MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-04-24 03:40:53+00:00
There's a mindset change needed to use a feature tree based constructive solid geometry system. The order in which you do things is implicit in the feature tree. Once you get this, it's not too hard. But figuring out where to start can be tough.

I miss the TechShop days, from when the CEO of Autodesk liked the maker movement and supplied TechShop with full Autodesk Inventor. I learned to use it and liked it. You can still get Fusion 360, but it's not as good.

The problem with free CAD systems is that they suffer from the classic open source disease - a terrible user interface. Often this is patched by making the interface scriptable or programmable or themeable, which doesn't help. 3D UI is really, really hard. You need to be able to do things such as change the viewpoint and zoom without losing the current selection set, using nothing but a mouse.

(Inventor is overkill for most people. You get warnings such as "The two gears do not have a relatively prime number of teeth, which may cause uneven wear.")
by vivzkestrel | 2025-04-24 03:42:45+00:00
its like 70 kms away from all the nearest towns etc. I would actually be able to travel to such offbeat places if it werent for 2 issues 1) i have to take a piss every 2 hrs at the least and 2) i need about 3 liters of water to clean myself with soap everytime I go to the washroom. Havent figured out yet how to work around these limitations
by interstice | 2025-04-24 03:42:49+00:00
I have noticed that AI are optimising for general case / flashy demo / easy to implement features at the moment. This sucks, because as the article notes what we really want AI to do is automate drudgery, not replace the few remaining human connections in an increasingly technological world. Categorise my emails. Review my code. Reconcile my invoices. Do my laundry. Please stop focusing on replacing the things I actually enjoy about my job.
by scripturial | 2025-04-24 03:43:35+00:00
I suspect it is probably right that they would find it more profitable to sell 100 copies for $10 than 1 copy for $1000. But I do wonder, it could be that the occasional $10,000 sale to a large company pays more in the long run for less hassle. It’s hard to know. Do any creative agencies release their sales information?

I’d say there should at least be a small niece for a company to profit off the back of less expensive more reasonably licensed font sales. I don’t know how many lawyers a small company would need to do this though. Would they be sued by Adobe (either for fonts that look similar, or with pointless lawsuits just to wear them out?)
by DaSHacka | 2025-04-24 03:44:07+00:00
You misunderstand, open source is bad actually, when the heckin cheeto man is the one doing it.

Just as its only worth complaining about geriatric geezers in office until the cheeto man brings in young hackers, then the problem is that "the old impaired people were good, actually".

Don't observe. Don't think. Merely repeat the approved message.

> The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
by jessfraz | 2025-04-24 03:44:21+00:00
Zoo co-founder here. Our product is still pre-v1. But getting to v1 very soon. We actually built a whole new CAD kernel from the ground up. I say this because we can't actually train on models the CAD engine does not yet support. Just 2 weeks ago we shipped csg boolean operations to the CAD engine. This unlocked new data to train our model on that use those operations. So its actually fair to say at the time he used our model we using about 2% of the data we actually have. Once we can use more and more the ability of the model will only get better.
by dangus | 2025-04-24 03:44:37+00:00
I think this whole thread is besides the point anyway.

VisionOS doesn't support VR gaming at a basic controller level. All it can do is the same traditional console controllers that other Apple devices support (PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, etc).

Metal vs. DirectX vs. Vulkan isn't the problem, the basic input devices and lack of interoperability with other non-graphics VR tooling/SDKs are the problem.

I know that Apple doesn't see it as a gaming device and mostly sucks at interfacing with the non-mobile gaming sphere, but if they had come out of the gate with messaging that was more like "We have built-in support for popular VR controllers, game developers can just do XYZ simple thing to port their games to VisionOS," they would have had some immediate momentum to help bolster the other select few things the device excels at.

But as it stands, nobody can make any of the kinds of abstractions you are referring to because the hardware is not capable of using the basic input devices that VR games depend on. Full stop.

Instead, prospective buyers are almost certainly comparing the Vision Pro with devices like the Meta Quest Pro and thinking "well, the Apple thing does some Apple stuff that nothing else can do, but I can't even play any occasional VR games on my Vision Pro and it's literally the most expensive headset money can buy."

The truth of the matter is that a Quest 3 can do pass-through vision, VR web content, and web browsing along with a decent selection of non-gaming apps at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Vision Pro and you don't even lose all that much due to it being less premium and advanced.

Even if we are comparing against a hypothetical $999 future Vision device where the external battery is gone and it weighs less it still doesn't compare all that well in that context. An analogy would be like if the iPhone wasn't allowed to make video calls and Android was. Maybe I don't use video calling every day but I can't justify buying a phone that doesn't have a feature like that as a concept.

IMO Apple thinks that controlling the device with just the hands and no controllers is the future. They feel like they have the iPhone all over again and that all the competitors using the metaphorical stylus and built-in keyboard are wrong. But as we found out with the iPad, sometimes a specialized input device (Apple Pencil) does serve a specific subset of customers very well to the point where it's considered a basic necessity.
by Falimonda | 2025-04-24 03:44:54+00:00
As just one example, SaaS businesses are beginning to use this to reduce the barrier to entry for their users, which is always the first step to the ultimate goal: a programmatic integration.

This is especially true for conventional SaaS that historically required one or more developers to read and internalize documentation for a service's API in order to make any use of it.

What are the odds that this developer fully understands how to squeeze every bit of value of out this expensive SaaS product, for which the company is paying monthly/yearly?

What if that developer jumps ship? Or the provider releases a major version bump with a significantly different API, but features that the business absolutely needs to integrate in order to stay ahead?

As much as it might seem hyped up at the moment, MPC and agent-based tool calling paired with CoT can and will make things orders of magnitude more efficient.

No business in its right mind will accept anything less than the total integration of MCP and agents across their entire stack by the end of this year.
by godelski | 2025-04-24 03:45:20+00:00
I'd say it's wrong in both cases, but we shouldn't ignore degrees of wrongness.

Copy pasting from stack overflow without attribution is wrong but it's also harder to claim "ownership" over single lines or small snippets. It depends how "obvious" they are. You definitely can't copyright trivial functions. There's a lot of gray here but yes attribution is always good.

But things get a lot less murky when we're talking about forking a project. That's usually nontrivial and non obvious. I think what's most important is that removing a license is an active decision. Certainly that would make a critical difference in a court [0]

Then there's further escalation by who is doing the action. The more power and influence you have the greater responsibilities. All men are not created equal. Men with more power can disproportionally do more damage and require higher accountability. So yeah, I care a fuck ton more about a government employee doing something bad especially while performing official duties more than some rando. The ability to do harm is very different.

The reason I dislike your comment is because it's dismissive of the action. "Other people do it!" Is not a defense nor excuse. It is even worse by ignoring multiple points of context.

[0] though protecting open source has been traditionally hard for many reasons. Specifically it's hard for small developers to take legal action, especially against larger bodies. But isn't this something we should want to be fixed? Credit for our own contributions?!
by pkhuong | 2025-04-24 03:45:38+00:00
It's classic Lin Kernighan (http://webhotel4.ruc.dk/~keld/research/LKH/) for the primal heuristic, and optimality proof by Concorde for cutting plane generation and branching (https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/book/index.html, or https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/computation.html for details specific to this instance), with CPLEX as the underlying LP solver.
by Animats | 2025-04-24 03:46:13+00:00
> I recall concerns from Boeing engineers when they switched to carbon fiber fuselages, that a strike would be far more serious than before, with Aluminum fuselages.

It's a serious problem for carbon-fiber wind turbine blades. Fiberglas is an insulator, and doesn't have lighting problems. Aluminum is a good conductor, and doesn't have lighting problems as long as there's a good a path to ground through the hub. But carbon fiber is a resistor, so conducting a lightning strike generates heat. Some copper or aluminum wire has to go into the turbine blades to bypass this.
by inasio | 2025-04-24 03:46:35+00:00
Proof in this case is that the upper bound and the lower bound of the solver converged. This is not like a SAT solver where the solution itself can be trivially evaluated to verify the solution, it requires trusting that the solver does what it's supposed to be doing, similar to what happens when you solve a MILP with Gurobi or CPLEX.
by oofManBang | 2025-04-24 03:47:02+00:00
Would technology that allows sealing of beer not apply even better to relatively nutrition-less water? Especially boiled water. Anything that can feed off of pottery + water or metal + water or glass + water is gonna take a lot longer to grow than basically any kind of familiar bacteria feeding off beer + any of the above.

> There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course

I imagine these are largely the same reasons people drink beer today. Spoiler: it generally ain't hydration or avoidance of disease.
by mediaman | 2025-04-24 03:48:11+00:00
The problem is that this isn't very useful except for the very earliest ideation stages of industrial design, which hardly need CAD anyway.

Most parts need to fit with something else, usually some set of components. Then there are considerations around draft, moldability, size of core pins, sliders, direction of ejection, wall thickness, coring out, radii, ribs for stiffness, tolerances...

LLMs seem far off from being the right answer here. There is, however, lots to make more efficient. Maybe you could tokenize breps in some useful way and see if transformers could become competent speaking in brep tokens? It's hand-wavy but maybe there's something there.

Mechanical engineers do not try to explain models to each other in English. They gather around Solidworks or send pictures to each other. It is incredibly hard to explain a model in English, and I don't see how a traditional LLM would be any better.
by sfpotter | 2025-04-24 03:48:13+00:00
D is really, really good. I hope it gets more love soon. D's focus on just getting shit done, lightning builds, QOL improvements all over the place, actually good modules, templates and metaprogramming that work, simpler more regular syntax, any memory management paradigm you want, being fully batteries included, being super easy to cross compile, being able to span all the way from Python/C# slop all the way down to tight-as-you-like C code... It's an amazing language and is getting better all the time. A real C++ successor. It has become my secret weapon! Maybe I actually don't want it to blow up soon, since it gives me a huge edge on anyone stuck with C++, which gets worse every release (how slow do builds have to get before people lose it completely?).
by coldbrewed | 2025-04-24 03:50:45+00:00
Coldbrew's law states that if an article is written in praise of AI and abstrusely written, then it's probably AI slop, written by someone who holds their own ideas in high enough regard to publish but holds their audience in low enough regard that they won't bother to edit it.

Edit: there it is. `vibe-coded and deployed with Claude Code`
by bradlys | 2025-04-24 03:51:28+00:00
I didn't think Aella of all people would put out a bounty. She must be looking for a wealthy man. As another commenter here said, it's two circles as far as the overlap goes for what she seems to seek - which I think is pointed out by how all the men she does know that meet her criteria are incompatible on some other fundamental level with her. (Not uber rich, not poly, not available)

What's funny to me about seeing the bounty at the end was that I had a similar bounty to friends and peers. I offered $50k then $100k then $250k then $500k... Eventually I started asking people, "I don't want to seem ridiculous here but guys... even at $500k none of you have even attempted. Do I really say $1m to get a single introduction?" I stopped even bringing up the bounty a long time ago. The more I told people of what I'd offer and their immediate refusal to even try to introduce me to anyone solidified just how much all the people I have in my circle thought I was destined to be alone due to my lack of physical attractiveness. They would mention they knew no one or that everyone they knew would not find me attractive in the slightest and it was futile for them to even bother anyone.

In all that time, only one gay man I had only talked to a handful of times set me up on two blind dates and I didn't ever prompt him about anything. Just told him I had been in NYC for a couple years and still had never been on a single date. The women who showed up didn't know what I looked like and neither did I for those women. I was just given two phone numbers and a couple names - so I arranged the dates and they showed up. Of course, it was a complete failure. The women saw me on first sight and were like, "Well, I guess this is what I get for trusting a gay man's sense of taste..."

I hope I never have to write a substack to find a partner. I want to completely forget these miserable years of being single and have a loving family to make it all fade away.
by shark_laser | 2025-04-24 03:52:14+00:00
I love Robin Sloan, but why not just build this on Nostr?

It can do everything required here and more, and you get immediate community support, and therefore increased adoption, a broad existing list of compatible clients (depending on event kind) and immediate ability to give back real value to those who provided you with content you found valuable.

His objection to Mastodon is that it is a "timeline" but he doesn't even mention Nostr. There are Libraries, App Stores, Podcasting Apps, Job Boards, Live Streaming services and more built on Nostr. It can be whatever you want it to be.
by outside1234 | 2025-04-24 03:53:13+00:00
I got so annoyed with the “trying to be smart” writing that I summarized it with ChatGPT.

The article “The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution” from Aethn delves into the transformative impact of advanced AI models on the global socio-economic landscape.

The author critiques the belief in a static “end of history,” suggesting that recent advancements in AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), are catalyzing a profound shift in how work and economic structures function. These AI models have evolved beyond previous limitations, enabling automation of tasks across various knowledge-based professions without extensive fine-tuning.

This technological leap is diminishing the traditional value of wages, as individuals can now leverage AI to perform tasks that previously required entire teams. Consequently, there’s a growing trend toward self-employment and entrepreneurial ventures, echoing the ideals of 19th-century thinker Lysander Spooner, who advocated for a society where individuals operate independently of wage-based systems.

The article posits that this “Spooner Revolution” will lead to a surge in small enterprises, a decline in traditional corporate structures, and a reevaluation of educational and economic institutions to accommodate this new paradigm.
by minraws | 2025-04-24 03:54:54+00:00
LLMs aren't as good as average humans, most software folks like us like to believe rest of the world is dumb but it isn't.

My grand-dad who only ever farmed land and had no education at all could talk, calculate, and manage his farm land. Was he not as good as me at anything academic yes. But

I will never be as good at him at understanding how to farm stuff.

Most people in who think LLMs are smart seem to conflate ignorance/lack of knowledge to being dumb.

This is a rather reductive take, and no I don't believe that's how human intelligence works.

Your dumb uncle on thanks giving who might even have a lot of bad traits isn't dumb likely just ignorant. All human IQ studies and movies have distorted our perception of intelligence.

A more intelligent person doesn't necessarily need to have more or better quality knowledge.

Or measuring them with academic abilities like writing and maths is the dumber/irresponsible take.

And yes please feel free to call me dumb in response.
by MrLeap | 2025-04-24 03:55:05+00:00
Reminds me of something from like 2007ish(?)~ called (fluxus). It was a lisp text editor with a render target in the background and some nice standard library for making 3d objects appear or sfx play. Everything was constantly evaluating/hotloading in the background.

So much fun, I can't find any of the videos in a quick search, so maybe lost to time. Great performative lisping in them hills though.

EDIT: I did find the old page on the wayback machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20120810224932/http://www.pawfal...
by alganet | 2025-04-24 03:55:29+00:00
Doesn't that also falls on the "blame the database engines and go for an experimental solution"?

I'm not saying databases are blameless. It's just that experiencing the issues they have by yourself is rewarding!

There is also a walk before the long walk of databases. Store things in text files and use basic tools (cat, sed, sh...).

The event driven stuff (like Kafka) reminds me of that. I am not very familiar with it though, just played a little bit with it once or twice.
by oaththrowaway | 2025-04-24 03:55:50+00:00
I went to a startup weekend maybe 9-10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. I didn't pick the best idea to work on, just the funnest sounding. Ended up with a small team (3 of us total) and we we're one of the only ones to actually have a good demo. I try to do some kind of hackfest every year now.

There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.
by dvrp | 2025-04-24 03:57:00+00:00
This is GPT’s take after I prompted it for his opinion on the crux of the piece:

It’s a bold, sharp take on AI’s coming shake-up.

• Core claim: New GPT-powered tools let one person match a small team’s output. That erodes big firms’ value and shifts us toward solo, AI-driven gigs.

• Strength: It sees how low coding, design or analysis costs plunge entry barriers—e.g. an indie writer using GPT to research, draft and polish entire articles.

But it skips some real-world frictions.

• Go-to-market still needs sales, trust and networks. AI can build a prototype, not always sell it.

• Risk and capital haven’t vanished: legal, data, infrastructure, marketing still demand teams or funding.

My take: AI will empower many more solo ventures and cut rote jobs. Yet wages and firms won’t crumble overnight. We’ll get hybrids—small outfits plus AI—before a full “Spooner” world arrives.
by simondotau | 2025-04-24 03:57:22+00:00
Apple has always allowed anyone into their club. You have to pay dues and follow some strict (but non-discriminatory) rules, but the result was a place which people liked going to.

Analogies aside, the REAL question is whether Apple is entitled to charge money for access to their developer APIs. Or whether Apple is entitled to place software license terms upon use of their intellectual property, e.g. when you link against Apple libraries which are then compiled into your binary.

We get up in arms about GPL violations, but also want Apple to suck shit. I don't think it's right to want it both ways.
Show HN: ProfileMagic – $10 AI LinkedIn headshots (20 photos, look natural)
by therajatg | 2025-04-24 04:00:25+00:00
I recently launched ProfileMagic — a simple tool that turns your regular selfies into professional-looking LinkedIn headshots.

You just upload a few casual photos, select your gender, and it generates 20 clean, natural headshots that actually look like you — not overly airbrushed or fake.

I built this because I wanted something affordable and straightforward. Most tools I tried were either too expensive or made me look like a Pixar character.

This one’s $10 for 20 photos — fast, no studio, no weird filters.

Would love feedback from the HN community!

→ https://www.profilemagic.ai/linkedin-headshot
by techpineapple | 2025-04-24 04:00:48+00:00
Ok, great, we want equality of opportunity. How do we measure that? Disparate impact seems like a guide, if an imperfect one, but if you can prove to me that everyone has equal opportunity, I’ll accept that, except I think “equal opportunity” is often just shorthand for “we’ll do nothing”. Do I have an equal opportunity to the guy who’s dad’s name is on one of the buildings?
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-24 04:03:24+00:00
Google Cloud has also gotten a huge boost from large retailers who, understandably, don't want to run their software on Amazon owned AWS.

When I asked out of curiosity why not Azure, especially given that these companies almost all use Office, Teams, Outlook, etc. several have told me it's because of Google Shopping and SEO. Though never formally stated or part of the contract it's often mentioned by Google that "They already have a relationship" with these companies via the feeds they provide for those products. And there are consistent talking point among the GCP sales reps about how they "help deliver you customers" and you "shouldn't fund a competitor".

Obviously not the same thing but it does indicate that Google isn't afraid to leverage their search monopoly in the other parts of their business.
by chadcmulligan | 2025-04-24 04:03:47+00:00
I worked with these guys that kept sending me AI explanations for SQL queries, like it was somehow helping. The explanations were fairly sound, though didn't seem to help them achieve the results they were after, and any Sql guy could have figured it out with a few minutes thought. They just had this chasm between what the AI told them and what it actually meant, words without understanding are just words. I am becoming concerned this will be the future, people saying words AI tells them and they have no idea what it means, I'm starting to see it already to a small extent, I'm hoping my sample is not representative.