MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cranium | 2025-06-25 09:02:14+00:00
Looks like the GraphQL beginnings, it feels fresh now and the AI products kind of nudge everything that way but fundamentally the main point is being able to package an API into a standard format, with documented endpoints, support for authentication, and different transports.

Nothing that couldn't be solved by a well designed REST API with Swagger documentation (and authentication, and websockets), but by being the same interface for all APIs it reduces the burden on the LLM.
by mandmandam | 2025-06-25 09:02:25+00:00
The claim: "for his admitted drug use"

The context: He smoked weed in California, where it's legal, years ago.

This guy isn't a drug trafficker. He's not doing meth or heroin, never did. He smoked weed, in a legal state (as millions of Americans do on a daily basis).

Then he made the critical mistake of handing over his phone to be searched, rather than flying home (!), upon which advanced creepy software (probably developed and funded by some of this very crowd) flagged this 'federal crime' of smoking weed while in Cali.

So yes, the meme is a red herring, but it's distracting from a thing that's still incredibly fucked up.
by pjerem | 2025-06-25 09:03:08+00:00
Yup, macOS is still a mixed bag for me. Both really clever egonomics most of the time but also incredibly frustrating when you want to do something Apple didnt thought about. And it's not going in the right direction tbh.

I think my personal macbook (Air M2) is my last. And it's a shame because hardware-wise it's just perfect.

Relase after release of macOS, I don't feel like i'm their target anymore. Like Windows, I can't even remember when was the last time I was excited about a new macOS feature.
by stevenhuang | 2025-06-25 09:03:10+00:00
The model I am using is the conventional understanding of physics. What model are you using?

> language meaning is not immutable physics.

Our understanding of physics is not complete, so why would our model of it be final? No one is saying it is.

Everything we currently know about physics, all the experiments we've conducted, suggests the physical church turing thesis is true.

If you want to claim that the last x% of our missing knowledge will overturn everything and reality is in fact not computable, you are free to do so, and this may well even be true.

But so far the evidence is not in your favor and you'd do well to acknowledge that.
by almusdives | 2025-06-25 09:03:46+00:00
As a scientific researcher, I use LLMs all the time. Mainly in place of Google search, to help write code and maybe summarize a paper here and there etc. But I definitely don't use it for the actual scientific process e.g. hypothesis generation or planning analyses etc. It tends to produce a lot of vague bullshit for this kind of thing; while not wrong not entirely useful either. I have a few colleagues that do though with more success. Although I think the success comes from articulating their problem in detail (by actually writing it out to the LLM) which I think is the source of "inspiration" rather than the resulting content from the LLM.
by Aardwolf | 2025-06-25 09:04:05+00:00
Rotation for speed/efficiency/compression reasons (indeed with PNG's horizontal line filters it can have a compression reason too) should have been a flag part of the compressed image data format and for use by the encoder/decoder only (which does have caveats for renderers to handle partial decoding though... but the point is to have the behavior rigorously specified and encoded in the image format itself and handled by exactly one known place namely the decoder), not part of metadata

It's basically a shame that the exif metadata contains things that affect the rendering
by robocat | 2025-06-25 09:05:58+00:00
The "noise" is very likely intentional.

A common way to price discriminate is to make the cheaper options take time and effort to obtain. People with less money will put in more time and effort e.g. price comparison, looking for discounts (codes or whatever), taking a few days to check prices, willing to move travel dates/times to get a cheaper price. Those with more money pay more and value their time/effort more highly.

Flight prices are not random - they are highly optimised (even using genetic A/B price generation algorithms that the airlines themselves might not fully be able to predict).

PS: Avoid LATAM Airlines Chile - dark pattern on website - those bastards increased the price while I was entering the credit card to pay (a popup - was ~2% but a dirty trick - maybe discrimination after detecting card owner credit details?).
by ajnin | 2025-06-25 09:06:45+00:00
What backward compatibility are we talking about here? Backwards compatibility of images will be fine, backwards compatibility of decoders might be impacted, but the article says the major image viewers (browsers) and image editors already support the 3rd version. Better compression is only planned for the 5th version of the spec.

Also if you forbid evolving existing formats, the only alternative to improve is to introduce a new format, and I argue that it would be causing even more fragmentation and be more difficult to adopt to. Look at all the drama surrounding JPEG XL.
by chii | 2025-06-25 09:06:47+00:00
> I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.

yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself.

This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions!

The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
by mandmandam | 2025-06-25 09:06:47+00:00
He said himself that's what the legal 'justification' was (not the real reason, which was his documentation of anti-genocide protests) - because he admitted to smoking weed while in California (where it was legal at the time) a few years back.

I don't get why people keep posting that tweet in this thread as if it justifies what happened. It's insane, and needs to be addressed.
by alganet | 2025-06-25 09:07:26+00:00
I just asked some user "what makes you think the human brain is based on mathematics?"

All this nonsense about souls was filled up by people trying to predict what my reasoning was, instead of _actually answering the question_ (which, apparently, can only be answered here _in opposition_ to something, not with plain honest words).

I left the line to be drawn by whoever answered it, and the answers show an abundance of misunderstanding about science.
by leptons | 2025-06-25 09:08:26+00:00
This is an all too common experience for me as well with "AI". It does exactly what you described as well as all kinds of other AI-brainfarts. It's made me about 2% more productive when it autocompletes the log statement I'm about to write, and even that it gets wrong a lot of the time.

Artificial colors and artificial flavors and artificial intelligence all have something in common - they are not as good as the real thing, and probably never will be.
by weatherlite | 2025-06-25 09:09:03+00:00
> So, the reality is that AI opens up new possible workflows. They aren't always appropriate. Sometimes the process of writing the code yourself and iterating on it is important to helping you build your mental model of a piece of functionality. But a lot of the time, there's no mystery in what I want to write. And in these cases, AI is brilliant at speeding up design and implementation.

I agree but I have a hunch we're all gonna be pushed by higher ups to use AI always and for everything. Headcounts will drop, the amount of work will rise and deadlines will become ever so tight. What the resulting codebases would look like years from now will be interesting.
by sylware | 2025-06-25 09:09:27+00:00
Until everything new is "optional". Hopefully PNG won't be the target of "enshitification". We all know that for file formats, there is a very strong pressure from developers and vendors for that to happen since it favors, hard, vendor and developer lock-in. If not careful, even with a team of PHD devs won't be able to write alternatives encoders/decoders that "reasonbly" and the world will end-up with very few alternatives implementations, if not only one.

I did skim through the specs, it seems most of it is related to cleanup and optional blocks, so it seems PNG is still safe, am I wrong? (asking those who did dive into the new specs deeply).
by whiteandnerdy | 2025-06-25 09:09:31+00:00
Good on you for seeing a problem and making something to solve it!

That said, I'm a bit confused about the use case. Wouldn't it be simpler and more secure to have all the encryption occur on the client side, and have the server be a dumb encrypted blob store?

Put another way, I think OpenADP tries to solve the problem "I don't trust hosting providers in any single sovereign nation" by splitting the trust between multiple nations; whereas it seems like it would be even better not to trust any of them.
by mandmandam | 2025-06-25 09:09:45+00:00
No one is saying it isn't against federal law.

It's still a demented justification to turn someone away from the country. "You can come here, buy weed in a majority of states, and face no fear of repercussions... Until you try and come back in". That's nutty. It's batshit.

And, the real reason he was brought in - as brought up by the Immi officers - was that he was doing journalism at one of the anti-genocide protests.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-25 09:11:32+00:00
Many countries have easy, accessible systems already. I can transfer single eurocents to everyone I have an IBAN for, and it'll appear on their bank account in seconds. Places like the US seem to prefer some kind of hybrid system where their bank integrates with one or more different companies to deal with doing easy bank transfers. The biggest problem right now is that you'd need to implement paying and receiving money for every single country's payment culture.

There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.

On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.

In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
by simoncion | 2025-06-25 09:13:34+00:00
> The context is that on a traditional Linux laptop/desktop you are in fact running everything as one user.

Um. Have you ever run 'ps aux', guy? At minimum you're running everything as two users (root and your user account), and probably three to twenty more, depending on what you have installed. I know that on my desktop system

ps axo user | sort -u | grep -v USER | wc -l

returns 12. Even back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, the default method of operation for Linux systems was to use multiple machine accounts.

> And no nearly all 100% of Linux systems do not run proper multi-user configurations because none of the most popular distributions ship like that. Not in the context of desktop usage anyway.

In addition to my commentary above, see: <https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/user-add.html.en>

Most Linux systems don't run every single program as a separate Linux user. That doesn't mean that those systems are "in fact running everything as one user".
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-06-25 09:13:42+00:00
That specific article is talking about the transition from ancillary services which drove the early battery adoption to actually buying and selling power which was only part of the business case for the initial battery rollouts.

The same story is repeating everywhere, batteries will very quickly supply all the ancillary needs for a grid at a fifth of the cost of spinning gas turbines if you let them.

The article seems written to intentionally confuse the saturation of that market with the wider abitrage market.

The high prices in a few days is likely more to do with Texas using those high prices to incentivize peaker plants rather than contract separately for capacity which some other markets do. They both still pay for it, just as different items on the total grid bill.

It would be strange if peaker style plants didn't make most of their money from peak times, whether they get paid via high market prices or capacity payments.

And when you enter a new market with batteries, it's shaving the peakiest peaks you've based your business model on. This also saves the most money (and carbon) for utility customers.

But all reporting on renewables needs to act like the whole thing is about to collapse into mad max for some reason.
by account42 | 2025-06-25 09:13:47+00:00
The tweet is relevant because it refutes the claim that he was denied entry because of a political meme which is what the article implies.

The legality of weed in the US is quite complicated. It is officially still as illegal as ever at the federal level and those laws are the ones that border control care most about. I never said that being denied entry because of that is "fair" or how things should work but it is not entirely unexpected. The US has historically been very hard on drugs and anyone visting ought to know that. It's best not to test the limits of the laws when you are a guest in a foreign country.
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-06-25 09:14:04+00:00
Why AI? AI is a big productivity booster, better to just generate more nuclear and renewable power, and then use AI to improve things more (same argument for AC).

Energy usage doesn't have to correspond to environmental damage much at all.

This degrowth mindset is the whole problem with the EU. They focus on scarcity and cutbacks and regulation and bans, rather than addressing the underlying issues to spur on growth and innovation.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-25 09:14:45+00:00
> So since my vape (example, i dont vape) has a power and data slot for charging and firmware updates, i should be limited to only using dual purpose cables day to day rather than a power only cable?

Well, yes.

Why can't you use a power+data cable for the vape (or whichever appliance takes both)? What's the deal-breaker here?

The alternative is labeling, or plugging cables in to see if they do what you want them to do.

Both are a poor user interface.
by reify | 2025-06-25 09:15:23+00:00
To be a human being and not a human doing.

just to be, it isnt as simple as its sounds, it takes work and committment.

I am lucky that I spent 20 years in personal therapy, which helped to uncover who I was and what I wanted. I had to disguard all the introjected shit that I had accumulated throughout my life and basically start again.

what is the measure of the man?

when i was a young man I thought it was to be a provider, bring in as much money as I could to pay the mortgage, feed my family and keep them in good health. Work, work, work, work, 7 days a week.

Many years after my first divorce I asked my ex-partner why we split. she told me that I was never there, you cannot have a relationship with someone who is not there.

she told me she would have been happier if we had 50% of the money I earned, and to have spent quality time with me.

The lessons in life are tough.
by CoolCold | 2025-06-25 09:17:14+00:00
> they just need to give a bit more relevance to WSL role on Windows laptops, doing an Apple move

Mind sharing a bit of info here - what do you mean and what Apple specifically did?

> everyone that only cares about UNIX/POSIX without religious attachment

I've personally helped to start with WSL for several persons, though I cannot say do they care on POSIX and UNIX as a concepts at all.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-25 09:17:30+00:00
Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again.

Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
by chownie | 2025-06-25 09:17:49+00:00
That is, to me, blindingly obvious in that it says to interrogate your own interests, not to interrogate others? My original "this is basically off topic" still applies.

If we revisit the original thread comment it doesn't really bring politics into this, or force people to consider their own political interests, or actually mention anything political at all!

This is very obviously your own bugbear brought into the conversation uninvited.
by pjc50 | 2025-06-25 09:17:54+00:00
> For me there used to be a clear delineation between scripting languages and compiled languages. Python has always seemed to want to be both and I'm not too sure it can really. I can live with being mildly wrong about a concept.

Eh. There's a lot of space in the middle to "well actually" about, but Python really doesn't behave like a "compiled" language. The more important question is: what do you ship to people, and how easily can they use it? Lots of people in this thread are bigging up Go's answer of "you ship a thing which can run immediately with no dependencies". For users that solves so many problems.

Quite a few python usecases would benefit from being able to "compile" applications in the same sense. There are py-to-exe solutions but they're not popular or widely used.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-06-25 09:18:54+00:00
A shameless plug, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise:

I'm trying to build a Fair-code platform called "MCP as a Service", which allows you to easily launch MCP servers (for example, Playwright MCP connected to a real browser), without the need to think about software or servers, "in the cloud".

This way, you can connect to the deployed MCP server from anywhere; for example, from within your n8n AI Agent workflow.

The Fair-code model means that there is a "hosted service" offering if you want a maximum of convenience, but you can fully self-host for maximum control.

It's still in the "humble beginnings" phase, but I would love to build this into an open alternative to existing, closed-source offerings.

See https://mcp-as-a-service.com for the details.

The hosted solution is available, free-of-charge, at https://app.mcp-as-a-service.com.
by ggm | 2025-06-25 09:19:10+00:00
There is a class of magazine aimed at fanatics for some things. Let's say its steam trains. Or dolls. You gin up a mock-up magazine, and sell advertising space in this proposed magazine, predicated on the target audience. When you've sold enough to be in profit, you go into print. Typically there is a free gift in part 1, or a model to be constructed from parts included in the magazine with an implication parts 3,4,5.. will be published in due course. A common sell was to include part 2 with part 1 free. It somehow built belief.

If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.

My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
by UmGuys | 2025-06-25 09:20:53+00:00
Simply put, bribes. Trump won't talk to you for less than a million if your name isn't Putin. It was an illegal strike. Should we be praising him for attacking random countries without authorization by congress? I think it's a very valid critique. Especially since this particular person literally tried to overthrow the government in 2021 and continues to act consistently as if laws don't apply.
by Gud | 2025-06-25 09:22:32+00:00
I’m also sceptical of this claim.

It seems to me that the capitalist economics mostly end up in capitalisms favor because it simply ignores a lot of variables.

1) Capital is allocated according to the wishes of the capital owner, generally to gain more capital and buy luxury goods. My question then is what does the people who have no capital get out of this system!

They are of course free to sell their labour, which is different part of the equation all together.

You may trade the few chips you have made from selling your labor for capital, but the chips you will receive will be of extremely low values, compared to the vast fortunes accumulated by wealthy families over generations.

Often these capital owners are descendants from feudal lords and others who gained their capital via dubious means.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-25 09:22:32+00:00
Because of the water cooling and all forms of producing energy that it entails.

It is like loving the planet eating soja, while ignoring the forests being destroyed to satisfy demand as planting fields.

Or farmable fields now being solar panel fields, because it is more profitable to sell energy, than living the farmer life, earning pennies for a hard work life, while kids die every day of lack of nutrition.

To fix the planet, first we need to get rid of profit driven societies.
by johncoltrane | 2025-06-25 09:24:46+00:00
The problem is that the light emitted by the background "eats up" the light emitted by the foreground object because there is, simply, more of it. The background is larger than the foreground and the intensity is higher. Ironically, the effect is easier to visualize with a light foreground against a dark background: that halo around white lines and text is also produced by a light background. The light halo eats up its darker neighbors.

So there are basically two ways to mitigate that effect: make the foreground elements larger or reduce the delta in intensity.

We can make lines thicker, boxes a little bit larger, and use bold text.

We can reduce the intensity of the background, from pure white to rgb(246, 246, 239), for example.

We can choose brighter colors in a kind of arms race against the background.

All three options have inherent limits, though.

Thick lines and large boxes kill details and bold text lack nuance, darkening the background is not always possible, and the catalogue of bright-enough-colors is pretty small.

One of the reasons why we, colorscheme authors, tend to default to dark backgrounds is that doing so gives us more colors to play with and thus more creative leeway.
by simoncion | 2025-06-25 09:25:28+00:00
> FWIW, I do see screen tearing on my X11 multi-monitor setup. I just don't care.

If you ever get really bored one day, and you have nothing else to do, and you're using AMD/ATi hardware, try enabling the TearFree option for your video card driver. Something like

Section "Device" Identifier "AMD" Driver "amdgpu" Option "TearFree" "on" EndSection

in a new .conf file in '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' and a restart of your display server(s) should do the trick. It works fine for me, and has worked fine for like a decade or more.
by LoganDark | 2025-06-25 09:25:42+00:00
I've always had the idea that time didn't need to actually exist for me to perceive it, because even if everything happened at once from outside, my perception of time is based on how much has happened so far. It's weird to explain, but it's related to how I personally believe backwards time travel is fully impossible without some sort of "time travel epoch", to before which it would be impossible to travel. (Also, I am pretty sure a "time travel epoch" is impossible anyway, since you can't save nor restore the state of the universe.)