MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elpocko | 2025-05-20 19:08:32+00:00
I like to call myself a hobbyist musician. If I could give the chord progression I just played on my piano to an AI and have it spit out ideas for melodies or more chords for a chorus that would go well with my 4 chords then I'd be a much happier, more productive, more creative musician, and I would learn from that. It would make me a better musician. AI doesn't hurt me, it boosts my creativity and my productivity. It's like a partner with infinite patience.

A filler-producing artist who can't rise above the level of generated content isn't much of an artist. Both are merely recycling pre-existing ideas.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." I don't agree 100% with that quote but I've heard it a lot in the past as a response to my complaints about the lack of originality in a lot of creative fields. Suddenly, with the advent of generative AI, it's not true anymore.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-05-20 19:08:59+00:00
Doctors are, unfortunately so far, people. And they're also gatekeepers to care.

It's naive to think they don't discriminate on all sorts of factors outside the guidelines, for instance when treating fellow doctors. Not that they'll admit to it. I know doctors who won't even admit to it to themselves. But they still do it: they'll just call it by a different name or make up an outside reason.
Show HN: Bricks – One Click Dashboards from Your Data Using AI
by manpreetsgarha | 2025-05-20 19:09:41+00:00
Hi HN

We’ve been building Bricks to make dashboard creation as simple as dropping a file.

You upload your data and Bricks does the rest: • Detects the structure • Picks the most useful charts and tables • Generates plain language insights and summaries • Applies a theme • Lets you add blocks using a natural language prompt • Exports to PDF or shares as a live link

We built this because creating clean dashboards from spreadsheets felt way harder than it should be.

We’d love your feedback on: • How useful the first dashboard feels • Any missing chart types or formats • Anything else that could make it better

Thanks for taking a look.
by cestith | 2025-05-20 19:09:59+00:00
I can. Some of it by some developers I can read far more easily than others.

Can you read arbitrary code written by developers from around the world in PL/1, or Ada, Forth, APL, or even C++? Big languages have lots of syntax choices, yes. It doesn’t need to be abused.

Even C has an obfuscated code contest that’s been going on for decades.
by thearn4 | 2025-05-20 19:10:47+00:00
I end up asking the same question when experimenting with tools like Cursor. When it can one-shot a small feature, it works like magic. When it struggles, and the context gets poisoned and I have to roll back commits and retry part of the way through something, it hits a point where it was probably easier for me to just write it. Or maybe template it and have it finish it. Or vice versa. I guess the point being that best practices have yet to truly be established, but totally hands-off uses have not worked well for me so far.
by gtoast | 2025-05-20 19:11:35+00:00
I'm stuck on the first step of the "Getting Started" guide.

1. I've downloaded helloworld.zip to my local computer, I think. 2. I open the filer.app.js by clicking the link on the webpage. This open a 90s.dev instance right on the page. 3. Then i'm supposed to mount helloworld/app as app and click it, so i click the mount button, it asks for the drive name, hi put in helloworld/app and click mount but nothing happens.

I must be missing how you're supposed to get helloworld.zip into the 90s.dev instance... how do you upload it into the instance?
by codalan | 2025-05-20 19:13:23+00:00
It sucks Yubikey (or other hardware based auth) isn't more prevalent in the financial/banking world. It helps mitigate a lot of types of attacks:

- No tokens to exfiltrate off a computer

- Avoids keylogger style attacks

- More durable than cell phones

That said, for people that have high amounts of money in certain accounts (> 1m), it might also present physical dangers (e.g. kidnapping, home invasion) for thieves attempting to get access to the hardware key.
by okanat | 2025-05-20 19:13:55+00:00
200% is just rendering the same pixels and them drawing them 4 times and driving a single monitor at the single resolution is easy stuff. Would your HiDPI system with one monitor at 125%, one at 100% and another at 150% scaling? This is when the font rendering gets fucked up and your Hi-DPI native toolkits start blurring icons. That's my setup. Windows is perfectly capable to make this work. GTK wasn't able to do fractional scaling until recently and Qt has 100s of papercuts.

I got a Thinkpad to just run this setup under Linux 2020. AMD didn't solve the problem in their driver until 2022 when I was able to drive all of them at 60 Hz.
by crote | 2025-05-20 19:14:13+00:00
Because the benefits are negligible.

Freight-wise, better load capacity can also be solved by ballastless track, using additional axles, or running longer trains. Passenger-wise, better stability can also be solved with canting - and wider tracks means significantly larger curves.

In return you get to buy significantly more expensive one-off trains and are unable to connect to your neighbors. Not exactly a great deal, is it?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 19:14:23+00:00
Thanks for the feedback.

You're likely using Firefox, right? This feature relies on showDirectoryPicker which Firefox doesn't support. You'd have to use Chrome for the getting started guide.

Also, the drive name shouldn't have a path. Name it something like "foo". I'll udpate the guide to reflect this. Then foo/helloworld.app.js will point to /some/local/path/helloworld.app.js, as long as you mounted "foo" to point to the directory at "/some/local/path"
by EmpireoftheSun | 2025-05-20 19:14:28+00:00
I am pretty dumb dude so take this with a grain of salt .

Majority AI today can create/simulate a "Moment" but not the whole "Process". For example,You can create a "short hollywood movie clip" but not the whole "Hollywood movie". I am pretty sure my reasoning is incorrect so I am commenting here to get valid feedback.
by johnmlussier | 2025-05-20 19:15:01+00:00
I’m not interested in about 75% of this offering. Really wish they had pieced this out or done a credit system for it all. I want higher coding and LLM limits, Deep Think, and would like to try agent stuff, but don’t care at all about image or video generation, Notebook limits, YouTube Premium, or more storage.

$250 is a the highest cost AI sub now. Not loving this direction.
by hollowturtle | 2025-05-20 19:15:42+00:00
How does a prompt describe creativity? It's a vision so far off that it's so frustrating because greater creativity came from limited tools, greater creativity came from imperfections, a different point of view, love, a slightly off touch of a painter or a guitar player, the wood of the instrument and the humidity affecting. I can go on and on, prompts are a reduction to the minimum term of everything you'd want to describe, no matter how much you can express via a prompt
by piskov | 2025-05-20 19:16:22+00:00
Given the lack of comments after an hour passed, we have a strong case of maybe five Google AI Ultra subscribers worldwide.

I, personally, try to stay as far as possible from google: Kagi for search, Brave for browsing (Firefox previously), Pro on OpenAI, etc.

We’ll see how fair OpenAI will be with tracking and what have you (given “off” for improve for everyone), but Google? Nah.
by subscribed | 2025-05-20 19:16:27+00:00
This is exactly where users of English as second language are being accused of cheating -- we didn't grew with the live language, but learnt from movies, classic books, and in school (the luckiest ones).

We use rare or uncommon words because of how we learned and were taught. Weaponising it against us is not just a prejudice, it's idiocy.

You're postulating using a metric that shows how much someone deviates from the bog standard, and that will also discriminate against the smart, homegrown erudites.

This approach is utterly flawed.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-20 19:17:14+00:00
"And yet, wealth remains stubbornly hereditary. Our capital allocators – who, during the post-war, post-New Deal era were often drawn from working families – are now increasingly, relentlessly born to that role.

For the wealthy, this is the origin of the meritocracy to eugenics pipeline. If power and privilege are inherited – and they are, ever moreso every day – then either we live in an extremely unfair society in which the privileged and the powerful have rigged the game…or the invisible hand has created a subspecies of thoroughbred humans who were literally born to rule.

This is the thesis of the ultra-rich, the moral justification for rigging the system so that (..)"

There. Enough said.
by m463 | 2025-05-20 19:17:15+00:00
Japan has a fascinating environment. It is very uplifting. Japanese citizens do not seem to participate in crime.

I wondered about this and discussed it with an american friend who lived there for a couple decades and whose kids were born there.

He said that they talk about everything in school. They go through scenarios like stealing, and have long discussions in class. They will discuss what happens, how people feel and what is the outcome. so education.

On the other hand, I commented on the nice society with japanese citizens and they have counterpoints, like "japan is too slow to change" and the like.
by wongarsu | 2025-05-20 19:17:21+00:00
Oscar in what category?

We are about six years into transformer models. By now we can get transformers to write coherent short stories, and you can get to novel lengths with very careful iterative prompting (e.g. let the AI generate an outline, then chapter summaries, consistency notes, world building, then generate the chapters). But to get anything approaching a good story you still need a lot of manual intervention at all steps of the process. LLMs go off the rail, get pacing completely wrong and demonstrate gaping holes in their understanding of the real world. Progress on new models is mostly focused in other directions, with better storytelling a byproduct. I doubt we get to "best screenplay" level of writing in five years.

Best Actor/Actress/Director/etc are obviously out for an AI production since those roles simply do not exist.

Similar with Best Visual Effects, I doubt AI generated films qualify.

That leaves us with categories that rate the whole movie (Best Picture, Best International Feature Film etc), sound-related categories (Best Original Score, Original Song, Sound) and maybe Best Cinematography. I doubt the first category is in reach. Video Generation will be good enough in five years. But editing? Screenwriting? Sound Design?

My bet would be on the first AI-related Oscar to be for an AI generated original score or original song, and that no other AI wins Oscars within five years.

Unless we go by a much wider definition of "entirely AI generated" that would allow significant human intervention and supervision. But the more humans are involved the less it has any claim to being "entirely AI". Most AI-generated trailers or the Balenciaga-Potter-style videos still require a lot of human work
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-20 19:17:32+00:00
I've been in buildings were people enter an occupied floor during office hours, go into the stairwell (no card needed to exit through the stairwell), and prop the door open with a brick or a piece of cardboard so it can be re-entered from the stairwell later.

You'd think that would trigger an alarm and alert someone, but I guess not in every case.

People walking by typically don't mess with a propped-open door, either, because they assume it's propped open for a reason.
by Keyframe | 2025-05-20 19:17:38+00:00
Hmm, interesting. There's basically no information what makes Ultra worth that much money in concrete terms except "more quota". One interesting tidbid I've noticed is that it seems Google One (or what is it called now) also carries sub for youtube. So far, I'm still on "old" Google One for my family and myself storage and have a separate youtube subscription for the same. I still haven't seen a clear upgrade path, or even a discount based on how much I have left from the old subscription, if I ever choose to do so (why?).

edit: also google AI Ultra links leads to AI Pro and there's no Ultra to choose from. GG Google, as always with their "launches".
by famouswaffles | 2025-05-20 19:18:03+00:00
>On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law.

The profile of investors (nearly all the biggest tech companies amongst others) as well as how much they're willing to and have put down (billions) is larger than most.

Open AI alone just started work on a $100B+ datacenter (Stargate)
by edanm | 2025-05-20 19:18:32+00:00
> the promises of groundbreaking use cases that will change the world are obviously not materialising and to anyone that understands the tech it can’t.

In what world is this obviously not materializing? Plenty of people use GenAI for coding, with some claiming we're approaching the level of GenAI being able to automate vast portions of a developer's job.

Do you think this is wrong and the people saying this (some of them very experienced developers) are simply mistaken or lying?

Or do you think it's not a big deal?
What If Every Picture You've Ever Seen Already Exists?
by cin4ed | 2025-05-20 19:18:37+00:00
I was thinking recently about how images work at the data level, and it kind of broke my brain.

Take a simple case: a 3×3 pixel image with only black and white pixels. There are only 9 pixels, and each has 2 options (black or white), so the total number of possible unique images is:

2^9 = 512

That’s tiny, you could generate and look at every one of those images in a few seconds. But already, you’re looking at the complete universe of 3×3 B/W images. Every possible shape, face, glitch, symbol, if it can exist in that resolution and color range, it’s already in there.

Now scale up.

A 1920×1080 image (full HD), with each pixel using 24-bit RGB (i.e., 16.7 million colors), has:

(2^24)^(1920×1080) = 2^49,766,400 ≈ 10^14,983,365

That number is incomprehensibly massive. It’s orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe (≈10⁸⁰). And yet, it’s finite.

Which means:

- Every possible frame of every possible movie is mathematically there.

- Every photo you never took exists in this space.

- Every piece of digital art, every childhood memory, every face, every impossible scene, all of it is representable by just one of those possible combinations.

Of course, almost all of those images are noise. Pure entropy. But buried in that space is literally everything.

Makes you wonder, are we creating images? Or are we just exploring a tiny, meaningful subset of a space that already contains them all?
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-20 19:19:34+00:00
I went to a very small rural school. I was a huge nerd, so standardized tests were always a breeze to me. I don't think I ever scored under ~97th percentile. My dad taught agriculture there (will be important later).

My senior year of high school, I wanted to enroll at a community college as a concurrent student. My high school demanded that I stay until at least 1:45 every day; I wanted to take a class at 12:30, which would require me to leave high school before lunch at 11:45. They absolutely refused to budge on this.

I set up a meeting with the school principal and superintendent. I laid out my case for why I wanted to leave before lunch and tried to be persuasive. Once it was clear they weren't having it, I switched gears.

My senior class was 31 students. The mean scores on the state standardized test was used to determine funding status for the school and to identify schools to target for consolidation - and my school was on probation. If their scores fell more than a couple of points the state would revoke their accreditation and work toward merging them with a neighboring district.

On the other hand, I already had a college acceptance letter and a full scholarship. The test was completely irrelevant to me.

I looked my principal in the eye and told her that if she couldn't work with me, I understood, but "if you're not willing to work to help me meet my goals, why should I work to help you meet yours?" In short, I threatened to bomb the test if they couldn't find a way to let me leave campus for college classes at 11:45 every day.

To be clear, I wasn't saying I wouldn't try to do well; I was saying I was very confident that I could get a pure 0% on that test. It wouldn't impact my future in any way, but with 31 students in my class that 0 would mean a 1-2 percentile drop in the school's mean test scores for the year -- enough to go from "secure in funding for another year" to "50/50 chance the district would be dissolved".

I left every day that year at 11:45.

They didn't change the policy, but let me enroll in a math class that was far below my level. I got along well with the math teacher (who knew what was up) and she let me take the mid-term and final before class started so I never had to attend the class.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-20 19:19:43+00:00
I do find myself wondering if the people working on this stuff ever give any real thought to the impact on society that this is going to have.

I mean obviously the answer is "no" and this is going to get a bunch of replies saying that inventors are not to blame but the negative results of a technology like this are fairly obvious.

We had a movie two years ago about a blubbering scientist who blatantly ignored that to the detriment of his own mental health.
by woah | 2025-05-20 19:19:47+00:00
It makes me sad that the US and western Europe which have been the most flexible and forward-thinking societies in the world for generations have now memed themselves into fretting and hand-wringing about technical advances that are really awesome. And for what? The belief that illustration and filmmaking which have always been hobbies for the vast majority of participants should be some kind of jobs program?
by woolion | 2025-05-20 19:20:29+00:00
The winning image entry for "The Yarrctic Circle" by OpenAI 4o doesn't actually wields a cutlass. It's very aesthetically pleasing, even though it's so wrong in all fundamental aspects (perspective is nonsensical and anatomy is messed up, with one leg 150% longer than the other, ...).

It's a very interesting resource to map some of the limits of existing models.
by aaaja | 2025-05-20 19:20:37+00:00
> unfortunately very man-like

Of course, because they are men. Being a man who calls himself a woman is the defining factor of "transwoman".

Most of these men intrude upon or demand access to women's spaces despite knowing that this will cause distress to women and despite having been told no.

It is a particularly threatening type of man that chooses to do this. The only reason that anyone lets these men get away with it is because they call themselves women and, because of misogynistic attitudes, their demands are valued more than women's needs.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-20 19:21:13+00:00
I think Microsoft Authenticator is the smartest right now because it's a "two-cloud" solution partly out of necessity, but also that seems a trustworthy architecture more generally. Since almost no one's phone runs Windows anymore, the raw app data backups "naturally" go to either iCloud or Google Drive. Then Microsoft keeps other (HSM) decryption keys in OneDrive. The threat model requires compromises of two clouds, so Microsoft Authenticator can be way more generous on how often and easily it backs up. It's an interesting point in the security vs. convenience tradeoff.
by rowanG077 | 2025-05-20 19:21:25+00:00
Obviously "Run everywhere" is after compilation. No language works without some kind of processing, and no machine code is not a language. Even if you'd call machine code a language it cannot be called a lingua franca by definition since it's designed to be architecture specific. I'm not sure why you are even start with linked libs, or even linking or libraries at all. That's far removed from the language itself, the C language standard does not prescribe how to link even. It's an implementation detail.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-20 19:21:44+00:00
You said Ansible and Puppet, they are not installed by default on any Linux distributions or BSDs that I know of.

I personally do not prefer "run command in multiple places at once" over "run command in four places in sequence", however. I think it would just be a "random" choice in my case, and I might just write a script that does either. I do not mind as long as it is a one-time thing, but if I would have to do this more than once, I would just automate it, via scripts. I would probably just have it run in sequence.
by skwee357 | 2025-05-20 19:21:46+00:00
I have a theory that language does shape individuals and societies. As someone who speaks 3 different languages (and learning one more), I’ve noticed interesting things.

For example, in one of the languages I speak, husban and wife literally means owner and woman. So a woman would say that he is her owner, while the man would say that she is his woman.

Some languages have different “you” meanings. There is a “you” for someone you know, a formal “you”, a “you” when addressing someone older than yourself.

While these things sound minor, I do believe they shape the thinking of individuals and societies.

I have a blog post draft about it, and now you reminded me that I should probably proofread it and publish.
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-05-20 19:21:52+00:00
So deliberately writing a prompt that meticulously describes how a generated photo would look like isn't creative, but pushing a button for a machine to take the photo for you is??!! If anything, it's the way around!

Of course that's not what I believe, but let's not limit the definition of what creativity based on historical limitations. Let's see what the new generation of artists and creators will use this new capability to mesmerize us!
Show HN: Plot lines of code over time in Git repositories
by genericspammer | 2025-05-20 19:22:51+00:00
It's a small wrapper around cloc (https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc), which just provides a convenient way to plot lines of code over time in a Git repository.

The script runs cloc on each commit in your current branch, starting from HEAD tracing back until the first commit.

For large repositories with many commits, you can tell it to only count every n:th commit with the '--step' option to speed up processing.

The way it works is quite sub-optimal, since every single file is counted in each commit, even if the file didn't change since last iteration. Might be a fun project later to find some nice optimizations, maybe by counting files one by one and keeping a dict of line count by file hash, or something along those lines.

Maybe someone will find this script useful, maybe not, anyways happy to hear if someone has any thoughts :)
by stackskipton | 2025-05-20 19:23:52+00:00
I don't get why 2+ years after Log4J we are still dealing with this from Java libraries developers.

Your end users are not security savvy, they will never be security savvy and you need to protect them from themselves instead of handing them loaded handgun. This language more than most is filled with people punching buttons for paycheck.

- Signed, Angry SRE who gets to deal with this crap.