MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-23 18:38:59+00:00
The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap - YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will probably land you in legal hot water.

See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.
by maebert | 2025-04-23 18:39:23+00:00
author says we made no progress towards agi, also gives no definition for what the "i" in agi is, or how we would measure meaningful progress in this direction.

in a somewhat ironic twist, it seems like the authors internal definition for "intelligence" fits much closer with 1950s. good old-fashioned AI, doing proper logic and algebra. literally all the progress we made in ai in the last 20 years in ai is precisely because we abandoned this narrow-minded definition of intelligence.

Maybe I'm a grumpy old fart but none of these are new arguments. Philosophy of mind has an amazingly deep and colorful wealth of insights in this matter, and I don't know why this is not required reading for anyone writing a blog on ai.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-23 18:39:44+00:00
>these absurd, customer-hostile practices

Companies no longer view their customers as their customers, and I'm not sure I've settled on an explanation that makes sense to me. I only have examples. The biggest one though was Bug Light and the Dylan Mulvaney thing from several years ago. I no longer have a link, but there was a paraphrased quote from the marketing director at the time directly expressing contempt for those who drank Bud Light. But a frustrated expletive, rather a full-on rant about how they were all moronic frat boys and gauche rednecks.

What does it mean when a company has no respect for its own customers, no gratitude, and even measurable levels of what can only be called hatred? I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the world we all live in this year of 2025. And I can't imagine it could possibly turn out well for any of us.
by crote | 2025-04-23 18:39:44+00:00
Honestly? I think the AI bubble will need to burst first. Making the rescheduling of appointments and dozens of tasks like that slightly more convenient isn't a billion-dollar business.

I don't have a lot of doubt that it is technically doable, but it's not going to be economically viable when it has to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into training models and buying shiny hardware. The industry first needs to get rid of that burden, which means writing off the training costs and running inference on heavily-discounted supernumerary hardware.
by hinkley | 2025-04-23 18:39:56+00:00
Access time is a a function of areal density, not unlike hard drives. Plus access logic increases at least logarithmic to the number of lines in the cache, so you’re probably looking at in the neighborhood of 50% slower for every doubling of L1 cache size.

Now as to why cache sizes didn’t increase much once clock speeds stagnated and feature size continued to decline, I couldn’t say. But L3 caches didn’t used to exist, and L2 has gotten bigger.
by 0_____0 | 2025-04-23 18:40:23+00:00
Caveat - I haven't gone to primary sources, but all indications are that they're doing pretty well. Increase of 1.8~% in number of store locations in the last 5 years.

Inflation adjusted, revenue is up 38% since late 2009.

Wal-Mart is similarly doing very well.

If you thought HD and WMT were dying, this may be a moment to reevaluate the heuristics you're using to gauge the health of retail businesses.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/home_depot_inc_hd_total_store... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HD/home-depot/reve...
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-23 18:40:53+00:00
I don't think I've ever seen that actually happen, if you mean reading a meaningful amount of the dep's code.

How many teams importing React have even one member who's ever read even a dozen key paths & files in the React codebase? Think it's more than 10%? I'd bet it's closer to 1% than 10%, of teams on which even one member has done that, ever. Do they check the diff for every update? Shit, IME you're lucky if a single person reads the entire changelog before updating, and certainly nobody's reading the diff. Repeat for everything else. Functionally nobody does this, outside niches where small numbers of low-line-count deps are the norm.

Rails, all those imports from Square you used to have to use to cut the "WT actual F is this?" rate in Android dev to something non-crazy making, et c. Basically nobody even skims this stuff, and I don't think the number of businesses willing to pay for their developers to do that is large.
by LiquidPolymer | 2025-04-23 18:41:11+00:00
This article keeps coming back up. I know so many people in Oregon who freaked out about this and started prepping go-bags and family emergency plans. Yet nobody really thinks about it much now. Such is human nature.

A while back on this forum I explained how I have my truck camper fully fueled, stocked with water, foo, and propane. Its electrical system is solar charged but it also has a built-in generator. It’s in this “ready mode” as an emergency shelter for my family. We don’t get much warning with an earthquake.

I was ridiculed by a few folks who seemed to suggest I was a paranoid prepper. But this article and its message have never left my mind.
by a4isms | 2025-04-23 18:41:17+00:00
Short reply:

I agree, it only goes half-way.

Elaboration:

I like the "horseless carriage" metaphor for the transitionary or hybrid periods between the extinction of one way of doing things and the full embrace of the new way of doing things. I use a similar metaphor: "Faster horses," which is exactly what this essay shows: You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."

Rewinding to the 90s, Desktop Publishing was a massive market that completely disrupted the way newspapers, magazines, and just about every other kind of paper was produced. I used to write software for managing classified ads in that era.

Of course, Desktop Publishing was horseless carriages/faster horses. Getting rid of paper was the revolution, in the form of email over letters, memos, and facsimiles. And this thing we call the web.

Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.
by TheKelsbee | 2025-04-23 18:41:33+00:00
I just plugged this prompt into Nova:

I want you to generate a document detailing the current landscape of AI model and agent providers. You should include external citations, a very brief synopsis of each tool, the pricing associated with the tool, and a link to check it out. Limit this to the top 20 tools in the AI space.

It generated a doc that I could download and build off of. Try something like that?
by 38 | 2025-04-23 18:41:52+00:00
> let my boss garry know that my daughter woke up with the flu and that I won't be able to come in to the office today. Use no more than one line for the entire email body. Make it friendly but really concise. Don't worry about punctuation or capitalization. Sign off with “Pete” or “pete” and not “Best Regards, Pete” and certainly not “Love, Pete”

this is fucking insane, just write it yourself at this point
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 18:42:37+00:00
>progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.

Except the Vision Pro displays have zero to do with the technology they'll use in spectacles. Spectacles are an entirely different tech stack. See the Orion demo for an example and you'll see that 100% of the R&D spent on goggles is tossed on the bonfire when considering spectacles.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-23 18:42:42+00:00
Definitely. Also, another thing that wastes time is when requests don't provide the necessary context for people to understand what's being asked for and why, causing them to spend hours on the wrong thing. Or when the nuance is left out of a nuanced good idea causing it to get misinterpreted and pattern-matched to a similar-sounding-but-different bad idea, causes endless back-and-forth misunderstandings and escalation.

Emails sent company-wide need to be especially short, because so many person-hours are spent reading them. Also, they need to provide the most background context to be understood, because most of those readers won't already share the common ground to understand a compressed message, increasing the risk of miscommunication.

This is why messages need to be extremely brief, but also not.
by red_admiral | 2025-04-23 18:43:15+00:00
Test fixtures as opposed to production code forgive a multitude of sins. Sometimes you have to mock up an object that could never exist in the real world, to assert that the main code doesn't just accept it and move on. Sometimes you poke at individual variables in an object that in the real world should only be accessed via the methods in its API. All in a day's work if you know what you're doing and never try that in the real code.
by troyvit | 2025-04-23 18:43:49+00:00
> so why was only the US federal government funding it, especially if it wasn't expensive to maintain?

I want to flip this question around as if it was asked by somebody from a country other than the U.S. If I was looking at America since 9/11 from the outside, I would see a country that was trying to destabilize itself. It started out slowly enough, but as the years have progressed the wobble has become more and more pronounced until today, where the U.S.'s trustworthiness is lower than I personally ever thought it could go. And it's going to get worse.

So if I lived outside the U.S. I would be asking the very same question: Why would a government that is so unstable and so dangerously powerful be in charge of something that the world kind-of would like to depend on? And I'd start my own version of it asap. I understand from the Reg article that the U.S. extended its contract in the 11th hour, but that just speaks to the point more than anything else.
by gameman144 | 2025-04-23 18:44:45+00:00
> Sure, at first you will want an AI agent to draft emails that you review and approve before sending. But later you will get bored of approving AI drafts and want another agent to review them automatically.

This doesn't seem to me like an obvious next step. I would definitely want my reviewing step to be as simple as possible, but removing yourself from the loop entirely is a qualitatively different thing.

As an analogue, I like to cook dinner but I am only an okay cook -- I like my recipes to be as simple as possible, and I'm fine with using premade spice mixes and such. Now the simplest recipe is zero steps: I order food from a restaurant, but I don't enjoy that as much because it is (similar to having AI approve and send your emails without you) a qualitatively different experience.
by nilslice | 2025-04-23 18:44:52+00:00
we’ve been building most of what OP has written about with https://mcp.run

We started doing this the day Anthropic released MCP in November last year. Our company has always been devoted to secure plug-in system technology having built Extism, a WebAssembly plugin framework.

We immediately saw MCP as the plugin system for AI and knew it would be significant, but were concerned about the security implications of running MCP servers from untrusted parties and using the STDIO transport which makes user systems vulnerable in ways we weren’t ok with.

So we built mcp.run which is a secure implementation of the protocol, running servers in fully isolated & portable wasm modules. They must be allow-listed to access files & network hosts, and cannot access any part of your system without your explicit permission.

They also run everywhere. Each server (we call them servlets) on mcp.run is automatically available via SSE (soon HTTP streaming) as well as STDIO, but can also be embedded directly into your AI apps, no transport needed, and can run natively on mobile!

We are excited about MCP and glad so many are too - but we really need more security-oriented implementations before it’s too late and someone suffers a seriously bad exploit - which could tarnish the ecosystem for everyone.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-04-23 18:45:03+00:00
They're not in the press a lot. They're probably still in production behind the scenes. I was reading about using them for scheduling not long ago. Btw, a toy one I wrote to show how they work got best results with tournament selection with significant mutations (closer to 20%).

There's a lot of problems where you're searching among many possibilities in a space that has lots of pieces in each solution. If you can encode the solution and fitness, a GA can give you an answer if you play with the knows enough. You also might not need to be an expert in that domain, like writing heuristics. If you know some, they might still help.
by abnercoimbre | 2025-04-23 18:45:06+00:00
Regarding contracts, there's an additional lesson here, quoting from the source:

> This is an interesting lesson in compatibility: even changes to the stack layout of the internal implementations can have compatibility implications if an application is bugged and unintentionally relies on a specific behavior.

I suppose this is why Linux kernel maintainers insist on never breaking user space.
by 13years | 2025-04-23 18:45:13+00:00
They are different contexts of errors. Take any of these humans in your example, and give them an objective task, such as take any piece of literal text and reliably interpret its meaning and they can do so.

LLMs cannot do this. There are many types of human failures, but we somewhat know the parameters and context of those failures. Political/emotional/fear domains etc have their own issues, but we are aware of them.

However, LLMs cannot perform purely objective tasks like simple math reliably.
by SllX | 2025-04-23 18:45:58+00:00
> Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)

I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.

> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?

Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.

> However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.

The bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-23 18:46:06+00:00
I've used multiple of these types of services and I'll be honest, I just don't really get the value. I'm in a ton of meetings and I run multiple teams but I just take notes myself in the meetings. Every time I've compared my own notes to the notes that the the AI note taker took, it's missing 0-2 critical things or it focuses on the wrong thing in the meeting. I've even had the note taker say essentially the opposite of what we decided on because we flip-flopped multiple times during the meeting.

Every mistake the AI makes is completely understandable, but it's only understandable because I was in the meeting and I am reviewing the notes right after the meeting. A week later, I wouldn't remember it, which is why I still just take my own notes in meetings. That said, having having a recording of the meeting and or some AI summary notes can be very useful. I just have not found that I can replace my note-taking with an AI just yet.

One issue I have is that there doesn't seem to be a great way to "end" the meeting for the note taker. I'm sure this is configurable, but some people at work use Supernormal and I've just taken to kicking it out of of meetings as soon as it tries to join. Mostly this is because I have meetings that run into another meeting, and so I never end the Zoom call between the meetings (I just use my personal Zoom room for all meetings). That means that the AI note taker will listen in on the second meeting and attribute it to the first meeting by accident. That's not the end of the world, but Supernormal, at least by default, will email everyone who was part of the the meeting a rundown of what happened in the meeting. This becomes a problem when you have a meeting with one group of people and then another group of people, and you might be talking about the first group of people in the second meeting ( i.e. management issues). So far I have not been burned badly by this, but I have had meeting notes sent out to to people that covered subjects that weren't really something they needed to know about or shouldn't know about in some cases.

Lastly, I abhor people using an AI notetaker in lieu of joining a meeting. As I said above, I block AI note takers from my zoom calls but it really frustrates me when an AI joins but the person who configured the AI does not. I'm not interested in getting messages "You guys talked about XXX but we want to do YYY" or "We shouldn't do XXX and it looks like you all decided to do that". First, you don't get to weigh in post-discussion, that's incredibly rude and disrespectful of everyone's time IMHO. Second, I'm not going to help explain what your AI note taker got wrong, that's not my job. So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of AI note takers though I do see where they can provide some value.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-23 18:46:12+00:00
> That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.

That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
Show HN: Document agent example that can parse and chat over unstructured data
by yaronsc | 2025-04-23 18:46:53+00:00
Hi all, Dapr maintainer here. We've added a new example that shows how you can build a conversational agent that can upload, parse and understand complex documents, while retaining long-term memory. The example also shows how the agent can upload the file to multiple storage providers. Would be great to get your feedback.
by nosianu | 2025-04-23 18:47:01+00:00
There was an HN topic less than a month ago or so where somebody wrote a blog post speculating that you end up with some people using AI to write lengthy emails from short prompts adhering to perfect polite form, while the other people use AI to summarize those blown-up emails back into the essence of the message. Side effect, since the two transformations are imperfect meaning will be lost or altered.
by alanfranz | 2025-04-23 18:47:02+00:00
Good lights last more (I have a Blackburn lamp and it’s working) but it’s still less convenient than dynamo. You need to remove and remount it every time, with the risk of dropping or forgetting.

Ofc if you mount fixed battery-powered lights and you could just swap a usb c battery, maybe it would compete with dynamo. But an easy swappable battery would still ve easy to steal (unless it’s inside the frame with a lock or sth like that)
by arghwhat | 2025-04-23 18:47:02+00:00
No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly.

If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like they just dumped what they had, but even that requires approvals and time from legal, and so someone has to decide its worth investing in.

(I have no interest in speculating about the Vision lineup itself, just commentating on open source contributions.)
by codedokode | 2025-04-23 18:47:39+00:00
So basically Google added additional tracking and fingerprinting features (so called "Privacy Sandbox") as a replacement for 3P cookies, but decided not to remove them after all.

I think that independent from Google browser vendors should 1) stop adopting any APIs that extend fingerprinting surface and 2) gradually lock down APIs that allow fingerprinting by putting them behind permissions.
by lukev | 2025-04-23 18:47:52+00:00
Agreed. And it's bad enough within apps... it's even worse the way they use push notifications for this kind of thing. I installed your app so I'd know when my prescriptions are ready, or when my ride is here. Abusing that privilege to upsell me on a credit card by making my phone buzz is infuriating.

I've had to uninstall so many apps because of this bad behavior.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-23 18:48:16+00:00
Oh, I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. I use Claude and ChatGPT to talk to about a ton of topics. I'm mostly referring to AI features being added to existing SaaS or software products. I regularly find that moving the conversation to ChatGPT or Claude is much better than trying to use anything that they may have built into their existing product.
by 38 | 2025-04-23 18:48:21+00:00
as a former long time cygwin user, my advice is dump cygwin ASAP. its not really good for anything anymore. the only reason I ever used it was for a C compiler, but Zig does that way better than Cygwin ever did. also honestly I don't even use C anymore unless I need to, I write most stuff in Go, but both Go and Zig can cross compile. finally I am using windows terminal and PowerShell
by bena | 2025-04-23 18:48:30+00:00
To be fair, when you don't have casinos, you don't have casino taxes, casino employment, casino tourism, etc.

Also, you don't just "have" casinos, building any building of that size is at the very least a multi-month affair and likely multiple years.

So once you say "yes", you've set something in motion that is way harder to unwind than it was to kick off.

Also, I can see it being the casinos themselves asking permission to enter the state. Once they're allowed in, why would they ask to leave? That would be the job of someone else.
by switch007 | 2025-04-23 18:48:51+00:00
Not really. If citizens see "fines" and think "whew, they got their just deserts", it's almost worse than no fines.

But the EU is frequently performative, so it doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if they agreed in advance with the EU the fines, behind some closed doors.

Nothing less than a billion these days even registers