on you? A serious question.

They ellicit so much immediate mental resistance on my side (coupled with ads-free life mostly via Firefox & ublock origin that propagates way beyond just blocks of static ads, ie no youtube ads at all) that any of those rare times I experience them, I add some small amount of hate towards given brand & product.

Somehow, brands that invest heavily in pushy ads tend not to be my main focus anyway so google et al just keep missing badly with me.

Something about preserving moral integrity, not subject to external manipulation etc. Subtle but powerful aspects of existence
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-15 19:28:49+00:00
“But you have to pay for expensive technical experts to run your own computers, you don’t with AWS/Azure.”

That’s the usual comeback from the cloud true believers.

The essential message that AWS wants you to believe “Your company doesn’t have the skills to run computers, and you need no technical experts at all to use AWS”.

The cloud is where Moores Law goes to die - insanely expensive slow computers.
by ndiddy | 2025-04-15 19:28:53+00:00
CMake gets a lot of hate because a lot of large projects use it poorly and the syntax is strange, but I've found it invaluable for projects I've worked on. The first page of this site has a great list of reasons why someone would want to use CMake. I would recommend at least reading that far rather than reading "CMake" in the title and reflexively commenting something negative. I skimmed through and this seems like a nice resource to get people spun up on CMake, I'll recommend it to new users in the future.
by stefan_ | 2025-04-15 19:29:08+00:00
Telling people that "Clang can compile for any architecture you like!" tends to confuse them more than it helps. I suppose it sets up unrealistic assumptions because of course outputting assembly for some architecture is a very long way from making working userland binaries for a system based on that architecture, which is what people actually want.

And ironically in all of this, building a full toolchain based on GCC is still easier than with LLVM.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-15 19:29:47+00:00
I usually talked with my toddlers asking them "why"? Why do you want to stay late? why don't you want to eat carrots?

They were usually thinking about trading and I was patiently waiting.

They do not like carrots (me neither btw), ok, so you get to pick a vegetable.

They want to play longer, ok, you play in your bed. Etc.

Of course this did not work all the time, especially when I was tired and maybe not that patient so more traditional ways of persuasion were used (no, nothing violent, just "do it because I said so")
by abalone | 2025-04-15 19:30:45+00:00
> We need a sane politics that can win and for that we need to start with a rallying cry

The answer is staring us right in the face.

It’s a catchy slogan and pulling tens of thousands even in deep red MAGA country.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/04/13/fighting-oli...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-04-12/bernie-san...
by divan | 2025-04-15 19:31:00+00:00
> One can validate and correct at the same time.

It's really hard though. This problem exists in sports coaching field as well. Coaches who provide corrective feedback that also supports an athlete's autonomy and acknowledges feelings are rare.

One of the good papers on this [1] topic.

[1] When change-oriented feedback enhances motivation, well-being and performance: A look at autonomy-supportive feedback in sport (10.1016/j.psychsport.2013.01.003): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14690...
by throw0101d | 2025-04-15 19:31:13+00:00
Noticed endians listed in the table. It seems like little-endian has basically taken over the world in 2025:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Hardware

Is there anything that is used a lot that is not little? IBM's stuff?

Network byte order is BE:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Networking
by minimaxir | 2025-04-15 19:31:25+00:00
Because Imagen 3 is a text-to-image model, not an image-to-image model, so the inputs have to be some form of text. Multimodal models such as 4o image generation or Gemini 2.0 which can take in both text and image inputs do encode image inputs to a latent space through a Vision Transformer, but not reverseable or losslessly.
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-15 19:31:37+00:00
> I understand it, it's really hard to compete with Amazon in today's environment, and I'm not judging anyone for using Amazon instead of buying from a store

I am. :-)

> I buy online too, and fundamentally these are for-profit businesses and I don't feel any obligation to give them charity.

You can also judge people for prioritizing profit over all else.

Even from a purely utilitarian-calculus perspective, it's a bit strange to me when people say "I wish we had X" but then "but I understand people need to make money". Like, if you wish you had X, then X has utility to you. Now, it may be that the amount you would pay for X is less than what was needed for X to survive, but that's not necessarily implied by the mere fact that X has to make money.

And that's leaving out all the other positive and negative utilities that come from these various choices. Like living in a town where you can go to a place and have interactions with people, or even just browse unfamiliar and interesting products, instead of just a big warehouse.

There isn't any reason not to judge people for doing things that you think make the world worse.
by RangerScience | 2025-04-15 19:31:37+00:00
The validation is that you're having the experience you're having, not that it's, say, an intractable problem, or necessarily the emotional experience you're having about it.

It's this:

1. You: I am having problem X 2. Them: You are having problem X. 3. Them: Here are possible solutions.

There are lots of variations on this. There are also multiple reasons to do it: validation and calibration being (AFAIK) the main ones. One way to look at it is that validation says I'm not going to fight you about your subjective experience.

Contrast:

1. You: I am having problem X 2. Them: Here are possible solutions.

This can come across as "your problem will be fixed but you do not matter".

Contrast:

1. You: I am having problem X 2. Them: You are not having problem X.

Now it's an argument.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-15 19:31:58+00:00
No problem! I also left this response to someone on reddit who said similar:

Nice. I want to write about my experiences someday, but some quick random thoughts about this:

My repository files are huge. i need to break them up. More submodules can work, and defining the inherent methods in a different module than the trait implementation.

I've found the directory structure this advocates, that is,

├── src │ ├── domain │ ├── inbound │ ├── outbound

gets a bit weird when you're splitting things up by feature, because you end up re-doing the same directories inside of all three of the submodules. I want to see if moving to something more like

├── src │ ├── feature1 │ │ ├── domain │ │ ├── inbound │ │ ├── outbound │ ├── feature2 │ │ ├── domain │ │ ├── inbound │ │ ├── outbound

feels better. Which is of course its own kind of repetition, but I feel like if I'm splitting by feature, having each feature in its own directory with the repetition being the domain/inbound/outbound layer making more sense.

I'm also curious about if coherence will allow me to move this to each feature being its own crate. compile times aren't terrible right now, but as things grow... we'll see.
by keeda | 2025-04-15 19:32:04+00:00
I have had AI models perform well on obscure use cases. Even two years ago, let alone the latest models, I've had ChatGPT generate correct code for bespoke requirements that I could not find anywhere else on the Internet. I actually spent a lot of time trawling GitHub and even SourceForge to convince myself this wasn't just a case of "stochastic parrots" regurgitating existing code from some forgotten corner of the Internet. (This also served as an exercise in researching prior art for what I as trying to do.)

In one case it made sense of my own gnarly, hacky, organically-grown, prototyping code that I myself had lost all mental context on and devised the correct solution to my prompt. Two minutes of prompting saved me an hour's worth of software archaeology.

Each time, the model seemed to "understand" the requirements, "grok" the existing code, identify the relevant concepts needed, and apply them to the task at hand. I certainly did the hard work of researching the problem and figuring out the high-level approaches, but the AI was very good at generating fairly complex code to implement those ideas.

While there certainly is a ton of overhyping going on, especially from the "AGI-is-nigh" quarters, the hype is compelling because these models really do succeed at useful tasks much more often than not.
by bk496 | 2025-04-15 19:32:23+00:00
Another great post!

I like the abstraction of server components but some of my co-workers seem to prefer HTMX (sending HTML rather than JSON) and can't really see any performance benefit from server components.

Maybe OP could clear up - Whether HTML could be sent instead (depending on platform), there is a brief point about not losing state but if your component does not have input elements or can have it state thrown away then maybe raw HTML could work? - prop size vs markup/component size. If you send a component down with a 1:9 dynamic to static content component. Then wouldn't it be better to have the the 90% static preloaded in the client, then only 10% of the data transmitted? Any good heuristic options here? - "It’s easy to make HTML out of JSON, but not the inverse". What is intrinsic about HTML/XML?

--

Also is Dan the only maintainer on the React team who does these kind of posts? do other members write long form. would be interesting to have a second angle.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-15 19:32:34+00:00
Yeah, that is pretty wild.

I recall a co-worker doing something related(?) for a kind of fun tech demo some ten years or so ago. If I recall it was shooting video while passing a slightly ajar office door. His code reconstructed the full image of the office from the "traveling slit".

I think about that all the time when I find myself in a public bathroom stall.... :-/
by overfeed | 2025-04-15 19:32:42+00:00
> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.

You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.

There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
JuryNow – Get an anonymous verdict from 12 real people
by sarah-brussels | 2025-04-15 19:33:07+00:00
Hi HN!

After 16 years of talking about it, I just built JuryNow.app, a fun game where you upload a question — anything from a moral dilemma to a fashion dilemma, or a business decision, a trivial question, a workplace problem or a political poll...in just 3 minutes, you will get an instant verdict from a diverse group of 12 anonymous people. While you wait, you do JURY DUTY, answering everyone else's questions. There is no commentary - just a binary option. The idea started 16 years ago after a friend died and her partner was suddenly alone, juggling parenting and life decisions without a sounding board. I wanted to build something that gives objective advice instantly — not based on AI, but from real, global minds.

How it works: 1. Ask a question in <80 words (yes/no or option A/B) 2. While you wait, you do 3 minutes of “Jury Duty” — answering others’ questions 3. Get your verdict: 12 votes, anonymous, no commentary, and diverse opinions

Sample questions people ask: - “I’m 8 weeks into my first year of being a doctor in a hospital after studying medicine for 5 years and hate it. Should I quit now or see the year out?” - “My brother’s getting married for the 3rd time abroad. Do I have a moral duty to go? (we have no parents)” - “Which sounds better: Honey & Date ice cream or Coffee Fudge ice cream?”

JuryNow is an antidote to AI - a game based on reciprocity and seeing the power of human collective intelligence...But...having JUST launched this MVP, in order to test the functionality, if there are less than 13 people logged on at the same time, your verdict will be simulated by AI (there is no other way to demonstrate it, but as soon as there are regular players across all time zones, I will joyfully dismantle & dismember this function permanently! So please do play! (no hate speech, no racist content, no sexual references please! And if you do see these, please report the question)

Would love your feedback! Try it here: https://www.jurynow.app It's fast , fun & there is a definite dopamine hit when you receive your real verdict! Thank you Sarah 58F
by its-summertime | 2025-04-15 19:33:12+00:00
Speaking of, the Lockpicking Lawyer's "Thank you" video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwuEPREECXI always irked me a bit, yeah its blurred, but as can be seen, (and as was possible back then, and way before then too, recovering poor data from windowed input has been a thing for 50+ years (e.g. radio signals, scanning tools, etc), if you think about it, its a cheap way to shift costs from physical improvement to computational improvement, just have a shutter), and yet he didn't block the information out, only blurred it
by Retric | 2025-04-15 19:33:32+00:00
Noting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than they first appear.

People are worried about automation driving people out of the workplace while others are worried about a lack of workers due to changing demographics. What’s going to happen is the result of a bunch of different forces, simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to prove accurate.
by rhet0rica | 2025-04-15 19:33:39+00:00
I am delighted to report you can feed this site anything prefixed with https://www.semiopedia.org/generate/ and it will produce a page of plausible-but-mostly-hallucinated wisdom.

https://www.semiopedia.org/node/gandalf

https://www.semiopedia.org/node/plankton-farts-and-dies

https://www.semiopedia.org/node/xavier-renegade-angel

https://www.semiopedia.org/node/try-finger-but-hole

https://www.semiopedia.org/node/cheat-commandos

https://www.semiopedia.org/node/skibidi-toilet

...I am somewhat less thrilled that "here's an LLM with a prompt and a domain, this is a website now!" is a thing people create for reasons other than entertainment.
by formerly_proven | 2025-04-15 19:33:41+00:00
> Intuitively, blur might do better than pixelation... but that might just be my own monkey brain talking. I'd love to hear more in the comments if you've dealt with that kind of image processing in the past.

A pixelization filter at least actively removes information from an image, a Gaussian blur or box blurs are straight up invertible by deconvolution and the only reason that doesn't work out of the box is because the blurring is done with low precision (e.g. directly on 8-bit sRGB) or quantized to a low precision format afterwards.
by lazystar | 2025-04-15 19:33:44+00:00
the -> cloud -> datacenter -> cloud -> datacenter move will by cyclical every few years.

companies that were in the cloud in 2018, did not have to pay the high costs of fixing hardware that was vulnerable to spectre/meltdown. in some cases, migrating from a datacenter to the cloud was cheaper than upgrading datacenters full of vulnerable hardware.

now with everyone in the cloud, datacenters have lower prices - so its going to draw companies into datacenters. in a few years, though, theyll have to either upgrade their hardware, or move back to the cloud. its gonna cycle like this for the forseeable future.
by chowells | 2025-04-15 19:33:45+00:00
Who said a word about looking at a certificate?

I said exactly the words I meant.

> I don't look at the browser bar or symbols on it. I care what my bookmarks do, what URLs I grab from history do, what my open tabs do, and what happens when I type things in.

Without the identity component, I can't trust that those things I care about are insulated from local interference. With the identity component, I say it's fine to connect to random public wifi. Without it, it wouldn't be.

That's the relevant level. "Is it ok to connect to public wifi?" With identity validation, yes. Without, no.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-04-15 19:33:51+00:00
My Windows-98 approved method for redacting a screenshot:

1) Open screenshot in MS-Paint (can you even install MS-Paint anymore? Or is it Paint3D now?)

2) Select Color 1: Black

3) Select Color 2: Black

4) Use rectangular selection tool to select piece of text I want to censor.

5) Click the DEL key. The rectangle should now be solid black.

6) Save the screenshot.

As far as I know, AI hasn't figured out a way to de-censor solid black yet.
by colanderman | 2025-04-15 19:33:55+00:00
Nice! I've used a homegrown CQT-based visualizer for a while for audio analysis. It's far superior to the STFT-based view you get from e.g. Audacity, since it is multiresolution, which is a better match to how we actually experience sound. I have for a while wanted to switch my tool to a gammatone-filter-based method [1] but I didn't know how to make it efficient.

Actually I wonder if this technique can be adapted to use gammatone filters specifically, rather than simple bandpass filters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammatone_filter
by franktankbank | 2025-04-15 19:35:27+00:00
I really doubt he's got those being made just for him without any concern with number of pieces. He's getting something off the shelf in that case or just lying. I've seen similar things being made and sold in America for less but they build thousands in a year. A metal box like that requires significant setup and probably some amount of new tooling. I wonder how well this guy is doing actually if he can't provide those kinds of numbers to his potential suppliers.
by porphyra | 2025-04-15 19:35:50+00:00
OpenAI themselves said

> One last note: we’ll also begin deprecating GPT-4.5 Preview in the API today as GPT-4.1 offers improved or similar performance on many key capabilities at lower latency and cost. GPT-4.5 in the API will be turned off in three months, on July 14, to allow time to transition (and GPT 4.5 will continue to be available in ChatGPT).

https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1911860805810716929
by bradstewart | 2025-04-15 19:37:07+00:00
> parents need to strike a balance between good faith listening and validating, while still ultimately retaining the last word and being able to be an authority when it matters.

This is pretty much the key in my experience.

To add a finer point: good faith listening is validating. Validating doesn't mean telling them it's ok, or giving in, doing what they want, etc.

It's the difference between "yes I understand you're feeling A, B, C, but we're doing it anyway because X" and "I don't care, stop it, be quiet and do it".