MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moregrist | 2025-05-14 17:34:35+00:00
This depends quite a bit of what you’re trying to optimize.

Gradient descent is literally following the negative of the gradient to minimize a function. It requires a continuous domain, either analytical or numerical derivatives of the cost function, and has well-known issues in narrow valleys and other complex landscapes.

It’s also a local minimization technique and cannot escape local minima by itself.

_Stochastic_ gradient descent and related techniques can overcome some of these difficulties, but are still more or less local minimization techniques and require differentiable and continuous scoring functions.

In contrast, genetic algorithms try to find global minima, do not require differentiable scoring functions, and can operate on both continuous and discrete domains. They have their own disadvantages.

Different techniques for different problems. The field of numerical optimization is vast and ancient for a reason.
by dataflowmapper | 2025-05-14 17:35:16+00:00
Yeah programming definitely offers most flexibility if you have that skillset. I'm particularly interested in your 'last 20% is like going to the moon' analogy for special-purpose tools or even Excel/Bash. Do you have any examples off the top of your head of the kinds of transformation or validation challenges that you find fall into that really difficult 20%, where only a 'real programming language' can effectively get the job done?
by bv_dev | 2025-05-14 17:35:29+00:00
I have used Github copilot since their beta release in 2023 and I don't find it anywhere near good these days. Automplete was good, but the industry has moved way beyond 2025. Copilot is slightly worse than Cursor which is itself a pretty average tool now. If you use truly agentic code generation, you won't be able to go back to Github Copilot.
by Yizahi | 2025-05-14 17:36:01+00:00
Uber Shuttle works in my home city since 2019. It's Kyiv, 3mil population, ancient public transportation network but probably a bit better than USA (by hearsay).

While it was working in normal conditions (before Covid and war) it wasn't that good. Routes were limited and timing iffy. Inside it was a regular small bus, so nothing fancy. And more expensive that public transport. So it is a serviceable transportation if there are no normal bus available at your route and at the same time uber shuttle route is matching yours. But any proper city transport beats them on all counts.

PS: from the article it seems this is not about Uber Shuttle feature, but a different new ride share feature. Anyway, I'll leave my comment, but consider that it is not quite relevant.
by tracker1 | 2025-05-14 17:36:04+00:00
I can only really speak for myself... I've largely avoided Apple's ecosystem, even though I do use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, and have had assigned macbook pros in prior work. My work itself isn't specifically for Apple products or deployed on Apple hardware. It's mostly backend services and web based front ends. For better and worse, the web is the application framework to rule them all.

My personal feelings towards Apple are mixed. I don't like their locked down environments, even if the last phone I loaded a custom ROM on what my old Nexus 6p about a decade ago, I like having the option. I like being able to side load one-off applications from source if I choose to.

I've got similar, and even worse opinions of Google. In my personal use, I have relied on a "Manifest v2" based plugin that is yet to be updated to "Manifest v3" and Google actively disabled it, even loading in developer mode, so settings clear every single time. I'm not sure I have it in me to update, but I may make one for the small functionality I use myself. It kind of sucks really.

In the end, I don't like walled gardens to begin with, and I don't like excessive rent-seeking behavior. I'm not sure where I stand with Valve over Apple, but I feel that Valve has generated a lot of good will with what they do with their resources and give back into the developer community itself. They also aren't required.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-14 17:36:11+00:00
The Hero’s Journey is useful as a writing tool, but imo it is also a lens through which we analyze stories (once we learn about it). My feeling is that _any_ story can be cajoled into matching the hero’s journey with enough imagination. For this reason, I’m not as concerned about the limited palate — i think it says more about our perspective than about the story itself. It’s like complaining that we’re missing out on math because we learn numbers in base 10. Consider this example:

“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“

Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-14 17:36:47+00:00
It probably is representative of training data based on Musk’s bent world view but doesn’t come across as effective propaganda. If it said some particular farmer got attacked at a particular time and it happens at a certain rate or so and so threatened more attacks or something it might be persuasive. As it is it just looks like an unhinged part of the cringiverse.
by npteljes | 2025-05-14 17:37:09+00:00
I have similar feeling with HDR to what I have with movie audio mixing. The range is just too big. I think this distaste also amplified in me with age. I appreciate content that makes use of the limited space it gets, and also algorithms that compress the range for me a bit. KMPlayer for example has this on for volume by default, and it makes home movie watching more comfortable, no doubt sacrificing artistic vision in the process. I feel a bit the same with the loudness war - and maybe a lot of other people feel the same too, seeing how compressed audio got. At the very least they don't mind much.

I really appreciate the article. I could feel that they also have a product to present, because of the many references, but it was also very informative besides that.
by mhink | 2025-05-14 17:38:13+00:00
While I do have a lot of love for TVTropes, I think what they're talking about here is a little broader than most of the tropes we see there (although they do have an excellent article on the Hero's Journey itself [1]). IMO, tropes in the sense that we see them listed there are building blocks for a narrative structure, of which the Hero's Journey is one example. As mentioned upthread, kishōtenketsu is an alternative (and for that matter, TVTropes has an article on it as well, see [2]).

1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
by Uncorrelated | 2025-05-14 17:38:17+00:00
Yes. For example, Lightroom and Camera Raw support HDR editing and export from RAW images, and Adobe published a good rundown on the feature when they introduced it.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained

Greg Benz Photography maintains a list of software here:

https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-display-photo-software/

I'm not sure what FOSS options there are; it's difficult to search for given that "HDR" can mean three or four different things in common usage.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-14 17:38:25+00:00
Children's animated films also require a fart joke or two.

My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they took us out as children, it was under exceptional circumstances. We went to see E.T. when it premiered. I remarked about Drew Barrymore's young character shouting "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G" and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a broader audience.
Show HN: LTXV 13B Distilled – Generate 5s Videos in Under 10s
by statusreport | 2025-05-14 17:38:55+00:00
Hey HN, after our 13B release we've been working on a faster version of our open-source video model and we're excited to share it.

We started with a 13B base model that already had competitive generation speeds (e.g. 55s for a 5s video on an H100 — faster than any other model out there). But we wanted to push it further to allow everyone to quickly iterate over their video generations. So we built a distilled version focused on speed without sacrificing temporal or spatial coherence.

With the Distilled model, you can now generate 5-second 720p videos in about 9.5 seconds on an H100, and around 1.5 minutes on a consumer GPU like an RTX 5090.

Because the base and distilled models are interoperable, you can mix and match them in a single rendering pipeline. That gives you three modes: - Distilled Pipeline: Fastest. Uses just 4–8 steps end to end. Ideal for rapid iteration and experimentation (~9.5 seconds on H100, ~1.5 min on RTX 5090). - Mixed Pipeline: Starts with the base model to capture accurate motion, physics, and detail, then switches to distilled at higher resolutions for faster rendering. A good middle ground. (~20s on H100, ~2.5 min on RTX 5090) - Base Pipeline: Full-fidelity generation from start to finish. Best quality, best for final renders. (~43s on H100)

All pipelines are compatible with our multiscale rendering system, which allows you to first render a lower resolution video and upscale it as needed.

The project is open source and available on GitHub (https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video/) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/Lightricks/LTX-Video-0.9.7-distilled). You can also enjoy our Comfy integration here (https://github.com/Lightricks/ComfyUI-LTXVideo) and our open source LTXV trainer (https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video-Trainer).

Would love to hear your thoughts — especially around performance, integration into your own tools or workflows, or any creative uses you're exploring. We're actively working on tuning and adding new configurations, and early feedback is super helpful.
by parliament32 | 2025-05-14 17:39:11+00:00
Attestation is not provided by the passkey provider itself, but the OS.

For example, iOS uses the App Attest service (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/prepar...). On Android, you get it from Google Play Services (https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/overview) then the built in key attest service (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...). MS Authenticator does all the legwork and returns the results to you at sign-in time.

On Windows, WHFB has this built in (obviously). On macOS, this comes from Platform SSO (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/dep7bbb0531...).
by Suppafly | 2025-05-14 17:39:18+00:00
>Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares.

As a homeowner this is abundantly clear by looking at your tax bill, and something that I suspect renters don't think about. I don't grumble much about paying my taxes, but when you look at the breakdown, it's insane how much goes to things I don't personally use or even get much benefit out of. I like the idea of public transit, but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go, not as an alternative transport method for people who can afford private vehicles.

>Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).

They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars and trucks do because of the way the weight is transferred to the axels. I think buses are important, but a lot of negatives are ignored because they are absorbed by the overall system.
by permo-w | 2025-05-14 17:39:38+00:00
it's telling that you've not actually addressed anything I said. you're just repeating yourself and appealing to the authority of others. you've quite clearly decided that Android is your "team" and you're just going to aggressively defend it and insult anyone who threatens that, and yes, you too were throwing around insults, just because they were less explicit does not mean you get to play as if you're the adult in the room

there's a difference between liking a walled garden and preferring a phone that just works pleasantly with all the features you need straight out of the box, and the fact that you're choosing to misunderstand this shows that you're just completely unobjective. and of course you are, you've literally explained your vested interest in this. it's like trying to argue atheism to an evangelical priest

besides, if we were talking about tablets or laptops or anything that you might actually want to do work on, then a walled garden is a huge issue, a massive dealbreaker. but as far as I'm concerned you're kidding yourself if you think your phone needs a wider pool of features than a Nokia from 2007
by jari_mustonen | 2025-05-14 17:41:23+00:00
The article mentions Jung's "collective unconscious," which is often misunderstood.

What he meant by it is that some unconscious features are collective, meaning they are genetically programmed in all people. Jung believed this also includes certain thought patterns, which can be inferred from stories. For example, he would have argued that a paragon of wisdom is typically an older man with a white beard (Gandalf and Dumbledore come to mind) because we have a genetically programmed inclination to see older men with white beards as paragons of wisdom.

Jung liked to use these kinds of methods to analyze the human psyche and its structures. Interesting guy. If anyone is interested, I recommend his collection of essays, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, as a first read.
by matt-p | 2025-05-14 17:41:27+00:00
Outside of the big clouds just buying a 1 Year lease (say) on a dedicated server is so cheap that you'd not be saving much vs spot instances and with spot instances you need code to manage this and you're introducing risk of slowdowns. Probably not worth the trade off.

To illustrate a 128GB ram 20 core server with a 10Gbps NIC and some small SSD storage is probably going to cost you <$2000 USD for a years rental.
by ijk | 2025-05-14 17:42:20+00:00
Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements.

Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.

Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.

There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-14 17:42:22+00:00
> What would happent to the primitive types of that language, then?

Not every language has them. A common example here is JavaScript, which, while `undefined` is a thing in, is closer to null than the C sense of undefined.

> When I said that, I was thinking of languages like Go and Java, both of which implicitly initialize integers to 0, booleans to false, floats to 0.0, and references to nil or null.

Right, that's zero initialization. I also agree that I think it's a mis-feature generally, but I think in the overall design space there's reasons you'd end up there. It's not the path I'd personally take, but I can see why people choose it, even if I disagree.
by sxg | 2025-05-14 17:42:23+00:00
> One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination.

In many cities, the exact opposite of that has been true in my experience. I’ve waited at bus/train stops only for it to be 20+ min late or never show up multiple times per week. The unpredictability makes it infeasible as a means of transportation to getting to work or anything time sensitive (e.g., sporting event or show downtown). This is a much bigger problem in smaller cities with rudimentary public transit, but I’ve also experienced it in larger cities like Philadelphia.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-14 17:42:48+00:00
> This does not look like RL. It's a genetic algorithm.

couldn't you say that if you squint hard enough, GA looks like a category of RL? There are certainly a lot of similarities, the main difference being how each new population of solutions is generated. Would not at all be surprised that they're using a GA/RL hybrid.
by dpflan | 2025-05-14 17:42:54+00:00
I have not read this linked article, but your comment made me recall a discussion about a speed up of CUDA kernels presented by Sakana AI Labs. The researcher Ravid Shwartz Ziv at NYU posted about it on LinkedIn [1], and here is the Twitter post of interest [2]

""" Yesterday's news about Sakana AI Labs provided an important lesson for all of us working with AI agents. Their announcement of an AI system that could supposedly optimize CUDA kernels to run 100x faster initially seemed like exactly the kind of use cases we've been hoping for in AI-assisted development.

Like many others, I was excited about it. After all, isn't this exactly what we want AI to do - help us optimize and improve our technical systems?

However, careful investigation by the community (on Twitter) revealed a different story. What really happened? The AI-generated CUDA kernel appeared to achieve incredible speedups, but the code was inadvertently reusing memory buffers containing previous results, essentially bypassing the actual computation. When properly evaluated, the kernel actually runs about 3x slower than the baseline. """

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ravid-shwartz-ziv-8bb18761_ye...

[2] https://x.com/main_horse/status/1892473238036631908
Ask HN: What article said 7 last Unix code someone could keep in their head?
by thevibesman | 2025-05-14 17:42:55+00:00
I'm looking for an article/paper I found on HackerNews (maybe in 2018 or 2019) that someone posted that was some description of a UNIX version (7 I think?) and in the introduction they mentioned it being the last version of UNIX that was small enough for one person to keep all the code in their head.

Does anyone know what paper I might be thinking of? I can't seem to locate it.
by advisedwang | 2025-05-14 17:43:10+00:00
Password/TOTP does not protect you against phishing. The phishing site can forward the password and TOTP you type into the real system, gaining your access.

FIDO/WebAuthn/Passkeys protect you against phishing, because of the origin binding mentioned in the article. On the phishing site, the required credential cannot be generated, and so no matter how convincing it is you can't accidentally give them a credential to forward.

Phishing is what these systems were trying to defend against.

Now if you were to say that the move from plain FIDO tied to a hardware key to passkeys tied to a Google account was a lock-in ploy ---- then I might be more inclined to agree.
by tracker1 | 2025-05-14 17:43:17+00:00
I'm not really surprised. Most things most people buy most often (food) is largely domestically produced. It also takes a while to fully affect supply chains and the announcements were well ahead of the actual tariffs. Beyond this, we trade with a lot of countries that aren't china, where 10% isn't that hard to split the difference between margins and consumer pricing.

Some products either are/were or just starting to see the effects. Another month or two and there might have been some interesting changes. Personally, I'm mixed as I've thought for a long time that tariffs would be better than income taxes. While a $3000 iPhone example may seem really bad, it's not something people should be buying every year even... Appliances used to measure their lives in decades and people expected that. Heavy tariffs may have reset those expectations a bit, and given room for more domestic options with time.

I was pretty sure it was mostly about taking an obscene position in order to negotiate to something fair. If you start off negotiating from a "fair" position, you will lose in the end.

Just my own take.
by seesthruya | 2025-05-14 17:43:19+00:00
Basically, they are all currently hot garbage.

In my practice we have:

1. Mammography CAD

2. Pulmonary nodule CAD

3. Intracranial hemorrhage CAD

4. Intracranial vessel CAD

They all stink! I would love it if they were useful, radiology is insanely difficult and I could use the help!
by lostlogin | 2025-05-14 17:43:31+00:00
Here in New Zealand you get a licence after purchasing the equipment, and require the machine spec, date of manufacture and serial number to get the licence.

It does require a radiologist name on the paperwork as they are the one with the radiation licence. However it is possible to get one if not a radiologist (dentists do, and radiographers have).

Being licensed to use the equipment is the hard bit, as insurance companies require accreditation which is hard to get.
by munificent | 2025-05-14 17:43:49+00:00
There is another film structure that is super common but is often overlooked. It is perhaps not coincidental that the protagonist is more often a woman. I found a blog post describing it once, but can't find it now.

In the typical three-act structure, the protagonist must make an internal change to themselves before they are able to resolve the conflict.

In this alternate plot structure, it is the community itself that must change. The protagonist is "right all along" and serves to the be the catalyst for that change. Almost as if society is the protagonist. It looks something like:

1. Inciting incident where problem appears.

2. Protagonist attempts to tackle problem using their "true self".

3. Family/village/community smacks them down and says they can't do that.

4. Protagonist tries to conform and solve the problem the way they are told to but fails.

5. Climax: Running out of options, the protagonist unleashes their true inner self and solves the problem.

6. The community witnesses this and realizes that they should accept the protagonist for who they are.

This is very common in Disney movies (Mulan and Frozen being stellar examples) and in family movies where the protagonist is a young person that "no one understands".

It is sometimes mixed with the typical three-act structure where the protagonist also makes an internal "change", but the change is most often simply accepting who they already were at the beginning of the film before trying to deny that throughout the second act.