MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How Fit3d Works?
by johngoodworks | 2025-08-05 21:52:42+00:00
So, I want to make my own version of fit3d , the 3d body scanning app. Partly because it too expensive for me and partly to match my desired use. I thought opensource software like meshroom could be used to get a 3d point cloud, but the best use case I could find for scanning yourself alone was: standing still on a turntable that gets rotated 360° (not practical). Did fit3d have to build everything from ground up, a custom built photogrammetry tool, by building upon, for example https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/baug/igp/photogrammetry-remote-sensing-dam/documents/pdf/math-of-photogrammetry.pdf ?
by wahern | 2025-08-05 21:52:51+00:00
> they see themselves as the legitimate government of China

No, they don't. But formally renouncing that position[1] makes them officially secessionist in the eyes of Chinese conservatives, adding pressure to invade. The One China fiction matters, though how much it matters is definitely up for debate. But it's a local minima, and rolling the dice comes with significant risk.

[1] At the state level. AFAIU, it's been renounced by several of the major parties in Taiwan, and when in power they've made movements at low levels of government that arguably contravene the policy. But it still remains the official position and its still enshrined in the Taiwanese constitution. And, yes, the US adds pressure to maintain the status quo as it would (might?[2]) be on the hook for the defense of Taiwan. But the majority of the population isn't in favor of formally renouncing it, either; the potential negative consequences are existential, and the material benefit is slim to none.

[2] During Trump's first term it was claimed he privately admitted that if China invaded Taiwan he wouldn't intervene.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-05 21:53:01+00:00
The problems that need solving are not problems you can develop your way out of, unfortunately. Just about every single little restaurant, shop, museum, etc wants to populate their information into google maps and keep it current. Kagi doesn't have that. They need to somehow get all the same data that is in google maps and put it into Kagi maps. It's impossible.
by msabalau | 2025-08-05 21:53:11+00:00
The Bush administration was looking to "win" in the Afghanistan by doing nation building, which was never going to work, and certainly wasn't going to be accomplished by military means. Obama and Trump both chose to kick the can the road, to not pay the political cost for "losing", Biden ended the conflict, and paid the political price.

But if the US had a different objectives, every human settlement in Afghanistan could have have been radioactive ash by September 12, 2001. Or, more realistically, the US could have gone in, killed all (for some value of all) the local elites as a warning to leaders elsewhere about the costs of harboring terrorists, and then immediately left the country in the same sort of chaos that they eventually did a couple of decades later. Kabul delenda est was always accomplishable.

The only people who should be ashamed of the their performance in Ukraine are the Russians, and the Europeans, for failing to be able deter or respond to the Russia on their own despite having an economy five times the size.

US interests are perfectly well served by seeing the Russian military mauled for a generation at the cost of aid, much of it material that was going to be decommissioned anyway, that costs roughly what Americans spend on golf in a given year (Once you throw in the costs of drinks on the 19th hole.)

Anyway, US arms sales are up since the start of the conflict, Russian sales have cratered.
by schroeding | 2025-08-05 21:53:29+00:00
The problem in Munich is that everything must go through a single two-track part underneath the city center, which is at absolute capacity. If anything breaks down there (and it does, often, very often), even a small delay in a single train, all trains get delayed or skip stops.

In my experience, you have to take at least one train early if you do not want to come late regularly. Even e.g. the main airport train line, used by tourists, often turns around before the actual airport due to delays.

If you live in the city itself, it's fine, you also have other options. If you live further away, it's barely acceptable to very bad, IMO.

It is reliable-ish, but more "Amtrak Capital Corridor"-reliable than "JR Yamanote Line"-reliable.
by cnst | 2025-08-05 21:53:40+00:00
I'm actually surprised that some prices are even lower now than they've previously been.

I don't think most people actually have a solid understanding of what is and is not affected by which tariffs.

If I understand correctly, most of the tech stuff is effectively exempt; and Canada/Mexico tariffs don't apply to most items that are covered under "the rules of origin" certifications under USMCA (the successor to NAFTA).

I think the biggest hit has been the elimination of the de minimis rule, which now makes it difficult and/or impossible to get anything directly from China by USPS, be that cheap clothing or small electronics.
by jimbob45 | 2025-08-05 21:54:18+00:00
I'm not sure anyone but Intel is against that. Both US parties are most likely furious that the CHIPS act was a massive waste of money. TSMC would love to outright buy a massive US presence with valuable IP. The US desperately needs Intel to turn things around to remain a strategic advantage. Only Intel in their cesspool of hubris would want to keep the status quo of mediocrity.

But TSMC, please please please, get Intel out of Oregon. I'm so tired of that loser state holding back companies from reaching their true potential.
by tptacek | 2025-08-05 21:54:42+00:00
What is this supposed to convince me of? The problem with hallucinations is (was?) that developers were getting handed code that couldn't possibly have worked, because the LLM unknowingly invented entire libraries to call into that don't exist. That doesn't happen with agents and languages with any kind of type checking. You can't compile a Rust program that does this, and agents compile Rust code.

Right across this thread we have the author of the post saying that when they said "hallucinate", they meant that if they watched they could see their async agent getting caught in loops trying to call nonexistent APIs, failing, and trying again. And? The point isn't that foundation models themselves don't hallucinate; it's that agent systems don't hand off code with hallucinations in it, because they compile before they hand the code off.
by bgirard | 2025-08-05 21:54:55+00:00
YMMV I'm using the $100/mo max subscription and I hit the limit during a focused coding session where I'm giving it prompts non-stop.

Unfortunately there's no easy tool to inspect usage. I started a project to parse the Claude logs using Claude and generate a Chrome trace with it. It's promising but it was taking my tokens away from my core project.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-05 21:55:13+00:00
Mandate of Heaven does pretty much sound like a mid power metal track. The mixing is perfect but the production is "off" which is kinda weird, also the vocal delivery is flat and empty which is probably the biggest AI tell. The lyrics are cheesy but that's power metal for you.

Overall still quite impressive progress, though I'd prefer it if AI could remix existing artists songs that I already liked instead of being focused on tepid original content.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-05 21:56:02+00:00
We don't want to reverse the causes of declining birth rates.

1) Car culture (and trespassing culture) eradicated free roaming areas for kids. This resulted in 2) parenting time is 20x higher than a few generations ago because 3) children live in adult-curated boxes, under 24/7 adulting because 4) they have no where to go. See 1.

In the US, a depopulated civilization would be allowed before we abandoned ~mandated driving.
by concinds | 2025-08-05 21:56:13+00:00
People should be way more upset at the fact that Safari adblocking today is still inferior to even MV3 Google Chrome. Apple's implementation of declarativeNetRequest was semi-broken until the very latest iOS 18.6.

Apple can do the bare minimum, years after everyone else, and barely get called out. The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.

Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-08-05 21:56:13+00:00
> Unlikely to actually happen due to greed.

Greed makes no sense in a truly post scarcity society. There is no scarcity from which to take in a zero sum way from another.

Status is the real issue. Humans use status to select sexually, and the display is both competitive and comparative. It doesnt matter absolutely how many pants you have, only that you have more and better than your competition.

I actually think this thing is baked into our DNA and until sex itself is saturated (if there is such a thing), or DNA is altered, we will continue to have a however subtle form of competition undergirding all interactions.
by tptacek | 2025-08-05 21:56:39+00:00
Again, as you've acknowledged, there's a whole meme structure in the industry about what a "10x" programmer is. I did not claim that LLMs turn programmers into "10x programmers", because I do not believe in "10x" programmers to begin with. I'm not being defensive, I'm rebutting a (false) factual claim. It's very clearly false; you can just read the piece and see for yourself.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-05 21:56:45+00:00
In economics terms, wealth is a measure of capacity to save, taxes come from that capacity too, so I use it as a better estimate of how much a particular demographics can contribute to taxes.

I think that's fair in the context of this thread, given the present distribution realities, the bottom 50% can't contribute to tax revenue. Conversely and a bit more subtle, the top 50% ability to save doesn't seem to be impaired by their >97% contribution to revenue.

> As programmers should know better than anyone, most of the wealth in the world is in the form of people and their capacity to work on teams that solve practical problems

I'm looking at this as a practical matter, I'm far from moralism and moral philosophy so I can't really relate to your argument above.
by heraldgeezer | 2025-08-05 21:57:09+00:00
>they're coddled

>bitching and moaning

Why is this always the American answer when anything good about EU gets brought up that maybe turned worse?

Vacation, workdays, sickdays, parental leave, free schooling and healthcare? and public transport as here.

It is a question of money, investment and what society you want. You chose the Ford F-150.

For me in Sweden, we also have worse rail now, also due to the same issue. Maintenance is never "sexy" weather its fibre or rail. Parking, roads and cars nets points here too sadly.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-05 21:57:15+00:00
When I worked in manufacturing we had an ERP system that was awful, and we ended up supplementing it with Excel spreadsheets and an Access database. I briefly started writing my own ERP system to replace the whole system, but I realized something: my ERP system would be hopelessly tied to our process at this company, and wouldn't be usable by the manufacturer down the street, which my buddy worked at, without extensive rewriting. Software of this kind has a tension between being general-purpose and being really good for one specific workflow.

Maybe ERP is one of those things that co-evolves with the company, shaping the company as much as it's shaped by the company.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-05 21:57:50+00:00
When I worked at Boeing, we'd have a meeting now and then in a meeting room. The engineers showed up on time. The lead engineers showed up 10m late. The supervisor showed up 30m late. Anyone higher up, even later.

This was never discussed, but the pattern was the same every meeting.

I seriously disliked that nonsense.
by moregrist | 2025-08-05 21:58:25+00:00
The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies.

Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-08-05 21:59:17+00:00
you're right, but sec is about threat profiles. there's a point where selinux, firejail, etc. aren't enough either. even a virtual machine may as well be wet rice paper to an alphabet soup agency. you should very much assume that even airgapping isn't enough, unless it's inside of a faraday cage.

xorg security measures are a different matter from stopping any random program from writing to your filesystem. broaden the conversation to be about all security across all attack surfaces under all conditions and nothing is safe. i'm still not gonna run everything as root.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-05 21:59:38+00:00
> If listening to a 70 year old disk makes you happier, just do it. You'll listen to more music if you do that than you would by forcing yourself to use the more "productive" streaming service.

Ironically, when I listen to vinyl instead of streaming, I listen to less music.

If I'm in the zone, I will often go minutes between flipping the record or choosing another one; even though my record player is right next to me.
by Vipitis | 2025-08-05 22:00:03+00:00
I wish they would share more about how it works. Maybe a reseach paper for once? we didn't even get a technical report.

From my best guess: it's a video generation model like the ones we already head. But they condition inputs (movement direction, viewangle). Perhaps they aren't relative inputs but absolute and there is a bit of state simulation going on? [although some demo videos show physics interactions like bumping against objects - so that might be unlikely, or maybe it's 2D and the up axis is generated??].

It's clearly trained on a game engine as I can see screenspace reflection artefacts being learned. They also train on photoscans/splats... some non realistic elements look significantly lower fidelity too..

some inconsistencies I have noticed in the demo videos:

- wingsuit discollcusions are lower fidelity (maybe initialized by high resolution image?)

- garden demo has different "geometry" for each variation, look at the 2nd hose only existing in one version (new "geometry" is made up when first looked at, not beforehand).

- school demo has half a caroutside the window? and a suspiciously repeating pattern (infinite loop patterns are common in transformer models that lack parameters, so they can scale this even more! also might be greedy sampling for stability)

- museum scene has odd reflection in the amethyst box, like the rear mammoth doesn't have reflections on the right most side of the box before it's shown through the box. The tusk reflection just pops in. This isn't fresnel effect.
by internet_points | 2025-08-05 22:00:19+00:00
things that might actually make me several x faster:

* if my Github actions ran 10x faster, so I don't start reading about "ai" on hackernews while waiting to test my deployment and not noticing the workflow was done an hour ago

* if the Google cloud console deployment page had 1 instead of 10 vertical scroll bars and wasn't so slow and janky in Firefox

* if people started answering my peculiar but well-researched stackoverflow questions instead of nitpicking and discussing whether they belong on superuser vs unix vs ubuntu vs hermeneutics vs serverfault

* if MS Teams died

anyway, nice to see others having the same feeling about llm's
by trod1234 | 2025-08-05 22:00:23+00:00
> The new approach

That won't work. The breaking of that model is far more widespread than one thinks because of how it was broken.

The breaking of the model breaks underlying models all the way down to the basis for economic distribution of labor.

Its a phase change where labor and expertise are free, without restriction and the people with that expertise do not receive economic benefit for it anymore. In short, your demand curves goes to 0 in that area. There may be a great need for something, but if the demand is 0 no one will fulfill that need. People aren't slaves. Many people conflate demand with need, Hayek in his economics in one book cover the distinction. TL;DR demand is the group of people where there is a point at which two parties are both willing to exchange something for something. Need is where no such crossection between the S/D curve in exchange can occur for the two parties involved. One is much smaller than the other, and at 0, it doesn't happen or you only get the efforts of slaves.

The trend is inevitably towards stalling the economic cycle, where such experts simply do not create such things, they do not share, the ones that could either abandon that expertise or they withdraw keeping it to themselves.

The vast majority of all action though is done for economic benefit, and when that's no longer the case people don't do it. People aren't slaves.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-05 22:00:34+00:00
And there goes my limit of curiosity now regarding this. I'm interested in what you have to say, but not 25 page mini-novel PDF from someone else interested. I'm glad you enjoyed that piece, but I have no interest in reading it, nor do I think it's reasonable for you to expect me to be interested. Much like with the author and the specifics of this encoding.
by zahlman | 2025-08-05 22:00:46+00:00
> Although cloned files share data, they’re independent – you can edit one copy without affecting the other (unlike symlinks or hard links). APFS uses a technique called copy-on-write to store the data efficiently on disk – the cloned files continue to share any pieces they have in common.

... So, reflinks?

... It seems so. https://pypi.org/project/reflink/ claims to support this for APFS, specifically by using `clonefile`.
by supermatt | 2025-08-05 22:01:03+00:00
> OpenAI confirmed it has been preserving deleted and non permanent person chat logs since mid-Might 2025 in response to a federal court docket order

> The order, embedded under and issued on Might 13, 2025, by U.S. Justice of the Peace Decide Ona T. Wang

Is this some meme where “may” is being replaced with “might”, or some word substitution gone awry? I don’t get it.
by bsder | 2025-08-05 22:01:04+00:00
> I find it fascinating how much a pretty large group of people just hate semaglutides and seemingly need to believe that it's some kind of Faustian bargain.

Some of us also remember previous weight loss drugs which had similar levels of hype and later got pulled because of really bad side effects.

If I needed to lose 100+ pounds, I'd be at my doctor tomorrow asking for it. The side effects of 100+ pounds are way worse than anything semaglutide might cause.

For people who are using it to lose 10-20 pounds, the tradeoff isn't as clear.

I am cautiously optimistic and hope that semaglutide lives up to the hype. lots of people will benefit if it does.
by Hilift | 2025-08-05 22:01:05+00:00
A cool new indicator is "tortured phrases". These are turning out to be a gold mine for detecting fraudulent papers.

"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.

"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/11/all-the-red-flags-sci...
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-05 22:01:10+00:00
People object to CASE tools also I think.

And while I don't categorically object to AI tools, I think your selling objections to them short.

It's completely legitimate to want an explainable/comprehendable/limited-and-defined tool rather than a "it just works" tool. Ideally, this puts one in an "I know its right" position rather than a "I scanned it and it looks generally right and seems to work" position.
by schoen | 2025-08-05 22:01:19+00:00
For anyone here who's never pondered it ("today's lucky 10,000"?), there's a lot of intentional structure in the organization of ASCII that comes through readily in binary or hex.

https://altcodeunicode.com/ascii-american-standard-code-for-...

The first nibble (hex digit) shows your position within the chart, approximately like 2 = punctuation, 3 = digits, 4 = uppercase letters, 6 = lowercase letters. (Yes, there's more structure than that considering it in binary.)

For digits (first nibble 3), the value of the digit is equal to the value of the second nibble.

For punctuation (first nibble 2), the punctuation is the character you'd get on a traditional U.S. keyboard layout pressing shift and the digit of the second nibble.

For uppercase letters (first nibble 4, then overflowing into first nibble 5), the second nibble is the ordinal position of the letter within the alphabet. So 41 = A (letter #1), 42 = B (letter #2), 43 = C (letter #3).

Lowercase letters do the same thing starting at 6, so 61 = a (letter #1), 62 = b (letter #2), 63 = c (letter #3), etc.

The tricky ones are the overflow/wraparound into first nibble 5 (the letters from letter #16, P) and into first nibble 7 (from letter #16, p). There you have to actually add 16 to the letter position before combining it with the second nibble, or think of it as like "letter #0x10, letter #0x11, letter #0x12..." which may be less intuitive for some people).

Again, there's even more structure and pattern than that in ASCII, and it's all fully intentional, largely to facilitate meaningful bit manipulations. E.g. converting uppercase to lowercase is just a matter of adding 32, or logical OR with 0x00100000. Converting lowercase to uppercase is just a matter of subtracting 32, or logical AND with 0x11011111.

For reading hex dumps of ASCII, it's also helpful to know that the very first printable character (0x20) is, ironically, blank -- it's the space character.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-05 22:01:26+00:00
The zoo also said they will "accept chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but no more than four at a time."

[submitted w/o opinion] Based on an actual conversation last night, son #3 would eagerly donate guinea pigs in support of this. I will note here that he would have to buy them first.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-05 22:01:35+00:00
Oh, that isn't what I mean, and I am willing to accept your view. (And I was joking a bit anyway)

What I mean about the beginning of an empire is, as I said -- the beginning of a true individual, not simply unitary, emperor. That the executive is transforming into l'état, c'est moi, which no US president has had the luxury of ever before, because Congress wouldn't ever have handed over the influence and authority they had.
by donatj | 2025-08-05 22:02:14+00:00
If PHP scoped to blocks, it would be less of an issue, you could just wrap your procedural code in curly braces and call it a day

{ $foo = 'bar'; // only defined in this block }

I use this reasonably often in Go, I wish it were a thing in PHP. PHP allows blocks like this but they seem to be noops best I can tell.