MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 18:48:53+00:00
>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.

Technology hardly makes a product.

>The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer,

You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer.

>* They got loads of feedback

Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wild in the first year and ramp up for the second year to a meaningful production run but that never happened because demand fell off a cliff once the fanboys got theirs and so the feedback is very, very limited and mostly negative or untrustworthy.

>* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.

Apple scale scales. Meet or break Watch's first 2 year sales maybe? Watch, derided as a failure in the first year actually sold about ~20M units across both year 1 and year 2. Vision Pro will sell fewer than 500K units across year 1 and 2. 500K units!! One doesn't need to define success when failure is so easily defined here.

>Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.

Spectacles will be entirely different technology stacks. See the Meta Orion prototype for example. You are correct, battery is an issue. Even bigger though is heat. Can't let things get smartphone hot on your face or it's game over. Anyway, expect low-res, narrow field of view, 2D overlays, more like your car's HUD than the immersive experience of goggles. But at least spectacles have a chance where goggles clearly do not, as demonstrated at both the high end and low end by Apple and Meta.
by 13years | 2025-04-23 18:48:59+00:00
> or how we would measure meaningful progress in this direction.

"First, we should measure is the ratio of capability against the quantity of data and training effort. Capability rising while data and training effort are falling would be the interesting signal that we are making progress without simply brute-forcing the result.

The second signal for intelligence would be no modal collapse in a closed system. It is known that LLMs will suffer from model collapse in a closed system where they train on their own data."
by bruce511 | 2025-04-23 18:49:08+00:00
>> It depends on where you took computer science.

Well, yeah. That's true for any field of study. Every college has strengths and weaknesses- its the opposite of a franchise.

>> I took a few foundational classes at community college.

A few foundational classes is somewhat different to classes you take in prep for a major. I did a foundational class in astronomy, designed for students who were just looking for an introduction. It was very different to my comp Sci classes in tone and style.

Yes there was some math involved, but not much in the comp science classes. Math was a pre-requisite though so we got our math in, well, math.
by ryansolid | 2025-04-23 18:49:34+00:00
To be fair by that metric Vue has the fastest now with its core built with Alien Signals. Raw reactivity benchmarks don't actually show very much because these systems are so fast that the quickest to the slowest reactive library doesn't even make a dent on a test that says render the DOM. And I say this as a benchmark enthusiast (and as that benchmark actually was crated by Milo from the SolidJS core team as part of our 2.0 research)
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-04-23 18:49:39+00:00
This happens whenever something hits the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle. The same thing happened in the social network era (one could even say that the beloved Google Plus was just this for Google), the same thing happened in the mobile app era (Twitter was all about sending messages using SMS lol), and of course it happened during Blockchain as well. The question is whether durable product offerings emerge or whether these products are the throwaway me-too horseless carriages of the AI era.

Meta is a behemoth. Google Plus, a footnote. The goal is to be Meta here and not Google Plus.
by fennecbutt | 2025-04-23 18:49:53+00:00
Lmao re modern media: every script that human 'writers' produce is now the same old copy paste slop with the exact same tropes.

It's very rare to see something that isn't completely derivative. Even though I enjoyed Flow immensely, it's just homeward bound with no dialogue. Why do we pretend like humans are magical creativity machines when we're clearly machines ourselves.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-23 18:50:53+00:00
One of the things I love about RSS and its clients is that I can walk away from my computer for a month, and then catch up (or not! I can mark feeds, folders, or the whole thing as read!) on what I've missed, whether it's from someone posting something once an hour, or something once a year, as the author suggests.

But with Spring 83, I leave a board, and may come back to a totally different board, knowing nothing of the context of how it got to where it is now. It's the equivalent of AIM status messages!

That's probably a feature in some people's minds, which is fine, but it's definitely not a feature for me.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 18:51:26+00:00
The biggest thing restraining it is the ergonomics and form factor. No one wants face PCs. Imagine how women, who are half the population, and who spend 0.5T dollars a year on hair and makeup products, are going to deal with smashing a 1.5 pound PC into their faces and held in place with straps around their head and hair. SJ would have smothered that thing in the crib the second his team had no answer for how a product that excludes half the population at the get go could possibly be successful. Can you imagine iPhone shipping in a form factor that required women redo their hair and makeup after every single use?
by ryansolid | 2025-04-23 18:51:32+00:00
Thank you for correcting this. I was going to come and respond when I saw this earlier but hadn't had a chance. Yes the annoying part is not being able to destructure but you definitely don't have to (and it isn't our recommendation) to pass accessor functions down as props. I wrote an article on our perspective here: https://dev.to/this-is-learning/thinking-locally-with-signal...
by yesfitz | 2025-04-23 18:52:12+00:00
Is Leexi's AI note-taker able to raise its hand in a meeting (or otherwise interrupt) and ask for clarification?

As a human note-taker, I find the most impactful result of real-time synthesis is the ability to identify and address conflicting information in the moment. That ability is reliant on domain knowledge and knowledge of the meeting attendees.

But if the AI could participate in the meeting in real time like I can, it'd be a huge difference.
by ipsento606 | 2025-04-23 18:52:15+00:00
> This stack gives me full control: no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in, > and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies.

I'm not trying to dunk on the author, but this sentiment encapsulates a tremendous paradigm shift in the meaning of "full control", compared to say:

* Writing in obsidian

* Syncing files via git

* Publishing via nginx hosted on the cheapest possible vps (with https via let's encrypt)

Running a static blog is one of the easiest scenarios to self-host, because even if you get slashdotted, nginx should be able to handle all the requests even if you're host it on a potato

It's not free, but you can get a VPS for $20-$30 a year.

This isn't the best fit for everyone, but it seems weird to talk about "full control" and "no risk of platforms disappearing" when you're relying on the free tier of two external companies
by hemant6488 | 2025-04-23 18:52:16+00:00
My wife was frustrated waiting for Testflight access to the original Audiobookshelf app, so I built SoundLeaf as an alternative. Started as a weekend project but evolved into something we both genuinely love using. It respects the self hosted spirit and privacy with zero tracking. Happy to answer any questions about implementation details or challenges connecting to the Audiobookshelf server API.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-04-23 18:52:26+00:00
Apple's "This video conferencing app just disabled reactions!!!!" notification is just the worst. Every video chat, every app, every time. Ugh!

I even like Apple's reactions implementation, which is pretty good, but there's definitely some PM that wants to push it in my face 10 times every day and I don't know what's worse, the PM doing this fully understanding the cost or whatever system stands aside and lets them continue.
by closewith | 2025-04-23 18:52:36+00:00
> I think you see this play out in Ireland, actually: there seems to be more of an interest in the Irish language in Northern Ireland, where the Irish identify is seen as more under threat, than in the Republic, where it is safe.

You have this backwards. Ireland, both Ireland and Northern Ireland, have pockets of interest in the language and culture, but it really is true that the country, culture, and language that was Ireland pre-famine no longer exists. It was successfully and deliberately eradicated.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-23 18:53:08+00:00
I would add: code defensively. Initialize your variables (either to a sensible value, or an outrageously wrong value) before passing pointers to them, even when you "know" that the value will be overwritten. Check for errors. Always consider what happens when things go wrong, not just when things go right. Any time you find yourself thinking, "condition X is guaranteed to hold, so I don't need to check for it" consider checking it anyway just in case you're wrong about that, or it changes later.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-23 18:53:11+00:00
"They're having a major drought. Hey, here's an idea: Let's go invade them, when there's no food for us to take!"

But if you mean it as a conquest instead of a resource raid, then maybe it makes sense, because you don't expect the drought will last forever. So invade while they're weak and disorganized, and then try to hold it after the rain comes back.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-23 18:53:15+00:00
That is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in.

On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-23 18:53:16+00:00
> Or to take another example where I've seen people excited about video-generation and thinking they will be using that for creating their own movies and video games. But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself

This seems like the real agenda/end game of where this kind of AI is meant to go. The people pushing it and making the most money from it disdain the artistic process and artistic expression because it is not, by default, everywhere, corporate friendly. An artist might get an idea that society is not fair to everyone - we can't have THAT!

The people pushing this / making the most money off of it feel that by making art and creation a commodity and owning the tools that permit such expression that they can exert force on making sure it stays within the bounds of what they (either personally or as a corporation) feel is acceptable to both the bottom line and their future business interests.
by kristopolous | 2025-04-23 18:53:56+00:00
I guess. Successful executions become so endemic you have to take a step back and recognize it.

Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix.

Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie.

Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well.

So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-23 18:53:58+00:00
In the arguably-unique case of Apple Silicon, I'm not sure about that. The SoC-integrated GPU and unified RAM ends up being extremely good for running LLM's locally and at low energy cost.

Of course, there's the upfront cost of Apple hardware... and the lack of server hardware per se... and Apple's seeming jekyll/hyde treatment of any use-case of their GPU's that doesn't involve their own direct business...
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 18:54:14+00:00
That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product that couldn't be called a success in any way beyond a great prototype and some excellent demoware. It's a flop and a joke.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-23 18:55:11+00:00
> since much of cap ex is deductible

Since when?

Last I checked, capex was not deductible. You can deduct depreciation of assets over time, but that's not going to offset profit to create a loss unless you're spending far more money than you profited (by say, taking out loans).

There is the expiring bonus depreciation provision on a limited limited class of assets which would let you create a loss, but even that's subject to recapture if you sell those assets.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-04-23 18:55:11+00:00
When I was a founding engineer at a(n ill-fated) startup, we used an AI product to transcribe and summarize enterprise sales calls. As a dev it was usually a waste of my time to attend most sales meetings, but it was highly illustrative to read the summaries after the fact. In fact many, many of the features we built were based on these action items.

If you're at the scale where you have corporate intranet, like Confluence, then yeah AI note summarizing will feel redundant because you probably have the headcount to transcribe important meetings (e.g. you have a large enough enterprise sales staff that part of their job description is to transcribe notes from meetings rather than a small staff stretched thin because you're on vanishing runway at a small startup.) Then the natural next question arises: do you really need that headcount?
by labrador | 2025-04-23 18:55:20+00:00
Thankfully, there's one in Norway still operating. Maybe its not Musk but one of the DOGE youngsters who don't know anything despite their supposed high IQ. It's malpractice.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

https://www.croptrust.org/what-we-do/programs/svalbard-globa...
by johnmaguire | 2025-04-23 18:55:45+00:00
I think the document you really want to look at is this one, which is the actual regulation the DMA is operating under: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/1925/oj/eng

That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.

When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
by echelon | 2025-04-23 18:55:47+00:00
> > Seems like many, if not all, AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0.

> Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.

I'm over here in "diffusion / generative video" corner scratching my head at all the LLM people making weird things that don't quite have use cases.

We're making movies. Already the AI does things that used to cost too much or take too much time. We can make one minute videos of scale, scope, and consistency in just a few hours. We're in pretty much the sweet spot of the application of this tech. This essay doesn't even apply to us. In fact, it feels otherworldly alien to our experience.

Some stuff we've been making with gen AI to show you that I'm not bullshitting:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x7IZkHiGD8

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FkKf7sECk4

Diffusion world is magical and the AI over here feels like we've been catapulted 100 years into the future. It's literally earth shattering and none of the industry will remain the same. We're going to have mocap and lipsync, where anybody can act as a fantasy warrior, a space alien, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Literally whatever you can dream up. It's as if improv theater became real and super high definition.

But maybe the reason for the stark contrast with LLMs in B2B applications is that we're taking the outputs and integrating them into things we'd be doing ordinarily. The outputs are extremely suitable as a drop-in to what we already do. I hope there's something from what we do that can be learned from the LLM side, but perhaps the problems we have are just so wholly different that the office domain needs entirely reinvented tools.

Naively, I'd imagine an AI powerpoint generator or an AI "design doc with figures" generator would be so much more useful than an email draft tool. And those are incremental adds that save a tremendous amount of time.

But anyway, sorry about the "horseless carriages". It feels like we're on a rocket ship on our end and I don't understand the public "AI fatigue" because every week something new or revolutionary happens. Hope the LLM side gets something soon to mimic what we've got going. I don't see the advancements to the visual arts stopping anytime soon. We're really only just getting started.
by macintosh-hd | 2025-04-23 18:56:17+00:00
There is nothing going on here but embracing. When Microsoft did it, they forked a project and added their own features to their private fork, intending to replace the original. Apple is directly contributing code to the source project here.

Even if Apple was somehow harming and attempting to subsume Godot in this situation, what would the end game be? What would managing a game engine descended from Godot do for them?
by bruce511 | 2025-04-23 18:56:34+00:00
Yeah, I'm more in this camp too. We did a lot of practical modules, things like OS development, databases and so on. So yeah, learning programming was the first couple months, then programming becomes the tool to express progress in knowledge depth.

It's probably fair to say that although we learned some history, we had the privilege of learning at a time the field was exploding. That history you learned, I lived and worked through that. It's somewhat surreal to realize that my career is your history class.

As mentioned above though, it'll vary a lot from one school to another.
by Arcanum-XIII | 2025-04-23 18:56:57+00:00
Well, for me it’s not enough because I need to get back to where I was, repeating the same actions so it gets to the same state. With live dev I don’t need this, or a history replay method. I only update the running code. Heck I could also update the in memory var too if so I want.

It’s good that it’s fast. Still no good enough!
by ZeroTalent | 2025-04-23 18:57:29+00:00
No, they actually have the files pane on the left, live preview mid-top, terminal errors mid-bottom, and the agent on the right. no looking at code.

Cursor has a "yolo mode" where you don't have to click accept for tooling even for system commands and people whitelist commands like sudo, su, and rf :))) I wish I was kidding.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-23 18:57:38+00:00
> Anne Ollila, chairwoman of the Reindeer Herders Association

These seem to be either domesticated or herded on certain territories by natives. So spray painting a herd may not be as hard as it sounds.

From https://reindeerherding.org/world-reindeer-herders

> The Association of World Reindeer Herders is a voluntary civil society organization for all the 24 different nomadic indigenous peoples who make a living from reindeer herding across 10 nation-states in the circumpolar north, formally founded during the 1st World Congress of Reindeer Herders in 1997.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-23 18:57:58+00:00
I've never heard of a functional language that would allow you to initialize a value to whatever value the system memory already had in that memory location. In languages that allow nil, it would at least be nil; in languages that don't, you would have gotten an error about an uninitialized and undefaulted value. In any typed language, you would have also gotten an error.

It's true that C may be unique-ish in this regard though- this bug also couldn't happen in Ruby, which is not a functional language, but Ruby certainly still makes undefined behaviors much more possible than in other languages like Elixir.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 18:58:06+00:00
Cook took all of the top Vision Pro talent and put them to work on Siri. Those who didn't go are either working on the spectacles (no relationship at all to the tech in the goggles) or they're working to clear out the pipleline of goggles work that's already close to finished that they can deploy along with a new model that uses mostly the same components as the first which lets them make their supply chain whole after they ended production well short of what they promised their component makers. Rather than leave their supply chain high and dry and their developers disappointed with early cancellation, they'll make one more go of it to buy themselves the time to progress on spectacles (again, totally unrelated tech) so Cook can claim that goggles evolved into spectacles rather than admit that goggles bombed and they're retrenching around spectacles and that entirely different tech stack and approach, for which zero of the goggles investment by Apple or 3rd party developers will transfer.
by isoprophlex | 2025-04-23 18:58:20+00:00
Makes you wonder if there is a place in the pipeline for generating G-code (motion commands that run CNC mills, 3d printers etc.)

Being just a domestic 3d printer enthousiast I have no idea what the real world issues are in manufacting with CNC mills; i'd personally enjoy an AI telling me which of the 1000 possible combinations of line width, infill %, temperatures, speeds, wall generation params etc. to use for a given print.
by lolinder | 2025-04-23 18:58:32+00:00
The point is that because of the way they structured their blog it would be trivial to do exactly this if they ever needed to. There's no complicated export from a locked in application, you just move your blog files from one host to another (maybe to your own VPS).

The overhead of switching from Cloudflare to a VPS if they needed to is really not that much larger than switching from one VPS to another, so they likely figured it wasn't worth paying $30/yr to own the whole stack, as long as they architected it such that they could own the whole stack if they needed to.
by kmac_ | 2025-04-23 18:59:19+00:00
I started with Repomix as an MCP server plus system prompt to reduce the scope to single packages. However, it still consumed too many tokens (and polluted the context with useless information). I used Gemini, context size wasn't an issue, but it was too expensive. Now I just use Cursor, it has built-in indexing with embeddings (I assume).