MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apsurd | 2025-05-25 02:17:49+00:00
I'm purely going off the homepage examples, I didn't use the app for myself, given I think it'll just be generic stickers.

A good example is the Tuxedo cat. The original image of the real cat shows the white fur on the face is not symmetrical, there's a cute little dollop of white over the right eye. The generated sticker is completely generic, symmetrical ^ shape of white fur. Real cat doesn't look like that. Not to their owner!
by nssnsjsjsjs | 2025-05-25 02:20:47+00:00
1500/y for 100 interviews seems OK. Doesn't matter if you are not using 100% of features.

Or is that per month?

I am interested in uncovering the real problem. Most apps we buy especially at work have shit we put up with (like AI sparkles everywhere) because basically they do the job. So switching I imagine happens when the platform isn't doing what's needed or as a cost saving exercise. It may be in rare cases a personal bugbear thing or ethical reason.

I just wonder what is the real driving painful issue, if any?
by tzs | 2025-05-25 02:21:26+00:00
> A proper dumb phone would only have enough firmware and OS to make calls and text, maybe a very rudimentary calculator.

It's that "maybe a very rudimentary calculator" part that would be the problem with trying to sell a dumb phone nowadays, I think. For some people calls, text, and a simple calculator would be perfect. For others though it would be calls, text, and a music player. Others would want calls, text, and a camera.

Back in the dumb phone days I would take some subset of these devices with me when I went out for the day:

• Calculator

• Music player

• Palm Pilot

• Camera

• GPS

I think a "dumb" phone would have to include most or all of those to really be commercially viable, although maybe the maker could make it work if they had several different models each with just a couple of those.
by hayst4ck | 2025-05-25 02:23:40+00:00
> Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none.

The corollary is any system where users can leave without pain is a system that has low investment appeal.

If you talk to investors they will say things like "we need a moat." A moat is exactly the opposite of what the author wants in the systems they want to use. Those who have money to invest generally aren't those who have higher ideals than money.

Competitors will seek to destroy things that challenge their power. One could imagine paying for large amounts of bad faith content in order to destroy a system's value by incurring moderation costs. So now you have a system that is not only unappealing to invest in, but must also defend itself from the resource expenditures of competitors attacking it by spending resources on defense.

> If they understand that forcing you to enshittify the service will send all your users packing and leave them with nothing, they will very likely not force you to wreck your service.

They would have never invested in the first place, making this statement self-contradictory under conditions of philosophical rigor. There is no way under Doctorow's philosophy to build an institution that could challenge a stronger institution. There is a clear bootstrapping problem to his ideology.

All collective action problems involve the exercise of responsibility, doing what must be done even if it harms you or isn't short term optimal. The author is trying to exercise responsibility by holding an ideological line, but doesn't do much to challenge power other than to assert the illegitimacy of power itself as an absolutely corrupting force.

But institutional investment is what builds entities strong enough to challenge other entities power.

The ultimate failure is the irresponsibility of getting something for nothing, because the cost of that "nothing" is submission.
by aragilar | 2025-05-25 02:23:56+00:00
Let's not hold Canonical up as some kind of paragons of open source. While yes, they're not as bad as Microsoft (which frankly isn't a high bar to clear), and it seems likely that at the beginning they were enthusiastic supporters, the source code for many of their key services is not open source (unlike e.g. Red Hat), and they have made numerous bad choices over the years (of which the ads were just one example). See the ongoing LXD debacle (https://lwn.net/Articles/940684/) for a recent example.

Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, Canonical/Ubuntu did good work fixing up lingering issues (e.g. their 100 papercuts program), but for whatever reason (maybe the people left) that was replaced by an era where have they tried to produce alternatives to what everyone else was using, and failing badly. Maybe if they went back to their origins then things might improve, but I suspect they've lost that culture, and they've become the linux distro most matching the trajectory of Google.
by sanity | 2025-05-25 02:24:05+00:00
A few months back I built a cryptographic alternative to CAPTCHAs called Ghost Keys[1] that uses a small donation as proof-of-humanity. For donating you get an anonymous keypair that works across services without repeated CAPTCHAs. The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators, and donations fund our non-profit[2].

[1] https://freenet.org/ghostkey/

[2] https://freenet.org/
by hackingonempty | 2025-05-25 02:24:10+00:00
The reality now is the ticket sellers and bands are the main scalpers and everyone else are now secondary scalpers.

Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first.

All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were around $40-$50 in 2025 dollars, now that is just the service charge. Just go on eBay and look at some ticket stubs then put the price / date into the CPI calculator.

It turns out that the bands couldn't beat the scalpers so they became the scalpers, charging outrageous prices with the assistance of the ticketing companies.

So stopping bots isn't as important as it was when CAPTCHAs were effective, since there is a lot less money on the table for professional scalpers to capture.
by amluto | 2025-05-25 02:24:31+00:00
I don’t have a good, accessible source for traditional tool applications, but knives are basically tools, and knifesteelnerds.con is a fantastic resource from an author who is a genuine expert:

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/10/19/knife-steels-rated-by...

Compare the toughness vs hardness charts for non-stainless and stainless. You’ll find some low alloy non-stainless steels with excellent toughness at a given hardness level, but those have poor wear resistance. Other than that, the charts are just not very different. Note that even some of the very most wear-resistant steels are stainless (but you’ll have to recognize the names or look them up to tell).

Of course, this says nothing about price, availability in large quantities, weldability, or ability to form them in the ways that people building large structures might want.
by arthurcolle | 2025-05-25 02:24:38+00:00
The examples definitely need to be changed, but I am considering just throwing away this implementation and restarting as I don't want to be tied to this current typescript implementation and I think I can move a bit faster with Rails.

The underlying pet generation is actual not too bad, but you're fundamentally right -> need to extract features from the core pet content and then use those to generate the sticker assets. I already do this - in fact I have a very advanced pipeline to take 1) OG image -> 2) create 30-50 variants -> 3) compare against stock to get good 8-15 variants -> 4) take those and generate prompts/images that are useful in creating the "final good stock"

From those, if there are multiple images on any single image, I split them. Then, as the user uses the app, the images get packed into one or multiple sheets that are then able to be shipped.

Here are some of the original animals for the sticker examples:

https://x.com/arthurcolle/status/1926469831970165097

I'll fix the app examples. Thanks for the shout.
by jjk166 | 2025-05-25 02:25:38+00:00
How often do you have multiple trucks going the exact same route at the exact same time?

If this were for transit between logistics hubs, this is just a less efficient version of trains. The one advantage of trucks over trains is their flexibility - the truck can go anywhere, unless of course it doesn't have a driver.

I suppose one driver could be driving both to one location and then keep going with an empty truck to a second location, but while that all is happening the one truck is not making any money. This only gets worse as you add more. It also doesn't really have any advantage over a double trailer.
by ygjb | 2025-05-25 02:26:20+00:00
You know how if you pile lots of flammable things in the corner of your garage and it's fine for years, and then a toddler strolls through with a book of matches, then suddenly you get a new and unique fire?

The conferences and scientists leaving are the results of decades of policy undermining education and human rights, coupled with the rise of the alt-right, normalization of racism and misogyny, with a soupçon of neo-nazism that allowed a populist regime to rise to power. All of that was the pile of flammable things. The extrajudicial deportations, conferences and scientists leaving, and tourism crashing are the first tendrils of smoke rising in the corner. It's not too late for America to fix it.
by tengwar2 | 2025-05-25 02:26:31+00:00
The low-pressure version from Evrin is not plausible. It's fairly easy to calculate the stored energy in a given volume of compressed air, and it just doesn't give you enough to be useful even assuming 100% efficiency. Theres a lot of "might" in this article that I'm not sure how to remove within Wikipedia rules but probably shouldn't be there.
by irjustin | 2025-05-25 02:26:44+00:00
> I was surprised at Roblox

Any place with a large gathering of children and free form text input/chat instantly turns this into exploit. Pretty much every video game w/ chat has to deal with this.

> free-wheeling early 90s bbs and early internet era

In simplest terms, the predators hadn't fully adapted yet.

It's sad but as with any tool that gains mass adoption it'll get both sides of the coin weaponizing it into something nefarious. In this regard I am worried about predators adapting AI tools in ways that aren't obvious and I am concerned for my children, but exactly as you say, we must "play with them" which helps ensure their safety at multiple levels.
by mindslight | 2025-05-25 02:27:19+00:00
> Because I'd like to not become deaf.

Alright sure, this is valid. But it drastically reduces your point from arguing about the ideals of liberty to just pragmatically having a device you find useful. "I don't care about the destruction of liberty because I might get a toy" isn't a compelling argument.

> We've got so little in common, it'd be difficult to even describe how far apart we are

Except you know, we probably actually aren't. I recognize your nick from early reddit, like a decade and a half ago at this point? Generally found your points agreeable, from my libertarian perspective. And yet here we are now, arguing on completely opposite sides.

> Which liberty do you no longer have, that you had one year ago?

The natural right of free speech is under open attack by these attempts to make universities obey the whims of an autocratic executive. Even not being in college, and not even really agreeing with the speech being used as a strawman here, that is still an infringement upon my rights. Just as say, drug prohibition is an infringement upon my rights even though I'm not really big into drugs.

> The argument that was most likely to convince me to be concerned is glossed over [economy]

I didn't gloss it over - I referenced it. Go read any of the economics threads where these arguments are hashed out. Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057663 . Maybe my coming from more of an Austrian economics analysis might actually ring true for you in some ways? I would love to hear where I'm wrong, but from what I've seen responses either fall into repeating talking points, nihilism, or ghosting the conversation.

It's most certainly true that the elites (US politicians and corporate class) have sold out the US worker with the monetary policies of the past few decades. The problem is that the Republican party is always stuck on complaining about being had by the last over-and-done con, with that energy going into supporting the setup for the next con. And I don't see how it's any different this time.

> maybe unpleasant for you

The destruction of our societal institutions, bureaucratic checks and balances, our economy, and our standing in the world are going to make things quite unpleasant for all of us. You just haven't realized it yet.
by throw383624 | 2025-05-25 02:28:32+00:00
Disagree. The older I get, the more I love living in the city.

I dislike having to drive long distances to do anything. In a city, my block alone has tons of stores I can go to.

Anywhere else I want to visit is just a subway ride away.

I do agree it's good to have parents and family around to help take care of your kids. That's even better in the city since the kids can just walk to there themselves once they're old enough.

I know some older seniors who can't drive anymore and it doesn't affect them at all because they can either take the bus or subway.
by Liftyee | 2025-05-25 02:31:46+00:00
I'm not sure about onsemi's openness, but I found the public datasheet for the U16 power regulator affected (NCP6343) with one search [1]. As the article explained, the Broadcom SoC has nothing to do with this fault.

I don't think "makers" should be brought into this - to me, "makers" include individuals who may not have any formal engineering education just putting ideas together.

Of course it's a different story for actual companies selling a product such as Raspberry Pi - the engineering standard should rightfully be higher.

[1] https://www.onsemi.com/download/data-sheet/pdf/ncp6343-d.pdf
by JadoJodo | 2025-05-25 02:33:50+00:00
> I don't allow my kids (kindergarten and middle school) to play Roblox based on the advice of a prosecutor in my town that works exclusively with child abuse, endangerment, and other crimes like that.

I've heard the same advice from a friend who works in law enforcement in this same area (child abuse, CSAM, exploitation) for the US (federal) government. Some of the stories I've heard...
by dangus | 2025-05-25 02:34:42+00:00
Our backgrounds sound similar. I just don’t sweat all those details when I set things up.

I’m not advocating for the use of cloud services necessarily, not saying we all need to allow someone else to abstract away everything. And I realize that someone on an ops team has to actually set that up at a low level at some point.

What I am saying is that there’s a lot of open source software that has already invented the wheel for you. You can run it easily and be reasonably assured that it’s safe enough to be exposed to the internet.

I gave the example of nginx proxy manager. It may be basic software but for a personal blog it’ll get the job done and you can set it up almost entirely in a GUI following a simple YouTube tutorial. It’ll get you an wildcard certificate automatically, and it’ll be secure enough.
by Qem | 2025-05-25 02:35:31+00:00
Sometimes I wonder if humanity had taken longer to understand and apply electromagnetism, could we have developed an technical civilization similar to our current one, but powered by compressed air? Instead of wires for electricity and pipes for water, houses would have two sets of pipes for water and compressed air, with home appliances powered by hose-delivered pressure. Not sure if a system like this would be scalable for a large city.
by technion | 2025-05-25 02:35:39+00:00
Concerts that are struggling with numbers shouldn't have a scalper problem though. If you want more people through the door, there are presumably base price tickets still for sale.

This problem mostly exists in the Swift concerts that sell out in four minutes before the internet explodes with people complaining the website never loaded for them. I'm sure "might harm sales" really won't be a problem for those concerts.
by AlienRobot | 2025-05-25 02:36:07+00:00
In my opinion the web is in dire need of a system of proof of humanity. This, together with a mixed system, could solve this sort of problem.

For example, there could be an API for e-mail providers to tell services that an address belongs to a human. The provider would need to implement methods to verify the user's humanity, so you wouldn't need to give every online service your personal info, only your humanity provider that vouches for you. Something like SSL certificate hierarchies could be used to ensure that smaller providers aren't vouching for bots, i.e. you have a root CA that signs their certificates, and if it's found that they don't actually do what they are supposed to do, the certificate isn't renewed. This added with some actual costs to get those certificates would give them an incentive not to lie.

I know some people complain about this not being "private," but let's be real. If you purchase anything from any online website, they have your home address, your phone number, your real name as printed on your credit card, and there is a non-zero chance that some moron stored your credit card number in plain text in a MySQL database. It's always going to be safer to trust PayPal than some random website with this information. Why not do the same with human identity?

Finally, if you can't sign up with any humanity provider for some reason, just make the process extremely annoying and limited. For example, if you have 100 tickets to sell, reserve 90 for people that can prove they are human and leave only 10 for potential bots, then implement a lengthy process for those users so that's not worth it for the bots. If 90% of the tickets are already purchased by people, it will be less profitable for scrapers already.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-25 02:36:09+00:00
> His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence: "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."

This analysis in the article feels woefully uncharitable and is incompatible with HN guidelines, ironically, but if internalized leads directly to the nitpicking style frequently seen on HN as a substitute for elucidation of ideas not well expressed on the way to deeper analysis. Dismissing mediocre writing out of hand seems classist more than anything.
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-05-25 02:36:27+00:00
how about on-device biometrics?

most of traffic is from mobile devices anyways. they have biometrics (e.g. Apple FaceID, fingerprint). they also have DeviceCheck (Apple Hardware + Apple servers) integrity checks of device/binary that is making requests. it is also free and private.

why using this technology is not part of conversation? seems like utmost strongest guarantees and perfect fit?
by 1propionyl | 2025-05-25 02:36:33+00:00
A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one:

Stop selling online.

Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.

Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.
by nssnsjsjsjs | 2025-05-25 02:37:12+00:00
Love the idea. I've only tinkered with ML. I liked w&b but if there was an open source alternative I'd definitely have used that.

Very modest to not mention the YC backing in this post. Guess you might get better (more informative) responses by not mentioning it.

Not sure how you will moneyify it? Probably good old "use our cloud" or "pro features"?

Good luck!
by energy123 | 2025-05-25 02:38:38+00:00
> I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs

I describe it as inverse purple prose. The over-engineered simplicity stands out and distracts from the content.

Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
by richardw | 2025-05-25 02:38:59+00:00
I’m assuming exploratory work from the exec, not something they make decisions with or put into production. If you need something you can trust, you typically need a lot of checks, including multiple humans.

I play a weird part at work near AI. I use it all the time but I’m the first person to warn everyone that it’s absolutely not trustworthy. No matter your prompt, the data, the guidelines built into it, the output is fundamentally flaky. But I use it while knowing that and working around it. Making the process reliable is a big part of my focus, and usually that means minimising the part the LLM plays. Checks and balances live where things are predictable.
by somat | 2025-05-25 02:39:06+00:00
I saw the Bone Quarry at Dinosaur national park a couple of years ago, And it was very nearly a religious experience.

I was on a cross country trip and decided to see it on a whim, so no real research on what it was, I thought it was going to be a large fossil, and went "I like dinosaurs, A fossil will be fun" But when I went around that last corner, entered the site. I was not prepared, the sight quite literally took my breath away.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/DNM_Quar...

Then when you learn that what you are seeing is only a quarter of what was found there... I am a little conflicted, on the one hand it is great that so many museums get near complete skeletons, get to share this great thing with so many people. But there is a good amount of regret. as majestic as what was preserved imagine if it were kept whole.

Final thoughts: Bone Quarry is a great name for a metal band.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-05-25 02:40:04+00:00
60/40 feels very pessimistic to me (meaning I think the election is more than 60% likely to occur on Nov 7, 2028 and the results heeded more or less as usual).

If you think 60/40 is the right odds, you have some opportunities available - to make fake dollars, at least: https://manifold.markets/AndrewG/will-donald-trump-attempt-t...

I bet you could find more than a few people here to take the other side of 60/40 odds in a $100 bet.
by braaaahp | 2025-05-25 02:40:32+00:00
I don’t mean protest.

I mean consume less media. Stuff.

Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt. How many new shirts does a person need a year? 2-3? That’s like what, a cold December?

Be a human not a battery in a Matrix pod propping up ad companies and Hollywood.

We live in a Newspeak bubble; it’s freedom to stare at screen.

Local culture in the US is hyper-normalized around money making metrics.

Boomers did all the drugs and lived. They convinced GenX and Millennials to Netflix chill, order grubhub and watch AI content

It’s so bizarre

Edit: this is what gets attention not blocking roads https://finance.yahoo.com/news/target-badly-misses-on-earnin...