MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soraminazuki | 2025-06-07 17:34:33+00:00
No, many of the problems listed in the wiki remains true whether or not you're on a paid plan. It's beyond absurd to spin them into an ad for YT Premium. Some of the problems are specifically about screwing over paid users, like this one:

> The YouTube Mobile app allows you to download videos for offline consumption if you have a YouTube Premium subscription. However, the app's DRM prevents you from watching downloaded videos, unless the app has "phoned home" in the last 48 hours. This caveat is not clearly disclosed on the main YouTube Premium page, instead requiring the user to navigate support articles to discover this limitation.

Imagine the disappointment of users who thought that "offline" meant "not online" instead of some Googlespeak nonsense, paid for YT Premium before going on a trip to a place with poor internet connection, only to find out that the video won't actually play. It's a trip ruined and money wasted.

YT Premium doesn't make the "headache go away," it just adds more.
by dkislyuk | 2025-06-07 17:34:33+00:00
From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_:

> One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of course, on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels underneath the pixels that you see, so there are no windows actually lurking underneath the ones that appear to be on top. To create the illusion of overlapping windows requires complex coding that involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed himself to make this trick work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of naïveté”, Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” He was working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a parked truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to the hospital to see him. “We were pretty worried about you”, he said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a pained smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember regions.”
by giardini | 2025-06-07 17:34:52+00:00
Here's an exercise anyone can do almost everyday that will increase bone density. I do it in the shower or wherever there's a solid safe tile floor:

Start with both knees and hips bent (like a football linebacker just before the snap), legs apart and arms bent at the side to maintain balance. Set one foot slightly ahead of the other. Now, using primarily the heels of your feet, jump up slightly(preferably only a few inches) and slam both heels back down, while switching which foot is forward. [Don't jump so much that you straighten your legs; instead keep knees bent at all times]. You're hopping in place and striking your heels on the ground, with the right foot forward first and then with the left foot forward, back and forth. Make sure the heel hits the tile and bears the brunt of the force (rather than the toes). Do 20 of these hops each time you're in the shower.

Slamming the heel of the foot into the floor vibrates the large bones of the legs. These vibrations will strengthen (all of) your bone over time.
by mikebannister | 2025-06-07 17:36:00+00:00
Today I added --mode plan (along with config option). Nice thing about "owning" my own wrapper is I can invent my own features.

https://github.com/possibilities/claude-composer?tab=readme-...

Note: in case you missed it Anthropic added plan mode that you toggle interactively. One of the best additions to CC. So I've only added the ability to start CC in plan mode.
by lucianbr | 2025-06-07 17:36:49+00:00
> “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged.

Isn't this an actually reasonable solution? I assumed age verification was supposed to be done by the site itself, and therefore it was considered a very bad idea. But this... what's the problem with this method?
by missedthecue | 2025-06-07 17:37:21+00:00
There are entire online communities around gaming the system. On how to report pre-service injuries as service related. On how to deliberately build a huge medical file while you're in to support your disability claim later. On where to go and when, in order to get your highest possible rating. Things to say and not to say. There is an entire industry of paid consultants that help you get the biggest claim possible.

It's a big issue. Over 30% of vets today have disability compared to 15% in 2008. 3% of federal revenue goes to paying veteran disability alone and it's climbing. No politician can talk about it because campaigning on taking money from disabled veterans is the best way to nuke yourself in the polls.
HDMI on Gaming Consoles
by sdrawkcabsti | 2025-06-07 17:37:41+00:00
You would think with gaming consoles costing SO MUCH you would at least get an HDMI port that can take a reasonable amount of impact, yet 1 cable gets tugged a little and broken it is. As you know, you need a very very small percision tip, soldering paste, microscopic vision and a thermostat controlled iron to + preferring a heat gun to help it melt without damaging other nearby parts.

When I took this thing apart, there was NO refinforcement whatsoever other than a useless heat shield which curved around but put all the stress on the most vulnerable part of the port, the plastic. Seriously, plastic, why not ceramic if you are charging 700$ for a system, at least use the ceramic ones. This is exactly the reason I am never buying a new system ever again. Brand new PS5 collects dust and why an HDMI port that barely got breathed on's plastic center broke off like a twig.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-07 17:38:22+00:00
Please tell us we company you are working for so that we don't send our resumes there.

Jokes aside, I have worked in projects where auto-generating code was the solution that was chosen and it's always been 100% auto-generated, essentially at compilation time. Any hand-coded stuff needed to handle corner cases or glue pieces together was kept outside of the code generator.
by neilv | 2025-06-07 17:38:36+00:00
> and saved me close to $2k over the 4.5 months.

The author wisely talks about safety considerations, but there's an it's-expensive-to-be-poor risk I'd like to emphasize:

One injury or illness caused by the frugality could wipe out that $2K savings, many times over, in immediate costs, and might never fully heal.

I think back to all the penny-pinching I did (less impressive than the author's), and much of it was necessary under the circumstances, but a very poor value tradeoff otherwise.
by dleslie | 2025-06-07 17:38:48+00:00
I don't use Nix, however this seems dismissive:

> While Nixpkgs is an amazing resource, Nix != Nixpkgs.

If Nixpkgs is the default and alternatives require additional research and effort then for most users it _is_ Nix.

> That doesn't make any sense. You can literally just split them into separate layers in whatever arbitrary fashion you'd like. The built-in Nixpkgs docker tooling has some support for this even.

Is this obvious, simple, and default behaviour?
by kmacdough | 2025-06-07 17:38:49+00:00
I could see it being inferred that way but, the way I read it, they are not meant as unilateral facts. Rather, they serve as rhetorical examples of where you might find contractors doing similar work, but where the one more in service of "public good" is taxed higher because it's open source. Strictly speaking, Windows bits are not all closed source and there exist closed source Linux bits. But it's not a point that really matters in the context of the conversation.

I think it's fair to use Windows and Linux as stand-ins for closed vs open source because it's a very accessible example. And knowing the technicalities clearly doesn't undermine the argument.
by James_K | 2025-06-07 17:39:04+00:00
Put out fewer versions of things. It is entirely possible to write a piece of software and only change the interface of it at rare intervals. The best solution I can think of though would be to allow one version of a package to provide multiple versions of its interface. Suppose you want to increment the minor version number of your code and this involves changing the signatures of a number of functions, you could design a programming language packaging system such that both versions are defined in the same package, sharing code when needs be.
by chriswarbo | 2025-06-07 17:39:12+00:00
> I was looking for an explanation of exactly why I hate Nix so much

Note that the parent said "I think Nixpkgs takes the right approach in mostly avoiding it". As others have already said, Nix != Nixpkgs.

If you want to go down the "solving dependency version ranges" route, then Nix won't stop you. The usual approach is to use your normal language/ecosystem tooling (cabal, npm, cargo, maven, etc.) to create a "lock file"; then convert that into something Nix can import (if it's JSON that might just be a Nixlang function; if it's more complicated then there's probably a tool to convert it, like cabal2nix, npm2nix, cargo2nix, etc.). I personally prefer to run the latter within a Nix derivation, and use it via "import from derivation"; but others don't like importing from derivations, since it breaks the separation between evaluation and building. Either way, this is a very common way to use Nix.

(If you want to be even more hardcore, you could have Nix run the language tooling too; but that tends to require a bunch of workarounds, since language tooling tends to be wildly unreproducible! e.g. see http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/nix_dependencies.ht... )
by MrArthegor | 2025-06-07 17:39:46+00:00
I’m agreeing with your description.

The mains issues with Linux is it’s just the kernel, and anything is developed in their corner without taking account of the rest. Also, I tend to think the Linux folk in general seem to want to reinvent the wheel every 6 months, where FreeBSD and BSD in general have tendency to make things better from previous work in comparison
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 17:40:08+00:00
A lot of computations are really higher complexity order functions with stair steps at certain intervals based on hardware trying to pretend they are constant time. All operations cost the same amount until n doubles again and then it’s slower. If you zoom out toward infinity, the stair steps smooth out into a logarithmic curve. It becomes logarithmic in the former case and square root in the latter. Even dividing two numbers or doing a memory address lookup stops being C, which is part of why prime factoring worked for RSA for so long.

If anyone had made clockless logic work you would see that adding 1 + 1 is in fact faster than adding 2^63 + 1.

If you put enough data into a hash table the key length has to increase logarithmically to the table size in order to have distinct keys per record. Even Knuth points out that hash tables are really nlogn - something I’m pretty sure my CS professors left out. In multiple classes. Man, did I get tired of hash tables, but I see now why they harped on them. Case on point, this article.
by 5mv2 | 2025-06-07 17:40:27+00:00
Appreciate the feedback!

100%. It's a lot easier when you live next to a Google campus. And it sorts all the menial matters that make a huge difference, like access to washing machines.

About the flagging, you seem to have been here for a while, any hint? I get the word usage can comes across as disrespectful now that people mention it, but didn't think a link would get flagged for that.
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-07 17:41:36+00:00
It's shocking to read opinions that kids would not «have that level of self-control». Children can display self-control... And of course they can.

(Just a tiny example: in many countries, we have them study since the age of five, sometimes earlier. They already have a sufficiently working anterior cingulate gyrus at and before that age; they have understanding of tradeoffs at and before that age.)

--

Ooooh, hitters that will probably reveal to be snipers. That just confirms the point: if some people think it normal to gesticulate and not formulate - well, that's them, not all... Some children will have a weaker will. Some will have a stronger one! And surely it can be educated.
by xoa | 2025-06-07 17:43:26+00:00
>The Defense Production Act exists.

Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what you think this means? Title 2 of the DPA did indeed allow seizing of private property, but like 4, 5, and 6 expired and no longer exists under present law. AFAIK only provisions of 1, 3 and 7 are still in force, and they would at most allow forcing continued Dragon production. I haven't studied it enough to know whether there is caselaw regarding interaction with the Takings Clause but I'm hardly the first to question it, at-the-time BHUA Senate Committee chairman Phil Gramm lead with that on the review of Clinton's use of the DPA for the California energy crisis. And in general commandeering and so on all require just compensation. It's also 2025, not 1955, and I'm highly skeptical the current courts wouldn't be stricter.

That's assuming it even went through at all though and SpaceX wouldn't win an argument for obvious political retaliation or other forbidden reasoning, or wouldn't drag on the legal fight long enough for 47 to be gone and the next POTUS to reverse course.

>The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions.

Have you like, opened a newspaper (physical or virtual) at all since last year? Growing debt is a huge deal, politicians are arguing over single digit billions or even millions. Hundreds of billions is not small potatoes even by American standards at this point, it's more then the entirety of veterans benefits & services, well over double all education, training, employment & social services, triple the entire transportation budget, etc. It'd be a big fucking line item to take on, and would require Congressional funding.

>They wouldn’t need to, though.

Yeah, they would.
by whateveracct | 2025-06-07 17:44:00+00:00
Nixpkgs isn't Nix and in production you rarely just use Nixpkgs verbatim. It's trivial to overlay whatever versions you want (including forks), and I'd say it's expected for any company in production to manage their package set.

We are talking about a company full of professionals. If they need something obvious, simple, and default to manage their build - the core business function that turns their text into deployable artifacts - maybe there is a skill culture issue.

The industry is full of ineptitude though.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-06-07 17:44:15+00:00
> There's nothing "omniscient" or "dim-witted" about these tools. They have no wit. They do not think or reason.

> All Large "Reasoning" Models do is generate data that they use as context to generate the final answer. I.e. they do real-time tuning based on synthetic data.

I always wonder when people make comments like this if they struggle with analogies. Or if it's a lack of desire to discuss concepts at different levels of abstraction.

Clearly an LLM is not "omniscient". It doesn't require a post to refute that, OP obviously doesn't mean that literally. It's an analogy describing two semi (fairly?) independent axes. One on breadth of knowledge, one on something more similar to intelligence and being able to "reason" from smaller components of knowledge. The opposite of which is dim witted.

So at one extreme you'd have something completely unable to generalize or synthesize new results. Only able to correctly respond if it identically matches prior things it has seen, but has seen and stored a ton. At the other extreme would be something that only knows a very smal set of general facts and concepts but is extremely good at reasoning from first principles on the fly. Both could "score" the same on an evaluation, but have very different projections for future growth.

It's a great analogy and way to think about the problem. And it me multiple paragraphs to write ehat OP expressed in two sentences via a great analogy.

LLMs are a blend of the two skills, apparently leaning more towards the former but not completely.

> What we do have are very good pattern matchers and probabilistic data generators

This an unhelpful description. And object is more than the sum of its parts. And higher levels behaviors emerge. This statement is factually correct and yet the equivalent of describing a computer as nothing more than a collection of gates and wires so shouldn't be discussed at a higher level of abstraction.
by madaxe_again | 2025-06-07 17:44:20+00:00
I find the whole premise for the situation mind-boggling. Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.

Then the Belgians came along, measured skulls, pronounced the Tutsis a separate (and superior) race, and the rest is… absolutely idiotic history.
by dataflow | 2025-06-07 17:44:36+00:00
> I think it's fair to use Windows and Linux as stand-ins for closed vs open source because it's a very accessible example

We're talking about businesses here that would struggle with these tax rules. Which I guess is, mainly, contractors or startups. How common is it for them to write open-source drivers vs. closed-source ones? I would've imagined the majority of drivers in such cases are closed-source, on every platform. But I would find it interesting to hear if things are somehow different on Linux.
by thewebguyd | 2025-06-07 17:44:39+00:00
> I would like to hope the orange site approaches this topic with more substance.

You won't find that here if Microsoft/Windows is in the title. HN will default to FUD on anything from Redmond.

How many here complaining about analysis in the photos app on Windows also sync all their photos to iCloud or Google Photos, which does the exact same thing? I bet it's a lot.
by landl0rd | 2025-06-07 17:44:49+00:00
If the only thing that verifier does is verification for accessing digital pornography, it remains blackmail-able. Not in the sense of identifying the specific content accessed but in the sense of "this user has gone through the steps to gain access" which is, frankly, good enough.

After verifying the ID, there is no reason the verifier needs to know to whom a token belongs, which would help this. It doesn't need to be repudiatable in practice because the security risk of a leak is near 0 and nobody ages backwards.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-06-07 17:44:57+00:00
Your points are well taken, though I want to nuance them a bit. My experience(with severe ADHD-C) is that this type of advice can work. It's just that it's not something you can just decide to start doing and immediately find success at. It's just a lot more complicated to get this off the ground, but it's possible. For some complex organisational system, you need to compile that system into "ADHD byte code" and for that, you need to bootstrap a compiler. Create an incredibly simple, extensible system which can do things your ADHD brain can't on its own. Then you need to find ways to force yourself to follow that system using various hacks like alarms tied to QR codes, body doubling, regular therapy or home visits, etc. then you can start implementing more complex structure in that system. And even the simple system is not gonna be easy. It's gonna take months of trying, failing, starting over. The ADHD brain is absolutely capable of developing habits(just look at the comorbidity rates between ADHD and various types of addiction), it's just a lot of work.

I'm in the process of doing this myself, and after 8 months, with many setbacks, I kinda have a base system I'm following that's significantly improving my quality of life and ability to keep up with everyday tasks. And it's still a struggle, but it's getting easier.

I'm writing a blog post about it currently, which will be more structured. It's about how I used my software dev skills to think about and tackle my ADHD(and other issues). Not about writing actual software(although software is involved), but imagining the brain exhibiting ADHD is a software system , identifying the "bugs", and combining concepts from software dev and behavioral/cognitive psychology to fix, or at least mitigate them.

This blog post could be finished two days from now, two years from now, or never. ADHD is still hard to live with, and I'm still quite dysfunctional. I guess if I do finish it, it'll be worth reading since I'll be on to something...
by ajs7270 | 2025-06-07 17:45:29+00:00
We analyzed 125 multimodal AI models to understand how they really work - here's what we found

Hi HackerNews! I'm Jisu An, and my team just published a comprehensive survey that tackles a critical gap in our understanding of multimodal AI.

WHY THIS MATTERS RIGHT NOW

The field is exploding with models like GPT-4V, Gemini, and Claude 3 - but there's been no systematic framework for understanding how they actually integrate different modalities (vision, audio, speech) with language models. This creates real problems for researchers and engineers trying to build or improve these systems.

WHAT WE DID

We analyzed 125 multimodal LLMs from 2021-2025 and discovered that the field has been developing somewhat chaotically. So we created the first comprehensive taxonomy based on three key dimensions:

1. LLM-based Fusion Levels - Early fusion: Modalities combined before the LLM - Intermediate fusion: Integration happens within LLM layers - Hybrid fusion: Combining multiple approaches

2. Contextual Fusion Mechanisms - Projection: Direct mapping to language space - Abstraction: High-level feature extraction - Semantic Embedding: Meaning-preserving transformations - Cross-Attention: Dynamic interaction between modalities

3. Representation Learning Approaches - Joint: Shared embedding spaces - Coordinate: Separate but aligned spaces - Hybrid: Best of both worlds

KEY INSIGHTS THAT SURPRISED US

Most models use ad-hoc integration strategies - there's been little principled design. Training paradigms vary wildly with no consensus on best practices. The field desperately needs standardization - current approaches are difficult to compare or reproduce.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

If you're working with multimodal AI, this framework provides clear guidelines for architectural decisions, systematic comparison of different approaches, evidence-based recommendations for integration strategies, and a roadmap for future development.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Multimodal AI is becoming the backbone of everything from autonomous vehicles to medical diagnosis. But without understanding how these models actually work under the hood, we're building on shaky foundations. This survey aims to change that.

Paper: https://www.alphaxiv.org/overview/2506.04788 arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04788

What do you think? Are there specific aspects of multimodal integration you'd like us to explore further? And for those building multimodal systems - what challenges are you facing that this framework might help address?

This is my first post here, so please let me know if there are better ways to share research with this community!