MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esafak | 2025-07-25 21:43:12+00:00
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10251

https://h-surgical-robot-transformer.github.io/

Approach:

[Our] policy is composed of a high-level language policy and a low-level policy for generating robot trajectories. The high-level policy outputs both a task instruction and a corrective instruction, along with a correction flag. Task instructions describe the primary objective to be executed, while corrective instructions provide fine-grained guidance for recovering from suboptimal states. Examples include "move the left gripper closer to me" or "move the right gripper away from me." The low-level policy takes as input only one of the two instructions, determined by the correction flag. When the flag is set to true, the system uses the corrective instruction; otherwise, it relies on the task instruction.

To support this training framework, we collect two types of demonstrations. The first consists of standard demonstrations captured during normal task execution. The second consists of corrective demonstrations, in which the data collector intentionally places the robot in failure states, such as missing a grasp or misaligning the grippers, and then demonstrates how to recover and complete the task successfully. These two types of data are organized into separate folders: one for regular demonstrations and another for recovery demonstrations. During training, the correction flag is set to false when using regular data and true when using recovery data, allowing the policy to learn context-appropriate behaviors based on the state of the system.
by megaman821 | 2025-07-25 21:43:33+00:00
I am not a Tailwind user but I am a big fan of these "headless" web components. I have been using home-grown web components for tabs, modals, drawers, dropdown, tooltips, toasts and selects they implement functionality and accessibility with minimal styling. I use them across different projects and different solutions (Django templates, Vue, React, vanilla HTML) without any problems.
by codingdave | 2025-07-25 21:43:36+00:00
SPAs make sense when your users have long sessions in your app. When it is worth the pain to load a large bundle in exchange for having really small network requests after the load.

Smooth transitions are a nice side effect, but not the reason for an SPA. The core argument of the article, that client-side routing is a solution for page transitions, is a complete misunderstanding of what problems SPAs solve. So absolutely, if you shared that misunderstanding of SPAs and used them to solve the wrong problem, this article is 100% correct.

But SPAs came about in the days of jQuery, not React. You'd have a complex app, and load up a giant pile of jQuery spaghetti, which would then treat each div of your app is its own little mini-app, with lots of small network requests keeping everything in sync. It solved a real problem, of not wanting to reload all that code every time a user on an old browser, with a slow connection, changed some data. jQuery made it feasible to do SPAs instead.

Later, React and other frameworks made it less spaghetti-like. And it really took off. Often, for sketchy reasons. But the strongest argument for SPAs remains using them as a solution to provide a single-load of a large code bundle, that can be cached, to provide minimal network traffic subsequent to the load when the expected session time of a user is long enough to be worth the trouble of the complexity of an SPA.
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-25 21:43:56+00:00
Need is a strong word. That's why I said effective.

You can often iterate to something that kind of works by adding epicycles. What you're left with is something that fails in rare cases you can't explain, is difficult to change (we don't touch that code), and is slow.

Compare a complex homegrown data store to a relational database like postgresSQL. Both get the job done, but one has significantly more conceptual clarity and reliability.

Being able to come across a hard problem and say, ok this is how to frame it and here is how to go about it, turns months of fiddling into a direct route.
Ask HN: Are AI Dev Tools Ready for Production? What Limitations Are You Seeing?
by skykarthick | 2025-07-25 21:44:01+00:00
Hello Everyone,

I see that AI-powered development tools and services are offering significant potential for rapid prototyping and faster application development. On other the side, it comes with a range of limitations and pain points that developers and citizen developers/builders frequently encounter.

For example:

- AI hallucinations and inaccurate code generation that lead to extensive manual fixes.

- Vendor lock-in makes data and code export difficult.

- Limited customisation and rigid components restrict unique features.

- Poor debugging tools hinder complex troubleshooting.

- Scalability issues impact production-ready applications.

- Unpredictable pricing creates frustration over AI and compute costs.

- Weak collaboration and version control complicate team workflows.

Do you agree on those limitations as well?
Ask HN: Why is virtualization still not solved?
by prmph | 2025-07-25 21:44:18+00:00
It's 2025, and virtualization is still a headache, even for casual use.

I use a MacBook Air M1 as my dev laptop, and I just wanted to have a reproducible dev environment running Debian.

My options: use devcontainer, or use a VM on Virtualbox, VMWare, Parallels, UTM, etc.

VSCode & Typescript gets messed up every now and then, such that they don't work and I simply can't continue with them. Not sure why, but I think there are weird internal bugs in those that surface whenever there is some special combination of circumstances on my machine. With devcontainer I think VSCode still runs directly on my machine but connects to the container, so this is nto a solution for me, I need a real VM.

So I try VirtualBox first. After spending hours installing Debian on a VM and getting it running nicely, within a short time the VM slows to a crawl. Nothing I do reliably fixes this. I also cannto get the display resolution to behave properly. I give up on VirtualBox, again (I keep trying this every few years forgetting why I don't use VirtualBox)

Next, I want to try VMWare, only to find out it is sold to Broadcom, and when I follow the link to their page, I'm supposed to log in to download, and yet I see no way to register. Oh well.

Next, I try Parallels. After getting a Debian VM running on it, I marvel at how smoothly it works. I'm in the trial, but I'm not going to have a problem paying up if everything goes on well. Alas, it was too good to be true. I start to to have random loss of internet connectivity (weirdly affecting the terminal only) in the VM. I see that the default networking mode is shared networking. I read guides online suggesting to switch to bridged networking. After spending oodles of time setting up the firewall and other security configuration on the VM and switching to bridged networking, I'm still having intermittent connectivity issues. it seems they are even worse now. Suddenly I remember again why I don't have a Parallels subscription after all these years.

Frustrated, I finally give up. I ruefully remember that UTM also has similar performance and screen display problems as VirtualBox.

So what options are left? I can't really physically install a dual-boot Linux on my Macbook (Asahi notwithstanding, since I only want Debian). Maybe I could sign up for a cloud VPS and use that. Or just buy new AMD mini PCs and run Debian on those. Either way, it's clear the virtualization story, after decades of supposed tech advancement, is still a bitter one.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-07-25 21:44:18+00:00
I don't think it was about not wanting to leave the audio input floating. Rather the "normal connection" is that the telephone subscriber is connected directly to the switchboard operator's annunciator (a display panel) so that the subscriber can light up a bulb on the annunciator when that subscriber wishes to ask the operator to reroute that subscriber's connection to another subscriber (instead of to the switchboard operator). This is why the switch ought to act like a double-throw, not just a single-throw switch. I think something along those lines is the reason...

> In a telephone-exchange system the wires of the several subscribers are run into a cen tral office, where, upon request, any wire may be connected with that of any other subscriber.

> In Fig. 4 is shown the cut-out connected with subscriber's wire in and the relay and annunciator P and O, and also, with the operator's telephone J, by means of the plug A, which is provided with a metallic point, and conducting-cord d. The connections are formed as follows: The subscriber S, by throwing on his local battery, sends a current along the wire in through the relay P, which, closing, the annunciator number of S is indicated at O, and the current passes along the Wire H, and thence through the switch to the ground Wire G.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-25 21:44:18+00:00
A justification of what, though? It isn't a cohesive argument on it's own but it is important perspective. If a significant fraction of societies have arrived at policies that contradict your worldview I think that ought to give you pause. (Note that I say that as someone who holds far more extreme views about legal freedom of expression than the vast majority of people out there.)

That's getting somewhat off topic though. In the context of this thread it's merely the observation that attributing this to "puritans" or "christianity" or "US history" is rather misguided. The US and western Europe are very much the outliers here.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-25 21:44:25+00:00
It's already an oligopoly. Most cities only have one or two. Of the few cities that have three or four (Chicago, say), the merger would reduce that by one.

Let's say you want to ship from Denver to Atlanta. In Denver, you hand your stuff over to either Union Pacific or BNSF. In Atlanta, you receive it from either NS or CSX. You only have two options in Denver, and only two in Atlanta. The merger doesn't change that at all.
by derefr | 2025-07-25 21:44:30+00:00
> we fell outside of their "risk appetite."

If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)

And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.

Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?

And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to

1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and

2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?
by prisenco | 2025-07-25 21:44:34+00:00
The View Transitions API is beautiful and I can't wait for it to become widely available.

I've soured on SPAs in the past few years. So much more can be done with standards than people realize. SPAs were best for specific use cases but we made them the default for everything. Marketing pages are built in React! Basic pages with marketing copy have a build step and require hundreds of megabytes of dependencies.

Like the author I've transitioned to a mantra of "let the web be the web."

But we have a whole generation of developers and designers that have come of age with SPA and mobile-like ux as standard. Getting everyone back to basics and understanding hypermedia, markup languages and cascading styles is a big ask.
by flir | 2025-07-25 21:45:09+00:00
In the case of date libraries, I think if I ported the tests from a few well-known libraries to my own, I'd have reasonable confidence in my own.

Having said that, I don't think date libraries are hard, I think they're messy. Mostly because humans keep introducing convenience fudges - adding a second here, taking eleven days off there, that kind of thing.
by 1659447091 | 2025-07-25 21:45:39+00:00
> [...]if you want to subtly influence perceptions and ultimately behaviors, you shouldn’t approach people with the goal of educating them or increasing their awareness of something, but rather, you should aim to tap into their unconscious mind to evoke emotions, and then use their emotional response to direct behavior.

It's crazy that we spend so much time on Psychology research when all you need to do is go to sales seminars and have people that may or may not have a high school education teach you exactly this.

The best education I got in human behaviour was a stint in door-to-door sales during a period of tech burn-out. Once you are aware of how people are trying to sell you, advertising and marketing is unlikely to phase you.

> If a message triggers anger or fear, your brain flags it as urgent; if it confirms your existing beliefs, your mind treats it as more likely to be true (confirmation bias); if others are sharing it, your confidence in it increases (normative bias; illusory truth effect). This pattern is observable in basically every viral disinformation event.

For shady nefarious uses, propaganda/disinformation -- being aware of what and when something triggers/activates us makes it is easier to not get swept away by where it's trying to lead (this would be the apt time to turn off and go "touch grass", literally)

My observations of people doing 180s in terms of personality happened because they are unaware of having ever been "activated". They tend to think they are "not emotional", are rational etc.

An example I found difficult to believe at first was: The easiest, most profitable sales were the people that told us up front they were absolutely not buying and won't/can't be persuaded or sold -- they are too $cognitive_identity. I didn't connect it then, but thinking about it now, they were already emotionally activated/involved and believed they weren't, more importantly didn't know/recognize it.

Personally, I believe some Stoicism (Epictetus mostly, maybe Aurelius) practices would help give people the tools to combat this assault on the mind/emotions.
by zahlman | 2025-07-25 21:45:46+00:00
That should be the beginning of the formative experience for that kid rather than the end. Yes, you can. How often do you? What are you missing by not thinking about problems in that way more often? What idioms could be unlocked that way? (How many Python programmers out there are aping wholly unnecessary "design patterns" created for C++ or Java? Or rather: shouldn't a design pattern be about the design rather than the implementation? What is a design, in the pure abstract, really?)
by ryandrake | 2025-07-25 21:45:49+00:00
Wow, so the entire company is a Founder and a Social Media Director??

> With a proven background leading product development teams at top Bay Area tech companies like Salesforce and Shutterfly, Sean [Cook, creator of Tea] leveraged his expertise building innovative technology

Blah blah blah blah blah... Just goes to show that you can write all sorts of powerful sounding words about yourself on your About page, but it doesn't say anything about your actual competence. I mean, I don't have a "proven background leading product development teams" but I sure as shit wouldn't make obvious amateur-level mistakes like this if I ever did a startup.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-07-25 21:46:55+00:00
HTMX (and similar) solves a lot of this. It so happens that we end up building two apps one frontend and one backend with SPAs as built today. I'd rather build a lot of it on the server side, and add some dumb interactivity on the client (show/hide, collapse/expand, effects). There is still a place for SPA though.
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-25 21:47:27+00:00
You are correct that mistakes are made all the time - but they tend to be "oh yeah let me fix that right now" mistakes. Or, "oh yeah that's not true in general, but it still works for this case". That's because the experts are thinking about the content of the material - and they are familiar with it enough to tell if an idea has merit or not. Formalism is just a mode of presentation.

Over-emphasis on formalism leads me to conclude you just don't understand the purpose of proofs. You are primarily interested in formal logic - not math.

I would invite you to read a few pages of famous papers - for example Perelman's paper on the Poincaré Conjecture.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-25 21:48:00+00:00
Thing is, with things like these, they only need one or a handful of cases. With everything, there is always a handful of cases - porn addicts, gambling addicts, revenge porn victims, trans women in women's spaces and sports, etc. The fundamentalists and right-wing media will hyperfocus and signal boost these statistically insignificant cases to push their own agenda.

For them, n=1 is enough evidence. For their moral compass or larger scale goals, n=1 is one too many.

There will always be some people - teenagers or otherwise - that develop mental health issues from e.g. porn games. But there's people developing mental health issues from Farmville or ChatGPT supposedly turning sentient and sharing the infinite Truth of the universe too. Somehow those aren't an issue.

It's not about preventing mental health issues. It's not about protecting women.
by strcat | 2025-07-25 21:48:06+00:00
> Multiple fully or mostly open hardware computers exist. They just cannot run android.

No, not really, and there's no reason those can't run AOSP.

> MNT Reform

It has a typical closed source ARM SoC and other components. The chassis and board being open doesn't make all the components open. CPU, GPU, MMU, USB, etc. are provided by the SoC and are closed source as usual. It has closed source hardware and firmware for the SoC along with other closed source hardware and firmware. Not having to load firmware from the OS does not mean it's open hardware and firmware. It's barely more open than other computers for the most complex parts of it.

How is something fully open hardware if the vast majority of the complexity is in closed source components providing most of the functionality? The SoC is just the most complex of these by far.

Why couldn't AOSP be run on a regular ARM SoC used in devices which run AOSP? AOSP works fine on top of the mainline Linux kernel and drivers.

> Talos II

A mostly open source motherboard where you drop in a closed source CPU is not really an open source platform. It's not fully open source itself and the CPUs used with it are not open source. IBM took steps towards open sourcing PowerPC as an ISA and relatively primitive open source cores OpenPOWER core designs exist. However, what's actually available and used with it are closed source CPUs. In theory, there can be open design CPUs for use with it. As a motherboard, it's pretty close to fully open hardware. As a functioning computer, it's mostly not because a motherboard is not a whole computer and is far less complex than the CPU even with a more traditional desktop design with less functionality moved into an SoC.

> Precursor

It has a closed source FPGA as the primary processor and other closed source components. It's far closer to being open source, but it isn't fully open hardware. This is the only one you listed which is anywhere close to mostly open source. It is very far from a powerful modern smartphone device though.

> Those are lightyears ahead in openess and auditability compared to anything Google produces.

The primary SoC in each is closed source. Precursor programs their CPU on top of that closed source FPGA so the CPU is open source in that sense and much closer to being mostly open. It's not the only closed source part of it.

The other 2 examples have a closed source SoC. One uses a regular closed source ARM SoC incorporating far more than a CPU and GPU into the closed source chip. The other depends on a more traditional desktop style closed source CPU from IBM outsourcing more to the motherboard.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-25 21:48:06+00:00
> Yah, over 50% it's going nowhere but expectation needs to consider how huge the win is even if it is lower probability.

yes that's literally the definition of expectation value...... so

ev = 1 bagillion * 0.0000000000000001 = ~0

hence you should absolutely not be taking higher equity/lower salary ever. hell i wouldn't even take that at a publically traded company if given the option.
by bawolff | 2025-07-25 21:48:18+00:00
Having the threat of lawsuits is not really about the actual lawsuit, its about scaring people into being more careful. If you actually get to the lawsuit stage, the strategy has failed.

> We can reduce the latency of discovery and resolution by adding software protocols.

Can we? What does this even mean?

[Edit: i guess you mean the things in your parent comment about requiring including some sort of canary token in the DB. I'm skeptical about that as it assumes certain db structure and is difficult to verify compliance.

More importantly i don't really see how it would have stopped this specific situation. It seems like the leak was published to 4chan pretty immediately. More generally how do you discover if the token is leaked, in general? Its not like the hackers are going to self-report.]
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-25 21:48:24+00:00
By buying it. Even the land-grant railroads bought the land, in the form of carrying the US mail at reduced rates for the next 80 years. (During World War 2, when the government was desperate for money, they let the railroads buy themselves out of the reduced mail rates. So it worked out to payments for 80 years with a balloon payment at the end.)
by trothamel | 2025-07-25 21:48:32+00:00
Python has the pprint module, which takes care of this for you, and for more datatypes than are done here. (I don't see how this would handle a hashmap in a sensible way.)

But I'm not sure how this addresses what I was saying, which is that the intuitions about algorithms you get working on Python are easier to transfer to popular languages like C++, Java, Javascript, Rust, etc..
by DrSiemer | 2025-07-25 21:49:03+00:00
Meanwhile, the war on tab width marches on. Back when I got tired of inconsistent tab widths, I simply based my preference on the silly fact that some research showed how developers using two spaced tabs make slightly more money.

Among our team we do not enforce a specific width, but respecting the choice of the original author of a project is required.

Kind of annoying how LLMs will sometimes randomly decide to change tab width.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-25 21:50:28+00:00
Thank you for your story. I like to try to imagine what conversations happened behind the scenes. The fact that the suddenly hauled you into the branch, and still decided that you were too "risky" (clearly a made-up excuse) says a lot. Whatever force is behind this is powerful and it's not even remotely explained by a coalition of angry activists.
by xigoi | 2025-07-25 21:51:15+00:00
Not the one you’re replying to, but my take: The main problem with classes is that they conflate a lot of concepts that should be separate and you usually need only one or a few at once, but are 5orced into all of them. Namely:

• Product type

• Reference semantics

• Namespacing

• Pipeline-style call syntax

• Redefinition of infix operators

• Dynamic dispatch

• Subtyping

For example, you cannot have a product type with value semantics or a type that redefines infix operators but is not a product type.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-25 21:51:38+00:00
I guess the GP's plan is a scatter approach. 1 indie has no power, but if for every banned indie you have 10 more setting up payment, it becomes financially untenable to go after them all. Compared to, say, making one or two calls to Gabe. Turning it from a game of corruption to one of whack-a-mole.