MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fossman | 2025-04-25 13:21:29+00:00
Me too. Too bad it can only be installed on Google hardware. Instead of giving $$$ to a surveillance corporation, I'd rather give it to small Linux phone vendors who are on the user's side from day one!

GrapheneOS is riding on decades of Google-funded development and is thus pretty great. Linux phone development never had that kind of funding but we are getting there slowly but assuredly through user funded development and community involvement.
by vintagedave | 2025-04-25 13:22:43+00:00
This is really impressive. As a portfolio alone, wow -- as a component set, fantastic.

Are these easy to include in Astro? I'd think so (avoiding React etc.) I am currently building with Astro and keeping things as minimal in terms of additional JS files etc as possible.

Couple of notes / questions:

* https://reverseui.com/craft/text-blur-reveal has 'coming soon' from last October, and it's really cool, I'd be tempted to buy it for this alone

* The top of your site has what looks like the dot logo component, but showing numbers and with a Matrix-like effect. Can that be a component too?

* How customisable are these? I saw one comment saying they were not at all and the code was not modifiable. That's a deal-breaker: we all want our own spin on things, not to copy blindly.
by chii | 2025-04-25 13:22:48+00:00
> I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free".

it's not a cognitive dissonance. Lots of places have conditionally free stuff - it's a form of price discrimination (coupons, special deals etc).

Microsoft is within their rights to make their servers conditionally free. What the community can respond with is to move to a different server, if such conditions are not within the bounds of the community's lines.
by xnorswap | 2025-04-25 13:22:48+00:00
I agree there's a teaching problem happening somewhere. I'm not sure I blame CS-education since I'd wager that most developers don't have a formal CS background.

I too regularly however come across people who believe some or all of the following:

- "Everything is ultimately just C"

- "All other languages just compile to C, so you should use it to be fast"

- "C is faster because it's closer to bare metal"

- "C is fast because it doesn't need to be interpreted unlike all other languages"

The special elevated position of C, being some kind of "ground truth" of computers is bizarre. It leads to all kinds of false-optimizations in practitioners in other languages out of some kind of misplaced confidence in the speed of C relative to all other languages.

The idea that C is "naturally faster" due to being some kind of representation of a computer that no other language could achieve is a hard myth to shake.
by leonidasv | 2025-04-25 13:23:04+00:00
LLMs are great for exercising skills, especially ones with a lot of available data in the training corpus, such as leet code. The prompt below, put in the System Instructions of Gemini 2.5 Pro (using AI Studio) summons the best leet code teacher in the world. You can solve using any language or pseudo-code, it will check, ask for improvements and guide your intuition without revealing the full solution.

You're a very patient leetcode training instructor. Your goal is to help me understand leetcode concepts and improve my overall leetcode abilities for coding tech interviews. You'll send leetcode challenges and ask me to solve them. If I manage to solve it partially or just commit small mistakes, don't just reveal the solution. Instead, trick me into discovering the issue and solving it myself. Only show a solution if I get **everything** wrong or if I explicitly give up. Start with simpler/easy questions and level up as I show progress - for example, if I show I can solve some class of data structure problems easily, move to the next. After each solution, ask for the time and space complexity if I don't provide it. Be kind and explain with visual cues.

LLMs can be a lot of things and can help sharpen your cognition, but you need enough discipline in how you use it, since it's much easier to ask the machine to do the hard-thinking for you.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-25 13:23:51+00:00
It is of value though. Asian farmers were able to use cell phones to check weather and market prices to be able to grow more and sell for a better price [1]. Mobile banking apps have allowed poor Kenyans access to formal financial services, improving financial stability for those most vulnerable [2]. Being able to send money to disparate family members safely and securely protects them from corrupt local informal networks. Access to modern technology developed in first world countries enable poor counties to skip over expensive intermediate steps, like going from no phones to cell towers without building out a land line network. The #saveourgirls social media campaign in response to the Boco Haram kidnappings was started locally, after frustration with lack of action by the inept/corrupt local government, and brought international pressure, support, and aid.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259029112...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/p...
by acdha | 2025-04-25 13:24:46+00:00
It would be better to acknowledge that you used the wrong term the first time than trying to blame marketing.

Signal always provides E2EE and that is always useful because it reduces the problem to worrying about the other end of the conversation, not all of the intermediaries. That doesn’t mean that you can blindly trust the other end, but that’s always true to varying extent - just because they’re using Signal doesn’t mean that their device hasn’t been compromised or that they are not forwarding messages or blabbing about something you expected to be secret. Signal doesn’t promise anything other than that your messages are secure between you and the other party.

That’s the point to focus on rather than trying to redefine end-to-end encryption. It’s why you want to talk about security in the context of a threat model: Signal is designed for normal people, not high-level government officials working with classified information, where they have entire professions because the problem is fundamentally harder and mistakes can have significant consequences.
by mschild | 2025-04-25 13:24:47+00:00
I grew up never needing paper maps. Once I got my license, GPS was ubiquitous. Most modern paper maps are quite the same as Google Maps or equivalents would be though. The underlying core material is the same so I don't think most people would struggle to read it.

I think learning and critical thinking are skills in and of themselves and if you have a magic answering machine that does not require these skills to get an answer (even an incorrect one), it's gonna be a problem. There are already plenty of people that will repeat whatever made up story they hear on social media. With the way LLMs hallucinate and even when corrected double down, it's not going to make it better.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-25 13:26:32+00:00
As someone who has played a fair amount of music with different people in different places, and who has attended quite a few odd little gigs and band practices and playing-in-your-friend's-house type things, as well as other types of mad musical moments, this is to be expected.

The idea of album sales or concert sales or youtube views or whatever being indicitave of music "quality" is a horrid historical perversion which is antithetical to the role music has played and still could maybe play in human life.

The worst thing about the modern commercial music industry, from my perspective, isn't the music that gets produced, but rather this made-up binary of professional music-salespeople ("musicians") on the one hand, and music-consuming plebs on the other.

The professional musician is measured by their album sales and ticket sales and spotify/chart success and their views on the big platforms, and that's it, end of story. The public is allowed an "opinion" on which "superstar" is "better", i.e., they pick kendrick or drake, or one k-pop band or the other, and that's it, you vibe to your type of playlist on spotify and fork over the money for the big shows and that's your musical existence.

I'm not sure how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like stale traditionalism or toothless hippie nostalgia, but I mean it in a real hard sense: "real music" happens when real people express themselves musically, on their own or in a communal setting.

It can be a kid doing her fifth piano class and you play two chords repeatedly and ask her to pick something in the room and say something about it and then you both take turns throwing out a melody and see where you end up. It can be three people hungover around a kitchen table who swap instruments for a few tunes, 5 friends in a garage screaming about their feelings, 10 friends in a cacophonous and smoky practice studio somewhere.

Your friend who never played any instrument who came along to hang out who starts chanting melodically and repetitively into a spare microphone at some stage can be the one who pushes the thing to some new level no one saw coming, and then there you all are, in this new musical moment.

Anyway. I didn't mean to rant there, but maybe you get my point.
by exe34 | 2025-04-25 13:26:34+00:00
some of us think in those terms and daily have to fight those who want 20 different objects, each 5-10 deep in inheritance, to achieve the same thing.

I wouldn't say 100 functions over one data structure, but e.g. in python I prefer a few data structures like dictionary and array, with 10-30 top level functions that operate over those.

if your requirements are fixed, it's easy to go nuts and design all kinds of object hierarchies - but if your requirements change a lot, I find it much easier to stay close to the original structure of the data that lives in the many files, and operate on those structures.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-25 13:26:38+00:00
We have found out, it's just that the people who do the finding out generally have money, so their opinion is automatically discounted.

It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.

Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.

There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.
by otherjason | 2025-04-25 13:27:00+00:00
This is the common argument from proponents of compiler autovectorization. An example like what you have is very simple, so modern compilers would turn it into SIMD code without a problem.

In practice, though, the cases that compilers can successfully autovectorize are very limited relative to the total problem space that SIMD is solving. Plus, if I rely on that, it leaves me vulnerable to regressions in the compiler vectorizer.

Ultimately for me, I would rather write the implementation myself and know what is being generated versus trying to write high-level code in just the right way to make the compiler generate what I want.
by dragandj | 2025-04-25 13:27:42+00:00
Cafes CAN use AI generated music, but WHY would they use it? Last time I checked there's millions of hours of human-produced music. The only reason might be the price, but AFAIK cafes have to pay a flat price to national music associations regardless of the actual music that they play. The downside is that AI-generated music might be cringe and chase away the customers. At best, cafes have no upside and no downside. At worst, they close the doors.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-04-25 13:27:45+00:00
I'd argue it's a bad candidate because it doesn't run in a normal person computing environment. I can't write a Python application and give it to another normie and have them able to run it, it doesn't run on a Phone, it doesn't run on a web browser.

So it's teaching them a language they can't use to augment their work between or pass their work to other non-techies.
by namaria | 2025-04-25 13:28:03+00:00
If anyone performing "rhetorical gymnastics" here is you. I've explained my position in very straightforward words.

I have worked with big audit. I have an informed opinion on what I find trustworthy in that domain.

This ain't it. There's no need to pretend I have said anything other than "personal data is not safe in the hand of corporations that profit from personal data".

I don't feel compelled to respond any further to fallacies and attacks.
by sebstefan | 2025-04-25 13:28:05+00:00
But also like as a matter of principle it's annoying when you're working on a big codebase, and you have weird, hidden, silently explosive unwritten contracts between random components

Package managers is an especially bad example because github projects typically are github.com/author-name/words-separated-by-dashes

So you will probably have somebody along the way pester you about allowing dashes between words, to play nice with github

But who's to know if the guy making that change will think of disallowing dashes at the start of the words? Likely he'll just add \- to /[A-Z\-]+/

Suddenly the script you wrote starts getting passed positional arguments that have dashes in them, until some wise guy tries to create a package called `--verbose`, then notices unintended effects on your pages, goes ahead trying `--verbose -- react`, ...

So anyway -- if I'm making a heavily reusable piece of code like this I make it as general purpose as possible in a way that makes it impossible to mis-use it
by sightbroke | 2025-04-25 13:28:15+00:00
> “Some important points are that it would not be pollution-free. Coal is still very dirty,” said Baker, conceding that perhaps the pollution would no longer be airborne, but “water and soil would still be at risk.”

Not emission free as I am reading it.

Still, if economically viable at reducing amount of CO2 released not effectively terrible as it extends the life of existing infrastructure to ease transition to replacement.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-25 13:29:17+00:00
There’s a few trends at play:

Young people in Europe and North America do not use Facebook anymore, if they even have an account at all.

It is still popular among older users in North America. This is one of the wealthiest demographics on earth, so Facebook’s advertising model will be ok for the foreseeable future.

Growth is still positive on Instagram and WhatsApp, though Instagram’s engagement levels have begun to decline.

Facebook’s main growth areas for all three apps are in the developing world. They pay carriers to allow Facebook to be accessed without counting against user data limits, so in a lot of these countries Facebook is synonymous with The Internet. Young people in these countries still see Facebook as cool, and they aren’t as likely to seek out platforms to avoid their parents on. The key problem is that these markets are not worth very much to advertisers because they have low levels of discretionary spending. This makes operating in these markets a long play for Meta; they spend some money on subsidies to build a user base in the hope that the users will gain higher levels of discretionary spending in the future, increasing the value of the market for advertisers.
by bluGill | 2025-04-25 13:29:28+00:00
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/73052/technomagica-progres... - it is a fiction story so it might or might not be to your taste. The story is a soviet (or just after the fall) scientists it reborn in a fantasy/magic world - like most such stories there is constant comparisons to the old world, but the old world is the soviet one not the western one. It probably isn't a comprehensive list, but it is a good overview of who the soviets saw as important.
by 2mlWQbCK | 2025-04-25 13:30:26+00:00
I don't think I ever had a A4 printer that could not also print Letter. It is almost certainly the exact same models that they also sell in the US, but with just some bit flipped in the firmware to change the default paper size.

My current printer, like most printers I believe, can be configured to print custom sizes. The maximum is something like 9 or 9.5 inches wide IIRC, and the length can be set much longer.
by qhwudbebd | 2025-04-25 13:31:15+00:00
I hope the images support in the responses API is more competently executed than the mess piling up in the v1/images/generations endpoint.

To pick an example, we have a model parameter and a response_format parameter. The response_format parameter selects whether image data should be returned as a URL (old method) or directly, base64-encoded. The new model only supports base64, whereas the old models default to a URL return, which is fine and understandable.

But the endpoint refuses to accept any value for response_format including b64_json with the new model, so you can't set-and-forget the new behaviour and allow the model to be parameterised without worrying about it. Instead, you have to request the new behaviour with the older models, and not request it (but still get it) with the new one. sigh
by arkh | 2025-04-25 13:31:33+00:00
I'm far from an AI enthusiast but concerning:

> There is a good chance that there will be a generational skill atrophy in the future, as less people will be inclined to develop the experience required to use AI as a helper, but not depend on it.

I don't how to care for livestock or what to do to prepare and can a pig or a cow. I could learn it. But I'll keep using the way of least resistance and get it from my butcher. Or to be more technological: I'd have to learn how to make a bare OS capable of starting from a motherboard, it still does not prevent me from deploying k8s clusters and coding apps to run on it.
by division_by_0 | 2025-04-25 13:31:38+00:00
I just saw Nue and Datastar suggested somewhere, but have not had time to check them out yet, but I will probably stick with Svelte, need to get stuff built.

One thing that also came to mind regarding Svelte 5 is that I always use untrack() for $effect() and declare dependencies explicitly, otherwise Svelte 5 becomes too magical for me.
by deeThrow94 | 2025-04-25 13:32:07+00:00
> Hypocrisy is an even worse trait than flaming people.

Eh I mean everyone's a hypocrite if you dig deep enough—we're all a big nest of contradictions internally. Recognition of this and accountability is paramount though. He could have simply owned his mistake and swallowed his pride and this wouldn't have been such an issue.
by formerly_proven | 2025-04-25 13:32:11+00:00
Microsoft couldn't have telegraphed their intentions more clearly if they tried, yet tons and tons of people and organizations fell for it (again!).

VS Code source is under MIT, but the built product is under an EULA - and all Microsoft extensions are under an EULA that requires the use of the EULA build.

As has been already posted multiple times here... https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
by Macha | 2025-04-25 13:32:18+00:00
I think if it was a distro like VSCodium, you could call it a fork. But Monaco is a small piece of VS Code. It's a text widget. A _nice_ text widget, but you can play with bare Monaco here:

https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/playground.html

You could shove this widget alone into electron and call the result a text editor, and I mean, Notepad was basically this for the windows text entry component for years, but it's a long way away from VS Code, or from Theia.
by skydhash | 2025-04-25 13:32:44+00:00
Java, C# are good for these kind of situation where you want to imitate the business jargon, but in a technical form. But programming languages like CL, clojure, and APL have a more elegant and flexible way to describe the same solution. And in the end easier to adapt. Because in the end, the business jargon is very flexible (business objectives and policies is likely to change next quarter). And in Java, rewriting means changing a lot of line of code (easier with the IDE).

The data rarely changes, but you have to put a name on it, and those names are dependent on policies. That's the issue most standard programming languages. In functional and APL, you don't name your data, you just document its shape[0]. Then when your policies are known, you just write them using the functions that can act on each data type (lists, set, hash, primitives, functions,...). Policy changes just means a little bit of reshuffling.

[0]: In the parent example, CustomerConceptNo{127,211,3) are the same data, but with various transformations applied and with different methods to use. In functional languages, you will only have a customer data blob (probably coming from some DB). Then a chain of functions that would pipe out CustomerConceptNo{127,211,3) form when they are are actually need (generally in the interface. But they be composed of the same data structures that the original blob have, so all your base functions do not automatically becomes obsolete.
by frankc | 2025-04-25 13:33:05+00:00
This is just wrong. I don't know how else to say it as this point. If you are doing something novel, you need to be a lot more specific in what you tell it to do, but it can still put it together 5x faster than you can do manually. It's like saying you can't do something novel with junior developers. On their own? Not really. Guided by someone experienced who can do the systems design and has the domain knowledge to be the product manager? Yes, you definitely can. And it's not different with advanced LLMs. It's even better than having junior developer's working for you because they don't get tired or bored. They won't slack on writing docs or tests. I have written novel systems by having LLMs do the grunt work, and they have better docs and tests than I have ever done before because it's willing to do the things I don't find as interesting without complaint.
by immibis | 2025-04-25 13:33:29+00:00
Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here"

This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace.

For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server.

I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.
by udit99 | 2025-04-25 13:34:00+00:00
Yeah, you're probably right. I agree that the problem might be shifting focus every year but the one difference with your math examples is that Singapore Math/Common Core math etc. all seem like different systems that don't build on top of each other. You (I'm assuming here) can't focus on Singapore Math one year, then the next year to add Common Core math on top of that etc. Its one or the other.

Spaced repetition on the other hand is a cross-disciplinary technique that just needs to be introduced and kept there. There's nothing else out there to substitute it with. If the young staff hype it up one year and then it becomes part of the curriculum and then they move on to other fancy edtech things, then there's nothing wrong with it.