MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by masklinn | 2025-10-11 11:23:22+00:00
> I wonder if at a certain age this instinct diminishes making a choice like his easier?

It's less likely to be "a certain age" and more surrounding factors: if most of your friends have passed and you don't have much chance to do things that interest you because you could pass at any moment yourself there comes a point where life has limited worth.

Essentially, hope runs out, and when it's run out entirely you either wait for death, or ... don't wait.

> It's fascinating that even for very ill or injured people the will to survive is so strong

Sometimes. Chronic illnesses are a massive contributing factor to suicide rates for instance: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
by ignoramous | 2025-10-11 11:23:44+00:00
Jason Zweig, Kahneman's friend, wrote about this and many other thoughts Kahneman would have gone through in making the decision.

As Barbara Tversky, who is an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford University, wrote in an online essay shortly after [Kahneman's] death, their last days in Paris had been magical... One afternoon, according to her online essay, she asked what [Kahneman] would like to do. "I want to learn something," he said. Kahneman knew the psychological importance of happy endings. In repeated experiments, he had demonstrated what he called the peak-end rule: Whether we remember an experience as pleasurable or painful doesn't depend on how long it felt good or bad, but rather on the peak and ending intensity of those emotions. "It was a matter of some consternation to Danny's friends and family that he seemed."

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/daniel-kahneman-assis... / https://archive.ph/fEWrc, The Last Decision by the World's Leading Thinker on Decisions (March, 2025).
by antonvs | 2025-10-11 11:24:10+00:00
I’ve recently been dealing with scaling one of those “framework and a database” web apps for a company that’s growing fast and hit scaling limits. You know what the easiest way to scale it is? Containerize it and deploy it on Kubernetes with a managed DB.

If you don’t recognize that, it may be because you don’t work with applications that need that scale. In that case, you might get away with simpler approaches. But if you expect to grow significantly, you can save a lot of money and pain by designing the app to scale well from the beginning.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-11 11:24:47+00:00
File extension shouldn't matter at all, because data should have associated metadata (e.g. HTTP content-type, CSS image-set, HTML <video><source type=""/></video>)

> It’d be useful to know if you can read the file by looking only at its extension

That would be madness, and there's already a workaround - the filename itself.

For most people, all that matters is an MKV file is a video file, and your configured player for this format is VLC. Only in a small number of cases does it matter about an "inner" format, or choice of parameter - e.g. for videos, what video codec or audio codec is in use, what the bitrate is, what the frame dimensions are.

For where it _matters_, people write "inner" file formats in the filename, e.g. "Gone With The Wind (1939) 1080p BluRay x265 HEVC FLAC GOONiES.mkv", to let prospective downloaders choose what to download from many competing encodings of exactly the same media, on websites where a filename is the _only_ place to write that metadata (if it were a website not standardised around making files available and searching only by filenames, it could just write it in the link description and filename wouldn't matter at all)

Most people don't care, for example, that their Word document is A4 landscape, so much that they need to know _in the filename_.
by viktorcode | 2025-10-11 11:24:58+00:00
This video is a direct continuation of the one where Cerny explains logic behind PlayStation 5 pro design and telling that the path forward for them goes into rendering near perfect low res image then upscaling it with neural networks to 4K.

How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
by samuelklam | 2025-10-11 11:26:00+00:00
PermitFlow (YC W22) | Staff, Fullstack & Frontend Software Engineers | New York, NY | ONSITE | Full-time | https://permitflow.com

PermitFlow’s mission is to streamline and simplify construction permitting in the $1.6 trillion United States construction market. Our software reduces time to permit, supporting permitting end-to-end including permit research, application preparation, submission, and monitoring.

We’ve raised a $31m Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Felicis Ventures, Altos Ventures, and the founders and executives from Zillow, PlanGrid, Thumbtack, Bluebeam, Uber, Procore, and more.

Permitting is a challenging yet interesting problem; thousands of municipalities across the United States have their own processes and requirements - many which are continually updating. Software, AI, and LLMs provide an exciting opportunity for us to reason at scale and distill a nuanced and localized permitting process into a standard and streamlined experience for our customers.

We're looking for customer-obsessed, ambitious, and hard-working teammates who are excited about solving a real-world problem with technology at its helm.

NYC Onsite Roles | apply at: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/permitflow?departmentId=d33195eb-89...

1. Staff Software Engineer - $200K-275K + equity

2. Fullstack Software Engineer - $125-240K + equity

3. Senior Frontend Engineer - $125K-240K + equity

https://permitflow.com/hiring
by pornel | 2025-10-11 11:26:05+00:00
Advancements in lighting can help all games, not just AAA ones.

For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global illumination, which makes them look great with their own art style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.

But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works only within certain constrained environments.

Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows. Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look worse by exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are underwhelming.
by greatgib | 2025-10-11 11:26:06+00:00
For a website speaking accessibility, it does something very bad and annoying with scrolling. Not using the native browser scrolling I think. When I use the middle wheel of my mouse to go up or down, sometimes it suddenly it ignore the command or stutter or go back a little bit instead of continue going down or some random movement. Even with using 2 fingers scroll with the touchpad, I can feel very slightly that there a subtle lag or stutter.
by zahlman | 2025-10-11 11:26:23+00:00
What do you suppose this administration dislikes about solar that wouldn't be equally unpalatable about nuclear? Keeping fossil fuels propped up is the only reason I can see solar not being an easy sell to Trump. Domestic solar panel production could be the space race of our time, and fit right into the tariff narrative, with the right prompting.

(And where did you get 9.5 from?)
by roenxi | 2025-10-11 11:28:07+00:00
There isn't any evidence that they could do what Keynes was suggesting they could. I thought he was making the comment after the war, but I just looked at the date again and realised they were in the middle of WWII at the time! They most certainly did not have spare resources and couldn't possibly afford to be building houses with them. The example he's giving is a case where they couldn't afford it because they couldn't do it. If he'd picked an example where they could do it but people were claiming they couldn't afford it that'd be different and better. But if they could do something we'd probably also find that the financial figures suggesting they could in fact afford it.

"You can afford what you can do" is a truism - if you can do something, the financial system will tell you that you can afford it except if something really weird is going on. If the resources were there to build the houses then the prices would shuffle around until it was also affordable.
by 0xEF | 2025-10-11 11:28:43+00:00
Having a living will is a great idea in general. My dad got a brain tumor and had no documentation on what he wanted do with his estate, in the event he became vegetative, etc. By the time he realized he needed one, it was too late for "sound mind judgement" and my mom had to go through this ridiculous legal process to ensure she held on to his assets and whatnot while she was directly caring for a dying man.

Save your loved ones some grief, create a living will with a trusted lawyer, update it about once a year. It's worth it. There are so many insane snafus one can get into with estranged family members, the state/gov't, medical institutions, etc that make the situation even more difficult and stressful to deal with. Don't expect anyone coming out of the woodwork to act according to honor. They are vultures and know no such kindness.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-11 11:28:50+00:00
> but it cannot be that APIs get designed as if everyone is still coding in Assembly

Why not though? In the end an API call is an API call, and everything is compiled down to machine code no matter what the source language is.

FWIW, the high-level "OOP-isms" of the Metal API is also its biggest downside. Even simple create-option "structs" like MTLRenderPassDescriptor are fully lifetime-managed Objective-C objects where every field access is a method call - that's simply unnecessary overkill.

And ironically, the most binding-friendly API for high-level languages might still be OpenGL, since this doesn't have any structs or 'objects with methods', but only plain old function calls with primitive-type parameters and the only usage of pointers is for pointing to unstructured 'bulk data' like vertex-buffer- or texture-content, this maps very well even to entirely un-C-like languages - and the changes that WebGL did to the GL API (for instance adding 'proper' JS objects for textures and buffers) are arguably a step back compared to native GL where those resource objects are just opaque handles.
by mosura | 2025-10-11 11:28:51+00:00
We never lived in a truth biased world.

This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature.

For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.
by ben_w | 2025-10-11 11:29:02+00:00
> Arguing "rationnaly" about whether someone is or is not the Antichrist ? Seriously ?

Sure, though I'm tempted anyway.

10-15 years ago I made a similar mistake and tried arguing with a young earth Baptist creationist preacher in Cambridge city center, so I know I shouldn't, but it's so very tempting. I mean, MAGA is just begging to be the mark of the beast…
by amiga386 | 2025-10-11 11:29:12+00:00
Hopefully that improves. The guy giving the presentation on AV2 made clear there was "rigorous scrutiny for hardware decoding complexity", and they were advised by Realtek and AMD on this.

So it seems like they checked that all their ideas could be implemented efficiently in hardware as they went along, with advice from real hardware producers.

Hopefully AV2-capable hardware will appear much quicker than AV1-capable hardware did.
Show HN: Augment your dataset with LLM distillation techniques
by uavhacker | 2025-10-11 11:29:26+00:00
Do you know that Small Language Models (SLM) can outperform LLMs if trained (fine-tuned) on domain specific datasets, like your companies knowledge base?

The issue: fine-tuning a SLM usually requires a dataset of 10k - 100k records, which is huge.

I created a platform for applying "human in the loop" augmentation techniques on your small dataset, so that you can start with maybe 100 records and build-up quickly huge datasets and launch a training without prior knowledge.

I implemented 2 techniques, based on LLM distillation, however: more to come.

HN, what Do you think? Do you see value in this idea? Would you prefer a public API or CLI instead?

I appreciate your help.

Kind regards Pawel
by antonvs | 2025-10-11 11:33:20+00:00
> However, for every success story, there are thousands of companies struggling with unfixable codebases.

> Do it right or don't do it. There's no "we'll fix it later" in production.

The first statement is largely true, but the second one is the wrong lesson to take from it.

Most startups accumulate tech debt due to resource constraints: time, budget, people. If they followed “do it right or don’t do it”, they wouldn’t exist.

What’s needed is conscious management of that tech debt. Good tech management understands that. As soon as it’s feasible to do it, you need to start devoting resources to addressing tech debt. “We can’t afford downtime to refactor” is what a manager who doesn’t understand that says.

The “companies struggling with unfixable codebases” are the ones that didn’t try to manage their tech debt until it was too late.
by jphastings | 2025-10-11 11:33:26+00:00
I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.

My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.

The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).

The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.

I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and: - Play tracks from Plex like OP - Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album - Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source

If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!
by nasretdinov | 2025-10-11 11:34:06+00:00
Arguably that's already happening with film grain — you have to extrapolate _what the original probably was_, encode it because it's smaller, then add the noise back to be more faithful to the original despite your image being better.

I imagine e.g. a picture of an 8x8 circle actually takes more bits to encode than a mathematical description of the same circle
by phkahler | 2025-10-11 11:34:06+00:00
My old ray tracer could do arbitrary quadric surfaces, toroids with 2 minor radii, and CSG of all those. Triangles too (no CSG). It was getting kind of fast 20 years ago - 10fps at 1024x768. Never had good shading though.

I should dig that up and add NURBS and see how it performs today.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-11 11:34:16+00:00
The claim that the best interpolation kernel for 2d images is just a product of two Lanczos kernels in the X and Y directions seems wrong to me. Rather, there is a proper 2D analog to the sinc function known as the jinc, or "Sombrero" function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sombrero_function . (This function is mathematically related to the "Airy" ringing patterns found in the optics of lenses.) Resampling with a jinc-based circular-window kernel should show a far lower intensity of ringing artifacts compared to the simple composition of two 1D Lanczos filters.

On a different point, when approximating a "brickwall" frequency spectrum an 'equiripple' pattern is generally considered desirable, and this will lead to a different kernel than the Lanczos approach does.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-11 11:34:50+00:00
So he was very old without any significant problems, but he wanted to avoid the inevitable problems?

If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren. He even made the 9 hour trip to come see us last year.

I’m very wary of making it legal for doctors to euthanize an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid an eventual decline.

It’s relatively common for families to push people into nursing homes, but in this case there’s an even stronger direct financial incentive. I don’t trust the system to adequately prevent this.
by goku12 | 2025-10-11 11:35:16+00:00
> You should have stopped there.

I'm in no mood to consider any sort of gatekeeping.

Like I said, much of the world is enjoying a lot of 'democracy and prosperity' that you delivered! If you choose a random conflict or crisis anywhere in the world and study its history, you will find your grimy fingerprints all over it, in 8 out of 10 cases. You still feel entitled to speak for the rest of the world as if everything revolves around you, despite being clueless about what they feel about your presence or involvement. And it comes with the customary "when did you ever thank us for what we did" style condescension that has become a persistent joke about you these days. This is exactly the type of hubris that landed you in the current crisis. If you want to see obnoxious ideological rhetoric, read your own statement imagining it's from a foreigner talking about your country. You'll see it if you have the intellectual honesty to do so.
by Certhas | 2025-10-11 11:35:46+00:00
This _might_ be true, but it's utterly absurd to claim this is a certainty.

The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time?

I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
by xpe | 2025-10-11 11:36:13+00:00
> Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.

This is overconfidence; e.g. it "it is clear to me, so it must have been clear to everyone else."

Indeed, there is a person in this overall thread [1] saying the use of "next" was ambiguous:

> I literally thought some unpublished book.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548294
by lazide | 2025-10-11 11:36:55+00:00
There already is chain of custody and rules of evidence in court. Faking evidence is a problem as old as time.

the challenge we’re seeing is when none of this has a chance to make it to court, because that video gets plastered all over Fox News, Youtube, TikTok, Truth Social first, etc. and no one cares if it turns out it was fake later.
by greatgib | 2025-10-11 11:37:11+00:00
Testing some emails in haveibeenpwned i realized something terrible about these leaks.

In isolation, ok, you have just your personal data like birthdate, name, phone number leaked just based on an email.

But now that there was so many leaks, just taking a single email, you can easily map an important part of the profile of a person. Give me an email, I now have: - All identification details, sometimes scanned id documents - linkedin details about the professional details of a person, which company when, ... - Even without the clear official address, you can have an average estimation of where the person live by looking at the countries or location of breached companies. - I can see with leak of big and small retailers like CostCo where the person is doing is shopping. Sometimes it can be worse for specialized retailers, like knowing that you might be vegetarian, or like buying electronic products. - With telecom providers breachs, you know the internet and mobile provider of a person, you can also discover that the person has multiple phone and mobile lines. - With leaks of forum and so, you can see if a user is into specific topics. - With things like leaks of airline providers like that, you can know if the person is a frequent flyers, might be a frequent visitor of some countries or area of the world as companies are often highly linked with their HQ country base. - You might also know that a person is frequently living in another place/country than its official residence ...
by _fw | 2025-10-11 11:37:14+00:00
This is disappointing, but not surprising. I think it’s clear the potential that devices like these have… they stand to be as much a step forward in computing as touchscreen and handheld devices.

If the Vision Pro was able to natively run Mac apps I think people’s attitude towards it would be a lot different.

At the moment, it’s a glorified iPad you can wear on your face.

But imagine if it wasn’t.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-11 11:37:24+00:00
> OpenGL was a very nice API

I think this is an extremely subjective take :) If you haven't been closely following OpenGL development since the late 1990s it is a very confusing API, since it simply stacks new concepts on top of old concepts all the way back to GL 2.0. E.g. if anything good can be said about Vulkan it's that at least it isn't such a hot mess of an API (yet) like OpenGL has become in the last 25 years ;)

Just look at glVertexAttribPointer()... it's an absolute mess of hidden footguns. A call to glVertexAttribPointer() 'captures' the current global vertex buffer binding for that attribute (very common source of bugs when working with vertex-input from different buffers), and the 'pointer' argument isn't a pointer at all, but a byte-offset into a vertex buffer. The entire API is full of such weird "sediment layers", and yes there are more recent vertex specification functions which are cleaner, but the old functions are still part of the new GL versions and just contribute to the confusion for new people trying to understand the API.
by tyleo | 2025-10-11 11:38:55+00:00
I slightly disagree. I think two things are better with the result type:

1. Exception overhead. Exceptions capture diagnostics and unwind stacks in ways that add cost to the user-error case.

2. Type system information. With the result type, you declare the possibility to fail, and exactly what failures to expect in normal operation. You can switch over specific errors vs the broad category of anything that inherits from `Exception`
by Jolter | 2025-10-11 11:38:55+00:00
Not all Alzheimers patients get aggressive/angry. I know it happens, I’ve known one person who did almost exactly what you describe above. He lived with his partner of many years, and seemed superficially very cogent and together. It was just that he started to see insults and conspiracies against his person everywhere around him. Not until later did the cognitive and memory decline become apparent, giving him a diagnosis that explained his bad behavior.

But my personal anecdata puts that man in a minority. None of my older relatives with Alzheimer’s have become aggressive or troublesome. Worry, anxiety and confusion seem to be much more common states of mind, which admittedly also doesn’t seem like such a fun way to spend your days.