MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by istjohn | 2025-07-15 16:43:29+00:00
A couple examples the author gave sounded plausible--though I hadn't seen the movies in question--but then I felt the author was beginning to reach.

It's a bit of a humble brag to complain that movies are too obvious, isn't it? Serpell invites us to pat ourselves on the back for our sophistication as we turn up our noses at art that the uneducated rabble can comprehend.

Yes, there is a tradition in the arts of weaving subtle elements into a work that will reward the savvy observer. Arguably, it began when scribes and storytellers became no longer satisfied to merely repeat ancient texts, and set out their own commentary and interpretation, no doubt with some frequency constructing theories that never were conscious in the mind of the long-dead author.

This literary game is wonderful for arts colleges who happily charge young adults a handsome fee to play at this game that arose in a time when eligible aristocrats scrambled after every affectation that might provide an honest signal of their ponderous amounts of free time, wealth, and sexual fitness. Like tonsils, these vestigial organs have their defenders.

No doubt Serpell holds the skills she honed first at Yale and then at Harvard in great esteem. I imagine she derives much satisfaction at her ability to write hundreds of pages expounding on the literary equivalent of atonal noise. But while I'm happy for her to share her preferences, I'm not sure why those preferences should hold any great weight when it comes to popular culture.

Unsaid--and of course it is unsaid, it would be gauche to speak directly--is the claim that great art cannot be direct, clear, or obvious. The purpose of art is not to speak to us, but to sieve society into gradations of fineness. If any coarse, unimproved grit passes through the sieve, the sieve is defective. After all, if this rough grit can pass through the sieve, who will pay Serpell to laboriously grind the sediment into a fluffy, airy, rarefied powder at Harvard.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-15 16:43:40+00:00
I’ve heard the theory somewhere that all dreams are more-or-less invented by the brain at the moment you wake up. So, your brain could just invent a narrative that ends with the loud thud that wakes you up.

Not sure if this is actually the truth, or just some random speculation, so heap of salt and all that. Also, I have no idea how to test it.

Sometimes I my significant other sleep-talks, and sometimes it is clear enough that I’ll answer (misunderstanding it to be regular talk). It is quite rare (although not unheard of) for them to remember what lead to a sleep conversation, which leads me to believe that whatever their brain is doing at night, it doesn’t have much to do with the dreams they remember. But that’s pretty dang anecdotal!

Edit: the sleep-talks they do remember could just explained by waking up in the middle of the night to find the memory of the sleep-talk in their short term memory, and then the brain retroactively spins up a dream to fit it, of course.
by salamanderman | 2025-07-15 16:44:14+00:00
Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.
Show HN: BotBudget – AI Agent Cost Calculator
by jakejohnson | 2025-07-15 16:44:42+00:00
Hi HN, I kept running into the same problem when helping clients forecast expenses for AI agents. Pricing can be complex and requires some serious spreadsheeting. You need to factor in different model tiers, token estimates, prompt caching, and a variety of services across your specific workflows.

After manually building spreadsheets for each client, I decided to build BotBudget - a free calculator that models these costs across hundreds of LLM models and AI services.

Key features:

- Multi-service workflows (LLM + STT/TTS + RAG + guardrails) - Recent pricing data for major providers - Built-in tokenizer for prompt estimation - Cost projections with growth scenarios - Shareable team links

It's been helpful for my consulting work, and I'm hoping others building AI products might find it useful too.

Try it at botbudget.com - would love feedback on what's missing or could be improved.

Simple stack btw: It’s built with Next.js, hosted on Cloudflare Workers using @opennextjs/cloudflare, and flat JSON pricing data updated daily with GitHub Workflows from self and community maintained sources.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-07-15 16:44:46+00:00
> And since the market price of a programmer is going to be set at $200/m

You keep saying this, but I don't see it. The current tools just can't replace developers. They can't even be used in the same way you'd use a junior developer or intern. It's more akin to going from hand tools to power tools than it is getting an apprentice. The job has not been automated and hasn't been outsourced to LLMs.

Will it be? Who knows, but in my personal opinion, it's not looking like it will any time soon. There would need to be more improvement than we've seen from day 1 of ChatGPT until now before we could even be seriously considering this.

> Those high level languages still needed actual programmers.

So does the LLM from day one until now, and for the foreseeable future.

> This is a bit of a non-sequitor; what does that have to do with breaking the pipeline for actual juniors?

Who says the pipeline is even broken by LLMs? The job market went to shit with rising interest rates before LLMs hit the scene. Nobody was hiring them anyway.
by gillesjacobs | 2025-07-15 16:44:46+00:00
Had many a friend in the Belgian hacker scene who were threatened with legal action after responsible disclosure. To my knowledge, these threats always remained empty: if there is one thing more expensive than engineering a fix, it is starting a lawsuit in Belgium.

It is a sad state-of-affairs that the culture is like this. Ultimately it results in a less secure society, where vulns are anonymously disclosed and shared.
by troyvit | 2025-07-15 16:44:56+00:00
Yeah I came here to say the same thing. It seems like it would simplify things. They do say:

"I initially considered training a single end-to-end VLA model. [...] A cable-driven soft robot is different: the same tip position can correspond to many cable length combinations. This unpredictability makes demonstration-based approaches difficult to scale.[...] Instead, I went with a cascaded design: specialized vision feeding lightweight controllers, leaving room to expand into more advanced learned behaviors later."

I still think circling back to smaller models would be awesome. With some upgrades you might get a locally hosted model on there, but I'd be sure to keep that inside a pentagram so it doesn't summon a Great One.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-07-15 16:44:58+00:00
Let's not ignore the technical aspects as well: LLMs are probably a local minima that we've gotten stuck in because of their rapid rise. Other areas in AI are being starved of investment because all of the capital is pouring into LLMs. We might have been better off in the long run if LLMs hadn't been so successful so fast.
by corimaith | 2025-07-15 16:45:45+00:00
Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.
by tolerance | 2025-07-15 16:46:06+00:00
Maybe try lurking into "Past".

Think about it. You can go into whichever pre-AI booming period you desire.

Today I think I'm gonna check out what was hot in May 2009.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-14

"Obama proposes no capital gains tax on qualified small business stock"

Sounds steamy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608202

See you there!
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-15 16:46:30+00:00
In general, model re-topology almost always requires a manual editing process post sculpting and texturing. There have been countless attempts to automate the process, but it usually requires working through an obscure book about rigging with secondary transforms etc.

Could check out https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/ for low-poly character mesh generation tools. =3
by zamadatix | 2025-07-15 16:46:32+00:00
It's less about whether one considers option A better than option B and more about whether the movie was shot for one option or "edited down" (pan and scan) to TV. If cinemas of the 90s had been 4:3 and TVs of the time 16:9, requiring crops to fill the screen properly, I'd have made the opposite statement.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-07-15 16:46:56+00:00
I just googled 'top nsfw Reddit' and aside from some disturbing implications of 'top' all opened fine with 'old.'. The IP is UK based, is coming up as UK on all geoip sites I tried and is in all of the last 30days of maxmind as UK based.

It might be some kind of phased rollout of course.
by anonym29 | 2025-07-15 16:47:18+00:00
Just to be clear, you're preaching to the choir. My preference would be for the entire intelligence community along with the rest of the entirety of the US federal government being dismantled as swiftly as is peacefully possible.

That said, most people here do not agree with me, most are statists who fundamentally enjoy kissing a boot stamping on the face of human freedom, they just have the delusion that their tribe is the good one and they're engaged in a fundamentally righteous and just conquest to crush the evildoers in the other tribe.

So we'll keep playing this stupid game where each side takes turns whacking the other side with the stick of government power, rather than acknowledging that we'd all be better off if we grew up, acted like adults, threw the stick away, and stopped taking turns trying to injure the other with it.
by idoubtit | 2025-07-15 16:47:30+00:00
> Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002.

Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).

"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)." in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...
by abracadaniel | 2025-07-15 16:47:33+00:00
The constrained total energy expenditure model is fascinating and counterintuitive. It seems the body adjusts its energy spending to keep it at steady state regardless of exercise. But, since exercise is still beneficial, it seems that too much energy spent on the “nice to have” processes are likely a source of the various diseases of sedentary life. It seems like the benefits of fasting are explained by this.
by int_19h | 2025-07-15 16:47:52+00:00
Realistically, the moment the two are decoupled, B) is going to be banned and blocked outright - and the more they are decoupled, the easier it would be to ban. By and large, the only reason why it's still possible to access "dark" content online is because it's so intermeshed with the more mundane stuff on infrastructure level that the most efficient blocking methods have unacceptably high levels of collateral damage.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-15 16:47:53+00:00
Everybody is talking how tv's got better and sound got better and streaming and dvds...

It's still not the same as the cinema experience.

But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.

Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.
by RaftPeople | 2025-07-15 16:48:09+00:00
> Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.

Ya, I was a teenager at the time wanting to buy a computer but apple was about $1200. The color computer was only $399, so I saved for a long time then bought one and learned programming and how to make video games.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-07-15 16:48:30+00:00
I just go outside when my internet is down for 15 minutes a year. Or tether to my cell phone plan if the need is urgent.

I don't see the point of a local AI stack, outside of privacy or some ethical concerns (which a local stack doesn't solve anyway imo). I also *only* have 24GB of RAM on my laptop, which it sounds like isn't enough to run any of the best models. Am I missing something by not upgrading and running a high-performance LLM on my machine?
by tharmas | 2025-07-15 16:48:31+00:00
Agreed as well. I would say shots on target (not straight at the goalkeeper) are a good metric of an exciting game. I would also include near misses past the post and just over the bar as I don't think these are officially counted as "shots on target".

Dribbles or passing plays into the box which may not result in a shot are exciting too. For match excitement/entertainment value these should be measured also.
by humbleferret | 2025-07-15 16:48:34+00:00
'Prompt Injection' is everywhere. While it's cheeky, you can't help but feel it's a fair countermeasure. If the academic publishing world is so overwhelmed that reviewers are resorting to AI, maybe the system itself is the real problem.

The only people affected are the lazy reviewers who weren't doing their job properly to begin with.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-07-15 16:48:36+00:00
>practical< usefulness of this type of research isn't results per se - but methods of getting to them

LIGO needs extremely precise lasers, stationary platforms, extreme positioning precision, tons of supporting software - even if things "exist", the _need_ for results provide advances and improvements

astronomy itself already gave us cmos sensors (aka digital cameras) - but using your phone camera doesn't really make you think "this is caused by distance measurement to the stars"
by singron | 2025-07-15 16:49:05+00:00
I don't think there is discussion of the snort-2 and snort-3 benchmarks, which the linear engine handily beats the python re for once (70-80x faster). I'm guessing they are cases where backtracking is painfully quadratic in re, but it would have been nice to hear about those successes. [In the rest of the benchmarks, python re is 2-5x faster]
by int_19h | 2025-07-15 16:49:15+00:00
They have been speed-running for decades. Remember "anti-social behaviour orders"? Those were introduced in 1998.

I think a better Orwell reference for this isn't 1984 though but rather https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel.... This is the essay that was originally meant as a preface to Animal Farm - and, ironically, was itself censored (by publishers).
by underdeserver | 2025-07-15 16:50:03+00:00
> That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever.

The people using ChatGPT like its output enough when they're the ones reading it.

The people reading ChatGPT output that other people asked for generally don't like it. Especially if it's not disclosed up front.
by sparkie | 2025-07-15 16:50:04+00:00
The switch misses the point. The compiler isn't smart enough to convert it to direct-threading, to the best of my knowledge.

A switch only selects on one character. To continue lexing you need the switch inside a loop. The compiler might optimize the switch itself to a jump table - but what does each case do - jumps back to the start of the loop, after which it enters the jump table again. There are two branches involved.

The point of direct threading is that there is no loop - you simply jump directly to the handler for the next character at the end of each handler.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-15 16:50:12+00:00
Easier to plan for is an interesting lens to look through, can't immediately discard it for sure.

From my perspective, negative expectations do have a higher chance of turning out real, but because negative expectations most often are just code for human misalignment. We have some philosophical, instinctual, or aesthetic (etc.) preferences, but then reality is always going to be broader than that. So you're bound to hit things that are in misalignment. It takes active effort to cultivate the world to be whatever particular way. But this is also why I find simple pleas to cynicism particularly hollow. It comes off as resignation, exactly where the opposite is what would be most required.
by jchw | 2025-07-15 16:50:26+00:00
Oops, I should note that I'm a U.S. citizen in a state without any porn age gate laws. I have no idea what the status of using old.reddit.com to bypass the NSFW filter is in other jurisdictions, or honestly even my own (not sure how to test it.) All I know for sure is that it worked last time I tried it.
by claudiulodro | 2025-07-15 16:50:33+00:00
It's not that outrageous. There are government-run liquor stores all over the country, and even government-run grocery stores, most notably at every military base. The image here of one seems like a totally normal grocery store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_020813-N-3642E-50...
by ewoodrich | 2025-07-15 16:50:35+00:00
Cline has two modes (Plan and Act) which work pretty well but Roo Code has 5 modes by default. (Code, Ask, Architect, Orchestrator, Debug) and it's designed so that users can add custom modes. e.g. I added a Code (simple) mode with instructions about the scale/complexity of tasks it can handle or decide to pass it to Code for a better model. I also changed the Architect mode to evaluate whether to redirect the user to Code or Code (simple) after generating a plan.

Roo Code just has a lot more config exposed to the user which I really appreciate. When I was using Cline I would run into minor irritating quirks that I wished I can change but couldn't vs. Roo where the odds are pretty good there are some knobs you could turn to modify that part of your workflow.
by pera | 2025-07-15 16:50:43+00:00
> People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever

While people seem to love the output of their own queries they seem to hate the output of other people's queries, so maybe what people actually love is to interact with chatbots.

If people loved LLM outputs in general then Google, OpenAI and Anthropic would be in the business of producing and selling content.
by tguvot | 2025-07-15 16:50:51+00:00
Somewhat topical: in case you want authenticated access to NIST NTP servers, you need to send a letter to NIST using the US mail or FAX machine (e-mail is not acceptable).

NIST will reply with a key number and a key value. The reply will be by US mail only, e-mail will never be used.

The office that normally receives US mail and FAX messages currently has limited access, which may result in significant delays in processing requests

https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...

(things you discover when you implement fedramp)
by MisterTea | 2025-07-15 16:51:31+00:00
> Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this,

Indeed. I have a friend who's younger brother fell madly in love with a girl his family did not approve of. He left home at 19 to live with her then returned about a year later married, with his first child at age 20. Shortly after he had his second child he finished university then helped his wife finish university and nursing school. They're 37 now, 3 kids, both have a career, house, and they still go out with friends and have a solid social life. Just saw them this past weekend and his son is a young man looking at university, daughter is excelling in school, and a toddler (happy mistake.)

BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.
by parodysbird | 2025-07-15 16:52:02+00:00
> movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator

That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
by cyphar | 2025-07-15 16:52:12+00:00
I am aware of that, and commented something similar in a sister thread. I was responding specifically to their claim that charging extra for source code is not in violation of the GPLv3, and that isn't true.

But yes, sole copyright holders can dual-license their code as proprietary or GPLv3, or just ignore the provisions of the GPLv3 for the same reasons you outlined. That being said, the binaries on the website are effectively under a proprietary license -- you or I are not free to redistribute them without first paying to get a copy of the source code.
by wnevets | 2025-07-15 16:52:18+00:00
No, it was DOGE and Musk that killed it [1], Elon even bragged about "deleting" [2] the team that created it. If you want to argue that lobbying got DOGE/Musk to do it that's fine but they're responsible for its death.

[1] https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-07-15 16:52:23+00:00
From a user perspective, this is extremely valuable. What an amazing improvement; unbounded especially. I do hope this would make it into actual RE2 & go.

When I use regex, I expect to be able to lookbehind, so I am routinely hit by RE2's limitations in places where it's used. Sometimes the software uses the entire matched string and you can't use non-capturing groups to work around it.

I understand go's reasons, ReDoS etc, but the "purism" of RE2 does fly in the face of practicality to an irksome degree. This is not uncommon for go.
by boscillator | 2025-07-15 16:52:52+00:00
I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.

Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.

There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.