MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coder543 | 2025-04-07 15:08:59+00:00
I downloaded a sample RAF file from the internet. It was 16 megapixels, and 34MB in size. I used Adobe DNG Converter, and it created a file that was 25MB in size. It was actually smaller.

Claiming that DNG takes up 4x space doesn't align with any of my own experiences, and it didn't happen on the RAF file that I just tested.
by JohnDeHope | 2025-04-07 15:09:12+00:00
What goes into your sense organs is just as meaningful, and capable of causing unwanted and lasting change or trauma, than what somebody does to your physical body. Intellectual force is no less force than physical force is.

Harassment is just a mild precursor to outright force. Advertising is just a mild precursor to intellectual force. Advertising is to indoctrination as physical harassment is to physical force.
by SkyBelow | 2025-04-07 15:09:31+00:00
In particular, the task requires understanding that one can impact the world through action. This is learned by humans through a constant feedback loop running for months to a year+. The very way we train AIs doesn't seem to teach this agency, only teach the ability to mimic having that agency in ways that we can capture data for (such as online discussions). Will that training eventually give rise to such agency? I'm doubtful with most current models given that the learning process is so disconnected from the execution and that execution is prompted and not inherently on going. Maybe some agent swarm that is always running and always training and upgrading its members could achieve that level of agency, which is why I'm not saying it is impossible, but I expect we are going to have to wait for some newer model that is always running and which is training as it is running to see true agency develop.

Until then, it is a question of if we can capture the appearance of agency in the training set well enough for learn it with training and not depend upon interactions to learn more.
by Zak | 2025-04-07 15:09:38+00:00
Thanks for the explanation. I have to question how reality-based that thinking is. I do not, of course expect you to defend it.

It seems to me that nearly all photographers who are particularly concerned with image quality shoot raw and use third-party processing software. Perhaps that's a decision not rooted firmly in reality, but it would take a massive effort focused on software UX to get very many to switch to first-party software.

> Raw files are where you can compensate for that, with the least impact on image quality. You can have ChrAb correction, applied after the demosaic, but it will be "lossy."

Are you saying that they're baking chromatic aberration corrections into the raw files themselves so that third-party software can't detect it? I know the trend lately is to tolerate more software-correctable flaws in lenses today because it allows for gains elsewhere (often sharpness or size, not just price), but I'm used to seeing those corrections as a step in the raw development pipeline which software can toggle.
by LikeAnElephant | 2025-04-07 15:10:53+00:00
I respectfully disagree that there’s no business opportunity that people are willing to pay for.

If your only target are developers or the tech industry, maybe, but there’s a whole world of non technical business people with problems that have extremely easy (and boring) technical solutions.

I’ve recently signed up my third customer paying $49/mo with a simple CRUD app. No targeted ads or landing pages. I literally walked into offices in my town and asked what the most annoying part of their job is and I made a prototype. They signed a 6 month commitment.

They’re amazed at my “computer skills” only because they don’t know any better.

Not saying I’ll become insanely rich, but my goal is a reasonable living ($200-$300k) within 5 years.

All this to say I think the opportunities in this market are there, but they look different.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-07 15:11:03+00:00
> The problem, it turned out, was a simple configuration setting (thank all that is holy) which I recognized immediately. It took me longer to figure out the mouse button thing. So like the proverbial plumber story, I opened my toolbox, took out a small ball peen hammer, tapped the configuration options, and the site popped up online.

That squares with my mental model (and, related to that, my guess half-way through the story was that it was erroneously listening on 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0). I also love the plumber analogy. I similarly enjoy the "mechanic's rates": $1 to fix it, $10 if you watch, $100 if you help
by no_wizard | 2025-04-07 15:11:10+00:00
>I don’t want to look back on my life thinking that I spent all my time chasing fake problems

Neo-liberal capitalist economies are full of fake problems.

Take flash trading for example. I know why it exists, and I know why it works. I don't fault people for getting involved in it, because they (and we) exist in the system we have.

Yet, think of all the money that has gotten both pumped into that industry and the industry has made in profits, and all for...being able to algorithmically trade penny differences in value at a profit due to volume.

Is that a problem that is worth solving? Well, in our current economic system, it is, but should it be?

I don't know whats better per se (I'm not arguing for communism or some other clearly failed economic political system) but I sure feel like I can identify problems that could quite easily fall into the made up category.
by tshaddox | 2025-04-07 15:11:16+00:00
I think magic is extremely interesting (particularly close-up magic), but I also hate the mindset (which seems to be common though not ubiquitous) that stigmatizes any curiosity in how the trick works.

In my view, the trick as it is intended to appear to the audience and the explanation of how the trick is performed are equal and inseparable aspects of my interest as a viewer. Either one without the other is less interesting than the pair.
by Stwerner | 2025-04-07 15:12:14+00:00
Ahh I absolutely love this idea of trying to infuse more emotional and fuzzy attributes to see what the LLM comes up with!

When I broke out the layout and style components I was thinking of being able to change the whole site aesthetic from something like "standard b2b" to "geocities fan page", but I'm excited to try getting fuzzier with the descriptions!
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 15:12:23+00:00
Nice point!

The graphical part is one source of difference, but there others as well. For example, chapter 4 in the Rewilding Software Engineering that Simon Wardley and I are writing compares what we call defined explorations (as seen in Jupyter notebooks) with dynamic explorations (as experienced in Glamorous Toolkit): https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-a360...
Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends
by MITthrow123 | 2025-04-07 15:12:59+00:00
I'm a senior at MIT studying Course 6 (EECS), and I'm graduating soon with no job lined up. I've applied to tons of places, done interviews, built side projects, but nothing has landed—and it's not just me. A lot of my classmates, some of the smartest and hardest-working people I know, are also unemployed or under incredible stress trying to figure things out.

It's honestly demoralizing. I came to MIT hoping to build a better life—not just for myself, but for my family. Now I’m facing the very real possibility of moving back home to an unstable and abusive environment while continuing to job hunt. The thought alone is crushing. I’ve even considered staying for an MEng just to avoid going home, but I’m completely burnt out and have no thesis direction. MIT gave me freedom, food security, friends, a bed of my own for the first time. It changed everything. But now that graduation’s here, it feels like it’s all slipping away.

If you've been through something similar—late job search success, unexpected turns that worked out, or just any advice—I’d really appreciate it. What helped you push through when it felt like the system failed you?

Thanks for reading.
by superkuh | 2025-04-07 15:13:12+00:00
I only "store" my webserver's logs and user submitted comments. But someone can still put the legal pressure on me, a random person, to force me to do work to turn over those logs/etc. It's wild. Like having a security camera, hosting a BBQ for the neighborhood, and having a neighbor demand access to the recorded video with legal threats. This whole thing really only makes sense in the context of for-profit incorporated persons. It should not apply to me, a random human person.
by chris_st | 2025-04-07 15:13:15+00:00
Some time, take someone who's interested in GT, and sit them down in front of the system and capture video of them using it. And don't tell them a thing. Just watch them interact with the system. See how long it takes them to get stuck in some particular way, or get the UI into some weird state they don't understand. Bring them back, tell them one thing to get them going, and then shut up entirely again and see how far they get.

It's just so incredibly hard to remember that "beginner mind", that you really have to see it in action to understand just how much is in your brain, that you don't even realize.

That exercise will probably help your book more than anything.
by douglas_fugazi | 2025-04-07 15:13:25+00:00
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by no_wizard | 2025-04-07 15:14:10+00:00
>but yeah, in general devs have nothing to complain about.

I respectfully disagree. I think there's alot of room for improvement in our industry, even in regards to pay we could do better. Think of the value delivered per engineer vs what they're paid, the ratio is typically very high, meaning engineers are paid a fraction of what value they provide.
by andrehacker | 2025-04-07 15:14:28+00:00
I've always been fascinated by the history and technology of microcomputers. It's similar to how enthusiasts feel about classic muscle cars. With microcomputers, you can understand every aspect of the technology, from the transistors and gates on the silicon to the components on the board, and all the way up to computer languages and the user interface. It feels like I could work on any part of it with just a bit of time. My daily driver is an M4, and I find any new trend in computing worth exploring. However, my retro computers always keep me company.
by codethief | 2025-04-07 15:14:32+00:00
Having gone through the process of incorporation myself, I agree with everything you said: Yes, there is some paperwork you'll have to take care of and a bit of a learning curve to everything but not outrageously so. It can all be done within ~2 weeks (including roundtrip times for mail). Yes, that's still a lot more than it'll take you in e.g. Estonia (where you can do everything online in a few minutes from what I've been told) but it really would be the least of my worries, compared to actually running the company.

That being said, I do think the process could be simplified drastically. Not necessarily by getting rid of the notary requirement but 1) through digitalization and 2) by streamlining (possibly centralizing) the whole back and forth between notary (official incorporation & signing of articles of incorporation), bank (getting a business account + obtaining proof you actually put the money in that account that you're claiming to have during incorporation), local court (registering the company, including articles of incorporation), tax authorities (getting a tax ID and sales tax ID), local authorities (getting a business permit), local chamber of commerce (paying dues for mandatory membership), Federal Gazette / federal company register (submitting your initial balance sheet).
by criddell | 2025-04-07 15:14:57+00:00
It's not working for me. I have those all unticked but if I create a new file and go to cell A1 and type 1/2, it puts 2-Jan in the cell rather than the text I want.

If I then put 60/100 in cell A2, it doesn't do any conversion. Then put the formula "=Search("/", A1)" in cell B1 and copy that to cell B2, B1 evaluates to #VALUE! and B2 evaluates to 3.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-07 15:15:31+00:00
> As a relatively new Linux user,

You need to understand that you are now in Unix land which means you compose this pipeline using programs that perform each step of the processes. So when creating an encrypted backup you would use: `tar -c /home/foo | gzip | aescrypt >backup.tgz.aes` or something to that effect. This lets you use whatever compression program in the pipe.

Breaking this composability leads to the kind of problem you are complaining about. It also removes the ability of splitting this pipeline across machines allowing you to distribute the compute cost.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-07 15:16:28+00:00
There’s a big difference between “becoming dependent on a competitor” and “using a competitor’s products for two to three years so you can shake the bugs out of your EV production process and get a product to market ASAP, then switch to domestic batteries that will soon be available.” This 2/3 year delay in the early part of the adoption curve matters a huge amount for the future of Japan’s EV business, particularly given that China is aggressively working to enter some important markets where Japanese companies have no competing EV product. Buying BYD batteries for two years matters only marginally to the long-term success of BYD.
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 15:16:40+00:00
> I literally walked into offices in my town and asked what the most annoying part of their job is and I made a prototype.

Consumers don't have offices. You are looking at a business-to-business transaction, which is where we said there is still opportunity, in large part thanks to those collecting angel money.

If you are going to disagree, surely you can provide an example of where you have sold to the consumer? Affirming that you could only find opportunity selling to other businesses too makes it seem like you do agree.
by brudgers | 2025-04-07 15:17:29+00:00
Having been a reader approxumately all my life, approximately all the books have been worth my time.

Though the best book is far and away Three Little Pigs which my now grown-ass-man child called “the wolf book” when requesting it at bedtime at the age of incredible. I highly recommend it — time spent with your child I mean,

But if you want an HNish book recommendation?…The Art of Computer Programming is well worth trying to read because it will be challenging for as long as you keep at it. Good luck.
by SamPerson | 2025-04-07 15:17:37+00:00
Thanks, really appreciate that — and your Bitcoin + escrow idea sounds interesting too. There’s definitely a lot of untapped UX potential in that space.

Right now, the donation flow is super simple and fully on-chain:

- The creator shares a unique page tied to their wallet address.

- Supporters send ETH, MATIC, or any ERC-20 directly to that address — no intermediaries, no custody.

- Funds are instantly available in the creator’s wallet.

There's no built-in off-ramp yet, but I’m looking into ways to plug into services like Coinbase Commerce, etc.

USDC is definitely on my radar since it’s widely accepted and has regulatory traction in the EU/US. I’d love to support flows where creators can auto-convert or cash out.
by pbohun | 2025-04-07 15:18:36+00:00
This argument doesn't really make sense. Imagine if someone said "You really need to learn assembly language for the VAX! Someday we'll have Windows 11 on a completely different architecture which is nothing like the VAX, but if you don't learn it now you're not gonna make it!"

Either what we have now is important and will be used 20 years from now and you should learn it, or things are improving so fast that our future interface will be very different.

How many of the "prompt-engineering" tricks that people gained from 2 years ago are relevant today? Almost none? So why should anyone waste their time on something that isn't very good today?

Use LLMs. Try them out for sure. But don't buy into the VC hype. They're just trying to 10x their money by spreading FUD.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-07 15:18:41+00:00
On the "bobby tables" thing, my point is basically that all the same rules for API services still applies. You still have to sanitize sql and all the other stuff we've already been doing for decades.

> How do I put it behind an API without dumbing it down to inutility?

I dunno, I'm still feeling this out and just asking honest questions. But so far, most of the MCP functions I've seen have struck me as "this could be done behind an auto-generated RPC service running in a sandboxed environment".
by swat535 | 2025-04-07 15:19:02+00:00
I just want to go back to the early days of Facebook, when it was simply a small list of friends I actually knew and enjoyed hanging out with online. No karma, no upvotes or downvotes, no organizations, just people connecting.

Is there even a social platform like that anymore? One that isn’t political, overwhelming, or trying to be everything at once? At this point, it feels like the only real options are private Discord servers or maybe WhatsApp.

I guess the elephant in the room is that any successful platform needs advertising, and once businesses get involved, things tend to spiral with ads everywhere, and eventually, politics creep in too.
by codethief | 2025-04-07 15:19:02+00:00
> Interesting case if we are the “ants” and it is our 3 dims happen to be compact looping somewhere beyond our event horizon. Multitude of Universes […]

I think you're mixing up two different cases here: 1) Our established 3 dimensions are actually compact, i.e. loop around or hit a boundary somewhere. No multiverse here. 2) There are extra dimensions, meaning that for every point in that extra dimension there's another 3-dimensional universe as we know it.
by lsaferite | 2025-04-07 15:19:34+00:00
Legit question, why would you be using an untrusted tool in the first place?

Why are people surprised they are vulnerable to a malicious tool when they are using untrusted and/or remotely hosted tools?

Without some method to tag context as sensitive and an LLM model/service that respects said data tagging, you'll likely never have a scenario where you can trust that the LLM isn't sending some sensitive information to an untrusted endpoint. If you accept that, then you have to design your system around not using untrusted endpoints. Just adding untrusted endpoints is kinda like running untrusted applications on your machine. It's fine until it isn't.

At the very least, your agent should have some way to mark the entire session as 'tainted' in such a way that calling out to untrusted sources is forbidden once sensitive context enters the loop. And that would need to live outside the LLM calling loop since the LLM could be tricked before the sensitive data was introduced. With the tool annotations being added to the spec, your internal tools could provide those flags the the agent to facilitate such a blunt security process. And I am aware there are likely holes in such a plan, hence my first question.
by CrimsonRain | 2025-04-07 15:19:38+00:00
I don't understand your issue.

If you are doing deployments, actions etc does exactly that. Run pure bash commands or whatever.

If you want it for other purposes, you essentially want to run a "server" application but don't want to manage a server. Just use serverless? Write a JS function (or some other languages) and the platform will run it when the event triggers.
Do "Runge Spikes" offer a better metaphor for hallucinations by LLMs?
by alan-crowe | 2025-04-07 15:19:46+00:00
Sometimes LLMs put on their novelist hat and insert fiction into contexts that demand an accurate account of the real world. For example, an LLM may invent a legal case that never happened, citing it as a precedent, to the peril of humans who never suspect that it could be merely made up.

We use anthropomorphic language: hallucination, confabulation, lies. But the behaviour of the LLM is weirdly inhuman. We are using language magic against ourselves by choosing our words unwisely. We persuade ourselves that artificial intelligence is like human intelligence, even as we describe how it differs from human intelligence.

We have a rough familiarity with fitting polynomials to evenly spaced data. We know that extrapolation works badly; higher order polynomial approximations breaks down especially badly. We know that interpolation with low order polynomials is fairly safe, and cough, mumble.

But high order polynomial interpolation may work well or badly, especially towards the ends of the intervals. The interpolating polynomial may trick us with good accuracy at the middle of the range, but further out, even though we are still interpolating, the values swing wildly. The graph exhibits spikes between the data points. See https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/11/18/runge-phenomena/

This offers a metaphor for the unwanted insertion of fiction. We picture the LLM interpolating the training data. We picture it doing some kind of high order or clever interpolation, capable of impressive accuracy. And whoops! What happened there? There are surprises lurking. Surprising in the same way that Runge Spikes are surprising.

The name "Runge Spike" offers an escape from anthropomorphism. It invites us to view "hallucinations" as a technical issue in interpolation. We are not accidentally insinuating that the LLM will have metabolised its tab of LSD in a year or two and stop hallucinating, without any need for a break through by researchers.
by wduquette | 2025-04-07 15:20:01+00:00
Feser's very good at explaining Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics clearly. His _Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide_ is a good introduction.

The point of Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics it not that it's useful for building things; it isn't, which is why the early moderns mostly abandoned it. But physics and the quantitative/mechanistic view of the world that it fosters is an abstraction from reality--an extremely useful and productive one, granted, but still an abstraction. It leaves things out that Thomistic metaphysics retains; and while Aristotelian science has been left in the dust, his metaphysics still has important things to say.

Modern philosophy embraced the mechanistic view of the world with Descartes, leading to a number of philosophical problems (the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, how to account for qualia and consciousness, and so forth) that are amply accounted for in the older philosophy.
by treetalker | 2025-04-07 15:20:06+00:00
Peter Bevelin's Seeking Wisdom.

The other day someone on here recommended The Philosopher's Toolkit, and I ordered a copy based on that recommendation. I've only started to dip into various parts, but I can already confirm that it is a good introductory compendium of the basics of philosophy, logic, and argumentation. In the same vein is Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

A personal favorite is Frances Yates's The Art of Memory (think: intersection of rhetoric, mnemonic systems, philosophical systems, and the occult during the Renaissance).

Matthew Butterick's Practical Typography and Typography for Lawyers. Bryan Garner's The Winning Brief.

Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis. Adler's How to Read a Book. Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

I could go on. Book posts are my favorite posts on HN, but they always lighten my wallet and at home I'm surrounded with ever-growing piles of great material.