MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-26 11:13:44+00:00
Glossing through the paper, here's my take.

Someone previously found that that the cross-attention layers in text-to-image diffusion models captures correlation between the input text tokens and corresponding image regions, so that one can use this to segment the image, pixels containing "cat" for example. However this segmentation was rather coarse. The authors of this paper found that also using the self-attention layers leads to a much more detailed segmentation.

They then extend this to video by using the self-attention between two consecutive frames to determine how the segmentation changes from one frame to the next.

Now, text-to-image diffusion models require a text input to generate the image to begin with. From what I can gather they limit themselves to semi-supervised video segmentation, so that the first frame is already segmented by say a human or some other process.

They then run a "inversion" procedure which tries to generate text that causes the text-to-image diffusion model to segment the first frame as closely as possible to the provided segmentation.

With the text in hand, they can then run the earlier segmentation propagation steps to track the segmented object throughout the video.

The key here is that the text-to-image diffusion model is pretrained, and not fine-tuned for this task.

That said, I'm no expert.
by vintagedave | 2025-11-26 11:16:34+00:00
This seems to argue for a single agent loop, rather than spread across multiple agents:

> Even in an agentic loop, it's tempting to organize task execution into specialized subagents. Doesn't it feel so clever to come up with these architectures? "The Widget CEO will delegate work to the Widget Engineer, and then the work will be verified by the Widget Tester, with input from the Widget Product Manager".

> While the idea is smart, the results are… dumb. Context is everything for an LLM - when every layer of abstraction introduces loss of context, the ability to string tools together and self-correct course washes away. Subagents still have their place...

Is this really true, if context is carried across? The same quote later refers to Claude and I thought Claude used many subagents, even with AIs writing prompts for other AIs.

I ask mainly because I have built an agent architecture based on state loops, as in their diagrams. (A coding agent: code, then a code review agent, step by step through todos.) Context is communicated across but the idea is wholly to have dedicated subagents. Now I wonder if this is a bad idea.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 11:16:34+00:00
All of these emergent properties of image and video models leads me to believe that evolution of animal intelligence around motility and visually understanding the physical environment might be "easy" relative to other "hard steps".

The more complex that an eye gets, the more the brain evolves not just the physics and chemistry of optics, but also rich feature sets about predator/prey labels, tracking, movement, self-localization, distance, etc.

These might not be separate things. These things might just come "for free".
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-26 11:16:49+00:00
Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.

Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
by isolatedsystem | 2025-11-26 11:16:59+00:00
There are children and there are adults. Children have more free time. Children watch more YouTube than adults. So LTT's audience is probably more children too.

Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three exclamation marks. They like flashy text on MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD addled three-second shots. They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.

I'm not a child. I'm too old and weary for that. LTT wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't gonna be watching.
by mikeayles | 2025-11-26 11:17:30+00:00
Author here:

I pulled inspiration from this port to a vectrex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuVnoqFF3II, there is a wayback machine link to the authors writeup credited in my writeup.

I have seen a lot of ports of DOOM on overpowered Windows based test equipment, particularly the Keysight MXA's, but they're just using them as a computer. Spectrum DOOM though. Could it be done by taking snapshots of a waterfall plot?
by graemep | 2025-11-26 11:18:29+00:00
A lot of people do use AWS for EC2.

Of the services you list, S3 is OK. I would rather admin an RDBMS than use RDS at small scale

> Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

At that scale the cost savings on not hiring sysadmins becomes much smaller, so what is the case for using AWS? The absolute cost savings will be huge.
by pedrolins | 2025-11-26 11:19:26+00:00
I was excited to check out lecture videos thinking they were public, but quickly saw that they were closed.

One of the things I miss most about the pandemic was how all of these institutions opened up for the world. Lately they have been closing down not only newer course offerings but also putting old videos private. Even MIT OCW falls apart once you get into some advanced graduate courses.

I understand that universities should prioritize their alumni, but there’s literally no cost in making the underlying material (especially lectures!) available on the internet. It delivers immense value to the world.
by ZaoLahma | 2025-11-26 11:19:36+00:00
AI makes the parts of my work that I spend the least time on a whole lot quicker, but (so far / still) has negligible effects on the parts of my work that I spend the most time on.

I'm still not sure if this is due to a technological limitation or an organizational one. Most of my time is not spent on solving tech problems but rather solving "human-to-human" problems (prioritization between things that need doing, reaching consensus in large groups of people of how to do things that need doing, ...)
by nickelpro | 2025-11-26 11:22:13+00:00
You have this entirely backwards. Open source is, definitionally, the code and a license. It is "first and foremost" those things. The community of people cannot exist without the code and the license. The code and the license can and often does exist without dedicated communities.

Everything else in open source is a cultural projection entirely ancillary to the code and the license.

> I'll just say that if you think otherwise, whatever good you think you're putting out into the world, is not much better than keeping the software proprietary.

I have never seen someone so entirely miss the point of open source. This is not a house party, this is not a community support network. There are genuine disagreements about open source philosophy, if it should be more focused on user freedoms or developer convenience, but they are all incompatible with the idea that open-source licensed code in and of itself "is not much better than keeping the software proprietary".

Stallman did not invent the GPL because he wanted an issue tracker and complete documentation from HP. He invented the GPL because he needed to fix his printer drivers.

A ton of very important open source code was thrust into the world, created immense value, but was never further supported or developed by its original developers. Off the top of my head: git, Doom, Bitcoin, and basically everything Fabrice Bellard has ever done.
by philipallstar | 2025-11-26 11:22:41+00:00
> Gradual growth inevitably results in loads of technical debt that is not paid off as Product adds more feature requests to deliver larger and larger sales contracts.

This isn't technical debt, necessarily. Technical debt is a specific thing. You probably mean "an underlying design that doesn't perfectly map to what ended up being the requirements". But then the world moves on (what if a regulation is added that ruins your perfect structure anyway?) and you can't just wish for perfect requirements. Or not in software that interacts directly with the real world, anyway.
by graemep | 2025-11-26 11:22:58+00:00
> Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

is that because they were using AWS so hired people who knew AWS?

I would personally have far more confidence in my ability to troubleshoot or redeploy a dedicated server than the AWS services to replace it.

> Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

There are lots of options for renting dedicated hardware, that the service provider will maintain,. Its still far cheaper than AWS. Even if you have redundancy for everything its still a lot cheaper.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-26 11:23:13+00:00
I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.

On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
by grvdrm | 2025-11-26 11:23:58+00:00
With you 100%

Kids rewired my brain too. Definitely not a perfect operator at all times, but I have - as you stated - a clear intention on how I'm spending my day.

Contrast to 20s and even some of 30s - definitely pre-kids but also pre-marriage - when I worked a lot more and thought that work was my most important north star.
by kotaKat | 2025-11-26 11:24:06+00:00
I'd also like to scream at Youtube for the "experiencing interruptions? find out why!" bullshit that enforces a five second wait before videos will load.

I only put 2+2 together when I was running yt-dlp and realizing there was a "Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site..." before downloads would kick in and... wellp. It all makes sense now.

As an ISP representative, I am getting absolutely pissmad that YouTube is gaslighting our users and making them think that our service is "terrible" because of perceived buffering on every video load because YouTube wants to play a shitty cat and mouse game against adblockers for all.
by aakresearch | 2025-11-26 11:26:21+00:00
Wow, sounds so familiar! I've once had to argue precisely against this very conclusion - "you saved us once in emergency, now you're bound to do it again".

Wrote to my management: "It is, by all means, great when a navigator is able to take over an incapacitated pilot and make an emergency landing, thus averting the fatality. But the conclusion shouldn't be that navigators expected to perform more landings or continue to be backup pilots. Neither it should be that we completely retrain navigators as pilots and vice versa. But if navigators are assigned some extra responsibility, it should be formally acknowledged by giving them appropriate training, tools and recognition. Otherwise many written-off airplanes and hospitalized personnel would ensue."

For all I know the only thing this writing might have contributed to was increased resentment by management.
by Antibabelic | 2025-11-26 11:26:22+00:00
There is no level of abstraction to go up sans context. Again, let me repeat myself as well: the calculator and the arithmometer do the same things -- from the point of view of the cleric that needs to add and subtract quickly. Otherwise they are simply two completely different objects. And we will have a hard time making correct inferences about how one works based only on how we know the other works, or, e.g. how calculating machines work.

What I'm interested in is evidence that supports that "The more you try to look into the LLM internals, the more similarities you find". Some pointers to specific books and papers will be very helpful.
by brigandish | 2025-11-26 11:26:49+00:00
The reports I’ve heard and read would be contrary to your claims. When I was in Hong Kong, for example, I saw huge protests, so I wouldn’t call it fine. Inside and out of Hong Kong, I’ve never met an HKer that was pleased about the China government’s plans. I also have heard that “its own system” is not a correct characterisation of the situation.

Have you been to Hong Kong?
by skydhash | 2025-11-26 11:27:19+00:00
I think everyone is fine scraping for what is already public. But there’s a lot of scrapers that just do denial of service. Of I have a 1TB of bandwidth from my provider and only 10% of it is consumed usually, it’s really difficult to not blame someone that slurps it up in 1 hour and prevent anyone else from accessing the content.
by flir | 2025-11-26 11:27:55+00:00
Now apply that thinking to computers. Or levers.

I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.

The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.

I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?

(Aside: calling out the lever sounds silly, but I think it's actually a great example. You can't do monumental architecture without levers, and the point in history where we start doing that is also the point where serious surplus extraction kicks in. I don't think that's coincidence).
by aforwardslash | 2025-11-26 11:28:26+00:00
Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
by 0xEF | 2025-11-26 11:28:52+00:00
It might be silly to impose rules on the English language at all.

And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.

In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.

English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.
by belter | 2025-11-26 11:29:28+00:00
> Google Search

Unusable nowadays and monopoly that should be broken....

> Google’s open-source MapReduce paper that shaped the big data industry.

Experienced ETL practitioners laughed at that paper, knowing that was how DataStage and other Grid ETL platforms always worked. Imagine...spliting the data across nodes, working on it in parallel and then bringing it together...Oh my if was not for Google nobody would have thought about it...

> Then came containerization, then Google’s Kubernetes.

A platform full of security bugs, that they created because they lost the cloud wars:

Kubernetes: The Documentary [PART 1] - https://youtu.be/BE77h7dmoQU?t=122

https://k8s.af/

They forgot about multitenancy, and 11 years after, they still dont have it....

> entire cloud computing industry seems to be based on Kubernetes, and our entire team develops on top of it.

Your team needs to go out more....
by iamtedd | 2025-11-26 11:30:39+00:00
Either:

I watch ten creators. I divide $10 per month between them evenly. They each get $1 per month.

Or:

I pay for YouTube premium. It costs $10 per month. I watch ten creators. The $10 goes to YouTube.

I make the following assumptions:

* YouTube only takes a portion of that $10

* YouTube divides the remaining money evenly across the creators I watch (10)

Each creator gets less than $1 per month

Which gives the creators more revenue?
by Yokohiii | 2025-11-26 11:31:25+00:00
I don't think you should focus on successful large projects. Generally you should consider that all big successes are outliers from a myriad of attempts. They have been lucky and you can't reproduce luck.

I'd like try to correct your course a bit.

DevOps is a trash concept, that had good intentions. But today it's just an industry cheatcode to fill three dev positions with a single one that is on pager duty. The good takeaways from it: Make people care that things work end to end. If Joe isn't caring about Bob's problems, something is off. Either with the process, or with the people.

Agile is a very loose term nowadays. Broadly spoken it's the opposite of making big up front plans and implement them in a big swipe. Agile wants to start small and improve it iteratively as needed. This tends to work in the industry, but the iterative time buckets have issues, some teams can move fast in 2 week cycles, others don't. The original agile movement also wanted to give back control and autonomy back to those who actually do stuff (devs and lower management). This is very well intended and highly functional, but is often buried or ignored in corporate environments. Autonomy is extremely valuable, it motivates people and fosters personal growth, but being backed by a skilled peers also creates psychological safety. One of the major complaints I hear about agile practices is that there are too many routines, meetings and other in person tasks with low value that keep you from working. This is really bad and in my perception was never intended, but companies love that shit. This part is about communication, make it easy for people to share and engage, while also keeping their focus hours high. Problems have to bubble up quickly and everyone should be motivated and able to help solving them. If you listen to agile hardliners, they will also tell you that software can't be reliably planned, you won't make deadlines, none of them, never. That is very true, but companies are unable to deal with it.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-11-26 11:32:01+00:00
> In MANY other countries...

When your scope is Europe ... The US is not the exception in the world, it's Europe which is.

The US has a dynamic job market where it's easy to lose your job, but easy to find another one. In Europe, and that's true for most EU countries, it's really hard to lose your job, but it's also really hard to get one for the very reason it's hard to get fired - and when you get a job, you will have to compromise on compensation and other benefits. It's not black and white here. While the European market is appealing to some people, the US market is preferable to others.
by dlahoda | 2025-11-26 11:33:21+00:00
end result is here https://zo-devnet.n1.xyz/docs - well documented strongly typed errors for API. most eveolved

https://zo-devnet.n1.xyz/docs#tag/default/post/action - mixes binary encoding, headers, and numeric errors embeeding (http goes to binary tx format).

all strongly typed without duplicated boilerplate.

inside - ad hoc error assembly - display_doc,derive_more, backtrace - no anyhow, not thiserror, no snafu.

fail fast and panic a lot, covered by proptests(toward fuzzytests).

used https://github.com/target-san/scoped-panic-hook to catch panics as exceptions.

was thinking to use https://github.com/iex-rs/lithium

panics = bugs or undefinenide behavour.
by ebonnafoux | 2025-11-26 11:34:27+00:00
In the article

> Contrast this with equivalent code that is full of logistics, where I’m using only basic Python language features and no special data wrangling package:

n = len(values) # Calculate mean mean = sum(values) / n # Calculate standard deviation variance = sum((x - mean) \* 2 for x in values) / (n - 1) std_dev = math.sqrt(variance)

He doesn' t know about the statistics package in the standart library of Python (https://docs.python.org/3/library/statistics.html). Of course, if you do not know to use Python, you will have a lot of boilerplate.
by raincole | 2025-11-26 11:34:33+00:00
> LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles

What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.

> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?

Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.

Back to the first paragraph...

> almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless.

The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.
by owenthejumper | 2025-11-26 11:34:47+00:00
You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority

Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.

Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’