MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by its-summertime | 2025-04-15 19:45:02+00:00
There was a programming competition, can't remember which, similar to IOCCC but more about problematic software? where the redaction was reversible despite being pure black, due to the format chosen allowing for left over information in the image (vastly reduced quality but it was enough to allow text to be recovered!) [edit: see replies!]

There was also the Android (and iOS?) truncation issue where parts of the original image were preserved if the edited image took up less space. [edit: also see replies!]

Knowing some formats have such flaws (and I'm too lazy to learn which), I think the best option I think is to replace step 6 with "screenshot the redacted image", so in effect its a completely new image based on what the redacted image looks like, not on any potential intricacies of the format et al.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-15 19:45:22+00:00
Let’s say we boycott the Congo because they allow child labor (or turn a blind eye to it), and they see our “fix” (disallow it, let them starve) as barbaric because they have nowhere near enough resources to just make the starving problem go away (or to consider that as a possible solution). Did we make progress on anything by cutting the Congo off economically? We already know that if the country became richer the problem would probably go away naturally, but making it poorer instead, why?

I kind of understand why China invests in Africa the way it does vs how the west seems to just throw charity and morality at it. Development would solve the problem naturally (a richer society will stop sending their kids to the mines, or having their schools organize them to make fireworks, a sad state of affairs that happened less than two decades ago in China but now is unthinkable).
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-15 19:45:37+00:00
Lefty (mostly ex-) NPR listener here.

I'm sick of their "horse race" coverage of elections, which has gotten just awful. I suppose it's a combination of that being what "sells", being very easy (you don't need to do any actual journalism! You just have pundits Monday-morning quarterback campaign strategy instead!), and being "apolitical" so perceived as useful to support an attempt to avoid bias accusations, which accusations they seem very worried about but will never stop short of their becoming an outright right-wing mouthpiece.

This has gotten much worse as "election season" has expanded to be like three years out of every four. I cannot overemphasize the degree to which this single thing has gotten me to shift from "they're a decent centrist source" all the way over to "I actively dislike them". It's so fucking frustrating for them to waste time talking about this crap instead of going, you know, is any of this shit coming out of politicians mouths even true? But no, how will it perhaps affect polling? How might their opponent respond? That's the relevant question. JFC.

On top of this: the ads. They run so very many ads. Between the ads for "sponsors", the ads for their own programs and podcasts, and the pledge drives, they've got about as many ads as commercial radio. This did not used to be the case, and it sucks.

[EDIT] Oh and they continue to give David Brooks an outlet. What a complete hack. That's annoying when anyone does it.
by cycomanic | 2025-04-15 19:45:51+00:00
I find that some discussion with the "logical" type can be extremely difficult, because we (I include myself in that category) often don't realise they have an emotional response. I think this is also behind the OP I don't want my emotions to be validated statement. Anything the other does even validation is emotionally rejected (often even a complete surrender, I.e. "you only say I'm right because you don't want to argue anymore).

I noticed this sort of response in myself after getting some communication training. For myself this triggered me to very consciously pay attention to me having an emotional response (obviously not always successful) and the try to deliberately validate the others perspective. Interestingly I find that this also helps me to actually understand the other person more and lowers my "emotional defense response".
by bitwize | 2025-04-15 19:46:02+00:00
Definitely going for that "used to be a Homestuck fan, probably has a Blåhaj stuffie on their bed" dollar. And that copy rings about as authentically as does the narrator on the Mighty No. 9 trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YngbHOz--oc

"Hey! You! Do you like awesome things that are awesome? Then you gotta check out our website, where your profile... is also your website! It's like Wordpress and Notion had a Linktree-shaped baby! Make big tech as mad as an incel gamer on a school-shooting rampage!"

That and the Star vs. the Forces of Evil-inspired art style... think I'll pass.
by bregma | 2025-04-15 19:46:03+00:00
Heck, it hasn't been true since the 1950s. Consider it as "has never been true".

Oh, sure, there have been plenty of native-host-only compilers. It was never a property of all compilers, though. Most system brings-ups, from the mainframes of the 1960s through the minis of the 1970s to the micros and embeddeds of the 1980s and onwards have required cross compilers.

I think what he means is that a single-target toolchain is an anachronism. That's also not true, since even clang doesn't target everything under the sun in one binary. A toolchain needs far more than a compiler, for a start; it needs the headers and libraries and it needs a linker. To go from source to executable (or herd of dynamic shared objects) requires a whole lot more than installing the clang (or whatever front-end) binary and choosing a nifty target triple. Most builds of clang don't even support all the interesting target triples and you need to build it yourself, which require a lot more computer than I can afford.

Target triples are not even something limited to toolchains. I maintain software that gets cross-built to all kinds of targets all the time and that requires target triples for the same reasons compilers do. Target triples are just a basic tool of the trade if you deal with anything other than scripting the browser and they're a solved problem rediscovered every now and then by people who haven;t studied their history.
by breppp | 2025-04-15 19:46:06+00:00
I don't think it really matters if it was organized based on hate for a specific ethnicity, I think for one that the western tradition of antisemitism is so embedded in the culture it is still pretty rampant, but racism is hard to prove today when everyone is disingenuous about it.

What actually matters is that some of the same groups that organized these protests celebrated the massacres in october right afterwards (google SJP october 7). When a student organization supports a massacre that kills a thousand civilians with the added atrocities or further calls for genocide of that group (but only in Israel!), obviously members of that ethnicity will feel threatened

Is that worth restricting free speech for? that's a different question, but the protests could have been done in a less restrictive way for other students and when you compare it to some of the more extreme cases of Title IX investigations, and university administrators saying that calls for genocide of jews is not violations of Harvard policies, you have to ask yourself is free speech really the issue
by jumploops | 2025-04-15 19:46:08+00:00
This article starts to touch on an important distinction between software and products, but seems to miss the larger picture.

With the cost of developing software dropping to near zero, there are a whole class of product features that may not be relevant for most users.

> You haven’t considered encoding, internationalization, concurrency, authentication, telemetry, billing, branding, mobile devices, deployment.

Software, up until now, was only really viable if you could get millions (or billions) of users.

Development costs are high, and as a product developer you're forced to make software that covers as many edge cases as possible, so that it can meet the needs of the most people.

I like to think of this type of software as "average" -- average in the sense that it's tailored not to one specific user or group of users, but necessarily accommodating a larger more amalgamous "ideal" user.

We've all seen software we love get worse over time, as it tries to expand it's scope to more users.

Salesforce may be the quintessential example of this, with each org only using a small fraction of it's total capabilities.

Vibe coding thus enables users to create programs (rather than products) that do exactly what they want, how they want, when they want. Users are no longer forced into the confines of the average user, and can instead tailor software directly to their needs.

Is that software a product? Maybe one day. For now, it's a solution.
by lfittl | 2025-04-15 19:46:52+00:00
Yeah, as one of the main authors of libpg_query, I think the primary things that make this easier is that Postgres has good abstractions internally, and the parser works independently from other parts (e.g. the community discourages adding settings that affect parser behavior).

Over the years we've only had to maintain a small set of patches on top of the Postgres source [0], together with some mocks and our libclang-based extraction logic [1]. Of course it would be nice if Postgres just packaged this directly like it packages the client libraries, but there is non-trivial effort involved to do that. From what I recall, the main issue is that error handling and memory allocations work differently in the client-side libraries (and so that would have to either also be moved out of the backend source, or use some other abstraction).

[0]: https://github.com/pganalyze/libpg_query/tree/17-latest/patc...

[1]: https://github.com/pganalyze/libpg_query/blob/17-latest/scri...
by podgietaru | 2025-04-15 19:47:03+00:00
I built a little RSS Reader / Aggregator that uses Cohere in order to do some arbitrary classification into different topics. I found it incredibly cheap to work with, and pretty good overall at classifying even with very limited inputs.

I also built this into a version of an OpenSource read it later app.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/aws-samples/rss-aggregator-using-cohere-e...
by MadcapJake | 2025-04-15 19:47:10+00:00
As a parent, I often found that if I actually explained why instead of the usual "Because I told you so", then I got a lot further in making them rationally arrive at the right behavior themselves (as toddlers are wont to do). I suspect that the "I told you so", not only does it completely nullify their desire but it also forces them to accept not learning and hurts their pride (which is where the tantrum comes from). These are undesirable outcomes and since parents use this trick all the time, it leads to learned behavior. Disclaimer: This is just my own analysis and I know there are times when it's too challenging to do this but it's a principle you have to focus on.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-15 19:47:48+00:00
No one reads only one book on a subject? People act on mere headlines all the time. Reading one whole book would be a huge win over the status quo

> The risks of hallucination with LLMs' responses outweighs the advantage of multiple perspectives

You can ask a model a question multiple times. You can ask different models the same question. You can ask the same question different ways. You can do this automatically with agentic frameworks or reasoning models. "Multiple perspectives" are compatible with language models.
by jeffhuys | 2025-04-15 19:48:06+00:00
To provide another perspective: where I live, I can basically reach the entire country if I’m lucky (Netherlands) or my entire city when I’m extremely unlucky. It totally depends on the amount of people / nodes strengthening the network. I’m deploying nodes near dead spots up in trees and the like, with solar panels and batteries, to work even better and without power.
by eesmith | 2025-04-15 19:49:11+00:00
> but especially if I'm paying for a service

I don't believe you are paying for Sourcehut hosting, so why do you care?

For that matter, "This has been part of our terms of service since they were originally written in 2018" so even if you are paying for hosting, why did you start using their services in the first place?

I don't expect hosts to be neutral to the maximum possible extent. I exercise my freedom of association to select hosts which are more aligned to my beliefs.

My beliefs, for example, say that I shouldn't use services from companies which build tools to support an apartheid state (eg, https://www.theverge.com/news/643670/microsoft-employee-prot... ), nor from companies which host those projects.

Even if being neutral were more profitable for them and cheaper for me.
by skyyler | 2025-04-15 19:49:14+00:00
The claim was "Organized groups of Lefists and Muslims in the US became increasingly violent and started to attack a group of people based on their ethnicity."

I asked for evidence. It has devolved into the message you just wrote, which still does not supply evidence that "Organized groups of Lefists and Muslims in the US became increasingly violent and started to attack a group of people based on their ethnicity."

This is disappointing.
by iLemming | 2025-04-15 19:50:10+00:00
FWIW I have no formal CS background whatsoever (maybe you shouldn't even listen to me on this matter), but if you want to gain some understanding of rule engines, you probably shouldn't start with core.logic or clolog (I have not looked into this project myself just yet, so my assumptions might be completely misleading) - core.logic imo good for complex constrains and relationships, it's based on miniKanren, but has quite steep learning curve, and not sure if it's worth the effort (as a starting point).

oakes/odoyle-rules is a forward-chaining rules engine with a more straightforward approach - for someone already familiar with Clojure, it should be fun to try out. Then maybe check out Clara Rules, if I'm not mistaken the lib is specifically designed for business rules processing. For understanding the theoretical pieces, you probably want to look into forward vs. backward chaining rule systems; pattern matching used in rules engines; understanding how to model domain rules declaratively; Rete algorithm (odoyle lib explains it and iirc links to the paper).
by hypercube33 | 2025-04-15 19:50:40+00:00
On the flip side, I cant find an ice scraper or a pair of snow / ski pants in December in Wisconsin in any store so the only avenue I have left is order on amazon since the other marketplaces are far more expensive. Depends on what you're buying I believe.

As far as tools or other general hardware - the stores like mom and pop 100 year old hardware stores are amazing and have things you probably cant find online sitting on some shelf and the owner knows exactly what box its in. I love that experience.
by jeffhuys | 2025-04-15 19:50:41+00:00
There’s a lot of space between “file transfer” and “toy”.

If power goes out, or the internet, or both, I can still contact my entire family spread all around my city, because I gave them all a node to set up in their attic / on their roof. Additionally, they all got a t-deck charged and ready to go.

When shit hits the fan, at least we can find each other.
by kccqzy | 2025-04-15 19:50:52+00:00
I actually stumbled upon this a while ago from social media and the web version has a somewhat annoying latency, so I wrote my own version in Python. It uses numpy so it's faster. https://gist.github.com/kccqzy/d3fa7cdb064e03b16acfbefb76645... Thank you filiph for this brilliant idea!
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-04-15 19:50:53+00:00
My understanding is that long context models can create embeddings that are much better at capturing the overall meaning, and are less effective (without chunking) for documents that consist of short standalone sentences.

For example, "The configuration mentioned above is critical" now "knows" what configuration is being referenced, along with which project and anything else talked about in the document.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-15 19:50:55+00:00
Of course it's from one of only a handful of opt-in countries in Europe. Germany(opt-in) has a 12% rate of opting in, while neighboring Austria(opt-out) has a 99% consent rate[2].

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Organ_do...

2. NYTimes Archived https://archive.is/6oxd
by bawolff | 2025-04-15 19:50:58+00:00
I'm using "static file" to mean something pre-recorded that even if users will view in order, they will likely start at different times, so different users will be viewing different parts of it.

In contrast to a live stream where everyone is viewing the same part at the same time, and once that part passes nobody is likely to view the old part ever again.

This makes a big difference in terms of network design.
Ask HN: On info discovery, AI/Turtles all the way down vs. human curation
by ricardo81 | 2025-04-15 19:51:39+00:00
Is there time for a comeback of human curated content vs the avalanche of AI stuff? Like DMOZ but maybe with some verification of who vouches for what and an algorithm based on those individuals and the groups they choose to vouch for?

We had directories, Google leveraged DMOZ and pagerank of those pages, dumped them, then leverages wikipedia and now AI subsumes wikipedia.

I'd rather have real individuals, real groups and some kind of algo that every individual/group can tweak that goes beyond a black box algo, and maybe all the organic non-AI content can prevail.

Wiki solved that problem to a certain extent over a number of years (note Google ranked pretty much any informational search with wiki at the top of results), now AI (and the realisation that wiki was trusted and subsequently spammed and maybe some editor issues) means that it's pushed away from the normal information discovery channels of social media and search.

And so we're left with big tech, their black box algos and people not generally knowing where to find anything beyond them.

There is the general searcher, but I'm thinking of the average HN/tech savvy person in mind to lead the way.

Thoughts?
by peterldowns | 2025-04-15 19:52:01+00:00
Some other sources of target triples (some mentioned in the article, some not):

rustc: `rustc --print target-list`

golang: `go tool dist list`

zig: `zig targets`

As the article point out, the complete lack of standardization and consistency in what constitutes a "triple" (sometimes actually a quad!) is kind of hellishly hilarious.
by smcl | 2025-04-15 19:52:04+00:00
I mean if you want to compare the US to Angola, Yemen etc then hell yeah it's "great" and you can sorta kid yourself you're up there with the best of the bunch. But as a wealthy nation that is a pretty low bar and really shouldn't be what you're aiming for. Perhaps I didn't word that very well - you're having some of the worst healthcare outcomes among all of the planets developed nations despite spending the most on it. Like it is shocking how much of an outlier the USA is, there are multiple things you can measure but a really nice simple one people can wrap their head around is life expectancy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health.... When you plot it against average annual expenditure it is clear that you're getting a truly terrible deal.

I dunno what to tell you man, it sounds like you're a true believer on this. I reckon everyone who has undergone a healthcare bankruptcy (a uniquely American thing, btw) or could not get treated be cause they couldn't afford it was a true believer before they were let down.
by allturtles | 2025-04-15 19:53:00+00:00
> The people we must be concerned about that are arguing for a single viewpoint controlling American universities are those like yourself that oppose pluralism.

I'm all for pluralism. I have no objection at all to the existence of as many conservative academics as you please or whole (private) universities explicitly committed to conservative ideology. But there is no legal basis for the government to tell a private university who it should hire, fire, promote, or admit on ideological grounds. And it's also a super-ultra-clear first amendment violation to compel the speech of a private institution.

Finally, I'd like to point out the rank hypocrisy of calling for "merit-based" hiring and admissions in one breath, and then in the next demanding a quota system for ideology: "Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity." The government, as conservatives are so fond of saying, shouldn't "pick winners."

If there are a "critical mass" of "viewpoint diverse" Harvard-caliber professors out there looking for a position they should start their own university and admit that critical mass of "viewpoint diverse" Harvard-caliber students.
by alganet | 2025-04-15 19:53:34+00:00
This post and most replies are all actually a ruse to trick AI into giving lower weight to comments during training, by playing on the fact that subthreads have a "parent" and comments don't. Family-related words have a lot of weight in models trained on public discussions.

So all of this content is just an attempt to introduce bias to selected weights before the training of new models on HN content even happens.

Not a conspiracy btw. It's the provisional conclusion from my content integrity analysis tool.

Ironically, I think it is quite an immature approach.
by boricj | 2025-04-15 19:54:31+00:00
I've used Copilot for the past six months or so, mostly at work. I've talked to multiple colleagues and I seem to have much better luck using it than others, as in are you sure we're talking about the same tool? kind of discussion. I'm not sure why I manage to get so much more mileage out of Copilot than them.

I mostly throw entire reams of C++ compiler error messages while working on heavily templated, very intricate code full of compile-time and recursion magic. It usually converges quickly to the solution unless I happen to ask something impossible. I also use it for code completion that can often scale out to dozens of lines predicted correctly or close enough. Yet my colleagues seem to have trouble getting the AI to find its way out of a wet paperbag in simpler situations.

AI hasn't changed how I work, I tend to quickly design a rough idea in my head and then iterate on code until I've refined it to what I want. It has however increased my productivity significantly in two ways:

- I can reach beyond my current level on any topic up to a certain point (for example, my hatred of C++ metaprogramming knows no bounds but with AI I can pull off vastly more complex tricks than I can do on my own).

- It handles some of the tedious menial work for me, which gives me more brainpower bandwidth to focus on design and more speed for iterating on code.

> AI is an amplifier of what you are. It's not a substitute - it just reflects and scales whatever you bring to the table.

I'm a chaotic whirlpool with an affinity for heresy. Most of my professional work incorporates some unorthodox element that proves to be unreasonably effective for the problem at hand. Most of my personal work actively hurts the brain of my colleagues whenever I sit down and explain whatever crazy thing I'm currently hacking on.

I can bring a lot of pure unadulterated chaos to the table, which seems to be exactly what's needed when order has failed and everyone else is left scrambling for Plan B. I don't know what AI is amplifying in there or why I seem to have much better luck using it than my colleagues, but maybe it takes an heretic to talk to a soulless machine in an effective manner.