MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-05-20 18:27:40+00:00
> AI is the polar opposite of traditional logic based computing --- instead of highly accurate and reliable facts at low cost, you get unreliable opinions at high cost.

In other words: Instead of buying a simple hammer for nailing a plank, all the marketing is about buying a bulldozer in a foreign country that they will ship to you, and in the process of using it for hammering the nail, you destroy the whole house.
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-05-20 18:28:39+00:00
It depends entirely on the context. For routes where total travel time is mostly governed by moving time, and the stationary time in stops is negligible, the capacity boost from double-deckers easily outweighs the longer (un)loading times. The alternatives to increase capacity can also be problematic: with longer trains you start running out of platform length (and long platforms add walking time); while running more trains closer together requires more personnel and rolling stock, and is limited by signaling block size and braking distance.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-20 18:28:57+00:00
Plus one thing that was never really mentioned during the tariff bs where many American republicans demonstrated a total lack of understanding of what tariffs are and how they work is:

The fact that, yes, China makes iPhones and America has to import them. However that completely ignores the fact that China is making iPhones for _Apple_ and that whilst I'm sure the Chinese factories make a little profit, Apple's is making much much more on their huge mark up when selling iPhones across the world.

Of course those iPhones are imported directly from China to place of sale, say the UK. But who sees the profit? An American company. _Even though_ those imports would not have counted against America's exports specifically as far as I'm aware.
by nine_k | 2025-05-20 18:30:15+00:00
But you don't have to outsource 100% of your creative work to your tools. This is a toolbox, not a complete automatic masterpiece generator. If you want serious production, don't remove yourself from the loop.

Drive the storytelling, consult with AI on improving things and exploring variations.

Generate visuals, then adjust / edit / postprocess them to your liking. Feed the machine your drawings and specific graphic ideas, not just vague words.

Use generated voices where they work well, record real humans where you need specific performance. Blend these approaches by altering the voice in a recording.

All these tools just allow you to produce things faster, or produce things at all such that would be too costly to shoot in real life.
by Closi | 2025-05-20 18:30:49+00:00
I don’t get how someone can look at these videos and think “wow there’s lots of flaws and it’s sloppy and no storytelling” rather than “holy smokes this stuff is improving fast!”

In 2 years we have moved from AI video being mostly a pipe dream to some incredible clips! It’s not what this is like now, but what will it be like in 10 years!
by jsheard | 2025-05-20 18:31:00+00:00
> Of people can generate full movies at home, there is no more Hollywood.

LLMs have been in the oven for years longer than this, and I'm not seeing any signs of people generating their own novels at home. Well, besides the get-rich-quick grifters spamming the Kindle store with incoherent slop in the hopes they can trick someone into parting with a dollar before they realize they've been had.
by colinmcd | 2025-05-20 18:32:40+00:00
No, that kind of interop, especially static interop (assignability), would've been totally unworkable. Despite the length of the changelog, there are very few breaking changes to the user-facing API surface. It's mostly internal/structural changes and deprecations (most of which can be fixed with a find&replace).

Report back about that .d.ts issue. It should be far better. That kind of type explosion usually happens when TypeScript needs to infer function/method return types. Zod 4 uses isolatedDeclarations so this kind of thing shouldn't happen.
by nemothekid | 2025-05-20 18:32:45+00:00
>And you are going to work on all 4mb at the time?

Yes? Assume you were going to decode the jpeg and display it on screen. I assume the user would want to see the total jpeg at once.

Consider you are working on processing a program that has a bunch of jpegs and is running some AI inference on them.

1. You would read the jpegs from disk into memory. 2. You decode those jpegs in into RGBA buffers 3. You run inference on the RGBA buffers.

The current ImageDecode interface forces you to do a memcopy in between steps 1 and 2.

1. You would read the jpegs from disk into memory. 2. You copy the data in memory into another buffer because you are using the Reader interface 3. You decode those jpegs in into RGBA buffers 4. You run inference on the RGBA buffers.

Step two isn't needed at all, and if the images are large, that can add latency. If you are coding on something like a Raspberry Pi, depending on the size of the jpegs, the delay would be noticable.
by qwertycodepl | 2025-05-20 18:33:12+00:00
Yes it's just esbuild and SEA BUT that's actually the point. SEA is officialy supported by node.js and it constantly improves. Remember pkg and nexe supports only the older versions of node.js (~14) and astra supports the latest ones.

So in a way, the "magic sauce" it that it doesn't try to do anything fancy. I made astra beacuse i needed to compile js to exe for latest versions.

I wanted astra to be simple, built on official tools, and be future-proof.
by rmonvfer | 2025-05-20 18:33:42+00:00
I was a Plus subscriber and upgraded to Pro just to test Codex, and at least in my experience, it’s been pretty underwhelming.

First, I don’t think they got the UX quite right yet. Having to wait for an undefined amount of time before getting a result is definitely not the best, although the async nature of Codex seems to alleviate this issue (that is, being able to run multiple tasks at once).

Another thing that bugs me is having to define an environment for the tool to be useful. This is very problematic because AFAIK, you can’t spin up containers that might be needed in tests, severely limiting its usefulness. I guess this will eventually change, but the fact that it’s also completely isolated from the internet seems limiting, as one of the reasons o3 is so powerful in ChatGPT is because it can autonomously research using the web to find updated information on whatever you need.

For comparison, I also use Claude a lot, and I’ve found it to work really well to find obscure bugs in a somewhat complex React application by creating a project and adding the GitHub repo as a source. What this allows me is to have a very short wait time, and the difference with Codex is just night and day. Gemini also allows you to do this now, and it works very well because of its massive context window.

All that being said, I do understand where OpenAI is going with this. I guess they want to achieve something like a real coworker (they even say that in their promotional videos for Codex) because you are supposed to give tasks to Codex and wait until it’s done, like a real human, but again, IMHO, it’s too “pull-request-focused”

I guess I’ll be downgrading to Plus again and wait a little to see where this ends up.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-20 18:34:13+00:00
It is indeed the very epitome of sanity, if you simply consider that the codes are secrets, and this entire practice is derived from having hardware dongles with secure enclaves, where secrets go in but never come out. It is the utmost in security when this one-way relationship is observed.

The ability to export secrets is an unfortunate compromise which vendors make for consumer markets. The MFA apps were not designed for exportability. If you own any Yubikeys you will know this. The whole idea is that this factor is "something you have", in other words, possession of the item containing your secret. An exported secret is no longer a secret, no longer something you have; it's just another password you're shuffling around.

The reason that you don't lose access to accounts when losing your MFA apps is that you took down the emergency backup codes and you committed them to paper, or some other durable medium, in a place where they can easily be accessed during a crisis. You did this scrupulously with each MFA activation, didn't you? Didn't you?
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-20 18:34:21+00:00
The 6 hours of real work battery that Apple manages with ARM is genuinely impressive, and finally I think shifted the landscape to take ARM seriously as a CPU for consumers.

But it's just not that big a deal. Sure, I COULD spend a day working without power, but it's 2025 and USB-C power delivery is a mature spec. My desk has power. My work desk has power. My living room has power. My bedroom has power. The coffee shop has power. Airplanes have power. My fucking CAR has power.

Where are you working that you need a full 6 hours of hard working power without occasional access to a power outlet and a battery bank won't meet your needs?

I would be satisfied with 2 hours of hard working battery, which is what Ryzen powered Windows laptops deliver. My girlfriend uses her $800 mid range Ryzen laptop to play games and other power hungry things off charger every single day. It's also what work laptops other than Macs have always provided. Sure, my Thinkpad from 2012 needed a giant tumor of a battery to provide that, but it was always an available option, and you could swap it out for a tiny battery if you really wanted to slim it down.

Never an option in apple land. Battery not good enough? Fuck you, too bad.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-20 18:34:32+00:00
> I'm not seeing any signs of people generating their own novels at home

Most humans are also not good at writing great scripts/novels either. Just look at the movies that bring in billions of dollars at the box office. Do you think you need a famous novelist to write you a Fast & Furious 11 script?

Sure, there are still great writers that can make scripts that tickle the mind, but that's not what the studios want anymore. They want to push VFX heavy rehashed slop that's cheap to make, easy to digest for the doom-scrolling masses of consumers, and rakes in a lot of money.

You're talking about what makes gourmet Michelin star food but the industry is making money selling McDonals.
by mrandish | 2025-05-20 18:35:29+00:00
This kind of retrospective from key people who were involved is invaluable from an historical perspective. I find hearing first-hand accounts of the context, assumptions, thought processes, internal debates, technical limitations, business realities and even dumb luck a good way to not only understand how we got here but how to do as well (or better) going forward.

While the nitty gritty detail of recollections captured when still fresh in memory can be fascinating, I especially appreciate reflections written a few decades later as it allows putting the outcomes of key decisions in perspective, as well as generally enabling more frank assessments thanks to fewer business and personal concerns.
by dekhn | 2025-05-20 18:35:41+00:00
I believe new liver cells come from both dividing mature hepatocytes, and hepatocyte stem cells. Cells can only divide a limited number of times, and they can't easily re-differentiate, so I would expect that while dividing mature hepatocytes would propagate the edit, they would eventually be replaced by cells that derived from stem cells that didn't get the edit.
by adrianmonk | 2025-05-20 18:36:07+00:00
They could preserve the same basic concept but scrunch it vertically a lot. Right now, the tiles in each column are spaced out so much that if you moved them all into one column, they wouldn't overlap.

Instead, they could stagger them. Some blank space would still make it easier to understand visually, just not as much. If they did this, it would be a bit harder to see how which date-circle on the timeline corresponds to which tile, but that could be fixed somehow, like a dotted line that joins a tile to its circle or by moving the circle to one side of the center line.

They could also shrink the contents of the tiles themselves.

(1) There's no reason to have MORE space after "Compromised data:" than before it. It wastes space, and (IMHO) aesthetically it looks very awkward and clumsy.

(2) Personally, I'd also not double-space the bullet items. I can see how it adds emphasis, but it wastes a lot of space and to me it looks bad.

(3) Too much vertical space above the "View Details" button. Sure, some padding is nice, but why so much more here than between the icon (at the top of the tile) and the first paragraph?
by pzo | 2025-05-20 18:36:47+00:00
correct, youtube video shows it was uploaded 5 years ago - doubt it is relevant today even if someone don't want to use VLM for those tasks. Google dropped ball on tensorflow lite and their rebrand to LiteRT is still WIP.

Probably safer bet is to use onnxruntime or executorch if someone needs to deploy on edge devices today. At least for onnx, community is huge on hugging face and plenty of modern SOTA models already in transformers and transformers.js.
Ask HN: Zed Instead of Cursor?
by travisgriggs | 2025-05-20 18:36:52+00:00
Curious on what others might have to say on using Zed instead of Cursor?

I figured I'd experiment with Cursor in January, and so have spent 4 months with that. I figured I'd try a different one now. I'm going to give Zed a run for a few months.

Cursor was decent. The agent stuff was helpful somedays, and there were a couple of "what the heck are you doing??" But overall, net positive. I wish the transition between just ask and agent was more fluid. I wish it were in the markdown/prompt itself, instead of a separate toggle button. In agent mode, it was way too eager to rewrite my stuff when I just had a question. And then I find myself forgetting I was in ask mode, and having to flip the mode just to say "yeah, can you write code for what I just asked". VSCode was full of features of course, but it also feels like a backpack that first time backpackers pack: too weighted down with too many things.

So far, Zed feels spartan and lean, almost too much the other way. What I wouldn't give for an actual settings dialog/form instead of having to dig through and edit json files. I've noticed more needs for reboots to get the communication with the agent working again. But it is snappy.
by bonki | 2025-05-20 18:37:18+00:00
I use KeePass as main TOTP app but migrated from Authy to Aegis (open source, great app) years ago which I use as sort of secondary backup, which also allows you to create backups and import/export data. I sync those off my phone using Syncthing. There is absolutely zero reason to use Authy for standard TOTP these days.
by neilv | 2025-05-20 18:37:41+00:00
Constructive (ha) tone intended: How do you address the liability risk to your business?

What happens if your product is involved in a fatal or very expensive construction incident or situation?

What happens if your product is involved in a PE going to jail?

One conventional startup possibility is that the startup shuts down, and its people move on to new startups and other employment. But I'm wondering whether that's different for startups that involve regulated safety-critical work.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-20 18:37:45+00:00
Feel free to look up the ton-mile by distance numbers. Rail exceeds trucks by fairly narrow margins only for hauls between 1,000-2,000 miles. Below that distance, trucks dominate. Above that distance, trucks also dominate. Even in that band, it's like a narrow difference of like 35% vs 40%.

Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.

> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.

Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.

Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).
by airstrike | 2025-05-20 18:37:52+00:00
On a technical level, this is a great achievement.

On a more societal level, I'm not sure continuously diminishing costs for producing AI slop is a net benefit to humanity.

I think this whole thing parallels some of the social media pros and cons. We gained the chance to reconnect with long lost friends—from whom we probably drifted apart for real reasons, consciously or not—at the cost of letting the general level of discourse to tank to its current state thanks to engagement-maximizing algorithms.
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-05-20 18:38:20+00:00
I want to upvote the first half of your post, the part about school being about learning a breadth of subjects. I believe that wholeheartedly, and I believe pursuing knowledge, thinking critically about the world, and engaging with your peers on an intellectual level makes for a more fulfilling "life," something more than just a way to pay the bills or becoming a good cog in the machine of the economy.

But the second half of your post is kind of mean-spirited. "You and many others are not cut out for a broader education," is a rude, elitist way to call someone stupid. With few exceptions, I think practically anyone is "cut out" for higher education. What that education looks like is obviously different for each person, but that's as it should be, as the world is so vast that the human race can only somewhat learn a significant portion of it all if we all learn something a little (or a lot) different.

The university system is a special time and place that society has carved out where individuals can prioritize learning and experimenting above all other considerations, including (ideally) their job or paying bills. It's amazing that society has prioritized this kind of self-actualization, and "societal-actualization." It's maybe one of our greatest achievements! Anything that cheapens that experience is a shame, whether that is the belief that one's primary value is only equal to what they contribute to the economy, the outrageous costs of college tuition, or the allure to use ChatGPT and similar tools to net easy wins at the expense of building a wonderful mind.
by quesera | 2025-05-20 18:38:22+00:00
Actors will license their appearance, voice, and mannerisms to these new media projects. (Maybe by established Hollywood studios, maybe not).

Then the first fully non-human (but human-like) actors will be created and gain popularity. The IP of those characters will be more valuable than the humans they replaced. They will be derided by old people as "Mickey Mouse" AI actors. The SAG will be beside themselves. Younger people will not care. The characters will never get old (or they will be perfectly rendered when they need to be old).

The off-screen dramas and controversies are part of the entertainment, and these will be manufactured too. (If there will even be an off-screen...)

This is the future, and we've been preparing for it for years by presenting the most fake versions of ourselves on social media. Viewers have zero expectation of authenticity, so biological status is just one more detail.

It will be perfect, and it will be awful. Kids born five years from now will never know anything different.
by jader201 | 2025-05-20 18:39:01+00:00
I'm surprised no one has yet to mention the use of the name "Flow", which is also the title of the 2025 Oscar winning animated movie, built using Blender. [1]

This naming seems very confusing, as I originally thought there must be some connection. But I don't think there is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43237273
by iLemming | 2025-05-20 18:39:07+00:00
> I could never find the killer feature vs other languages I already use.

You're kidding or trolling? Structural editing and the REPL are the greatest features of Lisp. The ability to just grab any expression and move it around simplifies so many things when coding and refactoring. With the connected REPL you can eval anything on the spot, that turns the entire experience of coding into a video game — you don't need to wait for linter, linker, compiler — you just run things. You often don't even have to save anything. I suspect when you "tried various lisp dialects" maybe you didn't use structural editing and the connected REPL?

Often people confuse Lisp REPL with REPLs in other programming languages, e.g. Python, where usually you have to copy-n-paste chunks of code into it. Lisp's REPLs are different in the sense that every step in Read-Eval-Print-Loop is different — in Lisp, you typically eval things right where you type them, by sending whole expressions to the connected REPL, which could be remote. We (for example) run ours in a Kubernetes cluster, that allows us to experiment with pods, running queries against the "real" DB tables, testing services "live".
by nine_k | 2025-05-20 18:39:19+00:00
Displaced hired personnel of course cannot hope for that.

But VCs own their business, they are not employees. If you own a bakery, and buy a machine to make the dough instead of doing it by hand, and an automatic oven to relieve you form tracking the temperature manually, you of course keep the proceeds from the improved efficiency (after you pay the credit you took to purchase the machines).
Show HN: Porting Mutable Instruments to Arduino, RP2040
by poetaster | 2025-05-20 18:39:20+00:00
I'm sharing this since it's been eating at me since about 2021 :) A little background and example sounds at https://poetaster.org/news/2025-05-11/

In short, Volker Boehm had done some ports of the MI synthesis code in 2020, unbeknownst to me. Once I discovered it a bit over a month ago and compiled his supercollider port, I realized, no excuses, get to it.

The intention is to keep the source as simple to use in an arduino context, so it's NOT as nice from a c++ developers vantage point. But, I think it's becoming approachable for less adept programmers.

Niek from Sluisbrinke has pushed me along, wanting to build a 'Meta-Mi' module: https://github.com/niektb/sluisbrinkie-eurorack-published

I just play these things on my scarp.
by crote | 2025-05-20 18:39:26+00:00
> I've noticed all the bridges we get on stations these days are much higher.

Sounds like a classic case of "let's not make a future upgrade impossible". The material cost itself is only a small part of the total, so making the new bridges slightly higher is a rounding error in your budget. However, you're saving many millions if there were ever a full-line upgrade in the future, as you no longer need to do a full bridge replacement during that upgrade.

As long as there is even the vaguest plan of an upgrade at some point in the future it makes sense to adhere to the new standard, just in case. It's the no-regret option.
by perdomon | 2025-05-20 18:39:27+00:00
Hashes of every answer to every question and every variation of that question? If that were possible, you’d still need to account for the extreme likelihood of the LLM providing a differently worded answer (it virtually always will). This isn’t how LLMs or hashing algorithms work. I think the answer is that teachers need to adjust to the changing technological landscape. It’s long overdue, and LLMs have almost ruined homework.