skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like the tagging standards accommodate a wide range of approaches to communicating provenance information. To address this author’s grumps, it seems like more specific tagging, rather than no tagging at all, might serve the interests of these photographers who really did make photos and really did use genAI just to create harmless elements of polish rather than to fabricate subject matter.

In fact, the CAI and the C2PA’s efforts seem to be aimed as much toward vouching and communicating that an image was captured by a camera’s sensor as they are toward flagging up generative AI (e.g. [0], [1]).

Which makes sense: it’s probably always going to be pretty easy to strip out metadata or digital watermarks. So as the flood of AI trash becomes the norm, the long term value would seem to lie in being able to prove that your image is not that.

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/content-credenti...

[1] https://c2pa.org/
Mercedes Split Turbo Was a Game Changer in Formula 1 [2021]
The slop itself was always destined to be just one part of the problem. But there was money to be made with it, so no one cared about the unintended consequences.
This is very useful. I'm surprised noone tackled it the way you did
The more I learn about how LLMs work, the less I believe this is an issue.
Even if it's 20 minutes -- which it often isn't -- that's $300/hour. If that's not enough to cover costs, well, maybe the costs are out of line.
> what we just witnessed was leadership rewarding and perpetuating a dysfunctional and broken system.

It's not clear that it is dysfunctional. If innovation is not a particularly high priority, but risk reduction is, then the system is working as designed - all of the checks are necessary. Compare to the "innovative" Boeing-type company which streamlines production by removing all safety checks.
there are a lot of conspiracy theories around hiv treatment in Africa, particularly SA
> But at some point, one needs to launch the thing

Do they? Even if risks are not mitigated and say risk for catastrophe can't be pushed below ie 15%? This ain't some app startup world where failure will lose a bit of money and time, and everybody moves on.

I get the political forces behind, nobody at NASA was/is probably happy with those, and most politicians are basically clueless clowns (or worse) chasing popularity polls and often wielding massive decisive powers over matters they barely understand at surface level.

But you can't cheat reality and facts, not more than say in casino.
> First, let me blame microservices. I heard your eyes roll,

No, that was the sound of me updooting the post.
Lacking a method to implement continuous improvement is the dysfunction.

“When [W. Edwards Deming] came to spread the gospel of continuous improvement in 1950, he was preaching to the choir. Toyota already believed in it. [Deming] simply gave them a process to better understand how to progress from failure. The idea of ever-improving coupled with what they learned from Deming—especially the Theory of Knowledge and shorter feedback loops via the PDSA loop, as well as the Theory of Variation and the accompanying statistical process control—let them succeed in their failure.”

From “Deming’s Journey” by John Willis. Solid recommended new read.

https://www.amazon.com/Demings-Journey-Profound-Knowledge-In...
Innovation means potential for failure and waste. The larger the company the more it's investors want it for steady predictable returns. Even shrinking returns as long as they are steady and foreseeable. A large company becomes about control. Look at summer blockbusters. They know the demographics that will see it and have a pretty good (not absolute) idea of how much they can make.

This is all by design.
Show HN: We added TypeScript-like schema enforcement to Fauna
If only the rest of the US DOTs can get on board. The path of “widen highways” is often the go-to for all of the states. Near zero consideration for alternative transportation methods.
This is exactly why the common advice is to automate your own tasks on your own time, with your own resources, don’t tell anyone, and enjoy working less.
Chloramine, then, which is what Minneapolis uses, last I checked, and I could smell it relative to water that had boiled or sat out long enough. Our noses aren't as sensitive as a dog's, granted, but still a useful sense.
The complexity in this area is a reason why i'm a proponent of public education, more societal focus on it, etc.

I suspect a big part of personal responsibility is the assumption that the average person is intelligent and capable of making informed decisions. Something i suspect many aren't, these days. Which isn't to say that we're all uneducated morons, but rather that many of the areas i brought up are purposefully being kept dark, obscured, etc. Which makes informed decisions.. well, difficult.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent, just wanted to bring it up. Appreciate your time :)
Amazon mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for Alexa AI revamp
Sorry if it sounds a bit harsh, but saying that changing stack would lower you from staff to middle engineer is idiotic.

A staff engineer is meant to be more removed from the code than an intermediate engineer, they're supposed to bring massive multiplier effect instead of cranking code all day. I don't think you should focus so much on the stack.
Logitech AI Edition Mouse
One addendum to this that I have observed: In many organizations, no one is "in charge." If change needs to happen, there are 100 checkboxes, 100 reasons not to change, 100 people who are concerned about their career, resume, budget, department, relevance, etc.

For every "innovation hero" that wins an award, there are 5 who are "managed" into leaving, marginalized, or disenfranchised. The high nail gets the hammer. I have been into and out of the startup space for the last 20 years, and most of the times that I was an "innovation hero" it was because there was one person in a corner office who was using me as a proxy for a change they wanted to see happen.

The American system of organizational management is...basically glue.
Zimbabwe kicked out all the WASPs. Where did they end up? A failed state.

The issue is not WASPs, it’s bad governance. But I guess life is easy when one can just blame WASPs rather than examine themselves to find fault.

We Africans have autonomy but refuse to use it for good. It’s condescending to assume we have no role in our problems and, to follow the logic, no role in the solutions.
Am I the only person who dislikes using the term "gifted" for high-performing students? I think the word downplays the amount of effort these kids put into learning and taking their education seriously and the amount of good upbringing their parents contributed. "Gifted" kind of implies that some unicorn flew down from the sky and just handed these kids a gift of big brains or something. There's probably a small genetic predisposition at play here, but don't discount the effort it takes to be able to pass a college entry exam in the 7th grade. Same with calling excellent artists and athletes "talented." They may have been born with slight advantages, but "talented" downplays the hard work and practice that it took to master what they're good at.
> I still havent spend a dollar on any of it...

Subscribed to GTP-4o (or whatever the paying one is called) for translating / finding typos / summarizing / etc.

Zero brand love and I'll switch to something else (maybe some future Claude model?) the second something better/faster comes out.
It's really not gross if you can accept that the author of such a statement would likely also believe racist is not a term that is used not as a binary (as in - you are either racist or not racist) but that racism is something we are almost all guilty of to some degree or another and not something that means you're going to hell or are a horrible person. In the same way that we are all at times capable of being selfish, or at times capable of being ignorant, or weak to temptation.

Saying they are racist in that light is more like saying that relative to the average, they are a bit more racist than the best of us.
> should every other country in the world ban US software?

For context, I'm not an American or European, and my home country is allied with Russia. That being said, the US is not just like the Russia, no matter how badly Putin wants the world to believe that.
There was some anime/manga I recall from when I was younger that had the phrase "heroes require bad things and/villians to exist."

This reminds of that.
Perhaps my biggest criticisms of 1984 is that it tends to make the reader fixate on some group of evil conspirators at the top, at the expense of understanding the banality of evil. I think this portrayal sows distrust in real democracy through presumption of evil intent.
Omniglot
Baba Is You: A puzzle game where the rules are objects you can manipulate
Comes up pretty frequently, you can search HN for 'usenet' for an infinite number of takes. Couple of recent threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336606

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36194941

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31681234
A big problem here is that slowed-down "teacher talk" does French learners an incredible disservice.

The classroom version of the language is at least a little bit different from natural, connected speech in every language I've studied. But classroom French is effectively a completely different dialect from the everyday spoken language.
"I often am repulsed that servers reads user agent." That is a backwards way of looking at it, they dont take the user agent, you give it. You you give any user agent you like or none.

No one providing a free resource online has any obligation to treat your requests in a particular way. If you dont like the way a particular HTTP service is responding, then dont send it requests.
Open Source Python Data Mad Map
Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket launch, but I always think about European exploration of the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners built empires on those achievements.

So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the thing.
Alcohol ethoxylates that were identified to cause epithelial inflammation and barrier damage[0] are listed as ingredients in consumer dish detergents[1] and rinse aids[2].

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/#:~:text=The%20alco....

[1] https://smartlabel.pg.com/en-us/00037000982067.html

[2] https://giantfoodstores.com/product/finish-jet-dry-3-in-1-ri...
> Wouldn't it be better to generate multiple tracks that can be mixed / tweaked together, rather than a single track? That way you can also keep the parts you like and continue iterating on the parts you dislike.

Totally and that is 100% what is coming. For a great many pictures too: why generate a picture full of lightning issues / approximation when you'll soon be able to generate and entire 3D scene and render it properly.

We've mastered 3D rendering and audio engineering.

I want the 3D models and the 3D scenes. I want the individual tracks (and combine them in Dobly Atmos or whatever shall be cool).

And that is coming, no question about it.
Spam.

USENET if you want to use it is still there, but the amount of spam vs active posts is low.

I'm just getting back into it after a couple years away.

Thunderbird is cross platform and handles USENET nicely.

I use Panix.com to get my feed but there's also SDF.org which lets you post for free once your account is validated (making a donation is a great way to instantly validate your account, I suggest the $36 one-time donation which will give you a full account)
Spam and binaries. Moderated groups moved very slowly as every message needed to be approved. Unmoderated groups became cesspools of spam and flamewars. Binaries groups carried so much data that supporting them was both expensive and legally risky.

As the utility of USENET as a discussion platform diminished due to spam and moderation difficulties, and the binaries groups became an expensive liability, ISPs stopped providing USENET access included with user subscriptions.

That takes us to where we are now. Mastodon is probably the closest successor architecturally, but I'm not sure there's a good example of a platform that has ever seriously solved the problems of moderation in a decentralized environment.
The official “export templates” that you use need to be able to run any game you create with the stock engine, so they are fully featured. You have the option (and it’s recommended) to compile your own export templates, at which point you can specify which parts of the engine your specific game does and does not need (e.g. turn off the 3D, turn off the more advanced UI components, etc…)
Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise Quick Report [pdf]
I just listened to the audio book on spotify, free for premium members, and I'm wondering if that's why I'm seeing so much about the Challenger disaster lately. Well worth a listen, and spends a great deal of time on setup for these key individuals who tried so hard to avert this disaster.
Author here. We chose to offer a dual commercial license for this case, which is not GPL and carries none of the obligations regarding sharing source code.

Of course the tradeoff is that it is not free (as in beer), but if your startup is getting sold then hopefully you got enough value out of our software to pay for a commercial license.
A few might be able and willing to, most will not. It will be easier for them to find alternative sources
A (Very) Comprehensive Guide to Text Prompt Engineering Techniques
I think you underestimate the degree that he is becoming a household name, especially since the ScarJo thing
Maybe they'll shut it down. It's become useless, just a heap of commercials and AI-generated rubbish :D
There must be some middle ground to permit cross origin requests. Would anyone rather have Perplexity deliver a browser extension that navigates to URLs to fulfill requests on the user’s behalf and the user’s identity?

Anyway, what value is the user to the publisher if the user doesn’t want to read? Why are their stressing out about losing traffic of people who don’t read?
do you think these are the only two options?

i pick option three: the current system.
The Petzl Am'D Ball-Lock[1] is the best locking carabiner I've encountered in the last decade of climbing.

1: https://www.petzl.com/US/en/Professional/Connectors/Am-D
> Windows has one major thing going for it: it’s best-in-class for gaming.
> It might even be the greatest gaming platform of all time

I keep hearing this. It's the worst gaming platform of all time. Windows was brute forced into being the only gaming platform on desktop computing due to the total dominance of the IBM PC and the Windows operating system. Neither of these were designed for games. Only cheap hardware and very powerful CPUs compared to the alternative made them viable at all. It should be viewed in terms of opportunity cost - what could gamers have had if it wasn't for Windows?
You can check how python does it, and also ask chatgpt - I found it to be very helpful in cases like these.
I like the Alpha Centauri reference here lol.
It does, but the last lesson learned is:

> All large organizations – both government and corporate—need an innovation doctrine or else risk being outpaced by competitors.

I don’t think the anecdote fits conclusion. The reasons to innovate are many, but being outcompeted is not that salient to, say, an IT person in some agency.
Microui: Tiny immediate-mode UI library
Athena is presto/trino rebranded. But you dont really pay for CPU and it can basically scale to 100 CPUs for free.

It is not really a database but an SQL interface for map/reduce jobs. But it can handle any size of data and is pretty efficient when it is partitioned.

And it has zero setup cost.
Relate to the four stages of employment:
1) This is the new person "X" - they are amazing and are going to solve everything!
2) "X" is pretty good, but maybe not as good as we thought.
3) "X" turned out to just be another average performer.
4) "X" is obviously terrible or they would have left for someplace that would treat them better than we do.
VeryGoodGraphics – vector graphics cross-platform UI framework
"once all the air-filled plastics [...] are crushed down" is doing a lot of work in this scenario but still an interesting thought experiment!
The discussion forum still has to be managed (I said "anarchy" facetiously) and at least minimal standards of professionalism would still have to apply. And if the board still devolves into a swamp of griping and bickering, then well, they can nuke it and at least say they tried.

Most ideas are indeed crap, and the good ones have to be picked out. But reducing the total number of ideas doesn't raise the percentage of good ones.
This can be by design, sure. But I think it is also an inexorable tendency for people in large groups. Once your company is 10x Dunbar’s number, it is very hard for “we” to mean the entire company.
> Moore's law ain't got nothing on NP-hard problems

Fun fact, exponential growth is exactly what you need against NP-hard problems.
Jesus christ lol.

You're being fooled by marketing.

Just because Brave calls it blocking, doesn't mean it is blocking.

Again, just do some god-damn research. Really, the bare minimum. It isn't news to anyone educated on this stuff that Apple has never* allowed proper ad blocking until recently in the EU.

But, believe whatever you want. I get being too scared to leave that ever so comfy RDF you found yourself in.

Well, I tried.
It is undeniable that high performing athletes, artists, etc put in a lot of work, but I don't think it is incompatible with the word "gifted".

When you enter college at 12 it is beyond a "slight genetic advantage" IMO.

And it's not just genetic. A gifted kids was given the gift of having parents who care, who put in the work and who have the means to put in the work.

I don't know, I think both things (predisposition and hard work) can be accepted as true.
Contrary to the name, I don't think that it's very good. The whole
thing is a canvas via WASM, so scrolling isn't smooth, selection doesn't
work, and accessibility is seemingly non-existent.

But I think the technology itself is interesting. While most modern UI
toolkits use HTML or React-like components, this uses a set of JSONs,
which describe the page.
You're absolutely right in terms of what is expected from Staff eng, but try to get a job in companies with primarily Java or .NET stack (I am talking mostly about Western Europe).

First barrier is an interview, from my experience people expect you to know nitty-gritty details of their stack if you want to lead other engineers and be a force multiplier. How do you even do a code review without properly understanding the trade-offs in that stack or widely accepted best practices in the community, which you accumulate over a long period of time.

You can of course fallback to another archetype of staff eng, and become a voice of leadership to translate high level business objectives to technical solutions, but companies I know still expect you to write a lot of code
The fact that Co-Pilot 365 is unable to directly search or reference current Microsoft documentation on their Learn site or any of the support articles and just tells you to go look that up yourself is annoying.

I understand the major selling point is it’s ability to search through your emails, team messages, meeting notes/transcripts, and SharePoint/OneDrive documents for information is not as useful as it could be because I can’t get it to find me information in my OneNote doc without giving it the documents and even then it usually just tells me to ask the person who last edited the file.
Groupthink is really common among programmers, especially when they have no idea what they are talking about.
It shows you don't need a lot of experience to see the emperor has no clothes, but you do need to pay attention.
>The US invaded 7 different countries and killed upwards of a million civilians by some estimates in this century alone. Should the same measures be applied to it, or is it “different” and I “don’t understand”

By the countries the US invaded, during the invasion - you bet.

>How about Israel?

I'm guessing Iran isn't a big user of Israeli software.
Sure, that's one way you could describe things, although not especially accurately.
Ask HN: Why did you get a tattoo?
I have never had the desire to have one. I think many of them look cool and they are so common where I live that any stigma is long gone, but never had the slightest interest.

Lots of people obviously want one enough to pay good money. Is it possible to describe? Maybe you just want it because you want it? Maybe you feel good for a long time afterwards? Maybe it's often a really deep personal thing you wouldn't discuss casually? Is the pain part of it?

I ask here as opposed to somewhere more general because people here have a keen interest in quantifying things.
The latter I think, I found the volume varied depending on how the coils were aligned. I'll give it another shot once Qi2 brings Magsafe-like perfect alignment to non-Apple devices.
Ask HN: How Should I Reach You for Marketing Purposes?
As a decision-maker at a tech company, I get dozens of cold emails per day from marketers/salespeople trying to sell me their product. Some are more creative than others, but they all have a similar theme, basically be personalized enough to break through and make a "personal" connection, then hook for more information. If I never read the expression "let's jump on a call" again it will be too soon lol

I have told many people that I hate this and that it doesn't work and that I think it's scummy and tend to turn against companies that contact me that way.

I was recently asked, "well, how should I get your attention for marketing opportunities?"

I realized I didn't have a great answer, so I wanted to execute a broad query over the HN userbase and see what others think.

Suppose you built a cool product that you believe can help people, and you need to get their attention. What is the best/correct/ethical way to do that?
> its absolutely cool to train AI on publicly available knowledge. Like its not a sin.

I think it is a sin to train LLMs on other people's works without their permission, but I separate this out from whether or not it's legally permissible. Not everything that is legal is acceptable.

In any case, right now anyway, the state of things is that if you put it on the open web, it's going to be used for training whether you approve of that or not. Which is why I and many others have abandoned the open web. It's impossible to publish there in a way that ensures that your work is not used in ways you disapprove of.
You can start by reading up about how embeddings work, then check out specific rag techniques that people discovered. Not much else is needed really.
> Wouldn't it be better to generate multiple tracks that can be mixed / tweaked together, rather than a single track? That way you can also keep the parts you like and continue iterating on the parts you dislike.

That'd interest me (a musical hobbyist) more than the "whole track" generators, for sure.

I imagine it's a harder task tho'. Presumably, if you give the same source material (video, prompt) to the AI multiple times, it will generate different pieces of music. So if you do a series of prompts, each one specifying a different instrument or group/bus, then you (or the AI) need to arrange for the parts to blend correctly, follow the same cues and assemble to a coherent arrangement. Is that one pass with multiple outputs, or multiple passes/prompts with one output each?

I have got the impression (from casual reading) that the music generators don't inherently "know" about different parts of a piece of music. They just know about the final output.
I know that, but there are assumptions you cannot make about equivalence etc. So if he's commenting on inaccuracies of numbers, he may find that surprising.

Tough crowd, sheesh.
Humanzee was grown in a lab before scientists euthanized it