MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Falimonda | 2025-07-03 23:51:01+00:00
As someone who hasn't had to own a car in over 8 years (lived in NYC) and recently bought a 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe with birdseye view parking it shocks me how uncalibrated my car-prioception is.

It's made me realize that objects are much further from the boundaries of my car when backing into a spot parallel parking. I would never think to get so close to another car if I had to only rely on my own senses.

With that said, I realize there's a significant number of people that are even poorer estimators of these distances than myself. I.e. those that won't pass through two cars even though to me it's obvious that they could easily pass.

I have to imagine a big part of this has to do with risk assessment and lack of risk-free practice opportunity IRL. Nobody is seeing how far they can push or train themselves in this regard when the consequences are to scratch up your car and others' cars. With the birdseye view I can actually do that now!
by ezekiel68 | 2025-07-03 23:51:18+00:00
There's another side to that coin: supply.

Since Gemini CLI was recently released, many people on the "free" tier noticed that their sessions immediately devolved from Gemini 2.5 Pro to Flash "due to high utilization". I asked Gemini itself about this and it reported that the finite GPU/TPU resources in Google's cloud infrastructure can get oversubscribed for Pro usage. Google (no secret here) has a subscription option for higher-tier customers to request guaranteed provisioning for the Pro model. Once their capacity gets approached, they must throttle down the lower-tier (including free) sessions to the less resource-intensive models.

Price is one lever to move once capacity becomes constrained. Yet, as the top voted comment of this post explains, it's not honest to simply label this as a price increase. They raised Flash pricing on input tokens but lowered pricing on output tokens up to certain limits -- which gives creedence to the theory that they are trying to shape the demand in order for it to better match their capacity.
by gblargg | 2025-07-03 23:51:59+00:00
It sounds like they are arguing that when performance matters, you have to know more about caching. Fair enough, you have to know a lot more about things when optimizing. For a lot of cases you can ignore caching because it can be done transparently. You depend on it to some extent because if e.g. every instruction had to be fetched off rotating storage like the old days, it would play a big role in your design. It's just something solved in general for most software to not have to know much about it.
Show HN: I made an app that turns your life memories into Manga
by djnd | 2025-07-03 23:52:45+00:00
I enjoy reading manga and journaling. Recently, I started wondering what would happen if I combined the two... I wanted a different way to document moments that happen in my life in a format that’s almost just as personal as writing, but also easy to share with friends.

That’s how the idea to turn life memories into manga came about. With MangaMe, you can take moments from your life, anything from funny stories to the most mundane everyday activities, and turn them into a manga page for you to keep or share.

The hardest part has been getting the AI to keep characters looking the same across different panels as I only require one selfie for this, and sometimes the text in speech bubbles still gets jumbled, but I think it's at a point that I wanted to share and collect feedback.

It’s a hard paywall since I’m using GPT-4 image for the image generation, but I currently have a promo going on now for 3 free generation credits. Would love for you to check it out and let me know what you think, or if you run into any weirdness.

Thanks!

iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6746081532

Landing Page: https://www.manga-me.me/
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-03 23:54:47+00:00
>uphold the content policies of HN

This follows the content policies of HN.

It clearly does play favorites when we are hearing the first firsthand account of an "unsaleable prison", but users will vote on the 20th AI article posted here.

Also, I expect better from the HN community when it comes to data. 5 (4, in reality. Because one of your links is flagged now) articles in a week not flagged for a forum that receives hundreds of submissions per day does not even meet the minimum statistical threshold.

I've been taking glances at the front page and top daily submissions for a week and was disenheartened that there were no articles on the Big Beautiful Bill that gained traction, or weren't flagged. I'm not particularly surprised at this point given historical trends, but a shame nonetheless.
by rented_mule | 2025-07-03 23:54:59+00:00
I think there's a distinction between worst-case and adversarial behavior.

For some types of problems, identifying worst-case behavior is straightforward. For example, in a hash table lookup the worst-case is when all keys hash to the same value. To me, it seems like overkill to think in terms of an intelligent adversary in that case.

But in the problem described here, the worst-case is harder to construct. Especially while exploring the solution space given that slight tweaks to the solution can significantly change the nature of the worst-case. Thinking of it as adversarial implies thinking in terms of algorithms that dynamically produce the worst-case rather than trying to just identify a static worst-case that is specific to one solution. I can imagine that approach significantly speeding up the search for more optimal solutions.
by mindwok | 2025-07-03 23:55:01+00:00
A very cathartic read. I enjoyed this, and I really related to the author's anxieties.

Our economics has created a collective belief that if you aren't trying to be the best at playing the game, then you will be left behind in poverty. Mediocrity is shunned in Silicon Valley, and the rise of social media has only inflated that idea. We're increasingly checking our humanity at the door so we can be great, and sacrifice ourselves at the altar of capitalism. For what? So we can look ourselves in the mirror and believe we are one of the special chosen ones?
by doctorpangloss | 2025-07-03 23:55:36+00:00
pretty esoteric when it's so simple: you either think

Bill Peebles is right, naturalistic, physical laws can be learned in deep neural nets from videos.

OR

Fei-Fei Li is right, you need 3D point cloud videos.

Okay, if you think Bill Peebles is right, then all this stuff you are talking about doesn't matter anymore. Lots of great reasons Bill Peebles is probably right, biggest reason of all is that Veo, Sora etc. have really good physics understanding.

If you think Fei-Fei Li is right, you are going to be augmenting real world data sets with game engine content. You can exactly create whatever data you need, for whatever constraints, to train performantly. I don't think this data scalability concern is real.

A compelling reason you are wrong and Fei-Fei Li's specific bet on scalability is right is the existence of Waymo and Zoox. There are also NEW autonomous vehicle companies achieving things faster than Zoox and Waymo did, because a lot of spatial intelligence problems are actually regulatory/political, not scientific.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-07-03 23:57:23+00:00
You can think of c as the conversion rate between space and time; then, light (and anything else without mass, such as gravity or gluons) travels at a speed of 1. Everything else travels at a speed of less than 1.

(Physicists will in fact use the c=1 convention when keeping track of the distinction between distance units and time units is not important. A related convention is hbar=1.)

You can tell that c is fundamental, rather than just a property of light, from how it appears in the equations for Lorentz boosts (length contraction and time dilation).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-03 23:58:51+00:00
>they're trying to keep intelligent discourse from devolving into flamewars

It's very easy to have no flamewars if we don't talk about it at all. Technically correct, but I'm not a big fan of "O(1) performance!" achieved in such way. Optimization is about doing useful work, not avoiding it.

It's a real shame suppression is part of the strategy. Instead, encourage users to 1) be mindful in touchy topics and consider every little word in their post and 2) to ignore those who clearly aren't trying to facilitate a discussion.

> I think Dan G is doing a admirable job with riding the line as well as is possible.

Apathy is submitting in to the status quo. There are plenty of times where I disagree but can understand a status quo that does not benefit me.

This is not one of those times. This status quo is dangerous to everyone.
by cushychicken | 2025-07-03 23:59:00+00:00
There's a lot to love about this.

I particularly like feeling like you need permission to show optimism and enthusiasm about your work.

I also particularly like this bit:

“Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”

...but mostly out of a sense of confirmation bias. It's nice to know that there are smart, accomplished people out there who share my view that Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan are jerks.

One thing this helped crystallize for me, in my position as a nascent team leader, is the position that: "If something about your daily work sucks, let's talk about it. That's the first step to seeing if we can fix it."

This seems like - not a panacea? But a solid strategy to help uncover many problems in an organization.

Enjoyed the read. Thanks for posting.
by zoky | 2025-07-04 00:00:08+00:00
> Grain is independent frame-to-frame. It doesn't move with the objects in the scene (unless the video's already been encoded strangely)

That might seem like a reasonable assumption, but in practice it’s not really the case. Due to nonlinear response curves, adding noise to a bright part of an image has far less effect than a darker part. If the image is completely blown out the grain may not be discernible at all. So practically speaking, grain does travel with objects in a scene.

This means detail is indeed encoded in grain to an extent. If you algorithmically denoise an image and then subtract the result from the original to get only the grain, you can easily see “ghost” patterns in the grain that reflect the original image. This represents lost image data that cannot be recovered by adding synthetic grain.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-04 00:00:53+00:00
1. File a complaint with the state insurance regulator where your insurance is issued in. You can find this regulator at https://content.naic.org/state-insurance-departments

2. File a complaint with the US Dept. of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA):

The EBSA, a division of the DOL, handles complaints related to employer-provided health insurance. You can:

Call the EBSA: Toll-free at 1-866-444-3272 to speak with a benefits advisor.

Submit a complaint using the EBSA's online form: https://www.askebsa.dol.gov/WebIntake/

The EBSA will investigate the claim and may contact your employer or insurance provider for more information. You may be contacted for additional details or documents. If the EBSA finds that your rights under ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) were violated, they may take corrective action on your behalf. Keep copies of all documents and correspondence. You can follow up on the status of your complaint by contacting the EBSA at the phone number above.
by pragmatic | 2025-07-04 00:02:13+00:00
Woah that’s bleak.

You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other people the bear is chasing.

The bar is so low in corporate America you could trip on it.

Just try to be halfway competent, do something useful at work, read a book or two about your industry. You’re already way ahead.

Don’t fall for the hacker news bs.

Lots of millionaires out here that never had a successful startup.
by dataflow | 2025-07-04 00:03:54+00:00
> What pleases me are the people who use D, like it, and tell me they make more money using D because D is much more productive to write code in.

I guess what I've been trying to say is that you would find yourself pleased much, much more often (and D being much more successful) if you recognized and addressed these high-level issues that people have been pointing out for decades, instead of denying them and going on forums telling customers why their expectations are wrong or unnecessary. I'm saying this because D really is a great piece of technology that got a lot of things right, except a few crucial details for some of the most crucial users. And it has had so much potential - potential that has been gradually lost largely because you haven't even recognized the flaws and hurdles that come with it.

It remind me of the infamous Dropbox comment. It's as if you invented FTP, but then whenever people told you it's hard to store & share files, you kept insisting that it's trivial with just a few simple steps on Linux, completely missing the massive market opportunity and the barriers you're telling people to walk through. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

And I'm not saying all this out of out hate for D, but out of (at least past) love for it. I desperately wanted to see it succeed, but I gave up because I realized you simply did not see the Achilles heel that frustrates many of its users and that has held back its potential.
by da_chicken | 2025-07-04 00:04:20+00:00
> Since this wooden rod travels several miles in a 6 second time frame - traveling more than 500M/s on average - don't we have to assume it accumulates?

No, we don't.

The most recent D&D Dungeon Master's Guide actually puts a note in the book[0] for things like this: The D&D rules are not a physics engine. The D&D rules are a simple framework for creating a game world, but that's not the same thing as being a 3d game engine or a generative data model. It's a game where you're expected to resolve complex events with a single die roll. It's not Unreal Engine 5 or Autodesk Inventor or COMSOL Multiphysics.

Just like D&D's morality and ethics system (alignment) falls over and cries when you poke it with a Philosophy 101 moral quandary, the game's event resolution is not intended for you to model the Large Hadron Collider.

[0]: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/br-2024/the-basics#Pla...
by alisonatwork | 2025-07-04 00:05:11+00:00
I had this experience even before LLMs, in particular when working with developers who came up in a non-western educational environment. There was a mindset that the only thing that matters is making the boss happy, and in a code review context the reviewer plays the role of boss, so the mindset is "do whatever is required for the boss to stop complaining", not "how can I learn from the knowledge this person is sharing". It's a fundamental difference in how people relate to one another professionally, and I think LLMs have spread this kind of attitude into broader cultural contexts - the devaluation of critical thinking and learning as a necessary part of the job and a more mercenary focus on uncritically churning out whatever the boss asked for.

The doomer perspective would be that people are getting dumber and more complacent and that this will unravel society, but that might not actually be the case if we consider that the mindset already existed in other societies that still thrive. Perhaps the people who never really gave a crap about the quality of their work were right all along? After all, despite the fact most of us are in the top 20% of earners in our countries and easily the top 10% or an even more elite minority globally, end of the day we are still "code peasants" who build whatever our boss told us to build so that an ultra-wealthy investor class can compound their wealth. Why should we waste our time caring about that? Why not get an AI to grind out garbage on our behalf? Why not focus our energies on more rewarding pursuits in our personal lives?

Of course I am playing devil's advocate here, because for me personally being forced to show up for work every day thanks to capitalism and then doing a half-assed job makes me more depressed than trying to excel at something I never wanted to do in the first place. But there is a part of me that understands the mindset and wonders if my life might be easier if I shared it.

Anyway, prior to LLMs I dealt with this phenomenon by reluctantly accepting that most people don't care anywhere near as much about the quality of their work as I do, and that it was hopeless trying to change them. Find the few who do care and prioritize actually-productive knowledge exchanges with them. Drop your standards for people who clearly don't care. If the code doesn't meet your standards but it's still more-or-less functional, just let it go. You might imagine it'll reflect poorly on you, except in reality management doesn't care anyway - the push to AI all the things right now is the "mask off" moment. Every now and then you'll still find a motivated junior who really is passionate about getting better and then being a part of their growth is still rewarding.
by rriley | 2025-07-04 00:06:09+00:00
This is really well done!

I love that I can start using it right away without needing to sign up, that’s becoming a rare (but refreshing) design choice. Also big thumbs up for the PWA support, being able to install it on my desktop instantly is a huge plus. The presets and project tracking are super handy too.

Congrats on launching your first public side project! it’s clear you built it with care and actual daily use in mind.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-04 00:06:25+00:00
My most overly generous interpretation is that any resistance within the party is intimidated down. We have cowards in congress who can't at least be decent enough to run away and live with their principles. If you followed the story of the "Big Beautiful Bill" you see this in action.

Mumdami's potential vote in as Mayor of New York is the only little spark at tihs moment that gives me hope that there may be a blue wave coming next year, when a 3rd of congress is up for election.

>Back then you people were adamant that your second amendment was there to protect free speech. But my suspicion back then was that this was mostly a thing guys who grew up in the comfort of a first world civilization would say to come across as tough and manly. And guess what.

Ding Ding ding. Sadly, the 2A crowd is comprised mostly of people who are in fact fine with a dictator. As long as they agree with the dictator.
by snvzz | 2025-07-04 00:06:48+00:00
>Still, no consumer based RV23 mini-ITX or micro-ATX or ATX form factor devices.

Sure. But there are RVA22+V such devices. RVA23 will eventually succeed these.

Many IP vendors announced RVA23 cores, but understand that the process from having a core design available for licensing to having a chip is very long, measured in years.

Among the designs that are further down in the pipeline of development, a highlight is Tenstorrent's Ascalon. According to them, a tapeout is "imminent". This was in the RISC-V Summit EU a few weeks ago. That'd mean RVA23 chips competitive with Zen5 in early 2026.
by geofffox | 2025-07-04 00:07:24+00:00
I am a meteorologist and I know a little about how programming works. I'm going to be 75 this month. My last computer class was the '67-'68 semester of high school.

That being said, AI and I have written some amazing programs to produce beautiful graphics I use on-the-air. And it's all in Python, a language I can read and not write.

If I can do this you should be scared.
by polytely | 2025-07-04 00:08:41+00:00
No idea, but when people say they can visualize an apple and then say it feels like number 1 on that chart, I would say that my experience of whatever I'm doing when I'm 'visualizing' an apple is more like 4 or 5

https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AppleVi...

I can only assume people are trying to accurately describe their own experience so when my experience seems to differ a lot it seems to me that there is more going on than just confusion about wording.
by rodface | 2025-07-04 00:12:12+00:00
That price is astonishing. My modeling knowledge is limited to plastic aircraft kits, so I have no idea what I'm looking at here. I'm not sure what it would take to pay that kind of money for a model aircraft, it would have to be the size of a coffee table and made by PLASMO or an equivalently (freakishly good) builder. I assume that KOHS engine is handmade of brass sheeting (the detail and workmanship do look exquisite)? How much of the cost is from its internal componentry (I assume it has a high-quality electric motor?)? Or is this just what it costs to play at the top of the model train game?
by notphilipmoran | 2025-07-04 00:12:24+00:00
I feel that the details regarding the type of the model and the purpose it serves are underrepresented here. Yes existing models will get cheaper over time as they become more obsolete but to be at the forefront of innovation or models costs will only increase due to the these mentioned bottlenecks. Also there is the basic law of supply and demand coming into play here. As models get more advanced more industries will be exposed to them and see the potential cost savings compared to the current alternative. This will further increase demand and with further innovation, there will be further capability in turn again increasing demand. I only see this reversing is you are not at the forefront of innovation and many people using these LLMs at this point are close at least compared to many "normal" people and their understandings of LLMs.
by shagie | 2025-07-04 00:12:38+00:00
> let's hope nobody drills a hole in the Moon

https://what-if.xkcd.com/46/ - while it deals more with the Earth (which has a more molten core), its still applicable. There's still molten material ( https://science.nasa.gov/moon/composition/ ) but it's a lot deeper.

> (or blows the Moon up)

As a classic Neal Stephenson (great world building, good plot... and it ends)... Seveneves starts with:

> THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.

... and given the book and the "what happens"... a watch surviving (much less keeping the phase of the moon) would be impressive.

There's also the Dr. Who take ("Spoilers") https://youtu.be/pHOnGSFzd3Y
by mxplerin | 2025-07-04 00:12:58+00:00
Yes. There is a whole sector of algorithm design called online algorithms dedicated to studying algorithms that must make decisions without complete information. A common analysis technique proves the "competitive ratio" of an algorithm by analyzing its worst case performance against an adversary. In fact, this article was the analysis of one particular online problem. For a simple introduction, you can check out "the ski rental problem." More complex applications include things like task scheduling and gradient descent.

Adjacent to this topic is algorithms for two-player games, like minimax, which depend on imagining an adversary that plays perfect counter moves.

In a similar vein, in ML, there is a model called generative adversarial networks (GANs) in which 2 networks (a generator and discriminator) play a minimax game against each other, improving the capability of both models at once.
by chr15m | 2025-07-04 00:13:20+00:00
Thanks for sharing this, great article!

You describe a way of living that is probably much more common than the ramen scurvy CEO lifestyle, but it doesn't get written about because people want to read about financial success and winning at zero sum games.

The typical "success" archetype is often at the peak of some hierarchy (e.g. CEO) where the vast majority in the game literally cannot occupy the top positions. So in those situations most participants are losers. Sounds like you found a way to quietly opt out of that framing of success e.g. in your time at Stripe.

Thank you for normalizing shiny object syndrome floundering!