MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-05-15 20:05:08+00:00
Hehe outside is “HDR content”? To me that still comes off as confused about what HDR is. I know you aren’t, but that’s what it sounds like. A sunny day has a high dynamic range for sure, but the acronym HDR is a term of art that implies more than that. Your article even explains why.

Tone mapping doesn’t imply HDR. Tone mapping is always present, even in LDR and SDR workflows. The paper you cited explicitly notes the idea is to “extend” Adams’ zone system to very high dynamic range digital images, more than what Adams was working with, by implication.

So how is a “window of luminance values” different from a dynamic range, exactly? Why did you make the incorrect and obviously silly assumption that I was suggesting a camera’s aperture changes the outdoor scene’s dynamic range rather than what I actually said, that it changes the exposure? Your description of what a camera does is functionally identical. I’m kinda baffled as to why you’re arguing this part that we both understand, using hyperbole.

I hope you have a better day tomorrow. Good luck with your app. This convo aside, I am honestly rooting for you.
by psychoslave | 2025-05-15 20:05:28+00:00
That is not comparable at all. To save people from obesity, smoking and drinking, you don't need more resources on fundamental research. You need different education, and socio-economical programs, possibly even less funds on the overall: if no resources is spent anymore in promoting bad habits, you end up with more financial resources and a healthier population.

Instead if no resources is allocated on developing all the technical requirements to do such a thing, humanity ends up with less tools to heal itself, and that's it.
by jampekka | 2025-05-15 20:05:46+00:00
> Going from MATLAB to NumPy I felt like I suddenly became a mediocre programmer, spending less time on math and more time on "performance engineering" of just trying to figure out how to use NumPy right.

Matlab is about as slow without readily vectorized operations as Python.

Slowness of Python is a huge pain point, and Julia has a clear advantage here. Sadly Julia is practically just unusable beyond quite niche purposes.

Python does now have quite serviceable jit hacks that let one escape vectorization tricks, but they are still hacks and performant Python alternative would be very welcome. Sadly there aren't any.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-15 20:06:02+00:00
The sad thing is, cutting down on the streamers does make an actual dent in outgo. Each platform is at least $9USD, and subscribing to them all at this point is easily $100/month. Obviously, some are higher than $9, but cutting the cord to save money tends to come out higher than the dreaded cable bill.

Avacodos be damned
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-15 20:06:03+00:00
> Especially since the most promising solutions come from rapidly developing technologies and research

What solutions are you referring to?

This sentiment baffles me when I see it. It's not like we learned we'd this problem yesterday, and now we've to guess how we might solve it based on guessing.

For 35 years, "rapidly developing technologies and research" hasn't improved the numbers. I understand that there's a regular stream of news which touts one thing or another as a possible solution, but which one of them has done anything? How long do we wait for this techno-optimism to bear fruit?
by goobie | 2025-05-15 20:06:44+00:00
The people who designed a government regulation to deputize private companies couldn't possibly have known how sloppy private companies are with other people's data?

They could have designed KYC to minimize long-term storage requirements etc at some cost to what they could enforce, but a government like the US is inherently sloppy with the rights that are reserved for parties besides itself.
by xp84 | 2025-05-15 20:06:49+00:00
I'm completely NT here and I agree with you 100%. Maybe it's also that I've usually worked in buildings where finding a free conference room (either on short notice or even in advance) was a nontrivial amount of trouble. So, using an open 10 minutes instead of essentially burning at minimum a half-hour by starting at :00, is doing the whole floor a big favor.
by bbor | 2025-05-15 20:06:56+00:00
Cool idea, if it works! That said, small nit:

> If you've ever used an AI coding assistant (like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or others powered by Large Language Models - LLMs), you've likely encountered situations where they don't know about the latest updates to programming libraries. This knowledge gap exists because AI models have a "knowledge cutoff" – a point beyond which they haven't learned new information.

This isn’t quite right. LLMs don’t memorize APIs because they aren’t trained to do so in the first place. LLMs are intuitive algorithms; if you want them to (reliably…) follow a finite set of formal rules, then you’re gonna need RAG either way.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 20:06:56+00:00
Not so sure about

A specialized ballistic missile defense platform based on a commercial ship hull — The US military has historically preferred to intercept ballistic missiles outside the atmosphere. The advantage is that one missile defense battery can cover a very wide area. A specialized ballistic missile defense ship could be kept farther back from more forward groups, protecting them without giving away its position with easily detectable radar emissions.

One thing about BMD systems of all kinds is that the footprint they protect is smaller than you wish it was

https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/22265/17_Simple_Model_Calculat...

part of the reason why the US has BMD ships is that they can placed in places such that the footprint works since the ocean covers like 75% of the Earth's area. To really be out of range of aircraft, anti-ship missiles and all that you'd have to be hundreds of miles away from the threat and that could well put you out of the footprint. Not to say that you couldn't have clever answers such as the launch vehicle being separated by the radar though most BMD systems use track-with-missile guidance that require the missile be in close communication with the radar for the terminal phase.
by drivers99 | 2025-05-15 20:06:59+00:00
Can I ask you this: What am I missing from my education or experience to be able to make sense of the original link (and by inheritance, this comment)? When I read the original post, I can't understand some of the words, and any full sentences and what they're saying, let alone a paragraph or as a whole what I'm even looking at (the URL says fiction, so I guess it's a short story of some kind). I'm not even talking about the top part in French, although it does apply to the French phrases scattered throughout. I hope I'm not the only one, because I feel pretty dumb right about now.

Take this for example (first the sentence in English from the story) :

> M. Trente has furnished a signal service to the scholarly world with his éclairage of one of our unsung research bodies, worthy of Block or Ginsberg.

Ok, M. Trente is a character. "signal service" sounds like some kind of business for sending messages. "éclairage", I don't know. "Block or Ginsberg", no idea. The meaning of the sentence? No idea.
by throwaheyy | 2025-05-15 20:07:01+00:00
This is why I do not use any google apps and deleted my google anccount. Their shitty software pisses me off.

Every time I try to use it, the UI elements shift around as I try an action as simple as activating a search box. But it is just laggy enough that you click on something a second time, since it apparently didn’t activate the first time. But by then it’s shifted everything around and you are either cancelling what you were doing, or you are taken off into some new workflow you didn’t want.

The absolute WORST is when you focus the search box and it shifts to the top of the screen. With lag, you click on the search box again, but now where it was is a list of completion suggestions and you are taken off to some search result page you never asked for.

It’s fucking infuriating and I won’t entertain it.
by agilebyte | 2025-05-15 20:07:19+00:00
I am avoiding the cost of API access by using the chat/ui instead, in my case Google Gemini 2.5 Pro with the high token window. Repomix a whole repo. Paste it in with a standard prompt saying "return full source" (it tends to not follow this instruction after a few back and forths) and then apply the result back on top of the repo (vibe coded https://github.com/radekstepan/apply-llm-changes to help me with that). Else yeah, $5 spent on Cline with Claude 3.7 and instead of fixing my tests, I end up with if/else statements in the source code to make the tests pass.
by caycep | 2025-05-15 20:08:26+00:00
a) that statement above has nothing to do with RFK

b) the whole point of NIH and other government research funds is to pay for this sort of "not clearly an effective use of dollars" type of research that Pfizer et al won't touch. but you can look at a ton of future applications from this - lipid packaging, CRISPR methods, drug delivery, etc that had to be devised, and could conceivably be commercially viable if the methodology is perfected and the cost comes down.
by godelski | 2025-05-15 20:08:51+00:00
You're not getting my point though.

> A passkey synced using iCloud or Google account does not break that model

Yes, yes it does. Have you seen how hard it is to recover these accounts? There's not uncommon HN posts that do get these solved, but only then by high visibility. A method most people do not have available to them.

> Or the equivalent to finding a locksmith is to log in with a non-passkey method

Sure, it is just that the backup methods end up undermining the security key.

Both of these were mentioned in my post you originally responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988957
by metalman | 2025-05-15 20:09:10+00:00
whatever, umm, "sanctioned forgery" but exactly how is it a "copy", as the Magna Carta was hand written, with 4 signed copys still in existance today. the item under discussion was created 85 years after the magna carta, and presumably, everyone who was involved with the original, was dead so this thing is just old, but has no direct connection, it's even listed as an "amended version" of the actual original document, which means of course that some ancient controversy and disagreement, is lurking for our perusal and picking sides
by zamadatix | 2025-05-15 20:09:17+00:00
> People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom. "Significant" in this case can be $10k or less.

I wonder why, select a person completely at random and by median you'll get just as much from what they have sitting in their checking account. Select a nicer area for an order of magnitude more. That's not encouragement to go assault people in their homes or kidnap families... just confusion.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-15 20:09:34+00:00
If you really want to improve Naval ship acquisition, then go back to when the US Navy had its own navy yards - which were full-bore shipyards, capable of constructing anything up to the largest aircraft carriers. So any time the defense contractors were getting greedy or moving slow, the USN could just build ships in-house.

Unfortunately, the old navy yards could not <cough/> generously support <cough/> our self-serving congressmen. Vs. the defense contractors could. Guess which one got phased out.
by codedokode | 2025-05-15 20:11:02+00:00
As I understand, the root of the problem is that Coinbase kept lot of sensitive information, including photos of IDs. If Coinbase was fully anonymous, and didn't require any KYC, the impact of the leak would be insignificant because it would be difficult to link user number 12345 with some real-world person.

So if we want to constrain impact of such attacks, we must make companies keep less data and delete them faster. For example, instead of storing a photo of ID, store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.

This applies not only to cryptocurrency, but to any company like Google, Uber, Amazon etc - if they didn't keep extra data, there would be little value in the leaks.

So the blame is not at cryptocurrency, but on companies not wishing to delete the data and governments demanding them to collect the data not necessary for operation. It's the government and capitalists who create problems out of nowhere.
by Chris2048 | 2025-05-15 20:11:35+00:00
> People get robbed at gas stations, convenience stores, parking lots, and streets at fairly high numbers

Not where I live. the comparison/debate is:

> In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe.

I think the point is, although (public) necrophilia is rare, so presumably is access to dead bodies, so the fact this happened is telling.

> does your example actually count as a “robbery” if they died first?

Of course it fucking does. picking someone's pockets is also robbery even if no confrontation is involved, and I'm pretty happy this guy is being charged with "attempted rape"; the fact the guy was dead doesn't make it not rape.

> The anecdote you brought doesn’t seem to reflect on safety

you don't see a correlation between safety, and the presence of people you cannot trust to be around?

> speed is absolutely a huge factor in driving injuries, one of the biggest. Again not sure how or even why to compare that to assaults on the subway

Speed, or speeding i.e. inappropriate levels of speed. The comparison is that an individual can control their speed, and the authorities can police it. There's not much you can do if you run into the wrong person on the subway.
by godelski | 2025-05-15 20:12:15+00:00
> Actually it is a feature.

There's a critical flaw in PGP actually. If you reply to any PGP encrypted email with "sorry, I couldn't decrypt" you'll, with high likelihood, get the cleartext version of the email soon after.

The joke is quite old and part of what I'm pointing to. Security doesn't work well if it isn't very usable. At least this is a bit better than secure communication, but it isn't as huge of a difference as it might appear.

The biggest boon in security has come due to making these tools easy to use. That's from decades of experience is realizing you can't get everyone to be technical.
by pompidoo | 2025-05-15 20:12:56+00:00
I felt like adding that disclaimer was a nice thing to do, informing the customer and letting them make their own decision. It makes almost no difference to remove that disclaimer (well, it would increase sales). it is not to protect myself. The price is very low and margin is very thin, what happens if Apple bricks the device? There would be very little money left to refund the customers, and most of the refunds would be eaten by transaction fees. Is it worth it for the customers to receive a few cents back? And that's assuming I keep all the money in the company and don't pay myself.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-15 20:14:07+00:00
If my employer ever fires me, even if it is unwarranted or unjust, item number 1 on the list "Shit I ain't gonna do" will be:

1. Don't write a fourteen thousand, five hundred, and twenty-three word (not including title) Medium post about my firing.

As far as I can tell, every single person involved in the video gaming industry from executives to workers to consumers falls into a category of person defined by their extreme levels immaturity and pettiness rivaling or even exceeding the film industry.
by autoexec | 2025-05-15 20:14:24+00:00
Netflix was originally $5.00 a month and there were zero ads. Now, even the "ad free" tier of netflix is full of advertising. Pause a show for more than 5 seconds, ads will start to play. Did a move you were watching just end? Ads for other shows will start to play (if they don't just start playing whatever they want automatically).

Just opening netflix gives you a huge ad banner at the top of the page. I've seen netflix advertise certain shows and movies with full screen ads you have to click past or scroll down past just to get to the "continue watching" category.

I've seen large half-screen sized vertical ads for certain shows shoved between two categories while scrolling down the page, and the same movies and shows are aggressively shoved into category after category to advertise them to you as you try to look for what you want to watch.

Categories like "trending" or "popular" are intended to sound objective, but the shows featured in them will change depending on who is logged in because they're actually just targeted ads.

Netflix's "ad-free" tier is filled with ads and unfortunately they're still less ad-infested than most streaming services.
by nis251413 | 2025-05-15 20:15:40+00:00
The syntax of actual array languages can be beautifully concise and expressive. You can express mathematical formulas in ways that makes sense when you read a single line, and once you get used to the notation and some originally non-intuitive quirks (from a programming background perspective), you can write in very few lines what otherwise would take you several lines of rather ugly, less readable code.

In my view, python+numpy is not actually an array language. Numpy as a library adds vectorization operations to python in order to help with speed. This is different. It does not (intend to) bring the advantages that array language syntax has, even if it was a bit more consistent.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-05-15 20:15:46+00:00
In my (admittedly not ship-building) experience, big problems happen when design and manufacturing are done by different organizations. The designer has to make guesses about the tools and processes at the manufacturer, and the manufacturer has little flexibility to make small changes to the design to improve manufacturability.

Of course there are ways to bridge this gap, including close collaboration and frequent back-and-forth between groups, but then when the spec has been fine-tuned for one manufacturer it can end up nearly impossible for third parties to competitively bid for a contract.

I think the navy can probably do design as well as anybody, but then they'd probably have to run the shipyards too.
by amlib | 2025-05-15 20:15:51+00:00
I believe everything could be solved the same way we solved high dynamic range in audio, with a volume control.

I find it pretty weird that all tvs and most monitors hide the brightness adjustment under piles and piles of menus when it could be right there in the remote alongside the sound volume buttons. Maybe phones could have hardware brightness buttons too, at least something as easy as it is on adjusting brightness in notebooks that have dedicated brightness fn buttons.

Such brightness slider could also control the amount of tonemapping applied to HDR content. High brightness would mean no to low tonemapping and low brightness would use a very agressive tonemapper producing a similar image to the SDR content along it.

Also note that good audio volume attenuation requires proper loudness contour compensation (as you lower the volume you also increase the bass and treble) for things to sound reasonably good and the "tone" sound well balanced. So, adjusting the tonemapping based on the brightness isn't that far off what we do with audio.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-15 20:16:01+00:00
"Meetings" should've never been the term.

There are team updates & all-hands that are one-to-many. They are often basically a seminar so can be recorded, sent out online, and Q&A delivered in a follow up 24-72 hours later after everyone has submitted & voted on questions. any interactive bits the only bits left.

There are 1:1s. These can be in person in a meeting room, online, or taken on-the-go.

Then there are decision & planning meetings; these are what was being optimized.

But if the other types of meetings were changed as above there’d have been no need.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 20:16:13+00:00
Interesting concepts there, as applied to psychology. And kudos for making it available freely. Definitely worth a read imho!

Skimming through its chapter on AI, made me think of Dave from EEVblog fame. In some of his videos he wears a T-shirt saying "always give negative feedback!". Which is correct - for those who understand electronics (specifically: opamps).

In short: design circuit such that when output is above target, circuit works to lower it (voltage, in this context). When below, circuit works to raise it. Output stability requires a feedback loop constructed to that effect.

There's analogies in many fields of technology (logistics, data buffering, manufacturing, etc etc, and yes, thermostats).

I'll leave it there, other sites like Wikipedia (or EEVblog!) better explain opamp-related design principles.

From what I've read, current AI systems appear like opamp circuitry with no (or poor) feedback loop: a minor swing in input causes output to go crazy. Or even positive feedback: same thing, but self-reinforcing. Guardrails are not the fix: they just clip the output to ehm.. 'politically correct' or whatever. Proper fix = better designed feedback loops. So yes, authors of this book may definitely be onto something.
by Robotbeat | 2025-05-15 20:16:14+00:00
Yeah, in some ways, the genetic code and molecular biology around transcription, etc, more closely resembles the abstract Turing Machine than an actual computer does. Absolutely fascinating that the messy world of biology ends up being pretty analogous to the clean world of binary logic. Gene sizes are expressed in kilobases, where a base carries 2 bits of information.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-15 20:16:56+00:00
> LLMs already break key aspects and assumptions of the 'Document Simulator'. [...] The “document-simulator” picture collapses that distinction, treating a dynamic decision process as if it were a block of pre-written prose. It's just nonsensical.

I feel you've erected a strawman under your this "document simulator" phrase of yours, something you've arbitrarily defined as a strictly one-shot process for creating an immutable document. Yeah, it's boring and "nonsensical" because you made it that way.

In contrast, everybody else here has been busy talking about iterative systems which do permit interaction, because the document is grown via alternate passes of (A) new content from external systems or humans and (B) new content predicted by the LLM.
by serbuvlad | 2025-05-15 20:17:12+00:00
Oh, so there is a billing backend. It's just managed by someone else.

Then yeah, just call it billing as a service.

I just dislike the wording of it all. "You don't have to do the billing in the backend, you can do it on the frontend". As if the frontend and the backend were mythical realms fighting for control.

We went from PHP generated websites, to PHP backend generation bad, use "client-side rendering" and "single-page applications", as the shiny new thing.

Then we went to Server Side Rendering (SSR), as a new thing. What do you mean a new thing? You're just doing in Node what everyone was doing in PHP 15 years ago.

And that's fine!

Not every idea has to be revolutionary, not everything has to be "the future", or "the only way".

You've found a service that does billing for you without having to integrate it into your backend. Great! Amazing! Good for you! I'm sure it's of interest to a lot of people!

But why can't you just, you know, say it like that?
by bee_rider | 2025-05-15 20:17:16+00:00
Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?