MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: VR.dev – a developer network for VR/XR/AR devs
by vrdev | 2025-08-29 14:16:36+00:00
I built vr.dev as a lightweight network for people in the VR, XR, and AR development community to showcase demos, promote themselves, and find collaborators. It’s early, but usable for portfolios and discovery.

Example profile: https://vr.dev/erik

What’s live now:

- Profiles with vr.dev/[username] URLs

- Showcase a .glTF file

- Resume/experience with industry-specific signals

What’s coming:

- Options for more showcases and supported asset types

- Advanced searching on experience and skills

- Closer integration with GitHub

- Better discovery

I’d love feedback on what I can add to make this more useful for you!

I’ll be hanging out here all day but feel free to reach out — hn@vr.dev
by myrmidon | 2025-08-29 14:16:41+00:00
I'm not a troll.

I scrutinise beliefs and assumptions even if they are convenient, and you should, too.

I don't believe that Musks main motivation to participate in the 2024 election was to avoid prosecution, because his actions are not really compatible with this, and there is a much more plausible alternative hypothesis that he preferred (possibly no longer) the republican platform for non-prosecution reasons/personal conviction instead, which his actions are very compatible with.

> Labor violations, taxes, National Highway traffic safety administration investigation Tesla

Let me say it like this: Billionaires generally don't have to care about minor infractions like this at all. The whole system is set up to shield them from liability, and wealth is an excellent buffer against effective prosection regardless of who is president. There have been a plethora of infinitely more serious infractions with zero real consequences for the CEOs involved, and this is not because they participated in past presidential election campaigns. See: the VW diesel emission fraud or much worse, leaded gas in the last century (and what associated industry did to keep that going).
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-29 14:16:52+00:00
At least in terms of reporting content to "Trust and Safety" they certainly behave like its gone forever. I have had friends report illegal content, to both Discord and law enforcement, the take away seemed like it was gone, now it's making me wonder if Discord is really archiving CSAM material for two years and not helping law enforcement unless a proper warrant is involved, yikes.
by malshe | 2025-08-29 14:17:00+00:00
The folks who are using RAG, what's the SOTA for extracting text from pdf documents? I have been following discussions on HN and I have seen a few promising solutions that involve converting pdf to png and then doing extraction. However, for my application this looks a bit risky because my pdfs have tons of tables and I can't afford to get in return incorrect of made up numbers.

The original documents are in HTML format and although I don't have access to them I can obtain them if I want. Is it better to just use these HTML documents instead? Previously I tried converting HTML to markdown and then use these for RAG. I wasn't too happy with the result although I fear I might be doing something wrong.
by jcmfernandes | 2025-08-29 14:17:55+00:00
Same here in Portugal.

My parents were in their early-to-mid 20s when the dictatorship ended here, and my mom speaks fondly of our dictator Salazar. She lost 2 out of 12 brothers and sisters — 3 months and 4 years old, respectively — to perfectly curable diseases, and 2 others are crippled because of health complications when they were children. None of the 10 that made it to adulthood studied past the 6th grade. My dad was sent to a Catholic boarding school 300 km away from his mom when he was 10, because she couldn't feed him; he only studied until the 4th grade and started working when he was 11 years old.

My mom votes for Chega, the far-right party, and my wife is an immigrant (and I'm an ex-emigrant). She resents her life, and Chega rides on that resentment. It's very painful to see loved ones drift into this hate.
by kgwgk | 2025-08-29 14:19:04+00:00
> boring and irritating

Ok, AIPedant.

I understand that you may find irritating that someone points out that the original problem is ill-posed and “the answer” depends on how we decide to “rephrase” it.

However, it doesn’t seem boring in the context of a discussion of how the problem is not well-posed and additional assumptions are required to get an answer.
by frereubu | 2025-08-29 14:19:23+00:00
I went to claude.ai and saw a pop-over window with this choice, clicked to opt out and saw a "server error" alert. Then went to Settings > Privacy and the option wasn't there. I had to click something else (can't remember now) to see the option, which wasn't opted out (which kinda made sense because of the error message) and the option is now in Settings > Privacy. I'm definitely someone who believes that cock-up is more likely than conspiracy for things like this, but this process should have been bulletproof - no initial error message, option always in Settings > Privacy - given the sensitivities involved.
by horsawlarway | 2025-08-29 14:19:37+00:00
The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks.

10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this.

In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day.

Over the entire lifetime of the device (5 years assumed) it's less than 50 USD in power costs.

I'll take basically any other quality of life improvement instead...
by darfo | 2025-08-29 14:19:43+00:00
The article cited [0] discusses ventilated filters, not all filters. It is a dodge for regulator's smoking machines.

Since I think people are going to smoke a better solution would be mandated biodegradable filters. Unfiltered cigarettes must be worse for smokers than filtered cigarettes. Unless the filter material itself is dangerous :)

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/109/12/djx075/3836090
by johnfn | 2025-08-29 14:20:00+00:00
Ah, so this is what the Sonic model that Cursor had was. I've been doing this personal bench where I ask each model to create a 3D render of a guy using a laptop on a desk. I haven't written up a post to show the different output from each model, yet, but it's been a fun way to test the capabilities. Opus was probably the best -- Sonic put the guy in the middle of the desk, and the laptop floating over his head. Sonic was very fast, though!
by strken | 2025-08-29 14:20:27+00:00
People expect that they can pay 0.05x in the Philippines or India, or 0.1x in Poland or Estonia, when that's just not going to happen. I've heard a few people say the multiplier starts at something like 0.4x or more for equivalent talent.

Since that comes with all the disadvantages and risks you'd expect from splitting your team across two countries and operating in a market you don't understand, at that price point a US company should probably start thinking about spinning up a cheaper team in, I dunno, Dallas rather than offshoring.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-29 14:20:29+00:00
Its focus seems to be on faster responses, which Grok 3 definitely is good at. I have a different approach to LLMs and coding, I want to understand their proposed solutions and not just paste garbled up code (unless its scaffolded) if you treat every LLM as a piecemeal thing when designing code (or really trying to figure out anything) and go step by step, you get better results from most models.
by SirMaster | 2025-08-29 14:20:38+00:00
Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay.

There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory.

What's wrong with this?

https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B...

And connect a card like this to the NVMe PCIe which you can connect 8 SATA HDDs to with SATA breakout cables.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276

If you need more than 8 HDDs you can get a SAS2 expander to connect to the SAS2 card and then you could easily connect 24 HDDs with a 6 port SAS2 expander and breakout cables.

Or if you put this small board and card into a server case that has a SAS2 backplane with expander built in, then you can just connect all the disks that way.

Another option, not ARM, but still low power and neat.

https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma

This has Thunderbolt 4 which you can connect to a PCIe slot like this:

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html

They have a lot of neat stuff, you can get the tiny LattePanda Mu, and dock it in this:

https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-mu

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2822.html
by RianAtheer | 2025-08-29 14:20:38+00:00
This is me Rian Atheer. I just read that article on finance gossips website "How AI Is Changing the Way We Trade and Analyze Crypto Markets" and as a trader, it made me realize AI isn’t something to fear but it’s just a tool. I’ve been using AI bots to track the market 24/7, but I’ve learned they only work well when I combine them with my own research and instincts. It’s all about balance, not blindly trusting technology. There are benefits as well that comes with trading through AI and those who know the usage are getting their benefits.
by LightBug1 | 2025-08-29 14:21:53+00:00
Nope - the VW episode was terrible, but they faced large fines and corrected course and it's history. I'm still slightly squeamish about accepting them but they've turned it around and I think I read have just overtaken Tesla in EV sales in Europe (a self-inflicted Musk wound, of course).

I see no course correction from Tesla. Just continuing and utter tripe from it's CEO, team, and Musk-d-riders.

This is an on-going issue for them and, at this point, with no further change? I hope it drives them into the ground (Autopilot, natch).
by neonspark | 2025-08-29 14:21:58+00:00
> But another cause of hallucinations is limited self-awareness of modern LLMs… Humans have some awareness of the limits of their knowledge

Until you said that I didn’t realize just how much humans “hallucinate“ in just the same ways that AI does. I have a friend who is fluent in Spanish, a native speaker, but got a pretty weak grammar education when he was in high school. Also, he got no education at all in Critical thinking, at least not formally. So this guy is really, really fluent in his native language, but can often have a very difficult time explaining why he uses whatever grammar he uses. I think the whole world is realizing how little our brains can correctly explain and identify the grammar we use flawlessly.

He helps me to improve my Spanish a lot, he can correct me with 100% accuracy of course, but I’ve noticed on many occasions, including this week, that when I ask a question about why he said something one way or another in Spanish, he will just make up some grammar rule that doesn’t actually exist, and is in fact not true.

He said something like “you say it this way when you really know the person and you’re saying that the other way when it’s more formal“, but I think really it was just a slangy way to mis-stress something and it didn’t have to do with familiar/formal or not. I’ve learned not to challenge him on any of these grammar rules that he makes up, because he will dig his heels in, and I’ve learned just to ignore him because he won’t have remembered this made up grammar rule in a week anyway.

This really feels like a very tight analogy with what my LLM does to me every day, except that when I challenge the LLM it will profusely apologize and declare itself incorrect even if it had been correct after all. Maybe LLMs are a little bit too humble.

I imagine this is a very natural tendency in humans, and I imagine I do it much more than I’m aware of. So how do humans use self-awareness to reduce the odds of this happening?

I think we mostly get trained in higher education to not trust the first thought that comes into our head, even if it feels self consistent and correct. We eventually learn to say “I don’t know” even if it’s about something that we are very, very good at.
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-29 14:22:20+00:00
>That's a trillion dollar market

not if you have to constantly expend enormous sums to stay ahead of your competition or otherwise you lose your edge. It's not the best coding model because they got some mystical treasure in their basement. It's so rapidly becoming a commodity that at some point Microsoft or Google will just offer just as good a model for free and like search they'll just start milking people with ads.

That's likely one of the reasons for the shifting privacy stances, not just for training but because monetization of the product itself is probably looking pretty dim in the long run.
by viridian | 2025-08-29 14:22:24+00:00
At this point I think the Democratic party would rather cede every office in the country to the opposition rather than tear down their careerist, insider focused superstructure.

If you are losing the chess game to adveraries who started playing the game mere months ago, you need to strip your play down to the bare fundamentals and start anew. What you've been doing isn't working against the softest possible opponents, it's time to pivot.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-29 14:22:27+00:00
Is this the model that is the "Coding" version of Grok-4 promised when Grok-4 had awful coding benchmarks?

I guess if you cannot do well in benchmarks, instead pick an easier to pump up one and run with that - speed. Looking online for benchmarks the first thing that came up was a reddit post from an (obvious) spam account[1] gloating about how amazing it was on a bunch of subs.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/user/Suspicious_Store_137/
by tjr | 2025-08-29 14:22:28+00:00
Unless one's job expectations have been altered to demand LLM-quantity output, how could someone be reliant upon these tools now? What were they doing two years ago (or maybe even six months ago)?

I can understand becoming reliant on a technology -- I expect most programmers today would be pretty lost with punch cards or line editors -- but LLM coding seems too new for true reliance to have formed yet...?
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-29 14:22:35+00:00
Difficult to explain because it's inconsistent

But I am struggling to remember things I did not used to struggle with

Going to an event on a weekend with my wife and completely forgetting that we ran into a friend there. Not just "oh yeah I forgot we saw them", like feeling my wife is lying to me when she tells me we saw them. Texting them to ask and they agree we saw each other

These are people I trust with my life so I believe they would not gaslight me, my own memory has just failed

Many examples like this, just completely blacking out things. Not forgetting everything, but blacking out large pieces of my daily life. Even big things
by Deegy | 2025-08-29 14:23:04+00:00
I guess I'll take the other side of what most are arguing in this thread.

Isn't it a great thing for to us to collectively allow LLM's to train on past conversations? LLM's probably won't get significantly better without this data.

That said I do recognize the risk of only a handful of companies being responsible for something as important as the collective knowledge of civilization.

Is the long term solution self custody? Organizations or individuals may use and train models locally in order to protect and distribute their learnings internally. Of course costs have to come down a ridiculous amount for this to be feasible.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-29 14:23:11+00:00
It's probably a bit like "This call may be recorded for quality purposes." That's a disclaimer that's usually required by the authorities, to let you know that you're being recorded, but it lets them off the hook, if the recording would be inconvenient to them. If it supports their side, they 100% always have it, but if it supports the caller's side, then it seems they didn't actually record that call ...so sorry...

Tesla's fairly notorious for casual treatment of customer car data (which they have a lot of). There was an article, recently, about how in-car video recordings were being passed around the office.

I know that at least one porn actress recorded a scene in a self-driving Tesla. I'll bet that recording made the rounds "for quality purposes."
by Jgoauh | 2025-08-29 14:23:31+00:00
i know ! its so stupid, all they have to do is ask people what they want and give it to them, but they can't piss of billionaires so they're stuck with 'its not our fault' and 'minorities can hang as long as they work' The republicans only ask billionaires what they want, politics are so much easier when your entire party is focused on the interests of like 1000 guys
by Romario77 | 2025-08-29 14:23:35+00:00
Anthropic enterprise share is pretty significant - on order of 30%. I think at this time it's pretty significant.

I am expecting AI companies to start using ads, it's inevitable as they need to make money at some point and $20 a month won't do it.

For ads the number of users is the main thing - the more users you have the bigger the market and more money you could earn. Google desperately needs to be in this space, that's why they are throwing a ton of money on AI.
by boxed | 2025-08-29 14:23:37+00:00
I think you might be confused about the expression "world model". In this context it clearly means that a person has an understanding of reality based on "math->physics->chemistry->biology->psychology" instead of "peer pressure->group identity" or whatever you see in QAnon or cults or whatever.

If a person primarily evaluates the truth content of a statement based on identity or something instead of math/physics/etc then that person has no "world model", and vice versa.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-29 14:24:11+00:00
You're basically using the outlier here to mislead about the typical/median and erroneously implying that they're more linked than they are.

40-50yr ago in the era of 10mph bumpers and whatnot the typical experience was superior because the typical driver is experiencing minor no-injury mishaps. Sliding off the road in the snow at low speed was a tow truck bill and only that, not $2k just to get the car drivable again.

Buuuuuuut, the results for the minority of drivers experiencing injurious crashes was way, way worse back then, as the people who screech about stats are happy to tell you.

What makes a car cheap to repair for the average user getting in the median or average accident and survivable for the guy who gets piss drunk and drives off a cliff are mostly tangential from each other. There's no reason we can't have both and there's no reasonable and non-malicious reason to hide or downplay the regression on this axis. Modern cars would likely perform way better than old cars if shrugging off minor accidents was not a decreased design priority due to stiffer cabins and other changes in construction.

The stuff that makes modern cars get totaled in minor hits is mostly a reflection of styling and fuel economy based choices.
by notahacker | 2025-08-29 14:24:11+00:00
Yeah, a slide like that would have been fine; fundamentally the slide is exactly like an academic paper in that some of the most interesting implications are just banal statements of the numbers in the data and qualifiers. In fact, the slide is much better than the academic paper... it doesn't contain much in the way of irrelevant data and qualifiers.

In practice Tufte and bloggers and commenters are retconning messages engineers not possessing foreknowledge of what was going to happen didn't wish to convey. The slide isn't supposed to say "no reentry" not because engineers don't know how to say no using PowerPoint, but because what the engineers are actually saying by selecting those points for consideration is "damage is theoretically possible but not in our simulations which test data suggests are actually on the conservative side; the test data is only at a very small scale though". If they'd dumbed it down, the slide would have said "it could go wrong but the limited data we've got suggests it won't"
by smjburton | 2025-08-29 14:24:13+00:00
I've been running trixie for a few weeks now and it's been solid, great release so far.

One of the features I'm most excited about is access to Podman 5.4.2, and the ability to use Podman Quadlets. It'll be nice to start transitioning my systemd service units over to the new format for my containers.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-29 14:24:22+00:00
Not clicking on that at work, but, if it's related to the P320, there's no reason that Congress hasn't ordered an investigation into this.

There's a decent chance that the handgun our men and women are issued is a danger. When the M16 had problems early in Vietnam there was an investigation and they found out it was a powder issue in the cartridges. No (good) reason that there's not something similar for this issue here.

And Sig can dig their heels in all they want, but when you've got ranges banning P320s and they're in the bargain bin at the local gun shop, well, the market has spoken. You can't unring that bell. Stop production of the P320, fire the executives, and do what it takes to repair this issue.
by michaelt | 2025-08-29 14:24:27+00:00
Requiring a user to MFA once per day per device is normal for a work account - but that's already a lot compared to services like gmail.

After all, workers are mostly working in an access-controlled office or their private home; and your endpoint protection will be ensuring they're connecting from a company-issued laptop and that they have screen lock on a timer and a strong password.

I'm already validating something-they-know (FDE password) and something-they-know (OS password) and something-they-know (SSO system password) and something-they-have (company laptop). And once a day I'm validating another something-they-have (TOTP code/Yubikey).

Asking people to provide the second something-they-have several times a day seems like security theatre to me.
by rpgbr | 2025-08-29 14:24:30+00:00
I treat WhatsApp as a hostile app[1], which means I deny any access to my stuff even if I get a subpar experience. In places where it's required (as where I live), this is the bare minimum a privacy-minded person can do.

[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/a-less-affectionate-approach-...
by clipclopflop | 2025-08-29 14:24:32+00:00
HW wise, the older units were intel atom based cpu (latest gen is amd I believe?) - the hardware is typical embedded stuff - cpu + eMMC + bt/wifi mcu + cellular daughter card. OS is linux + QT UI stuff. I would expect things have changed for newer HW revisions, but the previous gen did not utilize encryption (dmcrypt) so all data was unprotected at rest.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-29 14:25:53+00:00
Yes, this is extremely similar to my experience

I cannot remember events, conversations, or details about important things. I have partially lost my ability to code, because I get partway through implementing a feature and forget what pieces I've done and which pieces still need to be done

I can still write it, but the quality of my work has plummeted, which is part of why I'm off on leave now