MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DanHulton | 2025-06-15 15:23:11+00:00
You have invented essentially an _incredible way_ to poison AI image datasets.

Step 1: Create .meow images of vegetables, with "per-pixel metadata" instead encoded to represent human faces. Step 2: Get your images included in the data set of a generative image model. Step 3: Laugh uproariously as every image of a person has vaguely-to-profoundly vegetal features.
by Vegenoid | 2025-06-15 15:23:19+00:00
I feel like the sentiment of “we can train a competent dev in our language and stack” has given way to “we want a dev with proven experience in our language/stack” over the last few years. I suspect this has something to do with more non-technical staff being put in between candidates and the engineers they’ll be working with during the hiring process. These non-technical staff rely on “x years of experience in thing” to know if a person might be competent at that thing.

I think that this is one of the reasons networking is becoming more and more important, because it lets a candidate demonstrate their generally-applicable development skills to a fellow engineer who is capable of making qualitative engineering judgements.
by MOARDONGZPLZ | 2025-06-15 15:24:36+00:00
A lot of this is pretty POC-y. Agree digital to analog to analog to digital is kinda inefficient, and in the abstract MAC to PHY (which is probably what you mean when you say MAC to MAC) with RGMII is probably better. My off the cuff guess is that it is likely the written-up interface is easier to access or requires less diving into internals. Not sure where the RGMII lines are, and depending on the design of the Starlink mini itself (I am ignorant of this) the lines might have been buried deeper and less accessible, who knows.
by animal531 | 2025-06-15 15:24:38+00:00
When I was 20 I could come up with an idea and just sit and my computer and code it over however many hours without experiencing any issues.

If I was reading a book as a teen my eyes would eventually get a little fuzzy, but we're talking margins here.

Now I'm close to 50 and a confluence of things have hit me. I figured out that I have a crippling case of ADD (who knew?) and the medication has been amazing. I really want to code more and have so many ideas and things I want (and financially speaking need) to work on, but my eyes are taking a tremendous amount of strain, so in the end a whole portion of the gains feels as if they're being wasted.

The old brain is at least still firing, when that begins to go I'm not sure what I'm going to have left.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-15 15:24:39+00:00
Yup.

New information, new story. If I'm wrong, I promptly admit it. I'm weird, that way, apparently. I guess what I'm supposed to do, is refuse to admit fault, to the end. Sorry to spoil the fun. I didn't know the rules.

Funny how none of the worldly cynics, here, figured that out (I didn't, and I thought I was worldly and cynical). When I mentioned it to my cabbie friend, he popped it out instantly. It's a well-known issue, around here. The local airports and train stations have posters about it. I admit that I've seen the posters, but they didn't register, when I first heard the story. It seems the same folks have figured out how to ply their trade with modern ride-hailing apps.

Have a great day!
by perfectstorm | 2025-06-15 15:25:39+00:00
another anecdote taking Lyft - they showed me $10.76 price for a trip to the airport when Uber showed $21. obviously i called Lyft and they placed a temporary charge on my credit card for $10.76. Once the driver dropped me off, i noticed that the base charge jumped to $16.76 + airport fees and my total with tips came to a bit over $27. I contacted Lyft and they denied and claimed that they always showed me $16.76. smh. i have proof from my credit card that they placed a hold for $10.76 and yet they refused to adjust the price.
by kuberwastaken | 2025-06-15 15:26:10+00:00
> You generated pretty much ~all of this with Claude Haha no, it was a reworked version of an older image format I found that I modified to fit this, yes, there was AI assisted coding involved in the process but it wasn't a "make me an image format that does x"

>what's an "attention map"? with maximum charity, if we had some sort of attention-as-in-LLM-like structure precached, how would it apply beyond one model? By “attention map” I meant a visual representation of where a model can focuses its “attention” when analyzing an image — basically, a heatmap highlighting important regions that influence the model’s output. It isn't something that is very useful now but might be.

> You reinvented EXIF/JPEG metadata with naivete Partly true (at least for now) the core idea was to experiment with alternative metadata or feature embedding, not to replace well-established standards. It's not where I NEED it to be yet but as far as metadata usecases go, it's pretty cool.

> Your setup instructions use UNIX commands up until they require running a Windows batch file It's easier to set windows up to directly open other file formats, it's just a thing (and I'm on windows - so)
by Retric | 2025-06-15 15:26:36+00:00
There’s a big difference between mostly the same and actually the same. A sperm that doesn’t move is extremely unlikely to fertilize an egg. Thus, 1 is a test for fitness among a tiny percentage of total sperm but still a large number.

Length of survival is dependent on factors largely put side of sperms control, but sperm lifespan does test for massive genetic abnormality.

So yes 99% never get a chance to compete, but meaningful competition still occurs.
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-15 15:27:16+00:00
>It's off-topic here.

Per the guidelines, this is not exactly true. The guidelines make exceptions for political stories that are "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

It is up for debate whether stories about a country the entire tech industry and VC apparatus relies on sliding into autocracy is "evidence of some interesting phenomenon". An argument can certainly be made. If the bond markets are wobbling and tech stocks are being manipulated due to said phenomena I think it's silly to claim it's off-topic as a whole. Someone said a few years back that nearly half of the yc batch were non-US. It would be ridiculous to claim that the stories that make them reconsider starting a company in the US is strictly "off-topic".

Based on the guidelines, I see no reason why the official moderators would object to stories that show the naked intent of the executive branch to destroy any checks on its power coming from all other branches of government and consistently displaying admiration for autocratic goverments and leaders across the world while doing so, as stories that show evidence of US regime change would be "evidence of some new interesting phenomenon".

I think the main reason is not the stories being off-topic by themselves but moreso that the moderators believe they will trigger flamewars and low-value comments, so they act preemptively, as flamebait is also against guidelines. This clearly shows that the moderators do not trust the HN community with these stories. This is not surprising as "previous behavior predicts future behavior" is an oft-repeated YC adage. If those threads were filled with substantive comments from lawyers, fired federal workers, scientists, immigrants personally affected by the policies, I think the moderators would reconsider their status.

I can't help wonder though if and when it becomes clear that the longterm and second-order effects of the current admin have detrimentaly dented the US's innovative edge, whether the HN moderators will be satified with their muting of the discussion when they look back on their moderation. As Saul Bellow once said, "if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."
by princevegeta89 | 2025-06-15 15:27:23+00:00
I have a very extensive experience with both Ruby on Rails and Elixir/Phoenix. Also ended up building large full-stack apps on either framework.

In the beginning when Ruby on Rails said hello to me, I instantly fell in love with it and the simplicity and the natural semantics that flow with it. It was absurdly easy to write new features and ship them to production. As the codebase grew and the team grew we started running into situations where APIs broke, or to trace the workflow of things in terms of finding where methods came from, finding parent modules of modules, and finding their parents, configuration, and I started to note a general lack of IDE autocomplete and type-safety.

Then after a few years I jumped ship to Elixir and if felt like a breath of clean air when I had to learn FP. Everything was simple enough to understand. Performance knocks Elixir, Node, Python and any other interpreted stack out of the water. The Phoenix framework was, and is said to be thoughtfully designed and although there was no IDE support, we still had Elixir LS which was great enough to provide realtime guidance, linting and type safety during compile time. I was able to ship a very large app into production and it was bulletproof. The problem with Elixir was our other engineers struggled to shift away from Node, or any other stacks they already knew. They found the entire FP world to be weird. Hell, I found it weird too at times. Simple mutations of maps and arrays, that would be trivial in Ruby ended up being so complex in Elixir. In the end it felt like my team was not on the same page. I guess Elixir would be great if you ran a 3-person team or something, but since we were not, we got back to Ruby. In today's world though, I am largely looking at Go, for a backend system. IDE support is up there with Java, and the ecosystem is old and mature enough to find any package that you look for. Performance is C-like and learning curve is lean.

Just my 2c with all these platforms.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-15 15:27:33+00:00
no. in the modern web world you often have persistent client server connections, which make it a distributed system out the gate. the most inefficient way to deal with this is to go stateless, and without smart architecture to deal with unreliable connection, it's really your best choice (and, it's fine).

since BEAM gives you smart disconnection handling, web stuff built in elixir gives you the ability to build on client-server distributed without too much headache and with good defaults.

but look, if you want a concrete example of why this sucks. how much do you hate it when you push changes to your PR on github and the CI checks on browser tab are still not updated with the new CI that has been triggered? you've got to refresh first.

if they had built github in elixir instead of ruby would almost certainly have this sync isdur solved. in maybe two or three lines of code.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-15 15:27:44+00:00
> If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open

AFAICT this is a complete article of faith. Or insofar as it's true, it's true because doing it in the open allows other stakeholders to criticize and shape its direction – which seems precisely the dialogue that Jensen seems allergic to (makes sense given his incentives, of course)
by brookst | 2025-06-15 15:28:42+00:00
Pottery of the time was low-fired and did not generally reach vitrification, and it was not glazed with a silica-based glaze that would seal it.

So over time this pottery would absorb water. And especially low-fired bits could totally break down.

Source: amateur ceramicist, and I have first-hand experience with cone 6 clay (vitrifies at 1200c) bisc-fired to cone 04 (1060c) and crumbling to bits when left in water too long.
by kuberwastaken | 2025-06-15 15:28:55+00:00
Totally fair points, but the idea isn’t to stop at edge maps or simple overlays. This was meant as an early step toward expanding what an image can carry with it for AI workflows.

It’s definitely not finished, more like a poc right now for storing richer, AI-relevant metadata in a portable way. Appreciate you for taking the time to check it out.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-15 15:29:02+00:00
Unless they cancel the ride, and you ignore the notification.

I was talking to someone recently, and they were telling me about how they got a (Lyft, I think) ride from the airport (JFK), and the driver picked them up, and said that the ride had been canceled (as they got into the car), but that for $20, he'd take them where they were going (I assume the ride was less than $20).

Apparently, this is fairly common. There's been a couple of articles about how the Uber and Lyft drivers around JFK and LaGuardia have learned to game the system. They can also conspire to drive up the pricing.
by timschmidt | 2025-06-15 15:29:10+00:00
> A long history of researching and understanding photosynthesis went into developing and maximizing the efficiency of solar panels.

I don't think that's accurate. Some of the very first semiconductors were observed to exhibit the photoelectric effect. Nowhere in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Research_in_solar_c... will you find mention of chloroplasts. Optimizing solar cells has mostly been a materials science problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-inspired_computing on the other hand "trace[es] back to 1936 and the first description of an abstract computer" and we have literally dissected, probed, and measured countless neurons in the course of attempting to figure out how they work to replicate them within the computer.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-06-15 15:29:29+00:00
For the first time in my several decades, I live in walking distance to amenities (e.g. bank, hardware store, local & fast -foods).

Literally across the street from my neighborhood is among "the best local pizzarias," and I'll still offer to pay for the entire order if somebody else orders / picks-up ("tip them well" I'll usually suggest). I just don't want to talk on the phone (and don't use apps).

...Americuhly, the usual neighbor still drives (it's like 1000m, round-trip).
by echelon | 2025-06-15 15:29:32+00:00
This is a silly question.

It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.

The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
by isaacimagine | 2025-06-15 15:30:59+00:00
No mention of Decision Transformers or Trajectory Transformers? Both are offline approaches that tend to do very well at long-horizon tasks, as they bypass the credit assignment problem by virtue of having an attention mechanism.

Most RL researchers consider these approaches not to be "real RL", as they can't assign credit outside the context window, and therefore can't learn infinite-horizon tasks. With 1m+ context windows, perhaps this is less of an issue in practice? Curious to hear thoughts.

DT: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345

TT: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02039
by imperialdrive | 2025-06-15 15:30:59+00:00
Finally gave Claude a go after trying OpenAI a while and feeling pretty _meh_ about the coding ability... Wow, it's a whole other level or two ahead, at least for my daily flavor which is PowerShell. No way a double-digit amount of jobs aren't at stake. This stuff feels like it is really starting to take off. Incredible time to be in tech, but you gotta be clever and work hard every day to stay on the ride. Many folks got comfortable and/or lazy. AI may be a kick in the pants. It is for me anyway.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-06-15 15:31:58+00:00
Didn't mean to wind you up! Totally wasn't my intent. Looking over your site, I feel like my point is pretty strongly reflected by your work, though.

While models have been trained to deliver high-level impressions (with increasing attention to detailed problem domains), one-shot control is still relatively poor, and they lack the fundamental skill of a trained artist. There are chasms between what you think you're prompting, what the text encoder understands, and how the model interprets that input, with the resulting effect of a professional musician intentionally playing badly... hands not excepted.

For instance, in "Mermaid Disciplinary Committee" on your site, every hand has a deformity or finger count inconsistency. In "Spheron", the hands have no variation and suffer from cross-subject cloning (even 4o - look at the shield-carrier).

That's what I meant about creativity and being specific. Try prompting for three people holding up certain fingers on one or both hands. Start with the index, progress to pinky. Ask it to show you a hand gripping things, rotated in different orientations. Prompt for a hand with 3 fingers, then 6 fingers, then no fingers. Ask for gang signs or shadow puppets, pinching something, with fewer or extra digits. The illusion breaks down quickly.

This is a space I'm working in, retraining text encoders and diffusion models to understand the same things first year arts students learn. With how limited and poisoned most models are, it's been a huge effort.
by Uehreka | 2025-06-15 15:32:02+00:00
Third blind man touching the elephant here: the other commenters are wrong! it’s not about bit depth or linear-to-gamma, it’s the fact that the human eye can detect way more “stops” (the word doesn’t make sense you have to just look it up) of brightness (I guess you could say “a wider range of brightness”, but photography people all say “stops”) than the camera, and the camera can detect more stops of brightness than current formats can properly represent!

So you have to decide whether to lose the darker parts of the image or the brighter parts of the image you’re capturing. Either way, you’re losing information.

(In reality we’re all kind of right)
by abeppu | 2025-06-15 15:32:59+00:00
I think this means you're not longer optimizing for the right thing. My understanding is that max is important because your value of taking action A from state S includes the presumption that you'll pick the best available action under the policy from each successive state you visit. If you swap in some PDF, you're asking what's the value of taking action A if I then act by random sampling from that distribution thereafter.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-15 15:33:01+00:00
What graphs are you seeing? This is what the article says:

> Radiocarbon dating suggests the ridges [farming furrows or similar] were initially constructed roughly 1,000 years ago. They were maintained and used for 600 years after that.

Wikipedia says this:

> Erik Thorvaldsson (c. 950 – c. 1003), known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer [...]

> Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE

["Erik the Red"]

And this:

> The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.

> The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries

> The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850

["Little Ice Age"]

And this:

> The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE.

["Medieval Warm Period"]

The article would appear to suggest that the farm was established near the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period and abandoned near the beginning of the Little Ice Age... which seems incredibly unsurprising.

> They would have been farming here during a cool period.

I see no indication of that.
Show HN: I Built an Interactive Spreadsheet
by Kushal6070 | 2025-06-15 15:33:04+00:00
Hey all. I built an interactive spreadsheet, making it easy to run AI automations. Instead of combining multiple tools like Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, etc, it replaces all of them in a single table.

Currently solving for sales and marketing automations to start with, which makes a direct, affordable alternative to Clay. Would love to get feedback from the community.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-15 15:33:22+00:00
Just remember that 4 of the top 10 Top500 systems run on AMD Instinct cards, based on the latest June 2025 list announced at ISC Hamburg.

NVIDIA has a moat for smaller systems, but that is not true for clusters.

As long as you have a team to work with the hardware you have, performance beats mindshare.
by chongli | 2025-06-15 15:34:02+00:00
Board exams are fine. You can sit thousands of candidates for those. The issue is residency slots which are the main bottleneck. Why should a surgeon with 20 years of experience working in Mumbai be forced to become a resident alongside fresh-faced med school grads in the US? It’s a huge problem when it’s cheaper and safer to fly to India for surgery than to get the same surgery in the US (from a less experienced surgeon).

It’s the tyranny of the status quo. Milton Friedman was complaining about this more than 50 years ago.

[1] https://youtu.be/UmVrfbfKBIk
by ViktorRay | 2025-06-15 15:34:08+00:00
“A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people?”

This was written by the famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy in 1908. It was in a famous letter he wrote that Mahatma Gandhi later republished in his newspaper.

Considering the British East India Trading Company, which was a corporation, enslaved the country of India for a hundred years….I think it makes sense India feels an “emotional reaction” when some corporation “steps on its toes.”

As an American president once said:

“Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice…you can’t get fooled again!”
by KineticLensman | 2025-06-15 15:34:11+00:00
> It's only because of these restrictions that it is so obvious when writing is or isn't poetry. These features and forms can streched, but unlike lisp they cannot be completely redefined.

I disagree here. To take rhyming as an example. It's possible to have a poem where every line rhymes AND a poem where there is no rhyme at all. It's not as simple as saying 'okay the lines in this text don't rhyme so it can't be a poem'. The same is true of the things like spacing and meter. These are all massively variable, and the result doesn't even have to be bound by the usual rules of grammar. English - or any other natural language - is much more variable than Lisp.

For me the defining feature of poetry is that the form and nature of the language used in a text may suggest meaning over and above what the individual words say. This definition is subjective, and suggests that the poetry is in the eye of the beholder, but is more honest than a simplistic checklist of features to look out for.
by sshine | 2025-06-15 15:34:46+00:00
You're right, when I revisit this thought, there is nothing unfortunate about it.

I've re-read https://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/revision-history.html and can say that my initial reaction was just fomo'ing over my lack of early exposure to Lisp. It seems that what ESR omitted from his Jargon File was mainly stuff that made sense if you were logged into a specific set of PDP-10 machines at MIT.