MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleEntity | 2025-06-02 02:56:22+00:00
Back in the day, when Blender still had an openGL python module[0], I made a pie menu prototype without too much fuss.

With Vulcan, with what I've seen, this would have been a major endeavor just to get to the point where you can get a canvas so you can put some pixels on the screen as you have to do a whole lot of state setup and bookkeeping. Not really something you can wrap as a relatively simple python API for someone to do quick experiments with.

I did some other completely random, definitely not recommended, stuff in Blender like this camera motion tracking thing which would rotate the viewport as the camera moved and have the camera video as the background (also using the python GL module) to reproduce this paper I found on the interwebs. I also found the Clippy sprite sheet but decided that was probably a bridge too far even though it wouldn't have been too hard.

So, yeah, if you want your program to be crazy extensible a simple API is probably the best. Might not matter too much these days as you can just get the robots to do the hard work.

[0] I heard they were going to rip it out but haven't checked if they ever did
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-02 02:57:23+00:00
> As others have mentioned, it would be interesting if the author stuck in and got past the tamper checks to see if it would work as normal. Oh well!

That's the kind of thing a lot of guys in suits would take very seriously. After all you have to connect it to the banking network to see if it works as normal. Not advised.

It could also lead to lowlife types putting pressure on you to help them do that. Not the kind of thing to brag about.
by theamk | 2025-06-02 02:57:40+00:00
Advice to the author: attach the remote to the wall. Some remotes come with its own bracket, but if not then some double-sided tape would work. Author liked old fixed regulator, so they should be fine with new one being fixed too.

This would completely eliminate half of the problems - no more lost remotes, no more lost batteries. This will also go a great way towards "access in the dark" thing as author will start to develop muscle memory on where "1" button is.

For more "advanced" things, get a universal fan control. Those often have more distinctive buttons, and if you can find the one with plastic buttons (not rubber ones), then you can melt some of them for this super distinct feel in the dark.

In other words, don't just be angry, do something to fix. It's pretty easy in this case.
by edwin | 2025-06-02 02:58:40+00:00
A few take-aways from a study we ran (~800 consumer queries, repeated over a few days):

* AI answers shift a lot. In classic search a page-1 spot can linger for weeks; in our runs, the AI result set often changed overnight.

* Google’s new “AI Mode” and ChatGPT gave the same top recommendation only ~47 % of the time on identical queries.

* ChatGPT isn’t even consistent with itself. Results differ sharply depending on whether it falls back to live retrieval or sticks to its training data.

* When it does retrieve, ChatGPT leans heavily on publications it has relationships with (NYPost and People.com for product recs) instead of sites like rtings.com

Writeup: https://amplifying.ai/blog/why-ai-product-recommendations-ke...

Data: https://amplifying.ai/research/consumer-products
by sbrother | 2025-06-02 02:59:49+00:00
So the short answer is that this space is so early still that there’s plenty of space for more competition. But currently both of those market leaders are targeted at enterprise and have little to no penetration of the SMB/self-serve market. Ellm has a self serve onboarding flow, a $20/month monitoring only tier, and a $100/mo self-serve optimization tier — none of which require scheduling a call with a sales team.
by UltraSane | 2025-06-02 03:00:20+00:00
This article [1] talks about a 2U server containing 40 1PB drives which would be 40PB/server * 20 servers/rack = 800PB per rack.

102 32TB hard drives in a 4U 102 bay JBOD would is the densest magnetic storage can get. If we can put 8 of these in a rack leaving 10U for switches and servers that would be only 26PB per rack. So these 1PB SSDs would be up to 30 times denser.

[1] https://www.storagereview.com/news/e2-ssd-form-factor
by asidd24 | 2025-06-02 03:00:27+00:00
Hi HN, I've been working on a tool that uses ComfyUI and generative AI models to create product photography. The idea is to take a simple product image (e.g., with a transparent background) and allow users to generate various lifestyle or studio-style shots without a physical photoshoot. It's built on ComfyUI, leveraging its node-based system for flexibility in the image generation pipeline. The current version is hosted on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Jaroliya/AI-Product-Photograph...

I'm interested in a few things: Technical feedback on the approach or potential improvements to the ComfyUI workflow for this specific application. Thoughts on the current capabilities and limitations of generative AI for practical e-commerce visual needs. Any interesting challenges or solutions others have found when working with ComfyUI or similar generative tools for specific output-driven tasks. Play around with different prompts. More elaborate the better. Still early days, but keen to see if this kind of tool resonates and how it could be made more robust or useful. Would love to hear your thoughts and any constructive criticism.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-02 03:01:32+00:00
> Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while.

You haven't heard as much about sea drones because Russia was forced to stop naval operations close to Ukraine by them, after losing 1/3 of the Black Sea Fleet.

Though they still occasionally manage to make headlines doing other things, https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-naval-drones-shoo...
by sb8244 | 2025-06-02 03:01:44+00:00
I made this for my high school chemistry project. We made it in the morning so it would be ready for our afternoon class.

It was drying in the chemistry back office and there must have been a draft. It exploded during a silent study hall.

Somehow they let us remake it for class that afternoon. We tried to put it on the floor as a joke, but our teacher was wearing sandals that day (no lab). She wasn't happy about it.

I originally got the idea (and prank idea) the previous year from a retiring chemistry teacher.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-02 03:05:31+00:00
Well yes but the point was kinda moot because it was easily possible to add an opensearch provider and every self-respecting search engine supports that. Why wouldn't they? It makes it easy for users to adopt them and it's not hard, just some boilerplate code.

So the URL entry box wasn't really needed for the main purpose. It's nice to use the feature to use with things that aren't literally search engines though. Or to tweak the URL. I wonder, is the AI avoidance thing very effective? Not that I use Google directly but still.. (I use SearXNG as meta search)
by dostick | 2025-06-02 03:07:19+00:00
Figma has been for a while now designed and built for its investors rather than users. The biggest crime is Figma itself (Figma “design”) which is being redesigned over time to not improve but make it even worse with design decisions that are antithesis of good UIUX practice. And new generations of designers who haven’t seen much else, now take Figma’s design decisions as norm and use that in their work.

Nobody asked for figjam and slides, those are created to build growth for investors. Effort spent on those products should have been spent on fixing Figma “design” product.

They employ hundreds in customer support. Figma forums is a customer defusal machine giving a sense of attention with “thank you for the feedback” and nothing ever gets fixed.

What can you expect from a product that was a result of arbitrary choice by a guy who needed a use case for their real-time JS communication library.
by slavboj | 2025-06-02 03:07:20+00:00
Workstations routinely accommodate much more than that. The "under $1K" price referred to a 768gb build (12x 64gb sticks on a Skylake based system), you could also do a dual-socket version with twice that, at the cost of messing with NUMA (which could be a pro or a con for throughput depending on how you're spreading bandwidth between nodes).
by almostgotcaught | 2025-06-02 03:07:50+00:00
Sibling comments laments (obliquely) formal methods aren't more ubiquitous. The reason is not cost. It can also be cost but usually things that cost a lot people sometimes still want (lambos, ferraris) but almost no one even wants formal methods. Here's the reason:

> For example, the formal proofs of the seL4 kernel establish amongst other things that the implementation C code precisely matches an abstract model of the kernel. This is a really powerful and impressive result, but to understand it, you have to study the formal model in detail.

No not the complexity of understanding the abstract model - the fact that you have agree with the abstract model, the fact that the abstract model has to be a good abstract model of your system. This is what everyone says about TLA+, that sure you can prove a raft spec has no deadlock but you can't extract an implementation from the same spec. Yes I know some proof systems do actually let you extract (fsharp) but they are few and far between because proof languages are to programming languages as the NBA is to college ball: a whole different league of precision/specification (so lots of things cannot be translated).

I don't have answer/solution. Not saying that I do. The article is good though, reads like any basic sales journey (which isn't a bad thing).
by jimbokun | 2025-06-02 03:09:01+00:00
Andor and Rogue One are better prequels than the prequel trilogy in that they better match the tone of the original Star Wars and do a better job filling in the parts of the back story viewers care about.

How did the Rebellion start? How was it organized? What led to building the Death Star? How did they get the plans to give to Leia to give to Luke?

The only part of the prequel trilogy relevant to the story in A New Hope is the final battle between Anakin and Obi Wan.
by at0mic22 | 2025-06-02 03:10:10+00:00
Think Ukraine had its own airforce at the beginning, and for 30 years nobody stopped it from modernizing or acquiring new aircrafts.

Besides that, I doubt the US would have ever sold a single F35 to Ukraine just because of revealing radio-emission and reflection patterns to russian air defense, basically drawing F35 useless for future usage against Russia.
by twoodfin | 2025-06-02 03:11:21+00:00
I mean exploring why the Empire builds the Death Star in the first place.

There’s a version of Andor that does a bit more than hint that the Death Star is the ultimate (and ultimately doomed) metaphorical reply to Nemik’s manifesto.

In the final analysis, the Death Star is not about power. It’s not about control. It’s a choice, meant to be the last choice for the Rebellion: Submit, or lose everything you love, everything you were, are, will be, in an instant.

But, in the end, it’s this totalizing impulse that is the Empire’s critical weakness. There are always cracks in the edifice of tyranny. Other choices.
by shift8 | 2025-06-02 03:12:04+00:00
anything is more accurate than the llms at generating images. chatgpt, google gemini, all of them... they're not optimized for image generation. it's why veo is an entirely different model from google for example. and even veo isn't the best video model either. people dedicated to images and video are just spending more time here (such as black forest labs). as a result, those specialized models are better.
by jimbokun | 2025-06-02 03:15:04+00:00
I don't think any of the politics from the prequel trilogy lands. It's too cartoony for that.

Whereas Senator Mothma's story arc had me engrossed from beginning to end. From the complexities of a Senator's social life, to her financial difficulties, to the medieval like politics of marrying off her daughter for the sake of a political and financial alliance, to her risking more and more, to her brave and powerful speech condemning the empire.

There is nothing in the prequels that hits nearly as hard. Because it's all dialog the audience isn't paying attention to because the Jedi stuff is more engaging, and because the political stakes never seem that great.
by sync | 2025-06-02 03:18:06+00:00
Definitely a bit buggy but looks promising! Try the onboarding flow yourself as a real user (also on mobile!) - particularly leaving the site to research a competitor that is mentioned and then coming back (I got kicked out and had to start from the beginning, at which point it just paywalled me)

It also says I have canceled my subscription at the bottom of the paywall when I never had one. Still, these are little things and I think the bones are theee
by tocs3 | 2025-06-02 03:18:43+00:00
Synthetic aperture sonar has been around for some time. I was first exposed to multibeam bathymetry 25ish years ago and an acoustic camera at least 15 years ago. Maybe this is something with better specs?

“You forget that it’s not a photo, but an image re-created from sound,” Gini says.

This is something that always struck me about some of the sonar images. They can look a lot like photos but there are defensively differences. For instance in the picture at the top of the article it looks like a photo taken from directly above the wreck. In fact the sonar was above the top of the image pointing down to the bottom of the image (evident by the shadow). Sonar is pretty amazing.

One thing I would really like to see is this same tech used in air. You should (I think) be able to get similar results.
by mmooss | 2025-06-02 03:18:52+00:00
> Ukrainians are not required to (nor will they) sit back and take it out of abstract MAD force balance concerns.

Ukraine has very strong interests, but they have in fact restrained themselves from doing things that will provoke a war involving NATO. The US government has put many restrictions on Ukraine that Ukraine has abided by.

MAD isn't "abstract", if by abstract you mean somehow unreal. It has kept the humanity from being destroyed for generations, and the US and Russia invest a lot in maintaining it.
by echelon | 2025-06-02 03:19:10+00:00
1. From 2010 - 2023(ish), Google slept on DeepMind and allowed OpenAI to steal the narrative. That led to a boom in AI development outside of the Google labs. This is akin to Microsoft's loss of internet/web. A half dozen trillion dollar companies emerged from Microsoft's stumbling, and we're likely to see the same with Google's missteps.

2. After the rise of so many AI startups in the 2020 - 2023 period, the end of Google was being forecast by many. Most of Google's revenue comes through search, and everyone (Nadella, Altman, investors, et al.) were talking about the incremental value of search - Google had to retain 100%, and other players just had to grow.

3. The Google founders, sensing a major blow to their cash cow, took a break from their zeppelin startups and came back. They gave Deep Mind more autonomy, took a knife to product culture, and empowered and encouraged everyone to innovate. The whole company has been re-focused and told they must win AI or face extinction.

4. As of 2025, Google has been killing it on their releases. Gemini, Veo, ... you name it, and they've got industry-leading developments that out-perform and undercut the competition. It's beginning to look like not only will Google not die, but that Google could wipe the field with their AI superiority. It looks like they'll be able to dance circles around OpenAI.

The looming threats are (1) DOJ antitrust eroding Google search ingress and (2) other players stealing Search TAM without the new AI markets being able to replace the search / ads revenue.

Any non-Google players would be wise to put antitrust pressure on Google. Even after the current case ends, they should try to strip away defaults on web and mobile. Stop Google from being able to deploy AI through Google Search, Android, and Chrome. Make Google use the same word of mouth marketing that the rest have to.

It'll be an exciting series of battles ahead.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-06-02 03:21:57+00:00
Month or two ago, we had a bunch of these eugenics people down here in Austin and it really pissed me off. Eugenics and racism go hand in hand, though the eugenics people will loudly proclaim that it's not about race, it's about making better human beings. Having read up on the history of Nazi Germany when I was younger, I am unable to separate the eugenicists and the racists in my mind.

Good luck with the future world, kids. You're gonna need it. Fortunately, I'll be long gone by then.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-02 03:22:50+00:00
The RF communications they use are not robust in so-called denied environments, so it is relatively easy to severe the link with EW even if it is not that sophisticated. The use of fiber is a workaround that gives the drone a reliable control link. It does not protect the drone against direct EW (e.g. attacks against the onboard systems).

Robust RF communication for denied environments is tech that exists, it just doesn’t seem to be present on the Ukraine/Russia battlefield. This is likely because so much of the drone tech is derived from consumer platforms and both sides have limited access to sophisticated military-grade RF silicon.
by mmooss | 2025-06-02 03:24:00+00:00
Professionals in the field are not so sure, and any understanding of the history of warfare reveals that undesireable wars often cannot be stopped by the parties if they get into the wrong situations.

Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.

The US government and others have taken the risk very seriously and Ukraine has restrained itself from doing things that might provoke a Russia-NATO war.

You are also omitting the Russian perspective, which sees NATO in Ukraine as potentially existential.
by theamk | 2025-06-02 03:25:29+00:00
One of the hardest things in Arduino-based designs is power savings, and this one is not an exception.

This design has no power saving, which means it will only last few hours tops on the batteries. This could be improved, but the current design (ESP8266 + analog IR sensor) does not really work with low power.

A good start would be to put a 2nd low-power micro on IR encoder that'd (1) count pulses (2) wake up ESP8266. This will allow one to keep complex stuff (audio out) using Arduino libraries, while small piece of hand-written code will take care low power stuff.

A more advanced design would be to get rid of ESP8266 and switch to low power MCU. If you keep audio uncompressed, a small MCU (STM8 or AVR8) is perfectly capable of playing some speech... and it will only take microamps in sleep/sense mode. You likely won't be able to use as many pre-made libraries however, so this is substantially more development time.
by stevenwoo | 2025-06-02 03:26:38+00:00
Related trivia (he mentions he worked on low budget shows prior to this), 650 million dollar budget for show's two seasons or 26-27 million per episode: https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/andor-tony-gilro...

For reference, Rings of Power, Jupiter's Legacy and Citadel (US version) cost about twice as much per episode on Amazon, and Game of Thrones on HBO started at five to six million per episode and went up to 15 million by the final season.
by jimbokun | 2025-06-02 03:26:58+00:00
> it does make you wonder if he's just toying with Obi-Wan when he meets him like 3 days later...

I disagree.

If you set aside the difference in special effects capabilities, Vader is clearly being cautious in the light saber fight with Obi Wan on the Death Star. And we know that's because Obi Wan kicked his ass on Mustafar (THE KENOBI MINI SERIES NEVER HAPPENED I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT). And then Obi Wan never actually intends to fight Vader in earnest. He intends to become a force ghost all along. Still one step ahead of Anakin's understanding of the force.
by csomar | 2025-06-02 03:28:06+00:00
My guess is they probably don't care because their pricing is really low. If you want to self-host, for any serious company, you need a very resilient setup (multiple servers) because you can't afford to have your "authz" down. If your headscale is down, so is everything in your organization. $6/month/user is then relatively cheap. The savings on self-hosting will be minimal.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-06-02 03:29:22+00:00
I honestly don't know what you think quoting my entire original post achieves, other than making it clear that I did in fact mention "web of trust", thus undermining your claim that I'm a stooge for big tech.

I wouldn't let that bother you, though. Life must be exciting when you know that everyone else is secretly hellbent on authoritarianism.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-02 03:29:48+00:00
It's woven through strategic thinking in the 50s and 60s -- a nuclear delivery triad ensures any adversary that's able to neutralize one leg will still be held under MAD and therefore unlikely to launch a first strike.

Because technology was rapidly advancing, it was unclear whether any breakthrough (e.g. high altitude SAMs, etc.) might suddenly nullify one leg.

If that were the only leg, the game theory response would be for the nullifier to immediately launch a first strike, to take advantage of their no-doubt temporary superiority.
by Lammy | 2025-06-02 03:31:59+00:00
> Am I misreading the docs?

Yes, but don't feel bad, because this seems designed to be confusing and easy to overlook. See the privacy policy: https://tailscale.com/privacy-policy#information-we-collect-...

“When you use the Tailscale Solution, we collect limited metadata regarding your device used to access the Tailscale Solution, such as: the device name; relevant operating system type; host name; IP address; cryptographic public key; user agent (where applicable); language settings; date and time of access to the Tailscale Solution; logs describing connections and containing statistics about data sent to and from other devices (“Inter-Node Traffic Logs”); and version of the Tailscale Solution installed.” (emphasis mine)

Here's a Tailscale client startup with telemetry enabled, which is the silent default:

2025/04/13 17:02:07 logtail started 2025/04/13 17:02:07 Program starting: v1.82.0, Go 1.24.2: []string{"/usr/local/bin/tailscaled", "-port", "41641", "-tun", "tailscale0", "-statedir", "/var/db/tailscale"} 2025/04/13 17:02:07 LogID: b933623d2f5012930c72af6593b1a94f36749b5495076c937bde51dd620d21e5 2025/04/13 17:02:07 logpolicy: using system state directory "/var/db/tailscale" 2025/04/13 17:02:07 dns: using dns.openresolvManager 2025/04/13 17:02:07 ifconfig destroy: exit status 1 ifconfig: interface tailscale0 does not exist 2025/04/13 17:02:07 wgengine.NewUserspaceEngine(tun "tailscale0") ...

Versus the same client with the `--no-logs-no-support` opt-out argument added, where the very first line (not to mention the argument name itself) is some FUD trying to scare one into reverting to anti-privacy mode:

2025/04/13 16:29:20 You have disabled logging. Tailscale will not be able to provide support. 2025/04/13 16:29:20 logtail started 2025/04/13 16:29:20 Program starting: v1.82.0, Go 1.24.2: []string{"/usr/local/bin/tailscaled", "-port", "41641", "-tun", "tailscale0", "-statedir", "/var/db/tailscale", "--no-logs-no-support"} 2025/04/13 16:29:20 LogID: b933623d2f5012930c72af6593b1a94f36749b5495076c937bde51dd620d21e5 2025/04/13 16:29:20 logpolicy: using system state directory "/var/db/tailscale" 2025/04/13 16:29:20 dns: using dns.openresolvManager 2025/04/13 16:29:20 ifconfig destroy: exit status 1 ifconfig: interface tailscale0 does not exist 2025/04/13 16:29:20 wgengine.NewUserspaceEngine(tun "tailscale0") ...
by ericpruitt | 2025-06-02 03:32:58+00:00
I adapted the same moonphase logic for the status line program I use with dwm. Did you run into any discrepancies with using January 0 vs December 31st? Some of the translations of Walker's as noted in my comment at https://github.com/ericpruitt/emus/blob/ea059239845ee6d57614... seem to produce differing results.