MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-04 00:29:50+00:00
(Shrug) There's a difference between prescription and prediction. I predict that after 50 years of doing the same old shit the same old way, the practice of programming is about to undergo a series of wrenching changes that amount to nothing less than revolution. Changes powered by radical new insights into the nature and function of language itself.

I'm not initiating these changes, voting for them, or attempting to persuade other people to do so, as the person I replied to in the other thread is doing. I do welcome having something new and interesting to learn and think about, though.

Anyway, always good to hear from a new fan!
by starchild3001 | 2025-07-04 00:29:52+00:00
Great talk. Dr. Li has a way of cutting through the hype and getting to the fundamental challenges that is really refreshing. Her point about spatial intelligence being the next frontier after language really resonates.

I'm particularly hung up on the data problem she touched on (41 min). She rightly points out that unlike language, where we could bootstrap LLMs with the vast, pre-existing corpus of the internet, there's no equivalent "internet of 3D space." She mentions a "hybrid approach" for World Labs, and that's where the real engineering challenge seems to lie.

My mind immediately goes to the trade-offs. If you lean heavily on synthetic data, you're in a constant battle with the "sim-to-real" gap. It works for narrow domains, but for a general "world model," the physics, lighting, and material properties have to be perfect, which is a monumental task. If you lean on real-world capture (e.g., massive-scale photogrammetry, NeRFs, etc.), the MLOps and data pipeline challenges seem staggering. We're not just talking text files; we're talking about petabytes of structured, multi-sensor data that needs to be processed, aligned, and labeled. It feels like an entirely new class of data infrastructure problem.

Her hiring philosophy of "intellectual fearlessness" (31 min) makes a lot of sense in this context. You'd need a team that's not intimidated by the fact that the foundational dataset for their entire field doesn't even exist yet. They have to build the oil refinery while also figuring out where to drill for oil.

It's exciting to see a team with this much deep learning and computer vision firepower aimed at such a foundational problem. It pulls the conversation away from just optimizing existing architectures and towards creating entirely new categories. It leaves me wondering: what does the "AlexNet moment" for spatial intelligence even look like? Is it a novel model architecture, or is the true breakthrough a new form of data representation that makes this problem tractable at scale?
by belorn | 2025-07-04 00:30:51+00:00
If you drive around in EU then be aware that the law is different depending on the country. Schweiz for example do not allow to use or sell databases that has the location of speed cameras. In Germany you are not allowed to use apps that warn you of it. You are also not allowed to use your car lights to warn other drivers, but you can use hand signals. They are however allowed in other places like Belgium, Neitherlands and Spain.

Here is a list (but I can't say how accurate it is): https://lizhiguos.com/driving-aids-and-speed-camera-warnings...
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-07-04 00:31:12+00:00
Actually, that's NOT the deal in most Western democracies. In countries with free speech protections, writing an op-ed as a legal resident is following the rules, not breaking them.

Yes, even Western democracies sometimes fail at this - through mistakes, bad laws, or moments of fear. That's precisely why we need to call it out when it happens, not shrug and normalize it.

Rights are inherent to all people. When any government - Western or otherwise - punishes peaceful political expression, they're violating fundamental human rights.

'That's just how it is' is how rights erode. We should aspire to strengthen protections for everyone, not excuse their violation by pointing to other failures.
by armchairhacker | 2025-07-04 00:31:54+00:00
Most optimizations require you to think about how your code is structured, so as a side-effect you make the code more understandable.

In this article, it's cache levels forcing you to separate different types of data because they're accessed at different frequencies. Another example is Rust's borrow checker, whose main purpose is arguably to facilitate both safe and efficient memory management, but which can also be used to enforce invariants that aren't clearly memory-related (e.g. builder pattern, temp files that auto-delete after they're dropped).

These aren't abstractions though. An abstraction is the opposite, hiding structure when it's noisy and making it easier to change. For example, if you already have an architecture in mind and don't want to manually determine how frequently each type of data is accessed, it's better to use a compiler or library that automatically determines what to cache with little to no code or thought on your end; that's abstraction. Similarly, the abstract analogue to Rust's borrow checker is garbage collection, which allows programmers to not think about their data-structures' lifetimes at all. The cost is usually performance and you understand your application less in some ways (although you understand it more in other ways; abstraction hides details but too many details make it hard to see the big picture. Ideally, with abstractions in the right places, you hide only the "unimportant" details in ways that insignificantly affect performance).
by jgord | 2025-07-04 00:34:30+00:00
I kind of did a version of what you suggest - I think I linked to a video showing plane edges auto-detected in a pointcloud sample.

Similarly I use another algo to detect pipe runs which tend to appear as half cylinders in the pointcloud, as the scanner usually sees one side, and often the other side is hidden, hard to access, up against a wall.

So, I guess my point is the devil is in the details .. and machine learning can optimize even further on good heuristics we might come up with.

Also, when you go thru a whole pointcloud, you have a lot of data to sift thru, so you want something fairly efficient, even if your using multiple GPUs do do the heavy matmull lifting.

You can think of RL as an optimization - greatly speeding up something like monte carlo tree search, by learning to guess the best solution earlier.
by matt_d | 2025-07-04 00:36:32+00:00
Abstract:

"Extensions allow applications to expand the capabilities of database management systems (DBMSs) with custom logic. However, the extensibility environment for some DBMSs is fraught with perils, causing developers to resort to unorthodox methods to achieve their goals. This paper studies and evaluates the design of DBMS extensibility. First, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of the types of DBMS extensibility. We then examine the extensibility of six DBMSs: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, Redis, and DuckDB. We present an automated extension analysis toolkit that collects static and dynamic information on how an extension integrates into the DBMS. Our evaluation of over 400 PostgreSQL extensions shows that 16.8% of them are incompatible with at least one other extension and can cause system failures. These results also show the correlation between these failures and factors related to extension complexity and implementation."

Database Extensions Analyzer: https://github.com/cmu-db/ext-analyzer

Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7v0fubktoY
by kaiwenwang | 2025-07-04 00:36:46+00:00
I feel like very good isn't enough as employers want the best candidates but not the average candidates, and if you're sort of in the middle then the so-so companies don't want you either because they think you'll leave.

Something about the increased social stratification of our times, which also has to do with increased transportation and communication.

Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas.
by ljsprague | 2025-07-04 00:37:25+00:00
That's not the "point" of America.

>Even as a child growing up it was clear to me (from teachers, textbooks, books, movies) that what makes america special is its ability to integrate immigrants from various backgrounds into 1 working nation. It’s a land of immigrants from the start.

Is it possible you were fed propaganda from a very young age?
by shirro | 2025-07-04 00:39:43+00:00
Seems like a tough call for operating systems to do this when things are moving so fast. With risc-v its probably better to be future looking given current limitations but if a lower spec risc-v exploded in popularity you miss out.

Debian decided, probably very sensibly at the time, to set their minimum target for their 32 bit arm hardfloat distro to armv7. I guess hardly anyone used armv6 with hardware floating point apart from some obscure Broadcom chip. Then the original Raspberry Pi was released, moved an insane number of units, and Debian users would have been stuck with no hardware floating point. Fortunately Mike Thompson recompiled Debian for armv6 with hardfloat and that Debian fork (Raspbian) ended up becoming the basis for the official Raspberry Pi OS.
by michtzik | 2025-07-04 00:41:47+00:00
For the reader curious why the woman in [0] didn't get permanent residency via marriage:

> Milne was divorced from the nonimmigrant student she married prior to 1983. She then married a U.S. citizen but we found, in our above-said unpublished opinion, that she had admitted that it was a marriage of convenience. After another divorce, she married her current husband, a marriage that is uncontested as "bona fide." Her request for legal permanent resident status based on this marriage was denied under INA § 204(c) which precludes approval based on even an admittedly good-faith union if the petitioner had previously contracted an improper marriage.
by nisa | 2025-07-04 00:41:49+00:00
It's not personal but I can't help myself to think that's such a sad post here. Reducing learning a different culture through language by plugging in an earbud. Is the battery is gone or your phone is stolen you realize you can't automate anything and that you've learned nothing. It's not about the tech if it works it's amazing it's like babelfish but it's so shallow to assume everything has some direct and simple "value" that can be replaced by some machine or even better some paid service. It's so common here. Is this an US thing?
by eqvinox | 2025-07-04 00:41:53+00:00
Of course a tiny microkernel code base won't have NFS bugs. It doesn't implement NFS. The bug will instead be in the NFS process/daemon/service/… which considering it's an fs service won't exactly be unprivileged either, even if only by returning maliciously corrupted contents. (e.g. a SUID root file that should not exist.)

And, sure, a microkernel could have better security properties. However, (1) this has no connection at all to this specific bug, and (2) the Linux kernel seems to be doing reasonably well on security properties; or rather the industry seems to have decided it's sufficiently secure, even if not perfect.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-04 00:42:50+00:00
> They’ve all been solved 100x over by founders who’ve been funded on this site.

I’m kind of getting tired of software made by “founders,” who are just looking to monetize me and get their exit, as opposed to software written by normal users just wanting to be useful. I know I’m on the wrong website for this, but the world could use fewer “founders” trying to turn my eyeballs and attention into revenue.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-04 00:43:31+00:00
Voting is a compromise. People knew what Trump would do. The people to blame are those that voted for him or 'kept' their moral high ground and didn't vote for Kamala. I mean all withholding their vote cost was some torture, millions losing their healthcare, etc.

You know how you get people more to the left in the Democratic party? You work at it. You get your people volunteering in the party. You turn out votes. That's how parties/politics work. And you have to keep at it. Not kinda try one time on Burnies team then switch to just criticizing the Dems.

Or you could do nothing and then... enable torture and the loss of healthcare for millions. Not sure what the next step in that plan is but I guess that's where the far left has chosen for us to go. The far left in the US are accelerationists, they want it to all burn down so somehow starting again things go more their way. But they won't. The will be horrible AND we will be coming from a much worse place.
by dnemmers | 2025-07-04 00:44:55+00:00
they each drop a weapon that can vector itself to a very highly accurate position in a mountain, and you can penetrate with one and blow a hole, and then all of that material is suspended. And you have another one come in immediately afterwards and penetrate through much softer material, until you get into hard material, and you penetrate that, and then you explode, and you levitate all that material. Then you bring a third one in after it, you could start thinking about digging really deeply in

Incredible that they have the accuracy to hit the same hole repeatedly, digging further and further down with each subsequent drop.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-07-04 00:45:06+00:00
Again, I agree with what you're saying, but fail to see how that is affected by this bill.

The bill isn't legislating against Meta, or Google, or any of the big tech companies that are making the internet a worse place. If anything, the bill entrenches their place in the whole system by using their logins to identify minors.

I see nothing in this bill that will encourage the internet to be friendlier, or more creative, or less enshittified, or in any way "better". What are you seeing that I'm not?
by alisonatwork | 2025-07-04 00:49:32+00:00
In theory this makes sense, but in practice now that LLMs are writing the PR summaries we just have even more slop to wade through to figure out exactly what the change is trying to achieve. I think the slide in this direction already started with exhaustive PR templates that required developers to fill in a whole bunch of fluff just to open their PR. The templates didn't make bad developers good, it just caused them to produce more bad content for review.

My experience with LLM-generated summaries is the same as it was with the templates: many complete them in a way that is entirely self-referential and lacking in context. I don't need a comment or a summary to describe to me exactly the same thing I could have already understood by reading the code. The reason for adding English-language annotations to source code is to explain how a particular change solves a complex business problem, or how it fits into a long-term architectural plan, that sort of thing. But the kinds of people who already did not care about that high level stuff don't have the context to write useful summaries, and LLMs don't either.

The worst thing I've seen recently is when you push for more clarity and context on the reasons behind a change, and then that request gets piped into an LLM. The AI subsequently invents a business problem or architectural goal that in reality doesn't exist and then you get a summary that looks plausible in the abstract, and may even support the code changes it is describing, but it still doesn't link back to anything the team or company is actually trying to achieve, and that costs the reviewer even more time to check. AI proponents might say "well they should have fed the team OKRs and company mission/vision/values into the LLM for context" but then that defeats the point of having the code review in the first place. If the output is performative and not instructive, then the whole process is a waste of time.

I am not sure what the solution is, although I do think that this is not a problem that started with LLMs, it's just an evolution of a challenge we have always faced - how to deal with colleagues who are not really engaged.
by const_cast | 2025-07-04 00:57:06+00:00
These people are largely theoretical - I've heard this many times, but I've never seen it.

Regardless, I don't necessarily think piracy is immoral. There's a lot of situations where it's the only viable option. However, we should acknowledge that most people are pirating because they are cheap. Which, to me, isn't a sustainable model for anyone. Pirates want music, too, and if they keep this up then they lose as well.
by nebula8804 | 2025-07-04 00:58:03+00:00
>You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.

This would be a big help but maybe too little too late. Maybe we just enjoyed an era of living off the backs of Chinese labor. Now with their increasing wealth, their own desire to move up the chain and their abysmal birthrates, that era is ending.

India also does not have a great birthrate and other structural problems while other asian countries dont have the numbers to completely replace China. It might be that many products we enjoyed just dont make sense anymore if no other country is willing to pick up the slack or there isn't some amazing innovation in automation. Other products might survive with massive inflation.

Watch how this simple bluetooth speaker is made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U

Look at how many people are there to assemble the speaker at MSRP ~20-25$ per speaker.

Does that make sense in a world where those folks aren't being paid the wages that they are or they don't exist anymore because they have retired?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-04 00:59:13+00:00
It's a much older theme, going all the way back to the Biblical legend of the Tower of Babel (hence the name of the fish.) Like most of that material, the Babel myth was probably stolen from the Babylonians or even older cultures.

The powers that be -- whether gods or governors -- tend to feel threatened when people can communicate freely with each other. Don't join their side.
by lemphi | 2025-07-04 00:59:18+00:00
Basically the bare minimum amount of data is stored in Postgres. Many of the locations are stateless, or it's okay if they are wiped on server restart (like NPC shop inventories, since they can just be regenerated on server startup, so they only exist in server memory). And most of the game world is just included in the large static bundle (item names and descriptions, dialogue, etc.).

The main data stored in Postgres are things that must be durable, like your items, currency, unlocked avatars, friends list, gallery, garden, guilds, friendship levels with villagers, profile information, personal shops, and things like that. But even in these cases integer identifiers are used (for things like item IDs and avatar IDs), so the tables remain very lean.

What do you mean by classical update style? I'm not sure if you're still referring to Postgres or if you're talking about the minigames (like does the update loop run at a fixed internal?), or maybe something else entirely?
by RamRodification | 2025-07-04 01:00:35+00:00
> "do this or people will die" doesn't actually do anything

The very first message you replied to in this thread described a situation where "the prompt with the threat gives me 10% more usable results". If you believe that the premise is impossible I don't understand why you didn't just say so. Instead of going on about it not being a reliable method.

If you really think something is impossible, you don't base your argument on it being "unreliable".

> I don't get it lol.

I think you are correct here.
by tomhow | 2025-07-04 01:04:05+00:00
Please don't post grand pronouncements about a nation's merits or future like this. All it does is invite others to respond with opposing grand pronouncements about other countries or regions, leading to what we can see here: a huge flamewar about nations and regions.

The guidelines ask us to avoid flamebait. Please make an effort to observe all the guidelines in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by jgord | 2025-07-04 01:05:20+00:00
short answer yes .. I tried a _lot_ of approaches, many worked partially. I think I linked to a YT video screencast showing edges of planes that my algo had detected in a sample pointcloud ?

Efficient re-meshings are important, and its worth improving on the current algorithms to get crisper breaklines etc, but you really want to go a step further and do what humans do manually now when they make a CAD model from a pointcloud - ie. convert it to its most efficient / compressed / simple useful format, where a wall face is recognized as a simple plane. Even remeshing and flat triangle tesselation can be improved a lot by ML techniques.

As with pointclouds, likewise with 'photogrammetry', where you reconstruct a 3D scene from hundreds of photos, or from 360 panoramas or stereo photos. I think in the next 18 months ML will be able to reconstruct an efficient 3D model from a streetview scene, or 360 panorama tour of a building. An optimized mesh is good for visualization in a web browser, but its even more useful to have a CAD style model where walls are flat quads, edges are sharp and a door is tagged as a door etc.

Perhaps the points Im trying to make are :

- the normal techniques are useful but not quite enough [ heuristics, classical CV algorithms, colmap/SfM ] - NeRFs and gaussian splats are amazing innovations, but dont quite get us there - to solve 3D reconstruction, from pointclouds or photos, we need ML to go beyond our normal heuristics : 3D reality is complicated - ML, particularly RL, will likely solve 3D reconstruction quite soon, for useful things like buildings - this will unlock a lot of value across many domains - AEC / construction, robotics, VR / AR - there is low hanging fruit, such as my algo detecting planes and pipes in a pointcloud - given the progress and the promise, we should be seeing more investment in this area [ 2Mn of investment could potentially unlock 10Bn/yr in value ]
by kuschku | 2025-07-04 01:07:22+00:00
Even modern cameras have grain. If you need to integrate your scene with motion graphics, background replacement, or vfx, you'll need to remove grain on part of the image, edit it, add the original grain back where possible and synthesize new grain elsewhere.

Often it can also make sense to modify the grain for aesthetics. Denoising usually produces a less detailed result, but what you can do is denoise only the color channels, not the brightness channel. Brightness noise looks normal to us, while color noise tends to look very artificial. But by keeping the brightness noise, you avoid losing detail to the denoiser.
by godelski | 2025-07-04 01:09:04+00:00
Context matters, right?

Human reading code? Ambiguous. But I think you're using it. Running code? Not ambiguous.

Machine processing code? I don't think that's ambiguous. It's using the code. A person is using the code to make their machine better.

This really isn't that hard.

Let's think about it this way. How do you use a book?

I think you need to be careful that you're not justifying the answer you want and instead are looking for what the right answer is. I'm saying this because you quoted me saying "what is right" and you just didn't address it. To quote Feynman (<- look, I cited my work. I fulfilled the MIT license obligations!)

> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2025-07-04 01:09:22+00:00
You need a high-touch process, something like wash with high heat, maybe disinfectant, not overloaded, separate loads (cross-contamination). Dry with high heat for a long time, run a hot empty cycle after to clean machine.

In an ideal world, the host cares about your health and cleanliness and of course does all this for your sake. In the real world, it's toss and wash for minimal care, time and money.
by Pompidou | 2025-07-04 01:12:44+00:00
the top comment trick [ n, 1, n + 1, 0 ][n % 4] can be implemented in J as following :

f =: ]`1:`>:`0:@.(4&|)"0

Then:

(,. ; #: ; [: #: f) i.16 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 3 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 4 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 5 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 6 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 7 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 8 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 9 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1

....