MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Identicons – Deterministic pixel art avatars from any text
by maxcomperatore | 2025-10-05 23:14:58+00:00
I've built a unique identicon system where any text input becomes your permanent digital domain - same input always generates the same beautiful pixel avatar.

Think of it like collecting domain names, but for visual identity:

• Deterministic Identity: "alice" always creates the same unique avatar • No Central Authority: Your identicon exists as long as your text does • Collectible Assets: Each identicon has RPG stats (attack: 12.3, rarity: epic) • Visual Branding: Consistent avatar across all platforms without uploads • Multiple Tools: ASCII art generator, hash calculator, color palette extractor

It's like having a personalized pixel art domain that you own forever - no registrar fees, no renewals, just pure deterministic beauty.

Features: • Text-to-pixel-art avatars (deterministic generation) • Gaming stats and rarity system • Virtual marketplace for collecting • Multiple creative tools included

Try creating your digital domain: https://identiqwe.maxcomperatore.com/
by vee-kay | 2025-10-05 23:14:59+00:00
$1000 is more than the monthly wage of many people around the world, including many in USA (where the minimum daily wage has stagnated for decades).

e.g., in most Asian and African countries, Apple is considered as a luxury brand.

Of course, the Apple fanboys will be quick to compare it to Samsung and other companies who also sell $1000+ premium phones.

But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.

So yeah, when most people look at Apple products, they do assume their buyer to be "prestige status" (one who prefers luxury good/product).

It is also why Apple refuses to bundle chargers and cables (or at least, it tried to do so, until EU forced it to bundle them; but Apple does such cheapskate shenanigans in the other continents, where pro-consumer watchdogs/laws are lax), because it knows its fans will buy whatever it sells at whatever price points it sells even if basic accessories are not bundled. Unfortunately, Samsung and other companies are also following suit on such evil (anti-consumer) tactics.

Apple is also notorious for making it very hard for customers/third-parties to repair its products. This is why EU had to enforce its Right to Repair law on Apple stringently, and EU also forced Apple to give USB Type-C charging port (instead of Lighting port) on its devices which other manufacturers were doing so since years.

TLDR: Companies can act evil only if we let them get away with their evil ways.
by 100721 | 2025-10-05 23:16:23+00:00
As someone who’s fairly tech-literate but has a big blind spot in cryptography, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for articles, blog posts, or smaller books on the topic!

My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable. You sound both very knowledgeable on the topic, and very confident in the safety of modern encryption. I’m thinking maybe my understanding is obsolete!
by levocardia | 2025-10-05 23:16:39+00:00
Could it instead be the case that these tokens were initialized at some mean value across the dataset (plus a little noise), and then never changed because they were never seen in training? Not sure if that is state of the art anymore but e.g. in Karpathy's videos he uses a trick like this to avoid the "sharp hockey stick" drop in loss in the early gradient descent steps, which can result in undesirably big weight updates.
by alganet | 2025-10-05 23:17:16+00:00
No, you don't do that. You do exactly the opposite, you make it surprisingly neutral and reasonable so it gets praise and widespread use.

Then, you introduce the bias into relative unknown concepts that no one prompts for. Preferrably, obscure and unknown words that are very unlikely to be checked for ideologically. Finally, when you want the model to push for something, you introduce an idea in the general population (with a meme, a popular video, maybe even an expression) and let people interact with the model given this new information. No one would think the model is biased for that new thing (because the thing happened after the model launch), but it is, and you knew all along.

The way to avoid this kind of influence is to be cautious with new popular terms that emerge seemingly out of nowhere. Basically, to avoid using that new phrase or word that everyone is using.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-05 23:17:44+00:00
Are models necessarily IP?

If generative AI models' output can't be copyrighted and turned into private IP, who is to say the output of gradient descent and back-propagation similarly can't be copyrighted? Neither are the creative output of a human being, but both are the product of automated and computed statistical processes.

Similarly, if AI companies want to come at dataset compilation and model training from a fair use angle, would it not be fair use to use the same models for similar purposes if models were obtained through eminent domain? Or through, like in Anthropic's training case, explicit piracy?
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-05 23:18:32+00:00
She clarified that in her subsequent article. It was the result of Ben Shneiderman's and his students' controlled empirical studies, not whimsy or arbitrary "creative" design (which we suffer from so much these days).

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
by ebbi | 2025-10-05 23:19:21+00:00
Just today I came across Home Tech Co: https://www.hometechco.com/

Their take on monitors that aren't just the typical black plastic office-aesthetic slabs. I like what they've done with it, and personally would have been interested but this is 27" 4k and I can't downgrade from 5k (converted an old imac to work as an external display and I love it!)
by whoknowsidont | 2025-10-05 23:21:17+00:00
>runs 4x as fast in .net10 vs .net8.

Is this open source? Do you have numbers? I've been coding in .NET since it was "a thing" and frankly I'm having trouble mapping the optimizations to a local application at that magnitude.

The optimizations are seen at scale, they really won't mean much for your local application. Not a 3x+ improvement at least.
by westurner | 2025-10-05 23:21:39+00:00
> Currently, the market price for just 100 grams of this type of conductive plastic would be around USD 100,000—about ten times as much as actual gold. But for the human body, it is in fact the absence of metals that makes this material so valuable.

Is there any reason that conductive Graphene and Carbon allotropes like Carbon Nanotubes (CNT) can't solve for in-vivo applications?

Why plastic?

There are also plastic waveguides now; "Shattering the 'copper or optics' paradigm: humble plastic waveguides outperform" (2024) https://www.techradar.com/pro/shattering-the-copper-or-optic...
by ianburrell | 2025-10-05 23:22:11+00:00
There are more divided highways than interstates. There are US highways like US-101 or states ones like CA-99. Also, all of the US and state highways are called highways, at least when not in towns, not just divided ones.

There are areas of the west that have enough coverage for driving through but not for trips. You would be pushing it visiting the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon cause La Grande or Joseph only have slow chargers. Another is the "Loneliest Road in America", US-50 in Nevada, has 285 mile gap.
by debadyutirc | 2025-10-05 23:22:28+00:00
This is awesome. Love seeing more teams investing early in observability and evals instead of treating them as an afterthought.

Your setup (LLM-assessed complexity, semantic success metrics, tool-level telemetry) hits what a lot of orgs miss, tying evaluation and observability together. Most teams stop at traces and latency, but without semantic evals, you can’t really explain or improve behavior.

We’ve seen the same pattern across production agent systems: once you layer in LLM-as-judge evals, distributed tracing, and data quality signals, debugging turns from “black box” to “explainable system.” That’s when scaling becomes viable.

Would love to hear how you’re handling drift or regression detection across those metrics. With CoAgent, we’ve been exploring automated L2–L4 eval loops (semantic, behavioral, business-value levels) and it’s been eye-opening.
by mcdeltat | 2025-10-05 23:22:47+00:00
The way my psychologist explained social anxiety to me was it's based off an innate system in our brain which is sensitive to social rejection. Rejection is potentially very bad because that might mean we get kicked out of our group and die (at least that is true thousands of years ago). Anxiety is overthinking and subconsciously trying to control all the outcomes to reduce rejection. And this includes avoidance as a response.

This social anxiety pattern can be reinforced over time with negative or even neutral experiences, particularly through childhood. The system becomes attuned to unpleasant confirming evidence. Some brains may be particularly prone to this too.

I think this explanation is consistent with all the experiences people are sharing in this thread. The core model at work is still the social rejection system, even if the exact behaviours and rationalisations you have are a little different.

And the treatment is exposure therapy to get more neutral and positive experiences. Which can be very hard because your brain can be very strongly configured to avoid rejection. You may have to start very gently from steps which may not be particularly challenging (e.g. have a friend in a new coffee shop).
My worst hackathon experience: rate limits, chaos, and broken judging
by tothemooon | 2025-10-05 23:23:34+00:00
I recently participated in a hackathon hosted alongside Advertising Week, using twelvelabs’ API as a requirement.

The experience was… rough. The API had a hard 50-request limit with no visible counter. Every time we hit the limit during testing, we had to create a new account and swap API keys just to keep working. It slowed everyone down massively.

But the real pain came during judging. The rules said: 3-minute demo, 2-minute pitch, 2-minute Q&A. We followed that. But many teams went on for 20–30 minutes, showing entire company decks instead of hackathon projects. Presentations ran from 1:30 PM until nearly 5 PM; the venue was closing, so later teams got cut short or skipped Q&A completely.

The winning team didn’t even address the given prompt, and several others clearly presented pre-built company products.

I’m not mad we didn’t win — I’m frustrated at the inconsistency and lack of fairness. If time limits and problem statements don’t matter, what’s the point of running it as a hackathon?

Curious if others have seen this pattern: hackathons becoming more like unpaid product showcases than actual creative sprints.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 23:25:34+00:00
Generally speaking, yes. I do understand not everyone has the opportunities for life circumstances beyond their control. So I don't want to belittle that.

But speaking in macroeconomics, most people have the capacity to readjust if needed. I had to do so these last few years (and yes, am thankful I am "able bodied" and have a family/friend network to help me out when at my lowest points). And the market really sucks, but I eventually found some things. Some related to my career, some not.

But I'm 30. In the worst worst cases, I have time and energy to pivot. The opportunities out there are dreadful all around, though.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-05 23:25:47+00:00
I can saturate both a 1 and 2.5 Gbps links with WireGuard encrypted NFSv4 on thin clients that are relatively old.

I also use it for shared storage for my cluster and NAS, and I don't think NFS itself has ever been the bottleneck.

Latency-wise, the overhead is negligible on via LAN, though can be noticeable when doing big builds or running VMs.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-05 23:27:02+00:00
> Even [Jane] Jacobs believed that “there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space.”

"Even"? Historically no such demarcation existed. Often it still doesn't. Compare the commentary at https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2019/9/... :

> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-05 23:27:05+00:00
As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible computer looked the same: a beige plastic monolith. Most corded phones looked the same, most TVs looked the same, most film cameras looked the same, etc.

Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.

We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MfFjHvcZjFzZLRPa4p7QZm-970...

Striking and prize-worthy, but not how we roll.
by jacob_rezi | 2025-10-05 23:27:27+00:00
Similarly, my dad was a luthier for 15 years before passing away to cancer in 2022. In the 5th grade, I wanted to learn guitar, so being the engineer he was, he built one. But needed machines first, and wood, and the garage.

Being an engineer instead of a business-minded operator prevented his work from becoming too well known but the instrument and what he accomplished was special.

I know own the shop, guitars, and everything after his passing - a couple years ago I made a reddit thread asking for help - it blew up and is an interesting read - https://www.reddit.com/r/guitars/comments/1f07f1s/my_dad_lef...

I like to take pictures of products and build websites, unfortunately we just ran out of time.

https://sgg2.webflow.io/
by fumar | 2025-10-05 23:27:33+00:00
I eye the TE TP7 on my desk. I use it most days. Its design speaks to my millennial taste like candy. Sometimes I just hold it in my hand like I did with my Walkman or discmans of my youth. I admit some of the yarning is for nostalgia. Yet, surely task specific devices can offer better utility than single screen slabs in certain cases.
by xpe | 2025-10-05 23:27:40+00:00
Some context about big changes to the AISI from June 3, 2025:

> Statement from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Transforming the U.S. AI Safety Institute into the Pro-Innovation, Pro-Science U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation

> Under the direction of President Trump, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced his plans to reform the agency formerly known as the U.S. AI Safety Institute into the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI).

> ...

This decision strikes me as foolish at best. And contributing to civilizational collapse and human extinction at worst. See also [2]. We don't have to agree on the particular probabilities to agree that this "reform" was bad news.

[1]: https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/stateme...

[2]: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-119-goodbye-aisi
by skissane | 2025-10-05 23:27:43+00:00
> The Neutrino 6.4 version, which was made accessible as "openQNX" to the public

From memory: the source was made freely available to anyone who wanted to download it, but not under an open source license, under an individual non-transferable proprietary license; so, legally speaking, anyone who downloaded the source back then (before this program was terminated) is allowed to keep it and use it forever (under some usage restrictions, I forget the details), but they aren't licensed to share it with anyone else.

So this is somewhat comparable to all those leaked Microsoft Windows source code repositories on GitHub – technically illegal, but the copyright holder obviously doesn't care to try to stop it (especially ironic for Microsoft, given that as GitHub's owners, they could put an end to it very easily, if they could be bothered)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-05 23:27:50+00:00
If your threat model is this high that you assume encryption breaking to be into your threat model, then maybe you do need a level of comeptency in the process as well.

They have 2 Trillion $ economy. I am sure that competency shouldn't be the thing that they should be worrying at that scale but at the same time I know those 2 trillion $ don't really make them more competent but I just want to share that it was very possible for them to teach/learn the competency

Maybe this incident teaches us atleast something. Definitely something to learn here though. I am interested in how the parent comment suggests sharing one time pad or rather a practical way for them to do so I suppose since I am genuinely curious as most others refer to using the cloud like aws etc. and I am not sure how much they can share something like one time pad and at the scale of petabytes and more, I can maybe understand it but I would love if the GP can tell me a practical way of doing so to atleast have more safety I suppose than encryption methods I suppose..
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-05 23:28:14+00:00
At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice:

> This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.

I like that. It is direct and honest. I'm fine with people using LLMs for natural language related work, as long as they are transparent about it.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-05 23:28:47+00:00
What you are describing is more-or-less a planned economy, the polar opposite of America's market economy. The government has the power to appropriate things for the common good because it's perceived that private enterprise isn't a necessary force. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; only certain countries can "moneyball" their way through economics like that, though. America has long since passed the point of even trying.

Your heart is in the right place here (I agree about FOSS), but there is a snowball's chance in hell that any of this ever happens in the USA. We'll be lucky if AI doesn't resemble cable TV by 2030.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-05 23:29:03+00:00
I recently quit blue sky, and I won’t say that the ideological makeup wasn’t a component of that decision, but it wasn’t really that “I don’t want to be on a social media service that courts progressives” so much as like I want a feed that feels more dynamic and topical. Reddit seems like the only social network to figure this out.

Someone posted a theory that Jay is trying to send a signal that conservatives are welcome in blue sky. But why? And not like “I don’t want conservatives in blue sky” but more like, why does it feel like the only two groups in society right now are liberals and conservatives? Why not go after sports fans or gamers or music fans or thousands of other groups. _That’s_ to me what would make social media interesting, a place where political perspective feels tangential rather than core to the experience.

I wildly support Blue Sky’s mission of billionaire proof social media, and I’ve often wondered/been concerned of how it feels like progressive politics is the only topic, but way to too me miss the point.
by neilv | 2025-10-05 23:29:15+00:00
I remember that era of NFS.

NFS volumes (for home dirs, SCM repos, tools, and data) were a godsend for workstations with not enough disk, and when not everyone had a dedicated workstation (e.g., university), and for diskless workstations (which we used to call something rude, and now call "thin clients"), and for (an ISV) facilitating work on porting systems.

But even when when you needed a volume only very infrequently, if there was a server or network problem, then even doing an `ls -l` in the directory where the volume's mount point was would hang the kernel.

Now that we often have 1TB+ of storage locally on a laptop workstation (compare to the 100MB default of an early SPARCstation), I don't currently need NFS for anything. But NFS is still a nice tool to have in your toolbox, for some surprise use case.

> To his great credit, he trusted me after that when I said something was a bad idea based on my experience. It was an important lesson for me that even with experience, trust must be earned when you work with a new team.

True, though, on a risky moving-fast architectural decision, even with two very experienced people, it might be reasonable to get a bit more evidence.

And in that particular case, it might be that one or both of you were fairly early in your career, and couldn't just tell that they could bet on the other person's assessment.

Though there are limits to needing to re-earn trust from scratch with a new team. For example, the standard FAANG-bro interview of everyone having to start from scratch for credibility, like they are fresh out of school with zero track record, and zero better ways to assess, is ridiculous. The only thing more ridiculous is when companies that pay vastly less try to mimic that interview style. Every time I see that, I think that this company apparently doesn't have experienced engineers on staff who can get a better idea just by talking with someone, rather than fratbro hazing ritual.
by gerdesj | 2025-10-05 23:29:18+00:00
I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye.

I have had a Gmail email account since they were invite only back in the day and I run my company email system and by my company I mean my (ie MD) so I'm quite keen on it working.

I recently migrated the whole shebang to MS365 from Exchange on prem. I have kept our MX records pointing to our on prem SMTP daemon (Exim). That means that I can redirect mail to mailboxes as I wish - I am not beholden to MS. Several addresses end up being delivered to an on prem imapd (Dovecot).

Anyway, I did set up DKIM when it was invented and then DMARC and then I ditched them because it messed up with mail lists. That has all been sorted but I still don't have DKIM on my company domain.

I have never setup DKIM on my personal vanity domain collection. The only recent fix I had to carry out was to fix up reverse DNS (PTR record) for an SMTP/MX address. That is proper old school and only one recipient domain even noticed and dropped mail.

The bounce message you received may have said DKIM but it may have been lying or simply that was the last thing that went wrong or whatever.

The big email systems are run by reasonable people who do not discriminate against well run tiddly email systems. They will absolutely crap on spammers inbound (despite hosting them) and IP reputation is king. There are a lot more rules too and it is rare that any transgression is final - pretty much all systems are score based rather than absolute on one failure.
by moshegramovsky | 2025-10-05 23:29:24+00:00
I know about these:

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/AMD/AMD_gpu_s...

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/AMD/AMD_gpu_s...

Does the author know if there are any plans for similar in Vulkan with 8-bit support for these types as well? I would put them to very good use.