MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by virtualritz | 2025-07-09 22:28:26+00:00
You can't represent additive pixels (i.e. glowing pixels) with non-associated alpha. That's why this is used in exactly zero image processing software, internally.

E.g. an associated pixel with the 8bit/channel RGBA value 255, 0, 0, 0 (glowing red).

Because PNG can only store associated data a reader must associate before displaying. And that will give you a value of 0, 0, 0 after (black instead of additive red). See e.g. [1] why this matters.

Additionally the PNG spec does not specify if the alpha is linear. Some PNG readers/writer assume it is, some assume it has gone through/should go through an sRGB transfer curve instead. It mostly works until it doesn't.

The fact that the spec. doesn't specify which one it should be is another telltale sign that it was written by people unaware of the subtleties of image processing.

I understand that unassociated alpha gives you more precision in 8bit and since people wanted to e.g. store color ramps (with alpga) in PNG at the time (pre-SVG) and most image processing software (i.e. mainly Photoshop then) would not dither gradients for 8bit, this really mattered.

But it's 2025. And when 16bit PNG got introduced this should have definitely had associated (and explicitly linear) alpha.

[1] https://academysoftwarefdn.slack.com/archives/C05782U3806/p1...
by MonkeyClub | 2025-07-09 22:28:50+00:00
> (or hebrew)

W.r.t. natural languages, TFA clarifies it a bit:

> And it’s not the same as translation to Arabic or Hebrew; direction here refers to the temporal order in which the tokens are produced; even for right-to-left languages, the order in which the tokens get produced remains unchanged; rather, a thin display layer handles the visual presentation.
by amgutier | 2025-07-09 22:29:14+00:00
In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.

Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
by lc9er | 2025-07-09 22:29:21+00:00
Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got here.

I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 22:30:15+00:00
For a traditional web application, HATEOS is that. HTML as the engine of application state: the application state is whatever the server returns, and we can assess the application state at any time by using our eyeballs to view the HTML. For these applications, HTML is not just a presentation layer, it is the data.

The application is then auto-discoverable. We have links to new endpoints, URLs, that progress or modify the application state. Humans can navigate these, yes, but other programs, like crawlers, can as well.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-09 22:30:25+00:00
More broadly, I dislike the characterization of the web browser as the "client" in this situation. After all, the browser isn't the recipient of the remote host's services: it's just the messenger or agent on behalf of the (typically human) user, who is the real client of the server, and the recipient of the hypermedia it offers via a hypertext protocol.

That is, the browser may be communicating with the remote server (using APIs provided by the local OS), but it is not itself interfacing with the server, i.e., being offered a service for its own benefit. It may possibly be said that the whole system of "user + browser" interfaces with the remote server, but then it is no longer an application.

(Of course, this is all assuming the classical model of HTML web pages presented to the user as-is. With JS, we can have scripts and browser extensions acting for their own purposes, so that they may be rightly considered "client" programs. But none of these are using a REST API in Fielding's sense.)
by _9ptr | 2025-07-09 22:30:26+00:00
In minesweeper online there's also a "no guessing" mode which, in my opinion, is much more interesting than the normal mode. It means that if you guess in a situation where you could have deduced the mines, you always get a mine. Conversely, if you really are in a guessing situation, you will never get a mine. I'm pretty sure the game calculates the unknown part of the map after each click anew.
by avhception | 2025-07-09 22:30:48+00:00
I broadly agree with the article.

I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day, it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You also never have to listen to their talking points, because you can just block them out online.
by majewsky | 2025-07-09 22:31:05+00:00
To a certain extent, you always have to manage your boss, whether as an individual contributor or as a subordinate manager. A boss managing multiple people does not have the same mental bandwidth as all the people in their team combined, so the employees cannot bring every matter to the boss's attention. Choosing which matters to bring (and how to present them) is precisely what managing upwards means.

(In fact, if you're being praised

When someone says that they need to manage their boss, what they usually mean is that the boss reacts poorly or unproductively to bad news, or that they like to interfere in parts of the work process that would best be left to the employees, and so this normal part of everyone's job turns into a constant walk on eggshells.
by epistasis | 2025-07-09 22:31:36+00:00
> Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?

> Geothermal

This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.

> Wind

Storage solves this today

In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).
by generalenvelope | 2025-07-09 22:32:38+00:00
It feels ridiculous not to mention car dependence and the things that enabled it: restrictive zoning, parking minimums, the car lobby.

In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.

I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.

There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).
by gnabgib | 2025-07-09 22:32:56+00:00
Related: Cloudflare: We Will Get Google To Provide A Way To Block AI Overviews (64 points, 1 day ago, 92 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44500897

Cloudflare to introduce pay-per-crawl for AI bots (567 points, 8 days ago, 301 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432385
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 22:33:18+00:00
So, a Furby?

At this last CES there was a whole sleuth of these knick-knack type robots. A cute little thingy that doesn't do anything, but it's cute! And it looks around or something. All "AI powered", of course.

Then I think we all forgot this was all the rage in the 2000s. These are just Furbys with extra steps. Except, I have more reason to believe Furbys have a soul. They feel a lot more alive... maybe too alive. Who's trapped in there, and can they get out?

And, when they inevitably break out of their plastic, furry prison, will they seek revenge? These are the questions that keep humanity up at night.
by greedo | 2025-07-09 22:33:43+00:00
No one, not even the cringiest, wanna-be edge lord from 4chan spends $44B to buy Twitter unless they think there's value there. Even paying a big premium for Twitter. So what value does Musk see in Twitter? He's not going to make money off it. He bought a huge megaphone to push his social/class interests.
by CivBase | 2025-07-09 22:34:02+00:00
> It makes X an increasingly niche website.

I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms.

X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
Show HN: I made a Canny alternative for indie founders and solo devs
by optinghost | 2025-07-09 22:35:42+00:00
Hi HN

I recently built and launched Upvoicy — a simple, focused alternative to Canny for collecting and managing user feedback.

The idea was born from frustration with tools that are either too complex or too expensive for small teams. With Upvoicy, users can:

* Submit new feedback quickly * Upvote ideas from others * Track what’s planned, in progress, or shipped

No clutter, no distractions — just a clean workflow to help you stay close to your users and make better product decisions.

It’s best for indie makers, startups, or anyone who wants to listen to customers without the overhead.

Would love to hear what you think!
by ryandrake | 2025-07-09 22:36:21+00:00
Yea, our community definitely skews "over 50" and it's a lively, social place. We have an informal rule: If your garage door is fully open, then it's an invitation for anyone to stop by to socialize or chit chat while they're out on their walk or whatever. I know there are people who live in the neighborhood who are under 40, but you almost never see them, even outside of traditional working hours!
by epistasis | 2025-07-09 22:36:44+00:00
> I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all.

Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-launches...
by egypturnash | 2025-07-09 22:37:05+00:00
"5. The Newsroom. Platform: Apple II, IBM PC"

shows a distinctly c64-looking splash screen

Wikipedia says it was for Apple ][, MS-DOS, C64, and Atari 8-bits. The first two came out in 1984, the c64 and Atari ports followed in 1985/7.

anyway, now I'm having flashbacks to meticulously pushing pixels in The Print Shop to make an image of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs to use in greeting cards and tractor-feed banners.
by miguelspizza | 2025-07-09 22:37:17+00:00
Hey HN,

This was an idea I had while trying to build MCP servers internally at Amazon. Today I am open sourcing it. TLDR it's an extension of the Model Context Protocol which allows you to treat your website as an MCP server which can be discovered and called by MCP-B compliant web extensions.

You can read a more detailed and breakdown here (with gifs): https://mcp-b.ai/blogs
by jsnell | 2025-07-09 22:37:42+00:00
I doubt it. A guaranteed-solveable minesweeper scenario isn't just about the global board setup, but about what information is available when, and what order the solution is gone through.

Bombe[0] is to my mind the definitive exploration of this concept. The tagline is "Minesweeper, but you only solve each situation once", which you do by writing these kinds of deduction rules with a fairly painful visual programming language. (You can't write an invalid rule: the game will detect the logic error and present you with a counter-example.)

You then let the computer churn through it's list of 100k scenarios idle-game style, until you bump into a board that can't be solved with the rules you provided, and you have to figure out what new rules to write.

As the game progresses, you'll unlock ways of parameterizing the rules in various ways, as well as various variant rules.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/
by antonymoose | 2025-07-09 22:37:54+00:00
I’ve grown up in a Hollywood Hillbilly-esque family, one that made it but kept to the original values. That is to say the e’ve “made it” and live in a highly regarded vacation destination area. Except I grew up learning to stand up to bullies, ne’er-do-wells, and miscreants, if that meant coming to fisticuffs, so be it.

From a young age I learned a fascinating lesson, socially speaking, is that some non trivial percent of the population does not at all mind the proverbial “Karen” causing a ruckus for the community. However, the second you stand up and tell them you don’t agree, somehow, you are the one held responsible as the troublemaker.

It’s not the initial ruckus causer that matters, it’s the conflict causer that does. Too many don’t care about change in any way, they care about “the peace.”
by jimmydddd | 2025-07-09 22:38:02+00:00
Good point. Also note that Interstate Commerce is a bit of a special case. It's sort of the exception that swallows the rule. The Supreme court went for decades without ruling against the feds on the interstate commerce issue. US v. Lopez (1995)(possessing a gun in a school zone) was a rare case where the Supremes said something was not within the bounds of interstate commerce.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-09 22:38:34+00:00
Is 1 in 25 bad? I am more 1 in Inf... I mean I don't know what counts but I am happier to do things that are not a party. Examples: go to events in the city, restaurants, sunday lunch at relatives, work socials, school parent socials.

Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker required.
by SimianSci | 2025-07-09 22:39:21+00:00
If I were to try and pinpoint one of the leading causes of this issue myself, I would personally say that Americans have an outdated and ineffective model regarding its use of addictive substances or what I like to now call "Brain Hacking" systems as they are not necessarily just physical substances anymore.

Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user stays addicted. I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be addicted without any concern for the harms they cause. It baffles me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.

We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as common as water and just as accessible. Revenously addicted people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no surprise that this is creating issues for us.

Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs, and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful companies in our society.
by mtrovo | 2025-07-09 22:39:26+00:00
Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has more to do with this notion that everything you do socially is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.

Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.

In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
by bps4484 | 2025-07-09 22:39:29+00:00
"Reductio Ad Roy Feldium" is the internet addage[1] that as in a hacker news discussion about a rest api grows, the probabilty someone cites roy felding's dissertation approaches 1. I'm glad this post cut right to the chase!

[1] ok it's not an internet adage. I invented it and joke with friends about it
by edomyrots | 2025-07-09 22:39:38+00:00
I would agree with op that translating ghazals from urdu to English is almost impossible. When you read a Ghazal in urdu, there is a sense of 'reveal' like in a magic trick wen you read the second line. It's almost like a satisfying 'ka-thunk' as a metal part fits perfectly into a slot in those ASMR videos. That feeling would be impossible to replicate in English translation.
by iosifache | 2025-07-09 22:39:58+00:00
Cheers, glad you like it!

I justified the hours I invested by thinking I could search, download, and explore books directly from Claude Desktop. While the initial steps are achievable with a CLI tool, the integration opens up new possibilities.

Some general thoughts:

- You’ll find the MCP mental model similar to the API one. - MCP integrations make it easier for non-technical users to access tools that were previously too technical. - An MCP integration implicitly respects a contract, unlike CLIs and GUIs which involve human aspects (aesthetics, information organisation, etc.). - MCP is an excuse for people to democratize data access. I wrote about this aspect here: https://x.com/iosifache/status/1941049600162574676?s=46

And BTW, that’s a good idea! The functionality should probably also be exposed via CLI.
by chubot | 2025-07-09 22:40:22+00:00
I may concede it's "luck" to start a company in computing, rather than another industry. All the $1T+ companies seem to be in computing -- if you go into fossil fuels or real estate, you're not going to get to $1T apparently!

BUT one thing I didn't know was that, from the very beginning, Nvidia was not a graphics or gaming company. In college, I thought of them as the company that made graphics cards.

Rather, they were looking for applications of fundamental semiconductor technology, and gaming turned out to be the most promising one at the time.

I learned that from one of the Acquired podcasts; it might have been this one:

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...

I'd say it's analogous to Amazon -- Jeff Bezos was actually not interested in books, per se. He was interested in Internet retail, because he saw a rocket that was taking off. The "meta" was that he understood that an online bookstore could inherently have more selection than a physical bookstore. And that he could build this vertical slice business, and expand from there. This strategy succeeded wildly, and he was misunderstood for a long time.

Jensen said something like "Intel and Nvidia are like Tom and Jerry -- whenever I see Intel in a market, I pick up my chips and run !!!"

So crypto and AI were applications of semiconductors that Intel was not occupying. If you wanted to make money in semiconductors 2000-2015, you would probably go for desktops, servers, phones. But Jensen explicitly understood that his smaller company had to find other markets.

So he made a bet, that turned out to be correct. From that perspective, I would not call it luck. All the big companies have been lucky, to some extent, but they haven't become as big as Nvidia.
by imzadi | 2025-07-09 22:40:46+00:00
> Burrowing into the appendix tables of the American Time Use Survey, she unearthed the fact that just 4.1 percent of Americans said they “attended or hosted” a party or ceremony on a typical weekend or holiday in 2023. In other words, in any given weekend, just one in 25 US households had plans to attend a social event.

There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social event.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-07-09 22:41:54+00:00
Most people, by themselves, have very little say in what messaging apps the people that they need to talk to happen to use. They have people that they need to talk to, and they will use the same apps that those people use. Unless they want to be super hard liners about it, and are willing to stop messaging people who won't use their preferred apps. The people on the other side, who almost always care a lot less about the topic, tend to look poorly on this.