MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-05-02 03:35:28+00:00
I've found what's happening in north eastern Syria to be interesting.

This area was previously under the religious fundamentalist rule of Islamic State, who were pushed out by a Anarchist/Libertarian socialist milita, around half of whom were women (much to the dislike of ISIS, whose fighters believed if they were killed by a woman, they don't get to go to heaven).

Currently it's the first example of a working Anarchist system.

No laws means that capitalism isn't illegal, so it still exists there.

But most of the economy is based on cooperatives and wages are three times higher than the rest of the country.

They smartly played the global power order, letting the Americans develop their oil and the Russians develop their gas.

Unlike what many may think, people don't go around killing each other without laws in place - which does happen in the rest of Syria under a statist (State based) system of government.
by touristtam | 2025-05-02 03:36:50+00:00
Links:

- SingleFile: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

- Linkding: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

- BeautifulScript4: https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (assumed that was the python library Beautiful Soup 4 and not "Script")
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-02 03:37:47+00:00
a) you can save costs on llama by running it locally

b) compute costs are plummeting. inference in the cloud costs has dropped over 80% in 1 year

c) similar to a), spending a little more and having a beefy enough machine is functionally cheaper after just a few projects

d) everyone trying to do sentiment analysis is trying to make waaaay more money anyway

so I dont see NLP’s even lower costs of being that relevant. its like pointing out that I could use assembly instead of 10 layers of abstraction. It doesnt really matter
by cyberax | 2025-05-02 03:38:08+00:00
> Why not? Game devs want to be compatible with multiple consoles.

Console games are typically highly optimized for particular console hardware. This coupling allows great-looking games for hardware that is cheap to make.

As a result, it's typical for consoles to far outperform regular PCs of the same price range. Especially at the beginning of the console lifecycle.

So it can be argued that consumers benefit from this arrangement: they get cheap special-purpose devices for gaming that can't be obtained if consoles are prohibited.

> Games can be packaged to support multiple formats or a standard interface.

Sure. But for AAA-type games that push the envelope, it's not at all trivial.

However, it seems that this pattern is fading with the recent consoles. So perhaps they also need to be unbundled.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-02 03:38:17+00:00
What's the use-case for restoring session authentication state with an external service as part of that? You have the creds, and the session will expire in somewhere between 10 mins and maybe a week from the backup (for sites that need this security). I doubt you'll be restoring within the session timeout of most online banking.

I get the benefits of restoring a full backup, but in this instance it would seem to lose practical security benefits for theoretical purity.
I built a pixel art editor after playing Octopath Traveler II
by Kobayashiii | 2025-05-02 03:39:20+00:00
After playing Octopath Traveler II, I was really inspired by its art style and decided to create my own pixel drawing app from scratch. It's still in the early stages, but it already supports basic drawing, undo/redo, and a clean UI focused on pixel-perfect design.

I plan to add frame-by-frame animation support in the next version.

You're welcome to try it out and share your thoughts! If you like the project, a on GitHub would mean a lot to me.

Live demo: https://ayanamiii.netlify.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/KamiC6238/ayanami
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-02 03:40:00+00:00
They can track you just fine via CSS and countless other ways. They'll even fingerprint the subtle intricacies of your network stack.

What we need to do is turn the hoarding of personal information into a literal crime. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second our business with them is concluded, not compiling dossiers on us as though they were clandestine intelligence agencies.
by rvz | 2025-05-02 03:40:20+00:00
> I've been thinking about this over the past few days - If AI is as capable as people here claim - enough to replace junior or intermediate developers - could it be used to maintain semi-abandoned open-source projects?

I don't think AI agents can generalize reliably to maintain complex open-source software, better than the authors. Those who say that are out to sell you an AI product or something.

The benchmark I would consider is the maintenance of the Linux kernel and AI is far from approaching to the level that it can maintain correct critical code that is trustworthy enough to being merged into mainline. But we'll see.

> Overall, not a very difficult problem and I can probably do it myself given a few days. Human engineering hours are quite expensive though and for such a low value task, I would assume an AI agent would be more cost effective.

Software maintenance is indeed expensive for a reason, however we still can't assume that an AI agent can help deal with autonomous maintenance on OSS projects; large or small or even in [0] and [2].

Technical debt is also a cost and many of these abandoned OSS projects don't even have any tests in the first place, including both 'hydroxide' and the protonmail client in [2].

So how do you know you if either project really works or not? Even if you use AI, what if it introduces a new bug in its implementation? How would you know beyond 'it works for me'?

In fact, autonomous AI agents just risk introducing more technical debt in OSS projects and increases that cost rather than reducing it.
by Cordiali | 2025-05-02 03:41:04+00:00
I'd agree with non-capitalist, but the authors are far too absolute for my liking.

The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.

At this point, it's basically the standard example.
by dbushell | 2025-05-02 03:41:16+00:00
The "replacement" is already being penned: https://www.w3.org/TR/privacy-preserving-attribution/

Which is just going to be in additional to 3rd-party cookies. Google's own study concluded removing 3rd-party cookies loses revenue and "privacy-preserving" tracking increases revenue: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/15189422 So they'll just do both: https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-next-steps/
by AIPedant | 2025-05-02 03:41:56+00:00
It should be more discussed that LLM progress had almost nothing to do with building energy plants and whatnot:

Whereas early AGI proponents believed that machines would soon take on all human activities, researchers have learned the hard way that creating AI systems that can beat you at chess or answer your search queries is a lot easier than building a robot to fold your laundry or fix your plumbing. The definition of AGI was adjusted accordingly to include only so-called “cognitive tasks.” DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis defines AGI as a system that “should be able to do pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do,” and OpenAI describes it as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” where “most” leaves out tasks requiring the physical intelligence that will likely elude robots for some time.

(via this excellent Melanie Mitchell essay https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado7069)

Transformer-powered robots still seem exceptionally stupid compared to frogs, bees, etc.

Re the shock comment - it is difficult to argue that ChatGPT has actually changed the economy much, despite widespread adoption. Overheated tech stocks, dev tooling, better scammers, better academic cheaters, etc are not exactly an industrial revolution. And frankly for many users it is more of a toy than a useful tool, e.g. the Studio Ghibli fad.
by g-b-r | 2025-05-02 03:42:05+00:00
There's no need for a login to track you with "first-party cookies", looking at the IP is perfectly adequate, at most adding some fingerprinting if you really want.

The only problem is that then the tracking companies have to place more trust on the first party that they're giving them real data.

But they're doing it, actually, see confection.io for example
by Nifty3929 | 2025-05-02 03:42:24+00:00
This is a good point - but at some point we have to trust someone. I feel that the Signal folks are worth trusting. Plus it's open source, so the more technie among us can meaningfully audit what's going on. That's not foolproof, but it does seem better than most alternatives.

Certainly it's better for the gov't to pay Signal than to try to do it themselves.
by Calavar | 2025-05-02 03:43:38+00:00
Slapping the constexpr keyword on a function is useless by itself, but it becomes useful when you combine it with a constexpr or constinit variable. Which is not all that different from Rust:

// C++ constexpr Foo bar() { /* ... */ } constexpr Foo CONSTANT = bar(); // Guaranteed to be evaluated at compile time constinit Foo VARIABLE = bar(); // Guaranteed to be evaluated at compile time // Rust const fn bar() -> Foo { /* ... */ } const CONSTANT: Foo = bar(); // Guaranteed to be evaluated at compile time static VARIABLE: Foo = bar(); // May or may not be evaluated at compile time

So Rust is actually less powerful than C++ when it comes to non-constant globals because AFAIK it doesn't have any equivalent to constinit.
by bgthompson | 2025-05-02 03:44:22+00:00
You're welcome! My experience with the breaking changes in Zig has not been bad at all. For brevity in the blog I didn't get into what I had to do to get things working again, but the process itself was straightforwards. Sometimes the names of some standard library functions had changed, sometimes it was some extra fields in the build system. Whatever the case, the changes were almost always documented in the release notes anyway, so after reading the release notes I basically knew the (small) amount of work I had ahead of me.
by thayne | 2025-05-02 03:44:47+00:00
To be clear, I am not saying the current situation should continue, but if they are going to destroy Mizillas main source of revenue, there should be some kind of plan in place to make sure we don't end up losing one of two serious competitors to chrome.

As one possibility, the remedies could include Google paying reperations to Mozilla for the damage their anti-competitive behavior has done to Firefox, without Mozilla being obligated to use Google as the search engine, to give Mozilla more time to find alternative funding. I'm not sure that is necessarily the best option, but I'm sure they could come up with something that doesn't leave Mozilla high and dry.
by xena | 2025-05-02 03:45:22+00:00
Thanks! I'll be sure to post through it either way. My failure condition is going back to work somewhere else, so worst case it'll be more likely to happen :)

Really though my dayjob kinda burns me out because I have to focus on AEO, which is SEO but for AI. I get by making and writing about cool things, but damn does it hurt having to write for machines instead of humans.
by _JoRo | 2025-05-02 03:45:56+00:00
I think a lot of it is: feels good to think that you're smarter than most than to acknowledge the reality that you're probably not.

My intuition is that this type of thinking is becoming more and more entrenched in American culture. I think by the time the culture as a whole wakes up, things will be significantly worse and many of the people who tried to prevent it will have been pushed out or willfully left.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-05-02 03:47:30+00:00
Then sell software. I said that first thing. Where is the fantasy in that?

If you don't understand it such that you think it's a fantasy (despite the ocean of existing software as proof that is produced, and countless published manifestos from people who do it describing why they do), well that's a you problem not a me or anyone else problem.

You don't get it, that's fine, then simply don't get it, and don't participate in this activity you think is insane.

You are free to have any opinion you want about what constitutes a rational use of your time and effort.

But don't pretend you understand something that the participants do not understand. We're all eating non-fantasy food just fine, somehow.
by antman | 2025-05-02 03:47:35+00:00
Its great if one assumes a small team, small external dependencies, team's authority surpasses management's authority, specs don't change, team doesn't change and the project is a todo app.Then ofcourse people will wait for personal promotions afterwards while assuming collective responsibility beforehand. Sounds like a dream scenario that will attract "Pigs' with experience in large projects. Especially if by design there is no process to trace what happened in the project.
by stickfigure | 2025-05-02 03:47:44+00:00
This is, basically, what pushed me away from the Republican party (aside from the relatively recent culture war). The Republicans always claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility (as long as I've been alive, which is longer than most people on HN) but by objective measurable fact have consistently been the party of government bloat and high spending.

I don't like hypocrites.
by theamk | 2025-05-02 03:48:11+00:00
All companies should do this.. if anything so we know what not to use.

Any sort of proprietary product (be it fully closed source, source-available, or "open source with limitations") is always a risk. You were happily using database X, but they got acquired by Broadcom and now their product costs 100x what it was before. What do you do now?

That's why it is much safer to adopt open source - worst case is the company goes under, but you still keep using last released version indefinitely, and hope new entity (maybe even hyperscaler!) forks the code. Or make an in-house fork if you have enough resources.

"equitable source" license means it's not an option. That new product should really be much, much better than open-source alternatives to even be considered.
by tgma | 2025-05-02 03:48:32+00:00
Huh, this is some Bluesky-level manufactured offended-ness.

The only comment I made about an individual in particular was related to virtue signaling. The financial commentary was about the profile of the founders, not an individual's finances in particular. If you have been a mid-level engineer at FANGs for half that long in Bay Area, riding the tech wave of 2010s alone and bought a house, I would expect they would be in low single digit millions net worth plus or minus, which is be an entirely different league today than someone who is just getting started. This is not a comment on a single person's financial status, but a much more general observation about why the everyone-is-equal model does not result in equal sacrifice by startup employees.

Of course they are more than entitled to their compensation structure for their own company. I am not even objecting to it being appropriate for their circumstances (for example, if you expect all your employees to be relatively senior that might work just fine.) However, once you proselytize a model by writing a blog post, it is fair game for me to comment on it. If you think that's not appropriate, feel free to be offended.
by pas256 | 2025-05-02 03:49:25+00:00
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by bradgessler | 2025-05-02 03:49:45+00:00
I got a really stupid email from Redis®* a year ago that wanted me to put a disclaimer on the “first page” where Redis®* appeared on a website, as if it was a paper legal document.

That was the very moment Redis®* died for me—I’ve never encountered a tech company that was so aloof about how tech works.

Hopefully that damage is undone.

—

*Redis is a registered trademark of Redis Ltd. Any rights therein are reserved to Redis Ltd. Any use by Brad Gessler is for referential purposes only and does not indicate any sponsorship, endorsement or affiliation between Redis and Brad Gessler.
by goku12 | 2025-05-02 03:52:40+00:00
The CF verification page still appears far too often in some geographic regions. It's such an irritant that I just close the tab and leave when I see it. It's so bad that seeing the Anubis page instead is actually a big relief! I consider the CF verification and its enablers as a shameless attack the open web - a solution nearly as bad as the problem it tries to solve.
by bcrl | 2025-05-02 03:53:32+00:00
If Americans think Canada is the backdoor route for China into the US market, then why did Canada impose tariffs on BYD to align with US policy towards China made automobiles? Clearly actions mean nothing with the current administration.

Honestly, at this point I think Canada would be better off partnering with China. At least their tariff policies don't change from hour to hour. Canadian policy should be to rescind the tariffs on China made EVs going forward.

NAFTA was already killed off by 45. USMCA is being actively destroyed by 47. Canadians simply cannot trust the USA to be a reliable partner in anything now with present leadship.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-02 03:53:54+00:00
> You could write a static freestanding application and boot Linux directly into it.

> Nobody does stuff like this it's a lifetime of work. But it could be done.

1) Go binaries on Linux don't need libc (except for NSS, which is glibc-only idiocy).

2) Running a static libc-less binary as init is fun and easy! https://github.com/tv42/alone https://gokrazy.org/
by seyebermancer | 2025-05-02 03:54:14+00:00
“I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it. You have to let it all go.“

Not a dev but been “vibe coding” since chatgpt came out. The llms can write a book… if you try to accomplish it with a single prompt it’s trash. If you construct the book chapter by chapter it’s a lot better and more cohesive.

You don’t build the app with a single prompt - you build a function or file at a time in a modular, expandable format.

Hackers are comfortable working in the dark— navigate with a flashlight (some background knowledge, understanding on syntax, data structures, secure coding practices etc) and you can get where your going a lot quicker and can try out a lot of different routes you may not have seen or had an opportunity to explore otherwise- maybe stumble upon an Easter egg along the way.

You don’t necessarily need to spend hours reading the documentation on an unfamiliar library if you know how to get the AI to understand it, reinforce it with some examples and and use it- maybe in that process it expands your perspective or gives you an idea to incorporate into your production grade environment.

With how quickly things advance- it seems rapid prototyping would allow you to qualify what’s worth investing time in vs what’s not.

If you know about DAST, SAST and containers you can probably create a non total trash workflow for prototype qualifications and then pass to a more technically savvy specialized team member if warranted?

Exploratory data analysis doesn’t seem wholly dissimilar in value- never know when you’ll stumble across a good nugget to feature engineer if you aren’t actively mining and exploring.

“Vibe coding”==you’re getting the model to do what YOU want. Craft some nefarious things to understand how to hold the reins on the beast and that’s a decent starting point.

If the LLM is useless- learn up on NLP, word embeddings and BERT and fine tune one to your specific use case. Don’t use the same chat session to make every file- manage the memory and tokens strategically and use few-multi shot reinforcement learning to specialize the sessions knowledge.

Maybe things become a lot more bespoke and require less dependencies- less susceptible to supply chain attack. More variety could make your system less susceptible to automated attacks and make the pyramid of pain stronger.

If everyone reverse engineers the dependencies and builds most things in house with their own twist, maybe that enables more flexibility with custom encoding and makes it less intuitive for an attacker to analyze your tech stack and infer how it operates.

—surely over simplifying a few things and missing out on some production grade concepts but just grasping that the same thing that’s viewed as creating security gaps could also be used as a mechanism to close some if used efficiently and strategically. -— it’s not competition to a dev, use it so you can learn more and do better
by jsight | 2025-05-02 03:54:40+00:00
Musk has been talking about integrating Grok into Tesla cars and also adding a lot of space and rocketry specific training. It is completely possible that these models were trained on data that would logically be public at some point.

It is also possible that the author's guess is right and that these were to contain sensitive data.

Noone really knows, but honestly, these kinds of mistakes are happening all the time. Who hasn't accidentally leaked their own .ssh dir on github? lol
by Terr_ | 2025-05-02 03:54:45+00:00
Yeah, the only way third-party cookies will block creepier fingerprinting crap is if the creepy stuff is prohibitively more expensive.

But once anyone gets a creepy fingerprinting system working, the barriers drop, and it becomes cheaper to resell the capability as a library or service.

It may offer some minor benefits in terms of enabling companies that "want to be more ethical than the competition", but that too seems like a long-shot. :p
by canjobear | 2025-05-02 03:55:35+00:00
I wouldn't say NLP as a field was resistant to probabilistic approaches or even neural networks. From maybe 2000-2018 almost all the papers were about using probabilistic methods to figure out word sense disambiguation or parsing or sentiment analysis or whatever. What changed was that these tasks turned out not to be important for the ultimate goal of making language technologies. We thought things like parsing were going to be important because we thought any system that can understand language would have to do so on the basis of the parse tree. But it turns out a gigantic neural network text generator can do nearly anything we ever wanted from a language technology, without dealing with any of the intermediate tasks that used to get so much attention. It's like the whole field got short-circuited.
by tgma | 2025-05-02 03:55:44+00:00
I guess you've basically proven my point, although it appears I may have been poorly communicating it as if I meant you can afford a yacht or not, which I would certainly think would be deserved, but none of my business to comment on: you have a house/mortgage and your kids are now grown to college aged, but for someone who's not had as long of a career, the low-variance compensation means they have fewer opportunities to get ahead by trying harder and totally bound by equity performance [which actually does vary quite a lot, I'd suspect] so the risk-reward of a flat-comp startup generally favors the more established players in the labor market, unless the amount is somewhat above the range of the base salary they'd command elsewhere (which is the case with cash-rich players like OpenAI).
by guerrilla | 2025-05-02 03:57:37+00:00
If you wanted to know, you would know. It's not exactly a secret. Here you go though:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...

> Real-time bidding is the process by which publishers auction off ad space in their apps or on their websites. In doing so, they share sensitive user data—including geolocation, device IDs, identifying cookies, and browsing history—with dozens or hundreds of different adtech companies.