MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qasimWani | 2025-08-05 11:45:10+00:00
i previously co-founded a synthetic data company, focused on fine-tuning diffusion models for robotics and manufacturing. the standard approach: generate better data, train smaller models, deploy. recently, reasoning models like o3, grok, and gemini began showing signs of strong spatial awareness. so i tested them on bounding box detection in complex scenes. they failed. badly.

but the reasoning trace showed impressive semantic understanding. the failure wasn’t conceptual. it came from tokenization and decoding limits. the models knew what they were seeing but couldn’t translate it into precise coordinates. (gemini 2.5 performs better because it uses an MoE with task-specific heads).

as such, i built a simple system that gives these models tools:

1. overlay a reference grid (inspired by Set of Marks, Microsoft 2023) to ground them visually

2. crop and zoom into regions of interest

3. call external detectors like Grounding DINO when helpful

with only prompting, this setup enables zero-shot object detection on tasks that traditional vision models fail. for example, detecting the barely visible YC logo on this person's jacket from a linkedin feed screenshot is only possible once you zoom into the right regions [https://www.spatial-reasoning.com/share/45dfaeaa-e5a1-4a8c-a...]

demo here: [spatial-reasoning.com] open-source code: [https://github.com/QasimWani/spatial-reasoning]

curious to hear thoughts. still exploring edge cases and failure modes. might write a more detailed blog if there’s interest.
by augment_me | 2025-08-05 11:45:11+00:00
Documentation is the most valuable if it captures the design decision and intention at the time of the creation of the software, rather than the functionality of the software itself.

Its pointless to write "This function splits the input data into two equally sized chunks, multiplies each chunk with Y and then adds it together"

It makes more sense to write "The hardware X that this code runs on has a cache size of Y which makes this split necessary for optimal compute throughput".

This provides the next person an understanding of why the code looks as it does, and if it should be changed at this new moment in time, when perhaps new hardware is available.

I have seen so many design decisions being forgotten with time, and despite "documented code", a new engineer comes in and spends weeks trying to solve something that it inherently correct or is there for a good reason.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-05 11:45:20+00:00
> But perhaps if you really want to consider the problem, then just take a look at what China is building: missile destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth fighters. If all these things are so worthless and could not fight and defeat China, then why is China spending so much money trying to exactly replicate those capabilities if the future is all drones all the time or whatever other internet sensation of the moment.

Because: One of their best opening moves is a blockade of Taiwan, and that requires naval assets.

And because: There is such a thing as hedging your bets. No matter what anybody thinks, it is unwise to bet everything on your missile forces or new drones. You don't want to overcommit to one strategy or one way of waging war and later realize that you need to fall back on older means and methods. (As experienced by the Russians in 2022-2023.) So building a navy may be nothing more than a hedge against the possibility that other ways of making war won't work out.

But there's really no avoiding the fact that mobile launchers like the DF21/26/41 can launch a small LEO SAR constellation (i.e. just a few satellites) and a few ~10 minute contacts per day would provide enough targeting data to pinpoint any US surface fleet in the western Pacific. It's easy to see how a sufficient volume of missiles removes them from the board.

As an aside:

> If laser-equipped American destroyers

It's almost laughably easy to harden drones and missiles to high-power lasers. You can even retrofit old ones. Various different methods have been known since the 1970s. Lasers might work against trash-tier weapons and DJI drones, but the minute they become common on the battlefield countermeasures will become ubiquitous.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-05 11:45:25+00:00
>It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it

This sort of emotional hand waving in the direction of uncertainty is always employed in these discussions. What is the path from the status quo of late summer 1945 to peace without atomic bombs and how much death and destruction are the high and low end estimates? The status quo is/was well documented at the time and has been scrutinized with a microscope from all sides with the benefit of hindsight since. You are going to have a hard time charting a path from the status quo to piece that causes less death and destruction than what actually happened without a case where a bunch of exceptional things happen in a row.

You might not like that "basically fire bombing but with extra science to make it cheaper" was employed to end the war because of the 2nd and 3rd order implications of this extra cheapness but it's nearly certain that it was the least bad way to end the war.

>the invasion of the Soviets is considered to be the deciding factor in ending the war, and not the dropping of the bombs, so even the assertion that the bombs were responsible is questionable.

These sort of statements are always weasel worded so as to avoid comparing the relative size of the factors. They stood to have their entire country bombed into oblivion. The soviet invasion was simply the final straw on the same way someone who's lost everything may choose to go postal over a minor slight.
by hintklb | 2025-08-05 11:45:56+00:00
exactly the way I think. Home ownership is what you do when you act on autopilot.

If you think this through, it is essentially spending more money and more time on something very materialistic that doesn't matter that much.

Renting allows you to spend more time and resources doing things that really matter.

I think most people would come to that same conclusion if they really think about this from first principle, but as a society we have been pushed and molded to believe that home ownership is the pinnacle of success and personal accomplishment somehow. I have been attacked left and right for even suggesting that owning a home is maybe not as big of a deal for personal happiness as we think. In the west and in the US it has been pushed as a core component of people's identities.
by namibj | 2025-08-05 11:46:52+00:00
The problem is less from the full coverage measurements of congestion this scheme would need, and more due to the billing of almost all vehicles on almost all roads which could be used for bypassing major roads when driving congestion-relevant commutes. So main thoroughfares/arteries, pretty much anything you'd visually classify as "highway" (unless it's a dead-end), and Autobahn/Interstate.

Without cameras: How do you do the billing then? Like, what else other than ALPR or the privacy-basically-equivalent RFID tag/token stuck to the windscreen (and correlated with a camera or similar to catch vehicles with inoperable RFID tags)?

If you'd cover old-built urban cores, you could further punish the driving-in-circles tactic of avoiding multi-story parking garages that hopes to either find a surface spot during their brief empty lifetime, or even to stall until a former passenger has ran an errand and can be picked up again.
by solarkraft | 2025-08-05 11:47:28+00:00
I dislike some superficial things about it (and some less superficial things about WPF), but a lot of the ideas around how properties are set are pretty cool to me!

Also how (IIRC) it’s compiled to pretty standard .NET view code (“partial”) you could extend in other parts of the app.

I’m still happy to have left it behind for the aforementioned, ecosystem & tooling reasons.
by wickedsight | 2025-08-05 11:48:02+00:00
> you could be dead by next morning

I feel like this is often overlooked in financial planning. Everything is aimed at planning for (early) retirement. Meanwhile, the '$1 today is more valuable than $1 tomorrow' trope isn't just true for monetary value, but also for the value $1 might bring.

$1 today can buy memories for the rest of your life. It can bring experiences with family members and friends. Having $1 million in the bank in 40 years will never buy back time you may have wasted working to save that money.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't save or invest money for the long term, but I do think more people should take into account what they lose today by only focusing on the long term... Especially when that long term might never come.
by wltechblog | 2025-08-05 11:49:00+00:00
in most cases you can tell at a glance. We have run into vendors changing their internals without any way of telling other than opening the cam up. Last year mos vendors started moving their cameras from the T31 processor to the newer (cheaper) T23, without changing model names. I've bought at least one cam where one user got an Ingenic chip and I got some random ARM chip.. and a few cases where they have a few wifi chip options and its a coin toss which one you get. When possible I try to account for this in my installers, so that the user doesn't need to deal with it themselves, but other times its unavoidable.
by xrd | 2025-08-05 11:49:30+00:00
Are you using this with Home Assistant?

(Edit: my ISP is blocking, this is not an issue with hacs...

I'm trying to integrate this, but the HACS integration does not seem to work with my HA because the get.hacs.xyz server is misconfigured.

wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash - Connecting to get.hacs.xyz ([2606:4700:20::ac43:4465]:443) 28EBD0AA71710000:error:0A0000C6:SSL routines:tls_get_more_records:packet length too long:ssl/record/methods/tls_common.c:662: 28EBD0AA71710000:error:0A000139:SSL routines::record layer failure:ssl/record/.rec_layer_s3.c:687: ssl_client: SSL_connect wget: error getting response: Connection reset by peer)
by disruptiveink | 2025-08-05 11:49:38+00:00
Usually I would agree with you, but this is an incredibly common initialism, used by not just people in the industry, but also by consumers. Sure, it may not be as widespread as VHS (global) or API (tech-adjacent), but anyone who is in the market for this software already knows what NVR means.

Most people would know the term from either being quoted or looking up CCTV solutions, all of which, unless they're fully "cloud-based", come with a component that is called the NVR. You wouldn't even consider this if you weren't aware of the concept. If NVR means nothing to you, Network Video Recorder doesn't mean anything to you either. This is meant to be a replacement for closed and inflexible hardware boxes that are sold together with security cameras, and the name of those boxes are "NVRs".
by xandrius | 2025-08-05 11:49:59+00:00
So you never got gatekept by Apple from accessing a feature unless you had a specific version of the OS? Heck, even macbooks get killed every year by not allowing them to build for newer iOS versions.

The whole point of Apple, one could say, IS to make sure to forcibly make you update to access a new feature. That way either you can update or you've got to buy a brand-new device.
by AdilG | 2025-08-05 11:50:08+00:00
Hi everyone,

I'm building an AI recruitment platform and your comments really resonated with me - they really show why the current approach is broken.

We actually created this mess by making applications too easy - technology removed friction in the hiring process and now people click apply to jobs without even reading the JD.

Worst still with genAI people that may not be a good fit for the roles they apply, use AI to tweak their CVs to match the job descriptions and become a good fit on paper.

The results is that companies get flooded with irrelevant applications and respond with more friction, whether that is more screening rounds, more interviewing or AI interviews that add the friction back.

We're trying to solve this by adding good friction instead of bad friction. The AI should be working for candidates too, not just extracting value from them. Would love your thoughts on what would actually make an AI interview worthwhile from a candidate perspective.
by aatd86 | 2025-08-05 11:50:14+00:00
I am interested in any answer to this

> If the request is something like /user/detail/12345 and user 12345 doesn't exist, what should the response be?

This is quite an interesting question. If we consider that webservers host paginated applications, the answer would be that this is indeed an application level concern and we should return a 404 since the resource is not found.

SPAs without SSR may have muddled this since the application is about serving a client side application then. We could expect a 200.

It is not as straightforward as it seems perhaps...
by rightbyte | 2025-08-05 11:50:22+00:00
I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your videofeeds in the first place?

Like, I remember thinking the GNU guys were hippie crackpots. But it was like 15 years ago and I have forgot how to relate to that feeling... it is like realizing all my colleagues are not using adblockers and visit sites with ads. I just can't understand.
by tempfile | 2025-08-05 11:50:22+00:00
> Asking for consent is built into the HTTP protocol.

The HTTP protocol does not specify what is right and wrong. The fact a protocol encodes or permits a particular kind of behaviour does not mean that every use of the protocol is ethically justified. I am sure you would agree with me that "black people can't visit this server" would be such an unethical rule, even though HTTP permits you to enforce such a rule. So let's forget about the protocol for a minute.

Is it morally wrong to lie about your User Agent in order to visit a website. Well, that depends on whether it is legitimate for the server operator to discriminate according to the User Agent. If it is not legitimate, then lying about your User Agent to circumvent the restriction is morally justified.

So we are back at square one: is it legitimate for a server operator to discriminate what sort of a client is used to visit them. Since the service is public, the person is allowed to visit the service and to read the content. If the client is misbehaved in some way (some LLM scrapers are) then this is a legitimate difference. But if this is controlled for, so the LLM scraper can't be easily distinguished from a human doing the same thing, then the service is not harmed any more than would be ordinary. Therefore the discrimination is not legitimate.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-05 11:50:37+00:00
Of course, but our sun going red giant is billions of years away, and will happen regardless of whether we're still here, taking good care of the planet, or not.

I'm talking about what happens while earth is still in a livable state, even if maybe not for us. In the space of billions of years there could be many dozens of highly successful new eras of life each lasting hundreds of millions of years.

From an evolutionary perspective humans are not the big deal that we think we are - we've only been around for a few millions of years (homo sapiens only for a few hundred thousand years) vs phases of life such as Triassic, Jurassic, etc that lasted for hundreds of millions of years. We may well wipe ourselves out via nuclear war, global warming, etc in the blink of an evolutionary eye, say in next million years - a failed experiment in intelligence that proves to not be sustainable, to be replaced by successive waves of new life exploring different directions.
by ceckGrad | 2025-08-05 11:51:31+00:00
>Scepticism is not the psychological disposition to treat the increasingly implausible with the same equanimity as the increasingly plausible.

Okay, maybe that is a fair description of skepticism, but you're stating it as if you're an authority. I don't know that you're an authority on skepticism.

>The sceptic is under no obligation to ignore decades or centuries of science, nor be partisan to no established body of knowledge.

I don't think there is any authority figure who can say what skeptics are obliged to do or not to do.

>Sceptics are at their very best profoundly partisan to such bodies of knowledge,

I have no reason to believe you know what the "best" sort of skeptic is.

>This is an article in praise of gullibility as the highest form of scepticism, a very common attempted rebuke to sceptics when one has failed to meet the reasonable standard of evidence they demand.

I don't think you are reading the article correctly. I don't expect you to justify your interpretation to me, but I wonder whether you have a method to justify your interpretations to anybody. Maybe you are a very systematic and logical debunker, and you can justify your debunking calculations to your peers. If that is so, you should be a university professor or a think-tank principal investigator. You could share your debunking methods with the world that needs them.

>It is also a subtle ad-hom,

I think you are misreading that.

>The principled and knowlegable sceptic, who is not credulous nor obnoxious, not paranoid nor overly trusting -- this is a person in 2025 who would give no time to "parapsychology"

Well, maybe you really are qualified to decide which skeptics are principled and well-informed. If you really are qualified, you should be teaching others to be skeptics. If your methods really are so foolproof, you could purge the world of superstition.

But maybe you are not qualified to speak as if you were an authority on who is a skeptic and what methods are skeptical methods.
by barbinbrad | 2025-08-05 11:53:08+00:00
hey guys -- founder here.

here's a little bit about me, and why i decided to build this: https://carbon.ms/#memo

re: sage, i'd say that sage is well-known as being a great general purpose accounting software for multi-location, and multi-entity businesses. but i don't know of many manufacturers running on sage.

re: erpnext, also great. i love their open source model, their developer ecosystem, and great documentation. i'd say the major difference is the data model and the UI that it begets. in erpnext, i think everything is a "doctype" where with carbon things are more bespoke. each ui has it's own specific tables, and specific ui

re: erp
by arp242 | 2025-08-05 11:53:14+00:00
I cannot phantom why anyone would write lengthy walls of text trying to convince people "no askhually, your workflow is invalid and theres a better way!11" after they've told you very directly and clearly several times that this works well for them. People have different preferences. People are telling you that this works well for them. They don't really don't need to be condescendingly "educated". Learn to listen.
by sylware | 2025-08-05 11:53:30+00:00
You can have click/troll farms with real humans (going thru VPNs, BOT networks, etc). Even "normal" people who are "paid" (for instance gacha game campaign offering in-game resources for free, that in exchange of a good "review", yes they can link the review with the right account for resource "reward", and it seems it can go down to social networks).
by hexmiles | 2025-08-05 11:54:00+00:00
I tried to search if it's possible for a dev studio to release a game on Steam that works without it, by which I mean that if I uninstall Steam, the games keep working; I wasn't able to confirm, but it seems to be theoretically possible...

None of the games I have in my library work like that, but online some people suggest that some games work even without Steam, once installed.

Your point, however, still stands.
by lapcat | 2025-08-05 11:54:02+00:00
Apple is generally bad at search. For further evidence, see their developer website. To get anything useful out of it, I have to use a custom Google search: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&udm=14&q=site%3Adevelo...

Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak.

I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug.

For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.
by a5c11 | 2025-08-05 11:54:07+00:00
I already know like five of them, it's more than enough to write anything my weird brain comes up with :D. I'm fine with the setup I have now, if I ever would have to use agentic coding because my employer would demand doing things faster, for the pure sake of doing things faster, I will just quit. If everyone started demanding that, I will just say "goodbye" to my IT career for good because that wouldn't be fun anymore; yet another white collar job.

It's only about me having fun from coding. The low-level stuff is the most fun part. I don't know why is it so hard to swallow pill.
by qasimWani | 2025-08-05 11:54:11+00:00
another harder example: detecting a street sign on market st in sf that only becomes findable after multiple zoom-ins [https://www.spatial-reasoning.com/share/d7bab348-3389-41c7-9...]

one interesting pattern: forcing the model to keep its reasoning chain internal (i.e., no verbose "think step-by-step") actually improves accuracy. it seems to reduce hallucinations and overcorrections. still working on a clearer theory, but shorter chains seem to preserve spatial focus better.

curious how others think tool use like this could generalize.

also open to any references on visual grounding in LMMs. feels like a strangely underexplored space.
by aakast | 2025-08-05 11:55:06+00:00
Completely agree. I have always myself been a proponent of renting and investing in any other assets.

I'm a dane, and we have a very unique mortage system, so I might not have as much feeling in that regard with the rest of the world.

In this case, I just felt leveraging was left out of the equation in the discussions, so it was hard to follow.