MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dheera | 2025-07-23 16:49:38+00:00
I do a lot of amateur astrophotography too (https://www.instagram.com/dheeranet/), mainly with the objective of trying to show what things "would look like" if these deep space objects were much brighter; I maintain compositional and visual accuracy; all of these things could have theoretically been shot as-is as a single image if the objects were brighter.

> It's not uncommon to combine the LRGB data with e.g. H-alpha data.

Yeah I do this too. Typically I do HOO to maintain as close to spectral accuracy as possible. I don't have an S filter.

It is, by the way, possible to get DSOs shot as a single image, it's tricky. See the 3rd image in this series:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKXdL1YndQi/?img_index=3

I want to try to fine tune a diffusion model to make it possible to actually shoot these single shot with good fidelity.
by f33d5173 | 2025-07-23 16:49:51+00:00
Yes, you can't use it to create those other functions, but you can use it to fulfill the authors purported goal in using those other functions. It also solves the deficiencies the author highlights in those other approaches. You could of course point to deficiencies in it and seek to resolve those deficiencies, but that wasn't how the article was structured.
by polski-g | 2025-07-23 16:50:14+00:00
> Investigators then showed two witnesses a photo lineup that included Dillon and several similar-looking individuals. Both witnesses identified Dillon as the suspect, which led to his arrest

> “Police are not allowed under the Constitution to arrest somebody without probable cause,” Nate Freed-Wessler with the American Civil Liberties Union

...??

They had probable cause: two witnesses to the original crime identified him, after the AI identified him. He was rightfully detained, and then proved his innocence, and was released. The system worked as intended. Is the ACLU's goal to never detain someone, ever?
by autoexec | 2025-07-23 16:50:23+00:00
When properly accommodated, it's a nicer tent with electricity, AC, and an actual bed, kitchen, and bathroom. With tents you get dangerous hotplates/camping stoves and people pissing and shitting in streets instead of toilets. Some people really prefer the mobility, but most would happily transition to housing as soon it is made affordable/available. There are more vacant homes in SF than homeless people, and foreign investors buy up huge amounts of residential property and leave them empty.
by MITSardine | 2025-07-23 16:50:34+00:00
A gradient descent is used to solve optimization problems, those arise in many many cases unrelated to ML. Please research a little the history of this field, and notice how it predates ML by decades (even 180 years in the case of the gradient descent specifically).

A great deal of applied mathematics is related to finding a minimum or maximum quantity of something. There are not always constructive methods, sometimes (often) there's no better way than to step through a generic optimization method.

Some quick examples clearly unrelated to ML, and very common as they relate to CAD (everywhere from in silico studies to manufacturing) and computer vision:

- projecting a point on a surface

- fitting a parametric surface through a point cloud

Another example is non-linear PDEs. Some notable cases are Navier-Stoke's equations, non-linear elasticity, or reaction-diffusion. These are used in many industries. To solve non-linear PDEs, a residual is minimized using, typically, quasi-Newton methods (gradient descent's buff cousin). This is because numerical schemes only exist for linear equations, so you must first recast the problem as something linear (or a succession of those, as it were).

By the way, I might add that most PDEs can be equivalently recast as optimization problems.

Yet another is inverse problems: imaging (medical, non destructive testing...), parameter estimation (subsoil imaging), or even shape optimization. Similarly, optimal control. (similar in that it is minimizing a quantity under PDE constraints)

To summarize, almost every time you seek to solve a non-linear equation of any kind (of which there are many completely unrelated to ML), numerical optimization is right around the corner. And when you seek to find "the best" or "the least" or "the most" of something, optimization. Clearly, this is all the time.

I think I've provided a broad enough set of fields with ubiquitous applications, that it is clear optimization is omnipresent and used considerably more often than ML is. As you see, there is no association from optimization to ML or AI, although there is one the other way around. (much like a bird is not a chicken).
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-23 16:51:13+00:00
>The proposal sets a two-hour parking limit citywide for all RVs and oversized vehicles longer than 22 feet (7 meters) or higher than 7 feet (2 meters), regardless of whether they are being used as housing.

Maybe I'm jaded but I see this as a way to extract revenue from commercial vehicles while sailing under the flag of screwing the homeless so that it can be marketed to residents voters.
Show HN: Kafka, the first AI employee (NEW SOTA ON GAIA BY 20%)
by egrigokhan | 2025-07-23 16:51:15+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Gokhan, the founder of Brainbase Labs. Today we're releasing an early preview of our first generalist agent, Kafka. Kafka is the first AI employee, he comes with his own computer as well as his own email, phone and Slack so you can work with him just like you would with a regular employee.

You can forward him emails, give him a call, tag him on Slack.

We built Kafka as the basis for our other AI employees we will be releasing over the coming months. Kafka currently achieves 77.2% on the GAIA Level 3 benchmark, getting us closer to human performance at 87%. We've achieved this by creating a new type of planning algorithm called "structured planning" which allows Kafka to run very long term plans without getting sidetracked or hallucinating.

Kafka can do some cool things, he can push code to AWS, direct its own commercial using Veo3 and do actual production tasks on Upwork/Fiverr.

We're very keen to hear what HN thinks about Kafka, and how we can improve. Appreciate any feedback!
by hightrix | 2025-07-23 16:51:29+00:00
I'd argue it isn't a practical setup.

Dual-booting means supporting 2 OSes on my personal machine. My personal machine is for doing personal things, not supporting OSes.

I use windows on my main PC because it supports all the games I want to play, and it also supports all the software I want to use. Linux does not. Simple as that, for me.

I also use Linux and Mac at work daily. I prefer to use the right tool for the job.
by andruby | 2025-07-23 16:51:50+00:00
Insurances have a "loss ratio" (premiums vs paid claims) that has different ranges depending on the type of insurance.

> Gadget/Electronic Device Insurance typically operates with loss ratios between 30% and 60%. This means that 30–60 cents of every premium dollar are paid back out in claims. [0]

In other words, on average people pay twice as much in premiums than they would have without insurance. So you'd need to be way more clumsy/unlucky than average to make it worth it.

Of course, the peace of mind can be valuable too.

[0] https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:dfcf4d4a-d6f6-424c-949f-7940...
by cestith | 2025-07-23 16:52:17+00:00
Check out Modern Perl. It won’t limit you to one best way for everything. It will give you one best way to do many things, and a smaller set of good ways to do others. https://isbn.nu/9781680500882

Keep in mind though that the current state of Perl includes being in the process of getting a native object model baked into the language core. So that’s still in some flux but it’ll be better than choosing among eight different external object model libraries. It’s also more performant. The docs for that I’m not sure are in a bound paper book anywhere yet, but I’d happily be corrected.
by fragmede | 2025-07-23 16:52:22+00:00
It doesn't matter how good a driver I, or your wife, or any woman, or any man is. That drunk driver who's also texting and just had a stroke and passed out from fentanyl could plow into you while you're innocently stopped at a stop light and you're being as defensive as possible. I don't see any way to change that calculus for the paranoid, unfortunately.
by blipmusic | 2025-07-23 16:53:10+00:00
His "argument" for strict typing on the Lex Fridman podcast was also that it's mostly if you have "hundreds or (of?) thousands of engineers collaborating", which "strictly" puts his opinion in the bin in my case. I have absolutely, positively become more productive as a single developer due to strict typing. Parsing various kinds of binary data was enough to convince me. A.k.a. each to their own. On the whole, Elixir and BEAM seem really cool though, and there's work being done on typing, as well as the new Gleam language.

Note: I've not yet done any serious web-development, mostly command line tools, which I realise is not DHH's main focus.
by antognini | 2025-07-23 16:53:25+00:00
This is a really good overview. However:

> It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model!

This part is not true. The main advantage of Copernicus's model was that it reduced the number of epicycles needed. In the Ptolemaic system every planet (except the Moon and Sun) required an epicycle with a period of one year, which we now know was needed in order to account for the relative motion of the Earth on its own orbit. In a heliocentric system these epicycles could be eliminated. Copernicus presented his model more in terms of it requiring fewer calculations.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-23 16:53:28+00:00
How much of this is moral panic?

Like, objectively, how much overlap is there between a NEET who is addicted to waifus and dating sims in Persona and AI Friend or NSFW Apps?

My hunch is the overlap is significant, and at that point the problem is WHY you have those kinds of NEETs and how to resolve it, not the technology or medium itself.

Western Civil libertarian fundamentalists like much of HN would not appreciate the kinds of solutions East Asian societies like China and South Korea used (cracking down on games; limit hours spent gaming; and SEVERE social ostracism and disgust)

Edit: because subtext is apparently difficult

My point is, automatically jumping to "ban XYZ" does not solve the core problem that causes obsessive tendencies to manifest
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-23 16:53:42+00:00
>Surely they will spend somewhere between $4m and $44m trying to effectively force this 2 hour limit which will not result in 0 RVs where they don't want them

They'll make it back on the other end by engaging in revenue enforcement against box trucks and other legitimate business as the rule seems very clearly crafted to apply to them too.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-23 16:53:54+00:00
The ultimate question here is what the values of the "Society" are. Preferring real social interaction over isolation is a value judgement, clearly many people do value real social interaction less and less. There are two options here, either an outside force changes these values or these values are accepted as normal.

None of this has to do with technology itself, people are actively choosing to be anti-social. If you aren't going to accept their choice, what are you going to do?
by ghc | 2025-07-23 16:54:02+00:00
This post is a good example of why groundbreaking innovations often come from outsiders. The author's ideas are clearly colored by their particular experiences as an engineering manager or principal engineer in (I'm guessing) large organizations, and don't particularly resonate with me. If this is representative of how engineering managers think we should build AI tooling, AI tools will hit a local maximum based on a particular set of assumptions about how they can be applied to human workflows.

I've spent the last 15 years doing R&D on (non-programmer) domain-expert-augmenting ML applications and have never delivered an application that follows the principles the author outlines. The fact that I have such a different perspective indicates to me that the design space is probably massive and it's far too soon to say that any particular methodology is "backwards." I think the reality is we just don't know at this point what the future holds for AI tooling.
by thegeomaster | 2025-07-23 16:54:26+00:00
Same here. Reading the article, I could not really relate to the experience of being a single-language developer for 10 years.

In my early days, I identified strongly with my chosen programming language, but people way more experienced than me taught me that a programming language is a tool, and that this approach is akin to saying "well, I don't know about those pliers, I am a hammerer."

My personal feeling from working across a wide range of programming languages is that it expands your horizons in a massive way (and hard to qualitatively describe), and I'm happy that I did this.
by 8jef | 2025-07-23 16:54:51+00:00
While part of the arguments appear valid, comparison between tourism and oil fields is hot garbage, even for pro protectionist oil financed organizations.

Firstly, you need lots of oil so you can have tourism. No oil no tourism.

Second, yes, tourism is a fragile industry with low productivity. This is because tourism will mostly happen during times of peace, without pandemics. Then, most tourism services are personal, so yes, benefits aren't purely economic, they intersect with human values.

The truth is we are all moving toward a most walled and protectionist world economic system, where tourism tend to be associated with liberal values like immigration and free trade, and the U.S. is rethinking its ties with the outer multilateral world.
Show HN: Unlimited Access to Mainstream LLM and Image Generation Model APIs
by akakenl | 2025-07-23 16:54:57+00:00
Hi HN,

AI models are evolving rapidly, with many updates happening weekly. Some providers limit concurrent usage, and for some models, you might not even have access.

Our team has created an API aggregation service. With a single interface, you can quickly access popular LLM and image generation models. This means you don't need to register or pay various providers, and there are no access limits—you can use mainstream models with unlimited concurrency.
by derefr | 2025-07-23 16:55:09+00:00
> We're still a few generations of hardware away I'm guessing.

I don't know; I think we could be running models "as good as" Claude Opus 4, a few years down the line, with a lot less hardware — perhaps even going backwards, with "better" later models fitting on smaller, older — maybe even consumer-level — GPUs.

Why do I say this? Because I get the distinct impression that "throwing more parameters at the problem" is the current batch of AI companies' version of "setting money on fire to scale." These companies are likely leaving huge amounts of (almost-lossless) optimization on the table, in the name of having a model now that can be sold at huge expense to those few customers who really want it and are willing to pay (think: intelligence agencies automating real-time continuous analysis of the conversations of people-of-interest). Having these "sloppy but powerful" models, also enables the startups themselves to make use of them in expensive one-time batch-processing passes, to e.g. clean and pluck outliers from their training datasets with ever-better accuracy. (Think of this as the AI version of "ETL data migration logic doesn't need to be particularly optimized; what's the difference between it running for 6 vs 8 hours, if we're only ever going to run it once? May as well code it in a high-level scripting language.")

But there are only so many of these high-value customers to compete over, and only so intelligent these models need to get before achieving perfect accuracy on training-set data-cleaning tasks can be reduced to "mere" context engineering / agentic cross-validation. At some point, an inflection point will be passed where the marginal revenue to be earned from cost-reduced volume sales outweighs the marginal revenue to be earned from enterprise sales.

And at that point, we'll likely start to see a huge shift in in-industry research in how these models are being architected and optimized.

No longer would AI companies set their goal in a new model generation first as purely optimizing for intelligence on various leaderboards (ala the 1980s HPC race, motivated by serving many of the same enterprise customers!), and then, leaderboard score in hand, go back and re-optimize to make the intelligent model spit tokens faster when run on distributed backplanes (metric: tokens per watt-second).

But instead, AI companies would likely move to a combined optimization goal of training models from scratch to retain high-fidelity intelligent inference capabilities on lower-cost substrates — while minimizing work done [because that's what OEMs running local versions of their models want] and therefore minimizing "useless motion" of semantically-meaningless tokens. (Implied metric: bits of Shannon informational content generated per (byte-of-ram x GPU FLOP x second)).
by uncertainrhymes | 2025-07-23 16:55:42+00:00
Even though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were many companies happily using it for free and still demanding security updates.

I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens.

https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/
by ahamilton454 | 2025-07-23 16:55:59+00:00
It doesn't always ask great questions, but even just the fact that it does makes me re-think what i am asking.

I definetly sometimes ask really specialized questions and in that case i just say "do the search" and ignore the questions, but a lot of times it helps me determine what i am really asking.

I suspect people with execellent communication abilities might find less utility from the questions
by xg15 | 2025-07-23 16:56:44+00:00
> while others, such as Cologne, have simply added platforms at their main stations to enable suburban trains to run through.

We did?

Cologne's tram system is weird. Over the last century, they merged the tram, subway and selected private railways into a single network. The result is sort of a tram network on steroids, that also runs underground and serves longer distances to two neighboring cities. But it's still separate from the national train network or even "real" suburban trains (S-Bahn).

(Edit: Just learned the term "interurban" for that...)

That's unlike Berlin or Vienna, where you sometimes have subway and S-Bahn side by side in the same station, but on different tracks. I think that's closer to what they mean with "through-running"?
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-23 16:56:47+00:00
1. Even early computers of the 90s and 00s tended to reduce face-to-face contact. At least a lot of children started to spend more time on the computer than hanging out in real life. (The latter wasn't obliterated, but reduced.)

2. Airline and rapid travel encourages people to move away from friends and family because they can be visited or reuinted on occasion more often.

3. Not sure how you were enthusiastic about the climate – it's been going steadily worse since the use of fossil fuel technology, which in addition makes it harder for people to engage in sustenance farming in many places due to unpredcitability. People have to rely more on industrial farming

4. Industrial farming and large-scale farming puts many family farms out of business, meaing less human dependence on individuals and more on technology.

5. YouTube, etc. brings more knowledge to the world but many tutorials mean people can be more independent and rely on individuals less for their knowledge.

6. Personal cars mean people do not have to rely on each other for a lot of manual labor like hauling stuff, and they now drive instead of walk to the grocery store, which means a lower likelihood of encountering others you know.

7. All communications technologies in general mean less in-person communication, or a greater ability to move away from communities. The internet means less going to the library, etc.
by poulpy123 | 2025-07-23 16:56:51+00:00
If you do all the work, they indeed don't need to spend time and energy on the switch itself, and even better if their usage is limited enough they don't encounter missing software or incompatibilities with the windows world.

The irony is that before doing the work for the switch, and even before doing the work of checking if the switch is feasible for their need, they will need to spend time and energy to select which linux distrib they should choose. Switching from linux to windows of macos doesn't have this issue
by Lammy | 2025-07-23 16:56:59+00:00
The practical value is reinforcing among the general public the idea that humans should not be able to move freely around their own planet. In the future only money will have that right. The modern passport didn't even exist until World War Ⅰ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521634938 / https://archive.org/details/pdfy-S0NQwPjPkMlzZ2eS/mode/2up
by davidfiala | 2025-07-23 16:57:16+00:00
I'd love to see more examples in a portfolio or catalogue page. I think it would help me more clearly see what is possible than just the links above. Or at the very least, having them all together on one page without having to open the design chat URL for each to see the examples would be nice.

I'm glad to see you working on this. It's an incredibly difficult and important space!
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-23 16:57:19+00:00
We got at least a link between heavy road traffic and stunted lung growth in children, as well as at least 10% increased lung cancer rates [1]. Additionally, noise from road traffic has been linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and mental health issues [2].

Both of this is compounded by the fact that people living next to major roads tend to be poorer, so there is a socio-economic issue present as well.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/living-n...

[2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/ver...
by Scoundreller | 2025-07-23 16:57:22+00:00
> Tram-trains manage speeds about the same as the wholly tunneled Paris Metro.

Uhhh, it’s not.

E.g.

> Line 8 is 22.057 km (13.706 mi) long, including 2.8 km (1.7 mi) of open-air tracks in the southeastern suburbs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_8

Maybe they just meant comparing it to the tunnelled sections but I also don’t see why that would really impact speeds. It’s the traffic/grade separation that gets you the speed advantage.

also the Paris Metro is kinda slow because of station density, so you may save a lot of walking but have a lot of station dwell time.

Go during the day and pick any two arbitrary points in Paris and you’ll usually find cycling faster than transit on Google Maps.