MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Scarblac | 2025-07-10 19:57:21+00:00
In the middle ages there was a big debate in the Catholic church about whether beavers were fish (nobility hated eating no meat except fish on fridays and were looking for some variety).

It was argued that their tails are scaly like a fish', and of course they live in water. But on the other hand there's all the fur and so on.

So eventually it was decided that beaver tails count as fish, not the whole animal.

This led to it being hunted to local extinction in quite some places.
by sbarre | 2025-07-10 19:57:36+00:00
First off, I'm with you on the "don't try to pass off AI imagery as real"...

But.. OP never claimed these images were real in their post..

Since there are no giant beavers in the world today, we could have assumed they were AI generated?

This could have been an illustration or a 3D render instead.. Isn't AI image generation just another form of visualization, like those?
by bdangubic | 2025-07-10 19:57:44+00:00
the over-scheduling in this and other cases is largely due to the fact that if kids are not “somewhere” they will be watching tv or staring at some f’ing screen cause that’s what other kids are doing who are also home. I have a large network of friends with kids and every single one of them over-schedules every f’ing thing due to the lack alternative (or better said kids are better of at ____ than at home alone)
by conductr | 2025-07-10 19:58:13+00:00
People change. Just because a Gen X is nerdy/chronically online now, doesn't mean they didn't party in the pre-internet era. I'm one of them that fits that mold.

I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s, so I went to raves and keg parties every weekend and experimented with lots of drugs and even had sex.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-07-10 19:58:21+00:00
I’m unimpressed with this take. AI will replace those that fail to adapt their skills to the new strategies required to orchestrate the new systems that tie AI solutions together. Someone still has to instruct the AI and I’ve yet to see enough evidence to convince me this tech can be adequately used to replace my abilities… but it will replace my homies that stayed complacent and thought they’d be able to coast by on some archaic knowledge from 15 years ago when we first started.
by tptacek | 2025-07-10 19:58:22+00:00
I mean, I agree with you that the person behind the prompt needs to know what they're doing! And I don't care about 1-shotting, as I said in a sibling comment, so if that's all this is about, I yield my time. :)

There are just other comments on this thread that take as axiomatic that LLM-generated code is bad. That's obviously not true as a rule.
by cwillu | 2025-07-10 19:58:50+00:00
The surprise is the implication that the crossover between net-negative and net-positive impact happened to be in the last 4 months, in light of the initial release 2 years ago and sufficient public attention for a study to be funded and completed.

Yes, it might make a difference, but it is a little tiresome that there's always a “this is based on a model that is x months old!” comment, because it will always be true: an academic study does not get funded, executed, written up, and published in less time.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-10 19:59:10+00:00
> I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened.

From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.

If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.

If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)

But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.

I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?
by felarof | 2025-07-10 19:59:23+00:00
We are a chromium "wrapper"

But we are much more performant than other libs (like playwright) which are written in JS, as we implement bunch of changes at chromium source code level -- for example, we are currently implementing a way to build enriched DOMtree required for agent interactions (click, input text, find element) directly at C++ level.

We also plan to expose those APIs to devs.
by echelon | 2025-07-10 19:59:45+00:00
100%.

> All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.

It all adds up. Five minutes here, thirty minutes there. It all has to come from something.

The smartphone usage takes away in subtle ways too. Time spent idle is time that the brain can subconsciously solve things and work out interdependencies and relationships. If you put that time on YouTube, Reddit, whatever, then your brain is fully consumed with the dopamine drip.

Smartphones have added a tremendous amount of value to society, but it hasn't been without cost.
by demetris | 2025-07-10 19:59:49+00:00
> I've never used Astro so forgive my ignorance, but isn't that just creating a .html file, a .css file and then optionally provide a .js file? What does Astro give you in this case? You'd get the same experience with a directory of files + Notepad basically. It's also even more optimized for speed, since there is no overhead/bloat at all, including at dev-time, just pure files, sent over HTTP.

Astro is super for completely static stuff too. Sometimes static stuff can be complex and there a modern framework like Astro shines.

I will share a couple of files to explain.

The site is almost completely static. It serves minimal JS for:

(1) Prefetching (you can block that and nothing will break)

(2) Mobile menu (you cannot make an accessible mobile menu without JS)

The site is for the docs and demos of a JS library. I want many demos on it, to be able to see what patterns the lib can handle and where things break down. I want to be able to add/remove demos quickly to try ideas. Straight HTML written in index.html files would not allow me to do that (but it is fine for the site where I have my CV, so I just use that there).

This is the Astro component I made that makes it super easy for me to try whatever idea I come up with:

https://github.com/demetris/omni-carousel/blob/main/site/com...

Here is one page with demos that use the component:

https://github.com/demetris/omni-carousel/blob/main/site/pag...

Basically, without a setup like this, I would publish the site with 3 or 4 demos, and I would maybe add 1 or 2 more after a few months.

Cheers!
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-10 19:59:52+00:00
> Since there are no giant beavers in the world today, we could have assumed they were AI generated?

Both depict what are clearly supposed to be museum exhibits. Those exist: https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/

The problem is not that people will think they still exist in the wild today. The problem is one can't trust the "size reference" an AI made up out of whole cloth.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-07-10 20:00:04+00:00
I would speculate that it's because there's been a huge concerted effort to make people want to believe that these tools are better than they are.

The "economic experts" and "ml experts" are in many cases effectively the same group-- companies pushing AI coding tools have a vested interest in people believing they're more useful than they are. Executives take this at face value and broadly promise major wins. Economic experts take this at face value and use this for their forecasts.

This propagates further, and now novices and casual individuals begin to believe in the hype. Eventually, as an experienced engineer it moves the "baseline" expectation much higher.

Unfortunately this is very difficult to capture empirically.
by taeric | 2025-07-10 20:00:10+00:00
I'm sympathetic. Apologetic, even. I can sadly see an easy way to read the tone of my reply as overly condescending. But, to counter with the assumption that I have limited experience with kids is not helping the discourse.

It was specifically the use of the words "guilty" and "whining" that struck me as wrong there. I could see wanting to avoid seeing disappointment. But I don't consider that guilt. And I'm pretty strict on my kids when they start whining.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-07-10 20:00:21+00:00
Yeah, I did track and field in HS (not us) in a club, had to train 4 times a week 3 to 4hs each time, but I chose to do that. I did well in some competitions, but nothing large. I do fondly remember those times, for the friendships, for helping build discipline, for learning how to properly train and exercise, skills which I still use today, not really about winning competitions.
Show HN: FaceBlurify – browser‑only face blurring in <10 s
by HichamCh | 2025-07-10 20:00:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a free website that automatically detects faces in the browser and lets you blur/pixelate them client‑side. Short videos stream to a server for FFmpeg + FD model processing and are deleted later. * Privacy first * No sign‑up * PWA/offline once cached * Multi‑language UI (i18n‑next)

I’m looking for feedback on perf/UX, and also validate the need (If any...) before adding a Pro tier (longer videos, batch...).

Happy to dive into the code/design.
by godelski | 2025-07-10 20:00:44+00:00
I was able to find complaints fairly easily. I had them listed but HN ate my comment. Search "Missing emails" instead of "delete all emails" as the latter tends to provide instructions about how to bulk delete.

> Being open or closed source has nothing to do with hearing about problems.

Also, pay attention to observation bias and userbase bias.

If my dad faced this issue, he'd never post online. He'd call me or go to a computer repair shop. That's what your average user will do.

Open Source users tend to be a bit more tech savvy. There's that famous article about Linux gamers reporting way more bugs than average users and how it can be accidentally misinterpreted as "why develop for linux?" These frequency biases are a big part of this. Pluus, OSS tends to do better bug tracking.
by MisterTea | 2025-07-10 20:01:07+00:00
I miss them too.

Re. the radio: Now its a big useless screen that shows me useless data while still hiding all the useful data that I can get over OBD-II. And whats worse, that screen is tied to your fucking cars computer and configures your car so you cant remove it, no matter how much the software sucks. I hate my 2022 CR-V's garbage infotainment screen. Its a shit UI, shit audio quality, and the Bluetooth is bugged to all hell. I already have a computer with me in my car called a phone that does everything but better. And that's not saying much.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-07-10 20:01:19+00:00
Yes, lifecycle analysis is the holy grail.

And I'm not qualified to say the tidal based solutions will never beat out Geo/Solar/Win + Batteries. In my informed but non-professional opinion, it seems like this avenue will never ever work at scale.

From everything I've seen, we have the answer, we're just stuck under the boot of old money oil barons. Solar + wind + geo (depending on the geographic area) for the majority of our power generation. Nuclear + batteries to smooth out the duck curve form the bottom, paired with more aggressive demand pricing & thermal regulations to smooth it out from the top. That's the answer. But lobbyist's going to lobby.
by toast0 | 2025-07-10 20:02:17+00:00
People say that even without a payment to the donor's estate, because donating offsets the cost of disposal that would otherwise accrue to the estate.

Personally, I would consider donating my body to an exhibit in consideration of being exhibited; although I'm not much of an exhibitionist, so I'd still have to think about it. Similarly, I think I'd like to be respectfully dumped in a body farm, so forensic scientists can get more data about bodies that are less respectfully dumped in various places; that's an experience my body wouldn't be able to have except through donation or murder, and I'd rather not be murdered.
by rshemet | 2025-07-10 20:02:39+00:00
Cactus is a framework - not the app itself. If you're looking for an Android demo, you can go to

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rshemetsub...

Otherwise, it's easy to build any of the example apps from the repo:

cd react/example && yarn && npx expo run:android

or

cd flutter/example && flutter pub get && flutter run
by iLoveOncall | 2025-07-10 20:02:53+00:00
> Those are compute credits that are directly spent on the experiment itself.

You're extrapolating, it's not saying this anywhere.

> It's no more "compensation" than a chemistry researcher being "compensated" with test tubes.

Yes, that's compensation too. Thanks for contributing another example. Here's another one: it's no more compensation than a software engineer being compensated with a new computer.

Actually the situation here is way worse than your example. Unless the chemistry researcher is commissioned by Big Test Tube Corp. to conduct research on the outcome of using their test tubes, there's no conflict of interest here. But there is an obvious conflict of interest on AI research being financed by credits given by AI companies to use their own AI tools.
by godelski | 2025-07-10 20:02:53+00:00
> it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce

It's also impossible to mark a bug report as resolved if you can't reproduce it.

You could have fixed the bug (especially since a lot of TB was rewritten) but if you can't reproduce the bug you wouldn't know it was solved only that people stopped reporting it. This is actually a common occurrence with long standing bugs.
by presidentender | 2025-07-10 20:03:12+00:00
One of my favorite... solutions, I suppose, was to find a break (not a leak) in a pipe by running current through it and using some sensor (I think the vocabulary is "signal generator," but I do not know). Current does not run further, there is your break; dig and find.

When the pipe is PVC, though, current does not run through it - so what do we do? Why, pump an electrolyte solution, and run your current through that!

It's simple, but it's not done, and so the plumber friend who told me of the original solution patented it, tried to sell it, and found that potential buyers were almost offended at how easy it was. As soon as he'd describe it to people they'd almost think they came up with it themselves. So it is a valuable idea, but it is also utterly worthless.
by mapt | 2025-07-10 20:03:19+00:00
We're using natural gas peaking so far, but this is actually still not that cheap.

I am of the attitude that even with no additional fossil fuel infrastructure constructed, we would be fine if we made an effort.

A mix for new generation of something like 70% solar/wind/batteries, 10% better grid interties, 10% expanded peaking hydro, and 10% a better system of load modulation, works just fine.

Load following with a market rate for things like water heaters, car chargers, and various industrial processes is something that's been implemented in other countries half-seriously, but only treated as an epithet or a scam here. To actually work, you can't just "Charge people a market rate" and expect them to fiddle with the breaker box, you have to actually integrate that feed into a decision-making algorithm run by home automation, which can make distinctions like "We need the car to be 90% full by 7AM, but we can adjust between charging at 1KW and charging at 6KW to minimize expected billing based on a minute to minute rate schedule. The water heater can range between 130F and 160F as required due to a mixing valve. The average dew point in the HVAC system needs to stay between 40F and 60F on a three-hourly basis, but can be modulated in ten minute increments according to demand." These sorts of interfaces need to be simple enough that Grandma can establish them conversationally.

Grid interties allow Los Angeles to sell Boston sunlight and Chicago to sell Houston wind.

Peaking hydro is just pumped storage minus the new pump and the new dam. An existing hydroelectric dam just gets refitted for twice as many generators and starts running on a 50% duty cycle, while allowing more variation in the water level.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-10 20:03:33+00:00
"Frozen string literals" doesn't mean that string literals are frozen, but that string literals (in the code) are reified as frozen strings. Obviously, the feature name is less fully expressive than the full sentence used to explain it, but that's a natural trade-off with wanting a usable name; it is evocative of the definition, not a restatement of it.
by cyberax | 2025-07-10 20:03:46+00:00
> I mean all the ones that have come up since then as well and failed to displace it.

They won inside large companies: Coral in Amazon, Protobufs/gRPC in Google, Thrift in Facebook, etc. And they are slowly spreading outside of them.

OpenAPI is indeed an attempt to bring some order into the HTTP RPC world, and it's pretty successful. I'm pretty sure all the APIs that I used lately were based on OpenAPI descriptions.

So the trend is clear: move away from loosely-defined HTTP APIs into strict RPC frameworks with code generation because this is a superior approach. But once you start doing it, HTTP becomes a hindrance, so alternatives like gRPC are gaining popularity.

> Also, REST defined as "A vaguely HTTP-ish API that carries JSON" would have to be put later than that.

Ruby-on-Rails came out in 2005, and Apple shipped in 2006. REST-ful APIs were one of its major selling points ( https://web.archive.org/web/20061020014807/http://manuals.ru... ).

AWS S3 API, designed around the same time, also was fully REST-ful. This was explicitly one of its design goals, and it was not really appreciated by most people.
by bborud | 2025-07-10 20:04:08+00:00
In practical reality the distinction is mostly, if not completely, without a meaningful difference. The words "practical" and "meaningful" being key. The distinction only has relevance if one engages in pedantry. Or possibly some form of academic self-pleasuring.

I'm aware this is an unappealingly rustic reality, but it is nonetheless the reality experienced by most.

Besides in the practical world we are able to observe, REST isn't even an architectural style: it is several architectural styles multiplied by every possible permutation of how you address a dozen or more different concerns. Necessitating disambiguation whenever you talk about it. First to state the obvious, that it isn't really what Fielding described, then on to communicating what vector describes your particular permutation of choices.

It's okay. We don't need to pretend any of us care about REST beyond as an interesting academic exercise.
by felarof | 2025-07-10 20:04:20+00:00
We would've preferred to build this as browser extension too.

But we strongly believe that for building a good agent co-pilot we need bunch of changes at Chromium C++ code level. For example, chromium has a accessibility tree for every website, but doesn't expose it as an API to chrome extension. Having access to accessibility tree would greatly improve agent execution.

We are also building bunch of changes in C++ for agents to interact with websites -- functions like click, elements with indexes. You can inject JS for doing this but it is 20-40X slower.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-07-10 20:04:22+00:00
I don't need to fish, the subject-verb agreement was an example. Grammar points 2.2.1 (Pronoun-antecedent agreement, which they did feel the need to go into in detail) and 2.5 (Using Who, Whom, That, and Which Correctly) are other things I would consider "not up for debate".
by NotAnOtter | 2025-07-10 20:04:36+00:00
People are broadly misinformed. Nuclear plants release significantly less radiation than coal based plants, as an example. They do create a lot of waste that we currently don't know how to process, but the quantity is actually shockingly small in the context of a global issue. We're talking several warehouses. Not millions, not all of California. We can just pick some cave in northern Canada or central sahara and bury it there, it seriously isn't that much. It's better than where we currently store the waste which is basically the ocean & clouds.

Meltdowns are tragic when they occur - but rare. It just gets a lot of press when a city of 50k gets deleted than when global ecosystems fail or a billion people die a decade earlier than they otherwise would due to pollution related helath issues.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-10 20:05:25+00:00
Might be just my ESL self being silly but these examples both read horribly:

> For example, the sentence, "The Developer Center, a site for reference material and other resources, has been introduced to the OpenShift website." reads better than

Even without reading the next bit I just knew that no, this does not read better. The insertion of "a site for reference material and other resources" just makes this sentence horrible to follow period.

> "The OpenShift website introduces the Developer Center, a site for reference material and other resources." Here, the passive voice is better because the important issue ("The Developer Center") is the subject of the sentence.

This reads silly for another reason: websites don't... introduce things. Website owners might. Also, I feel it should say "reference materials" not "reference material".
by chubot | 2025-07-10 20:05:40+00:00
To balance my own viewpoint, another way to look at it is that the dollar is weak, and will probably get weaker for the next 10 to 50 years

So that is helping Nvidia reach $4T, and all the other tech companies

They also probably have good ways of offsetting the weakness of the dollar, whereas regular citizens and investors don't
by billfor | 2025-07-10 20:06:00+00:00
They don't require the cloud if all you want to do is turn them on or off. You can send SOAP requests to them, or use OpenHAB, HomeAssistant, etc... to control what you have, but longer term it might be a good idea to invest in Tasmota or ESPhome switches if you have technical knowledge. Paying up for Lutron might be a more long term solution if you want hands off, though they don't have the device coverage that Wemo had.

https://www.openhab.org/addons/bindings/wemo/

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wemo/
by godelski | 2025-07-10 20:06:01+00:00
> Lets not warn anyone about that AT ALL, lets keep the feature activated and let them users lose their data

How did you conclude this?

IDK why the assumption is that safety measures haven't been created. You wouldn't mark the bug as resolved if you put in safety features, right? You *ONLY MARK AS RESOLVED* after reproducing the bug and *VERIFYING* that it won't happen again. Right? Dear god I hope this is what you do, because otherwise you are prematurely closing bugs.
by motorest | 2025-07-10 20:06:11+00:00
> What major compiler does not support it?

The whole point is that it's not supported and it's not standard, thus using #pragma once needlessly introduced the risk of having the code break.

You should ask yourself what are you doing and why are you using non-standard constructs that may or may not work, specially when it's rather obvious and trivial to just use include guards. Using #pragma once isn't even qualify as being clever to gain anything.
by rshemet | 2025-07-10 20:06:12+00:00
Thank you! it goes without saying that the field is rapidly developing, so the use cases range from private AI assistant/companion apps to internet connectivity-independent copilots to powering private wearables, etc.

We're currently working with a few projects in the space.

For a demo of a familiar chat interface, download https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/cactus-chat/id6744444212 or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rshemetsub...

For other applications, join the discord and stay tuned! :)