MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterTea | 2025-07-15 17:00:37+00:00
> That or you more or less have to dive in for months and months.

Waaaaay back in the Quake 3 days I had a pirated copy of 3D Studio Max and decided to try and make a Quake (or maybe it was Half-Life) character model. Found an on-line tutorial that step by step showed you how to setup Max with a background image that you "traced" over. So I grabbed the images of front, back and side views of a human, loaded them into the various view ports, then drew a rectangle from which you extrude a head, arms and legs. Then you manipulate the block headed human mesh to fit the human background image - extruding more detail from the mesh as you go along. In one day I had a VERY crude model of a person. I also found out I dont like 3D modelling. Though I'd say a person who really enjoys it would pick it up in a week or two with good tutorials.

LLM's just cut out the learning part leaving you helpless to create anything beyond prompts. I am still very mixed on LLM's but due to greed and profit driven momentum, they will eat the world.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-07-15 17:00:43+00:00
It really is not.

You can dig in your heels on ideals and principles, but it is simply not realistic to expect a 3rd party extension marketplace from a closed source IDE startup run by 24 year olds in the Valley to protect you from all risk. (By the way, nor is it their goal - they are optimizing for breadth of the ecosystem and adoption and growth, not security and guardrails. That would likely cost you a lot more than $20/month.)

If you can figure out how to moderate a system of 3rd party software (or content, really) to protect the user from all bad things while maintaining global-scale content throughput, I suggest you start a company - I’m sure people will pay a lot of money for your capabilities.
by pge | 2025-07-15 17:01:04+00:00
It's pretty impressive (and not always widely known) how much cold water impairs swimming ability. There are some good videos on this site - coldwatersafety.org - of Coast Guard volunteers trying to swim in 45deg water. They lose motor function before making it 20m or so. Only one is able to make the short distance to shore, and he is one of the largest guys and a professional rescue swimmer. A 6km swim in 45F water for someone that is not wearing protective clothing or well acclimated to cold water is not realistic.
by boogieknite | 2025-07-15 17:01:17+00:00
Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down

Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-07-15 17:01:49+00:00
It's a hype cycle that will eventually die down. People here are usually pretty excited for new hype cycles they think they can make equity windfalls from. It's looking less likely that individuals will be making windfalls even as of this week with the new style of top-talent-acquihire acquisitions that seem to be increasing in number, so there's hope that HN goes back to generally technical :)
Show HN: Open-source GUI editor for JSON and function call schema
by xingzheli | 2025-07-15 17:02:23+00:00
I was working on function call schema for my AI startup recently, but I didn't have a good workflow, so I made a GUI editor to make it easier and faster to write JSON schema. It shows what annotations you can give to each property in case you aren't familiar with JSON schema keywords, so it's very user-friendly.

It also enforces the correct structure for the different types like "function" and "object", so you can't make syntax or structural errors. Cursor didn't use the OpenAI format when I auto-completed a {"type": "function"} schema, but this isn't a problem using my tool.

Why use this over Pydantic? It's a lot more visual, and you can reorder properties and change "required" properties without wrangling with text, so it's easier when you're in the prototyping stage.

The source is at https://github.com/anusarati/json-schema-builder.

What do you all think?
by immibis | 2025-07-15 17:02:28+00:00
The value extraction will also be much higher. When you control someone's main source of information, they won't even find out your competitors exist. You can program people from birth, instead of "go to a search engine", it's "go to Google" (as most of us have already been programmed!) or instead of "to send an email, you need an email account" the LLM will say "to send an email, you need a Gmail account". Whenever it would have talked about TV, it can say YouTube instead. Or TikTok. Request: "What is the best source of information on X?" Reply: "This book: [Amazon affiliate link]" - or Fox News, if they outbid Amazon.
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-07-15 17:02:37+00:00
Evolution operator shows that state evolves deterministically and doesn't hide randomness anywhere. You use probabilities when you want to explain human experience, because you can't practically compute human's state. But you don't strictly need fundamental randomness for this optimization, Bayesian probabilities work in the same way, whether randomness is fundamental or not is difficult to observe. That said, computational difficulties start in the measurement device, that's where you should do collapse if you don't want exponentially complex calculations.

Outcomes of observation are explained by linearity of evolution operator and decoherence, but then you get human factor: different people have different problems with this explanation, I think it's because unitary motion is unintuitive, Aristotle knew explanation of heliocentrism, but it didn't work, because geocentrism was more intuitive for him. Some apparently suggest that to explain human experience you need to calculate mind from physics, which needs to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which is impossible.
by doublerabbit | 2025-07-15 17:03:00+00:00
> I'm happy to see some modern features are only supported on Wayland.

Why?

If anything that's a reason to why I wouldn't fully jump to blender.

I have been working on my own hobby game engine for the past 15 years and have been excited to introduce Blender to the workflow. If this is the case I don't like it. Wayland has never work for me the same way as X has.
by bloppe | 2025-07-15 17:03:02+00:00
To believe that automation must reduce demand for labor is called the lump of labor fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

"While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000. This change did not result in large-scale unemployment, because workers found jobs in newly created industries (like farm equipment manufacturing). Another way to state this is that automation or technological improvements free workers to move to new growing industries."

Anyway, the article is clearly a fluff piece. It'll be much more interesting to read about the actual impact of Devin on Goldman Sachs' engineering efforts. I suspect it will help in certain ways and hurt in others
by jdiff | 2025-07-15 17:03:30+00:00
Eh, I kinda see what they're saying. They haven't become cheaper at all, but GPUs have increased in performance, and the amount of performance you get for each dollar spent has increased.

Relative to its siblings, things have gotten worse. A GTX 970 could hit 60% of the performance of the full Titan X at 35% of the price. A 5070 hits 40% of a full 5090 for 27% of the price. That's overall less series-relative performance you're getting, for an overall increased price, by about $100 when adjusting for inflation.

But if you have a fixed performance baseline you need to hit, as long as tech gets improving, things will eventually be cheaper for that baseline. As long as you aren't also trying to improve in a way that moves the baseline up. Which so far has been the only consistent MO of the AI industry.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-07-15 17:03:35+00:00
If people think at all rather than just doing what everyone else does. People invest in their future. Peasants don't own land, can't own land, have zero access to financial wealth or education, so they try to breed because adult children are the only type of family wealth they can produce.

Baby boom is those people with that mindset with some sudden prosperity.

Doesn't last as soon as they see the successful people invest in land, financial assets, material goods, and children's education. Base culture matters, you saw Confucius based cultures turn on a dime once they had two to rub together.
by mayoff | 2025-07-15 17:03:44+00:00
I golfed mine down to 15.623 cycles / voxel.

d2 = x^2+y^2 -- 6 / pi = 1.909859317102744 angle = 6 + 1.909859317102744 * atan(x, y) if z ~= 0 or d2 > 20 then return EMPTY end if d2 < 11 then return GREEN end if angle > t then return PURPLE end -- ugly special case because reference isn't smooth at 13 if t == 13 or angle + 12 > t then return RED end return PURPLE
by SirMaster | 2025-07-15 17:03:54+00:00
>the amount of calories burned by exercise is minimal

What evidence is there for this? All the things that calculate approximate calories burned for various exercises tell me that it's not minimal.

I burn about an average of an extra 500 calories a day doing exercise type activities. Playing pickleball, cycling, jogging, etc.

Losing 1 pound is about 3500 calories, so 500 calories a day burned is about 1 pound a week which is not insignificant or minimal in my opinion at least.

I kept my diet the same, and added about 500 cal average of exercise per day and have been seeing my weight dropping by a few pounds a month.

Obviously diet is the biggest factor, but if you just eat less and sit around all day, you body will adapt to the lower calorie intake and slow your metabolism down too and you will have to eat so little that you will never feel full or satisfied (so you will probably not be able to keep that up for long) and you will feel like crap and have no energy if you don't combine with exercise, at least in my experience.
by milesvp | 2025-07-15 17:04:06+00:00
I think this can't be understated. It also destroyed search. I listened to a podcast a few years ago with an early googler who talked about this very precipice in early google days. They did a lot of testing, and a lot of modeling of people's valuation of search. They figured that the average person got something like $50/yr of value out of search (I can't remember the exact number, I hope I'm not off by an order of magnitude). And that was the most they could ever realistically charge. Meanwhile, advertising for just Q4 was like 10 times the value. It meant that they knew that advertising on the platform was inevitable. They also acknowledged that it would lead to the very problem that Brin and Page wrote about in their seminal paper on search.

I see LLMs inevitably leading to the same place. There will undoubtedly be advertising baked into the models. It is too strong a financial incentive. I can only hope that an open source alternative will at least allow for a hobbled version to consume.

edit: I think this was the podcast https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
by Twirrim | 2025-07-15 17:04:07+00:00
Someone I collaborate with has been having all sorts of fun with a 4k->64k page transition for stuff running on Arm. Among some of the fun has been discovering memory leaks that really weren't noticeable or a big deal at 4k, but now that the page is 16x larger, suddenly becomes noticeable and can even cause problems.
by authorfly | 2025-07-15 17:04:07+00:00
As you age your interests and curiosity change, in ways you often don't see until later.

Very common in computer science contexts. Young undergraduates always pick up the new tech and make something that seems alien and wrong first. It's not even the masters students.

Possibly the same Kiro - Agentic IDE post would have been as interesting to you as the launch of Atom or something related to VS Code, etc.
by immibis | 2025-07-15 17:04:44+00:00
Targeted banner ads based on chat history is last-two-decades thinking. The money with LLMs will be targeted answers. Have Coca-Cola pay you a few billion dollars to reinforce the model to say "Coke" instead of "soda". Train it the best source of information about political subjects is to watch Fox News. This even works with open-source models, too!
by ysavir | 2025-07-15 17:05:06+00:00
The thing about facebook/twitter/etc was that everyone knew how they achieve lock-in and build a moat (network effect), but the question was around where to source revenue.

With LLMs, we know what the revenue source is (subscription prices and ads), but the question is about the lock-in. Once each of the AI companies stops building new iterations and just offers a consistent product, how long until someone else builds the same product but charges less for it?

What people often miss is that building the LLM is actually the easy part. The hard part is getting sufficient data on which to train the LLM, which is why most companies just put ethics aside and steal and pirate as much as they can before any regulations cuts them off (if any regulations ever even do). But that same approach means that anyone else can build an LLM and train on that data, and pricing becomes a race to the bottom, if open source models don't cut them out completely.
by baggy_trough | 2025-07-15 17:05:08+00:00
It is a ridiculous process. The cubic centimeters of tree stem have nothing to do with it. So why take that number and multiply it by some other arbitrary number to come up with an arbitrary value? The cubic centimeters of tree stem can provide some idea of a minimum value, but for famous objects, the material value is not the primary issue.

The cultural / heritage value is inestimable, but certainly much greater than the given figure by orders of magnitude.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-15 17:05:10+00:00
Maya hasn't changed much in a decade, and that is a wise choice for training/documentation. They focused on the content part which is its value proposition.

Blender has always had the perpetual Beta problem, as many boring core design issues were never really given priority. Fine for developers, but a liability in commercial settings.

Houdini is interesting, but with Blender Geometry-nodes now working it is unclear how another proprietary ecosystem will improve workflows. =3

The Entagma channel covers a lot of Houdini and Blender bleeding-edge features with short lab tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/@Entagma/videos
by Karliss | 2025-07-15 17:05:14+00:00
That's how the blender open movie projects have been organized for a long time. If enshittifaction was coming it would have happened 10 years ago. In few of the earliest ones it was a bit different with more of the files being publicly downloadable. But even then they where pre-selling DVDs containing best quality videos, commentary from artists, tutorials and all the production assets. Almost 20 years ago when first open movies were released internet speed was orders of magnitude slower. So while you could in theory download various production files it was less practical. Blender studio subscription (previously called Blender cloud) has been a thing since ~2014, long before the recent increase in popularity and sponsors.

I am talking more about the the context of open movies, but the few game projects are done in similar manner. Although software licensing makes things a bit more messier.

Some people pay money to fund a team of professional artists and maybe even 1-2 software developers to work together with blender developers on the open movie project in return people who paid get access to all the production files and high quality training material. In the mean time everyone else still benefits from the new features and other software improvements made during the production of movie.

One of the big problems with many open source software is not enough dog-fooding, insufficient user testing and involvement of professional users for the final software. Most of the developers are programmers not professional artists, and most of the artists are not programmers making it hard directly contribute or even communicate the feedback in a way that's actionable. Many of the professional users also don't want to waste their time with half finished open source software resulting in chicken and egg problem. Blender open movie projects solve those problems.

Providing paid training materials while getting user studies on large size projects in the process of making them seems like one of best ways for more sustainable open source with less conflicts of interest compared to what most open core software does.

It's not like the the Blender foundation is diverting money from developers towards projects no one asked. People are getting exactly what they are paying for. Based on 2023 reports blender foundation gets 2-2.5 million € in yearly donations, out of which ~70% goes directly towards developer salaries, 10% other salaries and only 3% (72000) is labelled as "support studio for testing" in the previous years explaining that it's the money going towards "Blender studio" for specific work. In the mean time Blender Studio has 6500 monthly subscribers (~0.9m € yearly).
by stale2002 | 2025-07-15 17:05:18+00:00
I'm not sure what this guy is even advocating for. Is he saying that LLMs should be made illegal or something? Given that they can run on my home PC, I doubt thats going to go well.

And if you can't make it illegal, then good luck stopping people from using it. It is inevitable. I certainly am not going to willingly give up those benefits. So everyone else is free to fall behind, I guess, and lose to those who defect and accept the benefits of using LLMs.
Ask HN: Did Anyone Here Lose Interest in Coding After a While?
by OulaX | 2025-07-15 17:05:35+00:00
I have a CS degree, and 3 years of experience, the spark of coding seems to have gone, I can't enjoy even small toy projects, I end up focusing too much on writing perfect code, I tried writing meh code, but I couldn't succeed.

Living in a country with no prospects or job oppurtunities for software developers doesn't help as well.

I want to learn from your past experiences if any.

Thanks
by magic_hamster | 2025-07-15 17:05:35+00:00
There are pretty hidden assumption in this comment. First of all, not every business in the AI space is _training_ models, and the difference between training and inference is massive - i.e. most businesses can easily afford inference, perhaps depending on model, but they definitely can.

Another several unfounded claims were made here, but I just wanted to say LLMs with MCP are definitely good enough for almost every use case you can come up with as long as you can provide them with high quality context. LLMs are absolutely the future and they will take over massive parts of our workflow in many industries. Try MCP for yourself and see. There's just no going back.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-15 17:05:44+00:00
> A clean room reimplementation of cuda would avoid any copyright claims,

Assuming APIs are either not copyirghtable or that API reimplementation is always fair use of the API, neither of which there is sufficient precedent to justify as a conclusion; Oracle v. Google ended with “well, it would be fair use in the exact factual circumstances in this case so we don't have to reach the thornier general questions”.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-15 17:06:23+00:00
> People with that sentiment ask about what alternative places exist, some of them make their own places

I don't think that's overall very true

Most of those people are just lonely and isolated, and that's a big part of why we are living in what people are calling a "loneliness epidemic"

It's easier than ever to make a new niche area. It's more difficult than ever to get your niche area discovered by others, because you are drowned out by the noise

It feels quite hopeless for many people in my experience
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-15 17:07:01+00:00
The decline of internet began way before trump, I'd say with the rise of facebook and everything moving on there (your local restaurant used to have a website, then switched to facebook only).

Centralized power, centralized censorship.

At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...
by CyanLite2 | 2025-07-15 17:07:13+00:00
Article assumes LLMs stay where they currently are or progress only incrementally.

Many Fortune 500 companies are seeing real productivity gains through Agentic Workflows to reduce paperwork and bureaucratic layers. Even a marginal 1% improvement can be millions of dollars for these companies.

Then you have an entire industry of AI-native startups that can now challenge and rival industry behomeths (OpenAI itself is now starting to rival Google/Microsoft/Amazon and will likely be the next "BigTech" company).
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-15 17:07:30+00:00
Yes, you are clearly also very educated. Impressive use of language!

I think it's pretty normal that as people get deeper and more invested in any given artform, they tend to become more appreciative of works that are less immediately pleasing to lay-people. You mentioned literature and (atonal) music, but this just as readily applies to food, wine, videogames, Anime, fashion, anything you can think of.

I'll agree that there's an unfortunate tendency for some people (again, in any artistic field) to get overly critical or dismissive of straightforwardly good work, especially if consuming, thinking about, and discussing the quality of work is their actual job and they're perhaps getting a bit bored of something they once loved. On the other hand, who better to recognize oversaturation of a given style or approach? I certainly wouldn't notice that wine producers are currently chasing the trend of dry whites, produced from heirloom European grapes to the detriment of all other kinds of wine! It's important to have at least some snobs, to push and goad artists away from currently oversaturated trends and continue the cycle of innovation and variety. And it's important to recognize that a critic complaining that a certain style is too popular doesn't mean they think it's a bad style or that you shouldn't enjoy it, just that they'd like to spend more of their life enjoying other things too.
by RandomThoughts3 | 2025-07-15 17:08:16+00:00
> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be

As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.

It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.