MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KoolKat23 | 2025-09-03 14:44:35+00:00
It's still early stages, that is why.

It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code.

I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter.

Immateriality has abstracted that particular few line codes away.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-03 14:44:51+00:00
> These days, I'm fairly senior and don't touch code much anymore but I find it really really instructive to get my hands dirty and struggle through new code and ideas. I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

If you just use prompts and don't actually read the output, and figure out why it worked, and why it works, you will never get better. But if you take the time to understand why it works, you will be better for it, and might not even bother asking next time.

I've said it before, but when I first started using Firefox w/ autocorrect in like 2005, I made it a point to learn to spell from it, so that over time I would make less typos. English is my second language, so its always been an uphill battle for me despite having a native American English accent. Autocorrect on Firefox helped me tremendously.

I can use LLMs to plunge into things I'm afraid of trying out due to impostor syndrome and get more done sooner and learn on the way there. I think the key thing is to use tools correctly.

AI is like the limitless drug to a degree, you have an insane fountain of knowledge at your fingertips, you just need to use it wisely and learn from it.
by rayiner | 2025-09-03 14:45:05+00:00
None of those things implicate “due process,” which is a very old, very specific concept. It dates back to the Magna Carta, and refers to the legal process subjects of the sovereign are entitled to before deprivation of property rights: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/due....

Due process doesn’t and has never applied to military actions against foreigners outside the country’s jurisdiction. Indeed, I’m unaware of any western country that applies its concept of domestic legal process rights to military actions against foreign actors in international waters. Such a concept would totally turn upside down how legal systems think about the boundaries between the sphere of domestic law and law enforcement and the sphere of military action.

As to Congressional abdication, you might have an argument that we need some sort of Congressional sanction, as Jefferson obtained against the Barbary Pirates: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers.... But that ship sailed a long time ago. Under the War Powers Resolution, the President is authorized to basically shoot first, ask for permission later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
by Uehreka | 2025-09-03 14:45:33+00:00
It’s tough to name the best local TTS since they all seem to trade off on quality and features and none of them are as good as ElevenLabs’ closed-source offering.

However Kokoro-82M is an absolute triumph in the small model space. It curbstomps models 10-20x its size in terms of quality while also being runnable on like, a Raspberry Pi. It’s the kind of thing I’m surprised even exists. Its downside is that it isn’t super expressive, but the af_heart voice is extremely clean, and Kokoro is way more reliable than other TTS models: It doesn’t have the common failure mode where you occasionally have a couple extra syllables thrown in because you picked a bad seed.

If you want something that can do convincing voice acting, either pay for ElevenLabs or keep waiting. If you’re trying to build a local AI assistant, Kokoro is perfect, just use that and check the space again in like 6 months to see if something’s beaten it. https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M
by ergonaught | 2025-09-03 14:45:35+00:00
No idea whether this holds up, but the human body is all about conditioning and maximizing energy efficiency, so it should at least be unsurprising if true.

My vehicle has a number of self-driving capabilities. When I used them, my brain rapidly stopped attending to the functions I'd given over, to the extent that there was a "gap" before I noticed it was about to do the wrong thing. On resumption of performing that work myself, it was almost as if I had forgotten some elements of it for a moment while my brain sorted it out.

No real reason to think that outsourcing our thinking/writing/etc will cause our brains to respond any differently. Most of the "reasoned" arguments I see against that idea seem based on false equivalences.
by drinkcocacola | 2025-09-03 14:45:53+00:00
Java is an amazing language, but about 4 years ago I moved to Kotlin (back-end): It has all the powerful Java features but it is way simpler to write and also nullability is embedded in the language (no more @NonNull @NotNull Optional<T> stuff). You might find a balance: the power of the JVM and its ecosystem that you can access through a beautiful language that is Kotlin.
by jbstack | 2025-09-03 14:46:59+00:00
It's a tradeoff. After using ChatGPT for a while you develop somewhat of an instinct for when it might be hallucinating, especially when you start probing it for the "why" part and you get a feel for whether its explanations make sense. Having at least some domain knowledge helps too - you're more at risk of being fooled by hallucinations if you are trying to get it to do something you know nothing about.

While not foolproof, when you combine this with some basic fact-checking (e.g. quickly skim read a command's man page to make sure the explanation for each flag sounds right, or read the relevant paragraph from the manual) plus the fact that you see in practice whether the proposed solution fixes the problem, you can reach a reasonably high level of accuracy most of the time.

Even with the risk of hallucinations it's still a great time saver because you short-circuit the process of needing to work out which command is useful and reading the whole of the man page / manual until you understand which component parts do the job you want. It's not perfect but neither is Googling - that can lead to incorrect answers too.

To give an example of my own, the other day I was building a custom Incus virtual machine image from scratch from an ISO. I wanted to be able to provision it with cloud-init (which comes configured by default in cloud-enabled stock Incus images). For some reason, even with cloud-init installed in the guest, the host's provisioning was being ignored. This is a rather obscure problem for which Googling was of little use because hardly anyone makes cloud-init enabled images from ISOs in Incus (or if they do, they don't write about it on the internet).

At this point I could have done one of two things: (a) spend hours or days learning all about how cloud-init works and how Incus interacts with it until I eventually reached the point where I understood what the problem was; or (b) ask ChatGPT. I opted for the latter and quickly figured out the solution and why it worked, thus saving myself a bunch of pointless work.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-03 14:47:09+00:00
Good point, and really just semantics. I guess you could say native mobile apps are “firmware,” using my criteria.

But I put as much effort into my mobile apps, as I did, into my firmware projects (it’s been decades since I wrote firmware, BTW. The landscape is quite different, these days -This is my first ever shipped engineering project[0]. Back then, we could still use an ICE to debug our software).

It just taught me to be very circumspect about Quality.

I do feel that any software (in any part of the stack) I write that affects moving parts, needs to be quite well-tested. I never had issues with firmware, but drivers are another matter. I've fried stuff that cost a lot.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/TF30194/TF30194-Manual-1987.pdf
by WalterSchulz | 2025-09-03 14:47:37+00:00
- Lua script support. It is not complete (in ML hardly anything is) but allows to access a lot of ML and Canon functions. Years ago someone made a script for automating solar eclipse shooting catching all critical phases while chilling and enjoying the view. - Introduced full electronic shutter (Silent Pic) for Digic 4 and 5. - Focus stacking for macro and - via Lua script - for landscape. - Exposure simulation switch for "cheaper" cams - Trap focus - Dual-ISO. Some HDR mode but without ghosting by manipulating sensor lines to record at different ISOs - Ghost image overlay - Customizable cropmark overlays (grids and others) - Fps finetuning. Several folks used it to record vintage monitors with very, very strange timings and without rolling bars.30.01 fps? No problem! - Zebras and focus peaking, vectorscope, wavelength monitoring, false colour support - RAW histogram - Bracketing with up to 11 frames (But why? ;-> ) - Intervalometer and bracketing (a bit more configurable than Canon has now) - Trigger by LCD's IR sensor (if any) or Audio (clap your hand) or motion detect - Rack focus - Display mirroring and upside/down options - Configurable presets (up to 15) - 30 minutes override for RAW recording, USB and HDMI streaming. Oh, and we have a new option to record native H.264/MOV for more than 29:59. Prototype but working. -Better AF micoradjustment for the cams having that option by Canon. - ,,,

Frankly: I once tried to maintain a help file and browsed through a lot of lesser known features. Took me days and I didn't even test RAW/MLV recording.
by duxup | 2025-09-03 14:47:39+00:00
> The CCP apparently sees people like me as valuable assets in their propaganda war, who can give the impression that there is nothing to fear from China.

I saw this across some various interest / hobby topics. A social media person documents their trip to China and starts dropping lines about how happy everyone is … then out of the blue they drop in weirdly off topic lines how they didn’t see any signs of mistreatment of Uyghurs (because tourists are likely to just run into these things?)… and then folks on other social media sites start linking to that video when the topic of china comes up. The linking to those stories happened on HN a lot for a while.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-03 14:47:41+00:00
> if you wanted chicken, they killed it in front of you. Needless to say, being directly confronted with the process…I didn’t eat meat the entire time.

The one time I had opportunity to kill a bird with my own hands and eat it, I ate it with far greater respect and less waste than any meat I'd ever even before or since. I wish there were an efficient way to bring the consumer closer to the animal in everyday Western society. I doubt that we would consume less meat, but we would certainly have more respect for it.
by nancyminusone | 2025-09-03 14:48:08+00:00
As someone who does these things, I am curious to know how and why you would choose AI.

Working these from text seems to be the hardest way I could think to learn them. I've yet to encounter a written description as to what it feels like to solder, what a good/bad job actually looks like, etc. A well shot video is much better at showing you what you need to do (although finding one is getting more and more difficult)
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-03 14:48:16+00:00
Hard to say. It is a write after free which rust technically prevents, but it depends on the abstractions chosen; it’s entirely likely there will be similar attacks that focus on exploiting flaws in the unsafe that will exist to trigger similar flaws. It should just be harder to exploit and easier to enforce that most of the kernel code is using “safe” abstractions.
by WithinReason | 2025-09-03 14:48:24+00:00
Stereo images have no explicit 3D information and are just 2D sensor data. But even if you wanted to use stereo data, you would restrict yourself to stereo datasets and wouldn't be able to use 99.9% of video data out there to train on which wasn't captured in stereo, that's the part that's against the Bitter Lesson.
by crinkly | 2025-09-03 14:48:40+00:00
This stuff really annoys me but the problem is really well solved elsewhere.

When you buy an Apple product it has a number on it Axxxx and a serial number somewhere. That's all you need to identify your product to anyone. That includes service manuals and spare parts.

And as far as warranty registration goes, they register it at the point of sale/activation as the warranty starting. Job done. No humans / lookups / anything required. It just happens.
by falcor84 | 2025-09-03 14:48:54+00:00
I don't think the concern is that non-experts would manage large software systems, but that experts would use it to manage larger software systems on their own before needing to hire additional devs, and in that way reduce the number of available roles. I.e. it increases the "pain threshold" before I would say to myself "it's worth the hassle to hire and onboard another dev to help with this".
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 14:48:58+00:00
Yeah, the external timer behaviour is fairly strong evidence. Curious though. These cams all seem to have a milli- and micro-second hw clock, and can both schedule and sleep against either. But it's also true that every cam has some weird quirks. And I don't know the 5d2 internals well.

From what I've seen, the image capture process is state machine based and tries to avoid sleeps and delays. Which makes sense for RTOS and professional photography.

If you care enough to debug it, pop into the discord and I can make you some tests to run.
by Jensson | 2025-09-03 14:49:08+00:00
> The number of users actually checking the output of a compiler is nonexistent. You just trust it.

Quite a few who work on low level systems do this. I have done this a few times to debug build issues: this one time a single file suddenly made compile times go up by orders of magnitude, the compiler inlined a big sort procedure in an unrolled loop, so it added the sorting code hundreds of times over in a single function and created a gigantic binary that took ages to compile since it tried to optimize that giant function.

That is slow both in runtime and compile time, so I added a tag to not inline the sort there, and all the issues disappeared. The sort didn't have a tag to inline it, so the compiler just made an error here, it shouldn't have inlined such a large function in an unrolled loop.
by chii | 2025-09-03 14:49:31+00:00
> my only job is to identify places where the current spec and the intended functionality differ and create a new spec to mitigate.

and to be able to do this efficiently or even "correctly", you'd need to have had mountains of experience evaluating an implementation, and be able to imagine the consequences of that implementation against the desired outcome.

Doing this requires experience that would get eroded by the use of an LLM. It's very similar to higher level maths (stuff like calculus) being much more difficult if you had poor arithmetic/algebra skills.
by daveguy | 2025-09-03 14:49:44+00:00
> An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B.

That is just not correct. There is no rule that says an abstraction is strictly functional or deterministic.

In fact, the original abstraction was likely language, which is clearly neither.

The cleanest and easiest abstractions to deal with have those properties, but they are not required.
by Uehreka | 2025-09-03 14:50:00+00:00
Yes: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-to-speech

Generally if a model is trending on that page, there’s enough juice for it to be worth a try. There’s a lot of subjective-opinion-having in this space, so beyond “is it trending on HF” the best eval is your own ears. But if something is not trending on HF it is unlikely to be much good.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-09-03 14:50:06+00:00
Muscles atrophy from lack of use - as an aging cyclist with increasing numbers of e-bikes all around, I think I may some day have to use one because of age, but what are all these younger people doing, cheating themselves out of exercise?

And so it is with many things. I wrote cursive right through the end of my high school years, but while I can type well on a computer, I have trouble even writing block lettering without mistakes now, and cursive is a lost cause.

Ubiquitous electronic calculators have eroded the heroic mental calculation skills of old. And now artificial "thinking machines" to do the thinking for you cause your brain to atrophy. Colour me surprised. The Whispering Earring story was mentioned here just recently but is totally topical.

https://croissanthology.com/earring
by colincooke | 2025-09-03 14:50:18+00:00
It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable.

Their trial design and interpretation of results is not properly done (i.e. they are making unfair comparison of LLM users to non-LLM users), so they can't really make the kind of claims they are making.

This would not stand up to peer review in it's current form.

I'm also saying this as someone who generally does believe these declines exist, but this is not the evidence it claims to be.
by rfrey | 2025-09-03 14:50:23+00:00
People interested in this might also appreciate this small channel: a no-holds-barred 5 axis machine with expected sub-micron precision. I've learned a lot about what kind of components are available when budget is not an issue (I'll bet this machine will cost 100k by the time it's done). https://www.youtube.com/@kasramehraky9283
by kragen | 2025-09-03 14:50:25+00:00
That's cherry-picking a single country's stock market with the benefit of hindsight, though. Over the time frame you're talking about, that country became the world's sole superpower and also underwent an unprecedented redistribution of income from workers to investors. Neither of those things can happen again in the US, they aren't very likely to happen anywhere else, and if you had invested at those points in time, you wouldn't have known they were going to happen. If investors had known they were going to happen, they would have bid the price up higher earlier on.

And of course it isn't a risk-free return.

Consider what happened to investors in Germany, Hungary, or Romania in the 01930s, or South Vietnam in the 01960s, or Afghanistan in the 01970s, or Iraq in the 01990s.

You might think this is irrelevant because you don't live in 01930s Germany or 01970s Afghanistan or 01990s Iraq; you live in the USA.

But, if you live in the USA, you don't live in the USA of the 01970s or the 01930s. You live in the USA of 02025. In 02025, the country most like 01930s USA or 01970s USA is China, which is obvious if you read books from the USA from those periods. The USA in 02025 is the country that's been trying and failing to build high-speed rail for 60 years, since Japan got it working, and just elected a xenophobic demagogue who praises dictatorship; it's much more like 01980s Russia or 01930s Italy.

Warren Buffett said that, in the long run, you can't expect the stock market to return more than the long-run economic growth rate, which you can't expect to consistently be more than 3%. I don't understand the logic behind either of these propositions, but I suspect Buffett knows more about market returns than I do.

— ⁂ —

By contrast, if you can get an 0.8% discount on the potatoes your family eats by bulk-buying enough potatoes for the next three months, that's about a 10% annual return on investment, and the risk is pretty low—and almost entirely under your control. And, in practice, you can often get a much bigger discount than that, especially if you assign some cost to the errand of going potato shopping. You just have to make sure you have proper potato storage and that you don't have a sudden dropoff in family potato consumption.

How do I figure that ROI? Well, the amount of extra money you have tied up in potatoes oscillates between two months' worth and zero, with an average of one month of potatoes. But your expenditures on potatoes are 0.8% less each month, which is your earnings from that investment. Every year, you save 10% of a month of potatoes: 10% of your investment. Tax-free.

If you learn to calculate ROIs and reorganize your household expenses on the basis of ROIs, whatever income you have will go dramatically further than it would for someone who hasn't done that.
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-09-03 14:50:42+00:00
US has tons of very dense areas with lots of places that can be easily reached by modern public transit, should political priorities ever change. Trains don't go everywhere because of a conscious, deliberate and top-down (centrally planned) choice to invest in car infrastructure. Trains of course used to go everywhere in North America, and were economically viable just fine, until cars were artificially made more economically viable. Stuck with cars due to conscious choices of past generations, unsuccessfully looking for external excuses ever since.
by Miraste | 2025-09-03 14:50:44+00:00
The AI act being "well developed" means it's dense enough that compliance can't be done without the backing of a major corporation's legal team. Tencent is a major corporation, but this is a janky research project that's not part of a product. The researchers don't have legal knowledge of EU regulations, and they probably have limited or zero access to anyone who does. Cutting off EU countries is the safe and responsible choice.
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-03 14:50:44+00:00
>If it's not static and it grows, then it cannot be scarce

Elaborate? Scarcity means demand for the resources exceeds the available supply. There is essentially unlimited human wants and only finite resources. The resource quantity can grow but it will never meet demand. Even if all growth goes to the people with less resources, the resources will still be scarce.
by krig | 2025-09-03 14:50:50+00:00
Well, the statement is circular, colloquial speech doesn't have to be coherent. It's my understanding of what people generally mean when they complain about UB in the C standard, and it seems to be what gingerbill means too.

My take on what he is saying is that the odin compiler won't try to exploit that there is some behavior which is platform-defined or only knowable at runtime to do aggressive optimizations etc.

https://xcancel.com/TheGingerBill/status/1495004577531367425

To point out that use after free is possible in Odin is not really a gotcha unless you really are just arguing semantics. That's by design, just like use after free is possible in C or C++ or Rust too.
by neya | 2025-09-03 14:50:56+00:00
I still have my 600D - it's hand down the most user-friendly DSLR I've ever owned, thanks to Magic Lantern. I also have a Sony A7S2. But, it is nowhere near the ease of use of my 600D. 12 years ago or so, I discovered Magic Lantern and I was blown away. It literally turned my camera into a high-end unit (for its time). What blows me away is that, my 600D can capture RAW video after installing ML. My Sony still can do only 10-bit video, 12 years later. The team deserves so much more funding and credit than they receive. I'm extremely grateful to the project and the people behind. I still haven't sold my 600D - only because of Magic Lantern. Thank you team :)