MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hhh- | 2025-07-07 08:34:53+00:00
Here’s a concise *Show HN–style* blurb you can paste into the *text* box. Everything comes directly from the WatermarkZero landing page. Feel free to tweak, but this is already sized for Hacker News norms.

````text WatermarkZero is a free online tool that uses deep-learning in-painting to delete any watermark, text or logo and rebuild the background so it looks like the mark was never there.

• Handles complex, tiled or translucent watermarks (Flux Kontext™ AI) • Keeps original resolution, no compression artifacts • JPG / PNG / WEBP support, no sign-up required • Upload → AI auto-detect & erase → download in seconds • Files are SSL-encrypted and auto-deleted after a few hours

Built with FastAPI + PyTorch on a single A10G GPU. Would love feedback on tricky edge cases, speed and the legal/ethical side of watermark removal.

Live demo → https://watermarkzero.com ``` :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} ::contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1} ````
by self_awareness | 2025-07-07 08:35:07+00:00
You mean you don't like INI because it's a Windows thing? But you also have it in .desktop files, git configs, php configs, samba configs, gtk config files, kde config files, it's a standard config file format for all Qt apps (QSettings).

JSON was popularized by web browsers, yet some people use it for configuration for system desktop apps, which have nothing to do with JavaScript. If usage of JSON is not a problem, then why popularization of INI by DOS+Windows should be a problem?

If you think INI files were a blip on a radar then you might not realise their real popularity. They even have support by the operating system api (WINAPI had support for INI natively, ReadPrivateProfileString). Unless you say that they were a blip on a radar on Unices in the 80s, then I probably would agree.

By the way,

> as the Unix world had plenty of file formats and tooling for such formats before then, and the Linux-based operating system world had been busy cloning them all for years

And that was probably a good motivation to use something established and standard, like an INI format.
by imtringued | 2025-07-07 08:35:13+00:00
>The problem with the argument is that it assumes future AIs will solve problems like humans do. In this case, it’s that continuous learning is a big missing component. >I think generally, anthropomorphisms lack predictive power.

I didn't expect someone get this part so wrong the way you did. Continuous learning has almost nothing to do with humans and anthropomorphism. If anything, continuous learning is the bitter lesson cranked up to the next level. Rather than carefully curating datasets using human labor, the system learns on its own even when presented with an unfiltered garbage data stream.

>I believe a good argument for continual learning being necessary needs to directly address why the massive cross-task learning paradigm will stop working, and ideally make concrete bets on what skills will be hard for AIs to achieve.

The reason why I in particular am so interested in continual learning has pretty much zero to do with humans. Sensors and mechanical systems change their properties over time through wear and tear. You can build a static model of the system's properties, but the static model will fail, because the real system has changed and you now have a permanent modelling error. Correcting the modelling error requires changing the model, hence continual learning has become mandatory. I think it is pretty telling that you failed to take the existence of reality (a separate entity from the model) into account. The paradigm didn't stop working, it never worked in the first place.

It might be difficult to understand the bitter lesson, but let me rephrase it once more: Generalist compute scaling approaches will beat approaches based around human expert knowledge. Continual learning reduces the need for human expert knowledge in curating datasets, making it the next step in the generalist compute scaling paradigm.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-07 08:35:23+00:00
Code page 65001 comes with a caveat, though:

> GDI doesn't currently support setting the ActiveCodePage property per process. Instead, GDI defaults to the active system codepage. To configure your app to render UTF-8 text via GDI, go to Windows Settings > Time & language > Language & region > Administrative language settings > Change system locale, and check Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support. Then reboot the PC for the change to take effect.

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/global...

I don't think changing the system settings for one application to work is a great idea, especially as that setting can break other applications. Until Microsoft fixes GDI, I think it'll be a while before UTF-8 is a viable option.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-07 08:36:30+00:00
I think that's far too cynical.

Usually what you end up with is a "three blind men and the elephant" situation; the product is simply too large for any one person to "fully" understand. Humans have a finite context window too.

So ending up with a product manager who is standing far enough away to see the whole elephant, but not in detail, while the engineers have detailed views of their part of the product but not the whole thing, is a reasonable position.
by atoav | 2025-07-07 08:36:38+00:00
I am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides complexity.

Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.
by close04 | 2025-07-07 08:36:46+00:00
> I think the general public (and by that I mean including software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up leading to being fired

I've seen this misconception perpetuated by management even in countries with very strong worker protection laws. Works particularly great on people who already have strong work ethics and internal fears, it stokes that fire. Employees would work as if any failure could lead to termination, especially in emergencies. Those managers use this as a "motivational" tool (as much as a hammer to the face can motivate you). They can squeeze more results out of their teams and maybe edge out a promotion.

It's illuminating to see when the people understand the pressure is many times fake, that even the internal SLAs are more relaxed than what they fear.
by hollowturtle | 2025-07-07 08:37:19+00:00
That is the by product of this tech bubble called hacker news, programmers that think that real world problems can be solved by an algorithm that's been useful to them. Haven't you thought about that it might be useful just to you and nothing more? It's the same pattern again and again, first with blockchain and crypto, then nfts, today ai, tomorrow whatever will come. I'd also argue it's useful in real software engineering, except for some tedious/repetitive tasks. Think about it: how nn LLM that by default create a react app for a simple form can be the right thing to use for a therapist? As well as it comes with his own biases on React apps what biases would come with for a therapy?
by heftig | 2025-07-07 08:37:49+00:00
Which codegen backend the building compiler uses is independent of which codegen backend(s) the built compiler uses.

Similarly, you can build Clang using itself or using GCC. The resulting compiler should behave the same and produce the same machine code, even if its own machine code is somewhat different.

The produced binaries could still have artifacts from the original compiler in them, e.g. if "compiler built-in" libraries or standard libraries were compiled with the original compiler.

Both GCC and rustc use a multi-stage build process where the new compiler builds itself again, so you reach an idempotent state where no artifacts from the original compiler are left.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-07 08:37:53+00:00
I'm sure this is a rarity these days, but it's actually really important to memorize at least a few important phone numbers of all kinds so they're accessible no matter what as long as you're conscious and able to communicate to people around you. It's actually sort of shocking how few people remember even their most basic, daily use numbers (parents, wife, husband, kids, kid's school etc) and would be helpless to call anyone crucial if they lost their phone and also have an emergency. Bad idea that.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-07 08:37:54+00:00
> Everyone, including the platforms knows what that means.

Well, that's what happens when you let an enemy nation control one of the most biggest social networks there is. They just go try and see how far they can go.

On the other hand, Americans and their fear of four letter words or, gasp, exposed nipples are just as braindead.
by viccis | 2025-07-07 08:38:34+00:00
For good reason. Learning fluency reading sheet music is critical. Rocksmith is great, with caveats, but the fact that they, by default, invert the strings compared to tablature conventions on guitar should be proof enough that they are pedagogically terrible without some guidance.

The other problem is that their learning technique, in which you start with fewer notes and add in all the notes over time, is not good at ALL. It masks certain things from you and even makes some things harder at lower difficulties when it's playing some scale and you don't know that so you're just playing random notes in it. Knowing that it was just a pentatonic scale or something would make it much simpler. Instead, you're taught to just play isolated notes instead of learning how to understand what that scale was, how to play it, and how to apply that to other songs. It's almost outright hostile towards a big picture music theory based approach on teaching how to play and instead focuses on memorizing the specific notes for each section of each song.

Anyway, piano scales and chords are not challenging to learn compared to most piano technique. If you don't have a teacher then buy Hanon, get a decent music theory book, and look up Youtube videos. Any of these training wheels based learning approaches seem to just assume that once you do it enough you'll pick up the theory. No. If you can't afford lessons (which I stress are very important) then you should at least make use of simple music theory books and videos on Youtube.
by raspasov | 2025-07-07 08:38:47+00:00
Not surprising people like Waymos even though they are a bit more expensive. For a few more dollars you get:

- arguably a very nice, clean car

- same, ahem, Driver and driving style

With the basic UberX it’s a crapshoot. Good drivers, wild drivers, open windows, no air-con. UberX Comfort is better but there’s still a range.
by sfg | 2025-07-07 08:38:48+00:00
According to the article, Norman influence led to double letters being used to better mark out sounds, which achieves the same as diacritics. It made English mostly good enough (failures like 'lead' are rare). Being good enough, and lacking a strong central authority, the language only accepted a conservative standardisation, and avoided larger changes such as including diacritics. Without these Norman changes, there is more chance diacritics would have been added, as it would not have been 'good enough'.

Written English is a worse is better story. The Norman influenced version being the first-mover that users cling to even when better comes along.
by whizzter | 2025-07-07 08:39:22+00:00
The article does mention cache friendly access patterns in the same context.

But yes, you're right. Back when I started with optimizations in the mid 90s memory _latencies_ were fairly minor compared to complex instructions so most things that wasn't additions (and multiplications on the Pentium) would be faster from a lookup table, over time memory latencies grew and grew as clock speeds and other improvements made the distance to the physical memory an actual factor and lookup tables less useful compared to recomputing things.

Still today there are things that are expensive enough that can be fit in a lookup table that is small enough that it doesn't get evicted from cache during computation, but they're few.
by trklausss | 2025-07-07 08:39:47+00:00
Looks like it, at least on the README, section "Building for Production" mentions it.

I'm a bit more concerned that it is a niche application. Not having Mac myself, can't compile it without going through the hassle of getting the environment running.

It would be better if the application was built is something a bit more cross-platform, as I find the idea really good. Not sure if the "mesh network" part would work though, as you need a really high enrolled-device density in order for it to work further than just an office (it's BT after all). I guess the "Fork" button is there for a reason, or maybe a new repo with some other stack.
by justinfreitag | 2025-07-07 08:40:03+00:00
From my recent post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44487261

What if instead of defining all behaviors upfront, we created conditions for patterns to emerge through use?

Repository: https://github.com/justinfreitag/v4-consciousness

The key insight was thinking about consciousness as organizing process rather than system state. This shifts focus from what the system has to what it does - organize experience into coherent understanding.
by inigoalonso | 2025-07-07 08:40:15+00:00
You're right to point out that English pronunciation varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully negate the value of a systematic orthography. What germandiago is referring to is the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accentual and dialectal variations within Spanish (e.g. seseo in Latin America vs. ceceo in parts of Andalusia) but these are largely phonological shifts applied systematically, not random deviations from spelling norms.

In contrast, English has a deep orthography, where historical layers (e.g. Norman French, Old Norse, Latin borrowings) and sound changes (like the Great Vowel Shift) have led to a chaotic mapping between spelling and pronunciation. A consistent system wouldn't eliminate dialectal variation, but it could reduce ambiguity and aid literacy, as evidenced by languages like Finnish or Korean.
by ValentinPearce | 2025-07-07 08:40:23+00:00
IIRC in the early 1900s, coercive methods were used to stop children speaking their native regional languages, a lot of it in school.

In my region of Brittany (France) the most famous example that was on posters detailing good manners would say : "Il est interdit de parler breton et de cracher par terre" meaning "It's forbidden to speak Breton and to spit on the ground", placing both on the same level.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-07 08:41:33+00:00
After the big surprise of seeing at work a list with all my personal purchases included in a big set of documents to which I, together with a great number of other colleagues, had access, I went immediately to the bank and I reported the fact.

After some days had passed without seeing any consequence, I went again, this time discussing with some supervising employee, who attempted to convince me that this is some kind of minor mistake and there is no need to do anything about it.

However, I pointed to the precise law paragraphs condemning what they have done and I threatened with legal action. This escalation resulted in me being invited to a bigger branch of the bank, to a discussion with someone in a management position. This time they were extremely ass-kissing, I was shown also the guilty employee, who apologized herself, and eventually I let it go, though there were no clear guarantees that they will change their behavior to prevent such mistakes in the future.

Apparently the origin of the mistake had been a badly formulated database query, which had returned a set of accounts for which the transactions had to be reported to my employer. I had been receiving during the same time interval some money from my employer into my private account, corresponding to salary and travel expenses, and somehow those transactions were matched by the bad database query, grouping my private account with the company accounts. Then the set of account numbers was used to generate reports, without further verification of the account ownership.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-07 08:42:15+00:00
>Unlike JS development there isn't massive volumes of internet resources to train LLMs on to produce usable RTL, etc code.

There is local data on each major manufacturer/designer that they can use to train their LLMs. I'm sure Synopsys/Mentor/Siemens are also working towards providing solutions to their customers can use to train their own LLMs.
Show HN: Instantly generate /llms.txt to make your website AI-readable
by mandarwagh | 2025-07-07 08:42:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I just built a small web app that helps you generate /llms.txt files for your website: https://llmstxt-cyuh.vercel.app GitHub: https://github.com/mandarwagh9/llmstxt

What is /llms.txt? Think of it like robots.txt, but for large language models. It’s a new emerging standard that gives LLMs a clean, Markdown-based map of your most important content (docs, guides, APIs). Instead of crawling bloated HTML, they get straight to the point.

The idea was popularized by Jeremy Howard and is gaining adoption across devtool companies like LangChain and Mintlify.

Why I built this I wanted a dead-simple way to auto-generate /llms.txt from any docs site or URL. This tool scrapes your site, extracts key Markdown links, and gives you a copy-paste-ready llms.txt.

No setup, no install, just paste your URL and download.

Stack

Frontend: Vercel + vanilla JS

Backend: Uses Gemini API (but can swap in any LLM)

Built with a focus on minimal UI + performance

Would love feedback, feature ideas, or suggestions for edge cases to cover (like private docs, multi-language support, etc.)

Thanks!
by Fluorescence | 2025-07-07 08:42:38+00:00
> Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

You might be selling yourself or others short with that notion of trauma that excludes what sounds like bullying.

I personally don't find traumatic impact to be determined by the severity of the event. If anything, it feels like I am built for the "big stuff" like family tragedy and during such events, where others have fallen to pieces, I can step up, I am more focussed and capable than normal. A stoic acceptance of such events comes naturally, it's life, it happens and I know I am needed.

In contrast, small events: rejection, failure, embarrassment, conflict etc. can be paralysing, debilitating, brain-breaking poison that I can't escape with out great suffering and effort.

The cases that cause me effort are expressly where the impact is irrational. Natural grief, sadness at misfortune etc. heal with time but irrational impact is where an inconsequential grit of sand has seized the entire gearbox and only grow without attention.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-07-07 08:43:49+00:00
Wasn't there the pug that did a nazi salute? Sure, the result wasn't jail, but the effects on free expression are devastating.

As a European I am quite jealous of the freedoms the US population has.

Currently Europe is the continent of the easily frightened and mentally slow people and with the current course it will only get worse in that regard.

A government procecuting such crimes also leaves the impression that they have lost control on certain issues at least.
by librasteve | 2025-07-07 08:44:21+00:00
well - yes ... that's the point of occam[1] ... if it can hang, it will hang deterministically

we have to zoom out from the 1980s when 4 CPUs were a lot ... but now you can build 40,000 (ie 200 x 200 array) of CPUs within the single reticle limit (ie same as a big NVIDIA) then a big MIMD must be coded with algorithmic patterns like map-reduce, pipelining, etc.

but the general CPU nature and HLL coding means that this is far easier than CUDA to get close to theoretical max performance

[1] or any CSP with both input and output descheduling - ie no queueing
by fenomas | 2025-07-07 08:44:49+00:00
When I see these debates it's always the other way around - one person speaks colloquially about an LLM's behavior, and then somebody else jumps on them for supposedly believing the model is conscious, just because the speaker said "the model thinks.." or "the model knows.." or whatever.

To be honest the impression I've gotten is that some people are just very interested in talking about not anthropomorphizing AI, and less interested in talking about AI behaviors, so they see conversations about the latter as a chance to talk about the former.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-07 08:45:18+00:00
>For fun, I once asked ChatGPT to roll along with the claim that “the advent of raytracing is a conspiracy by Nvidia that involved them bribing the game engine developers, in an effort to make old hardware obsolete and to force people to buy new products.” Surprisingly, it provided relatively little pushback.

It's not that far from the truth. Both Nvidia and AMD have remunerative relationships with game and engine developers to optimise games for their hardware and showcase the latest features. We didn't get raytraced versions of Portal and Quake because the developers thought it would be fun, we got them because money changed hands. There's a very fuzzy boundary between a "commercial partnership" and what most people might consider bribery.