skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think we’re revising history here, Blender was completely shunned until they started doing the exact opposite of GIMP and building for their users instead of building for the sake of building. It certainly had no first mover advantage and even poor students spent thousands just to not have to learn it and no professional studios used it.

This all changed within a few years of them fixing the UI and focusing on users.

>GEGL filters in the menu is what stops you from using Gimp?

It’s one example but my point is already proven by you calling them “GEGL Filters” step back from your biases for a second and really think about what you wrote and the wider implications to the rest of the application and its users.

People just feel they instinctively have to defend GIMP because it was one of the early larger real desktop Linux open source successes but to me it represents one thing, completely wasted opportunity and the importance of how culture and ideology of a team can squander something that could have been amazing.

“Oh people would never have switched from Photoshop, the workflow and keys are different” is pure cope, we know this because Figma decimated Photoshop and Illustrator as web/app design tools in about 2 years just by offering a better tool.

GIMP could have done this 20+ years ago with the right ideology.
It will entrench established search engines even more if they have to move to auth-based crawling, so that the only crawlers will be those you invite. Most people will do this for google, bing, and maybe one or two others if there is a simple tool to do so.
It's a few things but they act in almost every large organization.
1. Valuing everything purely by cost - giving up sovereignty is "cheaper" to do and will only lock you in more as cost goes up, until like you mention there's a tipping point.
2. Seeing support of domestic options as cost rather than investment. This supports issue 1 because it makes it harder to justify the (currently) higher priced domestic alternative.
3. Concrete cost of investing NOW vs possible future cost of fixing an issue later. This is why every app on a long enough time scale becomes 100% tech debt.
Haha, glad you liked the article. Anything in particular that felt trippy? Always open to feedback!
I've definitely done that as well. I generally don't have a problem with it, but it makes for an extra conversation the first time someone sees the pattern.

Given how some of the other ergonomic changes in go have gone (closures capturing loop variables, for instance), I'd support a change to lexical scoped defers if it were on the table.
AI diagnoses major cancer with near perfect accuracy
Uh, how about they want to make money? And they have to consistently pay their developers and other bills? Is this a serious question?
Like what? I think the web looked more or less the same in 2015 as it does today.
>Yes there are downsides to this idea but I'd like people to have real conversations around those rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.

It's hard to have a serious conversation when you present a couple of upsides but completely understate/not mention the downsides.

Eliminating anonymity comes with real danger. What about whistleblowers and marginalized groups? The increased likelihood of targeted harassment, stalking, and chilling effects on free speech? The increase in surveillance? The reduction in content creation and legitimate criticism of companies/products/etc? The power imbalance granted to whoever validates identities?

pjc50 brings up some other great points, which got me thinking even more:

Removing anonymity creates a greater incentive to steal identities, has a slew of logistical issues (who/how are IDs verified, what IDs are accepted, what are the enforcement mechanisms and who enforces them, etc.), creates issues with shared accounts and corporate/brand accounts, would require cooperation across every country with internet access (good luck!) otherwise it doesn't really work, and probably a million other things if I keep thinking about it.
The difference in speed between Angular 1 and React was like the difference between Python and Rust. Not only was React simpler than Angular and had fewer footguns, but it was so ridiculously fast out of the box compared to Angular.

Then Google google'd and left devs high and dry with the need to rewrite their apps from Angular 1 to Angular 2+, whereas React has been relatively stable, despite some incompatibilities -- yes there are new features and new methods, but you can still do React classes.
I'll bite...

We've learned a ton in the last few decades about how interconnected and complicated ecosystems can be. Likewise we've learned that the deep ocean isn't disconnected from the surface. The two send resources, energy, and bio mass to each other.

Additionally, we are extremely reliant on the ocean in so many ways and ecological collapse of the ocean would be catastrophic for our planet.

So while yes we don't have a smoking gun that says "deep sea mining is going to destroy the planet" we are being pretty cavalier playing with things we do not understand.
8th in this list of number of datacenters per country [0], most of the countries listed being much larger.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1228433/data-centers-wor...
"The best time to ditch tech giants was 15 years ago. The second-best time is now." -- Dutch proverb
They say Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad by his side
With GitLab, I have found https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local to be an incredible time-saver when working with GitLab pipelines (similar to https://github.com/nektos/act for GitHub)

I wish GitLab/GitHub would provide a way to do this by default, though.
Really love the principles set out here. Love the concessions made in order to keep the language simpler.

I've been idly considering building an alternative Rust std lib with a shape that reminds me of the capabilities system laid out here. In my case that was less out of a desire for supply chain security (impossible if I'm just swapping the std lib) and more to discourage side effects from being produced deep within the core of program logic.

WRT the rejection of async, has there been any consideration of a more general feature like generators or coroutines? Resumable functions are a really nice way to write state machines. I don't expect those to go out of style.
And how could they possibly base their actions on good when their technology is more important than fire? History is depending on them to do everything possible to increase their market cap.
I've been thinking about this even before AI. The internet has become society itself. Complete anonymity on the internet removes any sort of social pressure to act like a civilized person.
My understanding is that work done for an employer as part of your normal job duties is considered work for hire and your employer owns it.

Employers might also have you sign a contract to avoid legal questions about whether part of your work was in the scope of those duties.
I had this same mindset when React started gaining popularity. "Vanilla JS all the way". Then I saw the power of React, and fell in love with it. Then I landed a position that uses jQuery and Vanilla JS for everything a few years later... and oh my. It's absolutely awful.

I know, I know, vanilla JS is most likely going to work in 5+ years as opposed to the React codebase, but damn. Wretched.
I don’t think you’re missing anything, I think the plan really is to burn it all down and rule over the ashes. The old saw “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” works in reverse too. This is a foolish, shortsighted thing to do, and they’re doing it anyway. Not really thinking about where value actually comes from or what their grandchildren’s lives would be like in such a world.
I'd expect the same treatment in any other country. If you break the law and get deported, they are not going to let you walk around freely anymore. Maybe she expected special treatment?
Can we not just have a whitelist for allowed crawlers and ban the rest by default? Then places like DuckDuckGo and Google can provide a list of IP addresses that their crawlers will come from. Then simply just don't include major LLM providers like OpenAI
And people were outraged, then it became status quo. Now getting fondled by the TSA is passively accepted and hardly anyone writes about it anymore.
It'll still keep your site from getting hammered
It’s people that don’t care if they ruin things for everyone else.

Crawlers have existed forever in search engine space and mostly behave.

This sort of no rate limit, fake user agent, 100s of IPs approach used by AI teams is obviously intentionally not caring who it fucks over. More malicious than sloppy implementation
From the article:

>40 per cent of the world's 8.2 billion people live in rural areas

>the rural population is underestimated by half

Based on the first statement:
8.2*0.4=3.28 billion rural globally;

And according to the second statement, there re actually twice as many, so another 3.28 billion people, or:

8.2+3.28=over 11 billion in total on Earth.
> That's not how humans work.

I 100% agree. I mentioned that in my first post.

But then we recognize our emotional responses and even superstitions and we think about it and sometimes by doing so improve our lives.

In the end of course this is OP's call to approach this how they wish.
Saying “powers of two” is a universal way of denoting 2^n. It’s okay to admit being wrong rather than blaming OEIS for being vague.
Nah, it is not gonna be that simple. Office is not just editing software, that would be fairly easy to replace, Office is a collaboration suite, provides documents storage, provides authorization and authentication that can be integrated with practically anything companies, governments, universities are using.

Can we go back to '90 and relay on sending documents by email?

Building an alternative, even on the level of Google Docs, which has editing capabilities on the MS Word 2.0 level, is not gonna be simple, although I am surprised that European Union is ready to spend a lot of money on adjusting caps to bottles (this costed billions), but is not able to invest into its own capabilities in terms of IT infrastructure.
Greenpeace USA and its subsidiaries are US based non-profits with assets in the US. Nowhere near $600M, but what they do have can be collected, and Greenpeace USA and all its subsidiaries will certainly be driven into bankruptcy
So your answer is it's inevitable that any country will slip into authoritarianism so we must live as if we are in one already - and create a whole society around being able to subvert authority.

Have you considered that massively enables organised criminal elements in democracies and increases the chances of a slide into authoritarianism?
Personal media, cough cough
I've been working for the Weather and been at their old HQ right next to the new Falcons stadium. I'm reconsidering visiting this year because to the whole idea of being potentially sent to some detention center just because I don't like Trump or Musk.
This is extremely enlightening. I'm not surprised New York is basically the most expensive state to live in. There are obvious outliers though, such as Alaska, where you end up paying 50% markup on most basic home amenities just because of transit costs. I think I need to check up on where most of NYS money is really going.
I don't think it's possible to develop a frontier model without mass scraping. The economics simply don't add up. You need at least 10 trillion tokens to make an 8 billion parameter model. 10 trillion tokens is something like 40 terabytes.

You simply can't get 40 terabytes of text without mass scraping.
If that's what's disappointing you about the iPhone, it's WAY worse on Android. Google were the ones that pushed me to switch to an iPhone after almost a decade on Android. Stuff not "innovating" is a feature in a mature, well-designed system. Google does the polar opposite and changes things constantly just for the sake of change (well, it's internally so some PO can get a promotion). Most of their UI changes don't even come in app updates, they'll have both interfaces installed on your device but only toggle one on from a server-side flag tied to your account/device, so one day some app will completely change without you having updated anything, then a week later it might just go back to the old UI. They'll deprecate any app or feature you like and replace it with something else, insisting it has the same feature set when it doesn't. Everything feels like a constant beta you're paying to participate in.

The iPhone's new Photos app was a controversial change, but it was so infamous because it's such a rare exception to their standard of changing very little. Open up your Messages app or Settings and it looks and functions basically exactly as it did on the first iPhone in 2007.
Only if your CAPTCHA-like is hurled at every client indiscriminately. Otherwise you'll end up right back where Spamhaus started: maintaining your own list of good and bad actors.

The advantage of a third party service is that you're sharing intel of bad actors.
Actually it does have value, since I literally do what you describe, I just haven't plumbed the GitHub Pages part yet.

Here[1] I keep docs about the truck camper I'm building. I use one GHA[2] to generate the TOC, and another GHA[3] to run make in the root directory and then commit and push modified files (to a PR branch). The make process uses scripts to generate new Markdown pages based on a template, auto-generating Markdown tables from CSV files and inserting them into the final Markdown.

By keeping this all as a GHA, I don't have to do anything manual to generate the new site. I just open a PR with my new content and the actions fix up everything. It's basically a janky static site editor but using simpler tools I'm familiar with and can customize easier.

I've been wanting to host it as GH Pages but haven't gotten around to it. Partly I need to do this because my 3d models run into GitHub's LFS bandwidth limits and hopefully Pages won't (if I do run into Pages' bandwidth limit, I'll need to find some other cheap hosting, or not share my models anymore =/ )

[1] https://github.com/peterwwillis/truckcamper [2] https://github.com/peterwwillis/truckcamper/blob/main/.githu... [3] https://github.com/peterwwillis/truckcamper/blob/main/.githu...
As I understand it very very likely to cause dead zones. Ignoring the role these nodules play, the way I understand the mining works is it has huge combines crawling the ocean floor and kicking up huge plumes of dust to extract out the nodules. This:

A) kills all marine life that might be present on the ocean floor which is a huge disruption to a fragile ecosystem where everything is even more tightly interconnected

B) disorients and kills marine life in large area through the massive dust clouds that get created by the combined kicking up that dust

The problem with putting the onus on those concerned with this activity is it’s completely backwards. The risk is great enough that we don’t want profit driven activity going full steam to try to manifest those risks first and try to deal with consequences later. There is reasonable concern that this will cause huge disruptions to the ecosystem even before we get to the potential that these modules are why there’s oxygen down there to begin with.
There’s a clear and massive change in the number of people this is happening to since Trump started making executive orders though.

The system was always evil, but Trump seems to have dialled it up 10x…
Show HN: I accidentally built an MrBeast-style replicator
HeadShotly.ai’s Style Replicator is like the MrBeast of AI headshots—taking something good and making it insanely better. Just like MrBeast replicates viral content at a massive scale, our AI replicates your best headshot style, generating high-quality, professional variations effortlessly. Upload a photo, pick a style, and let the AI do the rest!
It does not even have to be dynamically generated. Just pre-generate a few thousand static pages of AI slop and serve that. Probably cheaper than dynamic generation.
Other stories make it too. Any stories on this topic often exit the frontpage due to how the algorithm works around political topics.

This one about deportations to veneuzuela got flagged, but was on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381043

Same with this story about a Lebanese professor from Brown who was deported: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384730

They all reached the front page.

The top comment on the story about the canadian woman detained suggests the article was ALSO flagged, and must have been unflagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411777

It is a reasonable expectation that this article will also be flagged. If any political story gets popular and heated enough some people flag it.

Update: This thread itself has been flagged off the front page
Fujifilm Launches GFX100RF medium format camera
The only thing that really annoys me about this is that the resources get scraped more than once. Sure, update a delta every month or whatever, but can't the AI bros get the sh*t together and share scrapes? It's embarrassing.

The special sauce is in parsing, tokenizing, enriching etc. There is no value in re-scraping, and massive cost, right?

Just do it.
If the server owner has Plex Pass then non-paying members can still stream remotely for free.

I have plex pass lifetime and have for almost a decade, best $70 I ever spent.

EDIT: It has been over a decade (June 2014) and it was $74.99
As heat and drought intensify, Australia's ancient Wollemi pines may no longer be safe in the wild. So conservationists are growing the pines in a globally dispersed “metacollection," with trees planted in botanic gardens from Sydney to San Diego. As the planet warms, tens of thousands of other plants may require this kind of intensive care.
My understanding is that tenuous hypotheses are a poor basis for a supposed "consensus".

What we have with origin of life is a bunch of "maybe it worked this way" ideas, with no good way to test them.
Tailscale offers a super basic reverse proxy called tailscale serve. Or baring that caddy has built in support. They have the full details for both in the tailscale docs.
The distributed nature of git lets me be independent of some central instance (you may decide that the master copy resides on Github, but with the advent of mesh VPNs like the ones Zerotier and Tailscale offer, you could also sidestep it and push/pull from your colleagues directly as well). It also lets me dictate who gets to access it.

What the article describes, though, is possibly the worst way a machine can access a git repository, which is using a web UI and scraping that, instead of cloning it and adding all the commits to its training set. I feel like they simply don't give a shit. They got such a huge capital injection that they feel they can afford to not give a shit about their own cost efficiency and that they go using the scorched earth tactics. After all, even their own LLMs can produce a naive scraper that wreaks havoc on the internet infrastructure, and they just let it loose. Got mine, fuck you all the way!

But then they will release some DeepSeek R(xyz), and yay, all the hackernews who were roasting them for such methods, will be applauding them for a new version of an "open source" stochastic parrot. Yay indeed.
Claude does quite alright. Across one and a half year I did more than several dozens of Mermaid diagrams of all kinds, and only the most complex perhaps were out of reach.

It also really depends on the printing.
Looking at the replies to your comment thread, I feel like you have to be trolling.
I take your point, because violations of the law and constitutional rights did happen then, too.

But I don't think the magnitude or key charactersistics are quite the same. Post-9/11, I mean you had to expect a freak-out. Marginal victory in a peaceful election... there's no external threat here that makes it make sense beyond "democratic country regresses toward fascism".
That's ignoring all the times when closer trade ties did lower the likelihood of armed conflict - not in the least, within Europe itself.

I agree that we badly miscalculated Russia, but not every actor is Russia and willing to tank its own economy for revanchism.
OP’s linked blog post mentioned they got hit with a large spike in bandwidth charges. Sending them garbage information costs money.
In the USA, where an increasingly authoritarian government has come into power... I think many would stop using the internet if that happened.
You don't. It's like Minecraft. You can do almost everything in Minecraft alone and everything exists in infinite quantity, so why trade in the first place?

This goes both ways. Let's say there is something you want but you're having trouble obtaining it. You'd need to give something in exchange.

But the seller of what you want doesn't need the things you can easily acquire, because they can get those things just as easily themselves.

The economy collapses back into self sufficiency. That's why most Minecraft economy servers start stagnating and die.
The Content-Ification of Software
This is why we can't have nice things. Restricting access or making it a little more difficult preserves goodness for real people.
> maybe greenpeace will just cease activities in the US

imho that would be good outcome, many of those 'activities' are 'crimes' according to judge
It'd be more accurate to say the state is a machine which operates according to procedural rules (laws, dictates, etc.) that aren't amoral in their construction.

This is part of the nature of states -- and any large social institutions which are governed in this manner. It's this proceduralisation of action which allows very large groups of people to operate together collectively -- the downside is "procedural sadism", if you wish to call it that.
They're not really proxying it, but they do assist with NAT hole-punching and you're probably using their authentication system for managing permissions.
> It's all ridiculous, and I don't understand how anyone can defend it.

it's a ultimately a difference in philosophy

UK governments over the past 30 years have decided that passengers should pay to run the railway, rather than the taxpayer out of general taxation

if you look at the distribution of earnings of those who use the railways you could even call this a progressive policy

meanwhile most European countries chose the other way round
Good thing law firms are overflowing with the desire to make large amounts of cash from contingency based cases.
Tried switching, but on Apple TV the Plex app just streams flawlessly unlike Jellyfin which buffers continuously.

But here is the thing: It is a wired Ethernet network between the server for both and the Apple TV, so there is absolutely no justification.

Jellyfin is going to be THE answer one day, but still has some growing to do.
On "impoverishment": the difference between private sectors in Europe and US are of course important, but I'm referring to a challenge on much lower level.

Lagging country that wants to increase pace, must find resources to invest. The easiest way to find these resources is to squeeze out parts of its population, to decrease consumption and rise investment. This was done historically in the Soviet Union, in Korea, in China. Europe is of course much more prosperous, but I don't think it can escape this logic. I'm not sure if either European politicians and populations are ready to implement such catch-up initiatives that would result in partial dismantling of the welfare state.
Culturally, the modern replacement for Usenet is probably Reddit. Architecturally, probably something built on top of a federated protocol like ActivityPub (Mastodon) or Nostr (Lemmy).

But I guess realistically you can't fight entropy forever. Even Hacker News, aggressively moderated as it is, is slowly but irrevocably degrading over time.
It's not even that. Under the US Constitution everyone, citizen or not, illegal or not, desirable or not, has at least 1st Amendment and Due Process rights.