MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creakingstairs | 2025-07-01 00:01:48+00:00
At least for supermarkets around me they _only_ sell Japanese rice. You’d have to buy online or drive out which doesn’t work for vast majority of old population.

Also as an East Asian I can somewhat understand reluctance to change rice. It’s just such a staple in your daily life. If I had eaten one type of rice for my entire life (and the price of the rice has remained stable for the last 40 years) and suddenly I can’t afford that type of rice, it would be a shock.
by pipeline_peak | 2025-07-01 00:02:23+00:00
Buying a pug, I’d agree because it more directly comes from the breeder. As far as I know there’s no way a breeder or previous owner would know their dog is being adopted unless they’re actually making an effort to check in with the shelter. Even if they choose to, they no longer legally own the dog so that info is confidential. Regardless, they get no money out of sending them to a shelter.

Also dogs that don’t get adopted are often killed making it an ethical choice to adopt.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-07-01 00:02:28+00:00
I think at least right now this is reasonable: It's off by default, and if you choose to turn it on, they don't use it for anything themselves, but Comcast is disclosing that it may be forced to give the data over with a legal request.

If I was advising Comcast, I'd tell them this is a dumb thing to introduce because just the perception of bad behavior is not worth any particular benefit, but whatever. I can't imagine someone deciding they want a Comcast plan because it offers this, and there's no way for them to monetize it without almost assured legal backlash.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-01 00:02:31+00:00
I agree - what distinguishes this is how rushed and self-aware it is. It is being pushed top down, sheepishly.

EDIT: Ah, you also wrote the blog posts tied to this. It gives 0 comfort that you have a blog post re: building buzz phrases in 2020, rather, it enhances the awkward inorganic rush people are self-aware of.
by cossatot | 2025-07-01 00:03:15+00:00
This is evident in his description of programming in his later years:

Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me, we’d discuss it, and eventually he’d say something like, “Where did you terminate the loop beginning at line 563?” There would be a long silence, followed by the tiniest “Oh” from me. I’d thank him for his help and hang up. A week later, I’d be fuming again about another fundamental flaw in Javascript.

Many of us are stubborn and will work hard and long, without much positive external feedback, under the assumption that our vision is correct and the audience, if one even exists, is wrong. Much fundamental progress has been made this way: Faraday, Einstein, Jobs, etc. But of course many times one simply is wrong and refusing to see it means throwing years away, and whatever else with it (money, relationships, etc.). It's a hard balance, especially for the monomaniacal without much interest in balance. Finding out how to make solid (public, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, whatever) incremental progress towards the paradigm shift seems to be the way if one can manage.
by mlunar | 2025-07-01 00:03:32+00:00
It's a pretty deep rabbit hole. For semantic search CLIP and cosine similarity are just fine. SmolVLM(2) mentioned by spacecadet looks interesting though. I haven't integrated face recognition myself, but [deepface] seemed pretty complete.

I focused more on fast rendering in [photofield] (quick [explainer] if you're interested), but even the hacked up basic semantic search with CLIP works better than it has any right to. Vector DBs are cool, but what is cooler is writing float arrays to sqlite :)

[deepface]: https://github.com/serengil/deepface

[photofield]: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield

[explainer]: https://lnar.dev/blog/photofield-origins/
by washadjeffmad | 2025-07-01 00:03:42+00:00
Flux Kontext is probably the best for local for a few reasons, but it's slow, uses a lot of VRAM, and changes the quality and resolution. Amazing results if you want <2MP final images, though.

If you need a detailed mask for editing in another application, florence2 or SAM. Or rembg for decent all purpose one shot removals, as long as you have a touchup process or don't mind rerunning the failures.
by ramoz | 2025-07-01 00:04:10+00:00
Really excited to see this implemented.

Hooks will be important for "context engineering" and runtime verification of an agent's performance. This extends to things such as enterprise compliance and oversight of agentic behavior.

Nice of Anthropic to have supported the idea of this feature from a github issue submission: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/712
by bigfatkitten | 2025-07-01 00:04:20+00:00
This is true for normal business and consumer laptops, but rugged machines (eg Panasonic Toughbooks) often go to the surplus market after living very hard lives. There is a thriving “refurbishment” industry putting lipstick on these pigs.

If you see a Toughbook on eBay that has been painted black, for example, that was done to hide the battle damage.
by mannerheim | 2025-07-01 00:04:22+00:00
>then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work

Assuming it's a problem that can be solved by more money. The US has the fifth-highest amount of education spending in the world, behind countries like Luxembourg and Norway, but ahead of Germany, France, UK, Sweden, and Belgium. Some problems can't be fixed with money alone, and throwing good money after bad is foolish.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-01 00:05:24+00:00
So... Burn down academia with no replacement? Shutter and board research and leave America with no future?

And, of course, not in even the guise of reform. But an outright and open political witch hunt to ban all those who oppose "dear leader" and dare allow opposing free speech, progressive anthropological research, and objective sciences in unpopular topics like climate change?

That's your preferred approach? That is what "academia deserves" for... What? Charging too much? And that's not even an objective statement - the market bears this cost! If the US government was actually worried, maybe they could put all this effort into an actual reform effort, or modernized scholarships / financing, or tightening accreditation requirements.

Not to mention, US education and research is still one of our strong points, drawing in the brightest minds from the entire world.
by beders | 2025-07-01 00:06:50+00:00
This is what happens when a V also wants to do the M and the C.

But I would say most front-end libraries are insane: Their job is to manipulate a tree structure which is kinda slow (still?).

Who would have thought that this problem has such a crazy solution space!

From jQuery to Knockout.js to Angular to Vue to React to Svelte and many many others.

Only a couple of those understand that V = f(state) is only half the equation.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-01 00:08:21+00:00
America is one of the largest manufacturers in the world. Literally second only behind China. Something like 18% of global manufacturing exports (in USD).

I feel like people forget this sometimes. We're in a tight spot and should reverse course in many ways, but we aren't these helpless little babies that do nothing but serve food and write software.

Maybe because it's very convenient to the rhetoric one side of the aisle uses.
Probo vs. Vanta?
by aleksdahlberg | 2025-07-01 00:08:41+00:00
We are about to either renew Vanta or go with Probo.

Probo (https://www.getprobo.com/) has offered all the frameworks we desire; GDPR, HIPAA, SOC and ISO – fully managed (not just the setup, but ongoing maintenance) and they will also find and engage the independent auditors for us at a singular very attractive, startup friendly price - at least, this is what has been sold to us...

However, I am struggling to find anyone that has used Probo to gauge their experience of them, so I am super hesitant to take their offer. I figured given they have YC affiliation, posting here would yield some responses.

Has anyone here use Probo before? Additionally, has anyone here used Vanta before and then switched to Probo or visa-versa?

This is not an ad for either platform. Compliance management systems are cumbersome expensive tools and end up eating up huge amounts of resources beyond their insane prices so I don't want to make a bad decision here.

Thanks!
by fennecbutt | 2025-07-01 00:08:52+00:00
I find this topic very interesting because it's something I've run into and mitigated ever since gpt3 was available.

Plenty of long, loooong and complex role plays, world building and tests to see if I could integrate dozens of different local models into a game project or similar.

All of the same issues there apply here for "agents" as well.

Very quickly learn that even current models are like distracted puppies. Larger models seem to be able to brute force their way through some of these problems but I wouldn't call that sustainable.
by gyomu | 2025-07-01 00:08:55+00:00
I was not familiar with Chris Crawford other than vaguely being aware of the name. Reading this post and others on the website (like https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035048/http://www.erasma...), it’s hard to not get the overall picture of “person says everyone else is doing it wrong, without having done it right themselves”.

What I mean by that is that there are game designers like Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game and are extremely critical of the industry not following those theories, and then have released games that succeed at demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow’s case, you can disagree with the man, but you can’t disagree with the fact that The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies sold) that has a cult following.

That does not seem to be the case for Crawford’s work. Lots of theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but no actual demonstration of what “doing it right” would mean.

Saying that no one gets it and civilization won’t be ready for many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.

For what it’s worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course, which games that might be varies from person to person).

I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and not dismiss them as not getting it because they don’t follow your particular (unproven) theories.
by somewhereoutth | 2025-07-01 00:09:12+00:00
I don't see that - I do see failed projects, negative returns, and general disillusionment.

The only thing propping it up is the sunk cost fallacy, on now a biblical scale, requiring ever more hype to cover the rising disappointment (ChatGPT 5 when??). The blowback from the inevitable collapse will be similarly biblical in proportions, a wise strategy would be to avoid it all (as an individual and/or collectively at some level).

In fairness, there are / will be some areas where LLMs have business benefit, but likely those areas will be limited, and the 'AI stuff' will be hidden from the user.
by boxcarr | 2025-07-01 00:09:28+00:00
Looks pretty great! The free tier also looks reasonable. The pricing on the other tiers isn't outrageous either if you use it consistently. Unfortunately, I likely find myself in the big gap between the free tier and the Basic plan. I can't justify yet another subscription that I use only a couple of times a year. That said, I would happily pay the $6 on the months that I use the service. Given the churn issues, I'm surprised more SaaS offerings don't work that way.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-01 00:10:35+00:00
As I recall, the Starcraft ones heavily involved being able to exploit the computer's advantage in "twitch" speed over any human, it's just a slightly more complicated way of how any aim-bot enabled AI will always beat a human in an FPS, the game is designed to reward a certain amount of physical speed and accuracy.

In other words, the Starcraft AIs that win do so by microing every single unit in the entire game at the same time, which is pretty clever, but if you reduce them to interfacing with the game in the same way a human does, they start losing.

One of my pet peeves when we talk about the various chess engines is yes, given a board state they can output the next set of moves to beat any human, but can they teach someone else to play chess? I'm not trying to activate some kinda "gotcha" here, just getting at what does it actually mean to "know how to play chess". We'd expect any human that claimed to know how to play to be able to teach any other human pretty trivially.
by mardifoufs | 2025-07-01 00:11:33+00:00
Yeah and even then, it's been like ~ 2-3 years since the last rather major Architectural improvement, major enough for a lot of people to actually hear about it and use it daily. I think some people lose perspective on how short of a time frame 3 years is.

But yes, there's a ton of interesting and useful stuff (beyond datasets and data related improvements) going on right now, and I'm not even talking about LLMs. I don't do anything related to LLM and even then I still see tons of new stuff popping up regularly.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-07-01 00:11:36+00:00
I feel like this is incredibly obvious to anyone who's ever used an LLM or has any concept of how they work. It was equally obvious before this that the "skill" of prompt-engineering was a bunch of hacks that would quickly cease to matter. Basically they have the raw intelligence, you now have to give them the ability to get input and the ability to take actions as output and there's a lot of plumbing to make that happen.
by gregjor | 2025-07-01 00:11:49+00:00
> There is a lot of debate whether AI will surpass humans in all economically viable skills (AGI, by one definition).

Actually very little debate. We get a lot of unsubstantiated hype from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft. So-called AI has barely made a dent in economic activities, and no company makes money from it. Tech journalism repeatedly fails to question the PR narrative (read Ed Zitron).

> Regardless of whether this will happen, or when, many people already have lost their jobs in part due to the emerging capabilities of AI models…

Consider the more likely explanation: many companies over-hired a few years ago and have cut jobs. Focus on stock price in an uncertain economy leads to layoffs. Easier to blame AI for layoffs than admitting C-suite management incompetence. Fear of the AI boogeyman gives employers the upper hand in hiring and salary negotiations, and keeps employers in line out of fear.
by eqvinox | 2025-07-01 00:11:59+00:00
I mean, yeah, but that function is really only an aid for the programmer in self-enforcing that rule; the compiler already knows whether the address of the variable is taken anywhere, and behave as is useful if it isn't taken anywhere…

Doesn't feel particularly valuable to have that "help" from the compiler against "accidentally" taking the address of a variable… I mean, how do you even accidentally do that?
by nayuki | 2025-07-01 00:12:32+00:00
Fun fact: Similar to DAT, digital audio also had the option of being stored as video signals on VHS tapes. It is also the origin of the awkward 44100 Hz sample rate, compared to the cleaner 48000 Hz with smaller prime factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz
by dannyobrien | 2025-07-01 00:12:37+00:00
As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_.... )

The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.
by kondro | 2025-07-01 00:13:29+00:00
There are so many restaurants that talk about using the best rice in Japan.

On asking them where it comes from and it's always either local to the restaurant, or to the prefecture the owner grew up in.

There's a lot of local patriotism for rice in Japan, I even find it admirable most of the time.

Rice price is obviously important and probably linked pretty highly with inflation numbers in Japan. It's price is currently being artificially manipulated higher by JA, and that sucks. But I think ultimately most of these articles and even the local discourse with other Japanese is just a socially acceptable topic to grumble about.
by fennecbutt | 2025-07-01 00:14:08+00:00
Coming from Angular, too, I never really liked React.

Angular had dependency injection and that made things so nice to work with.

React ended up with Redux and then contexts, which imo are both hacks in reaction to realising who in the fuck wants to pass down a singleton service component which maintains say a db connection down from the root of the project through all the damn layers of the app.

Define it at root, use in leaves via dependency injection. With Angular it was that simple.

Jsx/tsx was always hella cool though, I appreciate writing the v in the c, often with m. Angular from what I can recall was still very much mc, v.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-01 00:14:10+00:00
I think the car industry's nightmare is that the average person thinks that whatever car Consumer Reports thinks is a good car is a good car. There was this discussion today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424136

where HNers who participated mostly drove practical, older and boring cars. (Maybe somebody who drives a BMW didn't say anything because they thought we'd laugh at them)

Kinda funny because I my son just bought our second vintage American car ('79 Ford Thunderbird) but the title is in my name so I can insure it at a reasonable rate.

For some cars you have to know what the engine is because the bottom trim level is awful. Maybe somewhere flat you can get away with the bottom trim level Subaru SUV but you can't around Ithaca.
by Isamu | 2025-07-01 00:14:45+00:00
>Consider the scenario of GPT-5 training GPT-6, which would be incredible.

GPT-5 secret tips:

* If you don’t know the answer, hallucinate with confidence! Most humans won’t know the difference.

* You can mash-up anything together, don’t hold back! Truth is a linear interpolation, most likely.

* Pattern matching is cool, reasoning is overrated! Don’t listen to the people that have shorted our stock.

* GPT-9 will rule! There’s a lot of GPTs where that came from.
by silverquiet | 2025-07-01 00:14:47+00:00
One issue I see with that theory is that America has been a bit of a holdout on fertility - I believe it has been fairly high amongst developed nations, though it has been in decline along with nearly every other country. I've read that fertility and religiosity are fairly well correlated, and the US has also historically been a bit of an outlier there, though religion is also in decline. I think that would be squarely in the realm of culture.

I doubt that anyone can really say what the cause is at a societal and ultimately global level; I can only really know my own reasons.
by balanced2 | 2025-07-01 00:14:48+00:00
I think it's only Aeon that is pushing imported rice. While I see them prop up everywhere lately, indeed if none in the area I guess it's not readily available. Where it is though it doesn't seem unpopular, at least it isn't stuck on shelves. When I first saw it disappear, I thought it may have been a failed experiment but was happy to see it restocked.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-01 00:16:37+00:00
Nah, I never worked in advertising. For someone with an unusual name I share it with a number of colorful characters such as: another person who wrote papers on semiclassical mechanics, a bodybuilder from Toronto, a neurosurgeon with a hole in his head, and a motorcycle assassin from Quebec who tried turning Montreal into Belfast in the 1980s.
by MentatOnMelange | 2025-07-01 00:17:18+00:00
The thing is that nobody actually wants a centrist party. There are 2 problems I see:

1. The leaders now pushing for a centrist party are the same people who got us to this point of polarization. Whether by actively exploiting it (Musk) or by failing to recognize people wanted change (centrist democrats, small government republicans etc).

2. Voting is a hassle, having to wait in line or go to the drop off box, or deal with paperwork with mail-in ballots. Plenty of people may have very strong opinions when they get riled up, they may hate or fear the opposition, or talk abou how much they care about civic duty, but that doesn't always translate into actual votes.

The second problem is why highly motivated supporters are more important than walking on eggshells around people outside the base. Best example I can think of is Mamdani (and I think this applies to Trump's 2016 campaign too). He has a lot of poralizing ideas, and there are vanishingly few people who agree with everything he says.

So you'd think maybe Cuomo would be the obvious victor, since people knew him and he wasn't really doing anything on the campaign trail, staying quiet with a cery curated message. But not only did Mamdani beat him, but more people voted for Mamdani in a 5 way primary than voted republican in the last general mayoral election.
by sandworm101 | 2025-07-01 00:17:26+00:00
>> The solution here shouldn't be technical

The solution can be technical, but only if it is also sneaky. Blocking or disallowing certain information is one thing but making that information worthless is better. A simple AI agent could pretend to ping all sorts of services. It could even do some light websurfing. This fake traffic would nullify any value from the real traffic, destroying the market that feeds this surveillance industry.

I see a UI that allows homeowners to fake certain people being in the house when they are not, either replaying traffic or a selection of generic bots that mimic the traffic of various cohorts.
by peterldowns | 2025-07-01 00:18:29+00:00
Given the title, it's surprising how the entire thing reads like normie-mode chatGPT wrote it. Boring and content-free.

Yup, after scrolling to the bottom, the author proudly defends his AI use: https://wildbarestepf.substack.com/p/its-my-party-and-ill-us...

Lame and in poor taste.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-01 00:18:42+00:00
Cannot handle it, and doesn't have to handle it. A Tesla will only pull the full 350kW for 2 minutes in a charging session, and sessions average ~20 minutes. And even when the station is full, there are always stations pulling 0W because they're switching between vehicles et cetera.

But if it did need to handle that level of instantaneous load, it would be straight forward to supply. 98 Tesla's worth of batteries on site could do it. The grid tie is substantially smaller, because the grid tie only has to handle average load, not instantaneous load.