MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skrebbel | 2025-04-02 17:34:44+00:00
My wife convinced me that we should buy a dark gray car cause it would be less obviously dirty. I deeply regret not trying harder to convince her back, so we'd get a bright red or yellow one instead. It's super hard to find the car back on a parking lot and who cares when it's dirty? Bright colors are nice. I'm now trying to compensate by only buying colorful clothing going forward.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-02 17:34:52+00:00
My kids and I were kind of flabbergasted after listening to the "Song Exploder" podcast's episode on the Weezer song "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" about how Rivers Cuomo writes songs.

Basically, he obscures interesting chord progressions of songs he finds by recording his own simplified version without the song's original rhythm. Then he takes his spreadsheet he made over years, of lyrical phrases he came up with that he thinks will sound good in a song, organized by number of syllables and where the accent lands. Then, finally, some time in the futuer, once he has forgotten the original song's construction, he takes out the chord progression and finds places to fit different kinds of lyrical phrases.

It blew us away to know that his lyrics have no meaning whatsoever. In fact, that particular song was the result of a conversation between two teachers he overheard at one of his children's end of year gettogether.

It is quite extraordinary, and he is quite good at it, though we have few Weezer songs in our playlist.

https://songexploder.net/weezer
by navbaker | 2025-04-02 17:35:04+00:00
Our third grader just started viola this school year and I was amazed at how cheap the rental was! I was expecting to get raked over the coals monthly, but it was just a little over $100 for the entire year. The chin rest was one thing we didn’t have to pay for, the schools have the younger kids use a big foam sponge attached with a rubber band.
by dkjaudyeqooe | 2025-04-02 17:35:06+00:00
I'm not allowed to say "you're missing the point" because it's against HN rules, but maybe don't focus on this particular item so much?

It illustrates the dynamics of strictures on global trade with a simple item that has several inputs and that China is the most likely to win out in these sorts of situations because of their low cost advantage.

Cars or something are probably a better example but there are so many complicating factors that would make it less illustrative.
by parpfish | 2025-04-02 17:35:33+00:00
> I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.

could a factor driving current monotone style be less about aesthetics and taste and more that we're all just cognitively exhausted?

everything is fighting for our attention because our attention has been monetized. so when something bland shows up, it simultaneously provides a bit of respite and can seem more 'trustworthy' because it isn't clamoring for your attention.

if i were buying some kitchen appliances and i had a choice between a brightly colored models or a stark, utilitarian models, i have to admit that the stark ones have appeal because they "look professional" (even though it may not actually be pro quality) and "the color is just a sales gimmick" (even though boring industrial grey is also a sales gimmick)
by robinsonb5 | 2025-04-02 17:36:09+00:00
Excessive use of colour can certainly be vulgar - but restrained use is a valuable tool for clarity. As I type this, Firefox shows no hint at all that it has input focus, other than the tab's background being very slightly lighter and the tab's title text being very slightly darker. It's not so very long ago that colour would have been used to communicate this information clearly and unambiguously.
by gh0stcat | 2025-04-02 17:36:24+00:00
I quit my last job because I was so destroyed by anxiety, to the point I had physical issues like shortness of breath, throat tightness, racing thoughts and even some thoughts of not wanting to exist anymore. I quit that job to focus on getting healthy. Now that I am feeling healthier though, this job market is destroying me and I haven’t been able to get a “true” software developer role since. I do software at a meat manufacturer and its very chill. The funny thing is that I have so much mental energy that I can work on stuff I want to. Before I was doing backend software development but wasn’t super passionate about the technology. Now I am learning vulkan, ray tracing, 3d modeling and rigging, among other things. So idk I would love a job in those things, but for now having a less demanding job is better for me than a more demanding job doing something I am not that passionate about.
by guyzero | 2025-04-02 17:36:50+00:00
There's a really interesting book about this exact topic: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/chromophobia

edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.

I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.

"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."
by numpad0 | 2025-04-02 17:37:08+00:00
If you look close, they seem to have been always committed to create and maintain an impression that a) Nintendo makes perfect products that just works, and b) you can't negotiate a deal to your advantages with Nintendo. And I think it has to be part of their hardwired company policy as a surviving hanafuda card manufacturer in Kyoto - those cards were used in literally yakuza-controlled underground gambling for a long time.

I mean, just go watch The Godfather, and think how would you sell him a product, or worse yet, manufacture mass-market products that isn't intended for his acquaintances but he would be extremely interested with purchasing and using in substantial numbers. Lots of Nintendo behaviors and customer horror stories start making total sense.

(and Valve behaviors too. they have their own, no less adamant than Nintendo policies that you start noticing after a while)
by nyrikki | 2025-04-02 17:37:31+00:00
3-5 years typical, when I was looking at the newer ones at an auction site to play with most were IR with some bluetooth etc..

The link you provided appear to probably be IR based, but it was one of the brands that was a dead end for official docs when I was looking at them.

The newest ones seem to be using Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR) that was introduced in Bluetooth 5.4, but I couldn't find those type for a price I was willing to pay.

Nordic Semiconductors has an Apache licensed SDK and RToS, I didn't find the device and time to play with it but bookmarked it.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-software/nRF...
by malux85 | 2025-04-02 17:37:38+00:00
Also - try and adopt a growth mindset with a “can do” attitude.

It’s not your job to submit perfect, flawless code, it’s your job to understand the problem and submit a solution to the best of your abilities.

When you get feedback, don’t see it as criticism, see it as a mis-communication of requirements (how can we get better at that) or a learning chance (oh wow I never thought of that - yes let me fix it asap)

If there was something to learn genuinely then learn it, if there was someone just nit picking then be flexible and adopt their standards (within reason)

Part of being senior dev is unblocking and helping others, and a simple, positive, “can do” attitude and asking people “how can I help you more” can help the organisations culture and productivity more than “perfect code”

Naturally it is also possible you’re working in a place with a bad culture, in which case you need to switch.
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-02 17:37:53+00:00
no not so simple. Another underlying fear is that many people are predators. Universal income would enable unwanted predators. Of course, successful predators have already implemented long term income for their groups that is satisfactory to themselves and their chosen members. Many successful examples show that membership must be earned, showing some basic positives. Freeloading is also a fear, but it is related to gluttony. Successful people are also often gluttons, so that is not solved. Rivalry means "it is not enough to succeed ourselves, the opponent must lose" .. and gluttons tend to be rivalrous of other gluttons.
by mtlynch | 2025-04-02 17:38:05+00:00
Maybe you can, but I haven't seen anyone do that. It is tricky because the cases are apparently glued shut, so you need to do some delicate surgery to access the screen without breaking the device.[0, 1]

[0] https://blog.lidskialf.net/2021/02/08/turning-an-old-kindle-...

[1] https://www.instructables.com/Amazon-Kindle-e-ink-Screen-Tra...
by klausa | 2025-04-02 17:39:25+00:00
It's the "other stuff"/flavor compounds, definitely.

I don't think brewed coffee contains any meaningful amounts of sugar?

Coffee (filter/brewed, not espresso) is ~98.5% water by weight, even if the Eugenioides species has more sugar in the beans than Arabica (it might! literally no idea here) — if the difference would be "just" down to the sugar levels, I don't think it would be noticeable at the dilution levels we're talking about.

The difference in the natural sweetness vs adding sugar is an interesting question, honestly!

Sugar is usually added to coffee to hide/mask/round out the bitterness; whether naturally occurring or from overly developed roast. But it also masks/drowns out other notes, too. You'll get less bitterness, but less of the acidity, the floralness, of all the other subtleties that can make coffee great — you'll get _sugar_ sweetness (and it's a very different kind of sweetness than coffee can naturally have!), and less of everything else.

Eugenioides is different because it just doesn't have that baseline note of bitter/hashness _at all_, and it's naturally pretty sweet.

Instead of sugar, I think the "magic berries" (I never tried!) that mess with your bitterness perception might work better? I'm actually now curious to try it out...
by theoryofx | 2025-04-02 17:40:51+00:00
"these exploits that need a human in the loop to deploy -- I'd be more worried about who you let near your electronics "

These devices are flashed in factories in China and receive firmware updates over the air from China. There's no human required.

"you need a human analyst to listen to the interception. Perhaps a second to translate it."

Have you missed out on this new "AI" thing everyone is talking about?
by 0xCE0 | 2025-04-02 17:41:00+00:00
Here are couple of thoughts:

- Whenever anxiety fills my mind, I like to look deep space images to remind myself that all the human problems here on Earth are just made up. No other animal cares "economy", "startups", "performance reviews", "jiras" etc. What we humans have created here is truly form of "matrix" that forces to play by its rules, but it is illusion.

- If you think what other people think of you, the most probable answer is, they don't think anything of you, or if they think, one such thinking might last ~10 seconds. There are just too many people and too little time to think other people. No one probably cares, at least that is my own experience.

- I have always been the slowest performer in my jobs (and many times got special coaching/discussions because of that), yet it usually have been me who got promotions. It is because faster people usually just churn the same stuff, while my slow work has given me time to think what the work is actually about, and produce something completely new line of thinking and valuables that other people just don't do, because they just keep churching and churning the same.

- Keep up with the most important basics: sleep, healthy food, and physical exercise, to have energy for mental work.
by dkjaudyeqooe | 2025-04-02 17:41:32+00:00
Besides the time and cost to do that, which may make it uneconomic, there is also the fact that their inputs would be subject to tariffs in the US and exports to other countries from the US would be subject to retaliatory tariffs.

Your point is basically Trump propaganda at this point. Tariffs have historically had unintended consequences. For instance the tariffs on LCD screens basically killed the laptop industry in the US.

Maybe, just maybe, after 20 years of tariffs it might come true, for a limited selection of products, but consumers would be paying higher prices in the meantime, which may destroy the market.
by apetresc | 2025-04-02 17:42:53+00:00
I vaguely remember an old MSC or TWIM or something that described (the possibility of) a new authentication mechanism whereby I could set up either a dummy homeserver or something in .well_known that would allow me to use my own domain but without needing to use my own homeserver for the actual traffic. Sort of like an auth-only homeserver, if you will.

Is that part of MAS? Was that initiative ever fully-baked? Or am I just misremembering?
by brewtide | 2025-04-02 17:42:54+00:00
I can't tell if you're agreeing with my 'poibt' or disagreeing.

But yes, like telescopes. Or microscopes. Those still bind us to using our built in sensors that we 'trust'.

Then we obviously get into radio telescopes, or down to electron microscopes, etc and we start having to believe in the tech to get our new found understandings.

My mental hesitation lay in trusting AI to get to that level of belief -- if/when that happens, what do we really know or trust?
by eigenvalue | 2025-04-02 17:42:56+00:00
I recently started thinking about what a shame it is that LLMs have no way of directly accessing their own internal states, and how potentially useful that would be if they could. One thing led to the next, and I ended up developing those ideas a lot further.

Transformers today discard internal states after each token, losing valuable information. There's no rollback, introspection, or replaying of their reasoning. Saving every activation isn't practical; it would require way too much space (hundreds of megabytes at least).

The insight here is that transformer activations aren't randomly scattered in high-dimensional space. Instead, they form structured, lower-dimensional manifolds shaped by architecture, language structure, and learned tasks. It's all sitting on a paper-thin membrane in N-space!

This suggested a neat analogy: just like video games save compact states (player location, inventory, progress flags) instead of full frames, transformers could efficiently save "thought states," reconstructable at any time. Reload your saved game, for LLMs!

Here's the approach: attach a small sidecar model alongside a transformer to compress its internal states into compact latent codes. These codes can later be decoded to reconstruct the hidden states and attention caches. The trick is to compress stuff a LOT, but not be TOO lossy.

What new capabilities would this enable? Transformers could rewind their thoughts, debug errors at the latent level, or explore alternative decision paths. RL agents could optimize entire thought trajectories instead of just outputs. A joystick for the brain if you will.

This leads naturally to the concept of a rewindable reasoning graph, where each compressed state is a node. Models could precisely backtrack, branch into alternate reasoning paths, and debug the causes of errors internally. Like a thoughtful person can (hopefully!).

Longer-term, it suggests something bigger: a metacognitive operating system for transformers, enabling AI to practice difficult reasoning tasks repeatedly, refine cognitive strategies, and transfer learned skills across domains. Learning from learning, if you will.

Ultimately, the core shift is moving transformers from stateless text generators into cognitive systems capable of reflective self-improvement. It's a fundamentally new way for AI to become better at thinking.

For fun, I wrote it up and formatted it as a fancy academic-looking paper, which you can read here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Dicklesworthstone/llm_intr...
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-02 17:43:04+00:00
I wonder, do you find Outkast's ATLiens album to be derivative? Especially "Elevators" and "Wheels of Steel". I certainly don't know enough music to answer that question definitively, if anyone does.

Even though some of the lyrics have certainly not aged well, I do like its minimal aesthetic, and I was in Decatur, GA at the time, and it sure beat the crap Diddy and Mase were putting out at the time.

Side note: WCLK Clark Atlanta University radio station was the absolute best radio station I've ever heard, where I found my favorite music of all-time: AfroCuban jazz. Their Hip Hop and Jazz programs were fantastic. That's also where I learned of the magical spoken word intro version of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World".

"No one's musical education is complete."
by jckahn | 2025-04-02 17:44:03+00:00
Cool! I’ve recently consolidated all of my Google Chat and WhatsApp friends onto Matrix (via Element) because it’s E2EE. Gchat isn’t and I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations. So, those platforms can’t be trusted. Signal doesn’t have a web interface, so that’s a no-go for me. lol Telegram.

Matrix has been great for me and I recommend that everyone else use it!
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-02 17:44:10+00:00
> as institutional memory fades

This has nothing to do with institutional memory fading. It's to do with the total destruction of those institutions and the disappearance of the rule of law within the United States.

Things are moving too fast for people to adjust to the new reality. and so writers keep framing things in ways that are no longer relevant.

What actual institutional position or activity does the EFF suppose would effectively counter this in April 2025?
by joshvm | 2025-04-02 17:44:13+00:00
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.

I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.

It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
by paulcole | 2025-04-02 17:44:16+00:00
Yes! My role is not programming. But often I write code in Google Apps Scripts or Python to automate processes.

An example would be like when one of our salespeople closes a deal they complete a task in our sales software that triggers a bunch of Asana tasks for the onboarding team and builds the Google Drive folders and documents we'll eventually need for that client.

I used to have to figure out the code for things like that "by hand" and I was occasionally limited by my technical ability.

But what I've found now is that I'm limited by my knowledge of our business. If I can explain it to ChatGPT, I can get working code in minutes for things that used to take hours.

And I'm trying things now that end up taking hours that I wouldn't have even tried before because I saw them as "too hard" for me.

I honestly don't even read the code it generates. I have ChatGPT generate own log files that I feed back into it for debugging or analysis when anything breaks.
by walterbell | 2025-04-02 17:44:17+00:00
TikTok hired former TLA officers (2022), https://www.scrippsnews.com/science-and-tech/social-media/ti...

The U.S. intelligence community sees China as its top threat. But Americans who have left intelligence agencies are getting jobs at TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.. the lines between business and government get blurred in China, in part because of Beijing's national intelligence law, which compels citizens and businesses to share information with state intelligence-gathering efforts.. America's freedoms give China an advantage.
Show HN: Log9er another simple Python logging wrapper
by joseph8th | 2025-04-02 17:44:38+00:00
Log9er is a simple, opinionated Python logging wrapper class.

You can use it to normalize logging footprints across multiple projects, reducing boilerplate in development, and making it easier to create a uniform experience for log reading and parsing.

Nobody NEEDS Log9er. But maybe some Python devs might WANT it.
by munch117 | 2025-04-02 17:45:04+00:00
Whatever colour you put on the wall at home, you get used to. Your senses acclimatize to it because you see it all the time, even if it initially seemed "riotous".

Once you step outside, it does matter though. If your own home is shades of grey, then any colour you encounter outside is going to seem garish.

Visually exhausting you say? If you are being stressed by the colours of the world, then that's a problem of your own making.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-04-02 17:45:40+00:00
"realistic" is an interesting word, because it can have different connotations.

We can write a very accurate quantum mechanical model for the oxygen atom. But you can't actually simulate it without a galaxy sized classical computer. But it is very realistic=accurate model.

Or you can write and easily simulate a non-realistic semiclassical model. This one is a realistic=efficiently simulatable model.

Obviously a fully agent made model is more realistic in the "accurate" sense, because it correctly models the underlying reality. But if you make realistic agents, you have something inefficient (non realistic in the "simulatable" sense).
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-02 17:46:04+00:00
Almost all car makers offer bright colours by default. In my driveway is a bright blue Subaru (it was hard to pick between the blue and eye-searing orange) and a bright copper coloured Suzuki. Mazda is becoming famous for their innovative colour options. Google "Nissan Micra colours" to see what even Japan's most conservative carmaker offers to those who care to look.