MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-05-14 21:27:38+00:00
Yep, absolutely! ;)

This brings up a bunch of good points, and it tracks with what I was trying to say about conflating HDR processing with HDR display. But do keep in mind that even when you have absolute value images, that doesn’t imply anything about how you display them. You can experience large benefits with an HDR workflow, even when your output or display is low dynamic range. Assume that there will be some tone mapping process happening and that the way you map tones depends on the display medium and its capabilities, and on the context and environment of the display. Using the term “HDR” shouldn’t imply any mismatch or disconnect in the viewing environment. It only did so in the article because it wasn’t very careful about its terms and definitions.
by tlogan | 2025-05-14 21:28:05+00:00
Isn’t this what public transit is supposed to provide?

In San Francisco, I just hope Mayor Lurie will work to make riding Muni a less intimidating experience. I understand some people still find it convenient, and that’s great—but unfortunately, safety has seriously declined in recent years. Personally, I just can’t bring myself to ride it anymore.

Maybe it’s because I live near a Walgreens, and I often see the same groups of “shoppers” (aka shoplifters) frequently hopping on and off at the same stop I use. It’s hard to feel secure in that environment.
by viccis | 2025-05-14 21:28:21+00:00
>In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts.

When I lived in Atlanta, there were people, mostly YIMBYs and other urbanists, who wanted to charge a significant congestion fee to anyone living in surrounding towns like Alpharetta, Roswell, Duluth, etc., who commuted into the city to work.

It would effectively be a car vice tax paid by the working class, as most of the people I knew out there lived there because Atlanta rents and home prices are insane.

Congestion pricing is ok when there are alternate methods of transportation that are usable enough that you could expect a person to just switch to them rather than pay the fee. But when there's not such an alternative, the people will simply pay the fee because they have no other option, and now you've just further immiserated peoples' lives.

The closest thing to a response I've heard is that they think such a situation would encourage people to vote and push for better transit options. I just don't see it though. Ignoring that in my case, Atlanta, the city was a de facto one party city in which primaries were mostly determined by media endorsements and more emotional issues than transit and urbanism development, I just don't see that this kind of policy making that shapes the incentives (both carrot and stick) for the masses works in practice. Peoples' decisions are so much more complicated and subject to tons of other factors that this approach can't control.
by dhosek | 2025-05-14 21:28:44+00:00
Metapost was first released in 1989 by John Hobby in who was also effectively a coauthor of Metafont. I will say that the MF language is really kind of a delight. It has a clear influence from TeX in its macro construction, but the presence of first-class variables which TeX lacks makes it a more productive language overall.

I was a bit inspired by it when I took my one and only CS class as an undergrad. One of the few homework assignments I actually turned in was supposed to be a simple calculator with 26 assignable variables (A–Z). I thought that was boring, so I let variables be of any length and turned the calculator into a linear algebra solver so if you wrote, e.g.,

2X+3Y=14 X-Y=1 X Y

it would give you the values for X and Y that met the constraints. I got a C on the assignment because the TA didn’t understand my code (written in CWEB and presented as a 20+ page source listing alongside the functioning executable).
by dmos62 | 2025-05-14 21:29:36+00:00
I love the minimal approach and general-use focus.

If I understand correctly, the engine caches trajectories in the simplest way possible, so if you have a cached trajectory a-b-c, and you encounter c-b-d, there's no way to get a "partial" cache hit, right? As I'm wrapping my head around this, I'm thinking that the engine would have to be a great deal more complicated to be able to judge when it's a safe partial hit.

Basically, I'm trying to imagine how applicable this approach could be to a significantly noisier environment.
by sershe | 2025-05-14 21:29:53+00:00
You are a forced customer of a bureaucracy, so the standards are a little bit different. Corporations are accountable to their paying customers. Not perfectly. However, your ability to hold Meta or Amazon or whatever to account for things you paid for, and the ability to not pay/use them anymore is, while not as extensive as ideal, a lot more extensive than the same for FDA or ICE.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-14 21:31:12+00:00
Not sure about other countries, but RAs do outsource work to RRAs(1) and then sign the final product. This is relatively new as Medicare/Medicaid didn't recognize RRAs as mid-level practitioners until 2019. I suspect the answer is yes for ARRT-certified RRAs, but it will be state-specific (similar to the answer above about RAs).

(1)https://www.arrt.org/pages/earn-arrt-credentials/credential-...
by johnea | 2025-05-14 21:31:38+00:00
I generally agree with the concerns of this article, and wonder about the theory of the LLM having a innate inclination to generate bloated code.

Even in this article though, I feel like there is a lot of anthropomorphization of LLMs.

> LLMs and their limitations when reasoning about abstract logic problems

As I understand them, LLMs don't "reason" about anything. It's purely a statistical sequencing of words (or other tokens) as determined by the training set and the prompt. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, regarding this theory that the models may be biased to produce bloated code: I've reposted this once already, and no one has replied yet, and I still wonder:

----------

To me, this represents one of the most serious issues with LLM tools: the opacity of the model itself. The code (if provided) can be audited for issues, but the model, even if examined, is an opaque statistical amalgamation of everything it was trained on.

There is no way (that I've read of) for identifying biases, or intentional manipulations of the model that would cause the tool to yield certain intended results.

There are examples of DeepState generating results that refuse to acknowledge Tienanmen square, etc. These serve as examples of how the generated output can intentionally be biased, without the ability to readily predict this general class of bias by analyzing the model data.

----------

I'm still looking for confirmation or denial on both of these questions...
by chaboud | 2025-05-14 21:32:03+00:00
Having come from professional video/film tooling in the 90's to today, it's interesting to see the evolution of what "HDR" means. I used to be a purist in this space, where SDR meant ~8 stops (powers of two) or less of dynamic range, and HDR meant 10+. Color primaries and transfer function mapping were things I spoke specifically about. At this point, though, folks use "HDR" to refer to combinations of things.

Around this, a bunch of practical tooling surfaced (e.g., hybrid log approaches to luminance mapping) to extend the thinking from 8-bit gamma-mapped content presenting ~8 stops of dynamic range to where we are now. If we get away from just trying to label everyting "HDR", there are some useful things people should familiarize with:

1. Color primaries: examples - SDR: Rec. 601, Rec. 709, sRGB. HDR: Rec. 2020, DCI-P3. The new color primaries expand the chromatic representation capabilities. This is pretty easy to wrap our heads around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020

2. Transfer functions: examples - SDR: sRGB, BT.1886. HDR: Rec. 2100 Perceptual Quantizer (PQ), HLG. The big thing in this space to care about is that SDR transfer functions had reference peak luminance but were otherwise relative to that peak luminance. By contrast, Rec. 2100 PQ code points are absolute, in that each code value has a defined meaning in measurable luminance, per the PQ EOTF transfer function. This is a big departure from our older SDR universe and from Hybrid Log Gamma approaches.

3. Tone mapping: In SDR, we had the comfort of camera and display technologies roughly lining up in the video space, so living in a gamma/inverse-gamma universe was fine. We just controlled the eccentricity of the curve. Now, with HDR, we have formats that can carry tone-mapping information and transports (e.g., HDMI) that can bidirectionally signal display target capabilities, allowing things like source-based tone mapping. Go digging into HDR10+, Dolby Vision, or HDMI SBTM for a deep rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping

So HDR is everything (and nothing), but it's definitely important. If I had to emphasize one thing that is non-obvious to most new entrants into the space, it's that there are elements of description of color and luminance that are absolute in their meaning, rather than relative. That's a substantial shift. Extra points for figuring out that practical adaptation to display targets is built into formats and protocols.
by cyberax | 2025-05-14 21:32:41+00:00
> Are you assuming people share your prejudice? Who is 'riff-raff'?

There are homeless people literally smoking fentanyl on Seattle buses (and the light rail). Does that qualify?

And I'm not even talking about mere antisocial behavior like blasting shitty music from Bluetooth speakers or screaming obscenities at people.
by memcg | 2025-05-14 21:32:57+00:00
I have a 4G LTE Network Extender provided free by Verizon. My only issue is calls drop as I leave my property.

I called 911 in January and gave my address before the call dropped as I moved my car from my driveway to the street. The 911 operator called me back once I was back in range.

A few months later Verizon asked me to edit the location data with my address. Hopefully, I won't need to test anytime soon.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-14 21:33:03+00:00
Oops, you are indeed right. I was mixing in Tom and Nick in my memories. Needed to use 3 dudes to properly sell my horrible cliff notes.

Yeah, looking back there's a lot of history sprinkled in that I didn't appreciate when I was 16 and reading this for a teacher I really didn't like to begin with.
by abletonlive | 2025-05-14 21:34:13+00:00
Yikes. The reactionary reach for more regulation from a certain group is just so tiresome. This is the real mind virus that I wish would be contained in Europe.

I almost can't believe this idea is being seriously considered by anybody. By that logic buying any CPU is gambling because it's not deterministic how far you can overclock it.

Just so you know, not every llm use case requires paying for tokens. You can even run a local LLM and use cline w/ it for all your coding needs. Pull that slot machine lever as many times as you like without spending a dollar.
by nico | 2025-05-14 21:34:51+00:00
Very cool concept!

I wish v0, lovable, bolt et al did something like this with their suggested prompts

It’s such a poor user experience to pick a template, wait 3-5min to generate and then be dumped randomly either on an incredibly refined prototype, or a ton of code that just errors out. And in either case, having no clue what to do next
by seadan83 | 2025-05-14 21:35:00+00:00
I'm reacting to: "Math is language. 'Everything' is language. Language is the image of reality."

There are other discussions which say:

- Math is a subset of language, surely

- It's easily argued that languages are subsets of math.

Given that context, the distinction seems to be very important.

I find the following idea (paraphrasing) to be very interesting: "not only is math a subset of language, but the language and math are equal sets." I also think it's not true, but am curious how a person would support this assertion. So, my challenge is, because the logical "is" relationship is reflexive and the reflexive property does not hold here - how can this be true? The most satisfying answer has been (paraphrasing) "cause I'm using non-precise language and you should just infer what I meant." Which is fine I guess..
by AlexCoventry | 2025-05-14 21:35:27+00:00
The zero-sum mentality which leads people to think that way is already clear in The Mote In God's Eye. I think the point of the book is that despite being superior to humans in every way imaginable, the Moties are condemned to repeated violent conflict by Malthusian pressures, because they have nowhere to expand. One way I interpret the "mote" in God's eye is the authors' belief that no matter how good we get, we'll always be in potentially violent conflict with each other for limited resources. (The "beam" in our own eye is then that we're still fighting each other over less pressing concerns. :-)
by onedollarchat | 2025-05-14 21:35:43+00:00
Hi HN,

I built OneDollarChat (https://onedollarchat.com), a global chat where every message costs $1. Reading is free.

The goal is to create a public space with inherently higher signal-to-noise by making each contribution deliberate. It's an experiment in valuing online speech differently.

New users get their first message free ($1 credit after email verification).
by ignaloidas | 2025-05-14 21:36:16+00:00
Youtube has been long normalizing videos standard feed, switching to a -14 LUFS target in 2019. But LUFS is a global target, and is meant to allow higher peaks and troughs over the whole video, and the normalization does happen on a global level - if you exceed it by 3dB, then the whole video gets it's volume lowered by 3dB, no matter if the part is quiet or not.

The stable volume thing is meant to essentially level out all of the peaks and troughs, and IIRC it's actually computed server-side, I think yt-dlp can download stable volume streams if asked to.
by linkdd | 2025-05-14 21:36:22+00:00
Gotcha, thank you for the clarification.

I'd add though, that the "one leader" thing was not the only reason why I ditched Raft. The Go library hashicorp/raft was quite complex to use, and I've had a lot of situations where the cluster failed to elect a leader, and ending up with a corrupted state.

This might be a PEBKAC issue of course.
by epistasis | 2025-05-14 21:37:59+00:00
I see this with new apartment buildings in my small, NIMBY-dominated town.

Building proposed: "It will be too expensive! We need housing for those making 10% of median income, not for those making the median income!"

Building mid-construction: "This building is unbelievably ugly! How could we let this happen to our town?!"

Building completed: "This building is completely vacant! Why did we allow this to be constructed? It's just proof we should never build anything again, it's not needed."

18 months later, building fully occupied, lots of happy residents with mixed incomes: Silence, because they are too busy complaining about all the other buildings.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-14 21:38:44+00:00
... I'm not sure I've been anywhere where they don't do that in the last few years? It's inherently a little unreliable (in particular, it's hard to know ahead of time what dwell time at a stop will be, or if the bus will even need to stop at the stop), but it's fairly standard these days.

This thing is a good interface to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(app)

In many countries bus stops also have electronic signs indicating when the next buses are coming. Here's a thing from 15 years ago about their introduction in Dublin, which is not exactly world-leading, transport-wise: https://www.archiseek.com/discussion/topic/rtpi-coming-to-a-...
by pavon | 2025-05-14 21:39:02+00:00
For banks an other cases that (1) need to know you true identity, and (2) provide no expectation of privacy regarding sharing the existence of accounts with the government, a government run authentication would be fine from a privacy point of view.

The issue is that every site has moved to using 2FA, and most of them have no legitimate need to know your true identity. So using a government ID based solution would unnecessarily conflate authentication and identification and would be a real privacy concern.
by jdross | 2025-05-14 21:40:22+00:00
Many people who would otherwise love public transit – like me, hi, I grew up in NY and rode Muni & BART my entire 10 years in SF – avoid it in places like SF or the bus in NYC because increasingly over the last 15 years "the public" part has included very antisocial people, zero enforcement of social norms allowed, and declining enforcement of law.
by jack_peplinski | 2025-05-14 21:40:31+00:00
Your concern reminds me of this line:

> The self is no longer rooted to the experience of the body. It lives in various digitally mediated manifestations and iterations. As such it is variously coded and indexed. We can search not only the text but the archives of the self. [Source](https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-world-ordered-o...)

You could check out Distill or Pile.

https://un.ms/pile https://distill.id/
by wormius | 2025-05-14 21:40:52+00:00
I do my best to filter ai topics here using ublock, and it's blocked about a third of the posts, and yet every day there's a new variation, whether a new technique/technology, a new product (open source or commercial), etc... that I have to add to the filter. It's really offputting. Yet apparently this is the only site besides lobste.rs that has programming related content that is of any depth that I know of. I really wish hacker news had the ability to tag posts and let me filter (and tag them generally not have to get specific on each new buzzword or product).
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-14 21:41:35+00:00
> king-man+woman=queen

Is the famous example everyone uses when talking about word vectors, but is it actually just very cherry picked?

I.e. are there a great number of other "meaningful" examples like this, or actually the majority of the time you end up with some kind of vaguely tangentially related word when adding and subtracting word vectors.

(Which seems to be what this tool is helping to illustrate, having briefly played with it, and looked at the other comments here.)

(Btw, not saying wordvecs / embeddings aren't extremely useful, just talking about this simplistic arithmetic)
by toonalfrink | 2025-05-14 21:41:44+00:00
There's you who insisted on a FAANG job to make 6x more than you probably need and then there's me living on 1.5k a month because I refuse to do anything that feels more than 1% useless (i.e. most things in the enterprise). I'm not saying my attitude is better than yours, but I do think you didn't really need to grind leetcode if you really didn't want to do useless things
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-14 21:42:58+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I backed the first Pebble on kickstarter. Still have it. It was a great watch for the time. I loved it.

But these days I just have bigger requirements. The whole heartrate thing I don't even care about. Notifications are the main thing, but route tracking, integration with my alarm system and above all payments are just things I can't do without anymore. I had an Amazfit for a while which also had a 3-week battery life (though no apps) but it missed the payment option.

The charging is not a big deal for me because I only wear my watch outside anyway. And it charges in 30 minutes. It makes it easy for me to keep it charged also because it becomes a routine. With the amazfit it was often empty when I needed it.

But yeah it is great that there are devices for everyone.
by tonyarkles | 2025-05-14 21:43:00+00:00
> I'm sure we can all appreciate not climbing 30 flights of stairs, even if it we are physically capable of it.

Totally. And people seem to forget that you can temporarily go from "no disabilities" to "have a disability" to "no disabilities" very quickly. Slip of a knife while cooking can take a hand out of commission for a few days. Stepping on your glasses can make you visually-impaired for a few days. Ear infection can seriously affect your hearing until it's healed.

And there's tech issues that can come up too! A couple of weeks ago I needed to get an embedded Linux device set up with SSH and could only find a spare mouse in the office, no random USB keyboards kicking around. Trying to use the Gnome on-screen keyboard was an exercise in frustration. Some symbols were missing that I needed to type into a shell, for example.
by psunavy03 | 2025-05-14 21:43:30+00:00
That's how he got to DOD in the first place, by being the stereotypical "businessman who will clean up government." DOGE was not the first time politicans have talked about this kind of thing; it comes along every 20-30 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...
by mvdtnz | 2025-05-14 21:43:57+00:00
> Ok... Can you show me some like that in the EU?

Yes, trivially. There are filters for it on booking.com. Here's a link for rooms in Paris suitable for 2 adults and 2 kids with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen/kitchenette and a washing machine.

https://www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?label=gen17...
by erulabs | 2025-05-14 21:44:45+00:00
These perverse incentives run at the heart of almost all Developer Software as a Service tooling. Using someone else's hosted model incentivizes increasing token usage, but it's nothing special about AI.

Consider Database-as-a-service companies: They're not incentivized to optimize on CPU usage, they charge per cpu. They're not incentivized to improve disk compression, they charge for disk-usage. There are several DB vendors who explicitly disable disk compression and happily charge for storage capacity.

When you run the software yourself, or the model yourself, the incentives aligned: use less power, use less memory, use less disk, etc.
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-14 21:44:45+00:00
NYC is an extreme outlier. The city itself is older than America, older than the British colonies even. It was built by the Dutch. It's infrastructure is closer to Tokyo's[0] than any other American city. Congestion charge works in NYC because anyone driving solo into Manhattan is either an idiot or a cop[1].

In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so comically car-dependent. You might as well just raise the gas tax. Most cities don't even have a downtown to protect from cars, they're just suburban sprawl forever.

The actually radical solution for places outside the Tri-State Area is as follows:

- Ban mixed streets and highways ("stroads"). That is, any road in the network must either be built to exclusively service local properties, or carry high-speed thru traffic, not both. Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.

- Level the zoning code. Allow mixed commercial everywhere, get rid of lawn setbacks, and allow up to four story buildings basically anywhere the soil won't collapse from it. The only limitations to this policy should be to prevent existing tenants from being renovicted immediately.

- Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.

I'm not sure how any of this would play in the motosexual parts of America, though. Even nominally blue states like California would shit themselves if you tried to even slightly inconvenience car owners.

[0] To be clear, Tokyo as we know it today was basically rebuilt by America after we leveled it with firebombs. It was specifically built in the image of Manhattan.

[1] I can imagine several reasons why NYPD cops might not want to take public transit which I won't elaborate further on here.