MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by incomingpain | 2025-05-14 16:57:20+00:00
>Finishes all assigned tasks and projects on time

This is bad?

>These sound like a description of a perfect employee

Yes it does.

>The employee is a psychopath

Completing their work on time is psychopath behavior? shifts in seat

>The employee has nothing important to do all day

Your employer's work isn't important? Most of the time or like all the time?

>The employee cannot say no, doesn't have personal opinion and/or boundaries

Employees are paid to say no. This is a bad employee! Fire them right away!
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-14 16:57:21+00:00
We are not talking about asking your landlord if you can hang some window flower baskets from your studio. We are talking about a contract clause on the order of "keep the f-ing yard mowed and the trees trimmed" between two big evil organizations where Statistically Nobody(TM) really cares.

I understand there's no urgency but regardless of timeframe it's just not reasonable to expect discussions to happen between government and a tenant in the way you think they should in the current regulatory environment. Nobody's immediate interest is served by doing it that way and everyone's interest is served by doing it the way they did except in this rare case the public interest and it blew up and became a "court of public opinion" thing hence the lawsuits flying every which way and the finger pointing.

If you want to see organizations act how you seem to want toward government then government needs to change. Organizations are unfeeling and sociopathic in pursuit of their goals. They are keeping the .gov at the maximum arms length possible, spreading liability all around, and letting these processes hum along and "fail" in dumb ways that are probably obvious to the people on the ground (but of course nobody will take on the responsibility of raising objection) because those failures are less terrible when they do occasionally happen than the kind of problems you'd get they didn't make it SOP to run the way they run.

The common sense you speak of has been implicitly outlawed by the high tax of liability that is levied upon it.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-14 16:57:24+00:00
Offshore workers and generative AI have a lot in common. Little formal training. Lots of book smarts but zero context. Performs ok at well specified tasks, extremely poorly otherwise. Cannot understand human-written design documents with enough nuance. No aesthetic design sense. And finally their undisputed ability to pump out high volumes of code (including high volumes of garbage).

The only difference is that LLMs have a deeper and wider understanding of English, no time zone barriers, and nearly instant response time. I find it hard to picture a world where AI doesn't decimate these types of low-skill software jobs.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-14 16:57:28+00:00
> HDR gaming: Yes.

The difference is absolutely stunning in some games.

In MS Flight Simulator 2024, going from SDR to HDR goes from looking like the computer game it is to looking life-like. Deeper shadows with brighter highlights makes the scene pop in ways that SDR just can't do.

EDIT: You'll almost certainly need an OLED monitor to really appreciate it, though. Local dimming isn't good enough.
by hinkley | 2025-05-14 16:58:29+00:00
I was kind of disappointed the first time I saw an IBM mainframe and it kinda just looked like a rack of servers. To be fair, it was taking up a little bit of a server room that had clearly been designed for a larger predecessor and now almost had enough free space for a proper game of ping pong.

Hyperscaler rack designs definitely blur this line further. In some ways I think Oxide is trying to reinvent the mainframe, in a world where the suppliers got too much leverage and started getting uppity.
by wmf | 2025-05-14 16:58:59+00:00
Femtocells are remotely controlled by the carrier, they require GPS location (and maybe spectrum sensing), and I assume the backhaul is over VPN. Obviously they can't guarantee any QoS but it's better than having no signal.

(Fun trivia: Our office paid $XX,000 for AT&T MicroCells which wouldn't activate because they couldn't get GPS signal.)
by frabonacci | 2025-05-14 16:59:36+00:00
You’re right, Lumier might seem similar to Lume CLI, but it adds browser-based desktop streaming via noVNC and integrates with Docker for easier management, which is a familiar interface for many developers. Since our parent project C/ua will use KVM-based containers on x86/x64 hosts, aligning to a container interface here seems a natural step for us. Docker also allows packaging noVNC as a self-contained dependency, streamlining setup for some users.

On a comparison with Tart, UTM, Lima, we actually touch it in this GitHub discussion: https://github.com/trycua/cua/issues/10
by altairprime | 2025-05-14 17:00:25+00:00
No; Windows 10 barely supports it, and of my hundreds of Steam games, exactly none have any code making use of it; seemingly only AAA mega-budget games have the pipeline bandwidth, but e.g. Dune Imperium and Spaceways have no reason to use it and so don’t bother. Windows 11 focused on improving wide color support which is much more critical, as any game shipping for Mac/Win already has dealt with that aspect of the pipeline and has drabified their game for the pre-Win11 ICC nightmares. Even games like Elite Dangerous, which would be a top candidate for both HDR and wide color, don’t handle this yet; their pipeline is years old and I don’t envy them the work of trying to update it, given how they’re overlaying the in-game UI in the midst of their pipeline.

(It doesn’t help that Windows only allows HDR to be defined in EDID and monitor INF files, and that PC monitors start shutting off calibration features when HDR is enabled because their chipsets can’t keep up — just as most modern Sony televisions can’t do both Dolby Vision and VRR because that requires too much processing power for their design budget.)
by nlitened | 2025-05-14 17:00:33+00:00
> Your employer's work isn't important?

All work tasks can't be equally important, in my opinion. Some are more important and must be completed on time, some are less important and may be postponed if there were more important tasks. Some are not important at all.

It's very strange if somebody always has enough time to do _all_ the tasks, even the least important ones, I think.
by parliament32 | 2025-05-14 17:00:36+00:00
Attestation is probably the best feature of passkeys.

From a corporate compliance perspective, I need to ensure that employee keys are stored in a FIPS-compliant TPM and unexportable. Key loss is not an issue because we have, ya know, an IT department. The only way I can ensure this happens is by whitelisting AAGUIDs and enforcing attestation.

With these factors I can also get out of the MFA hellhole (because I can prove that whitelisted vendor X already performs MFA on-device without me having to manage it: for example, WHFB requires something you have (keys in your TPM) and either something you are (face scan / fingerprint) or something you know (PIN), without me having to store/verify any of those factors or otherwise manage them). Same goes for passkeys stored in MS Authenticator on iOS/Android.
by cge | 2025-05-14 17:00:55+00:00
>Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.

To be somewhat more specific: while I travel extensively and am in the US often, I am often outside of it for more than a month at a time, and it appears that Google will shut off data outside the US if you use data outside the US for too long. If you are using a different SIM for the primary data connection, it appears that they won't even if you have it enabled as a backup.
by chpatrick | 2025-05-14 17:01:16+00:00
Not defending it but I think it was more of a test if you have the dedication (and general smarts) to grind them for a few months than software engineering skills.

Similar to hiring good students from famous universities even if most of CS isn't that applicable to day to day programming work, just because it's a signal that they're smart and managed to get through a difficult course.
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-14 17:01:36+00:00
LA Metro's bus system covers most of LA County (1,447 square miles), ranking it among the top in terms of geographic coverage. In terms of ridership, it is second only to the NYC bus system in the U.S., and is among the top 20 in terms of ridership globally.

LA Metro also offers an on-demand hailed shuttle in several neighborhoods (Metro Micro). And has for several years, including several partnerships with Uber and Lyft that were ultimately terminated because private companies can't offer micromobility services as efficiently as a public agency can. Metro Micro costs a fraction of what LA Metro was paying Uber and Lyft but provides more rides in more neighborhoods.

LA Metro also has more e-bike coverage than any of the private e-bike services, most of which are now bankrupt.
by namro | 2025-05-14 17:01:41+00:00
On Android, Keepass2Android developer is working on supporting passkeys in the near future (https://github.com/PhilippC/keepass2android/issues/2099) but I'll be honest, I haven't dedicated enough time learning about passkeys to be sure the app will be able to support all implementations of passkeys and avoid vendor locking completely.
by dahart | 2025-05-14 17:01:59+00:00
I think most HDR formats do not typically use 32 bit floating point. The first HDR file format I can remember is Greg Ward’s RGBE format, which is also now more commonly known as .HDR and I think is pretty widely used.

https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~bjw/rgbe.html

It uses a type of floating point, in a way, but it’s a shared 8 bit exponent across all 3 channels, and the channels are still 8 bits each, so the whole thing fits in 32 bits. Even the .txt file description says it’s not “floating point” per-se since that implies IEEE single precision floats.

Cameras and displays don’t typically use floats, and even CG people working in HDR and using, e.g., OpenEXR, might use half floats more often that float.

Some standards do exist, and it’s improving over time, but the ideas and execution of HDR in various ways preceded any standards, so I think it’s not helpful to define HDR as a set of standards. From my perspective working in CG, HDR began as a way to break away from 8 bits per channel RGB, and it included improving both color range and color resolution, and started the discussion of using physical metrics as opposed to relative [0..1] ranges.
by zb3 | 2025-05-14 17:02:30+00:00
> I wouldn’t feel safe enabling it for any app

Then don't enable it, no need to take away my ability to do so. Granular permissions are good (especially when the app can't reliably know they were refused), providing I have the ultimate control.

> it’s a damned if they do, damned if they don’t scenario for Google.

Did they consider my scenario above - where the app doesn't know it was not granted a permission?
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-14 17:03:00+00:00
I think an OLED is basically an absolute necessity for HDR content.

My current monitor is an OLED and HDR in games looks absolutely amazing. My previous was an IPS that supported HDR, but turning it on caused the backlight to crank to the max, destroying black levels and basically defeating the entire purpose of HDR. Local dimming only goes so far.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-14 17:03:09+00:00
> On the other hand, in languages where you don't have to explicitly initalize variables after declaring them, I think the best solution is

I agree, for sure.

> I don't think it's conceptually simpler for the user to always initialize variables to zero or null.

I'm not saying zero, I'm just saying null. Because null is a valid value for that type, it's equivalent to

> Not having uninitialized variables by requiring the user to provide some value
by mxfh | 2025-05-14 17:03:19+00:00
Maybe my response was part of the broader HDR symptom—that the acronym is overloaded with different meanings depending on where you're coming from.

On the HN frontpage, people are likely thinking of one of at least three things:

HDR as display tech (hardware)

HDR as wide gamut data format (content)

HDR as tone mapping (processing)

...

So when the first paragraph says we finally explain what HDR actually means, it set me off on the wrong foot—it comes across pretty strongly for a term that’s notoriously context-dependent. Especially in a blog post that reads like a general explainer rather than a direct Q&A response when not coming through your apps channels.

Then followed up by The first HDR is the "HDR mode" introduced to the iPhone camera in 2010. caused me to write the comment.

For people over 35 with even the faintest interest in photography, the first exposure to the HDR acronym probably didn’t arrive with the iPhone in 2010, but HDR IS equivalent to Photomatix style tone mapping starting in 2005 as even mentioned later. The ambiguity of the term is a given now. I think it's futile to insist or police one meaning other the other in non-scientific informal communication, just use more specific terminology.

So the correlation of what HDR means or what sentiment it evokes in people by age group and self-assesed photography skill might be something worthwhile to explore.

The post get's a lot better after that. That said, I really did enjoy the depth. The dive into the classic dodge and burn and the linked YouTube piece. One explainer at a time makes sense—and tone mapping is a good place to start. Even tone mapping is fine in moderation :)
by alexjplant | 2025-05-14 17:03:27+00:00
> Yeah, the Guardian has had several articles lately with obvious non-facts that are likely LLM fabrications. Good to see more people call them out on it here.

It's not the first time I've seen it. I briefly had a recurring donation going to The Guardian but switched it over to ProPublica for this very reason. They seem to do harder-hitting "boots on the ground" investigative journalism and are more factual in their reporting. I suppose my first point is a matter of opinion but one or two independent sources that I consulted agreed that the Guardian is hit-or-miss if you fact check them.
by CalChris | 2025-05-14 17:03:33+00:00
> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter?

So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, ….

What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby.

Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through.

I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me.

Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-14 17:03:38+00:00
Hat tip to Bisrepita for the earlier share.

In my experience, red tops can do almost anything they want -- they can deviate from the planned route in any way that they wish. Also, most only accept cash (is this changing?). Green tops are pretty strict about stops and accept cash or local metro card (Octopus). On a deeper, urban explorer level: The red tops have waaaaay more aggressive drivers. It feels like GTA sometimes.

When riding a mini-bus, you only need two words of local language (Cantonese) to make it stop: 有落 jau5 lok6 ("yau-lok"). (You need to really shout to be heard over the revving engine.) For green top routes, use Google maps. They will guide you on what green top to take. Example: If you want to go hiking in Sai Kung, take the 101M green top mini-bus from Hang Hau metro station to Sai Kung pier. (Google maps can provide directions with the bus info.) Red tops are more adventurous and should only be taken if you speak/read more than a few words of Canto (50-100 words is fine).
by bee_rider | 2025-05-14 17:03:51+00:00
I thought this was a pretty interesting parallel, and reflection on the idea.

> Ironically, the monomyth is now being stretched out of shape by commercial forces, too. Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’ Not surprisingly, Hollywood is working hard to combine narrative boundlessness with satisfying, self-contained stories: the Marvel ‘Multiverse’ is a kind of vast conglomerate of autonomous (super)heroes’ journeys.

The piece seems a bit critical of the monomyth, but it does flag the current, massive alternative as quite stupid as well. Instead of a hero’s journey for a hero, we have a franchise journey, degrading the typical arc to put it in service of the whole.
by badmonster | 2025-05-14 17:04:41+00:00
btw, Neo4j supports vector properties and building vector index out of it. It's supported in cocoindex to configure a vector index: https://cocoindex.io/docs/ops/storages#neo4j

Neo4j also supports building embedding leveraging more information in the graph in addition to single node's property: https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-data-science/current/machine-le... (It's hard to incrementally compute them, but users can still compute them after the graph is built)

looking forward to learn your thoughts :)
Show HN: Tako, a Knowledge Search API
by ttobbaybbob | 2025-05-14 17:04:56+00:00
I'm Bobby, CTO of Tako. We just launched our Knowledge Search API.

Our API takes natural-language prompts like "Nvidia M&A history" and returns visual answers and grounding text sourced from real-time, structured data (example: https://trytako.com/card/YHloo1Ea7GRnBr_s5r6s/).

Most AI systems can’t effectively reason about real-time, structured data. One reason is access: a lot of the most valuable info is trapped in databases web crawlers can't index. Google solves this with a team of 2k+ engineers that ingest data (stocks, sports, etc) into a proprietary Knowledge Graph. Our goal is to offer developers the same knowledge search + visualization primitives Google has built, tailored for AI use cases, and delivered via API.

We seek to augment LLM’s capabilities, and this means that most of our biggest technical challenges stem from not getting a lot for “free” from LLMs. For example, RAG architectures that generate final outputs with LLMs introduce accuracy issues we can’t tolerate, and are too slow. We’ve built a Generative Augmented Search (GAS) architecture that uses LLMs (currently Llama 3.3-70B on Cerebras) to analyze input queries (~200 ms) but use deterministic retrieval for most output generation. The data in our knowledge graph generally isn’t available in LLMs or the web, so we have to acquire it directly from sources (including licensing it from authoritative providers like S&P Global). A limitation of this approach is that some developers want us to offer the flexibility of LLM analysis across web sources, even if it means tolerating non-authoritative sourcing and some hallucination. We’re working on some solutions to that now.

Curious to hear how other people are fighting hallucination.

I'd love your feedback on the product (and happy to discuss/answer questions about it/the tech stack)
by khm | 2025-05-14 17:05:37+00:00
This isn't true. Municipal routes can be optimized to serve the majority of people, and then a ride hailing service can be offered to feed off-route users into the fixed-route network. Most transit agencies offer this service, and many offer full-on ride-hailing (example: C-TRAN's "The Current" in Vancouver, WA).

I don't know where this "can't use a phone" thing comes from. ADA requires that transit services above a certain size offer paratransit, but doesn't specify how those rides are booked. I haven't run into anyone who can't make phone calls and can't book rides online.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-05-14 17:05:44+00:00
I formerly worked at https://corista.com, dealing specifically with integrations with AI pathology algorithm vendors like https://www.qritive.com and https://visiopharm.com. (Note: we dealt specifically with microscopy rather than radiology.)

I really think we were doing things the “right way” before I left: providing AI analyses from various vendors as overlays for slides, and being able to pre-flag slides with obvious cases of cancer or other infection. (These analyses typically being custom algorithms provided by vendors through APIs we collaborate on, not LLM output.)

With things like this simply built into an existing, established pathology platform, I’m pretty confident a team of 4-5 pathologists could do the work of 6-8, with better quality output, similar to how Copilot and other tooling speeds us up as developers. At $300-400k/yr/doctor, that’s considerable savings (and the opportunity to allocate more doctors in specialties that aren’t easily automated).

However, for lots of reasons, it seems the market doesn’t necessarily agree with me on the value potential of this approach in this field (which can certainly be a self-fulfilling prophecy).
by mrob | 2025-05-14 17:05:50+00:00
One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story.

I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu
by miladyincontrol | 2025-05-14 17:05:51+00:00
I do prefer the gain map approach myself. Do a sensible '32 bit' HDR edit, further tweak an SDR version, and export a file that has both.

Creative power is still in your hands versus some tone mapper's guesses at your intent.

Can people go overboard? Sure, but thats something they will do regardless of any hdr or lack thereof.

On an aside its still rough that just about every site that touches gain map (adaptive HDR as this blog calls them) HDR images will lose that metadata if they need to scale, recompress, or transform the images otherwise. Its led me to just make my own site, but also to handle what files a client gets a bit smarter . For instance if a browser doesnt support .jxl or .avif images, im sure it wont want an hdr jpeg either, thats easy to handle on a webserver.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-14 17:06:22+00:00
This is an example of why you shouldn't link to X or anything that looks like X.

Here you've got some guy who is talking to himself while pretending he's talking to others, not giving enough frame to understand what really happened. It looks like he showed it a picture and Grok started blabbing about "farm attacks" but what do I know?

Move on folks, nothing more to see here.