MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toast0 | 2025-05-22 19:24:51+00:00
Codec selection is always a complex task. You've got to weigh quality/bitrate vs availability of hardware encode/decode, licensing, and overall resource usage.

The ITU standards have had a lot better record of inclusion in devices that people actually have; and often using hardware encode/decode takes care of licensing. But hardware encode doesn't always have the same quality/bitrate as software and may not be able to do fancier things like simulcast or svc. Some of the hardware decoders are pretty picky about what kinds of streams they'll accept too.

IMHO, if you're looking at software h.264 vs software vp9, I think vp9 is likely to give you better quality at a given bitrate, but will take more cpu to do it. So, as always, it depends.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-22 19:25:18+00:00
> If you create a block deeply within a cascade of nested function calls, nineteen activation levels deep, and return that block out of all those nestings, is it still aware of the nineteen levels that have terminated, and to what purpose/benefit?

A block cannot be returned, because it is not an object; it has to be used to create a Proc object with either proc or lambda semantics to be returned.

With lambda semantics, its just a closure, doesn't care about the dynamic scope, and returns immediately to whatever calls it with return/next, or returns from the calling method with break.

With proc semantics, it does retain the connection, and return or break will result in an error when those scopes have terminated, but next will still return to the caller. (You don't generally want to return a proc for that reason, the use for procs is passing down a call chain, not returning them up.)
by rglover | 2025-05-22 19:26:07+00:00
It's being made out to be something bigger/more important than what it is to create hype and investment interest. Is it incredibly useful? Yes. But it's not aliens landing on the front lawn of the White House offering us anti-gravity tech.

If they said what it really was (see my other comment in this thread [1]), they couldn't leverage it to make more money/get more investors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44065739
by swyx | 2025-05-22 19:26:15+00:00
analysis as the resident summaries guy:

- sonnet has better summary formatting "(72.5% for Opus)" vs "Claude Opus 4 achieves "72.5%" on SWE-bench". especially Uncommon Perspectives section

- sonnet is a lot more cynical - opus at least included a good performance and capabilities and pricing recap, sonnet reported rapid release fatigue

- overall opus produced marginally better summaries but probably not worth the price diff

i'll run this thru the ainews summary harness later if thats interesting to folks for comparison
by chairmansteve | 2025-05-22 19:27:14+00:00
Problem being....

You fire the copywriter, but you still have to pay for the advertising (google clicks, tv spots etc).

So if you have $100,000 ad campaign and you use AI instead of paying $10,000 to the copywriter, you probably have a higher chance of wasting the $90,0000 ad spend.

So it comes down to, the AI probably makes a skilled copywriter better. But you can't get rid of him
Show HN: Generate huge dummy images using drag and drop
by flythru | 2025-05-22 19:27:16+00:00
When I was working on a web app that supported image uploads, I often wished for a quick way to generate dummy images (especially with some weird dimensions) for testing. Then I built this small app for that purpose.

Feel free to try unusual dimensions like 1x1 px or 2x20,000 px, but it does fail eventually for dimensions that are too large due to browser limitations.

It's also open source :)
by djhworld | 2025-05-22 19:27:44+00:00
I would say I was sad to see it go, but I moved to karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder) a few months ago and it's been a perfect replacement. Most importantly, you can self-host it - which is great.

One thing that stood out to me in the article was this this to justify the shutdown

> But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.

I'd be really interested to hear what exactly they mean by this, are people visiting fewer websites? Walled gardens like facebook etc make it useless for bookmarking so I can see how pocket would be a bad fit there
by delbronski | 2025-05-22 19:28:18+00:00
My personal motto is: “don’t chase perfection, and don't settle for mediocrity“. I can’t just ship the most basic thing because I find that boring and demotivating. I don’t like to make good enough things. I take joy in going a little deeper into things. But chasing perfection is a never ending road.

What helps me is to write down my vision of an mvp. As I start to work on it that vision may change. I may think of this or that feature. If I get that itch to add something new, I go back to that document. I ask myself if this is really a critical addition. Sometimes I come to the conclusion that yes, this new way of thinking is the way to go. Most times I just write it down as something to explore in the future and keep going.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-22 19:28:47+00:00
>NIR doesn't start becoming the preferred wavelength till the object gets up to at least 800 deg F.

My understanding is that due to the relative bell curve of emitted wavelengths a hot object should still look "funny" in the same way that a cherry red piece of iron still looks like iron, just different. Is that not true for NIR?
by yeahokbut | 2025-05-22 19:29:07+00:00
They’re used to openly saying what they are doing and expecting everyone to ignore it: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

Worked so far. But social media put everything up for scrutiny. The smart ones hide it. Trump doesn’t care cause no one will revolt with violence.
by nightpool | 2025-05-22 19:29:25+00:00
The sibling comments mention that C is used in a lot of places in Ruby that incur cross-language overheads, which is true, but it's also just true that in general, even ignoring this overhead, JIT'd functions are going to be faster then their comparable C functions, because 1) they have more profiling information to be able to work from, 2) they have more type information, and (as a consequence of 1&2) 3) they're more likely to be monomorphized, and the compiler is more able to inline specialized variants of them into different chunks of the code. Among other optimizations!
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-22 19:29:30+00:00
Ah ok, I had misunderstood then, excuse me. That is not unreasonable at all as a metric of success.

When you say professional, you mean philosophical journals, or what? My first thought would be the language - people aren't writing much response to him in English and German too? What is the situation like regarding interplay between the worlds of English language and German language philosophy?

I can see why his books might be popular with a lay audience, in that they're short, and quite manageable in terms of the images and sentences.
by kmacdough | 2025-05-22 19:29:59+00:00
And they might all be right!

> This tech could lead to...

I don't think he's saying this is the version that will suddenly trigger a Renaissance. Rather, it's one solid step that makes the path ever more promising.

Sure, everyone gets a bit overexcited each release until they find the bounds. But the bounds are expanding, and the need for careful prompt engineering is diminishing. Ever since 3.7, Claude has been a regular part of my process for the mundane. And so far 4.0 seems to take less fighting for me.

A good question would be when can AI take a basic prompt, gather its own requirements and build meaningful PRs off basic prompt. I suspect it's still at least a couple of paradigm shifts away. But those seem to be coming every year or faster.
by podgietaru | 2025-05-22 19:30:07+00:00
I still use the self-hosted version of Omnivore - I had built quite a lot around it so when that shut down I just decided to transfer over.

It was hard enough going from Pocket to something else, I didn't want to do that again.

I actually have a Supernote now, and side-loaded the Omnivore App onto it - so I use my Kobo less (though still somewhat at night due to the backlight.)
by thomasahle | 2025-05-22 19:30:29+00:00
> Now, diffusion LMs take this idea further. BERT can recover 15% of masked tokens ("noise"), but why stop here. Let's train a model to recover texts with 30%, 50%, 90%, 100% of masked tokens.

> Once you've trained that, in order to generate something from scratch, you start by feeding the model all [MASK]s. It will generate you mostly gibberish, but you can take some tokens (let's say, 10%) at random positions and assume that these tokens are generated ("final")

This is clearly wrong. If you actually froze 10% of gibberish tokens, your output would be terrible!

What you actually do in discrete statespace diffusion (see e.g. [1]) is to allow every token to change at every time step.

You combine this with a "schedule" that allows the model to know how close it is to being done. E.g. at t=0/20 the changes will be large, and at t=19/20 only small refinements are made.

Update: There is actually a kind of model that "greedily" freezes the top-p most confident tokens, similar to what the blog post describes (though not at random!) this is called MaskGit [2], but it is not a diffusion model and doesn't work as well.

Btw, you can also just use "continuous diffusion" with a transformer/bert model, where you've removed the top softmax layer. Then everything works as normal with Gaussian noise, and you just do softmax at the the final time step.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03006

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04200
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-05-22 19:30:34+00:00
I started buying Kikkoman's "whole bean" soy sauce (I don't remember what it's called in Japanese: maroyaka?), because I found a local Asian mart carried it, and it was reasonably priced. Seems you can find it on Amazon these days, even:

https://www.amazon.com/Kikkoman-Maroyaka-Sauce-33-8-Ounce-Pa...

Haven't compared it side-by-side with the normal stuff, but anecdotally it tasted a little more mellow to my palette, and I will probably continue using it moving forward when my 1L bottle runs out.
by EGreg | 2025-05-22 19:31:09+00:00
I've been a huge proponent of open source for a decade. But in the case of AI, I actually have opposed it for years. Exactly for this reason.

Yes, AI models can run on GPUs under the control of many people. They can provision more GPUs, they can run in data centers distributed across many providers. And we won't know what the swarms of agents are doing. They can, for example, do reputation destruction at scale, or be a persistent advanced threat, sowing misinformation, amassing karma across many forums (including HN), and then coordinating gradually to shift public opinion towards, say, a war with China.
by lakeeffect | 2025-05-22 19:31:24+00:00
We really need to establish a universal basic income before jobs are replaced. Something like two thousand a month. And a dollar for dollar earned income credit with the credit phasing out with at a hundred grand. To pay for it the tax code uses GAAP depreciation and a minimum tax of 15% GAAP financial statement income. This would work toward solving the real estate problem of private equity buying up all the houses as they would lose some incentive by being taxed. I'm a CPA and I see so many real estate partnerships that are a tax loss that are able to distribute huge book gains because accelerated depreciation.
by outlore | 2025-05-22 19:31:30+00:00
100% this. Regarding the vetting part: The bluesky waitlist/invite system was a bit extreme but a karma system which prevents posting before reaching a certain level (some subreddits and hacker news does this) could also improve the quality of conversation Also, over time we have seen how advertising really skews the quality of social platforms, so I’d challenge you to come up with other forms of monetization, which could be donation or subscription based, or perhaps points based rewards like Bamboo’s maker hub.

I’m not a huge fan of how AI generated content can pollute social media, but using it for moderation could be useful, such as detecting company pages, spam and other harmful content.
by crat3r | 2025-05-22 19:31:43+00:00
If you ask an LLM to "act" like someone, and then give it context to the scenario, isn't it expected that it would be able to ascertain what someone in that position would "act" like and respond as such?

I'm not sure this is as strange as this comment implies. If you ask an LLM to act like Joffrey from Game of Thrones it will act like a little shithead right? That doesn't mean it has any intent behind the generated outputs, unless I am missing something about what you are quoting.
by Animats | 2025-05-22 19:31:43+00:00
Sigh.

Decades ago I headed a project to build a proof of correctness system.[1] It was for a rather dialect of Pascal for real-time engine control programs. Some of the comments I made back then still apply.

- Assertions belong in the program source, and in the same syntax as the language of the program. They're mostly written by the people writing the code. The proof of correctness work can and should be integrated with development.

- Most, but not all, of the theorem proving can be automated with what's now called a "SAT solver". We had the original Oppen-Nelson simplifier for that.

- Sometimes you need more theorem proving power than a SAT solver. We used the original Boyer-Moore theorem prover for that. It's automatic, but you can help it by suggesting intermediate theorems.

- To tie complex theorems to concrete code, programmers should write

assert(a); assert(b);

where a can be proved from the code above by the SAT solver, and b is what you need to prove constraints on the following code. Now you have to prove a implies b. That's when you need a more interactive prover, or one with more power. a implies b should be a statement that stands alone, without reference to other code. This allows turning the problem over to the people who are into theorem proving, while the programmers can get on with coding.

- Many of the people involved in program verification are heavily into the formalism, rather than seeing this as a way to eliminate bugs. This leads to excessive formalism. That tendency has to be restrained.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/pasv
by inanutshellus | 2025-05-22 19:31:43+00:00
Reading pro-Pocket comments is so surreal.

I never really paid any attention to Pocket and never used it but 100% of the comments I ever saw were about how it was some invasion of privacy tool that was evidence of corruption in Mozilla selling your data to 3rd parties or something.

Now it's dead and ... everyone here is mourning its passing. Guess I was a successful mark for anti-Mozilla FUD tactics.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-22 19:31:45+00:00
> citing something does not imply that the cited thing is “foundational” to the work from which it is cited.

I neither wrote nor implied that. Sure there are many reasons to cite papers, but in saying "citing the research as foundational", meaning that their foundation is the reason for their citation. You were so eager to write all those words you didn't stop to actually read mine. Therefore, I think that's all I have to say to you, I'll leave the rest unread.
by chermi | 2025-05-22 19:31:46+00:00
TL;DR newton basically got the FORCES right, but forces don't tell the whole story because of (mainly ) 1) insufficient propagation speed because ocean is deep 2) think of it kind of like a diff eq, the boundary conditions (largely from land masses) from the actual structure of the earth make the solutions much more interesting than F=ma might suggest.

Edit- I recommend actually reading it, especially the second answer.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-22 19:31:48+00:00
s/crazy/deliberately evil/g

They might prefer to start with certain targets, but all international students are target of opportunity [0] the same way they've attacked people with lawful residency.

[1] Though perhaps with some very particular and suspicious quasi-ethnic exceptions. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crljn5046epo

[0] Ex. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/us/immigration-green-card..., https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article304988381.html
by podgietaru | 2025-05-22 19:31:57+00:00
While the Kobo app is still available an alternative might be:

Self-Host Omnivore: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/blob/main/self-host...

Use this proxy to point to the Self-Hosted instance to pull from Omnivore Instead. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter

This is what I've been doing for a year or so now. I hope they don't remove the Kobo integration code from my Kobo.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-22 19:32:06+00:00
One thing that. I dunno bugs me or maybe I just observe it is how literal or one-sided people seem to be. There is a very reasonable argument to be had about where we should direct our resources. For a current debate - Does a country direct it's resources to it's native population even though immigrants are kind, respectable people who are just trying to get ahead for their family?

But like holding this idea in your mind is too hard. It's hard to say "Even though this person over here is a good person, and I understand their plight and what they're going through, I'm going to make the hard decision to allocate resources away from them" instead you have to create a world in which this person is actually bad, or that empathy itself is the problem, and that way you can sort of feel good about taking resources away.
by Retric | 2025-05-22 19:33:26+00:00
You’re still not getting it, not having a boss means I have a very different view of businesses decisions. Most people have an overly narrow view of tasks IMO and think speed, especially for minor issues, is vastly more important than it is.

> LLMs allowing optimal time use in certain case

I never said it was slower, I’m saying what’s the tradeoff. I’ve had this same basic conversation with multiple people, and after that failed the only real option is to remove them. Ex: If you don’t quite understand why what you wrote seemingly fixes a bug don’t commit it yet, seems to work isn’t a solution.

Could be I’m not explaining very well, but ehh fuck em.
by iLemming | 2025-05-22 19:33:35+00:00
Moreover, every programming language has its own community. With conventions, rules, style guides, code of conduct, roadmaps and mentality. With some "weird" takes and with some "pragmatic insights", with their own "rock stars" and "graybeards" to respect and follow. Each with its own unique landscape of hills to choose to die on. "Nothing's wrong with XML", "Give me JSON or death", "Fuck that, YAML all the way for me", ".yaml is dead, long live .toml!", "pfff, you mortals have no idea but EDN is way better..." — and that's just some data-representation disagreements. Once you get to actually processing the data, it gets even worse: "object-orientation is bullcrap", "oh, no, this FP shit is so hard to read for me, what's wrong with good-old 'for' loops?", "if you're not using static types, you're a bad, bad person...", "yes, these 35 libraries to run our 3-liner script are really necessary", etc. Every single programming language has its own pain points and joyful bits. That's why programming is both an amazingly gratifying and a heinously crappy trade.

Do you want to age into an old, happy programmer? Avoid emotional attachment to any single programming language. Borrow good ideas from different sources, but don’t settle on a single PL, paradigm, or convention. Sure, you’ll probably end up hating each of them for different reasons, but you may find some that you don’t loathe so badly.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-22 19:33:37+00:00
You’re not missing anything. In general, I don’t think you can really trust the vast majority of software developers anymore. Incentives are so ridiculously aligned against the user.

If you take the next step: “do not use software from vendors you don’t trust,” you are severely limiting the amount of software you can use. Each user gets to decide for himself whether this is a feasible trade off.
by tguvot | 2025-05-22 19:33:44+00:00
>Thus far, it doesn't seem like Israel has made a serious good faith criminal investigation into the conduct in question.

actually... when Israel tried to claim principle of complementarity it was rejected because it can be invoked only within 1 month of start of investigation. And current arrest warrants were filed under investigation that prosecutor started in 2020 or something, way before current events for which warrants were issued.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-22 19:33:49+00:00
> Am I the only one who is super skeptical about “AI will take all jobs” tales?

No. I am constantly baffled at these predictions. I have been using LLMs, they are fun to use and decent as code assistants. But they are very far of meaningfully replacing a human.

People extrapolate "LLMs can do some tasks better than humans" to "LLMs can do everything as well as humans"

> but how do people extrapolate from LLMs to a world with no more work?

They accept the words of bullshitters that are deeply invested in Generative AI being the next tech boom as gospel.

"Eat meat, said the butcher"
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-22 19:34:09+00:00
So that was my conviction, too. However, in my tests it seems like upgrading to a version a model hasn't seen is for some reason problematic, in spite of giving it the complete docs, examples of new API usage etc. This happens even with small snippets, even though they can deal with large code fragments with older APIs they are very "familiar" with.
by greatgib | 2025-05-22 19:34:14+00:00
Ah yes, I forgot this funny joke where for years I didn't understand why the dock was suddenly jumping to the other monitor without wanting to come back.

And finally discovered that you should do a strange movement of two fast tap to the bottom of the screen without mouse to move the dock on this screen. Would always happen unexpected but will be very hard to execute well to bring the dock back.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-22 19:34:23+00:00
Depends on how one thinks of "mass," since (a) there is an unholy amount of tooling out there which only speaks the GitHub API (not even mentioning GitLab, Gitea, ...) and (b) AIUI the Fossil folks abhor history mutation which is great for them and really not great for a subset of git users. I get the lightweight impression that they took Mercurial's "please don't" and turned it up to 11
by coffeemug | 2025-05-22 19:34:48+00:00
It would not be a reversion to 2020. If I were a rogue superhuman AI I'd hide my rogueness, wait until humans integrate me into most critical industries (food and energy production, sanitation, electric grid, etc.), and _then_ go rogue. They could still pull the plug, but it would take them back to 1700 (except much worse, because all easily accessible resources have been exploited, and access is now much harder).
by yeahokbut | 2025-05-22 19:34:55+00:00
My Dem senator from a “very blue state” described the US economy with decades of forced austerity and rising inequality as a model for the world and then Trump ruined our credibility.

Let that settle in; our credibility is was built on growing inequality. Decades of austerity being cheered on behind closed doors to leave a left wing senator believing austerity politics, gentle eugenics is a model for the world.

The problem is not the parties. It’s the people in power.
by aziaziazi | 2025-05-22 19:35:29+00:00
Interesting, I read GGP as:

If they stopped learning (=including) at march 31 and something popup on the internet on march 30 (lib update, new Nobel, whatever) there’s many chances it got scrapped because they probably don’t scrap everything in one day (do they ?).

That isn’t mutually exclusive with your answer I guess.

edit: thanks adolph to point out the typo.