MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Real-time webcam motion capture for MMD anime characters
by Amyang | 2025-09-07 00:21:04+00:00
Built a web app that captures your movements via webcam and applies them to 3D anime characters in real-time. No special equipment needed.

Demo: https://mikapo.vercel.app

How it works:

MediaPipe extracts 3D landmarks from your camera feed Custom hierarchical solver converts landmarks to MMD bone rotations Real-time 3D rendering with Babylon.js

Technical challenge: Mapping MediaPipe's world-space coordinates to MMD's bone coordinate system while handling left/right asymmetries and maintaining smooth animations across frames. Features:

Face, hand, and body tracking Multiple input sources (webcam, video files, images) Live character rendering with physics

Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and runs entirely in browser. The pose solver handles the complex math of converting computer vision landmarks into proper character bone rotations. GitHub: https://github.com/AmyangXYZ/MiKaPo
by kstrauser | 2025-09-07 00:21:41+00:00
The sheer amount of overhead induced by insurance is staggering. For example, the sum of the net profits of all insurers represents money extracted from the system without contributing to health. And the amount of time doctors spend documenting patient care over and above what’s medically necessary purely to make insurers happy is time not spent seeing patients. Clinic staff spending hours on the phone each day arguing against denials is wasted money. (Anecdote: an insurer refused to authorize an MRI for a patient until my wife xrayed their damaged tendon, which doesn’t show up on xrays. She had to conduct a useless medical procedure on the patient before they’d pay for one with actual diagnostic value.)

The whole overhead imposed by the useless rent seekers is money not spent on making people healthier.
Show HN: Blockchain that mines blocks with real achievements, not math puzzles
by Amyang | 2025-09-07 00:22:39+00:00
Built a blockchain where you mine blocks by accomplishing real-world goals instead of solving computational puzzles. AI verifies your achievements, peers review them, and successful ones become permanent blockchain records.

Demo: https://proof-of-awesome.app

How it works:

Submit achievements like "ran 5km today" or "learned a new song" with photo evidence AI validates achievement authenticity and difficulty Community peer review for quality control Accepted achievements earn you the right to mine the next block Earn AwesomeCoins as rewards, permanently recorded on-chain

Technical implementation:

React + MUI frontend with real-time updates via Socket.io Node.js + MongoDB backend with simplified blockchain data structure Deterministic phase transitions synchronized across network nodes Built-in achievement categories (fitness, gaming, lifestyle, general)

Why this matters: Traditional proof-of-work wastes energy on abstract math. This creates value through actual human accomplishment while maintaining blockchain security properties. Every block represents someone doing something genuinely awesome in the real world. No crypto speculation, no fees - just a permanent record of human achievement. GitHub: https://github.com/AmyangXYZ/proof-of-awesome
by skrishnamurthi | 2025-09-07 00:22:45+00:00
Racket is a rich and powerful language, but it is also designed with certain specific ideas in mind. You can learn more about the "zen" of Racket here:

https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffkb...

That might help you decide whether Racket will help you with what you're trying to brush up on.
by temp0826 | 2025-09-07 00:23:42+00:00
I mean I sort of get it. When you aren't taking objective data (I don't know what that would even be, brain scans or testing for levels of neurotransmitters, if those levels even mean anything..?) then what can you do besides acknowledge that it's a black box? Guessing what is going on in someone's skull would be disingenuous, no?
by georgeecollins | 2025-09-07 00:24:13+00:00
There are certain things, being an elite athlete, a movie director (and a lot of the key talent), a team that makes a really great video game, a medical resident, where you are going to be competing against people willing to make incredible sacrifices for success including long hours and sacrifices of their personal life.

I agree celebrating regular workers putting in crazy hours is a terrible idea. It shouldn't be the norm, but it is also something that some people will reasonably choose to do.
by dwattttt | 2025-09-07 00:24:26+00:00
> with the growing focus on safety, you can rest assured that an implementation that wouldn’t diagnose erroneous behaviour would be soon out of the game.

Unless they were incumbent and inertia keeps them in. Or they're the only choice you have for a niche target. Or you have some other reason to keep them, such as (thinking?) the performance they bring is more important.
by ejstronge | 2025-09-07 00:24:57+00:00
You may not know this, but pre-eclampsia is not a synonym for hypertension. Instead, hypertension is a manifestation of preeclampsia.

The baby aspirin is not for hypertension (it does nothing for hypertension). Its goal is to prevent changes in placental vasculature that may lead to severe pre-eclampsia in those already at risk for pre-eclampsia. One clinical sign that demonstrates risk for pre-eclampsia is high blood pressure.
by Animats | 2025-09-07 00:25:04+00:00
See this article in Gizmodo.[1]

"In a visible sign of its shifting posture from daredevil innovation to cautious compliance, Tesla this week relocated its robotaxi safety monitors, employees who supervise the autonomous software’s performance and can take over the vehicle’s operation at any moment, from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat."

And this one in Electrek.[2]

The state of Texas recently enacted regulations for self-driving cars that require more reporting. Tesla's Robotaxi with a driver is not a self-driving car under Texas law.

Musk claims Tesla will remove the safety driver by the end of the year. Is there a prediction market on that?

[1] https://gizmodo.com/tesla-robotaxi-2000653821

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
by overfeed | 2025-09-07 00:25:20+00:00
> I think discussing these "rug pulls" without discussing the destructive habit of many large companies to only profit without giving back misses the mark

There's nothing destructive about using software in accordance to it's license, no one's puppy is being kicked.

The problem is too many developers and startups decide to be "paid" in exposure and use permissive licenses as a growth hack while chasing deployment counts and GitHub stars. They are perfectly fine with widespread, unpaid adoption until a hyperscaler with superior infra is involved, then suddenly the license becomes a liability. You can't have your cake and eat it.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-09-07 00:25:24+00:00
Health insurance companies do not provide any medical services. They are the middle man between patients and the places/people that actual do provide medical services. So when they deny coverage, they just keep all the premiums paid by the patient. That money is sucked up by the middle man. So you don't need to raise premiums, you need to lower profits at health insurance companies. Every billion they make in profit is a billion paid by patients and not received in services.
by jv22222 | 2025-09-07 00:25:41+00:00
Speaking as someone who knows nothing about Japanese and is unlikely to use any app to ever learn Japanese... but just as a software ui/ux dev first time in. (ie take this with a pinch of salt)

On the test screens I was expecting there to be an option to shown the answers (ie cheat mode) so I could go through and get 100% score first few times.

And use that as a kind of flash card mode to get my footing in understanding stuff.

Then move out of cheat mode and see if I learnt anything!
by cj | 2025-09-07 00:25:52+00:00
Much worse, if for no other reason than applying it and having it leave behind a white residue on your skin makes people much less likely to reapply once it rubs off.

I always pack my own sunscreen when traveling to islands that ban normal sunscreen. I feel bad if it actually damages the reefs, but reef safe sunscreen is terrible at protecting from the sun.
by artyom | 2025-09-07 00:26:15+00:00
You may be right about nostalgic reasons, but as a freshman during the emergence of microcontrollers, I've asked the same question to and old professor, in the sense of "why discrete digital electronics is still widely used?".

His response still resonates with me today: a military grade 555 would work in extreme conditions (e.g. heat), would last pretty much forever, would consume virtually no power, and will still cost you a penny.

Sometimes that's exactly what you need. Reliability, durability and cost trumps the power of programmability.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-07 00:26:20+00:00
I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at peak use while charging without drawing down the battery.
by spacechild1 | 2025-09-07 00:26:59+00:00
> This means C++ is riddled with types that have unrelated "I'm empty" state

Again, these cases are still rare. Most classes either don't require user-defined move operations, or they have some notion of emptiness or default state.

> And if we don't want to allow None? Too bad, you can't express that in C++

That's actually a good example! Nitpick: you can express it in C++, just not without additional logic and some overhead :)
by cma | 2025-09-07 00:27:23+00:00
It's public record, on Musk's word, that Eberhard was in the series A too for $75,000:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/12/29/how-much-equit...

Your claim was

> They contributed no money

Where did you get this from?

Tesla also licensed the design from tZero before the series-A I believe. And Eberhard was sort of keeping tZero afloat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY
by coldblues | 2025-09-07 00:27:41+00:00
I agree with you, but Anki is a generalized flashcard SRS memorization tool, not specifically made for learning Japanese, so it's not within my area of critique; I'm thinking of apps similar to Duolingo. It works extremely well because it helps you memorize very efficiently. One of the few applications that will indeed boost your learning by a lot. Anything requiring manual input rather than a simple Again or Good button choice tends to be worse. Any Anki deck requiring manual input as an answer should not be used.
by wodenokoto | 2025-09-07 00:28:51+00:00
Ajatt is absolutely ridiculous and I never understood how it rose to prominence online.

His result to efforts ratio listed back in the days was terrible and reading through is blog - back when it was a blog - was impossible. Everything read like an informercial and never got to the point.

Last time I checked it was a book club. Didn’t bother to check this time.
by afr0ck | 2025-09-07 00:29:03+00:00
CXL uses the PCIe physical layer, so you just need to buy hardware that understands the protocol, namely the CPU and the expansion boards. AMD Genoa (e.g. EPYC 9004) supports CXL 1.1 as well as Intel Saphire Rapids and all subsequent models do. For CXL memory expansion boards, you can get from Samsung or Marvell. I got a 128 GB model from Samsung with 25 GB/s read throughput.
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-07 00:29:36+00:00
> For starters, this propaganda often mischaracterizes the Monroe Doctrine as the US preying on its neighbors the way Russia and China are currently doing, when in fact it was a policy aimed at keeping wars between European colonial powers away from the newly independent countries in the Americas.

...so we can freely do as we please. Of course we've been preying on our neighbors. We've been invading and deposing all across the Americas to force alignment with our interests for well over a century now. We even have terrorist training camps hosted on our soil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...

What, do you think that our invading Grenada, or Panama, is somehow in their interests? It's a flagrant violation of international law and sovereignty. To imagine that this is somehow an abnormal deviation from our "protection" of our neighbors is... well, I honestly didn't realize anyone thought that way anymore.

Furthermore, we didn't enforce this doctrine when France invaded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Saint_Pierre_and_Mi...), nor in the Falklands war.

Look I can understand not thinking america is "evil" or entirely machiavellian, but it seems just as absurd to take any noble intentions we claim to have at face value. The monroe doctrine is as good an example of this as any.
by webdevver | 2025-09-07 00:30:53+00:00
C++26, C++29, C++32, ... C++50?

Surely all good things come to an end, but where? i reckon there will be a C++29. what about C++38? C++43 sounds terrifying. Mid-century C++? there is no way in hell i will still be staying up to date with C++43. Personally I've already cut the cord at C++11.
by clbrmbr | 2025-09-07 00:30:54+00:00
Great start! I like the aesthetic and focus on a single language. Most of all, making it open source and just getting it out there!

I'd love to collaborate, but I think we've got to look at overall concept first. There's a lot of information on the screen and it's not really clear how the learner journeys through. Greatly reducing the amount of info on the screen at once, focusing learner's attention on a single path would be helpful.

There's many theories of language acquisition, but I think Krashen is most on-point: we learn through comprehensible input. New vocabulary really needs to be encountered in context of meaningful sentences that are understandable to the learner. Further, when training, production with spaced repetition is really the most effective strategy.

I'd love to see there be a really great free learning tool that brings a pedagogically sound approach to Japanese learners!
by jtickle | 2025-09-07 00:32:28+00:00
I know ultraviolet CCD sensors exist and are probably expensive, specialty scientific equipment. I've kinda had this hope that one smartphone manufacturer (any of the big ones) would go to the trouble of including a UV camera and drive costs down. On the one hand you can market a unique and fun photography tool that lets you see the world in a different way. And then in the more serious part of the commercial, you show friends at the beach taking UV pictures of each other after applying sunscreen and one person says "You missed a spot right there, mate."

Plus I'd imagine you could immediately tell if your sunblock were BS and do an even better job of holding these folks accountable. You and buddy of similar skin tone both buy SPF 50 and apply it, take pictures, and see that one of you is not as well protected.
by asdff | 2025-09-07 00:34:03+00:00
If anything the hackers in north korea are probably world class if the government is getting their students into focused training programs early in their schooling. Western nations have nothing equivalent due to schooling being generalist and undergrad and grad school not really introducing you to the sort of work you'd actually do on the job as a hacker. 22 year old western hacker for a 3 letter agency is going to have maybe a 6 month softball tangentially related internship of experience under their belt while the north korean might have years and years by that point.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-07 00:34:24+00:00
>Will we pay the 20% tax/fine? Grudgingly yes. Particularly if this stuff becomes law and local labor force becomes even more expensive than it is now.

This is the point. They could just BAN outsourcing. But letting it just be more expensive is a compromise to allow companies to find people when overseas is the only way to do it.

>The same sort of thing happened with manufacturing jobs. You can wish for those jobs to come back all you want. It is not happening in any significant numbers.

If the tariffs stick, and get set to a sufficiently high rate, then the jobs will come back. In the meantime, investors are scared to be screwed over on new factories in the US which would be uncompetitive without tariffs.
by abustamam | 2025-09-07 00:35:33+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I think another comment pointed out, no one on their death bed ever said "I wish I had worked more."

I like working. I like making money. But I love my wife and daughter. As long as our needs are covered, and honestly, a lot of our wants, and save enough for retirement/emergency, I see no need to overwork myself.

I hope the working class just rejects this notion altogether. This is toxic for our society. If people don't push back, then companies will keep asking for more and more and it affects everyone.
by kens | 2025-09-07 00:36:05+00:00
I went into a lot more of the Navajo history in my previous article [1] so I didn't repeat it in the new article. The quick summary is that the Navajo suffered a century of oppression, were forced off their land in the Long Walk, and had their sheep slaughtered in the 1930s in the Navajo Livestock Reduction. In the 1960s, the Navajo had 65% unemployment, $300 per capita income, and lacked basic infrastructure. Various groups looked to industrialization as a solution, so Fairchild opened an IC manufacturing facility on Navajo land in 1965, employing 1200 Navajo workers and becoming the nation's largest non-government employer of American Indians. The plant was generally considered a success, but in 1975, Fairchild had business problems and laid off 140 Navajo employees. Things went downhill and a radical group, AIM (American Indian Movement), took over the plant with rifles. The armed occupation ended peacefully after a week, but Fairchild closed the plant and moved production to Asia.

[1] https://www.righto.com/2024/08/pentium-navajo-fairchild-ship...
by tony | 2025-09-07 00:37:02+00:00
Location: RGV, Texas, USA (US Citizen)

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, AWS, Datadog, Sentry, React, AI LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini)

Résumé/CV: https://tony.cv, https://tony.cv/cv.pdf

Email: tony [at] git-pull [dot] com

Interested in AI oppurtunities, shoot me an email and let's say hi! Mission-oriented, senior+ software engineer. Veteran of 2 YC startups, 2 acquihires.

I've contributed to over 100 open source projects. Find my packages tmuxp and libtmux in major Linux distros, FreeBSD, and brew.
by dwattttt | 2025-09-07 00:37:24+00:00
It's an interesting proposal. A new grammar which can express everything (legal) that C++ can, can be automatically translated, but can avoid being ambiguous (https://stackoverflow.com/a/794083).

You'd have an existing language with a new syntax; it can perfectly interact with existing C++ code, but you could make those suggested changes, and could also express things in the new syntax that couldn't be done in the old one.

EDIT: taking an example elsewhere in this thread; taking an address of an uninitialised variable and passing it to a function. Today the compiler can't (without inter-procedure analysis) tell whether this is a use of uninitialised data, or whether it's only going to write/initialise the variable.

A new syntax could allow you to express that distinction.
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-07 00:37:35+00:00
Not to mention veterinary pathways. My ex GF was volunteering at a vet practice, where they kept no track of their meds, other than "hey boss, we seek to be low on Ketamine, swing past the animal pill shop and get a load of it pls".

Also there are travel pharmacies, which will sell you prescription drugs, so long as you insist you're about to go travelling somewhere remote.

The whole pretence that dangerous drugs are controlled and kept away from people is a pretty thin veneer.
by paulcole | 2025-09-07 00:37:36+00:00
> It’s a toxic, mostly unrewarding effort

I’m impressed that you’ve surveyed everyone to confirm this because surely you wouldn’t cast a value judgment based on your own beliefs?

> No, but as a rank and file employee you only have access to so much information

But surely if I enjoy spending time at work and thinking about work then I do have that opportunity to continue contributing ideas and effort after 8 hours?

I get that you don’t like the 996 idea. But that doesn’t make it objectively bad which is what you seem to believe.
by andy99 | 2025-09-07 00:37:44+00:00
For many years there has been an extortion email going around along these lines. It's apparently effective because for some percentage of people it may match their behavior

E.g from 2022: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2022/11/28/has-a-ha...

Unfortunately publicity about this attack makes the scam email all the more plausible.

On the plus side, the whole thing is easily avoidable and hopefully awareness will improve peoples operational security.
by asdff | 2025-09-07 00:37:58+00:00
It makes sense why they wouldn't from a game theory standpoint. Why not shift liability? Waymo would too if they could set up such a structure in a way that makes sense. It is a little different for a cab where a 13 year old could call one on moms cellphone vs a car you buy outright and is registered to a licensed driver who pays for the insurance on it.

Still, my point is all this has nothing to do with the tech. It is all regulatory/legal checkers.
by thisoneisreal | 2025-09-07 00:38:13+00:00
This strikes me as a perfect description of the core problem. Whenever I think about this, what sticks out to me is that other animals do all sorts of things that look like "intelligence," or at least cognition, and they do it totally without language. My cat clearly recognizes objects, assigns them different values ("scary," "tasty," "fun to play with"), interacts with them in some kind of loop, even predicts their behavior to some extent and acts curious about them (it was really fun to watch her try to figure out the construction guys when I had some work done on my house over a period of a few days). These strike me as much more foundational aspects of intelligence than language. Language has of course immeasurably contributed to what makes human cognition and intelligence, but it's almost certainly built on these pre-linguistic foundations. Another very good hint in this direction is all of the non-verbal thinking that humans have done. Einstein has a famous quote about thinking visually and physically, without using language at all. All of these are powerful suggestions that something else is going on, and most likely some aspect of these things are necessary for true intelligence.
by mmillis1 | 2025-09-07 00:38:47+00:00
SEEKING WORK | North America Time zones - Remote | PHP/JS Full Stack Dev Part-Time: ~20 Hours per week Location: Southern California

Technologies: PHP (12 yrs), Laravel (6+ yrs, subject matter expert), MySQL, JavaScript, Vue, Tailwind, Bootstrap, REST APIs, Inertia.js

Email: mmillis@pm.me

I'm a full stack developer with 12 years of experience in PHP and 6+ years of specializing in Laravel. I've built and maintained large web applications, internal tools, and SaaS platforms for startups and large companies. I enjoy working on clean, readable codebases and simplifying dev workflows. I'm searching for contract or part-time remote work with a small to medium-sized team that values craftsmanship and clarity. I'm eager to jump into established codebases or help architect new ones.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-09-07 00:38:55+00:00
>As far as I know he's a crackpot who makes up random shit that has no basis in science.

Well for me then you are in the category of most people. Ill read/informed and will parrot what mainstream 'science' has to say. Anything that one says that is against the common narrative in medicine is struck down by the 's' word. You can laugh at me.