MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Uncorrelated | 2025-06-04 20:13:27+00:00
Other commenters here are correct that the LIDAR is too low-resolution to be used as the primary source for the depth maps. In fact, iPhones use four-ish methods, that I know of, to capture depth data, depending on the model and camera used. Traditionally these depth maps were only captured for Portrait photos, but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.

1. The original method uses two cameras on the back, taking a picture from both simultaneously and using parallax to construct a depth map, similar to human vision. This was introduced on the iPhone 7 Plus, the first iPhone with two rear cameras (a 1x main camera and 2x telephoto camera.) Since the depth map depends on comparing the two images, it will naturally be limited to the field of view of the narrower lens.

2. A second method was later used on iPhone XR, which has only a single rear camera, using focus pixels on the sensor to roughly gauge depth. The raw result is low-res and imprecise, so it's refined using machine learning. See: https://www.lux.camera/iphone-xr-a-deep-dive-into-depth/

3. An extension of this method was used on an iPhone SE that didn't even have focus pixels, producing depth maps purely based on machine learning. As you would expect, such depth maps have the least correlation to reality, and the system could be fooled by taking a picture of a picture. See: https://www.lux.camera/iphone-se-the-one-eyed-king/

4. The fourth method is used for selfies on iPhones with FaceID; it uses the TrueDepth camera's 3D scanning to produce a depth map. You can see this with the selfie in the article; it has a noticeably fuzzier and low-res look.

You can also see some other auxiliary images in the article, which use white to indicate the human subject, glasses, hair, and skin. Apple calls these portrait effects mattes and they are produced using machine learning.

I made an app that used the depth maps and portrait effects mattes from Portraits for some creative filters. It was pretty fun, but it's no longer available. There are a lot of novel artistic possibilities for depth maps.
by ursaguild | 2025-06-04 20:13:41+00:00
Ingesting documents and using natural language to search your org docs with an internal assistant sounds more like a good use case for RAG[1]. Agents are best when you need to autonomously plan and execute a series of actions[2]. You can combine the two but knowing when depends on the use case.

I really like the OpenAI approach and how they outlined the thought process of when and how to use agents.

[1] https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/retrieval-augmented-gen...

[2] https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/building-ai-agents-with...
by tempestn | 2025-06-04 20:13:51+00:00
One thing I'll say for the current era is that it has made a lot of such fiction appear more realistic in hindsight.

Another example is the Silo book series, recently adapted to a series on Apple TV. I remember reading those books thinking it was insane than the people would act in such clearly counter-productive ways against their own interests, or that leadership would make up elaborate lies rather than just telling people the truth so they would see why certain actions were necessary. And now I'm watching the same plot a decade later, and it all hits home.
by ivape | 2025-06-04 20:14:45+00:00
Think project management might have been a toxic concept drilled into all of our heads from work. Make a list for the day if you need to, otherwise you should mostly know what needs to be done. De-programming all that bullshit is not the worst idea.

The eradication of Project management and all it's concepts is an ideology I'm hoping to push, along with the elimination of all of their jobs (PMs/Scrum/Agile) along with their toy software. Just an army of one at the moment though.
by biophysboy | 2025-06-04 20:14:48+00:00
Ehh.. I think you're overestimating how easy it will be to make science repeatable. Even if we perfectly execute experimental/statistical methods, biological experiments are not always going to be reproducible.

Edit: as a follow up (because I feel like I strawmanned you), I am just trying to say that p-hacking is not always malice or incompetence. Sometimes limited methods/theory miss confounding variables, sometimes labs lack resources, etc.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-04 20:14:56+00:00
>one that's likely to burn in the middle of the night when parked in a garage attached to my house.

ICE cars do this all the time. It doesn't make the news as much as a brand new product doing that.

Granted, the "EVs are less likely to start fires" take is also misleading. It's not usually doing a "like for like" comparison, because the majority of ICE fires are in very old and poorly maintained cars. Things like wires chewed through by rats, oil leaking out of gaskets and accumulating, stupid wiring for speakers, etc.

It will depend how gracefully the average EV ages when owned by the average person who ignores maintenance.

Keep in mind we've had old lithium ion batteries for two decades now, and we don't see your average phone store randomly burning down. Or those kiosks you can sell absolutely clapped out, old phones to. How often do those burn down?
by jmward01 | 2025-06-04 20:15:19+00:00
I agree with the need for proxies, but if they are used then there needs to be strong evidence that they are valid and studies should report both the proxy results and the implied quality/quantity of life results based on the proxy results. This would help to put the true potential impact into perspective AND help with followup studies that can more easily check the actual impacts observed verses the predicted impact based on the proxy values. Keeping the focus on quality/quantity at every stage, especially if it is just mentioning that there isn't a strong connection between the study objective and real utility, is deeply important.
by thrance | 2025-06-04 20:15:27+00:00
Indeed, we'll have one last neoliberal half-competent democratic leadership that will undo ~10% of the damage Trump did, and then we'll have the true final boss. The current fascist was ok, but the next fascist will be the reaaal deal.

Much suffering is to be found in the future. I find solace in the fact that all fascist states eventually crumble under the weight of their irrationality and incompetence.
by impossiblefork | 2025-06-04 20:15:30+00:00
This was a radical and fantastic idea of Palmerston's, which led to vigorous debate.

But the interest in Palmerston's case going against Portugal and hunting the slave ships with the intent of ending the slave trade. That's what he felt was England's interest.

Other things Palmerston cared about was that no country would end up powerful enough to dominate the entire world-- that's another thing he saw as part of England's interest. How sad to reduce interest to economic concerns or maintaining traditional alliances, when the idea was initially to justify this act of going against Portugal and the traditional alliance.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-04 20:15:43+00:00
most people just want to see blurry shit in the background and think it makes it professional. if you really want to see it fall down, put things in the foreground and set the focal point somewhere in the middle. it'll still get the background blurry, but it gets the foreground all wrong. i'm guessing the market willing to pay for "better" faked shallow depth of field would be pretty small.
by kragen | 2025-06-04 20:15:47+00:00
That's a perfectly reasonable request, but I didn't have them.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-5... is one, I guess. Aha, https://unherd.com/2024/11/j-d-vance-de-facto-prince-of-the-... says,

> Vance has described himself as a “reactionary” at war with the “regime”. He drops casual references to his personal friend Curtis Yarvin, and he’s fond of delivering thunderous pronouncements like “the universities are the enemy” (the title of a 2021 speech) and “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_JD_Vanc... looks like the jackpot, though, leading to https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...:

> Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Which links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMq1ZEcyztY.

And https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right... is entitled, "What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and others are learning from Curtis Yarvin and the New Right,":

> Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America—that history was headed in the wrong direction. “Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” [Yarvin's girlfriend] Laurenson said, just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others. “They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’” (...)

> “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on. “And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
by evklein | 2025-06-04 20:15:56+00:00
I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone I don't know? Scam. Car dearlership advertising 0% APR for 5 years on a brand new car? Scam. Even something like my workplace offering a new optional benefit - probably a scam. Did things always feel like this?
by yonran | 2025-06-04 20:16:01+00:00
What would it take for an individual or small business to run a version of this locally? To file, you need an MeF account with IRS; does the IRS grant those freely? And to import W2s and 1099s, it seems that there is a DataImportService interface but unfortunately there is no implementation and the APIs to IRS are not public.

If the Biden administration wanted to break the tax software oligopoly, they should have focused on making the government’s own interfaces open.
by mmooss | 2025-06-04 20:16:13+00:00
> But that can be said for most actions in a war. Multiple actions taken together is what changes the course of a war

Yes, great point.

> you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war

I wrote above,

By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.

And as you say, it brings the war home somewhat. Imagine the response of Americans if a military base on US territory was attacked successfully.

We can debate the definition of 'terrorism', but a fearful pscyhological effect was, I suspect, the primary aim of the attack.

And that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do (if you attack legimmate targets, which Ukraine did). I think people on this thread think 'terrorism' is an insult.
by freejazz | 2025-06-04 20:16:17+00:00
>How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?

Did you read the article? Because he sits in immediate proximity to the power of the executive branch of the federal gov't, wherein a number of its most prominent members are devout fans of his who espouse his work...
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-04 20:16:40+00:00
> This is a fairly cynical way to frame this.

dismissals of negative reactions as 'cynical' rarely acknowledge the fact that a 'cynical' response is often no more cynical than the cynicism of the target.

bespoke pricing is a cynical tactic, no matter how you dress it up. it provides a legal shroud, and i've no more patience in me to give the benefit of the doubt to any profit-motivated enterprise that can't at least be upfront about what they want to charge for their services.
by ben_w | 2025-06-04 20:17:08+00:00
> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100.

75 years is a long time. At lot can change.

75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement

The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".

> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.

Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.

Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
by patternwell | 2025-06-04 20:17:13+00:00
I kept getting stuck in foggy loops — frozen after feedback, looping decisions, unable to explain the logic to myself.

Most tools were too vague (“just journal it”) or too rigid (“rate your mood 1–10”). So I built something for myself:

The Repatterning System — a modular clarity kit for overthinkers, ADHD minds, and anyone who spirals mid-task or post-interaction.

It includes:

Loop Mapping: trace internal triggers → thoughts → freeze responses (Notion + PDF)

Narrative Disruption: spot stuck inner stories and gently rewrite

LoopLens Prompts: optional GPT reflections (no AI experience needed)

No login. No app. No subscription. Just early access modules — PDF + Notion — at your own pace.

Curious if anyone else here has built tools for nonlinear clarity or reflection during cognitive overload. Would love thoughts.
by motorest | 2025-06-04 20:17:20+00:00
> Both Perl and Python are from the same generation, and both are active and both have their latest release in 2025.

I don't think that's what they mean by "Python" or "Perl". It sounds like they have a sizeable ancient Perl codebase that they want to replace with Python due to practical reasons. No one cares if Perl's first release was a couple of years before Python's. What matters is the company's ability to maintain and extend their codebase.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-04 20:17:51+00:00
Telling it to use Python with 4o

https://chatgpt.com/share/6840a944-3bac-8010-9694-2a8b0a9c35...

Even o4-mini-high got it wrong though (Indonesia)

https://chatgpt.com/share/6840a9aa-1260-8010-ba3f-bd99fff721...
by agumonkey | 2025-06-04 20:18:40+00:00
Here's an old (and lean) website full of detail about their lineup

http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/

here's another https://r2e-micro-informatique.jimdofree.com/ (with a picture involving woz :)

I'm not sure my memory is correct, but some of the designers went to work in the US in the 60s, when communication and data processing started to blend. The interactions between US and European mindsets was interesting.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-06-04 20:19:04+00:00
> This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.

As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-06-04 20:19:45+00:00
> If the IRS knows about the transaction and is able to complain about me not paying enough, that suggests that they already have the information that I'm sending them.

You mistakenly assume that simply knowing what is on the 1099-B form is sufficient to determine your tax on the gain. They don't know if you are married or single or head of household (filing status) in the current tax year. They don't know what some of your itemized deductions and other income not reported to them might be (which in turn, along with filing status, determines what marginal tax bracket you are in). They don't know if you are actually just a nominee for someone else's income. These are just a few examples. They don't know any of this stuff until you tell them by filing your complete return.
by xeromal | 2025-06-04 20:21:25+00:00
Bummed about this. I know some people didn't like it but it never hurts to have extra signals about the quality of the product even if it falls short. My typical research path was looking for legit amazon reviews, fakespot highlights, and reddit comments. Using vetted.ai to replace fakespot but it's pretty mid in what I've seen so far.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-04 20:21:34+00:00
> Hybrid vehicles report 3,475 fires per 100,000 vehicles, driven by the complexity of their dual powertrains. Gasoline and diesel cars follow with 1,530 fires, while EVs report significantly fewer at 25 fires.

Their own data is showing that their conclusion might be sketchy. If EVs were so naturally unlikely to start fires, shouldn't hybrids only have a small number more fires per 100000 than ICE vehicles?

Car fires usually come from poorly maintained electrics and leaking oil. How could adding an EV system to that make it so much more likely to ignite, but so unlikely to ignite when it's just the EV?

Most full EVs are still extremely expensive and sold to the luxury market and are even fairly new. How often do fairly new, luxury ICEs and Hybrids ignite?
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-04 20:21:37+00:00
But said critics have no basis for saying it's dubious.

Just look at that MAHA report. Exactly the sort of thing you would expect when you ask an AI to support something false. A human generally recognizes when a search throws up a totally false hit. And, in general, the right hits show up in the results before the wonky stuff--but when you're searching for something that doesn't exist, or doesn't exist in a web-readable form all you get is the wonky stuff. But the AIs don't have the ability to recognize they're in the garbage and distill it out so you no longer see it's pedigree. But it's still garbage.
by lcrs | 2025-06-04 20:22:38+00:00
There are a few projects now that simulate defocus properly to match what bigger (non-phone camera) lenses do - I hope to get back to working on it this summer but you can see some examples here: https://x.com/dearlensform

Those methods come from the world of non-realtime CG rendering though - running truly accurate simulations with the aberrations changing across the field on phone hardware at any decent speed is pretty challenging...
by atemerev | 2025-06-04 20:22:48+00:00
I never found any of his ideas interesting. Unusual, maybe, but unusual does not mean interesting. I come from a country with a history of autocracy, and it has been an absolute dogma for me to not touch anything autocratic with a six-mile pole.

Well, I hope the rest of the world now will get the memo too, before we'll need a world war to crystallize the lesson.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-04 20:23:29+00:00
I don't disagree with your description of the problem in this comment. But the OP was perfectly fine if it's just something "to account for" on the scale of 3%.

Your strong dismissal of OP, and talking about how it "could be the entire profit margin", made it sound a lot more serious than it is, and that's why I disagreed with how you were commenting earlier and posted a counterargument.
by underlipton | 2025-06-04 20:25:04+00:00
Tangential: I'm reminded of the sadly stillborn Final Fantasy Versus XIII, and its apparent ambition to present a "modern" monarchy, styled visually with elements of both contemporary business and the mafia. You're right, there's nothing inherently noble or benevolent in autocracy; the king brought forward to the present isn't a statesman or innovator, he's a robber baron or a crime boss. I kind of lament that that sort of explicit idea didn't enter the cultural discourse.
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 20:25:37+00:00
I didn't overstate them, if anything I was far too generous.

It's plainly true that Apple software locks you into Apple devices, which are more expensive than they should be. In addition, those devices are some of the most anti-consumer computers made. You can't repair them, they're locked down.

What Apple does is impressive, sure. But let's not pretend that making mediocre software that runs on 1% of computers is anything compared to the Web. They have fundamentally different goals, which is why native Apple software doesn't compete with the web.
by xp84 | 2025-06-04 20:25:40+00:00
If they intend for a mass market to read their articles, indie publications should find a way to sell a user an article for a fair price. Especially in the context of coming from a news aggregator site, it's absurd that I'm going to buy a recurring subscription for Tax Software Quarterly, Yacht Week, Greg's TV Reviews etc. The number of distinct domains I click through to from HN alone would be hundreds of dollars a month if I'm starting subscriptions for each one.

I hate and block ads, since they literally screw up the functioning of the page now, so I don't think they should "just have ads and be open" -- but I think expecting average non-journalists to sign up for subscriptions to multiple "national newspapers" and a half dozen news magazines is absurd, which is why people here don't like paywalls, and bypass them wherever possible.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-04 20:25:55+00:00
Yes and no. This is a common pattern, but implemented very lazily. Most of this can (and probably should) be refactored out to separate classes/functions.

But no, I don't think this would faze most Java devs. It's ugly and bad practice, but more or less acceptable depending on personal taste. It works, at least.

Point of interest: LLMs tend to go too far in the opposite direction with code like this. They will break everything apart into functions or classes, even trivial one-line lambdas. I find that even more obnoxious than the monstrosity you linked.