MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seedlingfl | 2025-11-18 16:33:02+00:00
I just released v0.2.0 of Triton-Augment, a PyTorch library to eliminate the GPU data augmentation bottleneck.

The core issue is the "Global Memory Tax": Sequential transforms (Crop, Jitter, Normalize) force the GPU to repeatedly read/write intermediate tensors to VRAM. This kills performance.

The Solution: I use Triton to fuse the entire augmentation pipeline into a single, highly-optimized GPU kernel. This eliminates all intermediate memory I/O.

The Results:

Video: Up to 73.7x faster than Kornia on 5D video tensors.

Image: 8.1x average speedup (up to 12x) over Torchvision v2.

It's designed as a drop-in replacement for your existing Compose pipeline. Check out the GitHub repository for the full API and detailed benchmarks.

I'm focused on developing the next phase (Resize, Rotation, etc.) and welcome any feedback on the kernels or usage patterns!

GitHub: https://github.com/yuhezhang-ai/triton-augment
by jihadjihad | 2025-11-18 16:33:13+00:00
> Spin up agents to tackle routine tasks that take you out of your flow, such as codebase research, bug fixes, and backlog tasks.

The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how anything is built, no one understands why anything breaks, and cruft multiplies exponentially.

But at least we're not taken out of our flow!
by bayindirh | 2025-11-18 16:34:11+00:00
I mean, Jason Cammisa is not some "YouTube person". He's arguably his generation's Jeremy Clarkson.

e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKCmmH-x9mIbtnKiNfg2...

He tells the stories, interviews with the people who built these cars (if possible), gets and drives a copy of the said car.

We're talking about a person who painstakingly perfects the pronunciation of the brand and model names just because he feels doing otherwise is not respectful for the brand, model and people involved with the car.

---

Let's talk about specs. The spec[0] (pg 4) states that:

Photometers are placed at fixed locations on the test track to record the visibility and glare illumination of the test vehicle on each approach. To correct for changes in illumination that are due to changes in vehicle pitch, multiple photometers are used at each measurement location to capture illuminance readings at different heights. The illuminance readings are synchronized to the vehicle position and pitch using a common GPS time signal. The synchronized data are used to produce pitch-corrected illuminance versus distance curves that are used for the headlight rating. All data are processed using the DIAdem software package distributed by National Instruments. The processing scripts are available at https://github.com/iihs-hldi.

This is a fixed receptor, fixed path, multiple approach test and is susceptible to optimization of the illumination map designed by the car manufacturers.

Moreover, test document states that:

Illuminance data are collected with Gamma Scientific photometers (Part # U68401). The photometric sensors provide a very close match to the spectral response of the human eye. They are fitted with diffusers to reduce the illuminance measurements for off-axis incidence angles in accordance with Lambert’s cosine law. The sensors match the targeted cosine response to within 3 percent at angles up to 25 degrees, which is the maximum angle between the test vehicle and sensors on the sharpest curve (at distances greater than 10 m). The sensor signals are passed through a low-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 35 Hz to allow for accurate measurements of pulse width modulated light sources such as LEDs. Each sensor is connected to its own transimpedance amplifier board that has fixed gains to yield a fast response while still minimizing linearity errors in the range of illuminance values for which the headlight ratings are assigned.

Again more places to optimize the headlight.

If the test finds the lights are "in-spec", and people are increasingly unhappy/uncomfortable, then something is wrong.

[0]: https://www.iihs.org/media/0e823704-32d1-4500-b095-15d064d82...
by bilekas | 2025-11-18 16:34:12+00:00
> The Gemini app surpasses 650 million users per month, more than 70% of our Cloud customers use our AI, 13 million developers have built with our generative models, and that is just a snippet of the impact we’re seeing

Not to be a negative nelly, but these numbers are definitely inflated due to Google literally pushing their AI into everything they can, much like M$. Can't even search google without getting an AI response. Surely you can't claim those numbers are legit.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-18 16:34:16+00:00
> Executive orders cannot overrule the Constitution.

And I would hope this is a fairly universally held position, not so partisan. Today one side might cheer an executive order overriding the 14th amendment, but how will they feel if the next administration decides to pull the same stunt with the 2nd?

We don't want to go there. There are already some states experimenting with doing end-runs around the Constitution with their own civil laws, and for similar reasons I would expect rational people to want that effort to fail.
by bradlys | 2025-11-18 16:34:39+00:00
This depends too much. It’s standard at many stores to have someone who goes out and fetches all the carts. They have to do this anyway because of the cart corrals. This sounds like some idea by a European in some tiny parking lot without those.

People here have mentioned it only taking 30-60 seconds, which definitely speaks to European centric stuff. A lot of the places I’ve shopped where I’m using a cart, it takes minutes to return. That’s why people aren’t doing it. You spend 1-2 minutes walking to your car. That’s why they leave the cart, it’s an extra 5 minutes round trip. But for an employee who is going to be going around the lot anyway to do this job, it’s no extra added time.

This also ignores that people like me will sometimes pickup a cart like this on the way to store if it’s convenient. We also don’t leave them in parking spaces or whatever. We leave them somewhere reasonable.
by eimrine | 2025-11-18 16:34:48+00:00
Which case is 100% FOSS and which one is a proprietary obfuscationware? Which case has been heared by you just because it is good and which case has been heared by you just because some adware? Which case is from human to human and which one is from alien for hunter (or from hunters for aliens)? Which case has been made to make the humanship rich and which one has been made to make the maker rich?

Sad you can even compare one of our culture's cornerstones and one of the last sources of freedom with something harmful on multiple levels made with manufacturing user's (used's?) consent to be your supervisor. I have nothing to say for those who are OK with their watchers in their panopticum.
by jonjacky | 2025-11-18 16:34:50+00:00
Severo Ornstein called his memoir of the 1950s - 1970s Computing in the Middle Ages. Ornstein worked on SAGE, TX-2, LINC, and the Arpanet IMP among other things, before moving on to Xerox PARC.

https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...
by grayhatter | 2025-11-18 16:35:00+00:00
Forgiveness not necessary, these are good questions.

Internet packets have to travel through many routers between the source and the attack and the server they're attacking, at each step the routers usually get smaller. the smaller routers are less able to withstand the amount of traffic destined for one server, which means they can't route traffic to all the other servers that are not under attack. a common strategy is to drop the traffic at a much farther away server, thus protecting the smaller routers, thus protecting all the other servers.

The host Network would definitely still be affected by the DDOS, which is why the strategy is often to "blackhole" the traffic farther away from the individual server racks.

I see people say route traffic to /dev/null All the time, but I personally try to reserve that for the individual servers or the nearest router, just to avoid your exact confusion.

depending on how well designed, any specific network is the "hug of death" which has taken down many sites would also degrade the performance of the peers next to that server. Which is why many ISP are quick to block the traffic farther away. To protect not you but their other customers.

To be fair (pedantic), if it's part of a DDOS, it's not a legit request. Depending on the capabilities of the attackers, they will either choose obviously invalid requests because those take longer to process or exclusively valid requests which take longer to process. it is generally speaking much easier to send valid well-formed requests because that's what most libraries exist to do. you're often writing custom code if you want to send an invalid request because that is a bug in other cases.

A good example of an invalid request is setting up TLS transmitting a partial packet and then closing the connection (or leaving the TCP open), This one can be particularly expensive and much harder to detect.

> How does taking the site down stop the DDOS attack?

When people say take the site down, in this context, they often mean one of two things, either changing the DNS configuration to point to a different IP address (or none at all), or "null routing" traffic to the under attack IP, at an edge router, edge in this case meanthing their upstream ISP or other network peer. (farther from the victim server) I object to both uses because the specificity is important. When I say take down the server, I almost always mean quit [nginx] or power off the box.
by mikeortman | 2025-11-18 16:35:05+00:00
Its available for me now in gemini.google.com.... but its failing so bad at accurate audio transcription.

Its transcribing the meeting but hallucinates badly... both in fast and thinking mode. Fast mode only transcribed about a fifth of the meeting before saying its done. Thinking mode completely changed the topic and made up ENTIRE conversations. Gemini 2.5 actually transcribed it decently, just occasional missteps when people talked over each other.

I'm concerned.
by Arubis | 2025-11-18 16:35:50+00:00
Pragmatically: if you want to enforce the legality of a state-affirmed migration path, it has to be viable. Without a militarized border (which is impractical based on nation size and undesirable for fiscal and moral reasons) and a militarized interior (do you _like_ what ICE is becoming?), the best mitigation for illegal immigration is viable legal immigration.

Fiscally: immigrants have above-average entrepreneurial tendencies. It doesn't take a lot of enterprise creations and resulting tax payment and job creation to offset a _lot_ of social service consumption. Inbound migration also is what keeps the US from having a net-shrinking population, which until we can get away from late-stage capitalism is a death knell for the economy.

Morally and ethically: this is a nation of immigrants. If you claim to be a native, do you speak Navajo? Ute?

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
by estearum | 2025-11-18 16:36:45+00:00
The principal idea behind EA is that people often want their money to go as far as possible, but their intuitions for how to do that are way, way off.

Nobody said or suggested only smart people can or should or are “doing EA.” What people observe is these knee jerk reactions against what is, as you say, a fairly obvious idea once stated.

However it being an obvious idea once stated does not mean people intuitively enact that idea, especially prior to hearing it. Thus the need to label the approach
by rvz | 2025-11-18 16:37:08+00:00
Google always has been there, its just that many didn't realize that DeepMind even existed and I said that they needed to be put to commercial use years ago. [0] and Google AI != DeepMind.

You are now seeing their valuation finally adjusting to that fact all thanks to DeepMind finally being put to use.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073
by stefs | 2025-11-18 16:37:24+00:00
i'm very doubtful gmail mails are used to train the model by default, because emails contain private data and as soon as this private data shows up in the model output, gmail is done.

"gmail being read by gemini" does NOT mean "gemini is trained on your private gmail correspondence". it can mean gemini loads your emails into a session context so it can answer questions about your mail, which is quite different.
by giantrobot | 2025-11-18 16:37:29+00:00
People use CloudFlare because it's a "free" way for most sites to not get exploited (WAF) or DDoSed (CDN/proxy) regularly. A DDoS can cost quite a bit more than a day of downtime, even just a thundering herd of legitimate users can explode an egress bill.

It sucks there's not more competition in this space but CloudFlare isn't widely used for no reason.

AWS also solves real problems people have. Maintaining infrastructure is expensive as is hardware service and maintenance. Redundancy is even harder and more expensive. You can run a fairly inexpensive and performant system on AWS for years for the cost of a single co-located server.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-18 16:37:30+00:00
> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

The first time I used the hi-beams in my life was when I came off the ferry on Manitoulin Island and drove to my hotel from there. This is what that road looks like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L7JajQbGQA7Fog1g9. No reflectors, the road lines aren't reflective, no ancillary lights from civilization to be aware of, and of course since it's so rural, you get to deal with all of the wildlife running around. I turned my hi-beams and realized for the first time in my life all the things I wasn't seeing before.
by Kiro | 2025-11-18 16:37:50+00:00
Pretty long stretch between "useless" and "completely satisfied". I don't think I'm completely satisfied with anything in my life including AI, but that doesn't mean I'm not having a lot of success with it.

The things stated in the article are true and even pretty tame. Agent mode in Cursor has been standard for months and I'm surprised that anyone would say that LLMs are not good at scanning documents. The normal AI skeptic's position would be "yes, but that's all they're good at".
by Wistar | 2025-11-18 16:37:53+00:00
Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

As for LEDs, to me, the Tesla Model 3 headlights are the worst offender, but not all of them, just the majority. I can look down a column of oncoming cars and pick out the Model 3s from a few blocks distance. I suspect that the Model 3 headlights are often maladjusted as they have a user/driver-accessible headlight aiming menu and it looks to me like a lot of Tesla owners get in to that menu and do some freelance aiming. Plus, a lot of Model 3 drivers around here—and there are a lot of them here (Seattle area)—seem to turn on everything, brights, DRLs, fog lights, every lamp.

Another egregious offender is the Acura Jewel-Eye headlights although I am seeing ever more cars with headlights set to stun.

The worst situation is waiting at an intersection where the pavement is crowned to drain the intersection, making the headlights on the cars opposite just miserable to contend with. Sometimes so bad I can’t see the traffic lights.

I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-18 16:37:59+00:00
_Generally_, people short (or buy puts, anyway) on companies because they think they will go down. You're thinking of a kind of _attack_, but that's not at all the norm. Most shorts are just people thinking "the market if overpricing this"; if they're right (and if the market corrects itself in reasonable time), they make money.

(There is a third scenario, where the likes of Hindenburg Research take out a short position and then reveal problems with the target company, which naturally pushes their price down, but again that's rare.)
XenonUI – A Hybrid Retained/Immediate Mode UI Framework in C++ (SDL3)
by XenUI | 2025-11-18 16:38:22+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm excited to share XenonUI, a cross-platform UI framework written in modern C++ (using SDL3 for rendering). I've been working on this for a year and it's currently at v0.9.0-alpha.

Why XenonUI? I started this project because I found existing cross-platform UI options were too heavy or too rigid for developing specialized desktop tools or game engine debug UIs.

The key differentiator is the Hybrid Mode approach:

Retained Mode: For complex, persistent elements like settings dialogs or configuration windows. Objects (Button, Slider) are created once and handle their own state/events. (Similar to traditional application frameworks).

Immediate Mode: For fast, lightweight components like in-game overlays or logic that needs to run every frame. Widgets are drawn and handle their logic in a single function call, perfect for visualizing real-time data. (Similar to Dear ImGui).

This lets developers choose the best paradigm per application context.

Links and Quick Start Code & Examples: [https://github.com/Sarowar-s/XenUI]

License: Apache 2.0 (Permissive)

I'm looking forward to any feedback on the C++ design, performance on different platforms, or suggestions on simplifying the API. Thanks for checking it out!
by giarc | 2025-11-18 16:38:47+00:00
These prediction markets are so ripe for abuse it's unbelievable. People need to realize there are real people on the other side of these bets. Brian Armstong, CEO of Coinbase intentionally altered the outcome of a bet by randomly stating "Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, Web3" at the end of an earnings call. These types of bets shouldn't be allowed.
by doctoboggan | 2025-11-18 16:39:05+00:00
Apple is struggling with _productizing_ LLMs for the mass market, which is a separate task from training a frontier LLM.

To be fair to Apple, so far the only mass market LLM use case so far is just a simple chatbot, and they don't seem to be interested in that. It remains to be seen if what Apple wants to do ("private" LLMs with access to your personal context acting as intimate personal assistants) is even possible to do reliably. It sounds useful, and I do believe it will eventually be possible, but no one is there yet.

They did botch the launch by announcing the Apple Intelligence features before they are ready though.
by coffeecoders | 2025-11-18 16:39:06+00:00
Feels like the same consolidation cycle we saw with mobile apps and browsers are playing out here. The winners aren’t necessarily those with the best models, but those who already control the surface where people live their digital lives.

Google injects AI Overviews directly into search, X pushes Grok into the feed, Apple wraps "intelligence" into Maps and on-device workflows, and Microsoft is quietly doing the same with Copilot across Windows and Office.

Open models and startups can innovate, but the platforms can immediately put their AI in front of billions of users without asking anyone to change behavior (not even typing a new URL).
Show HN: WithoutBG Focus – Background removal with sharp edge detection
by kocabiyik | 2025-11-18 16:39:23+00:00
I've been working on background removal models for a while (previously released Snap). Focus is a major improvement, especially for hair, fur, and complex edges.

It's fully open source (Apache 2.0) and runs locally. I also run a paid API to sustain development, but the open source model is complete and functional on its own.

Deliberately unfiltered results (you'll see where it fails): https://withoutbg.com/resources/background-removal-results/m...

Quick start:

pip install withoutbg

Or run the Docker web UI:

docker run -p 80:80 withoutbg/app:latest

The model used mean gradient error in training, heavily penalizing missed edges. This produces sharper results but occasionally causes false positives in foreground-background classification. Would appreciate technical feedback on this tradeoff.

GitHub: https://github.com/withoutbg/withoutbg Docs: https://withoutbg.com/documentation/integrations/python-sdk
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-18 16:39:25+00:00
I've been working off of the Penguin Classics list found on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penguin_Classics) for the Borges stuff. It's a bit of a slog, and not everything is on libgen (I'd guess about 70% is, at best), but it was a quick (hah!) way to add a few thousand books to my library.

>Not fiction or difficult, but I suggest Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millennium".

Thanks for the recommendation. Grabbed it too. Now back to the Fs in my Penguin Classics list...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-18 16:39:36+00:00
It's not really. People are just very bad at putting the things around them into perspective.

Your power is provided by a power utility company. They usually serve an entire state, if not more than one (there are smaller ones too). That's "centralization" in that it's one company, and if they "go down", so do a lot of businesses. But actually it's not "centralized", in that 1) there are actually many different companies across the country/world, and 2) each company "decentralizes" most of its infrastructure to prevent massive outages.

And yes, power utilities have outages. But usually they are limited in scope and short-lived. They're so limited that most people don't notice when they happen, unless it's a giant weather system. Then if it's a (rare) large enough impact, people will say "we need to reform the power grid!". But later when they've calmed down, they realize that would be difficult to do without making things worse, and this event isn't common.

Large internet service providers like AWS, Cloudflare, etc, are basically internet utilities. Yes they are large, like power utilities. Yes they have outages, like power utilities. But the fact that a lot of the country uses them, isn't any worse than a lot of the country using a particular power company. And unlike the power companies, we're not really that dependent on internet service providers. You can't really change your power company; you can change an internet service provider.

Power didn't used to be as reliable as it is. Everything we have is incredibly new and modern. And as time has passed, we have learned how to deal with failures. Safety and reliability has increased throughout critical industries as we have learned to adapt to failures. But that doesn't mean there won't be failures, or that we can avoid them all.

We also have the freedom to architect our technology to work around outages. All the outages you have heard about recently could be worked around, if the people who built on them had tried:

- CDN goes down? Most people don't absolutely need a CDN. Point your DNS at your origins until the CDN comes back. (And obviously, your DNS provider shouldn't be the same as your CDN...)

- The control plane goes down on dynamic cloud APIs? Enable a "limp mode" that persists existing infrastructure to serve your core needs. You should be able to service most (if not all) of your business needs without constantly calling a control plane.

- An AZ or region goes down? Use your disaster recovery plan: deploy infrastructure-as-code into another region or AZ. Destroy it when the az/region comes back.

...and all of that just to avoid a few hours of downtime per year? It's likely cheaper to just take the downtime. But that doesn't stop people from piling on when things go wrong, questioning whether the existence of a utility is a good idea.