MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rpdillon | 2025-08-26 02:37:36+00:00
Can vouch. Had an .mkv that browsers wouldn't play, and asked AI to give me a command line that maximized compatibility so I could stream it from CopyParty without folks on my network having to mount it and stream to VLC, rather than just play in the browser.

This is one of those cases where I couldn't really verify that what it suggested was correct:

ffmpeg -i file.mkv -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" -c:a aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart output.mp4

I could look up all those flags, but I haven't. But the command did seem to work! I'm sure the HN crowd can critique. =)

And so I'm curious about the concept you're getting at: command line tools that offer natural language interfaces. Maybe the command line can become more broadly accessible, especially if designed with that that use case in mind.
by mountainriver | 2025-08-26 02:38:56+00:00
Sorry too! Rereading my comment it sounds a bit snarky.

I agree that a backer would definitely help here, one of the reasons for posting this is to see if we can drum up more interest there.

I agree in the guardrails as well, we are thinking checkpoints with clear deliverables to unlock more cash could help. It’s really interesting that the existing crowdfunding platforms don’t enforce a whole lot of this and still work. It seems off to me but I can’t argue much with the outcome, it could be that the smarter crowd that engages here would care more though.
by joules77 | 2025-08-26 02:39:17+00:00
There was no plea in my comment. Was just pointing out their blind spots which they will discover soon enough. But the tech folk here, who are trained to think dashboards, metrics, scale and efficiency are the answer to handling complexity/unpredictability can get easily carried away by the Yarvin's of the world, because you won't hear much talk about the blind spots here. We already saw how carried away they were with Elon/DOGE. Can't avoid reality.
by bsimpson | 2025-08-26 02:40:00+00:00
My dad went to school near Cupertino and got a student prerelease of the first Mac in '84. I've been in this ecosystem as long as I've been alive.

As many others have said elsewhere in these comments, Apple has been stagnating in quality for a long time. Even the Jobs-era iPhones were buggier than anyone inside the Reality Distortion Field (and most of the tech press at the time) would admit. I'd have to really squint to think of anything good that came from bringing iPhone tech to the Mac.

All that said, the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium. There were year-on-year improvements in the early years of X, but I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."

Unfortunately, the "by Apple" part of that sentence is load-bearing. So far as I can tell, desktop Linux is still largely the work of hobbyists on GitHub. I don't expect there to be a unified design philosophy, and I do expect it to need constant tweaking to get each package to work how I'd like and to keep them working with one another.

Even if Apple's desktops have been stagnating for at least as long as they've been naming them after landmarks, I don't know of an alternative that's worth the effort of switching.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-26 02:40:29+00:00
Validating JSON with third party runtime libraries like zod is only necessary because JSON doesn't support schemas though. There's nothing wrong with those libraries, they solve a real problem but the problem is in JSON itself.

The whole point of REST was to allow visitors to not only see the response to a request but to also be able to understand both the semantics and the functionality of it.

Think HTML - it would be comparatively useless if HTML could only contain structured data with meaning, semantics, or schemas. Anchor tags, buttons, and forms are semantic and tell the user not only what a piece of text is but how they can interact with it.

With JSON you have to know the shape of requests supported, the shape of data returned, and how to use that data to make other requests.
by travisgriggs | 2025-08-26 02:42:02+00:00
> They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist.

Maybe. Some developers get really passionate about their work and try hard. The results can often fail on execution, but often show signs of overthinking things, and wanting to work.

I’ve been working with a design studio on a data science domain that isn’t your every day (ag tech analytics) and I find the results really disappointing. They can make things conventionally nice. It’s better than a generative solution, yet it’s still very “conventional” and “safe”. Every time we get to a chance to do some innovative infographic, they give it a half hearted effort and then say “let’s just use words” and get all typography geeky.

Point being, my experience is that quality iconographics are not the automatic domain of the gatekeepy designer profression (to be fair, I have worked with some design people that just have a knack).
by loog5566 | 2025-08-26 02:43:53+00:00
Connectivity is where the DRIVE AGX Thor Developer Kit truly shines. The platform includes:

16 GMSL 2 ports

2 GMSL 3 connections

3 100/1000/10G-T1 (with four-port and six-port H-MTD)

DisplayPort output supporting 4K at 60Hz

6 GMSL3 (MATE-AX x4)
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-26 02:44:15+00:00
Cheers.

I'd say Vista introduced or changed—for the better—a ton of Windows paradigms, most of which still endure. User account control, dwm.exe and the WDDM, improved user profiles, the ribbon UI, and more. Vista had the most pervasive changes to Windows in the past two decades, from UI and UX to fundamental OS primitives, APIs, and syscalls.

Disdain levelled at Vista is unfair—it was a heavyweight OS that needed better hardware than was really commonplace at the time.

As for money now being the end game... I have no words. The stupid Weather app (sorry, no, WebView2 wrapper) on Windows 10 and 11 is exasperating.
by scythe | 2025-08-26 02:44:53+00:00
Sorry, that comparison to heat pumps wasn't meant to imply that heat pumps would be used in this system. Rather, the focus was on the pipes that transfer heat from the system to the ground and back. That component remains basically the same — the heat pump components of a GSHP are above ground. My thought was that experience installing GSHP would allow you to bracket out the cost of the interred heat exchanger and make a comparison to the title proposal.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-26 02:45:18+00:00
Absolutely nothing. Technically, it’s strictly worse. People even added other namespaces to patch up some of its deficiencies, e.g. <content:encoded>.

I think the reason that RSS is used can be summed up as: Apple is lousy at developer relations.

They didn’t invent podcasting (name or technology), but they were the first major player to do stuff with it. Although consensus was already strong that RSS was technically terrible and Atom had existed for over a year (though it was not finalised) and was even fairly popular, Google especially having embraced it⸻ Apple chose the old-and-inferior RSS as their foundation. And then stuck their heads in the sand and didn’t talk to anyone, ever. Because that’s Apple’s style: throw stuff out there, let people do what they want with it, don’t attempt to be a community leader.

So what did everyone else do? Feeds had to be RSS, of course, to appease Apple. And then other apps implemented RSS, just RSS, like Apple had done, because what’s even the point of using Atom if it won’t work on the biggest platform? General-purpose feed readers didn’t have much specialised functionality, and had a few major players and a long tail of other clients; it was a much more well-distributed field, all things considered. But podcasting was, as I understand it, much more only one player for a while, then only up to two or three; and it depended on more specialised functionality. So it was never as democratic as general web feeds.

Over time podcast feeds ended up a horrible mess of repeating the same logical field 3–6 times in differently-named elements for different platforms, as they all added their own namespaces and mostly-identical-but-sometimes-slightly-different data fields¹. Because people were using it as an actual data format with domain-specific fields, they were more likely to just use an XML parser and talk just RSS, rather than a feed library which would be RSS-/Atom-neutral.

I believe that at some point Apple did implement Atom (not sure when), but it was too late, too much other stuff didn’t support it and so no one used it and so they ripped it out again a couple of years ago, and podcasting is set in stone using the inferior RSS.

I should write this up further at some point: the tragedy of podcast feeds.

—⁂—

¹ This stupid pattern can be seen on the web too. <meta name=description>, <meta property=og:description>, <meta name=twitter:description>, something in a JSON+LD block…
by pabs3 | 2025-08-26 02:45:22+00:00
There are alternatives, using them involves sacrifices though, and there the modem baseband isn't replaceable yet. Take a look at GrapheneOS, F-Droid, Replicant, Purism Librem, PinePhone, PostmarketOS, PureOS, Mobian etc.

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
by zmmmmm | 2025-08-26 02:45:32+00:00
> developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users

You have here Google making a statement it can't actually fulfill and one that it knows it can't fulfill. So Google is willfully lying here.

The minute Google has a technical capability to control what applications run on Android it's out of their hands. It is in the hands of courts, governments, dictators and authoritarians. That's just the nature of the world - Google has to obey the law and Google doesn't make the laws.

I guess it sounds hysterical, but in that sense, this is an absolutely massive loss of freedom for the entire planet as communication power that rested with individual choice is now transferred wholesale back to governments by this decision.
Built a small site to track AI jobs in Australia, worth continuing?
by neptune-jam | 2025-08-26 02:45:48+00:00
I’ve been noticing that most AI/ML jobs in Australia are scattered across global job boards.

Makes it tough to get a clear picture of what’s actually happening here, both for job seekers and for companies hiring.

So I put together a simple landing page for “AI Jobs Australia” just to see if there was any interest.

https://aijobsaustralia.com.au/

Posted it on Reddit and, to my surprise, a few people signed up on the waitlist.

The idea isn’t just to list jobs but also to show trends, e.g. which industries are hiring, what skills are in demand, etc.

Curious what people here think. If you live in Aus, would this be helpful?
by pjc50 | 2025-08-26 02:46:30+00:00
Accidental non-deterministic compilers are fairly easy if you use sort algorithms and containers that aren't "stable". You then can get situations where OS page allocation and things like different filenames give different output. This is why "deterministic build" wasn't just the default.

Actual randomness is used in FPGA and ASIC compilers which use simulated annealing for layout. Sometimes the tools let you set the seed.
by elphinstone | 2025-08-26 02:47:15+00:00
Heroin works, do you praise the dealers as "disruptors" and blame the victims? Not a far-fetched example, the opiod epidemic was basically that.

Individuals have few resources to protect themselves from massive corporations armed with sophisticated technology, predatory tactics, and a compliant and captured state.

This kind of victim blaming is sociopathic.
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-26 02:47:19+00:00
I don't think this approach will work for most people. Assuming the Bluesky firehose is 50GB/day, that's a massive amount of data to have to download just to filter for the handful of events a person might actually be interested in. My phone barely goes through a couple GB per month!

But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.
Tell HN: Out the door price for Unitree R1 ($5900) Robot to USA
by fcpguru | 2025-08-26 02:48:07+00:00
Got this email directly from unitree:

--- For the R1

For the product details you can find in this link: https://www.unitree.com/R1

The R1 basic we just released is 5900USD and the delivery will begin before end of the year.

If you need to program the robot, you can choose the R1 EDU, price is 12500USD for the standard version, version with higher computing power price is 14750USD and version with 3 finger dex hand with tactile sensor price is 26050USD, the delivery starts end of this year.

Freight is 1000USD, duty on the buyer side. ---

Going with the $5,900 USD one but customs adds the shipping so $6,900. I'm in Los Angeles, assuming direct to LAX air I could skip HMF payment (only charged on ocean shipments). HTS Code is 8479.50.00.00: Industrial robots

Base Duty 2.5% and Section 301 Tariff 25%

Total Landed Cost (to LA port):

Product + Shipping: $6,900

Duties & Tariffs: ≈ $1,932

Customs Broker: ≈ $150

Grand Total: ≈ $8,982
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-26 02:48:08+00:00
I'm familiar with all those nations. (In fact the ECOWAS nations are the ones I'm most familiar with.)

Every one of them, I've heard people calling black people "black".

I've also been all over Western Europe, and it's the same story. I've definitely heard the people in Paris, München, wherever call black people "black".

I thought the answer would be someplace I haven't been. Like maybe parts of Asia outside of Japan and China?

Maybe Eastern European nations use a different term?

Or maybe other parts of Africa? (SADC nations maybe?)

But they definitely call black people "black" in the Gambia and Nigeria.
by throw10920 | 2025-08-26 02:48:17+00:00
On one hand, the potential privacy invasions enabled by this technology (e.g. Xfinity (of course Comcast) a few months ago[1]) are pretty scary.

On the other hand, the technology seems potentially extremely useful. I've had an interest in pose estimation for many years, but doing it with normal cameras seems tricky to do reliably because of the possibility for visual occlusion (both from the body itself and from other objects). I'm curious to see if I can use this for something like tracking my posture while I use my computer so I can avoid back pain later in life.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726
by tzs | 2025-08-26 02:48:25+00:00
A similar hypothetical was in the classic book "Peopleware" from 1987, if I recall correctly, imaging the reaction if the phone was a new invention and the phone company salesman wanted your company to put a phone on every engineer's desk which would allow anyone else in the world with a phone to at any time interrupt your engineers with no warning.

They had an anecdote about one company they consulted at which illustrated how normalized interrupting engineers had become. The engineers were putting their phones on "do not disturb" (DND) to stop all the interruptions so they could get their work done, and management sent around a memo saying that the engineers needed to stop putting their phones on DND because that caused the calls to forward to the secretary, and all the calls were making it hard for the secretary to get any work done.
by defrost | 2025-08-26 02:49:13+00:00
> Everybody remembers when the first black stuff came to their country. The first returned immigrant who changed your popular culture by imitating things that black people were doing in the US, whether it was rock and roll, or just how to dance.

What memories would Manu DiBango, Bongo Kanda, Touré Kunda, Salif Keita, Fela Kuti, et al have of "black stuff" do you suppose?

Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu shouts out to the works of Angélique Kidjo, not Chuck Berry.
by HocusLocus | 2025-08-26 02:50:17+00:00
My primary device is a 2010 Comtech (good luck finding one). It's just a voltage multiplier off of 110VAC( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage_multiplier ). I bought 8 $5/ea Chinese 'neg ion modules' and tied then to the back of the fan... they are parts to build into a much weaker device for cars. They will last longer (because they're resin sealed) and safer (12VDC supply) but by comparative output measurement I will need an array of 36 to match the output of the 2010 device. At $5 ea, this is doable. There are single power supply units more capable but I like the idea of 36 separate waterproof replaceable 12VDC things.
by theyianster | 2025-08-26 02:50:38+00:00
I think your site is interesting from a technical perspective, but dangerous from a human perspective.

To be more explicit, I feel like the framing isn’t great for humanity. It turns into “I proclaim X, so let me find a source” instead of “I wonder about X, let me look for authoritative information.”

The site spits out one or two links (in my case always just one), and then it’s on the user to click through and parse the paper. That feels incomplete. A Perplexity-style interface would be more useful, where an LLM reads the abstract (at minimum) and explains the nuance.

Take one example on the homepage: “Meat reduces cancer risk.” The site points to a study. I read it. The study absolutely does not prove that meat reduces cancer risk. What it actually shows is a small, observational, and potentially confounded association between higher animal protein intake and slightly lower cancer mortality. The authors explicitly state it isn’t conclusive.

But in conversation, if someone says “meat reduces cancer risk,” I disagree, and they whip out this site—it suddenly looks like “science proves it.” Except it doesn’t. And let’s be honest: neither of us is going to sit down and read an eight-page study in the middle of a chat. I only did because (a) I find it interesting, and (b) I’m stuck on a plane with Viasat wifi speeds blocking real work.

Without diligence, the tool risks turning weak claims into “settled fact.” Further, as science and the scientific method are under continued assault in the free world, tools that oversimplify or misrepresent evidence risk deepening mistrust and reinforcing narratives that science is just a weapon to win arguments rather than a process to seek truth.
by strange_quark | 2025-08-26 02:50:58+00:00
The second someone has to deal with returning an item that an LLM hallucinated they needed is the second they cancel this service. The hassle of returning something vastly outweighs any perceived convenience of not having to buy toilet paper or whatever the next time you're at the grocery store. Hell, you can buy toilet paper in 10 seconds on your phone while sitting on the toilet from Amazon, and that's been possible for probably 15 years. What problem is this actually solving?
by m463 | 2025-08-26 02:51:33+00:00
from the techcrunch article:

> According to its own survey, Google says that more than 50 times more malware came through internet-sideloaded sources compared with Google Play, where it has required developer verification since 2023.

50:1 is not preventing. It is just "well, we are better than nothing"

I'm pretty sure there can be other curated stores that can serve the customer¹

[1] customer: owner of phone, not advertisers, data merchants, etc
by throw10920 | 2025-08-26 02:51:51+00:00
This is really bad. I think that most people on HN will agree with that.

The problem is that most normal people (HN is not normal - mostly for the better) don't even understand what sideloading is - let alone actually care.

How can we fix this?

(aside from making people care - apathy enables so many political problems in the current age, but it's such a huge problem that this definitely isn't going to be the impetus to fix it)
by DrNosferatu | 2025-08-26 02:52:16+00:00
But synthesizing FFmpeg commands is not the total gain from “AI expenditure”, is it?

There are infinite similar use cases.

I guess the killer app (for AI coding) will be a framework to successfully structure projects in appropriately sized complexity morsels LLMs can efficiently chew through.

- Has Amazon’s Kiro truly managed this?

- What other efforts are there in this direction?
by dijit | 2025-08-26 02:52:16+00:00
I don't think it's fair to characterise Jobs-era iPhones as buggy; they were significantly less buggy than Android, Meego and Symbian.

I think only BlackBerry OS was more polished, but it had significantly fewer things that people actually wanted.

There were bugs, sure, but I was working at Nokia at the time and what was cooking us was not "the luxury brand experience" (because, that comes later): it was that Apple had gotten the software of a mini-computer right, and they executed on it really well.

Android distributors tended to throw much more powerful hardware at the problem to achieve similar results to the consistency of experience.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-26 02:53:28+00:00
Hmm maybe I am a sociopath then. One thing though is that I do respect other people a lot. I just won't bend my identity to fit in. If we don't gel I don't fight them but I'll just leave. But yeah if that makes me a sociopath that's fine, I am what I am :3 I'm not young by the way.

I would mind being excluded, like I said I do have communities, I just find them to fit me not change me to fit them. Most communities I'm in are also super open and accepting of that anyway.

In a small town this would be difficult obviously, and things like poly and lgbt are more hated there.

> Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too.

My parents were religious when I was young. They had me baptised. But by the time more stuff had to happen (communion I think?) I had already decided I hated religion and wanted nothing to do with it. My parents were ok with that. My grandparents were pretty pissed because they were really catholic but I always hated that side of the family anyway.
by nxobject | 2025-08-26 02:53:32+00:00
If you're talking about C(p, s): consider how lines of latitude create a sequence of circles on Earth: the curve C(p, s) is the "circle of latitude" given by fixing p on S^2 as your North Pole, and 's' as (up to rescaling) the "latitude" relative to the North Pole. More specifically, when 's' = 0, C(p, s) is the Equator relative to the North Pole, and when 's' approaches 1, imagine these circles of latitude getting closer and closer to the North Pole.
by bryanhogan | 2025-08-26 02:55:02+00:00
The first link included has nothing to do with using Obsidian to publish a site? This whole comment feels like an automated ad.

According to the Obsidian roadmap real-time collaboration will be added soon as a core feature.

For anyone interested in making their Obsidian vault into a site there are multiple options:

1. Using the official Obsidian Publish.

2. Using Quartz (or Obsidian Digital Garden)

3. Astro (custom coded, or any other static site generator, e.g. Jekyll or Hugo.

4. Astro Starlight (or any other pre-built documentation tool that can use markdown or mdx)
by defrost | 2025-08-26 02:56:55+00:00
I've also worked in a good many of the non G20 countries across the planet (geophysical field work) and while, yes, of course skin colour is referred to everywhere it's noticeably less frequent in many countries - I took the stance that the GP was commenting on a relative frequency as compared to (say) the US.

In my experience, which may differ to yours, it was as common in Benin to refer to someone as black as it was in Zurich to call another white.