MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sillyfluke | 2025-05-30 15:20:13+00:00
I'll quote the story, since you don't want to google it:

>> While Overholser himself described Ufimtsev’s work as, “so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd’s nerd would have waded through it,” he quickly recognized that a creative interpretation of the book could offer a means by which one could calculate how electromagnetic energy would reflect off of a two-dimensional shape.

Overholser then reasoned that if they could break down the design of an aircraft into a collection of two-dimensional triangles, it could be possible to calculate an aircraft’s complete radar return without having to actually build it and stick it in front of a radar array for testing like Boeing’s Quiet Bird. <<

It was a book, not a journal paper apparently.
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-30 15:20:15+00:00
> The number of quantized bits is a trade off between size and quality. Ideally you should be aiming for a 6-bit or 5-bit model. I've seen some models be unstable at 4-bit (where they will either repeat words or start generating random words).

Note that that's a skill issue of whoever quantized the model. In general quantization even as low as 3-bit can be almost loseless when you do quantization-aware finetuning[1] (and apparently you don't even need that many training tokens), but even if you don't want to do any extra training you can be smart as to which parts of the model you're quantizing and by how much to minimize the damage (e.g. in the worst case over-quantizing even a single weight can have disastrous consequences[2])

Some time ago I ran an experiment where I finetuned a small model while quantizing parts of it to 2-bits to see which parts are most sensitive (the numbers are the final loss; lower is better):

1.5275 mlp.downscale 1.5061 mlp.upscale 1.4665 mlp.gate 1.4531 lm_head 1.3998 attn.out_proj 1.3962 attn.v_proj 1.3794 attn.k_proj 1.3811 input_embedding 1.3662 attn.q_proj 1.3397 unquantized baseline

So as you can see quantizing some parts of the model affects it more strongly. The downprojection in the MLP layers is the most sensitive part of the model (which also matches with what [2] found), so it makes sense to quantize this part of the model less and instead quantize other parts more strongly. But if you'll just do the naive "quantize everything in 4-bit" then sure, you might get broken models.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02631 [2] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07191
by mdaniel | 2025-05-30 15:20:38+00:00
Apologies if this is a dumb question, but is there no "hello world"-ish sandbox for testing this theory? I can very easily imagine that trying to go head-to-head with R1 or such is going to be a boatload of GPU, but for just testing tokenizer head-to-head isn't there a smaller sized one that can be used in a bake off?
by guerrilla | 2025-05-30 15:20:39+00:00
With romance scams it's ego, especially with men. My neighbor needs to beleive that 25 year old blondes taking selfies on yachts are interested in him. Nothing in the universe could convince him otherwise. He would have to change so much of his personality and life to accept who he is or become who he would need to be. It's impossible. I think this is actually a question of thermodynamics at this point.
by rs186 | 2025-05-30 15:20:43+00:00
Listened to the whole show, and I am very disappointed that they don't put enough effort into stressing how much cryptocurrency facilitates all these. They talk about cryptocurrency as if it's just a way to transfer money, and it happens that bad people use it for scams. No, it's almost the sole reason pigbutchering works so effectively these days and works as the perfect tool for scammers in obscure corners in the world.
by swyx | 2025-05-30 15:22:06+00:00
its not part of the conversation because the influence here is tangential at best (1) and your sense of how much vc money is on the table at any given time is not good (2).

1a. most seed/A stage investing is acyclical because it is not really about timing for exits, people just always need dry powder

1b. tech advancement is definitely acyclical - alexnet, transformers, and gpt were all just done by very small teams without a lot of funding. gpt2->3 was funded by microsoft, not vc

2a. (i have advance knowledge of this bc i've previewed the keynote slides for ai.engineer) free vc money slowed in 2022-2023 but has not at all dried up and in fact reaccelerated in a very dramatic way. up 70% this yr

2b. "vc" is a tenous term when all biglabs are >>10b valuation and raising from softbank or sovereign wealth. its no longer vc, its about reallocating capital from publics to privates because the only good ai co's are private
by burkaman | 2025-05-30 15:22:11+00:00
It's very difficult to tell what the global recycling rate is, here's a good article about that: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/battery-recycling-.... It might be as high as 59%. There are a lot of companies working on ramping up this industry in the US, some examples are https://ascendelements.com/, https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/, https://ecobat.com/our-business/ecobat-solutions/lithium-ser.... There's no real technological barrier, it's just about making the economics work.
by strangecasts | 2025-05-30 15:22:19+00:00
As an aside, a few early 90s games did experiment with spheroid sprites to approximate 3D rendering, including the DOS game Ecstatica [1] and the (unfortunately named) SNES/Genesis game Ballz 3D [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVNxnlgYOyk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfhiGHM0AoE
by phendrenad2 | 2025-05-30 15:22:53+00:00
These are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society. They've been primed to worry about an "AI apocalypse" by Hollywood for their entire lives. The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. If you can correctly guess (or logically determine) which is correct, and bet all of your money on it, you can launch yourself into a whole other echelon of life.

I've been a heavy user of AI ever since ChatGPT was released for free. I've been tracking its progress relative to the work done by humans at large. I've concluded that it's improvements over the last few years are not across-the-board changes, but benefit specific areas more than others. And unfortunately for AI hype believers, it happens to be areas such as art, which provide a big flashy "look at this!" demonstration of AI's power to people. But... try letting AI come up with a nuanced character for a novel, or design an amplifier circuit, or pick stocks, or do your taxes.

I'm a bit worried about YCombinator. I like Hacker News. I'm a bit worried that YC has so much riding on AI startups. After machine learning, crypto, the post-Covid 19 healthcare bubble, fintech, NFTs, can they take another blow when the music stops?
by flippyhead | 2025-05-30 15:23:22+00:00
Yeah for sure! At least I try to do this. It's that framing that I use when starting the competative search. Still, too often and well after I've launched, I find myself discovering significant competitors I wish I'd known about. Also sometimes it's hard to know what keywords customers will end up using -- which is often the source of my missing competitors I end up caring about.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-30 15:23:57+00:00
Food is plentiful here, but unevenly distributed. Childhood hunger is still a serious problem.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/childhood-hunger-food-insec...

During the initial pandemic, great strides were made in the United States to mitigate childhood poverty, but these measures were quickly overturned. Now the administration wants to defund SNAP and other food security programs. Alas.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-30 15:24:28+00:00
>Vaccine skepticism (and the broader medical skepticism) is a weird one though.

We, as people, are much more sensitive to loss because of action over loss because of inaction. Doing nothing at the risk of getting sick sometime later doesn’t feel as risky as choosing to go take a product with risks, even though the risks are a million times lower than if you get sick. Taking a vaccine feels like you are doing something risky. It is distantly related to the trolley problem.
by zug_zug | 2025-05-30 15:25:12+00:00
> conspiracy theory

?

We all live in this interconnected thing called a "culture." Maybe you've heard of it. It affects what we all do it at all times, the clothes we wear, what we value, who we strive to be, and where we spend most of our money.

In fact, some people would even give up their lives if the cultural pressure told them to. I bet most people are so heavily subjected to the pressures of cultures that they wouldn't violate harmless cultural norms for $1,000 a day (e.g. crossdressing).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
by gibspaulding | 2025-05-30 15:25:19+00:00
> By the way, if you are a software type, I would highly recommend knitting.

I can attest to this. I’m still very much an amateur, but have really enjoyed getting to the point where I can start to picture a shape I want and mold it with a combination of k2tog and kfb.

That said do you have any suggestions on knitting resources for the more programming/engineering minded? Picking a pattern and the exact matching yarn and following along stitch by stitch is not terribly interesting to me. I’ve much more enjoyed figuring out how to design/size things from scratch, but that approach is not how most knitting resources I’ve come across are written. I would love to find some tutorials that focus more generically on things like various approaches to making an elbow or splitting one cylinder into multiple, etc.
Show HN: An AI image editor that understands context (FLUX.1 Kontext)
by howardV | 2025-05-30 15:26:40+00:00
Hey HN!

I've been working on FLUX.1 Kontext, an AI-powered image editing platform that leverages Black Forest Labs' revolutionary FLUX.1 Kontext models.

*What makes it different:* - Context-aware editing: The AI understands relationships between objects in your image - Natural language prompts: "Change the background to a sunset" actually works as expected - Professional-grade results: Built on the same tech stack powering enterprise AI tools - Real-time processing: Most edits complete in under 30 seconds

*Technical details:* - Frontend: Next.js 14 with TypeScript - AI Models: FLUX.1 Kontext Pro/Max from Black Forest Labs - Security: Cloudflare Turnstile integration - Image processing: Optimized pipeline for various aspect ratios

*Why I built this:* Existing AI image editors often miss context or produce unrealistic results. FLUX.1 Kontext models excel at understanding spatial relationships and maintaining consistency across edits.

*Try it free:* [https://konfluxart.com]

Would love feedback from the HN community! What image editing challenges have you faced with current AI tools?

Tech stack details and implementation notes in comments if anyone's interested.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-30 15:26:54+00:00
Note that this isn't improving the LLM itself, but the software glue around it (i.e. agentic loops, tools, etc). The fact that using the same LLM got ~20% increase on the aider leaderboard speaks more about aider as a collection of software glue, than it does about the model.

I do wonder though if big labs are running this with model training episodes as well.
by interludead | 2025-05-30 15:27:01+00:00
Perplexity more and more looks like an overestimated Yahoo or AOL. Tons of ads and clutter, and a questionable product strategy. How you gonna build dashboards when the LLMs' accuracy isn't guaranteed? It requires the same time investment as building it from scratch bc of all the double-checking of your data after the LLM vibe coded smth

TL;DR sounds somewhat cool, not sure if usable in real life
by jchw | 2025-05-30 15:27:49+00:00
I don't actually think it would go down like that so I think the point is moot, but are we really going to go through this again? Developers should (and often do) know better than to get into these unsustainable situations, but they still do it.

I have some unsolicited advice: please don't open source something that you are actively planning to sell. Nobody will take this advice of course, because delivering your product as an open source project is an easy way to generate some leads and even get some free labor here and there. But if you don't want people to feel deceived, start with your expectations out front and magically people won't be angry at you.

On the other hand, I agree people wouldn't be angry at company B in this scenario, because they're not the ones who set the incorrect expectations to begin with. OTOH though I really do doubt "we just removed some features so we could charge you for them" would be a successful pitch as a brand new vendor for something.

I'm struggling to understand how there's even still a lot of debate on this subject because it's very simple, if you can pull off a sustainable FOSS project then the world will be grateful but in many cases it becomes very clear over time that there was effectively no plan, just a lot of hope that maybe things would work out somehow. Whatever good that is.
Show HN: Leap – Full-stack AI developer agent that deploys to AWS
by machekb | 2025-05-30 15:28:18+00:00
We just launched Leap, an AI developer agent that helps you build and deploy apps with real backends to your own AWS or GCP cloud.

We built it because every AI app builder we tried fell short. They were fine for prototypes, but not for real systems. No support for proper backend infra, no isolated test environments, and sometimes shockingly no way to own your code.

We build Leap to be more appropriate for developers:

- Connect GitHub to put your code in a repo you control - Work with code generation using pull request–style revisions with diffs - Get Architecture diagrams and API docs for your app as you build - Develop using an isolated preview environment - Deploy either via open source tooling or the integration with Encore Cloud for automated deploys to AWS/GCP

Leap uses Claude 4 Sonnet and runs on our open-source framework Encore.ts[1], which provides declarative infrastructure (like a cloud-agnostic CDK-layer). We found the framework to be a good fit for LLM code generation as both application logic and infra is defined in the same context, and the declarative nature makes it less error prone.

Right now we think Leap is best for starting new projects or building new isolated services in existing larger systems.

The biggest challenge right now is dealing with larger codebases as models struggle to cope with large contexts. And while we're doing a few things to optimize this, we intentionally made it so that you can switch to your IDE any time and keep working there. To run your app locally you only need the open Encore CLI installed, which also can be used to build the app as a docker container.

We're just getting started and would love your feedback if you try it. And also it would be helpful to understand what would make this useful for you?

- You can try it here: https://leap.new - Here's the launch blog post and video: https://leap.new/launched

[1]https://github.com/encoredev/encore
by mdaniel | 2025-05-30 15:28:50+00:00
Just as a "for your consideration," how would anyone have known without you weighing in on a HN thread?

I don't know what it is about frontend apps that makes them assume that every request is 200 OK or that every Promise is always .then(response) but as a consumer of the web it drives me batshit, and as a developer of enterprise apps it makes me the bad guy in PRs

Anyway, I'm not exactly wagging my finger at you but rather if this thing you are shipping is designed to help generate apps for people, it would be stellar if the generation included at bare minimum a // TODO watch out for errors
by bgwalter | 2025-05-30 15:28:51+00:00
Why not use the promised exponential growth of home ownership that led to the catastrophic real estate bubble that burst in 2008 as an example?

We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the elimination of any working class representation in politics and suppression of real protests like Occupy Wall Street.

When this bubble bursts, the IT industry will collapse for some years like in 2000.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-30 15:28:54+00:00
Totally agree, I think crypto is cool from a technological standpoint, but I don't think I've seen one common genuine use of BTC, etc.

And before someone comes in with very specific, anecdotal examples - notice I said "common", ie not buying your indie music from a retro-Serb band that plays using the concept of instruments as instruments and from abandoned sewers; but only on Mondays.

I definitely feel like the majority of crypto traffic is primarily due to bubbles/moneymaking/bets/pumps+dump and then the secondary/next closest use case is for criminal activity. And then after that perhaps the myriad of much smaller use cases like people paying for Proton using crypto.
by dlivingston | 2025-05-30 15:29:01+00:00
> I’ve asked on some PRs “why is this like this? What is it doing?” And the answer is “ I don’t know, ChatGPT told me I should do it.”

This would infuriate me. I presume these are academics/researchers and not junior engineers?

Unfortunately this is the world we're entering into, where all of us will be outsourcing more and more of our 'thinking' to machines.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-30 15:30:06+00:00
This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other. The other 7 billion people are not economically relevant and will just barely participate in the economy. It'll be like the movie Elysium.

I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he OK with a market that just consisted of rich people? "Because rich people have the money!"
by mock-possum | 2025-05-30 15:30:12+00:00
I do think that the kind of people that complain about the male loneliness epidemic are the kind of people who would struggle with those issues-

The only way to establish relationships is to be real - so of course if you believe you can’t be real, that’ll be a problem.

Relationships kick off and grow and solidify via socializing - so of course if you’ve let your social skills atrophy and believe you have no chance to practice and improve them, that’ll be a problem.

Your third point sounds like it’s really just a combination of your first two points, discomfort with being open and honest with others, and discomfort with intentionally socializing with strangers. Of course if you avoid those things to spare yourself the discomfort, you’re also avoiding the opportunity to make friends.

The rest of it (testosterone? Co-ed?) sounds like bullshit to me.

What I hear you being concerned about is: people don’t see the value in leaving their comfort zone in order to pursue what they want. Those fears you mention about not being real, and not knowing how to socialize, and not being around others, and being forced to go to schools for women (??) just sound like irrational fears to me. None of that stuff will kill you.

If being a man is anything, then surely, being a man is facing those kinds of situations and saying “this makes me uncomfortable but it has to be done, I am afraid but I will do it anyway.”

For me, that is the male loneliness epidemic, if such a thing even exists - it’s the unwillingness of some men to face their fears and do what needs to be done to make a connection with another human being.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-30 15:30:14+00:00
They still exist where I am, and are desperate for members, because their memberships tend to have an average age probably over 60. Some new blood could really invigorate them, but they have trouble finding any.

I sometimes wonder how my grandparents' generation, who were generally hard-working farmers and tradesmen, and who raised large families relative to today, found the time to maintain all those groups along with their churches. Different priorities, I guess, and that was not only before the Internet, but before TV really took over.
by skydhash | 2025-05-30 15:30:34+00:00
I was referring as new as some orthogonal dimension in the same space. If we're referring to your definition, any slight changes in the parameters results in something new. I was arguing more about if the model knows about axes x and y, then it's output is constrained to a plane unless you add z. But more often than not it's output will be a cylinder (extruded from a circle in the x,y plane) instead of a sphere.

The same thing goes for image generation. Every picture is new, but it's a combination of the pictures it founds. It does not learn about things like perspectives, values, forms, anatomy,... the way an artist does which are the proper dimensions of drawing.

> that humans somehow exceed the Turing computable

Already done by Gödel's incompleteness theorems[0] and the halting problem[1]. Meaning that we can do some stuff that no algorithm can do.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
by astroimagery | 2025-05-30 15:31:00+00:00
I’ve spent years photographing the night sky, and every image I take is a snapshot of ancient history—light that began its journey millions of years before hitting my camera sensor. From nebulae to distant galaxies, each photo is a blend of science, patience, and a bit of luck. I’d love to hear from others who’ve tried deep-sky astrophotography: What’s your most memorable shot? What gear or processing tricks made the biggest difference for you? And for those curious, I’m happy to share my workflow and lessons learned about capturing and processing faint cosmic signals.
by Spivak | 2025-05-30 15:31:21+00:00
It's a whole separate skill to be able to code with an audience, let alone an audience who is judging you. I could forgive a non-technical interviewer not knowing this but surely someone who is a dev themselves understands the very real performance anxiety. It's bonkers why we do this to people— the best I've seen is the in person talks about their experience, architecture, problems they've encountered and how they solved them and then either code samples from their public code if they have some or a short take-home assignment if they don't.

They could cheat on the take-home but it isn't meant to be difficult and you hopefully figured out at the in-person that they're someone who wouldn't need to bother cheating.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-30 15:31:30+00:00
Already possible in C++ARM, as any look into 1990's C++ frameworks documentation on digital archives would prove, regarding RAII.

Or even articles in The C/C++ Users Journal, Dr Dobbs, PC Techniques, Microsoft Systems Journal.

Unfortunately many that write C with C++ compilers, only started paying attention around C++11.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-30 15:32:00+00:00
If the docs are fluid, 3 ring binder makes sense so you can adjust the contents accordingly. If the docs are more static, your local print shop or an online vendor can print and spiral bound the doc at a nominal cost for shipment to you. In the case of both, it's helpful to be able to take your own written notes to add into the binder, or write directly or on post it/sticky notes in a spiral bound medium.

Related:

As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44113210 - May 2025