MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-07-26 10:22:34+00:00
> How long do you think it will be before a reliable dish washing / laundry doing domestic bot is on the market? a decade or two?

Depends if they only do this, or if they're fully general robots that also do this.

The former, remember we've already got dishwashers and washing machines.

The latter, to a standard that won't lead to regular news stories about how it tries to put a pet corgi into the bread bin or fry someone's pet goldfish for dinner, the problem space they need to navigate (literally and metaphorically) is much more complex than what is needed by level-5 FSD. Right now level-5 isn't a solved problem (running into parked cars should be "never happens" not merely "rare"), suggesting that even the more power-intensive compute (800 watts) isn't sufficient for the easier challenge of level-5 FSD, let alone domestic robots, and at that power level such domestic robots would need to be sold with an external computer running of mains not an internal one that runs of batteries.

Even if the software is a solved problem, which it isn't, getting the compute into a mobile body with the much smaller power envelope of an android vs. a car means the gap between level-5 and such robots is order of 5-10 years. But, to emphasise, this countdown has not yet started, and I'm not saying it will be between 2030-35.

For large-scale use, the global electrical power supply is currently 375 W/capita, and even with my expectation of wind+PV allowing us to double this by 2032, there's not enough electrical capacity for a huge number of these robots in this form on that timescale.

Regarding clanking self replication, that depends on the exact details of what you mean. It took a while to get the taxonomy of level-[12345] self driving, and right now we're too far from meaningful self replication to even make a taxonomy of self-replication:

• If all you need is industrial robot arms that work in a factory that makes more industrial robot arms, we've probably already got that.

• If you need the robots to be sufficiently general that we can fill up the payload bay of Starship with ~1000 of them, dump them all on the moon, and a few months later they've bashed enough rocks together to make an ore processing system, and a year later they've built a factory that makes more of themselves, that's much much harder and I don't think we've got enough information yet to even enumerate all the steps between here and there.
by chneu | 2025-07-26 10:23:35+00:00
new person got hired after old person left. new person says "we can save x% by shutting down these links. 99% arent used" and the new boss that's only been there for 6 months says "yeah sure".

Why does google kill any project? the people who made it moved on, the new people dont care because it doesn't make their resume look any better.

basically nobody wants to own this service and it requires upkeep to maintain it alongside other google services.

google's history shows a clear choice to reward new projects, not old ones.

https://killedbygoogle.com/
by tetha | 2025-07-26 10:26:23+00:00
It does touch on what I was thinking as well at the end of the first section: Usually this makes sense if your application has to manage a lot of complexity, or rather, has to consume and produce the same domain objects in many different ways across many different APIs.

For example, some systems interact with several different vendor, tracking and payment systems that are all kinda the same, but also kinda different. Here it makes sense to have an internal domain model and to normalize all of these other systems into your domain model at a very early level. Otherwise complexity rises very, very quickly due to the number of n things interacting with n other things.

On the other hand, for a lot of our smaller and simpler systems that output JSON based of a database for other systems... it's a realistic question if maintaining the domain model and API translation for every endpoint in every change is actually less work than ripping out the API modelling framework, which occurs once every few years, if at all? Some teams would probably rewrite from scratch with new knowledge, especially if they have API-tests available.
by SenHeng | 2025-07-26 10:26:26+00:00
> It's much better ux when a user downloads the whole catalogue and then apply filters on the client without having to touch the server until he wants to get to the checkout.

This is what we[0] do too. We have a single JSON with a thousand over BOMs that's loaded directly into the browser. Previously we loaded the inventory data via an API as is usually expected. The fact that there's even an API meant requiring progress and loading bars, API unavailability scenarios, etc.

Having it all as a single preloaded JSON meant that all of the above goes away. Response is instantaneous.

[0]: https://chubic.com
by hansmayer | 2025-07-26 10:27:06+00:00
> "To move from operating on pig cadaver samples to live pigs and then, potentially, to humans, robots like SRT-H need training data that is extremely hard to come by. Intuitive Surgical is apparently OK with releasing the video feed data from the DaVinci robots, but the company does not release the kinematics data. And that’s data that Kim says is necessary for training the algorithms. “I know people at Intuitive Surgical headquarters, and I’ve been talking to them,” Kim says. “I’ve been begging them to give us the data. They did not agree.”

So they are building essentially a Surgery-ChatGPT ? Morals aside, how is this legal? Who wants to be operated on by a robot guessing based on training data? Has everyone in the GenAI-hype-bubble gone completely off the rails?
by simonw | 2025-07-26 10:27:09+00:00
Maker Faire went bankrupt in 2019: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/maker-faire-now-make-commu...

More on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_Faire

They're actually back now, but in a less expensive venue in Vallejo: https://bayarea.makerfaire.com/

Next Vallejo event is 26-28 September 2025.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-26 10:27:16+00:00
That's just human capability elicitation.

Having "skin in the game" doesn't somehow make a human surgeon more capable. It makes the human use more of the capabilities he already has.

Or less of the capabilities he has - because more of the human's effort ends up being spent on "cover your ass" measures! Which leaves less effort to be spent on actually ensuring the best outcomes for the patient.

A well designed AI system doesn't give a shit. It just uses all the capabilities it has at all times. You don't have to threaten it with "consequences" or "accountability" to make it perform better.
by jfyi | 2025-07-26 10:30:05+00:00
Because authorize.net is a payment gateway, not a processor. You'd still need a processor and the one your bank works with will have similar requirements.

Honestly, those rates are better than I expected. I think OnlyFans has a 20% rate and the one real experience I have had with processors that handle adult industry was nearing 30%. They had legitimate fraud problems though.
by goku12 | 2025-07-26 10:31:12+00:00
I know something subjectively more valuable than gold that you may be able to make from a Tokamak - Energy! Considering the crisis unfolding, it can't come soon enough. Why then are we talking about wasting neutrons for making a metal that's sufficiently available, if you disregard its uses for vanity? And what about its utility when you've made enough gold that it's commercially worthless?

The main issue here is that Tokamaks are yet to reach engineering break even - they're yet to produce more energy than they consume. Even the multinational ITER project is built without any components to deliver any energy to the power grid. It's disconcerting that this problem is not being discussed enough when fusion reactors are touted as a solution for the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, we are talking about putting our strained energy resources into making gold? Haven't we learned anything from degrading the biosphere for extremely energy-inefficient endeavors like crypto mining and AI training? Humanity needs to set its priorities straight.
by hansmayer | 2025-07-26 10:31:12+00:00
...Except that a surgeon can reason in real-time even if he wasn´t "trained" on a specific edge-case. Its called intelligence. And unless they have been taking heavy drugs ahead of the procedure, or were sleep deprived, its very un-likely a surgeon will have a hallucination, of the kind that is practically a feature of the GenAI.
by chneu | 2025-07-26 10:33:55+00:00
it's not the cost of hosting/sharing it. It's the cost employing people to maintain this alongside other google products.

So, at minimum, assuming there are 2 people maintaining this at google that probably means it would cost them $250k/yr in just payroll to keep this going. That's probably a very low ball estimate on the people involved but it still shows how expensive theses old products can be.
by cyber1 | 2025-07-26 10:34:21+00:00
Hey, I understand you and know this stuff well, having worked with it for many years as a C dev. To be honest, this isn't how things should generally be done. Macros were invented for very simple problems. Yes, we can abuse them as much as possible (for example, in C++, we discovered SFINAE, which is an ugly, unreadable technique that wasn't part of the programming language designer's intent but rather like a joke that people started abusing), but is it worth it?
by journal | 2025-07-26 10:35:10+00:00
absolutely nothing. when i first heard about mcp i decided to not even try. my understanding of the vision is an endpoint you can post and receive a response. at the same time i don't like the color scheme on hn and i ask myself why doesn't hn have an api endpoint for all what they show and let people post? but the biggest question of all is why "you give me json and i decide what to do with it" isn't the norm and we have to consume this html garbage layouts and colors of which i fundamentally disagree with on a very down to earth human level. i guess wars have been started over sillier things. what if my pink isn't the same pink as your pink? like how do you know? we used to have this kid that saw things at higher refresh rate and the school would have to increase monitor refresh rate for him. so it's possible we've gone down the wrong road for way too long. i see projects like ESP32 and i dream of the day when to be considered an application you have to be certified to use finite amount of resources and that games aren't all trying to be realistic all the time while knowing damn well they can't render volumetric smoke for shit which alone would increase game quality by over 50% in my opinion, but apparently smoke compute is expensive, so we wont see realistic smoke probably not in our lifetime me guess. we have total domination in linux has absolutely no competitor and is used for different reason from the only consumer os windows. we're going in the wrong direction with a lot of these hot off the press ide, forks, extensions, just the whole ecosystem of bullshit is brewing. html every year i assume it's getting a new feature browsers implement, it's like a train that started moving so fast it's difficult for you to get on but it's so long that it never leaves the station and the station is forever. just absolute madness. i wish we could slow it down. imagine being born now but only realizing learning how to prompt an LLM is important when you're 20 while everyone else has 20 years of experience advantage. it's kinda funny reading people on here complain about things they don't like while collectively knowing you all have the power to change everything you put your mind to. everyone complains about the simplest things they have absolute control over. like, the only reason i'... we're all just disagreeing on things we're all agreeing on to then agree to them again. does that make any sense?
by Tade0 | 2025-07-26 10:36:03+00:00
Parents don't usually send kids to those things with some grand career plan for them in mind, but to occupy the offspring with something that isn't cartoons. Finding what they want to do in life via such activities is just a bonus.

Meanwhile the shortage of engineers is actually a shortage of everyone, as demographics shifted towards there being fewer children overall.

Regarding solutions all eyes should now be on Japan, as they're a harbinger state - crises they have tend to repeat elsewhere - and they have had this problem for decades now.
by ahoog42 | 2025-07-26 10:36:05+00:00
regarding data collection, both android and ios provide multiple ways to review, approve/deny, and manage access to data. it's certainly not perfect but is being constantly improved. And for the HN crowd, you can always run mobile security/privacy tools like mobSF to inspect the app. I'm not suggesting we should have to do this but we can and frankly browser fingerprinting is opaque, also constantly evolving and quite good at tracking and data collection. i'm not sure avoid the better ux of a native app is much worse and given the privacy tools and data available, I generally prefer the native app
by Earw0rm | 2025-07-26 10:36:06+00:00
Indeed you can take this further and think of three address spaces:

- Visible register file. 4-6 bit address space, up to 2kb in size. Virtualized as hidden (hardware) registers. Single cycle access. Usually little or no access controls or fault handling, if it exists you can read/write it.

- Main memory, 32-64 bit address space. Virtualized as caches, main RAM and swap. Access may be as low as 5 cycles for L1d, hundreds for main RAM, up into millions if you hit the swap file. Straightforward layer of access controls: memory protection, segfault exceptions and so on.

- Far storage, URIs and so on. Variable-length address space, effectively infinite. Arbitrarily long access times, arbitrarily complex access controls and fallbacks.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-26 10:36:55+00:00
> Frankfurt on July 26th 2029 at 1pm

That's a localized date and time. And it shouldn't be what you store but what you present based on the user's preferences. The same calendar event would be completely different in the calendar of a tourist visiting Frankfurt. And calendar invites of course can have multiple participants that each want their date times localized to their time zone and locale. So the best way to do that is to store the time zone in a 100% normalized, unambiguous way that is then transformed into whatever matches the user's preferences as part of the presentation logic.

In the same way, place names are localized. The French would spell Frankfurt as Francfort, for example. Location should be a separate field. And it implies nothing about the locale that should be used for presenting the timestamp or the timezone that should be used. Because Frankfurt is a rather international town and some might prefer MM DD YY instead of DD MM YYYY. Not to mention the use of am/pm vs. 24 hour time. And of course it has a big airport that people use to travel to pretty much all time zones on the planet. Hard coding all that in a timestamp is a mistake. Because now you need needlessly complex parsing logic and transformation logic to fix that mistake. Which is what this article is about.
by samiyaparacha | 2025-07-26 10:36:57+00:00
I’m a self-taught person who modeled the Collatz Conjecture as a symbolic recursive system — like a finite-state machine instead of a number puzzle. This structure uses modular classes, loop recursion, and power-of-two collapse to show why it always converges.

It doesn’t rely on brute force or unproven assumptions — just symbolic transitions and deterministic collapse logic. The work is uploaded on Zenodo. Feedback from the CS and logic community is welcome.
by subhobroto | 2025-07-26 10:36:59+00:00
This is a very well done site but perhaps a bit too much of a demand test to be on HN which is extremely tech heavy (the typical reader is likely to wonder "I can already ask an LLM to do this. Why would I pay this company to do this for me?"). This would do very well on other, less tech heavy sites. I would also suggest some changes.

Above the fold, there's a lot of pitch how Draw.io requires "No credit card, no trial periods, no BS." and "It's genuinely free - has been for years, always will be. That's why millions use it, and why converting your images to Draw.io format makes so much sense. Your converted files will always be editable, no subscription required"

Below the fold and at the very bottom, this service itself starts off at $5/mo on sale right now.

I would imagine this would confuse people. They might interpret that this service is free too, then be suprised at the "no free tier" and some are going to be outright angry and very vocal about it.

So I would change the messaging along the lines of "We help you convert images into Draw.io so you pay us just once for the diagram you want converted"

To enhance the message, I would further say "This is how much we sponsor Draw.io for enabling our own business" and write blog posts about the struggles to build the service or even open source the methods to fine-tune a model to do the conversion.

Good luck, this is valuable!
by ben_w | 2025-07-26 10:38:10+00:00
> an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either

They definitely can be. One of the viral videos of a Tesla "oops" in just the last few months showed it going from "fine" to "upside-down in a field" in about 5 seconds.

And I had trouble finding that because of all the other news stories about Teslas crashing.

While I trust Waymo more than Tesla, the problem space is one with rapid fatalities.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-26 10:38:49+00:00
It's really JFK's, Nixon's, and Reagan's fault.

JFK made the mistake of obliterating institutions in preparation for the residential treatment centers plan before having the latter secured. (And then he got got before finishing either.) Nixon and Reagan doubled-down on this unfinished project by making it even worse without offering anything resembling a functional, affordable, accessible, and humane mental healthcare system in America. Reagan and Trump both share the quality of obliterating anything they don't understand.
by uecker | 2025-07-26 10:39:16+00:00
Except that I find C++ far from being perfect. In fact, I switched from C++ to C (a while ago) to avoid its issues and I am being much happier I also find my vec(int) much nicer.

In fact, we are at the moment ripping out some template code in a C code base which has some C++ for cuda in it, and this one file with C++ templates almost doubles the compilation time of the complete project (with ~700 source files). IMHO it is grotesque how bad it is.
by chneu | 2025-07-26 10:39:28+00:00
I just went through the old thread and it's comments. It appears google didn't specifically state they were going to end the service. They hinted that links would continue working, but new ones would not be able to be created. It was left a bit open-ended, and that likely made people think the links would work indefinitely.

This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.
by pyman | 2025-07-26 10:41:41+00:00
I thought about your comment, and IMO the reason some (or most) SPAs are badly built comes down to the inexperience of developers and hiring managers. They don't know much about performance, they don't measure it, they don't handle errors properly, they ignore edge cases, and some are learning as they go.

Bottom line: they build the SPA, but leave behind a terrible UX and tech debt the size of Mount Everest.
by curtisblaine | 2025-07-26 10:42:52+00:00
Not only SPAs are here to stay, but they're eating up native app on the desktop (with Electron et al., it's much easier to hire TS devs and write your app once rather than have different native codebases for Windows, Macos and Linux).

Now, I understand the argument that simple article-based websites shouldn't necessarily be SPAs. Page transitions are perfectly doable in pure HTML and CSS. But if you have less then trivial local state and complex + specific components, forcing the MPA pattern will only complicate your codebase.
by maccard | 2025-07-26 10:44:04+00:00
I live in the middle of a major UK city, which is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the UK (if not the world). There are massive gaps of mobile coverage in the city - 5G is spotty at best, and it regularly falls back to much older protocols in the city. There are dead zones where you can literally walk 6 ft and drop to 0 coverage, and walk another 6ft and be on full blown 5G. Apps and sites like uber, twitter, Reddit, instagram all handle these awfully.
by cyber1 | 2025-07-26 10:44:33+00:00
I'm currently at a crossroads: C++ or Zig. One is very popular with a large community, amazing projects, but has lots of ugly design decisions and myriad rules you must know (this is a big pain, it seems like even Stroustrup can't handle all of them). The other is very close to what I want from C, but it's not stable and not popular.
by pshirshov | 2025-07-26 10:44:39+00:00
Essentially, I do want to stay with PI-PIII-level hardware at most. Things were much simpler back then and the percepted lags were much lower. If I swap the HDD with an SSD in a typical PII desktop running NT4, everything happens just instantly. I'm not even talking about DOS and clean beautiful text mode/turbo vision interfaces. On my Threadripper I wait a couple of seconds for a text editor or a todo list to start.

My quality of life didn't improve much in the PIV+ era. I can play 4k videos now, but the software is much slower, UIs are ugly and, more importantly, inconvenient because there are no native toolkits anymore, just the browser and it dictates the idioms UI designers can use.

Also I want local-first software which does not pipe all my shite to some shady guys, not unreliable plaintext storages somewhere in over the continent.

I don't want to pay subscriptions for everything. I still can run what I purchased 15 years ago but I don't have the option to own anything in this modern world.
by santaboom | 2025-07-26 10:44:56+00:00
Curios what you mean by 3D and also how 3D is used. Assuming something like [0] I can pretty confidently tell you that it is not 3D as it is a low power microcontroller and this technology is mostly used in large expensive HPC/AI chips also afaik 3D stacking of logic die is not really a thing (if anyone knows counterexamples pls provide) it is much more common for stacking memory die ex HBM. As for your proposed coprocessor that actually might benefit from 3D integration with the trad cpu as >> # of interconnect / memory channels could allow you to route data more directly to processing elements. Something like this is proposed with “2.5D” stacking in [1] where HBM (3D) is connected to an FPGA with 128 channels.

[0] https://resources.pcb.cadence.com/blog/2023-2-5d-vs-3d-packa...

[1] page 6: https://bu-icsg.github.io/publications/2024/fhe_parallelized...
by AngryData | 2025-07-26 10:45:33+00:00
Okay yeah sure, it can and does happen on occasion, but how often matters a lot. We can't just ban everything over every rare and unlikely scenario, and it will still do basically nothing to stop 99.9% of gun crime. Plus from when the CDC was allowed to research such things, they found between 500,000-3,000,000 cases of defensive firearm use per year in the US, 2-10x as high as violent crimes.

Maybe you live somewhere privileged enough that you can rely on the police to protect you, but most of the US doesn't. For many people in the US police response is 30+ minutes, and the police themselves pose as much of a threat to them as the criminals they are calling about if a potential danger.
by brailsafe | 2025-07-26 10:47:07+00:00
First: "That makes me deeply uncomfortable, so I'm going to leave"

Second: Tough to say, probably nothing if that's the end of the communication. I hear stories pretty regularly of men being misled into taking someone out on the first date, paying for it, and then finding out a second date or anything beyond that was never on the table for one reason or another. It's definitely rude and vulgar, and people should reserve that for special cases.