MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is the current sota model for abstractive text summarisation?
by meander_water | 2025-09-01 07:36:35+00:00
I need to summarise a bunch of long form text, and I'd ideally like to run it locally.

I'm not an NLP expert, but from what I can tell, the best evaluation benchmarks are G-Eval, SummEval and SUPERT. But I can't find any recent evaluation results.

Has anyone here run evaluations on more recent models? And can you recommend a model?
by captainmuon | 2025-09-01 07:37:17+00:00
No, please do invent your own crypto, just don't deploy it! Coming up with schemes and then seeing where they fail is the best way to learn the intricacies. I think more of us 'lowly developers' should be familiar with the common pitfalls.

That the bank is aware of your identity is not neccessarily a flaw, but a boundary condition of the protocol. Assuming a trusted intermediary, how can we.... I think a solution here is not purely technical, but also social. How about establishing a trusted intermediary that can check your identity, but for sure does not do anything malicious with the information? Maybe there is a strong taboo against disclosing the information, like with the confidentiality of confession.

There is another flaw in the proposed scheme, how do you make sure that people don't just take the signature from another person? This one is pretty tricky to solve.

I have been thinking about similar "proof of attribute" protocols for a while, since they have interesting use cases outside of age verification. You could verify that a person on HN is really an Apple employee, without Apple being able to identify that user. Or on a dating site, you could verify that the user is a certain gender, in a certain age bracket, and the account is tied to a social media account in good standing (not a throwaway account), without having the link explicit somewhere (and thus leakable).
Ask HN: What ever happened to probabilistic thinking?
by arisAlexis | 2025-09-01 07:37:29+00:00
I thought probabilistic thinking was the way programmers and rational people in the tech & science world used.

Lately I see b&w messaging like:

"We will never cure aging". "We will never reach AGI in our lifetimes". "AI has 0% of catastrophic risk - Lecunn". Etc.

How can people in tech think in absolutes? Why not think "hey, maybe there is 10% we cure aging or 10% chance we all die and these are super important"? After all isn't it obvious to everybody that probability * magnitute = impact?

Said more clearly so we don't get into a discussion about correctness of percentages:

Possible and Impossible are hugely different.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-01 07:37:37+00:00
> All of the innovation will have to occur in indie games now, for which there is little pressure to have cutting edge graphics or mass market appeal.

Both of these things are ostensibly untrue if your goal is to turn a profit with your game. There are 40 new games released to steam every day. It isn't necessary to have polished graphics to have a wildly successful launch, but it helps tremendously.

The biggest problem I see with graphics in indie titles is lack of regard for the lighting system. The "unity look" is simply a consequence of developers being unaware of (or disinterested in) basic camera/environment settings and the benefits of non-realtime lighting modes.

Baking lights should never require a 30 minute oven session unless you are scratching at AAA scene complexity or using a machine from 2013. This stuff typically finishes in seconds with GPU light mappers now. You can see the global illumination update effectively live in the scene editor if you manage your texel budget conservatively.

Having this kind of lighting system can make any scene look absolutely incredible, even using low poly meshes and lower res textures. It doesn't take an army of artists to make a game look good when you can lean on physically accurate lighting and material systems. It used to be a full time job to fake all of that stuff. Now we can do it for approximately free. The fact that most don't utilize these tools is a big competitive edge for someone who is willing to spend the extra 50-100 hours it takes to learn these systems.
by boxed | 2025-09-01 07:38:18+00:00
> In contrast, those caught up in the supposed progress of reason during the Revolution and accompanying Enlightenment couldn’t do better than knocking off the heads of statues built by their ancestors.

Or you know.. the science that made that webpage's existence possible.

Meanwhile catholicism has brought as "supposed progress" like industrialized pedophilia.

Or maybe there's good things in both rational thought and faith... You just have to be pretty aggressive in fighting the bad sides.
by swiftcoder | 2025-09-01 07:38:28+00:00
> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs

Yep, and it's mostly caused by the VC funding model - if your investors are demanding hockey-stick growth, there is no way in hell a startup can justify (or pay for) the resulting Capex.

Whereas a nice, stable business with near-linear growth can afford to price in regular small Capex investments.
by avodonosov | 2025-09-01 07:38:41+00:00
Ha-ha.

Android doesn't even let you access your files. It has famously blocked acess to the subfolders of /Android/data - every app has a subfolder there where it sfores files. And you can not visit these subfolders since Android 11.

A buggy app accumulates gigabytes (literaly, i am not exagregating) of temp files there, but i cant visit the folder to delete them.

Google explains that "it's for you safety".

I have to call it with the strong word "idiotic".

There are apps now where storing files in a shared, accessible folder is a payed option.

And in this world you want to own your hardware.
by rayanboulares | 2025-09-01 07:39:08+00:00
Who fueled AI, though? If not those millions of lines of free, well-documented, commented code just sitting on GitHub, contributed for “fun” to show off work. Almost no other profession would do that, especially not in their free time.

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers would never give away years of their expertise for free. Developers did. The rest will be history.
by hvb2 | 2025-09-01 07:40:42+00:00
Much less expensive too.

I think in general that expectation is NOT acceptable though especially around data loss. Because the non engineering stakeholders don't believe it is.

Engineers don't make decisions in a vacuum, if you can manage the expectations, good for you. But in most cases that's very much an uphill battle which might make you look incompetent because you cannot guarantee no data loss.
by zgm13827 | 2025-09-01 07:41:02+00:00
Use this free pixels to inchs converter to easily convert pixels to inches online. We provide the commonly used PPI/DDP, you can also set any PPI/DPI you need, if you are not sure about the PPI/DPI of the image, our converter also supports uploading images to get the details of the image. There are no usage limits, completely free.
by Doxin | 2025-09-01 07:41:32+00:00
Another good example of what should clearly count as fair use is the 3BSkyen channel on youtube[0]. The guy does analyses of animated media and has a habit of turning 5 minutes of media into an hour or more of analysis. He cuts and rewinds and replays stuff constantly. No one in their right mind is going to watch a 3BSkyen video instead of the original. There is no competition between them.

And yet for a lot of IP he can't show the media he's reacting to because it'll immediately and automatically get claimed.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@3BSkyen
by crote | 2025-09-01 07:42:10+00:00
Also, don't forget that the route negotiation protocol is mostly unsecured. As we have seen in the past, it is very easy for a 3rd party to (accidentally or intentionally) redirect traffic through its routers.

In practice this means you have to consider the possibility that anyone on the entire internet can inspect your traffic. Traffic from your home in Seattle to Google's west coast data center? For all you know it could be going via Moscow.
by opan | 2025-09-01 07:42:16+00:00
I have never encountered a non-HiDPI setup where non-bitmap fonts looked especially different or good, so I don't think my OS[1] is relevant. If you look at screenshots of classic Mac OS it has a beautiful timeless look to the fonts, that I feel I similarly get using Terminus in my terminals. I also wanted to list an old Windows version out of fairness, which would be 3.1, I guess, but when quickly looking up screenshots, it doesn't look quite as good as I want it to. Your first instinct that my setup is wrong when I'm commenting on the state of fonts as a whole tells me you're probably used to the blur. Most people who aren't already a bit weird about their terminal fonts don't seem to understand or at least don't seem to care when I talk about the blurry font problem.

[1] But I'll tell you anyway so I don't seem like an asshole. I'm using Guix System GNU/Linux and the Sway Wayland compositor on my primary PC at the moment.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 07:42:22+00:00
> There’s something in the reality that it’s the app developers not the user that are being restricted by Apple.

Reading this comment as a user and developer in one person, it's so weird to see this disjointed picture of developers and users. You should have rights and feel unrestricted as a user but I shouldn't? Have you considered that being a developer is about the same as being a writer instead of a reader? We're the same...

> I don’t want my computer to become a walled garden

Why not? I don't think I can articulate an answer to the "I don't feel restricted" remark earlier better than you can probably do yourself by seeking what it is that rebels against these walls
by fooker | 2025-09-01 07:42:32+00:00
> C++ itself could never adopt for legacy reasons.

I agree with your point except for the 'never' qualifier. It was certainly true when Rust was born.

C++ has proven the 'never' part wrong multiple times. I think, by 2030, the only thing that C++ would lack that Rust has right now is the unified toolchain/packaging ecosystem because people are not going to settle that debate.

Everything else is well on its way to be implemented, in one of three forms - core language features (eg: concepts), language features that primarily enable writing more powerful libraries so that you do not have to come up with language features for everything (eg: reflection), and finally tooling support from the compiler as a test bed of what the language could guarantee (lifetime checks and annotations in clang).

Of course Rust is innovating pretty well too, I am very interested in seeing what async/coroutines are going to look like in a few years.
by seszett | 2025-09-01 07:42:50+00:00
Having seen the state of churches in France compared to that in other countries where they simply get sold off by the Church as real estate for money and because it can't fund their maintenance, this piece of opinion doesn't seem to be much based on reality.

The most obvious point is equating vandalism during the Revolution (a civil war during which the Church sided against the people, which can maybe explain some vindication against it) with bad upkeep by the current government, 200 years later.
by brnt | 2025-09-01 07:42:53+00:00
Did you try the NVidia driver from the Debian repo and/or NVidia themselves? The former would not load on my Optimus machines either, without any clue as to why. (I sunk more time than I should've into this. I literally tried everything on the wiki pages to discover they are horribly outdated.) I totally agree: this is not great. I know people will blame me for choosing NVidia, or NVidia, but why can Fedora, Ubuntu et al do this right?
by dvdkon | 2025-09-01 07:43:30+00:00
You seem to be arguing that adding complexity reduces freedom, but I don't think that's true in a reasonable interpretation of the word.

Your argument would suggest that virtual memory takes away user freedom, because it's now much harder to access hardware or share data between programs, but that sounds ridiculous from a modern perspective. I think it's better to keep freedom and complexity separate, and speak about loss of freedom only when something becomes practically impossible, not just a bit more complex.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-01 07:44:13+00:00
Your first paragraph is bullshit. It's always something. "Your ideas kill me, they must be stopped".

Terrorism, disease, children's safety, drugs, etc.

No emergency justifies it because emergencies have a tendency of staying forever, entrenched in law, long after the perceived emergency has been forgotten.

Funniest thing was, you wanted to quarantine and oppress the healthy. You also didn't quarantine and oppress the rich or your politicians who didn't abide by their own theater. No, the coward man went along with the excuses and screamed murder at the sky. Just like in history, you accuse groups of people of being "a disease" to suppress them. Google that, will ya?

As for risks, I posit you're a risk to me, with your hellbent intent of locking me up because I don't follow your theater. Should I ban you from society? Engage in state punishment and suppression like you wanted?

Stop killing your family and friends.

My taxpayer dollars go to not breaking the social contract and you not killing people with your ideas. Cease and desist killing people. You'll murderer.

Oh, see how easy it is to just say those things?

Now argue in the real world. We're not in 2020 anymore.
by indigo945 | 2025-09-01 07:45:51+00:00
The linked blog post explains it. The spec can be implemented by open source software, but the upcoming (or now current?) update to the spec enables attestation, that is, it allows the auth provider to cryptographically verify which implementation the client is using. Under this scheme, auth providers can simply choose to no longer support open source implementations like KeePassXC, and since the spec authors have already claimed that KeePassXC is "non-compliant" because it doesn't ask for a PIN on every auth request, it seems likely that that would happen.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-01 07:46:26+00:00
They were kind of developed, and then abandoned due to governments saving on research (not because they didn't work). Or at least one kind was: "organoids" (which is a play on that they could be grown in any form, so some student decided to print a kind of alien-shaped almost-kidney, which then led to an article ... plus when used people want a flat relatively thin shape)

They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet.

And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student).

I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least.

It isn't just the US that is defunding science.
by 11324msthrow | 2025-09-01 07:46:27+00:00
> Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.

In practice it is exactly the same. EMs are instructed that they must have someone at for instance 80 (below-meets-expectations), or occasionally at 60 (PIP). This has resulted in layoffs. The pseudonyms we're told to use are infantilizing when we can see the results.

> I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity

I'd ask you not make assumptions about my feelings in this, vs taking the statements I'm making at face value.

Not that it's unique to his division, I can assure you I worked organizationally close enough to know that, regardless of other sources of stress, there is(was) relevant work pressure up through the VP level encouraging late hours and long days that goes well beyond healthy, often acknowledged outright as the way to stand out in leadership AMAs. The evidence of this is documented in the article, and your dissembling is somewhat astonishing.

> If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.

I'm sharing it, you're just disregarding it. There is a system in place that through basic game theory ensures a prisoner's dilemma without compromise, with the escalation being longer hours and more work. While any given leadership may encourage it more or less, to not see how that pans out naturally when employment is on the line, especially as proven out by multiple recent rounds of 'performance' driven layoffs, seems purposefully obtuse. One doesn't know when the heart attack is coming, but one does know when the PIP is coming; we can't be surprised at the choices people will make.
by ShellfishMeme | 2025-09-01 07:46:35+00:00
I've once received a USB-C charger with a portable breast milk warmer device that outputted 18V at 2A without doing PD negotiation.

That fried another device when I plugged it in.

This is non compliant in the EU, but when I reported it to the responsible authorities, they didn't feel like doing anything about it.

We are talking about a charger that can fry any device and potentially cause a fire, coming with a product aimed at people with babies, that's clearly non compliant to be sold in the EU, and they are doing nothing at all. Pretty shocking if you ask me.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-01 07:46:44+00:00
This is the point I keep getting at in the other thread, it's a confusing topic.

It is technically possible, yes. You can turn Gatekeeper off via the command line in various ways, or even via an obscure deliberately non-discoverable set of GUI tricks.

But it isn't reasonable to expect any normal person to do that. So, in practice, any app that isn't some open source widget targeting developers does register them with Apple. In this sense it also isn't possible.

This isn't specific to ARM. It's also been true on Intel Macs for a long time too. The only thing that changed on ARM is some minor detail - the kernel now requires a "signature" for all binaries, but a "signature" is also allowed to be a hash match against a local machine-specific whitelist, so this doesn't make much difference in practice to anyone except toolchain developers. It seems to have mostly been about reducing tech debt in the security stack.

The registration process is however very lightweight. There are no app policies involved beyond "don't distribute malware" and "verify your ID so we can do something about it if you do". It's not like the app store where there are lots of very subjective criteria. To get an identity is nearly automatic, you can do it as an individual with a credit card and approval is automated. Ditto for applications: it's automatic and driven by a simple (albeit undocumented) REST API. You upload a zip containing your signed app to S3, it's processed automatically, the app now works. The notarization API is extremely open - you need an API key, but otherwise anyone can notarize anything, including apps written by other people. So in the early years of this system when lack of notarization just triggered a security warning, lots of people notarized any app they found that was missing it. This made a nice smooth backwards compatible path to transition the ecosystem. Nowadays, there is no bypassable security warning, an unnotarized app is just described as corrupted and won't open without tricks.

So - does macOS "support" sideloading or not? It's very ambiguous. You can argue both yes and no.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 07:47:37+00:00
Nobody said that...

You can keep your device enslaved to Apple all you want. You don't have to use the administrator permissions on Windows if you don't want them. Some of us do want freedom

You've got it completely backwards that having the option to control your hardware means you, as an individual, are impacted by anything at all if you don't want to administrate your own device
by Nevermark | 2025-09-01 07:47:55+00:00
I wonder if the circuit could be modularized into a quantum ALU. Where many of the otherwise identical components in the original layout, couldn't just be arranged as operations time, over a reduced number of distinct components.

Most digital algorithms would explode in terms of hardware needed, for increasing N, if we didn't distribute that computation in time, as well as across elements.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-01 07:48:04+00:00
Memory is definitely a key component of our thinking processes, but "consciousness" in a philosophical sense is usually taken to refer to the so-called "hard problem" of the phenomenal character of awareness and experience, at its most basic level. The insight that this basic phenomenal character can be impersonal and even momentary in a way that nonetheless fully explains our ordinary experience is quite a substantial simplification! It does seem to make the "hard" problem just a little bit easier, if only by potentially restricting its scope.
by sbinnee | 2025-09-01 07:48:31+00:00
I happened to listen to a podcast episode yesterday where the topic was Git rebase. There were 4 people in the panel. One person made a point that he did not understand why they even care, saying basically Git is broken, all the VCSs are broken because they are too complicated and they get in the way. He said a lot of things but my take was that all the existing VCSs are just a distraction. I personally don't agree with him. But while listening to his argument, I started imagining a perfect VCS which is not Git, JuJutsu, perforce, or whatever.

This got me thinking why I have not tried Jujutsu yet (which was mentioned in the episode briefly) even after I saw it multiple times on HN over the years. It is probably because it just looks like another Git, maybe a less complicated one. But nonetheless it's going to be Git-like, and I know enough about Git and am competent with it. So there is little incentive to learn and try another Git-like tool.

I would love to try a VCS vastly different from Git. But it cannot be just different, it should be better than Git. That, I think, is hard to come by.

By the way, if anyone is interested which podcast I am talking about, this is the episode. "The Real Problems w/ Git" on ThePrimeTime. https://youtu.be/t6qL_FbLArk?si=GOkixm86rFADoc4x