MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2025-07-03 17:26:14+00:00
People are always trying to rationalize and justify aesthetic preferences. The depth and nuance of your understanding of a thing will change how you perceive variations of that thing, whether it's guitar tonewoods, style of music, types of paint, flavor of beer, or the grain in film. If you know a lot about a subject, you can tell a lot about the history of a thing, and that's going to change how you feel about a thing.

A child watching a Buster Keaton skit and gasping and giggling and enjoying it is going to have a different subjective aesthetic experience of the media than a film critic who knows exactly what type of film and camera were used, and what the meaning of all the different abstractions imply about the scene, and the fabric of Keaton's costume, and so on, and so forth.

Subjective aesthetic preferences are in the realm of cognition - we need a formal theory of intelligence mapped to the human brain, and all of these subjective phenomena collapse into individualized data processing and initial conditions.

There's something about film grain contrasted against clean cel animation which might make it easier for people to suspend disbelief. They are conditioned to think that absence of grain is associated with unreal animation, particular types of media, and CGI. Home video and news and so forth had grain and low quality, so grain gets correlated with "real". In my view, there's nothing deeper than that - we're the product of our times. In 40 years, media will have changed, and it may be that film grain is associated with surrealism, or edited out completely, as it's fundamentally noise.
by samat | 2025-07-03 17:26:34+00:00
We do quality outsource development for usual web/mobile stuff (yeah, it exists).

80% of our job is helping clients to figure out what do they actually need and what's reasonable to implement given current state of tech, finding that balance between ideal and realistic software, or rather negotiating it.

So expecting client to write SOWs/specifications is like expecting client to write code.

Aha, actually, I've recently seen it quite few times: people send me detailed SOW which look good, but once I try to read them to actually create an understanding of the domain logic/program in my head — it does not make any sense.

Very close to the grand-grand-parent comment about mentoring junior programmers. Now imagine they are the one paying you!
by ivape | 2025-07-03 17:26:42+00:00
will the fact that their lives pause while we’re gone shatter the illusion?

When two people leave the house in the morning and return home at night, does either person truly know what happened with the other person? Almost every interaction you have with other people is just “filling in” reality (reality is sparse, as far as you are concerned).

Person A: Saw a guy in a pikachu outfit at work today

Person B: Okay.

What else is there to say in reality? Just accept the context given to you.
by sharkbot | 2025-07-03 17:26:45+00:00
Agree. Purely opining, but I assume that it's because of the emotional connection that artistic media has on people, despite the flaws.

People remember the emotions the artwork engendered, and thus the whole work is associated with the feelings, flaws and all. If the work is particularly widely known, the flaws can become a stand-in for the work itself.

I see this in video games - I'm fond of the NES-era "flaws" and limitations (palette limits, sprite limits, sound channel limits), but less connected to the Atari 2600 or SNES/PS1/NDS/etc flaws. Shovel Knight is charming; A Short Hike, while great, doesn't resonate on a style level.
by zserge | 2025-07-03 17:26:46+00:00
To be fair, the project is linked to the blog post I recently wrote, so it's merely a tiny personal/educational project.

I tried to experiment with an API similar to what k8s api server offers: dynamic schemas for custom resources, generated uniform REST API with well-defined RBAC rules, watch/real-time notifications, customisation of business logic with admission hooks etc.

I also attempted to make it as small as possible. So yeah, I don't try to compete with Pocketbase and others, just trying to see what it takes to build a minimally viable backend with a similar architecture.

The choice of the "database" is dictated by the very same goals. I deliberately made it an interface, better databases exist and can be plugged in with little code changes. But for starters I went with what Go stdlib offers, and CSV is easy enough to debug.
by zzzeek | 2025-07-03 17:26:55+00:00
I think it's a serious question because something really big is being missed here. There seem to be very different types of developers out there and/or working on very different kinds of codebases. Hypothetically, maybe you have devs or specific contexts where the dev can just write the code really fast where having to explain it to a bot is more time consuming, vs. devs /contexts where lots of googling and guessing goes on and it's easier to get the AI to just show you how to do it.

I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI bots / agents to help with coding tasks. I'm sort of getting them to help me but I'm still really not being blown away and still tending to prefer not to bother with them with things I'm frequently iterating on, they are more useful when I have to learn some totally new platform/API. Why is that? do we think there's something wrong with me?
by deepdarkforest | 2025-07-03 17:27:36+00:00
From a cash flow perspective of course it makes sense to sell the future before you have it as working product. It just needs a great salesman or narrative to keep it going, im not arguing that.

> that feedback loop is very important for improving machine learning models at scale

Oh will you have your own feedback loop with let's say user's data? Or you meant as an example?

> * That's why we're open sourcing everything, to avoid the feeling of overpromising on what is ready today*

I agree here, it helps the today, but I dont think it helps the feeling of overpromising on what is ready today, its more like, even if it's open source , it does not increase the chances of it being ready/autonomous in the future. (im just playing devils advocate here)

I also agree with the intermediate benchmarks for sure, this is more to what i was referring to, it would be nice to see some more short term usecases/fun applications that are realistic to hit today or in the nearer future, that would drive a lot of sales value, at least for me, rather than go from now to full autonomy. Good luck!
by rbanffy | 2025-07-03 17:27:54+00:00
I'm always worried when someone wants to build an OS and builds a UI layer on top of it. It's a lot of work just to make a good kernel that's compatible with real hardware and is easy enough to port software for it.

While I agree an AR-first UI would greatly benefit from a real-time kernel, I think developing both separately would be the wisest path.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-03 17:29:08+00:00
> Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this without feeling like it's a waste?

I would invert the question, how can you think it's a waste (for OP) if they're willing to spend $1000/mo on it? This isn't some emotional or fashionable thing, they're tools, so you'd have to assume they derive $1000 of value.

> free version... the amount of times it's really wrong is very high... it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information from third party

Respectfully, you're using it wrong, and you get what you paid for. The free versions are obviously inferior, because obviously they paywall the better stuff. If OP is spending $50/day, why would the company give you the same version for free?

The original article mentions Cursor. With (paid) cursor, the tool automatically grabs all the information on behalf of the user. It will grab your code, including grepping to find the right files, and it will grab info from the internet (eg up to date libraries, etc), and feed that into the model which can provide targeted diffs to update just select parts of a file.

Additionally, the tools will automatically run compiler/linter/unit tests to validate their work, and iterate and fix their mistakes until everything works. This write -> compile -> unit test -> lint loop is exactly what a human will do.
by djinnish | 2025-07-03 17:29:21+00:00
I feel like that's the biggest question I have about Astral. I wonder what they have in the tank. All of this software is great, but I'd like to see them get some kind of benefit, if only to assure me that they'll continue to exist and make awesome software.

(And also so they'll implement the `pip download` functionality I'd like!)
by alganet | 2025-07-03 17:30:11+00:00
How can I be sure that spatial intelligence AIs will not be just intricate sensoring that ultimately fails to demonstrate actual intelligence?

> "trilobite"

The trilobite ancestor had a nervous system before it had an eye. It was able to make decisions and interact with the environment before the ability to see or speak a language.

It feels to me like this basic step is still missing. We haven't even crossed the first AI frontier yet.
by gruez | 2025-07-03 17:31:19+00:00
>The ship owner paid the insurance company a premium.

>It isn't clear to me that banks are doing anything comparable. They are paying some tax, but so is every business.

From wikipedia: "The FDIC charges premiums based upon the risk that the insured bank poses."

Moreover even if the government provides this for "free", it's hardly the only example where the government provides an implicit subsidy to some group by not levying direct taxes. For instance Louisiana probably gets more FEMA aid than Idaho, but when was the last time you heard someone making snarky comments about how Hurricane Katrina victims got "bailed out" by the federal government?

>For a bank the calculation seems to be heads I win (trebles and massive bonuses all round) tails you (the tax payer) lose. Given this situation, from a game theory point of view, why wouldn't they take reckless risks, if the regulations allow them to?

That's exactly why the regulations are there for, to mitigate the moral hazard. The same exists for insurance, which often comes with various provisions the insured has to follow. For buildings it might be having working sprinklers and annual inspections of fire alarms. For restaurants it might be training/inspections that are over and above what the local jurisdiction requires. Of course, just like banks the insured are also incentivized to do as little as possible to comply with the regulations. Nobody is going be inspecting their fire equipment once a month, even though that'd probably reduce the fire risk by some non-zero amount. Any sort of insurance is going to have this issue.
by genewitch | 2025-07-03 17:31:43+00:00
As someone who lives here now, the corruption is still alive and well. We're - the citizens - currently fighting against having CO2 "pumped in via pipes" and injected into "geological formations". Every citizen in the state gets their water from a well. Injecting refuse "CO2" into the ground will contaminate our water supply; but as the person at the meeting i went to on Monday said, "When there's money involved the politicians stop thinking about the citizens."

I don't know. I don't really like it here, but my kid's family live here. And on the other side of the coin, where isn't there corruption?
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-03 17:32:04+00:00
I see these posts on HN from time to time. Do you really think your code was any better when you were an intern? Mine was god awful. They probably binned all my work after each internship! I don't think an LLM makes them any worse.

Here is the crazy part: As a nearly neckbeard, there were no code reviews or PRs in my era. And mostly zero unit tests.
by nsxwolf | 2025-07-03 17:32:54+00:00
I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They offered very different experiences in the 90s.

Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.
by gausswho | 2025-07-03 17:33:01+00:00
At least on the Android front, I'd prefer the app allow me to write to my own storage target. The reason is because I already use Syncthing-Fork to monitor a parent Sync directory of stuff (Obsidian, OpenTracks, etc.) and send to my backup system. In effect it allows apps to be local first and potentially even without network access, but allow me to have automatic backups.

If there were something that formalized this a little more, developers could even make their apps in a... Bring Your Own Network... kinda way. Maybe there's already someone doing this?
by retsibsi | 2025-07-03 17:33:29+00:00
Even if the most bearish predictions turn out to be correct, the comparison of LLMs to NFTs is a galaxy-spanning stretch.

NFTs are about as close to literally useless as it gets, and that was always obvious; 99% of the serious attention paid to them came from hustlers and speculators.

LLMs, for all their limitations, are already good at some things and useful in some ways. Even in the areas where they are (so far) too unreliable for serious use, they're not pure hype and bullshit; they're doing things that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago.
by keybored | 2025-07-03 17:33:29+00:00
> For instance, someone makes false charge to lock up someone innocent in the name of 'reducing crime', is the issue the goal of justice and low crime or is it the problem with the standards of evidence used to lock up the criminal?

The immediate problem is the troll that is lying and hiding behind a purported agenda. Exposing their real agenda is the immediate fix.

You don’t rhetorically concede to the troll that “reducing crime” is good because they’re a troll. Conceding anything to them is a strategic blunder. They are trolling. It’s irrelevant to the case.
by Kina | 2025-07-03 17:33:36+00:00
This reminds me of modern windows having fake panes. They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”.

I have to imagine past glassmakers would have been absolutely enthralled by the ability we now have to make uniform, large sheets of glass, but here we are emulating the compromises they had to make because we are used to how it looks.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-03 17:33:43+00:00
c is constant, the speed of light is not.

c is the speed of light in a vacuum, but it is not really about light, it is a property of spacetime itself, and light just happens to be carried by a massless particle, which, according to Einstein's equations, make it go at c (when undisturbed by the medium). Gravity also goes at c.
by laurencerowe | 2025-07-03 17:33:44+00:00
I misremembered the speed of electrical signal propagation from high school physics. It's around 2/3rds the speed of light in a vacuum not 1/3rd. The speed of light in an optical fibre is also around 2/3rds the speed in a vacuum.

It seems there is quite a wide range for different types of cables so some will be faster and others slower than optical fibre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor

But the resignalling must surely be unrelated?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-03 17:33:55+00:00
My understanding is that tmux is primarily an OpenBSD project, and rust isn't a good fit for them (for reasons that summarize to portability problems), so it is extremely unlikely. Also, this is a hobby project that currently is all unsafe, so there's not even any particular point. (EDIT: Of course, as it gets rewritten the latter point is likely to diminish)
by krapp | 2025-07-03 17:34:45+00:00
There is no other, better, more humane form of capitalism. Capitalism's only concern is the generation and control of capital by the capitalist class. It isn't that capitalists want to destroy the environment, it's that they don't care about the environment beyond it being a resource to be exploited and consumed. "Better capitalism" just means doing more of that exploitation faster and more efficiently.

I don't know what you love and call capitalism but I suspect you've been convinced that as a system it has some inherently moral dimension. It does not, and cannot. It's a paperclip maximizer, that's all.
What is SOTA for retrieval in RAG systems now?
by stormfather | 2025-07-03 17:34:58+00:00
Have there been significant improvements this year?

The simple flow we landed on in 2024 was:

1. Chunk and embed docs with embedding model 2. Embed query (maybe using an LLM to reformulate first) 3. Retrieve N1 docs using cosine similarity 4. Narrow to N2 using a reranking model 5. Inject these docs into context to generate answer

Have there been significant advancements? Has anyone had seen improvements using graph structures like Neo4j for more sophisticated retrieval?
by collingreen | 2025-07-03 17:35:25+00:00
Thanks for the answer and that makes sense for your perspective - government is pretty much just there for you to be able to lay claim to things and all other benefits should be done by explicitly optted-in individuals.

I don't think it's helpful for me to try to take a position about what is and isn't theft by governments you were born into but wish you weren't. I don't even know how to start untangling that one and I think perspective overwhelms any reason there anyway.

I do appreciate your response about my question - very helpful!
by chrsw | 2025-07-03 17:36:17+00:00
I have some technical questions about feet.

Human feet have metatarsophalangeal joints connecting the toes to the rest of the foot. But humanoid robots don't have these (at least, the vast majority don't). Why? These joints are very useful.

Also, the bottom of the human foot is soft and has thousands of nerve endings. Can we really expect robots to get anywhere near human mobility performance without this level of compliance and sensory sophistication?
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-07-03 17:37:47+00:00
How much grain is there in IMAX films?

There's an influx of high-profile directors/films right now and in pipeline filmed for IMAX (F1: The Movie I think, Mission Impossible, etc) and Christopher Nolan's Odyssey coming next year shot entirely on IMAX film with newly developed smaller/quieter cameras made to accomplish it.
by timtas | 2025-07-03 17:38:39+00:00
> how soon before we start designing codebases for LLM agents to navigate more cleanly?

In my (so far limited) experience, the best thing you can do is establish and consistently follow patterns in you handwritten code.

I find Claude does really well with “follow existing conventions and patterns” or pointing to some specific part of the app and saying “do it that way.”

I prompt Claude the same way I would a junior dev, and that seems to work really well so far.
by zserge | 2025-07-03 17:38:44+00:00
Like others have guessed, I limited myself to what Go stdlib offers. Since it's a personal/educational project -- I only wanted to play around with this sort of architecture (similar to k8s apiserver and various popular BaaSes). It was never meant to run outside of my localhost, so password security or choice of the database was never a concern -- whatever is in stdlib and is "good enough" would work.

I also tried to make it a bit more flexible: to use `bcrypt` one can provide their own `pennybase.HashPasswd` function. To use SQLite one can implement five methods of `pennybase.DB` interface. It's not perfect, but at the code size of 700 lines it should be possible to customise any part of it without much cognitive difficulties.
by eviks | 2025-07-03 17:38:51+00:00
> Picture this: you’re watching a classic film, and the subtle dance of film grain adds a layer of authenticity and nostalgia to every scene

It just adds visual noise that obscures details of the authentic scene, and nothing prevents nostalgia from being tied to many of the more prominent visual cues like old actors or your own old memories from when you watched it first...

> contributing to [film's] realism

But there is no grain in reality, so it does the opposite

Otherwise I'm glad AV1 marches along and instead of wasting bitrate encoding visual garbage has an algorithmic replacement mechanism- which also means you could turn it off easier.
by codekansas | 2025-07-03 17:39:18+00:00
Yeah, really like that project. The main difference is that it's much shorter than ours, and shorter robots are cheaper. The downside is that it can't really reach normal human spaces. Actually, we made another robot called Zeroth Bot which you can build for $350 if you want: https://docs.kscale.dev/docs/zeroth-01

We are planning to release a similar-size robot later this year (calling it M-Bot) that will be closer in height and price, but our current focus has been on launching the full-size humanoid.

Mechanically, I think Berkeley Humanoid Lite is pretty similar to the 3D printed one we made last year. Our main focus with the K-Bot redesign was to make it not break so much. 3D printed components break a lot and repair time can be quite long. Also, having the wiring routed internally makes a huge, huge difference. So there are some benefits to doing QA on a manufacturing line in terms of quality and consistency.
by lvl155 | 2025-07-03 17:39:19+00:00
Based on people around me and anecdotal evidence of when Claude struggles, a lot more than you think. I’ve done some analysis on personal use between Openrouter, Amp, Claude API and $200 subscription, I probably save around $40-50/day. And I am a “light” user. I don’t run things in parallel too much.
Show HN: AI Image Selector – Pick Your Best Photo for Social Media
by shadowofvacuum | 2025-07-03 17:39:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small web app that uses AI to help people choose their best photo for social media or profiles.

You upload multiple images, and it scores and selects the best one based on visual appeal, clarity, and emotion.

It’s free to use and runs fully in the browser with help from Google Gemini + FastAPI. I’d love to hear your feedback or ideas for improvements!

https://ai-image-selector.fly.dev/

Thanks!
by CharlesW | 2025-07-03 17:40:04+00:00
Yep, the implied officiality of "the next evolution of SQLite" is creepy and deceptive positioning.

Their "about" page explains a lot — they're disastrously top-heavy with investors and have been in a holding pattern for 3 years (according to CrunchBase), and so don't have a choice but to kill the king or die trying.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-03 17:40:33+00:00
Exactly. To the extent that a politico-economic system is concerned with anything other than how the capitalist class can maintain control of society through control of the means of production, it is not capitalism. Of course, platonically pure capitalism is rare, and even relatively pure capitalism is mostly a thing of the past since most of the places it was present replaced it with mixed economies in the mid-20th Century, but that's not "kinder capitalism", but simply less capitalism.
by probably_wrong | 2025-07-03 17:40:52+00:00
> You really have to put in a good effort to lock yourself out.

When Google and Apple block you, you stay blocked for good regardless of how many backup measures you provide. An Apple representative literally told me once that I needed to provide the phone number of the thief who stole my brother's phone if I wanted to regain access to iCloud; Google asked for my password and backup email only for their system to say "that's not enough to let you in, but there are no other methods so you're SOL".

Even in more "normal" situations, how much do I need to pay to get someone at Google to check my identity (possibly with official ID) and restore my account? Answer: None, because that's not a service Google offers - you can try to sign up for a paid plan, but even then there's no guarantee that they'll listen to you.

Any system that depends on FAANG companies is a system where you can find yourself locked out without recourse. I definitely blame the service.