MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by milani | 2025-09-29 21:39:10+00:00
Often, when I use generative AI to produce videos, the results are close to what I envision but rarely capture my imagination exactly. Prompting the AI to fix specific details can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. To address this, I'm developing solutions that make the creative workflow more intuitive. So far, I’ve built an app that allows users to provide visual clues as guides, along with a 3D environment where the camera can be freely manipulated within the generated scene.

The community is moving fast though. Now higgsfield allows using arrows and pointers to edit the video but so far, no one is doing a good camera control visually.
by hewwwww | 2025-09-29 21:39:11+00:00
In my free time I’m still working on My Financé (I keep getting feedback this name is confusing), which is a fairly undifferentiated personal finance tool.

It’s a labor of love, but I love it!

I’m currently building a simulation engine that lets you forecast your spending, build scenarios (like taking a year off, getting a cat, move to a new city, etc based on your current spending patterns and assets.

https://myfinancereport.com/

It’s great fun to have a project of one’s own to just toil away on.
by Theodores | 2025-09-29 21:39:14+00:00
France - where the 'Society of the Spectacle' was written by Guy Debord in the 1960s, where he predicted late stage capitalism as being mediated by images, so rather than reality, human existence and relationships between people are 'mediated by images'.

This is at the heart of what is going on. Society of the Spectacle is not an easy read, but it most definitely is pertinent to what is going on. Instagram is the final boss!
by motbus3 | 2025-09-29 21:39:24+00:00
You are probably right, my point is that Populism, and at least it, does need to perpetuate de problems, hence, no populist leader is/was ever effective.

Not an answer but an appendix. There is common misconceptions on the definition of politics. For the masses politics means to define policies through negotiation and prioritisation. For politicians, it means something related to exert political power.
by observationist | 2025-09-29 21:39:46+00:00
It means the enshittification is reaching full acceleration. The MBAs have taken over. It'll be a constant battle between monetization and research, and a continual skewing of research and development as unnecessary expenses, followed by a full-on torching of the reputation in return for fast cash now and trading on vibes thereafter, while the rest of the world moves on.

Sama wants to speedrun the Apple arc, it looks like.
by guywithahat | 2025-09-29 21:39:54+00:00
If it makes you feel any better the Trump admin didn't actually ban the words "climate change", "decarbonization", etc. They added it to a list of words to avoid. The article title just editorialized it to the word ban.

I didn't really get into it in my initial comment because it sort of feels like it's besides the point, but I agree "ban" and "please avoid" are different words that mean different things, and the Trump admin did not "ban" these words. I think the comparison avoiding "illegal alien" and "climate change" is quite similar, as the administrations were trying to direct department culture through removing speech they view as political. It's another great reason why we should not depend on government for societal guidance.

And I'm at work right now but you can search for "biden admin ban word women/female/mother/etc". You may not be able to use google because they remove a lot of links to conservative outlets (I like yandex for this kind of search, although I haven't searched enough to know whether they're the best).
by landl0rd | 2025-09-29 21:40:12+00:00
I want the bot to do the drudge work, not me. I want the bot to fix lint errors the linter can't safely autofix, not me.

You're talking about designing a kitchen where robots do the cooking and humans do ingredient prep and dishwashing. We prefer kitchens where we do the cooking and use tools or machines to prep and wash dishes.

I don't want it to be an "architect" or "designer". I want it to write the annoying boilerplate. I don't want it to do the coding and me to do the debugging, I want to code while it debugs. Anything else and you are the bot's assistant, not vice-versa.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-29 21:42:11+00:00
Agreed. Our differences are very little and we have a lot of similarities

Yet we fight over differences and brush over the similarities.

Why? because hate sells.. People are selling hate/internalizing hate/ragebaits.

I had actually written one shit post comment about something echo chambering of sorts or how or why we should love each other and try be discussing of sorts you could say while still bringing action towards thing.

I think that the one thing most people agree over is big tech's oligarchy of sorts and how they can somewhat abuse it and I can think of ways that I can make the right people understand it I suppose too, never tried it tbh.

idk I just want to bring you attention to the one shitpost I wrote which I intented to write a shitpost but I think I wrote really relevant things in there and I am proud of them

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45406430

We all need to be understanding of each other and enlighten us to the real issues that we have the power to solve but we don't because of numerous reasons. Lets make a world a better place because We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our Children.

Have a nice day.
by coffeecoders | 2025-09-29 21:42:30+00:00
Uber and Airbnb solved real pain points: global availability, predictable, nice interfaces, cashless payments, reviews etc. These are the things small, local systems struggled to provide consistently.

Also, my point isn't that the current system is objectively better. It's that scale and convenience created network effects that make it "essential" in practice, even if it’s buggy, slow, or worse in some respects.
by slfnflctd | 2025-09-29 21:42:30+00:00
Robotics are also a big one.

Given a useful-enough general purpose body (with multiple appendage options), one of the most significant applications of whatever we end up calling AGI should be finally seeing most of our household chores properly roboticized.

When I can actually give plain language descriptions of 'simple' manual tasks around the house to a machine the same way I would to, say, a human 4th grader, and not have to spend more time helping it get through the task than it would take me to do it myself, that is when I will feel we have turned the corner.

I still am not at all convinced I will see this within the next few decades I probably have left.
by excitedrustle | 2025-09-29 21:42:56+00:00
Working on Fraim, open-source agents for cloudsec and appsec engineers to complement existing deterministic scanners. Born out of our 3 years of learnings building such scanners for IaC. Turns out in the real world policies are subjective enough to make this hard.

Examples:

- Policies are frequently subjective. Hard to codify, but LLMs can evaluate them more like a security engineer would. "IAM policies should use least privilege." What is "least" enough? "Admin ports shouldn't be exposed to the Internet." What's an admin port?

- Security engineers are stretched thin. LLMs can watch PRs for potentially risky changes that need closer human review. "PR loosens authz/authn." "PR changes network perimeter configuration."

- Traditional check runs (SAST, IaC, etc.) flood PRs with findings. Security doesn't have time to review them all. Devs tends to ignore them. Frequent false positives. LLMs can draw attention to the important ones. "If the findings are unusual for this repo, require the author to acknowledge the risk before merging."

https://github.com/fraim-dev/fraim

https://www.fraim.dev
by vitus | 2025-09-29 21:42:57+00:00
Yeah, that was what I tried with row-Hamming / col-Hamming (namely: treat entire rows / cols as matches or not). I then used the min of the two to address those issues.

Either way, I guess my implementation had a bug -- A* does yield a significant speedup, but adding the 0.25x scaling factor to ensure that the heuristic is admissible loses almost all of those gains.

For some concrete numbers: with the bug that basically reduced to BFS, it ran in about 7s; with the bug fixed but a wildly inadmissible heuristic, it ran in about 0.01s; with the heuristic scaled down by 4x to guarantee its admissibility, it ran in about 5s.

I think scaling it down by 2x would be sufficient: that lower bound would be tight if the problem is one row move and one column move away from the goal state, but potentially all four rows and columns would not match. In that case, it ran in about 1.6s.
by sfpotter | 2025-09-29 21:43:03+00:00
I don't know what it is about this name, but I read it as "My Fiancé". My brain did not register the first "n" and it wasn't until I read your parenthetical remark that I went back and re-read.

The name isn't confusing, per se ("get married to/be exclusive with your finances", OK), but it also isn't very strong... "financé" is also very strange and awkward to pronounce as a native English speaker. Probably because it comes across more as Spanish-seeming despite it being a play on a French work.
by cperciva | 2025-09-29 21:43:35+00:00
Release engineering for FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE. Major releases are always a lot of work, but this is probably the biggest release in 20 years due to the new base system distribution system landing. (We're switching from "here's a tarball containing everything" to "here's 500 packages", with resulting changes in the build process, download/update mirrors, installer, etc.)
by jesse__ | 2025-09-29 21:43:53+00:00
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
by nicbou | 2025-09-29 21:43:54+00:00
I have made a Bürgeramt appointment finder. It was down for a few weeks after the city of Berlin changed its anti-bot measures. I just released an updated version that works again: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder

My citizenship wait times page (https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/citizenship-wait-times) has also gotten enough feedback to be useful since its release last month. I'd like to make it more useful with better visualisations.

Now I'm working on another iteration of my health insurance calculator (https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/health-insurance-calculator). It's kind of a big deal both because it's a huge financial decision for recent immigrants, and because it funds a big chunk of all the free stuff I'm putting out. This is especially important with ChatGPT and AI summaries halving my traffic. This iteration will recommend health insurance combinations that work for a visa application and for a long-term stay in Germany. It will provide far better explanations.

At the same time, I'm testing a new insurance broker with far shorter response times, so people can directly ask an expert to help them choose. They're reachable via Whatsapp, and that made a huge difference in how people get advice. It worked so well that I want to do the same for other topics. I'm already talking with an immigration lawyer who's interested.
by Animats | 2025-09-29 21:44:07+00:00
> Today it's "catastrophic risks." Tomorrow it's misinformation, hate speech, or whatever else the state decides needs "safety mitigations."

That's the problem.

I'm less worried about catastrophic risks than routine ones. If you want to find out how to do something illegal or dangerous, all an LLM can give you is a digest what's already available on line. Probably with errors.

The US has lots of hate speech, and it's mostly background noise, not a new problem.

"Misinformation" is more of a problem, because the big public LLMs digest the Internet and add authority with their picks. It's adding the authority of Google or Microsoft to bogus info that's a problem. This is a basic task of real journalism - when do you say "X happened", and when do you say "Y says X happened"? LLMs should probably be instructed to err in the direction of "Y says X happened".

"Safety" usually means "less sex". Which, in the age of Pornhub, seems a non-issue, although worrying about it occupies the time of too many people.

An issue that's not being addressed at all here is using AI systems to manipulate customers and provide evasive customer service. That's commercial speech and consumer rights, not First Amendment issues. That should be addressed as a consumer rights thing.

Then there's the issue of an AI as your boss. Like Uber.
by magicnubs | 2025-09-29 21:44:20+00:00
It all comes down to glutamate and gaba again. It's been really interesting to see how fundamental these two molecules are as I have learned more about medical biology/neurology. They are implicated in so many medical and psychiatric conditions, yet you tend to hear much more about the monoamine transmitters (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc). But they are also hard to target for therapeutic purposes because gabaergics (barbituates, alcohol, z-drugs, etc) are often dangerously addictive; gaba just feels good... until the bill comes due. Maybe someday we will find a way to upregulate gaba activity in the body/brain without the inevitable crash. Hopefully we will, at least for the sake of people that suffer from over/under-excitatatory diseases.
by wk_end | 2025-09-29 21:44:34+00:00
I can't speak for Ada, but C++ closures require that you explicitly specify what's captured from the enclosing environment and how (i.e. copy or reference). That capture is also unsafe, which relates to the issue of automatic memory management: for instance, if you have a function that returns a closure that's captured a reference to something in the function's stack frame, stack semantics mean that value will be destroyed. I'm sure C++ developers are fine with them but - having not used them in anger - they sound quite brittle.

The answer in the Odin FAQ maybe could be expanded to say "many uses of closures require automatic memory management, and while Odin could add some kind of support for closures to handle the uses that don't, it'd add too much complexity and too much potential for bugs to be worthwhile". Not to speak for gingerbill, here.
by iinnPP | 2025-09-29 21:44:37+00:00
If I had a requirement to either do something I didn't want to do or pay a nickel, I'd just fake doing what needed to be done and wait for the regulatory body to fine me 28 years later after I exhausted my appeal chain. Luckily, inflation turned the nickel into a penny, now defunct, and I rely on the ability to pay debts in legal currency to use another 39 years of appeals.
by fnordsensei | 2025-09-29 21:44:43+00:00
I’ve had the opposite experience with GPT-5, where it’s utterly convinced that its own (incorrect) solution is the way to go that it turns me down and preemptively launches tools to implement what it has in mind.

I get that it’s tradeoffs, but erring on the side of the human being correct is probably going to be a safer bet for another generation or two.
by mrandish | 2025-09-29 21:46:23+00:00
It's not specifically against a law but debtors who got shafted can choose to sue the "old" and "new" companies under a few broader laws, basically alleging "I had a valid contract with the old company but this sale is a sham transaction to get out of the contract and 'NewCo' is unjustly enriching themselves by screwing us 'OldCo' debtors." IANAL but my sense is such a case can be won but is far from a slam dunk and it will cost money and take time. Debtors will have to decide if they are out enough money to be worth sinking more money into recovering it. This kind of move might also be an aggressive escalation tactic in a hardball negotiation with debtors unwilling to renegotiate on acceptable terms. It's possible that the OldCo/NewCo people doing this may choose to leave certain assets in OldCo to make legal challenges less likely to prevail than if they'd completely emptied out OldCo.

Other impacts can include future potential NewCo lenders being pretty leery about getting involved with the same people. It's also not a great look for the founder(s)/senior execs in terms of future resume - unless there are extenuating circumstances which justify doing it. An example can be something like a fundamental disagreement between co-founders who are major shareholders. In that scenario this may not be to shaft debtors but rather for the majority co-founders, investors and key employees to 'dump' a minority non-cooperating co-founder who's no longer involved with the company, has a "change of control" veto and won't sell their shares but can't stop an asset sale. Basically the board approves the sale and the key execs/employees all vote with their feet. The original OldCo shareholders still own those shares, they're just worthless without the people, IP, assets, etc. In such a case, the non-cooperating shareholder might have grounds to sue but one defense can be a solid paper trail showing the company treated them fairly, offered to buy out their shares at fair market value and was basically forced into this as the only alternative.
by babypuncher | 2025-09-29 21:47:00+00:00
If there's one thing I've learned watching the trajectory of social media over the last 15 years, it's that we've been way to slow to assess the risks and harmful outcomes posed by new, rapidly evolving industries.

Fixing social media is now a near impossible task as it has built up enough momentum and political influence to resist any kind of regulation that would actually be effective at curtailing its worst side effects.

I hope we don't make the same mistakes with generative AI
by mk12345 | 2025-09-29 21:47:04+00:00
Very cool, reminds me of the library of Babel (of which you also made a version! [1]).

I made something similar a while ago, the Hdd of Babel [2], which contains all possible files(*) , and wrote down some thoughts on it [3].

I really like how it makes us think about the nature of information.

[1] https://libraryofbabel.app/

[2] https://mkaandorp.github.io/hdd-of-babel/

[3] https://dev.to/mkaandorp/this-website-contains-pictures-of-y...
by brailsafe | 2025-09-29 21:47:05+00:00
That all sounds fantastic, I'm sure I'd find that pretty engaging and I enjoy making small collections of hobbyist interests and going on adventures in-pursuit of niche experiences as well.

I wasn't so much curious about the mechanics of the hobby, although it is interesting, rather what defines it as a "community". Like what qualifies or doesn't qualify as being in or out of the "community"? If I make a list of birds I've seen, and don't share it with anyone, am in a community? If I share a photo on Instagram and mention it in passing to my close friend, am I in a community then? Do I need to be on some common platform, communicating at all about other bird lists? My grandfather kind of has a similar hobby with planes, but I'm sure he doesn't think of himself as part of a global community of plane enthusiasts, yet his local wood carving community is a place he goes and talks to people he knows by name and has spent years around, evidently a community with the requirement that you're into wood carving
by elpakal | 2025-09-29 21:47:16+00:00
Adding a chat feature to my iOS app size analysis tool that runs locally on your Mac. My goal is to make everyone a build engineer, where you can chat with your builds and get insights and improvement areas. Testing out on-device Apple Intelligence models but need to find the time to do more validation testing.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881
by neilv | 2025-09-29 21:48:01+00:00
> It may be true that youth confers certain [...] mental benefits

I think it would be better if HN didn't tell impressionable 20yo techbros things like this.

> massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.

This is generally recognized in many places, outside of techbro echo chambers.

> in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar,

To your 20yo techbro, this sounds like damning with faint praise.
by Nexxxeh | 2025-09-29 21:48:17+00:00
I feel that the Saudis purchasing EA is specifically a good sign that future EA games won't be profit-focused at the expense of quality.

I was talking to the GP and P comments in regards to the company's focus. They discussed the problems of current EA and whether future development would be increasingly profit-driven at the cost of quality.

>>I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in the current gaming market.

>I'm not sure the investment group attempting to diversify Saudi oil income is going to be less profit oriented than the stock market in general

I suspect that EA was not purchased with profit as the primary motive, and that decreasing quality further would run counter to their aims.

I think their motives are more sinister and subversive. I'm not sure what the relevant equivalent term to (e)sportswashing is for this. Gamewashing or whatever. I think buying EA is going to be a prominent example of it.

My comment included calling Saudi Arabia's Crowned Prince Mohammed bin Salman by his nickname Mohammed Bonesaw. This refers to his alleged direct order to assassinate and butcher Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

The 15-person Saudi agent hitsquad used a bonesaw to dismember Khashoggi, hence the nickname.

This makes clear from tone and context that I do not feel that the Saudis buying EA is a good sign overall.

I realise that relying on tone and context clues to remove ambiguity is not good accessible writing so I apologise for that.
by arthurjj | 2025-09-29 21:48:37+00:00
"Two prompts and then do it yourself" is a pretty good heuristic. Last year I was simulating a boardgame [1] and wasted ~1 hour trying to get ChatGPT to solve a basic coding combinatorics problem. I needed a method in python to generate all possible hand decisions a player could make. I couldn't make it understand that certain choices were equivalent

[1] https://arthur-johnston.com/paths_of_civ_tech_tree/
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-29 21:48:38+00:00
Sorry, tech is moving to China.

It's a cultural thing. The USA never has and probably never will really value technical talent.

"Noone gets paid until something gets sold".

I heard this mantra over and over again from US business leadership during my technical career.

It never occurred to them that nothing gets sold until something gets built. They just took that part for granted.
by Narushia | 2025-09-29 21:49:16+00:00
By default, Mypy warns you if try to reassign a method of any object[1]. It will also warn you when you access non-existent attributes[2]. So if you have a variable typed as `object`, the only attributes you can manipulate without the type checker nagging are `__doc__`, `__dict__`, `__module__`, and `__annotations__`. Since there are very few reasons to ever reassign or manipulate these attributes on an instance, I think the `object` type gets us pretty darn close to an "unknown" type in practice.

There was a proposal[3] for an unknown type in the Python typing repository, but it was rejected on the grounds that `object` is close enough.

[1]: https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/error_code_list.html#c...

[2]: https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/error_code_list.html#c...

[3]: https://github.com/python/typing/issues/1835