MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Latted – Turning Books into TikTok-Like Short Form Content
by metehanoz | 2025-07-31 14:23:27+00:00
Hey! Latted is a weekend project I built to convert books into TikTok-like short form videos with AI-generated visuals. The first book I converted is "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu and you can try it out with no signups.

Why did I build this? I have a long list of books that I never get to read. I always said 'I had no time' but that is simply a lie when I average 4 hours a day on YT shorts. So I wanted a way to read books that would give me similar dopamine hits as YT shorts and maybe replace hours I’m spending on TikTok-like video with something more useful.

How is it different? I tried audio books but I think they work better for passive listening when doing other chores. I wanted a deeper immersion with the book while decreasing the time I spend on YT shorts.

Would love to get your feedback on:

- Storytelling - is it actually compelling? How could it be better? - Next books?
by jjraden | 2025-07-31 14:23:50+00:00
Speaking of eyes, Veritasium's occasional collaborator Dianna Cowern (Physics Girl) is doing much better after complications from long covid left her bedridden for two years. It's good to see her up and at 'em.

Her latest video, showing her out of bed and going for short walks, is here: https://youtu.be/vqeIeIcDHD0?si=WoxpqZOuRTWD2XYd
by 9rx | 2025-07-31 14:24:00+00:00
> if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively

Even then who knows. I once had to deal with an employee who filed a claim without a leg to stand on. The powers that be had already decided from the get-go I was at fault, even though they clearly didn't even bother to look at what I submitted. When questioned about it they couldn't even speak to it! They initially sided with the worker, but after weeks of phone calls that basically amounted to "read what I gave you already", eventually they relented with "Oh yeah, you are right. I have revised my decision." If it had been a slightly more biased/lazy person instead...
by flashgordon | 2025-07-31 14:24:55+00:00
Clarifying - If the employee is not coachable why spend years? I know you mentioned the "admitting failure" aspect of letting go (this probably makes me a sociopath to even ask this).

Now coachability could mean different things - Are they absolutely unreceptive to feedback? Were they actually hired in the wrong role? fantastic interviewers but terrible on the job, mislevelled, completely wrong area, passion etc? Record of toxicity?

Arent these (except may be the mislevelled bit) grounds for a PIP to begin with. Ive felt these situations were easier to manage in FAANG?MAANGO etc precisely due to the highly process driven cultures. Also i think the "emotion" of it goes away because hiring is extremely generalized and pipelined (best case you see a candidate's interview feedback if you are the HM and usually you only do that if you are happy with the "numeric rating"). Generalized hiring has its own problems but that's another story. Again this may be different at various companies so just trying to job my memory.

Btw I loved this:

> I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.

Often managers are demonized without recognizing that managers themselves are part of the machine that is the company and the culture (and I feel this actually has become so by design).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-31 14:25:13+00:00
Options are literally just insurance plans for stocks.

Just like car insurance or home insurance. They are called options, because when you get in a car crash you have the option of calling your insurer, because you purchased insurance. When your stock crashes, you have the option to call the counter-party to cover the loss.

If options were called "insurance contracts", they would still be the same thing, and probably more understandable to the public.
by zahlman | 2025-07-31 14:25:14+00:00
> I agree, reverse discrimination is not a thing, which is why it’s ridiculous when conservative politicians throw around the term

They don't throw that term around. They correctly call out discrimination that happens to go in an opposite direction from what you find politically convenient.

People in your camp invented, probably unknowingly, the "reverse" terminology, because your narrative requires the premise that "discrimination" can definitionally only negatively impact certain groups of people. Which is how and why you can defend the other instances as "not a thing", even when you are shown proof of them occurring — they just don't fit your redefined terms. It is the same logic as "you can't be sexist against men", used to deny the sexism inherent in even the clearest situations. The framing is itself sexist — as it supposes that men are an inferior group not worthy of the philosophical protection of the term, nor of recognition of real and obvious harm inflicted upon them because they are men. (I have even seen attempts to spin such harms as primarily affecting women.)

"Dismantling various programs" only has anything to do with discrimination where those programs are actually discriminatory. I have seen much dismantling of "programs" by conservatives that I strongly disagreed with, but not on those grounds.
by jghn | 2025-07-31 14:25:16+00:00
To be clear, it's simple for a *company* to fire someone. It often can be a pain in the ass for a *manager* to do it. For instance, a process like this:

1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this can take a LONG time.

2) Bring HR into the process, where they'll do the equivalent of "did you turn it off and on again?" for quite some time

3) If they let you, set up a PIP, which itself will take several weeks

4) Finally the person is let go
by Catbert59 | 2025-07-31 14:25:31+00:00
A lot of people metion "Reticulum" in this regard. But that's a one-man-show project.

The only project that got some serious momentum is Meshtastic. That's decentralized LoRa with flooding/next-hop-routing that can be backed with MQTT.

I think a huge step forward would be a decentralized BLE LE (a super robust Bluetooth Low Energy mode) Mesh based application as it can be used on smartphones.
by hitekker | 2025-07-31 14:25:38+00:00
Your insight is true enough that almost every recruiter asks a manager "have you PIP'd someone before?" in the first phone screen. It's a hard experience that some junior managers cannot, or will not, do for a variety of reasons.

IMHO, besides the messiness, performance management is unspeakable because people generally hate authority. We've all had bad experiences with authority figures. We're also told many fantasies about the morality of groups of people. If the people are blameless, then the the fault lies with the manager who resembles (or opposes) our teacher, our parents, our government. And so forth.

I use to subconsciously think that until I learned, the hard way, it was irresponsible blame-shifting. A recent HN discussion demonstrated some of those dynamics at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273798
by rpdillon | 2025-07-31 14:25:44+00:00
Just for posterity, since this didn't take off: I'm posting this because it's age verification that you can't opt out of. My read here is that if Google's AI thinks you're underage for whatever reason, it nerfs your account into a "kid mode", and the only way to revert your account to adult mode is to supply Google with a copy of your government-issued ID.

There seems to be a straight line from "age verification for porn" to "the end of anonymity on the internet" and Google seems to be taking quiet steps to get us there sooner rather than later.
by LexiMax | 2025-07-31 14:25:54+00:00
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.

What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.

Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
by airstrike | 2025-07-31 14:26:15+00:00
I'm super biased in favor of iced.

Yes, there are missing features (it's not even version 1.0 yet!) but I think the number is very small now and the solution is usually to fill in the gaps yourself—which is possible because iced is totally modular

I've made a spreadsheet editor and a slideshow editor with it so "slimmed down photoshop" seems feasible although admittedly you will likely need to get deep into the renderer (possibly write your own renderer traits and there), but I suppose you're comfortable with that given your goal.

If you're not allergic to Discord, come join us. It's a helpful, awesome tight community IMHO

Link for the lazy: https://discord.gg/3xZJ65GAhd

Project link: https://iced.rs
by qcnguy | 2025-07-31 14:26:21+00:00
Yeah or maybe most parents don't care because they think you're wrong? Many people with young kids now grew up with the internet as kids themselves. They remember their parents going through the exact same moral panic about the internet in the mid 90s, they remember using it anyway with no restrictions whatsoever ... and they remember they grew up just fine.

When I was a kid I was logging in every night, talking to random strangers online, I even met up with a few as the years passed. Everything was fine. If you were right that it's as bad for a child's development as drink and drugs I should have ended up a burned out husk. Not only did I not, none of my friends did either and they all also had unrestricted access to the internet.

Regulations aren't the answer. They hardly ever are. Half of HN's content these days is just people being faced with the negative consequences of regulations they themselves supported and then doing a No True Socialistman meme: "good regulations haven't been tried yet!"
by lucasyvas | 2025-07-31 14:26:34+00:00
The web has no choice but to move to a paid access model in my view. It was fought against for years but I don’t see another option left.

Maybe after sign up, biometric authentication being mandatory is the only thing that would potentially work. The security and offline privacy of those devices will become insanely valuable.

Anyone not authenticating in this way is paywalled. I don’t like this but don’t see another way.

I’m not using the web if I’m bombarded by captcha games… shit becomes worthless over night if that’s the case. Might as well dump computing on the Internet entirely if that happens.
by Izkata | 2025-07-31 14:27:21+00:00
> Maybe they should change the button to say, "I am a robot"?

Long time ago I saw a post where someone running a blog was having trouble keeping spam out of their comments, and eventually had this same idea. The spambots just filled out every form field they could, so he added a checkbox, hid the checkbox with CSS, and rejected any submission that included it. At least at the time it worked far better than anything else they'd tried.
by severusdd | 2025-07-31 14:27:26+00:00
This broadly matches the theme of this post that Replit CEO posted yesterday: https://x.com/amasad/status/1950260314823397767.

Current AI coding tools don't seem to have any real impact on true development productivity/ efficiency yet.

Apparently you cannot just one-shot everything to production. who'd have thunk? :-)
by boesboes | 2025-07-31 14:27:35+00:00
After 30 years of writing code myself, i am quite happy to let AI do the bulk.

But, especially with legacy code and monoliths with a lot of different conflicting patterns, you MUST check every thought and step. Every change. Lest it goes off and forgets what it was doing because it is stuck rewriting the same code in different ways.

tbh, I think it is fair to say these tools only really help if you are very senior and can smell bad code from the other room ;-) On real world legacy codebases at least. The code is ok and often on par with half the guys that work here, but they learn from mistakes and feedback ;)
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-31 14:28:03+00:00
The Blizzard / Battle.net captcha if you get flagged as a possible bot is extremely tedious and long; it requires you to solve a few dozen challenges of identifying which group of numbers adds up to the specified total, out of multiple options. Not difficult, but very tedious. And even if you're extremely careful to get every answer correct, sometimes it just fails you anyway and you're forced to start over again.
by isaacremuant | 2025-07-31 14:28:07+00:00
Your censorship is fundamentally stupid and harmful for society.

You're an authoritarian throughout and through and want to impose your tyranny through "keep you safe" like every tyrant.

You're the useful supporter and as much to blame as the corrupt politicians who enact these things.

Who on earth are you that you want to tell everyone else how to live. So conceited that you think you should rule over other people's kids.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-07-31 14:28:12+00:00
I'm trying to understand the point you're making here but don't really get it. The OS is just software, in most circumstances. Most modern OS require at least one binary blob that has to be sent to some hardware device. This is mostly because the the device manufacturer didn't want to include NVRAM and at the end of the day is usually just software as well.
by foobarian | 2025-07-31 14:28:35+00:00
The only reason we even had good science is the arms race. When there was a threat of someone else getting nukes or radar then the anti-science cohorts were silenced with a quickness, and large percentages of GDP were thrown at R&D, including poaching scientists from abroad, to get there first.

With nothing like that looming right now, there is no check and balance on the anti-science regiment, and so sliding downhill we go. Sadly I don't see this changing either, unless theoretical physicists turn up the basis for some new weapon.
by TXTOS | 2025-07-31 14:30:09+00:00
i mostly use LLMs inside a reasoning shell i built — like a lightweight semantic OS where every input gets recorded as a logic node (with ΔS and λ_observe vectors) and stitched into a persistent memory tree.

it solved a bunch of silent failures i kept running into with tools like RAG and longform chaining:

drift across hops (multi-step collapse) hallucination on high-similarity chunks forgetting prior semantic commitments across calls

the shell is plain-text only (no install), MIT licensed, and backed by tesseract.js’s creator. i’ll drop the link if anyone’s curious — not pushing, just realized most people don’t know this class of tools exists yet.
by rrr_oh_man | 2025-07-31 14:30:19+00:00
For anyone struggling with this:

https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-...

This podcast has made me a 10x better manager.

Good starters:

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-t...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/03/the-management-trinity...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/01/how-manage-arrogant-pr...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/02/the-management-trinity...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/06/manager-tools-onboardi...
Show HN: New SWE-bench leaderboard compares LMs without fancy agent scaffolds
by lieret | 2025-07-31 14:30:43+00:00
Hello from the SWE-bench/SWE-agent team at Princeton/Stanford.

When we created the SWE-bench benchmark in 2023 from hundreds of real-life GitHub issues/pull requests, the highest score was just a couple of percent. The tasks were so challenging for LMs, that most people didn't even want to work on them.

Half a year later, SWE-agent showed that the early 2024 LMs were actually good enough to resolve up to 20% of the GitHub issues in the benchmark. This kicked off a whole wave of coding agents.

Back then, developing agents was all about working around tons of silly behavior from the LMs. For example, if a command didn't work, they would try running the exact command again. If a command didn't return output, they would assume it never ran. They also couldn't get whitespace right in their edits, would get stuck into repetitive attempts and much much more.

So agents got pretty complicated to work around all of that bad LM behavior.

But now it's 2025, and LM companies have invested a whole lot of money to make their LMs really good at being agents.

So we asked two questions:

1. What's the simplest agent we can write that still scores near SotA? 2. How do LMs compare when we evaluate them using this simple agent?

Turns out, the agent can be very simple indeed! mini-swe-agent (https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent) has only 100 lines of code for the agent class (plus some 100 lines for environment etc.). It is little more than a loop that parses LM output for shell commands, executing them in a subshell, and continuing.

We then took various LMs and put them to the test in a real apples-to-apples comparison without a fancy agent scaffold to prop up bad LMs.

Our new leaderboard https://www.swebench.com/ shows the results.

The highest score is currently 65% with Claude Sonnet 4 (which is not much less than the 70% that most fancier agents observe).

o3, o4-mini, and Gemini 2.5 Pro are significantly behind, but not hopeless, achieving 50-60%.

We were really surprised by these strong numbers overall: It shows that as LMs get stronger and better adapted at performing difficult, highly iterative tasks, we can take our hands off of the steering wheel, provide the minimal necessary environment, and let the LM figure out the rest.

Let us know if you have any questions, our team is here on HN today :)
by Doxin | 2025-07-31 14:31:07+00:00
I think the artist put it as "and then the last gear turns so slowly it doesn't really matter, so I cast it in concrete."

Assuming we're talking about Arthur Gansons "Machine with concrete"[0] of course. I quite like how a lot of his work seems to have a punchline to it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg
by thatnerd | 2025-07-31 14:31:19+00:00
The comparison to the present-day US isn't hyperbole. It's not a perfect match but there are parallels.

The article mentions Lysenko, a Soviet "biologist" who set back Soviet biology for a generation. He believed, for example, that plants in the USSR would not compete with each other for resources the way they did in capitalist societies, but would instead share resources. He asserted that crops could therefore be planted closer together in the USSR, yielding more food per acre. Evidence to the contrary was suppressed: Lysenko had Stalin's ear and a zealot's confidence. The rest of the field was either purged or fell in line. Scientists lost their jobs or got sent to Siberia.

The comparison to the present-day US isn't perfect, but it also isn't hyperbole. While scientists in the US mostly aren't in the same type of danger of arrest for speaking out (assuming ICE doesn't start targeting political opponents), but we're looking at a similar era in the US in terms of making theories and data fit ideology. RFK, Jr. has his preferred biological theories about vaccines, autism, and disease. Government scientists are at risk of losing their jobs and their financial security if they reference (or publish) findings that Kennedy objects to. Universities are still (as far as I can tell) safe for natural scientists because the first wave of the crackdown is focused on the humanities and social sciences, so this purge of scientists is limited to federal government employees, but the effect is real, and it isn't a stretch to assume that if the government finds success in the current purge, it will go looking further afield.

The human impact is significant for those affected, but the article is right to point out that this purge of scientists from the government for ideological goals will have a broader impact for society: it will set back American science.

Kennedy doesn't even have to be wrong on the facts for the culture he's creating to be toxic for federal science in his department and beyond. Just the politicization of science pushes our country towards being a scientific backwater.
Ask HN: Anyone solved hallucination or semantic drift in RAG?
by TXTOS | 2025-07-31 14:31:20+00:00
i’ve worked on a bunch of RAG pipelines recently (pdfs, semantic search, QA bots) — and honestly the biggest failure mode isn’t crash or latency, it’s quiet hallucination.

the model:

retrieves a chunk that looks right but is semantically off loses reasoning chain after 2–3 hops confidently gives answers based on mismatched or context-drifting chunks

sometimes you can fix it with chunk overlap or re-ranking, but often it’s deeper: cosine similarity just isn’t enough to preserve semantic continuity.

has anyone here actually solved this in production?

i ended up mapping out 13 of these failure patterns (like drift, loop collapse, overconfidence, broken symbolic prompts), and patched the system structurally — not just prompt tricks.

curious if anyone else has tackled this structurally, or just learned to “live with it”?

(no links / not promoting anything here — just legit wondering if anyone went beyond band-aids)
by hnuser123456 | 2025-07-31 14:32:22+00:00
It has been commonly observed that the current crop of LLMs can be too agreeable/sycophantic (or on some topics, too disagreeable) due to the commonly chosen RLHF priorities.

Simply asking the LLM in two separate contexts the same question but from opposing perspectives, then in a third context asking it to analyze both responses and choose the most neutral and objective take, you wipe out any "(dis)agreeableness" bias and dig closer to a deeper, more nuanced synthesis of a given topic. This paper is just taking this idea to the next level.

This isn't really possible with RLHF alone unless you train the LLM to often give two opposing perspectives, which would get tiring.