MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Xmd5a | 2025-04-25 14:14:23+00:00
I wrote an anagrammatic poem that poses an enigma, asking the reader: "who am I?" The text progressively reveals its own principle as the poem reaches its conclusion: each verse is an anagrammatic recombination of the recipient's name, and it enunciates this principle more and more literally. The last 4 lines translate to: "If no word vice slams your name here, it's via it, vanquished as such, omitted." All 4 lines are anagrams of the same person's name.

LLMs haven't figured this out yet (although they're getting closer). They also fail to recognize that this is a cryptographic scheme respecting Kerckhoffs's Principle. The poem itself explains how to decode it: You can determine that the recipient's name is the decryption key because the encrypted form of the message (the poem) reveals its own decoding method. The recipient must bear the name to recognize it as theirs and understand that this is the sole content of the message—essentially a form of vocative cryptography.

LLMs also don't take the extra step of conceptualizing this as a covert communication method—broadcasting a secret message without prior coordination. And they miss what this implies for alignment if superintelligent AIs were to pursue this approach. Manipulating trust by embedding self-referential instructions, like this poem, that only certain recipients can "hear."
by propernun | 2025-04-25 14:14:23+00:00
PM doesnt attend standups most of the time. There is a "scrum master" assigned but that is not a real role, its just round robin and ever engineer gets to do the role. The scrum master just calls out people's names (team is in person + online) and asks them to provide updates. No one, not including the scrum master updates anything. Though I am up to speed, but PM is not and this becomes challenging for them (and sometimes for me too if I am unable to attend standups)
by cogman10 | 2025-04-25 14:14:57+00:00
> streaming system will process n messages in O (n log n)

I'm guessing this is mostly around how backed up the stream is. n isn't the total number of messages but rather the current number of unacked messages.

Would a radix structure work better here? If you throw something like a UUID7 on the messages and store them in a radix structure you should be able to get O(n) performance here correct? Or am I not understanding the problem well.
by kewin3 | 2025-04-25 14:15:05+00:00
We have built autonomous agentic workflow orchestrator, Kewin.ai, to automate the difficult parts of the B2B procurement process, so decision makers can focus more on the important aspects while the heavy lifting of requirements understanding, vendor discovery, scoring and demo scheduling is taken care by Kewin. We advanced Kewin with capabilities to negotiate with vendors, create buyer groups (anonymous!) and negotiate group deals with vendors. Please review and let us know your opinion.
by eth0up | 2025-04-25 14:15:17+00:00
As a musician with infirmities and other hindrances, I have dreamed of this for many years. Consider the DJ, particularly the variety that remixes music. While a skill in itself to manage the h/s/ware, such an artist is largely exhibiting their taste in music, excerpting, rearranging and altering existing music to accomplish a sound otherwise missing. I've found many such remixed versions vastly superior to the originals.

Now imagine, without mastering a specific instrument or skill, you can now create the music in/of your own mindspace, which for me is rarely the music I hear, and often a deviation of what I do hear.

I'm sure this isn't quite what's being offered yet, but every time I grasp my instruments with my trademark touch of inevitable futility, I hope I make it to a time when I can produce what my lack of virtues presently prohibits. It's not the physical acrobatics or mathematical showcasing of great music that I want - it's the end result of the music itself.
by rpdillon | 2025-04-25 14:15:22+00:00
Yeah, the main reason I never switched from emacs to VSCode is because I was worried about Microsoft's stewardship of it, particularly the fact that the extension ecosystem, which is so critical to a good editor, was burdened. There have been a lot of discussions about VSCodium's use of the manifest files from the original VS Code manifest without permission, and while that wasn't enforced, it was never really resolved.

Sad to see it go in such a predictable direction.
by kretaceous | 2025-04-25 14:15:38+00:00
This was comforting because I have these constant worries but I think it's a false comfort.

> Your brain is telling you something important—listen to it

I don't trust it cause it's often wrong and sucks at prioritising. Sometimes, the stimulation an ADHD brain is looking for can be in form of something actively detrimental. If I "listen to my brain" in the moment, there's a significant chance I don't come out stress-free at the end of the day and instead become more anxious.

I'm all for increasing things in your life that you want to do more of. But that often takes doing things instead of giving in.
by madars | 2025-04-25 14:15:51+00:00
Neat! As a human one can recognize that this question embeds a computation and use a standard trick - explicitly ask the LLM to use a program to generate the answer. LLM's are great at generating code but not necessarily that great at executing it "in head" (e.g., "what's the numeric integral of foo?" vs "write a Python program that computes foo"). Some instances of this are noticed by models themselves (I guess by now all know that they are bad calculators so would whip out code to do multiplication) but still a lot of them remain. Concretely, Claude 3.7 with "How is ahnentafel number 67 related to me? Use a program to help you." gets to "your father's father's father's father's mother's mother", whereas without the hint it indeed trips up in arithmetic and logic errors.
Show HN: An inline UX and conversion helper for developers
by dsco | 2025-04-25 14:15:52+00:00
We've been building a tool called checkra.io to help solo developers with conversion recommendations, copywriting and UX. It's a JS snippet (script tag or npm) that adds a floating button to your site.

Click it, select any part of the page, and ask for feedback ("How can I improve conversion?", "Is this section clear?", "Accessibility issues?"). An AI (GPT-4 for now) analyzes the element + surrounding context and gives you suggestions directly overlayed on the page — even generating HTML/CSS previews for fixes.

It’s for solo devs & small teams — anyone who wants fast feedback without copy pasting HTML back and forth from the browser to the IDE and preview. It’s already caught a bunch of blind spots in own projects and we thought you'd find it interesting.

You can test it live on the checkra.io website
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-04-25 14:16:14+00:00
may be, just ask google.com next time? But I'll help you to get the page, that delivers the information you are asking for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify

here, I also did the work for you, is the page that describe wordpress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

I also created a prompt for chatgpt:

"i'm not clear, what the difference of shopify compared to wordpress is. can you tell me what shopify is used for, what is wordpress is used for? My idea is to create an AI-powered platform for e-commerce and content management, also focused on personalizing websites."

And I also asked my personal gpt with "hey gpt, there is a guy who wants to combine wordpress and shopify and create an AI-powered platform for e-com and cms-functionality, but is asking for hands-on experience with shopify. will he succeed?"

gpt told me too much, but the essence is you'll most probably will fail, because you want to build, but don't even want to invest the time to look for the differences or the "what is it all about". gpt especially put emphasis on its question "does he plan to use vibe coding or is this guy is just lazy?" I dunno, was my answer. So gpt told me to give you the links, so it can be checked if you're just lazy, or really not capable to do the basic research. But, I don't care - its up to you to find your way. Have fun and success, my friend!
by fidotron | 2025-04-25 14:16:45+00:00
What pushed YouTube over the edge was it had backers that were willing to overlook and fight for the rampant copyright violations that it had at the time. Then once big enough it then did the deals to go legit, which it now enthusiastically supports for any new entrants.

No other streaming site would have got away with that. Napster was also a bit of a demonstration of how it probably wouldn't work, so it wasn't a low risk strategy.
by calrain | 2025-04-25 14:17:17+00:00
Focus more on what is important to them.

They are delivering the work, you need to understand why they don't have time to update tasks and why they don't see it as a priority.

Your goal should be to understand their position, not force them to do something that they see as low priority.

Successful projects don't come from engineers being forced to do Agile ceremonies.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-25 14:17:44+00:00
> I don't think I disagree with you generally, but it must be recognized that trademarks are different from copyrights in that there is a mechanism where if you don't assert your rights in the trademarks you could lose them.

That sounds exactly like you disagree, and not just with me but with reality.

When this discussion topic arises, the most common thing people leap to is genericization - it is possible that if basically everybody calls this thing a Doodad when you one day sue some company to stop them using your Doodad trademark to describe their product, the judge says that's just what everybody calls these thing so you lose. But: One: This happens when you're a tremendous success! Most businesses would kill to have a product as widely known as Xerox copiers or the Hoover vacuum cleaner. Two: You can't fix this with lawsuits anyway, the judges are looking at what everybody calls the product, and you're not going to sue everybody and even if you sue movie stars and TV hosts you won't change what everybody else calls it.

Next most common are people's half memories of the 20th century trademark restitutions from World War I and World War II Germany. German industrial firms as "punishment" for their role in these conflicts had their marks invalidated in some cases. So you might well find that some mark which is protected in say, Venezuela or Japan is just generic in the United States or say France, because they won the war. In a fuzzy memory this somehow becomes the Germans "failing" to protect their marks, just conveniently in the immediate aftermath of a war, hmm, I wonder why it's only German companies, why they "failed" to do this and only in countries they'd just lost a war against...

Finally Estoppel. Estoppel isn't special to trademarks, it's a general principle in civil law about you can't tell people they can do X and then sue them for doing it. If Disney allowed primary schools to do a Little Mermaid play that's blatantly just the script of the original cartoon movie, and then one day they pick on the play at Little Nowhere Infant School and decide to sue, the lawyers for the school (if it can afford them and doesn't just settle) would argue that's Estopped, there's a long standing understanding that it's OK for schools to do this. Estoppel has practical limits so it's not a real threat and is often over-inflated by IP lawyers. So e.g. if Little Nowhere is selling a stream of the play that's not what Disney agreed to allow, or maybe the Little Nowhere "Infant" school somehow has adult actors and a huge live audience which makes $$$ on ticket sales, again a judge can see this is not what Disney envisioned, so they're entitled to sue anyway.
by LightBug1 | 2025-04-25 14:17:55+00:00
Obviously it's subjective, but no ... the model 3 does not look really nice. The new generation with the facelift just crosses the borderline of acceptable, as does the newly face-lifted model Y. But the countless prior generation 3 and Y that litter our streets surely must be a marginal drag on the Tesla brand ... they're aging terribly. Which isn't hard considering my initial impression of them.

The model S is literally the only car they got right.

Let's not even talk about the CT. I can't even bring myself to utter that horizontal fridges name ...
by rthomas6 | 2025-04-25 14:17:57+00:00
Eh. Google may be better than Microsoft in this regard, but this is basically what they're doing with Android. AOSP is now lacking a lot of core functionality that comes with Google Pixel phones, such as RCS messaging, emoji reactions to text messages, camera features and photo editing, voicemail transcription, crash detection. Even the keyboard is worse in AOSP.
by diggan | 2025-04-25 14:18:07+00:00
The island I grew up on in Sweden (with a population of ~700) got broadband in 2007 sometime I think, and in 2013 got fiber optics. Surely most of North America has to be using better stuff than DSL at this point? Although geographically and politically it is probably a bit harder to get high performance internet access everywhere there.
by dspillett | 2025-04-25 14:18:38+00:00
As an outsider to the conversation I'd say it answers it vaguely at least.

Perhaps you could ask a question less vague than the reply it incited? What is it that you want that keeps you with vscodium over other options? Or if you don't have enough information/experience of them, just what do you like about vscodium enough that you aren't particularly feeling any need to consider alternatives?
by morsecodist | 2025-04-25 14:19:02+00:00
From the video it doesn't really seem like tar pit ideas are about technical limitations but more about solving the wrong problem. I don't think the ideas you list are tar pit ideas at all. The value proposition for all of these things is obvious. The technology was hard but once the technology existed it was pretty clear that people would want these things.

At least from my read of the definition tar pit ideas are not just ideas that have been tried and failed but they are supposed to seem easy. Things like the restaurant discovery example are technically very easy to build but the limiting factor to people enjoying buying from restaurants is not a tech platform.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-25 14:19:03+00:00
> Wondering if it's legal to use characters you don't have rights to. (how do you justify possible IP infringement)

IP law tends to be "richer party wins". There's going to be a bunch of huge fights over this, as both individual artists and content megacorps are furious about this copyright infringment, but OpenAI and friends will get the "we're a hundred-billion-dollar company, we can buy our own legislation" treatment.

e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/17/uk-propos... a straightforward nationalisation of all UK IP so that it can be instantly given away for free to US megacorps.
by Ragnarork | 2025-04-25 14:19:17+00:00
> I feel like once a language is standardized (or reaches 1.0), that's it. You're done. No more changes. You wanna make improvements? Try out some new ideas? Fine, do that in a new language.

Thank goodness this is not how the software world works overall. I'm not sure you understand the implications of what you ask for.

> if they aren't cheekily mutating over the years

You're complaining about languages mutating, then mention C++ which has added stuff but maintained backwards compatibility over the course of many standards (aside from a few hiccups like auto_ptr, which was also short lived), with a high aversion to modifying existing stuff.
by eli | 2025-04-25 14:19:24+00:00
It's a text string that is frequently associated with attacks and vulnerabilities. In general you want your WAF to block those things. This is indeed the point of a WAF. Except you also don't want it to get in the way of normal functionality (too much). That is what the security vs usability trade off is.

This particular rule is obviously off. I suspect it wasn't intended to apply to the POST payload of user content. Perhaps just URL parameters.

On a big enough website, users are doing weird stuff all the time and it can be tricky to write rules that stop the traffic you don't want while allowing every oddball legitimate request.
by thomastraum | 2025-04-25 14:20:31+00:00
"the correlation between quality and fame is weak at best, and that we should be suspicious of any definition of design excellence that depends on visibility."

everyone needs to internalize this. its similar to the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect) if someone in your domain is famous but their "quality" is weak, assume by default this is true for all other type of famous.
by jrockway | 2025-04-25 14:21:18+00:00
Yeah, and this seems like a common Fortune 500 mandatory checkbox. Gotta have a Web Application Firewall! Doesn't matter what the rules are, as long as there are a few. Once I was told I needed one to prevent SQL injection attacks... against an application that didn't use an SQL database.

If you push back you'll always get a lecture on "defense in depth", and then they really look at you like you're crazy when you suggest that it's more effective to get up, tap your desk once, and spin around in a circle three times every Thursday morning. I don't know... I do this every Thursday and I've never been hacked. Defense in depth, right? It can't hurt...
by dylan604 | 2025-04-25 14:22:42+00:00
"It's a beautiful dream – a very expensive, but beautiful dream."

While that might be true, what is expensive for me is chump change for someone else. However, that is very difficult to grok as there was no prices mentioned anywhere that I could see. Sure, it'll be expensive to me because I have to ask. But I also know that I cannot afford a fully spec'd out MacPro, but at least I can see the numbers.
by diggan | 2025-04-25 14:22:58+00:00
That's so cool on so many levels, and I really enjoyed that indeed, now I have to fight the urge to try to build it myself, good thing it's weekend.

However, it does seem to miss the single most useful feature (for me) which is the resistance part. I understand there is a DC motor controlling the snap points and whatnot, but what I'd like is constant resistance I guess, to a configurable level, rather than snapping to specific points and such.

I don't think it would be possible to hack on top of the already made hardware, but didn't seem like it was already done in the software side of things, although I did skim through things so maybe I missed it.
by vorpalhex | 2025-04-25 14:23:18+00:00
1. California is trying to construct rail. The project is the most expensive rail that has ever been built and basically no track has been laid. The company that was initially trying to do the build left to go build rail in Africa because it was less dysfunctional.

2. California has dramatic experiments in cheap/free healthcare and is facing a giant budget shortfall due to it. Right now it is asking the Fed to backstop it's healthcare spending but that seems extremely unlikely.

So even California can't run free healthcare it seems, and it has been unable to build any train track due to extreme bureaucratic paralysis.
by busterarm | 2025-04-25 14:23:52+00:00
I share this experience -- had a friend who left from IG to form a startup and came back to FB a couple of years later. His entire perspective on the company shifted and he left after only 2 months. Complete disillusionment at all levels. "This is not the same company."

That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.
by lukev | 2025-04-25 14:24:22+00:00
If this happened the way it's being reported, yeah, several people should lose their jobs.

I suspect this is a case of being more afraid of saying "no" to the boss than of facing consequences for violating policy. Policies are unfortunately not self-enforcing.

Trump's been firing Inspectors General and dismantling mechanisms of internal accountability across the government, so perhaps that's a correct calculus in this case.
by smeej | 2025-04-25 14:24:24+00:00
The example of not being able to navigate roads with a paper map points in the direction of what concerns me. Even if I have been diligent about maintaining my map-reading skills, other people's devaluation of those same skills affects me; it's MUCH more difficult even to find a mostly-updated paper map anymore. Or if for some reason GPS were to stop working for a whole town while I'm visiting it from out of town, nobody can tell me how to get somewhere that might sell a paper map, even if I'm still proficient in reading them and navigating from them.

Even if I work diligently to maintain my own skills, if the milieu changes enough, my skills lose effectiveness even if I haven't lost the skills.

That's what concerns me, that it's not up to me whether the skills I've already practiced can continue to get me the results I used to rely on them for.
by netsharc | 2025-04-25 14:24:46+00:00
Reminds me of an anecdote about an e-commerce platform: someone coded a leaky webshop, so their workaround was to watch if the string "OutOfMemoryException" shows up in the logs, and then restart the app.

Another developer in the team decided they wanted to log what customers searched for, so if someone typed in "OutOfMemoryException" in the search bar...
by eli | 2025-04-25 14:24:47+00:00
You figured all that out just because the headers indicate the site passed through Cloudflare at one point? That's quite a leap!

If Cloudflare had a default rule that made it impossible to write that string on any site with their WAF, wouldn't this be a lot more widespread? Much more likely someone entered a bad rule into Cloudflare, or Cloudflare isn't involved in that rule at all.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-25 14:24:50+00:00
Funny but I am a big fan of paper notes because paper notes exist off the screen. Right now I have 5 virtual desktops, probably 4 IDE windows, maybe another 5 command line windows, a Copilot Window, an RDP window to log into a computer (which has about half as many things open right now but sometimes has more), Slack, Outlook, a few Firefox windows, a Chrome window, an Edge window (I'm a web developer so I am checking different web browsers, using the dev tools, all of which means... more windows)

Many of those windows like the IDE and the web browser windows themselves have tabs.

The last thing I want to supplement my attention is another application where I have to think (1) which computer? (2) which virtual desktop? (3) which window? (4) which tab? Paper notes are privileged though because they are right in front of me.
by mat_epice | 2025-04-25 14:25:07+00:00
EDIT: This comment is wrong, see fsmv’s comment below. Leaving for posterity because I’m no coward!

- - -

Undefined behavior only means that the spec leaves a particular situation undefined and that the compiler implementor can do whatever they want. Every compiler defines undefined behavior, whether it’s documented (or easy to qualify, or deterministic) or not.

It is in poor taste that gcc has had widely used, documented behaviors that are changing, especially in a point release.
by pimanrules | 2025-04-25 14:26:07+00:00
We faced a similar issue in our application. Our internal Red Team was publishing data with XSS and other injection attack attempts. The attacks themselves didn't work, but the presence of these entries caused our internal admin page to stop loading because our corporate firewall was blocking the network requests with those payloads in them. So an unsuccessful XSS attack became an effective DoS attack instead.