MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by intellix | 2025-04-23 17:48:54+00:00
I had the HTC Vive quite a few years ago, using it a lot and constantly buying new games and experiences to try it out. It was a little annoying paying full whack for little 5-10min tech demos but was still encapsulated by it. Eventually got the wireless extension to avoid having to detangle the rope of a cable you were tethered to, but the base stations in the corner of the room were still annoying me cause you constantly had to re-calibrate it everytime someone nudged or moved them.

Left it for quite a few years and after seeing the reviews about the Quest 3, I bought that and was amazed by how simple it was to pickup and use and the fact that you didn't need a monster computer running it. You literally pick it up and get going. The Meta app store is filled with lots of VR Titles which aren't just tech demos and you can STILL hook it up to your computer and play a host of Steam games. The Quest 3 was like €500 and basically a full platform.

The Vision Pro got announced with a few improvements like higher resolution but it was an insane €3500... ok I was curious how much better it would be, since I was quite impressed by my Quest 3.

My friend had bought one, one of those people who loves to wear expensive watches and be seen in public having a lot of money. As with a lot of Apple products it's sometimes about being seen to have the latest thing and the Vision Pro was great for sitting in public, catching attention and showing people that you can afford a €3500 device.

He brings it on holiday and is passing it around the room, showing people the dinosaur tech demo and everyone is amazed at how brilliant it is. For all of those in amazement (including my friend) it was their very first experience getting into VR and I also went through the same feeling when I first got the HTC Vive.

He gives it to me and shows me the dinosaur tech demo and all I could really think was... how does this thing cost €3000 more than the Quest 3? I asked him: Where are the games? there are none. Can you hook it up to Steam? No... When the battery dies, can you swap it with another? No.

Unless I had bought my Quest 3 to compare them side-by-side I honestly could not feel that it was much better visually... the finger tracking to go through menus wasn't bad, but that was it.

I think the fact that Apple devices are generally in the thousands already: MBP can be like £3000, iPhone can be like £1k... it makes sense that they were able to sell them for the price of what they did, but for me it's just insanity.

Do they have a library of games yet? Do they have any VR Games yet? Someone said it wasn't priced for consumers and I guess that's fine, but again... why wouldn't you just buy a Quest 3 (unless you hate Facebook)?
by psalaun | 2025-04-23 17:49:11+00:00
In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children.

So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-23 17:49:26+00:00
Maybe, but the vast majority of software isn't written by, or for, software businesses. It's written by internal teams for businesses whose main product is insurance, or retail sales operations, or cabinet manufacturing, or real estate, etc.

To quote Copilot, "According to recent data, nearly 70% of top economic performers use their own software to differentiate themselves from competitors."
by minimaxir | 2025-04-23 17:49:40+00:00
OpenAI is reporting the pricing for image generation (https://openai.com/api/pricing/) very confusingly in the form of tokens, but looking at the documentation it translates the generated image dimensions and quality into tokens and the advanced pricing page does the math for you. https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing

A generated `medium` 1024x1024 is $0.04/image, which is in the same class as Imagen 3 and Flux 1.1 Pro, although who knows what a "medium" image is, or if the images that went viral from the ChatGPT UI were using `medium` or `high`. Testing from their new playground (https://platform.openai.com/playground/images), the medium images are indeed lower quality and still take 15 seconds to generate: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1915114021466017830
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-23 17:50:19+00:00
There were rumors indicating that they were working on the AVP for almost a decade before it was announced. With Apple, rumors have less to do with an imminent release and more to do with marketing, particularly to investors: such gossip placates those who are getting antsy that Apple might get left behind, especially when (as with VR) other big tech names like Facebook and Google are obviously moving to box Apple out.

If VisionOS comes back, it will be in a "Prey" or "Marathon"-like manner (or, best-scenario, A User Environment Reborn).
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-23 17:50:28+00:00
The proposed alternative doesn't sound all that much better to me. You're hand crafting a bunch of rule-based heuristics, which is fine, but you could already do that with existing e-mail clients and I did. All the LLM is adding is auto-drafting of replies, but this just gets back to the "typing isn't the bottleneck" problem. I'm still going to spend just as long reading the draft and contemplating whether I want to send it that way or change it. It's not really saving any time.

A feature that seems to me would truly be "smart" would be an e-mail client that observes my behavior over time and learns from it directly. Without me prompting or specifying rules at all, it understands and mimics my actions and starts to eventually do some of them automatically. I suspect doing that requires true online learning, though, as in the model itself changes over time, rather than just adding to a pre-built prompt injected to the front of a context window.
by phillipcarter | 2025-04-23 17:50:45+00:00
I thought this was a very thoughtful essay. One brief piece I'll pull out:

> Does this mean I always want to write my own System Prompt from scratch? No. I've been using Gmail for twenty years; Gemini should be able to write a draft prompt for me using my emails as reference examples.

This is where it'll get hard for teams who integrate AI into things. Not only is retrieval across a large set of data hard, but this also implies a level of domain expertise on how to act that a product can help users be more successful with. For example, if the product involves data analysis, what are generally good ways to actually analyze the data given the tools at hand? The end-user often doesn't know this, so there's an opportunity to empower them ... but also an opportunity to screw it up and make too many assumptions about what they actually want to do.
by holtkam2 | 2025-04-23 17:50:49+00:00
I feel like the fundamental bottleneck of software dev velocity will be human brains ability to understand the code being made. We can’t deploy code / packages / systems / apps we don’t deeply understand, no matter if those components were written in 3 weeks by a team of devs or in 3 seconds by GPT-7, we’re still responsible for it when it gets into users hands, and we’re not gonna deploy stuff that we don’t know how it works. Because at the end of the day it’s our necks on the line if something goes wrong and we’re asked to fix it. We can’t just point the finger at AI, which means we’ll always have to understand what we’re putting out there in the world, and that’s essentially what our jobs will be in the future. The one who’s accountable for the software systems put into production.
by p_ing | 2025-04-23 17:51:13+00:00
Proton relies on Linux sys APIs not available on macOS, but the Porting Toolkit is available. I've been able to "play" Noita on my M2 Air (granted the perf sucks, but that's what I get for owning an Air). This discussion hasn't been centered around kernel APIs, but rather graphics APIs (D3D/Vulkan), if you're going for that "gotcha!".

Crossover is another option, though I have no need to pay for it as I own a Windows PC/consoles.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton...
by karmakaze | 2025-04-23 17:51:47+00:00
> as i was lying in bed on a sleepless night. i realized i hadn’t learnt a new concept in weeks. i had built a few useful apps with ai, but a nagging question kept me awake - what was the point of it all if i didn’t learn a thing?

A succinct post illustrating that vibe coding is to become a cog that will be the first to be replaced by the AI you use. It's a temporary, automatable job--like entering a career in warehouse package handling with robots due sooner than later.

Code or code not, there is no Vibe coder.
by mbgerring | 2025-04-23 17:52:02+00:00
There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:

- electrify everything, including industrial processes

- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification

- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation

- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere

It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.

I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.

I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.

Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.
by IOT_Apprentice | 2025-04-23 17:52:08+00:00
Pre Cloud at eBay we managed 30k windows servers via a tool called site controller that referenced ALL servers as objects with properties of configuration state, build version and operational state.

ALL databases had their startup configuration parameters defined per instance across datacenters.

Furthermore SRE had tools to rate limit connections or restart of a database so that it was not overwhelmed by incoming connection requests. We also built tools to do fine grained definition of load balancers and what services were behind them to be able to redirect traffic on the fly and then reset to the original mappings once connectivity of the LBs was resolved.

These tools weee centralized and available to both SRE and senior system administrators.

These things evolved to new tools which accommodated a private cloud, then docker then Kubernetes. I left prior to kubernetes implementation.
by mrangle | 2025-04-23 17:52:11+00:00
Apple has its act together. Those, who are not Apple, do not in comparison. They are Big Mad that Apple does.

You don't understand the term "rent seeking". Because in this case, it's Apple's competitors that are rent seeking by utilizing the force of the government to make Apple give competitors access to its private but non-monopolistic ecosystem.

I think that Apple should call that bluff and leave the EU.

Which in turn will increase public pressure on the EU, but not as functionally as it would in a democratic system.

All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
by yilugurlu | 2025-04-23 17:52:52+00:00
I use this library in production; it has great tools and features that I couldn't find in Python, that I missed from other frameworks or languages. The only downside is that you have to figure out what is what from the code; the documentation is not good. But once you figure out the details, it's downhill from there. We use this with the Litestar framework; there are things that I hate, but in general, it works out really well. Especially, if you managed to set up your services, repositories correctly, then many things happen magically. Though I suggest anyone who'd like to "taste" these use `msgspec` as a serialisation library. We hit the wall earlier when we wanted to use Pydantic in complex schemas for serialisation, so we went back to msgspec. The downside is that msgspec misses the validation part.

Anyway, I recommend that anyone go beyond the regular SQLAlchemy. I like the syntax `account = await accounts_service.get_one_or_none(*filters, id=account_id)` a lot.
by vrosas | 2025-04-23 17:53:27+00:00
In simple terms, AI can make developers more productive, but it takes experienced engineers to get good results. Mediocre developers are still outputting mediocre code, albeit a lot faster than they used to. If you don't have the mental model to achieve what you want, and are just following what chatpgpt spits out, you're going to get torched sooner rather than later.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-23 17:53:35+00:00
As someone who used Amazon, stopped, then comes back from time to time, it's crap. You've been trained to it, it hasn't been optimized for you.

From my life, if you feel like you shouldn't but still do, you should stop/check yourself. Applies to the hard things in life, but also the easy ones like not using a store.
by mindslight | 2025-04-23 17:53:40+00:00
(baseless speculation) perhaps China Post requires a paper customs declaration on packages, whereas commercial clearance is free to keep that information electronic and present it to US Customs electronically?

FWIW my Choice packages have been showing up by consumer car courier rather than USPS.

I've got a couple of things still coming that I ordered late. They should be clearing customs before the 2nd, so hopefully I won't have to find out what actually happens!
by Lerc | 2025-04-23 17:54:14+00:00
Don't sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes count as a control group that challenge the Gruen transfer theory itself.

They do not have any intention to confuse or distract, yet the effect of causing people to linger and browse remains.

In the comments here, Amazon and AliExpress have been pointed to, but again this does not seem to be confusing by intent. There is a degree of deception by some vendors but that exists purely to get people to buy their product.

On the other hand, I have always thought that one of the primary uses of A/B testing, was to abdecate the moral responsibility of decision making. You no longer need to intend to coerce, cheat, deceive, or confuse. A/B testing let's you only intend to make money and all of the malicious descions are taken out of your hands.
by xraystyle | 2025-04-23 17:54:42+00:00
This comment really sums it up well. Literally everything with antenna design is a trade-off. You can design an antenna to radiate very well at a given wavelength. The better it is at doing this, the worse it tends to be at every other wavelength. You can make an antenna that radiates to some degree across a wide array of wavelengths, but it's not actually going to work very well across any of them.

Same thing with radiation patterns. You can make a directional antenna that has a huge amount of gain in one direction. The trade-off is that it's deaf and dumb in every other direction. (See a Yagi-Uda design, for instance.)

Physics is immutable and when it comes to antenna design there really is no such thing as free lunch. Other than coming up with some wacky shapes I don't really think AI is going to be able to create any type of "magic" antenna that's somehow a perfect isotropic radiator with a low SWR across some huge range of wavelengths.
by agentultra | 2025-04-23 17:54:51+00:00
This. This times a thousand.

Every problem I overcome is a lesson learned that enriches my life and makes me more valuable.

The results are nice but it's the journey and understanding that matter to me.

There's more value in having a team of people who understand the problem domain so deeply that they can create a computer system to automate the solution. When things go wrong, and they will, you have to have the understanding in order to confidently resolve the issue.

"But AI can do it!"

Sure.

But can you?
by i_love_retros | 2025-04-23 17:54:58+00:00
I find that even though I have to spend time understanding what the llm wrote, it's still faster and less energy sapping than if i write the code myself.

Plus I just get the LLM to write tests for it's code and I make sure the coverage is complete.

But it does make me feel uneasy still, like a dirty little cheat.
by bobthecowboy | 2025-04-23 17:55:05+00:00
FWIW, I believe DNF (as of 5?) is now written in C++.

But as a long time Linux user who always has to use a Mac at work I've been consistently floored by how painful Homebrew is to use, to the point that for my latest corp-issued MacBook I switched to home-manager and I'm not looking back.
by chasil | 2025-04-23 17:55:09+00:00
Bear in mind that Microsoft was the largest commercial UNIX vendor in licensing XENIX for the TRS-80 Model 2 alone. From this experience, they had significant knowledge of 32-bit preemptive multitasking.

That exposure allowed them to see how valuable Dave Cutler's PRISM team would be in a total redesign in melding VMS and (whatever tolerable) UNIX features into a new kernel, but focusing it upon Win32.

There were OS/2 and POSIX emulation layers also, but these were obviously second class.
by jonahx | 2025-04-23 17:55:53+00:00
> 3. Learned behavior. It's ironic how even something like ChatGPT (it has hundreds of chats with me) barely knows anything about me & I constantly need to remind it of things.

I've wondered about this. Perhaps the concern is saved data will eventually overwhelm the context window? And so you must judicious in the "background knowledge" about yourself that gets remembered, and this problem is harder than it seems?

Btw, you can ask ChatGPT to "remember this". Ime the feature feels like it doesn't always work, but don't quote me on that.
by qwerpy | 2025-04-23 17:56:08+00:00
I deeply hate this behavior. Another example: The Health app on iOS has a closeable banner for the "Health Checklist" UI, which gives me the option to turn on things like crash detection, fall detection, etc. All of which are notifications. I hate notifications so I will never turn these on. I dutifully scanned through it the first time and verified everything was turned off, and the banner went away. But like clockwork, the banner comes back every 2 weeks and asks me to go through the checklist again. I suspect there's a "right answer" here. If I consent to turn everything on, it'll stop nagging me. But this badly needs a Never button, not a X button that actually means "nag me again in 2 weeks". I get that some product manager wants their fancy watch features enabled for more users so they can get a promotion, but their career ambitions are degrading my experience.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-23 17:56:09+00:00
>The population (especially the younger generation, who never seen a different kind of technology at all) is being conditioned by the tech industry to accept that software should behave like an unreliable, manipulative human rather than a precise, predictable machine. They're learning that you can't simply tell a computer

Youtube isn't your computer. It's their computer. And the precise, predictable mechanical command they have given it is to manipulate you.
by kurthr | 2025-04-23 17:56:10+00:00
Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.

I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.
by benterris | 2025-04-23 17:56:14+00:00
I really don't get why people would want AI to write their messages for them. If I can write a concise prompt with all the required information, why not save everyone time and just send that instead ? And especially for messages to my close ones, I feel like the actual words I choose are meaningful and the process of writing them is an expression of our living interaction, and I certainly would not like to know the messages from my wife were written by an AI. On the other end of the spectrum, of course sometimes I need to be more formal, but these are usually cases where the precise wording matters, and typing the message is not the time-consuming part.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-23 17:56:14+00:00
Short-term thinking is a big problem. I'm not sure why the stock market continues to grow despite short-term thinking absolutely destroying stalwarts like Boeing, GE, Intel, et al. I suppose part of the stock market's perceived-success over the last 20 years is that short-term thinking- in the form of buybacks. I'll never forget that United Airlines ($UAL) needed that huge government bailout in 2020 when COVID hit because they had just spent ALL of their cash on stock buybacks. Actually, not to go on a tangent, the airline industry has decades and decades of proof that the U.S. government won't let them fail. United basically had the United States' blessing to blow all their cash reserves.

Another part of the equation are apps like Robinhood that have opened the floodgates and enabled the lower and middle classes to invest in the stock market (however recklessly). When you consider the stock market is just one big Ponzi scheme (the newcomers support the old-timers with fresh capital and enable them to retire) you see it as less of a "no-brainer, guaranteed road to wealth" and more of the hunting ground that it really is- where the 1% steal from the rest of us using "tools" like market volatility to scare people into selling at a loss.

Fun fact: Robinhood now offers IRAs, and allows you to TRADE OPTIONS with your IRA. This should 1000% be illegal.
by henning | 2025-04-23 17:56:16+00:00
The main use of evolutionary algorithms in machine learning currently is architecture search for neural networks. There's also work on pipeline design, finding the right way to string things together.

Neural networks already take a long time to train so throwing out gradient descent entirely for tuning weights doesn't scale great.

Genetic programming can solve classic control problems with a few instructions when they can solve it, so that's cool.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-23 17:56:25+00:00
Backup doesn't necessarily mean "in case of grid failure". A gas boiler or a simple electric boiler is a valid backup to a heat pump being inoperative, in the middle of defrost cycle, or otherwise just unable to provide enough BTU/hr into the building due to an extreme cold temperature.

Particularly in temperatures where the heat pump is at/under 2.0 COP for a few dozen hours per year, an electric boiler makes a great deal of sense. It's almost as clean as the heat pump in the extremely rare times when it's needed for supplementation due to extreme cold temps, can allow for a more suitably sized heat pump to cover the 99% of heating hours [meaning greater efficiency there], is extremely reliable due to its simplicity, is fully automatable with existing controls, doesn't require local gas supply network, and is a pretty good match for a heat pump.