MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sarpro – 5–20× faster Sentinel‑1 GRD → GeoTIFF/JPEG
by danielVi | 2025-08-15 13:15:09+00:00
I’ve shipped a big performance upgrade to Sarpro, an open‑source Rust tool for converting Sentinel‑1 SAR GRD products into GeoTIFF or JPEG. Since my initial post [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44872768), Sarpro now avoids full‑resolution I/O when you only need a smaller output and performs reprojection in‑process without writing giant temporary files.

Highlights: - Target‑size reads and single‑step warp: read/warp directly to the final output size instead of loading full‑res first. This cuts I/O and memory by 5–20× for small outputs. - Reprojection to any CRS: `--target-crs EPSG:xxxx` with in‑process gdalwarp via VRT (no temp GeoTIFF). Resampling: nearest/bilinear/cubic/lanczos. - Faster autoscaling: O(N) histogram‑based percentiles replace O(N log N) sorting. - Batch + GUI: both now honor reprojection/resampling in batch mode. - Performance: on a modern laptop (M4Pro12), scaling a dual‑band ~400–500MP GRD to 2048 px typically completes in ~1–2 s; no‑warp downsamples can be sub‑second. Full native warps remain tens of seconds as expected.

Features: - CLI, GUI, and Rust API - Synthetic RGB from polarization pairs, robust autoscaling, optional padding - TIFF and JPEG outputs with georeferencing/sidecars, metadata emission

I’d love feedback from the RS/EO community: more RGB presets, additional processing modes, tiling for ML, and cloud pipeline integrations.

Links: - GitHub: `https://github.com/bogwi/sarpro` - Previous HN thread: [Show HN post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44872768)
Ask HN: Vibe coding with reusable components to reduce hallucinations?
by zavg | 2025-08-15 13:15:09+00:00
Idea: Instead of pure “vibe coding” (just letting ideas flow into code), what if we first vibe code a bunch of reusable components with well-defined, predictable APIs between them? Then we ask AI to vibe code using only these components.

The hope: by constraining the building blocks, we reduce unpredictable hallucinations that often happen when vibe coding an entire monolithic codebase from scratch.

Has anyone tried this? Does it work in practice?
by NoGravitas | 2025-08-15 13:15:14+00:00
All of the 90s Star Trek series were filmed on 35mm, but all of the post-production work (editing, SFX, etc) were done on tape, at 480p. There's no 35mm copy of the final result to scan and color-grade for a "normal" HD remaster. For the TNG remaster, what they actually did was re-do all of the post-production from the original 35mm negatives. VFX were re-composed, some were re-done in CG. They finished the TNG remaster just as streaming services were ramping up and Blu-Ray disk sales declining, and sales were disappointing given the amount of work that had to go into them.

Paramount will never remaster DS9 or VOY because they don't expect to make the money back, because neither was as popular as TNG. And it's worse for DS9 and VOY because they extensively used CGI effects for things like ship battles, which were originally rendered at 480p. If the original assets could be found, they could be re-rendered, but in many cases, they would have to be fully re-created.

Fans have created AI upscales which are generally better than watching the horrible 480p releases that were on Netflix and are now on Paramount+. But they are also sometimes uncannily smooth and unpleasant.
We tested three AI coding assistants on a repo
by santoshvp | 2025-08-15 13:15:33+00:00
Not a demo. Not a hello-world. A full-scale code war.

We wanted to see which AI coding assistant could handle real-world complexity—a massive repo, multi-service architecture, legacy code, flaky APIs, and every edge case we could find.

The Setup: - 1.2M-line monorepo - Six microservices in different languages - 40+ dependencies - A database schema that would make a junior dev cry - An API spec that changed mid-task (on purpose)

The Tools & Cost: - Cursor — strong autocomplete, context limits ~250K tokens, costs ~$600/year - Windsurf — fast edits, context up to ~400K tokens, costs ~$550/year - Dropstone — unlimited token context, remembers every file, every change, costs just $12

Performance: - Cursor: lost track after 250K tokens, broke unrelated modules - Windsurf: struggled with multi-file reasoning past 400K tokens - Dropstone: handled the entire repo without forgetting anything, refactored across services, fixed old bugs, wrote unit tests referencing files from days ago

Key Takeaway: - Cursor = great for small bursts - Windsurf = rapid prototyper, context-constrained - Dropstone = AI brain that never forgets at a fraction of the cost

Memory and context matter. When it runs out, even good AI struggles—but for $12, Dropstone can handle huge, messy projects without token limits.

Curious to hear: Has anyone else tested AI coding assistants on large projects? How did cost and context limits affect your workflow?
by Terretta | 2025-08-15 13:15:47+00:00
> On iOS there is no choice.

Two things people think can't be done, but are:

https://setapp.com/

https://www.xbox.com/en-us/play

Save the Xbox one to home screen for full screen experience, turning your iPhone or even iPad 13" into a Logitech gCloud if you add https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D7CHHB42
by jemmyw | 2025-08-15 13:15:54+00:00
I wish he was still alive too, but I think the books had come to an end, at least the mainline ones. The problem was he started taking it in a very Victorian direction and I felt like it lost the dark grittiness the earlier books had. He was at his best when riffing off others, Shakespeare and Tolkien and the other influences that were, again, a bigger part of the earlier books.

I think it was Going Postal or Monstrous Regiment where I thought to myself I don't look forward to these the same anymore. Before then I would read a new Discworld in one sitting. However, when I look back it was the Truth (book 25) where I felt the direction went off for me, even though I continued to enjoy them. I mean, 25 incredibly funny books is an amazing and wonderful thing anyway (I think Thief of Time 26 was very good).
by canyon289 | 2025-08-15 13:16:49+00:00
We constantly are evaluating architectures trying to assess what will work well in the open ecosystem. It's quite a vibrant space and glad you have one option that works. For this model in particular we evaluated a couple of options before choosing a dense architecture of its simplicity and finetunability.

For the other Gemma models, some the smaller sizes should work on your laptop when quantized. Does Gemma 1b and 4b not work on a quantized? It should fit the memory constraints. I use Ollama on low powered devices with 8gb and less of ram and the models load.

For TTS a colleague at HuggingFace made this bedtime story generator running entirely in browser.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/bedtime-story-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds95v-Aiu5E&t https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/bedtime-story-...

Be forewarned though this is not a good coding model out of the box. It likely could be trained to be an autocompletion llm, but with 32k context window and smaller sides its not going to be refactoring entire codebases like Jules/Gemini and other larger models can.
by the_gastropod | 2025-08-15 13:16:59+00:00
I assure you, if $10M doesn’t seem like it’s clearly enough for you, $100M won’t either. That worry doesn’t go away.

$10M generates a passive $400k per year (trinity study 4% rule yada yada). If you can’t manage on $400k/year, you might be what we call extremely out of touch.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-15 13:17:22+00:00
> Wealth inequality continues to increase. These measures are insufficient.

The point of tax and spend/redistribute is to provide services and goods, not eliminate inequality. Inequality in itself is a moot point.

> Slightly lower prices cannot house the growing homeless population for example - slightly lower prices can never house people without money.

Homelessness scales directly with housing affordability. The data makes this clear. Not with drug-use rates or inequality. A large portion of the homeless population is transient and temporary, 80%+. Lower prices will lower the homeless population, full stop.

For the chronically homeless you can weave in other interventions and try to offer geared-to-income or free spots (this is already a thing), but you can't force them to do anything. You can't force them to take medication, you can't force them to show up to appointments. If your big solution is to introduce involuntary confinement, that has nothing to do with housing, but conversely I don't think assigning a bedroom apt in itself addresses the core problems that ail them. Covered at length here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-inc....

> The best effect that YIMBY can have on housing is to put a slight downward pressure on prices.

Real-world examples suggest it's anything but "slight". See: housing affordability disparity between red and blue cities just for example.

The last estimate for the total homeless population in Japan in 2024 was just 2820 people, in the country. That's 0.2 per 10k, the best rate in the world, in a country that is anything but equal.

If your metric for an effective housing policy is decimating the rate of homelessness, clearly sound zoning and regulation is the first place to look. This is NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE with having special interventions reserved for the chronically homeless who will never work, but these represent a fraction of the homeless.
by robinhouston | 2025-08-15 13:17:42+00:00
It’s similar in the sense that it’s a pseudocylindrical projection. Unlike Robinson it opts for a strict equal-area property at the expense of less accurate direction and distance. In that respect it’s more similar to Eckert IV. Another interesting pseudocylindrical projection is Winkel Tripel, which explicitly tries to balance three types of distortion.

I’m not objecting to the Equal Earth projection, which is a perfectly respectable contribution to the pseudocylindrical repertoire, but to the language this site is using to promote it.
by extraisland | 2025-08-15 13:17:59+00:00
> One of them is closed and had a yearly of 5k, not exactly screaming legitimacy.

I've closed businesses after they weren't successful. Doesn't mean it was illegitimate? No. It means they didn't make money.

Even if that one wasn't legit there are plenty of others that one can find easily e.g.

https://crowdsnow.com/

https://crowdsondemand.com/

It isn't very nice when people dismiss things like this when they can be found on duckduckgo.

Normally these businesses are used for media campaigns.

But there is nothing stopping them from being used by political groups, parties etc.

> But the other one… yeah they seem real. So my apologies indeed

Thank you.
by mystraline | 2025-08-15 13:18:03+00:00
> Is open hardware even possible at some point?

It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.

We already have open source:

5DoF 3d printers with slicers

Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters

Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)

Electrochemical synthesis lab

Open source flow batteries

Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)

I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.

Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.

The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.

I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.

As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
by kqr | 2025-08-15 13:18:10+00:00
> It’s not in the 20k unless your population is extremely high

Common misconception. Population size has almost nothing to do with the necessary sample size. (It does enter into the finite population correction factor, but that's only really relevant if you have a small population, not a large one.)

...actually, come to think of it, you meant to write "unless your population variance is extremely high", right?
by WillAdams | 2025-08-15 13:18:25+00:00
As a person who chose to buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon rather than upgrade his Ordbot Quantum w/ a heated bed and enclosure and to then try to re-design it to use a CoreXY motion system, I would agree that is exactly the path which we are on --- the new printer came in at a lower price than just the initial parts order for heated bed and enclosure, let alone a different motion system. All of the printers which I wanted (Positron, Prusa Core One) or was considering (Bambu Labs P1S) were over twice or almost twice the price of the ECC.

That Elegoo seems to be supporting open standards: https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/elegoo-launches-aut... was one thing which allowed me to justify placing that order.
Ask HN: What methods do you follow to improve your vocabulary?
by beratbozkurt0 | 2025-08-15 13:18:51+00:00
I've recently been working on an app that will make memorizing vocabulary easier. But before I share it, I wanted to hear your tips.

I learn faster by creating flashcards. By spending 10 minutes a day, I learned over 500 words in about 2-3 weeks.
by eoskx | 2025-08-15 13:19:28+00:00
Here are some follow-ups to the article cited. Pretty wild what Sig's response has been:

https://practicalshootinginsights.com/the-document-sig-sauer...

https://practicalshootinginsights.com/sig-sauer-vp-consumer-...

https://practicalshootinginsights.com/new-unsealed-sig-sauer...

https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-15 13:19:32+00:00
It is about keeping score with the other billionaires. Bigger market cap and bigger yacht = more status. Personally, I think you have to be some sort of sociopath to prioritise your billionaire ranking over all the good you could do by giving some of that money to good causes. But I guess being a sociopath is probably helpful if you want to be a billionaire.
by dcre | 2025-08-15 13:19:34+00:00
It is sort of amazing that it works, and no one knows why, but empirically speaking it is undeniable that it does work. The IMO result was achieved without any tool calls to a formal proof system. I agree that is a much more plausible-sounding approach.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/google-deepmind-earns-gol...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-15 13:19:49+00:00
China, being a planned economy at heart, has a "VC" system that is essentially just the government deciding what needs to be developed, and then Chinese banks lending without any practical strings to those developers.

Profit and loss, ROI, business plan, aren't really factored in. China wants to develop AI? You have some experience and want to start an AI business? Great! Here is a few million go make AI.

This is the system that led to those infamous ghost cities and billion dollar high speed trains to nowhere. China puts the carts before the horse, and hopes at at least a few of them get to the destination. They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.

It also means that if you are competing against one of these chosen industries, you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money, whereas you need to make interest payments.
by jononor | 2025-08-15 13:19:51+00:00
Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money. But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.
by hopelite | 2025-08-15 13:19:57+00:00
Yes, and it was effectively facilitated by the British government through its actions and policies.

The whole highest order issue in the whole west is that there is not only effectively zero responsibility, zero accountability, but also zero consequences.

The easiest to understand example of this may be how corporations can commit all manner of what are effectively crimes (i.e., it is what you would be charged with) and they not only do not have any effective consequences, the consequences usually instill the lesson that it is extremely profitable to commit the crimes and just pay the meaningless fine as a cost of business.

In most cases corporations even just account for it as an expense and add it to the cost and price they charge. So, for example, all the EU fines they so concisely levied over the last years against American tech companies like Microsoft and Google; they had been charging the various European governments and companies for a reserve to pay such expected fines.

It always baffles me that people do not understand the basic premise that organizations of people are not their own entities, especially when you don’t punish the individuals that make them up in the same way that individuals that are not in corporations are. Is quite literally a kind of new stratified system. Joe if ACME Corp can commit financial crimes and get away with it, but you can’t. He can even commit homicide through negligence with impunity, while you are thrown in jail for decades.

It really should be the other way around, if a corporation commits crimes, if you did or should have known about the crimes, you are collectively also held criminally liable just like a getaway driver of a bank robbery is.

Somehow we have not evolved past the point that the most powerful and responsible are the least accountable and have the least consequences for their actions.
Do you think that the next big thing in AI is to respond in sub 100ms time?
by defyonce | 2025-08-15 13:19:59+00:00
I've been coding in Claude Code recently, and having to wait for it to compute kills all focus and attention. I have to switch constantly, and it makes me tired pretty soon.

I think, if that thing could respond instantly, like my Emacs for its commands, then it would be a supercharged mega boost for productivity.

If it could work with the same speed as a shell, then it would be really awesome!

What do you think?
by lazide | 2025-08-15 13:20:28+00:00
Few people would be surprised if a car drove forward when on, in gear, and the gas pedal is depressed.

When a specific make/model has a nasty habit of driving through the sides of garages when off and no one is touching them, and eventually runs someone over and kills them? People get concerned.

Especially when the manufacturer knew this could (and was!) happening and insisted on gaslighting everyone about it for years.

That cars can be used to run people over (and sometimes are even designed to do so effectively!) doesn’t change that. Especially since most miles driven never run anyone over at all.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-15 13:21:13+00:00
You can tell the AI in your prompt to write a specific sort of style. I'm originally from Detroit; did you know Detroit had a unique dialect named Inland Northern American English

Man, you talkin like you know some stuff right there. For real, if we had somethin that show who write like a real person instead who sound all robot. It’d point folks in the right way, even the ones writin all stiffed. Maybe make ‘em step they game up and sound like they got a pulse.
by altairprime | 2025-08-15 13:22:04+00:00
Oh, sure, tax the rich! Specifically, I would start with break up the untaxable trusts and corporate holdings exemptions, and cancel the real estate “unrented properties” tax rebate so that they’re forced to lease at market rates or otherwise sell dormant property holdings. But that’s not going to have any effect on inflation, so I’m not going to discuss that further it in this inflation-focused post.

If you tax corporations directly, they’ll just raise prices to pass the tax on to workers — but if you don’t tax corporate profits properly, they’ll just raise prices to consume all worker income and suffocate the dual competitors of entrepreneurs and of quality of life gains by households — so you have to tax corporations in a way that charges them extra revenue tax when their profits go up faster than their wages, neutralized only by paying workers more and maintain or lower prices. That’s what this proposes: either they help the Fed meet inflation targets by raising wages rather than prices, or they see their profits reduced in a way that can’t be charged to workers — as doing so would raise prices and thus inflation, which would further amplify their tax against their profits, resulting in a death spiral for their corporation between shrinking demand and growing overhead. (And, in times of deflation, the opposite: they are compelled by threat of reduces profits to raise prices rather than wages, just as they do today exclusively, until inflation stabilizes at the Fed target of whatever percent.)

This all works because, in the U.S., the uncontrolled component of inflation is the growth in profits minus the growth in wages. You can’t specify a wage floor or companies will just lay people off or raise prices, and you can’t impose a simple tax on corporate profits or companies will just lay people off or raise prices. The only way to prevent that is to tax (growth in profits – growth in wages – inflation target), which in an excess-inflation climate such as today — combined with the classic U.S. revenue-scaled tax rate schedules — would cost corporations who don’t invest excessive profit growth back into their workforce more than the simple cost of the wage increases would have.

(The R&D exemption that Amazon abuses would, as previously discussed, need to be restricted to less than 100% of research costs; use the same profit tiering schedules as above so that R&D for a billion-dollar gross-profit before-deductions company is capped at one half of the annual inflation rate — once you’re making that much, you don’t need the exemption to grow.)

(Offshore labor would need to be estimated at the federal minimum wage rate adjusted for currency strength/weakness to the country hosting that labor, unless explicitly documented otherwise through worker counts and wages, which would significantly worsen the value of offshoring: offshoring-to-cheap-labor companies would be at a significant disadvantage for growth taxation versus those that simply paid the costs of domestic investment, training, and wages.)
by Pomelolo | 2025-08-15 13:22:06+00:00
I think there's 2 kinds of psychodelic oneshot. Woz & Jobs. Woz became content with all he had and Jobs turned into a psycopath. Both geniuses, both gave us a lot. I'd rather have someone like Woz be a trillionare and e/alt using his wealth for good than a money hungry monster.
by znpy | 2025-08-15 13:22:07+00:00
I’ll relay what i’ve been told years ago when moving similar arguments myself:

“If I don’t take that job (and that fat paycheque) then someone else will. Whatever Meta is set to accomplish, irrespective of whether it’s actually evil or not, will most likely be achieved. So might as well take the job and the money. As a bonus, you get to work on interesting stuff rather than the usual CRUD webapp.”

And the sad truth is, they were right.

Not only that, marketing yourself as an ex-FAANG afterwards (whether the faang is meta or whatever) will likely yield better positions or salary anyway. And the experience you get working on larger scale systems (along with much higher quality standards) improves you a lot as an engineer.

So long story short, it’s mostly upsides.