skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course it's open for discussion. Free speech is not limitless.

You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts.

Advertisement is just another form of speech that can be limited.
Very cool. Anyone know more about this: "This discovery opens the door for researchers to begin dissecting the genes that could play various roles for cellulose biosynthesis in the plant"

ie. how does this let them find the relevant genes? Knocking out likely candidates and then do an image?
There are two ways of trying to achieving goal. One is to start from big picture, think if we even want to do something, then plan how to go there. Second is to start from technicalities and probably immediately go nowhere.

You are starting from technicalities before you even took the moment to actually think of goal is worth it.

If it is worth it and we would indeed be better off - plan how to go there, it may not be easy, but it will be possible this way or another. If it is not worth it after all - just say it, no technicalities needed, redirect time and effort elsewhere.
It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast (which should not have 1A protections at nearly the same level). Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser and makes the viewer into a product.
In the last 40 years how many millions of man years have been put into manipulating people/breaking down their internal barriers by the ad agencies? By social media companies? By media companies? In the hundreds of thousands of man years at least (but more likely in the millions to tens of millions). There have been around 80 billion human years of output in that time and sales are a huge part of civilization so easily in the 10s of millions of human years of energy put into how to better manipulate/break down/re-train people.

If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, your above argument makes sense.

If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 man years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.

Edit: The amount of focused research, science, practice, experience in manipulation humans is unprecedented. Never before have millions to tens of millions of human years been dedicated to things in such a continuous, scientifically approached way. Yet we act as if the world is basically the same as 1980 except we have smart phones/the internet.
Don’t know much about the guy. Nissan has been in Smyrna since 1983.
I initially believed a single prompt could generate a self-solving Rubik's Cube, but I spent several days learning why that wasn't feasible.
No worries, we can make those illegal too.
For some tips :)
https://theunscrambled.com/anagram-solver
I use ublock origin on Firefox and next dns on my router with a block list. I pay for ad free YouTube. My kids had a lesson in how annoying commercials are during a trip where they tried to watch a BBC animal documentary and had to see the same commercial five times in a row because I guess not enough advertisers signed up with the provider. I don't like billboards. I'm pretty sympathetic to getting rid of advertising and do so as much as possible in my own life.

That said this article glosses over the first amendment which absolutely needs to be considered because (at least in the United States) that is the big barrier to any sort of restriction.

Also the idea of what constitutes an ad. Billboards? What about large signs showing where a store is? Are people with big social media accounts allowed to tell us about their favorite products? Only if they don't get money? What if they get free products? We'll have financial audits I assume to make sure they aren't being sneaky. No more sponsored videos? What about listing the patreons that made the video possible?

How will this be sold to the people that need ads for their small business? We'll need a majority support to pass a constitutional amendment.

Anyway, this seems impossible but good luck!
A streaming brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis
I find these kinds of projects really exciting. Does anyone know if the people behind this project have any connection to #ScanAllFish[1], which was also featured on Hacker News last year[2]?

[1]: https://www.adamsummers.org/scanallfish

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40021458
It may well be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
The article didn't mention Python's atomic refcounts. They're very bad for cache usage as they're constantly invalidating cache.
I said No handwaving with scale. :-)
Glad to see this, been noodling on it for a long time. My crazy proposal is to make advertising illegal, in the US... by nationalizing Craigslist. USList or some such.

No more billboards, no more ads on TV or radio or podcasts or when you're on a plane or when you're in an Uber and they have that screen. No more ads in something you've already paid for a la newspapers.

You want to advertise to, say, all the people in Arkansas? You have to pay them directly to post your ad on Arkansas USList. Want to target further? Great, you have to pay the county to post on their board. Then, people that want to see your ads can go to their local board, filter by their interests, and maybe see your ad. Want to target all the electricians in a county? Their union runs a board and you can pay them.

Cities/counties/states/${localeType}s could opt to, say, issue an advertising dividend to their residents.

My definition of advertising is the unwanted stealing of your attention by someone who wants you to buy something. Or be aware of something you could buy. It takes you out of a context you have put yourself in, stealing your attention (and therefore your time, which is all we really have in this life).

My stupid USList idea flips this on its head by making it possible to only see ads when you want to.

Movie trailers when you're at the cinema are ads, sure. But they are ads that fit the context you've put yourself in. If you're at the theater, it makes sense for the playbill to list other shows. If you're at a restaurant, the list of specials, or a wine recommended by your server are both appropriate. Even a list of specials or deals in the window of a restaurant, as long as it isn't 100x100ft and illuminaated, is fine by me.

But an LED billboard distracting you with a 2-for-1 meal deal as you drive down the freeway is out of your context (and dangerous! and needlessly polluting!) When we consider the tracking and spying that has become possible thanks to online advertising companies like Google, Facebook, etc... it's scary. And entirely needless.

Like I said, I've been noodling on this for a while and am definitely the crazy anti-advertising guy in my circles. But once I point out the prevalence of ads and how it's like being kicked in the knees all day, I've found people seem to start getting it. I've done more than a few pihole + wireguard installs, UBlock origin + Sponsorblock installs, etc.

Fuck ads.
It doesn't, but I have a gut feeling that it may impact the prices for new rents in some unexpected ways. For example, people who are living in a rent controlled place may be less likely to leave, this may impact the supply/demand ratio (relatively to the total) and affect the market. Also the apartment owners are aware of the rent control law and so they may try to increase the initial price to try to compensate for it.
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

No it wouldn't. If someone opens up a new restaurant a block away there's not going to be much word of mouth when it just opened, and even if they make a website, web search will prioritise the websites of existing restaurants because their domains have been around longer and have more inbound links.
People who pay for consumer research type services. "I want a general-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax that compiles to native code. It should be statically typed and supports both automatic (garbage collected) and manual memory management." One micro payment later I have a list of links and reviews. In this case the research is the product instead of me.
The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product.

There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.
I don't find anything surprising about that. What humans generally see of each other is little more than outer shells that are made out of sequenced linguistic patterns. They generally find that completely sufficient.

(All things considered, you may be right to be suspicious of me.)
iOS doesn’t support email encryption. My provider(mailbox.org) offers an option to automatically encrypt all incoming email.
Money. It’s advertising if mony or anything equivalent flows in any form, even after the act.

Many countries have laws against corruption that are structured like that.
Theoretically: yes.

Realistically: no, you can’t stop big companies from advertising. Just having multiple shops bearing your logo gives you a level of brand recognition that’s hard to beat. Even if no one advertised, they’d still find ways to dominate the conversation and outshine competitors through sheer presence. You’re right that it becomes a kind of arms race, but in practice, trying to "opt out" often means falling behind.
Not if the stuff we do buy is worse for the environment. I just bought an EV, I’m worse off financially for it, but I could afford it. If I was worried about a recession I wouldn’t have splurged like that. Same with installing a heat pump and reinsulating my attic.
> I thought Ford was caught doing cute things to avoid the chicken tax by converting vans to trucks

Regulators don't take kindly to those kinds of shenanigans.

Ford had to pay $365M in fines [0] for that stunt (which is around 6% of their yearly net income - painful in a low margins industry like car manufacturing).

Volkswagen tried something similar in India as well and now needs to pay $2.5-3 Billion (17% of their year net income) as a result.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-p...
So, if no one competed to get ahead of competitors, by making better or cheaper products and to grab the available marketshare, we would just have better and cheaper products without it? Sounds flawed to me.
I am just wondering did you have this all somehow saved up or did you pull it out of somewhere? Amazing list of things. Thank You.
Someone else made the point that ads cost money, so this isn't about free speech. I guess making advertising free would be the same as banning it since it exists to be sold.
Ha ha, so your answer is, everything that advertising pays for, which is like 99% of the internet usage today, would go away.
> It's speech for sure.

Good point. It’s specifically paid speech that’s the problem.
Give me! I want. Take my money.
I disagree, one component of advertising is discovering things you didn’t even know existed. Having to actively look stuff like that up would be much harder.
> So at this point it does not matter what you believe about LLMs: in general, to trust LeCun words is not a good idea.

One does not follow from the other. In particular I don't "trust" anyone who is trying to make money off this technology. There is way more marketing than honest science happening here.

> and o3 did huge progresses on ARC,

It also cost huge money. The cost increase to go from 75% to 85% was two orders of magnitude greater. This cost scaling is not sustainable. It also only showed progress on ARC1, which it was trained for, and did terribly on ARC2 which it was not trained for.

> Btw, other researchers that were in the LeCun side, changed side recently,

Which "side" researchers are on is the least useful piece of information available.
People market themselves when they put on makeup. Should makeup be banned too?
Caesar cypher +7

Zv tf buklyzahukpun, ha slhza pu QZ dolyl P't mhtpsphy, pz aoha pa dvbsk il. Ylhzvu ilpun pz aoha Zla jhu lzzluaphssf il hu Hyyhf, dopjo pz h mbujavy:
jvuza zlaThw = (zla) => (mu) => uld Zla(zla.rlfz().thw(mu))

Mvy vaoly shunbhnlz, P'k nblzz aopz klwlukz vu pm fvb jhu palyhal vu paz lsltluaz.
>Roomba is exactly what happens when you make a good product, get a good lead and then fill the company with MBAs and think you'll coast along on name alone instead of innovations.

Same with the big German car brands. They put MBAs at the helm in the 90's who outsourced all their tech innovation development to suppliers to lower costs thinking their history, prestige and brand names alone will carry them into the future, and now the Chinese are out-innovating them.

Similar with Intel. When you reach that point it's often too late to turn it round as you're now a sclerotic bloated organization, full off people who coasted and failed upwards for decades and made sure to hire other people just like them.
> That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents.

That's a bit of a strawman argument.

> ...Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything.

I agree - some reform is necessary. The current system often exacerbates the imbalance, but completely dismissing advertising ignores its potential role in leveling the playing field for smaller players when done responsibly.
A lot of corporate environment is perception manipulation. I feel it borrows a lot from the general public perception manipulation that companies and governments do which is through ads and media. There needs to be a better way to go about these things as it affects everything. Skills are less values these days, at least in Big tech, compared to perception manipulation.
Says the person paying a provider to get their voice out there to make themselves look better or influence the world.
In the communications industry there are SOME fairly bright definitions:

- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content

- Public relations is when an entity, without paying, causes another entity to transmit content

- Public affairs is when an entity causes a governmental entity to consume specific content at minimum, up to possibly influencing decisions. It should go without saying that this is without paying as well, otherwise it's corruption/bribery
Without advertising you won't have search, because that's how search engines are funded. And you'll also lose pretty much all of the online options for word-of-mouth, too.
I don't think it's a zero sum game. Some degree of advertising will make a product more discoverable regardless of whether competitors advertise or not.
Ad business stopped to be necessary and started to be almost exclusively evil years ago. If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you, something is clearly wrong. 100 years ago ads were indeed ways of discovering products and services. But now ads are almost exclusively battlefields for more and more money paid for by consumers’ anxiety, wellbeing and health when ads are more and more dishonest and hostile.
Claude often gets the face colors wrong on Rubik's Cubes.
Gemini makes errors when implementing or using the Kociemba algorithm
"Congress shall MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

What part of that are you confused by? You are making a brash claim that the writ of the state includes the ability to censor speech.

Your right to free speech is not granted by anyone. It's your natural right. It's not possible to separate this right from a human with a law.
This is great. You should add an og:image / social image using one of the interactive bits to help with sharing on other platforms / discord etc!
It is weird that HN isn't talking about tariffs at all - since this is probably the biggest economic mixup since COVID.
An Interview with Aeneas Rekkas, CTO of Ory
Think for a moment about what kind of horrible totalitarian system you'd need to be living in for it to be able to jail a waiter just for making a product recommendation. Given the current US administration, how could anyone in their right mind think it's a good idea to give the government that kind of power?
Obsolete by price. This technology only scales linearly. All the investment in it had a different growth expectation. I suspect this level of investment will eventually collapse.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. “Make illegal the parts of the economy I see and I don’t like, but not the parts of the economy that belong to the same category but I simply do not see” is just one of many flaws of low effort insight blogs.
I'm not convinced modern advertising qualifies as free speech. It's often manipulative, used by bad faith actors, used for tracking, slows websites down, is obtrusive, disrupts concentration, etc.
The article has 1.5% per decade and that's over the past 2 decades, which could be accounted for by the measuring point, especially with an 11 year solar cycle.
Then your company would be beholden to the Yelp's of the world. Pay up or have your listing removed.
The Llama 4 herd
Russia actually did do that recently though right? "What stands on Russian soil is owned by Russia"
And the US still trades with them, and seems to really want a closer relationship.
It is about taste. I still like german car brands. They learn with each iteration. Even the volume knobs returned. Materials are nice. But for sure the other brands are more gimmicky.
Fun experiment, try and benchmark a simple file download on a simple web server using rocket.rs (which also uses tokio and hyper, and has a built in fileserver type, so just a few lines of code) and compare it to a vanilla nginx config.

Here’s the rocket.rs source I used:

#[rocket::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), rocket::Error> {
rocket::build()
.mount("/", rocket::fs::FileServer::from("/tmp/test"))
.ignite()
.await?
.launch()
.await?;
Ok(())
}

And do `mkdir /tmp/test && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/test/bigfile bs=1G count1` to create a 1G file, and run `time curl -o /dev/null localhost:8000/bigfile`.

My nginx config:

worker_processes auto;
master_process off;
pid /dev/null;

events {}

http {
sendfile on;
access_log /dev/stdout;
error_log /dev/stderr;
server {
listen 8089;
server_name localhost;
root /tmp/test;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
}

launched with `nginx -c "$(pwd)"/nginx.conf -g "daemon off;"`

The results for a 1GB file for
me on an nvme ssd, averaged over 100 runs:

nginx: 150ms
rocket: 4 seconds

Or roughly 25x slower. Release mode makes no difference.

You can definitely write slow code in rust if you’re naive about reading/writing between channels a few kilobytes at a time, which is what rocket does, vs using sendfile(2), like nginx does.

Edit: These numbers were from a few months ago... I tried it again by just pasting the above into a new project with `cargo init` and adding rocket and tokio to my deps, and it's now 2.3s in debug and 1.2s in release mode. It may have improved since a few months ago, but it's still 10x slower.
Don't ban. Educate.
I have not followed all of LeCun's past statements, but -

if the "core belief" is that the LLM architecture cannot be the way to AGI, that is more of an "educated bet", which does not get falsified when LLMs improve but still suggest their initial faults. If seeing that LLMs seem constrained in the "reactive system" as opposed to a sought "deliberative system" (or others would say "intuitive" vs "procedural" etc.) was an implicit part of the original "core belief", then it still stands in spite of other improvements.
Mathematical Foundations of Computing [pdf]
So many mythical man months incoming.
Presumably they can't have a menu either? The menu might induce you to buy something.
> the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency

(It's too late to edit now, but just for posterity's sake, I meant they were a huge personal focus of Trump's at the end of his first presidency.)
“What if we made advertising illegal?”

Many small companies would go out of business, that’s what. Yes we definitely need advertising reform, but advertising is a very important part of any business if they want to be successful. Making it illegal would cut a lot of businesses off from their potential customers. The author doesn’t seem to propose any alternative solution for this.
Discrete Mathematical Modeling [pdf]
The figures I used are grid scale installed capacity. It is 3x as expensive to create a new watt of oil electricity production.
I’m not convinced by the argument that it shouldn’t be considered free speech. What exactly we mean by a private place… I dunno, but I definitely feel like I’m “going to” content, even if it is just digitally, when I’m on a phone. So, it doesn’t feel like they are invading my privacy. It is an annoying person in public, usually protected unless they are violent.

In terms of “let’s try this surprising new change in the laws,” I’d rather see it become illegal to collect a lot of information about people. Maybe we can consider what Facebook/Google and data brokers do something like stalking.
> Brown is different, because you can only see it in the right context, otherwise it becomes orange.

But that's how it is defined, so no, it is not different.
Cool. I think low hanging fruit to add drag n drop. Some options are libraries like dnd-kit or hello-pangea/dnd.
> This is a blinkered, partisan view.

Please don't be lazy, explain what you mean. Your simple statement does not bring any value as an counter-argument.

You could add a "because..." and along with your reasoning.
99% of consumer tech would die
You can learn all that stuff by doing and looking at other people’s design, it’s a bit niche to package that up into a ln advanced language design/compiler class, everyone is making different trade offs so are focusing on different things. There also isn’t really a market for more than a few highly trained language designers and implementers, and most wind up doing different things than what they were trained for.
I can confidently say that the vast majority of this skill I have in my career came because my side projects were interesting and sufficiently hard and, here's the important one: general. There's so much specialization in our era – being able to connect dots across a wide variety of concepts, fields, and disciplines is a superpower.
It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers

Professor Legasov would be disappointed
Show HN: Convert a sprite sheet into a GIF with one click (open source)
I built a free web tool that turns sprite sheets (often used for video game character animations) into GIFs.

Upload your spritesheet image, and then use the controls to set row / column count, frame duration, and image offset margins.

The tool then converts your sprite sheet into a GIF file.

Completely free and open source (MIT license).

Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/spritesheet-to-gif

Any suggestions or feedback would be much appreciated!