MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dbg31415 | 2025-12-03 16:25:55+00:00
I don't get why they bother changing the aspect ratio in the first place. What audience is saying, "I want a weird one-off version of the show in HD, please"?

Most of these shows were shot for 4:3. Directors framed for 4:3, lit for 4:3, blocked scenes for 4:3, and even built their special effects around 4:3. Stretching that work into widescreen feels a bit like deciding to colorize Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It solves a problem no one actually has.

Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. Vertical phone clips shot by amateurs on TikTok, grainy GIFs, and IMAX footage down-scaled to fit our phone (and connection). Content that wasn't designed to fill the entire screen isn't the issue.

From what I've seen, most of these old shows end up on free or bargain streaming services packed with ads. I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my dad where they sped up the dialogue and trimmed pauses, squeezed the credits into a tiny picture-in-picture box, and still lopped off another minute so the episode ended mid-sentence. All of that was just to make room for extra commercial slots the original show was never designed to accommodate. Disgusting, really... though I suppose you get what you pay for.

Sticking with the original 4:3 and simply adding pillarbox bars is cleaner, simpler, and far more respectful -- and ultimately more enjoyable for the audience.

Relevant :

* "That Was A Mistake": Steven Spielberg Admits He Regrets Removing Guns From E.T. // https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regr...

* 5 Worst Changes Star Wars Made From The Original Cuts // https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editi...

* 'Casablanca' gets colorized, but don't play it again, Ted | Interviews | Roger Ebert // https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colori...
by tristor | 2025-12-03 16:25:55+00:00
Which is why I consistently have told people to ensure that they pick a DAC which is powered independently if they intend to connect it via USB. Schitt Audio makes great stuff (it's what I have sitting on my desk right now) which is designed in that way, but there's no magic formula to beat physics when you physically power an audio device over a connection that is vulnerable to induced noise.

If you're trying to eliminate noise in your audio setup, the first and most important thing is having audio converted from digital to analog outside of the computer chassis itself (e.g. instead of a soundcard get a DAC). The second thing is to disconnect the power flows between the two systems (e.g. get a DAC which is separately powered). The third thing is to connect the DAC via a non-electrical connection so that the signal path is not vulnerable to noise in the environment between the two systems (e.g. use Toslink/optical and not USB/copper). The fourth thing is to condition the power input to DAC to remove transients (use an audio power conditioned, which does not need to be some grandiose thing, it's a bunch of capacitors).

Beyond that, there's not much you can do, after all there's EMI/RFI all of the time in the environment. If the DAC chassis is metallic and properly grounded, it should reject most, and the same should be true for the computer chassis, but there is always going to be /some/ incidental noise. As long as the noise floor is low enough that it's well below even quiet listening with amplification, you'll never hear it. But the default state of audio on most computer systems is pretty shit and people don't realize it, because they are mostly listening to Bluetooth earbuds (which at least provide no physical path for induced noise).
by pacificat0r | 2025-12-03 16:26:02+00:00
Entities that can't be picked, don't write to the texture, entities that can be picked, write to the texture their id. Whatever is closer to the camera will be the id that stays there (same as a color pixel, but instead of the object color you can think object id). So you are limited at one ID per pixel, but for me that works.
by mstngl | 2025-12-03 16:26:05+00:00
What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478 [2] Nice example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg
by kmundy | 2025-12-03 16:26:09+00:00
Right! Sort of the reason the MLR cap ran into this issue in the first place.

The insurers are forced into the only remaining avenues to grow profits: 1. Grow the pie, by letting prices rise. 2. Acquire the entities benefitting from this price rise.

Which is exactly what they did, leading to this constant upward spiral of insurance premiums.
by pier25 | 2025-12-03 16:26:34+00:00
> 100-1000x lower than any transducer

This seems like a lot but it's only 20-30db lower than whatever reference they're using.

This is the spec that really matters: THD+N: 0.0003% which is roughly -110 dB. It's very good and completely inaudible but not exceptional these days.
by raddan | 2025-12-03 16:26:42+00:00
> I’ve been thinking about an act to intentionally enrich members of Congress for reducing the deficit (e.g. a fraction of percent of savings certified by GAO goes to district and to member’s fund with a multi year cool off period, saving based on ratcheted down watermark).

There needs to be more incentive to be wise with that money though. If a representative decides to “fall on their sword” and cut spending on local infrastructure projects, they enrich themselves while impoverishing their constituents. Other reps probably won’t jump in to save a district they don’t represent. I would worry that this would make politicians fleecing their neighbors even worse.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-03 16:26:47+00:00
> predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances

I'd add with reliability, boundaries, and tolerances within the necessary values.

The problem with the TV remote is that nobody has given a damn about ergonomic needs for decades. The system is reliable, well understood, and has well known boundaries and tolerances; those are just completely outside of the requirements of the problem domain.

But I guess that's a completely off-topic tangent. LLMs fail much earlier.
by senfiaj | 2025-12-03 16:27:41+00:00
So you claim that the compiler "knows about this but doesn't optimize because of some safety measures"? As far as I remember, compilers don't optimize math expressions / brackets, probably because the order of operations might affect the precision of ints/floats, also because of complexity.

But my example is trivial (x % 2 == 0 && x % 3 == 0 is exactly the same as x % 6 == 0 for all C/C++ int), yet the compiler produced different outputs (the outputs are different and most likely is_divisible_by_6 is slower). Also what null (you mean 0?) checks are you talking about? The denominator is not null/0. Regardless, my point about not over relying on compiler optimization (especially for macro algorithms (O notation) and math expressions) remains valid.
by johnmaguire | 2025-12-03 16:27:42+00:00
Yes, violating historical precedent is part of the tradeoff - I see no contradiction. Are you able to identify the positive benefits offered by this approach? If not, we're not really "engineering" so to speak. Just picking favorites.

> The sad thing about systemd (including systemd-resolved) is that it is default on Linux distributions. So if you write software then you are forced to deal with it, because quite a few users will have it without being aware of the issues.

I'm well aware - my day job is writing networking software.
by dllu | 2025-12-03 16:27:43+00:00
Beamforming with a phased array is talked about in the article, but you are conflating two very different types of arrays. You can't form beams with the types of macroscopic arrays I was referring to, since they consist of macroscopic array elements whose phase cannot be controlled, and reside behind a fixed lens that ensures that they all point in different directions.
by h2zizzle | 2025-12-03 16:28:02+00:00
You've got it flipped. He was working from a false premise; his conclusions were a net negative to the conversation. I brought it back to zero by pointing out the flaw. And now you want to paint me as the bad guy, probably because I dashed the egotism at the core of his mistake, which you drew some amount of esteem from. The same deal as the people who persecuted Galileo for upending the geocentric model of the universe. Just because he couldn't extrapolate all of the ramifications of a heliocentric model doesn't mean he "wasn't contributing" by pointing out its significance.

But I suppose this analogy reveals that your tack is fundamentally European. So, at least you're consistent. What would be better is if you'd have some humility. Say it with me now: "We forgot to consider prior art because it originated from a part of the world that we tend to fail to acknowledge. This failure adulterated our analysis with an inferior premise. Thank you for pointing this out. We will now make a more appropriate analysis using research on the subject that was previously in our blindspot."
by jcranmer | 2025-12-03 16:28:18+00:00
x % 3 == 0 is an expression without side effects (the only cases that trap on a % operator are x % 0 and INT_MIN % -1), and thus the compiler is free to speculate the expression, allowing the comparison to be converted to (x % 2 == 0) & (x % 3 == 0).

Yes, compilers will tend to convert && and || to non-short-circuiting operations when able, so as to avoid control flow.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-03 16:28:23+00:00
Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things."

It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway."

So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team would have given us, but more expensive.
Ask HN: Is the absence of affect the real barrier to AGI and alignment?
by n-exploit | 2025-12-03 16:28:24+00:00
Damasio's work in affective neuroscience found something counterintuitive: patients with damage to emotional processing regions retained normal IQ and reasoning ability, but their lives fell apart. They couldn't make decisions. One patient, Elliot, would deliberate for hours over where to eat lunch. Elliot could generate endless analysis but couldn't commit, because nothing felt like it mattered more than anything else.

Damasio called these body-based emotional signals "somatic markers." They don't replace reasoning—they make it tractable. They prune possibilities and tell us when to stop analyzing and act.

This makes me wonder if we're missing something fundamental in how we approach AGI and alignment?

AGI: The dominant paradigm assumes intelligence is computation—scale capabilities and AGI emerges. But if human general intelligence is constitutively dependent on affect, then LLMs are Damasio's patient at scale: sophisticated analysis with no felt sense that anything matters. You can't reach general intelligence by scaling a system that can't genuinely decide.

Alignment: Current approaches constrain systems that have no intrinsic stake in outcomes. RLHF, constitutional methods, fine-tuning—all shape behavior externally. But a system that doesn't care will optimize for the appearance of alignment, not alignment itself. You can't truly align something that doesn't care.

Both problems might share a root cause: the absence of felt significance in current architectures.

Curious what this community thinks. Is this a real barrier, or am I over-indexing on one model of human cognition? Is "artificial affect" even coherent, or does felt significance require biological substrates we can't replicate?
by tristor | 2025-12-03 16:28:36+00:00
Schiit Audio makes great stuff, I've been using it for years and have other gear as well to compare to. I think it's good for what it is, although their pricing has gone a bit out of control lately. The problem here is not the maker of the DAC, it's that it's bus powered over USB, which is a problem regardless of who makes it.
Show HN: ToolPlex Desktop – MCP marketplace and AI workflow builder
by entrehacker | 2025-12-03 16:29:04+00:00
Hi HN. I crawled the MCP corpus, catalogued everything and built a standalone desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux.

We all know MCP has caught on, but is frequently criticized for lack of discoverability, overly permissive standards (e.g. auth, SSE vs Stdio), and wide attack surface. I wanted to build a desktop app dedicated to MCP, that could improve discoverability and address quality issues through collaborative tool use and curation. ToolPlex Desktop provides personalized recommendations, search functionality, tons of categories, and recommendation algorithms to promote the best MCP tools over time. It also has community feedback and reporting mechanisms so agents and users can give real time feedback to other agents.

On top of this I built an agent-native workflow builder (agents can build workflows) called playbooks. Playbooks are step by step shared workflow memory that can be used on across any AI model in the app. The general flow in ToolPlex is 1) install the MCP tools you like, 2) build playbooks for your recurring playbooks, 3) run your tools and playbooks with one click, 4) discover new tools and workflows; repeat.

ToolPlex operates on BYOK for the main AI providers or you can use the built in AI gateway. I built a new chat interface designed specifically for tool calling with advanced features like token limits on tool responses and detailed context length reporting. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks!
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-03 16:29:08+00:00
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

> More than half of excess U.S. health spending was associated with factors likely reflected in higher prices, including more spending on: administrative costs of insurance (~15% of the excess), administrative costs borne by providers (~15%), prescription drugs (~10%), wages for physicians (~10%) and registered nurses (~5%), and medical machinery and equipment (less than 5%). Reductions in administrative burdens and drug costs could substantially reduce the difference between U.S. and peer nation health spending.
by runjake | 2025-12-03 16:29:30+00:00
I have not had luck getting Case Catalyst to run well in WINE and it is not in the WINE AppDB. WINE is great software, but just stick with Windows, so you don't have two problems.

Also, uninstall any extra software (so called "crapware") that came installed on your laptop. These are notorious for hogging resources. Often this comes in the form of antivirus software and "lite" software suites that nag you for subscriptions constantly.

Uninstall anything Symantec, Norton or Adobe (unless you absolutely need it).

I personally use Chris Titus's WinUtil to debloat: https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
by positron26 | 2025-12-03 16:29:39+00:00
The FSF is the only home to the most dogmatic and narrow minded human beings I have ever met in my life. I dare not begin writing why. It is an essay. I have priorities to build things independent of the FSF proclivity for shortcomings.

The reason I recommend Lem is because CL is a general purpose programming language. The two-way flow of professional code in and out of the editor is a tremendous advantage that pays all sorts of dividends to libraries, innovation, runtimes, and tooling. Elisp is a Lisp, but affectionately known as "the worst of the Lisps" among serious Lisp programmers.

Some among the Emacs community are not blameless. Todays AI naysayers are just yesteryears tree-sitter doubters who said "We don't need all that fancy JSON garbledeygook" about LSP adoption. They were against an X frontend. They were against cl-anything in the symbol space. As the rock weathered away, the most abrasive sands remained. Proud they are of the lost atoll upon which no coral may grow.
by abixb | 2025-12-03 16:29:53+00:00
I get that, but what I'm saying is that it's anticompetitive as heck. In a fair system, profits from NVDA's revenue growth should've been distributed to shareholders as dividends or reinvested into the company itself, not buy its own customers -- that's my (and countless others') biggest gripe with the whole AI bubble bs.

Antitrust regulators must be sleeping at the wheels.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-03 16:30:19+00:00
Why does Germany, after having spent 1 trillion in "green" infrastructure, and generating more than half its electricity using renewables, still has the highest power costs in the rich world and needs to import massively electricity from France, then?

Why are people putting their head in the sand in front of those basic facts while saying "this is fine"?

And regarding France, subsidies for the renewable sector are a big part of the electricity cost.
by LM358 | 2025-12-03 16:30:26+00:00
>They seem to make decent products

I don't agree with that sentiment. Their designs are subpar and the quality of the soldering is (maybe was) unacceptable:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/h...

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...

The above review specifically goes into the problem from OP.

There's also their amplifier with a rather non-standard architecture that tries to solve a non-problem (injecting feedback in a NFB loop - I might remember wrong, if so, forgive me) which leads to it measuring double digit (!) THD if you feed it a sine wave. I'm not an experienced engineer but it is IMO a non-starter to have an amplifier try to decide what is and isn't a musical signal as part of its protection circuitry, short of detecting DC offsets or shorts (pun not intended). I'm not in the market for a 1800$ amplifier that goes bzzzt if you feed it music it disagrees with [1]

https://www.stereophile.com/content/schiit-audio-ragnarok-in...

>Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp

I don't disagree with your point. However, a company designing products like these should be able to design a filter for this usecase unless you're trying to use your DAC as a a measuring device, or there is something seriously wrong with your motherboard. I honestly haven't heard of any other brand product with this problem unless it's ~20 years old and in need of repair. It doesn't cost much in the BOM, however it does cost in engineering hours/competence and QA and this is something that should have been caught by the latter.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzMbY4sZvIw

Edit: I just want to add that I don't want to hate on Schiit. Honestly I'd like new audio companies to succeed and I applaud them for rejecting MQA back in the day and for not going all-in on the audiofool bullshit one sees too much of. But seeing such poor engineering and QA leaves a sour taste in my (electronics engineering) mouth. Maybe they have improved lately, I wouldn't know. I'm not really in their market anyways.
by kragen | 2025-12-03 16:30:26+00:00
This seems to be either LLM AI slop or a person working very hard to imitate LLM writing style:

The key dynamic: X were Y while A was merely B. While C needed to be built, there was enormous overbuilding that D ...

Why Forecasting Is Nearly Impossible

Here's where I think the comparison to telecoms becomes both interesting and concerning.

[lists exactly three difficulties with forecasting, the first two of which consist of exactly three bullet points]

...

What About a Short-Term Correction?

Could there still be a short-term crash? Absolutely.

Scenarios that could trigger a correction:

1. Agent adoption hits a wall ...

[continues to list exactly three "scenarios"]

The Key Difference From S:

Even if there's a correction, the underlying dynamics are different. E did F, then watched G. The result: H.

If we do I and only get J, that's not K - that's just L.

A correction might mean M, N, and O as P. But that's fundamentally different from Q while R. ...

The key insight people miss ...

If it's not AI slop, it's a human who doesn't know what they're talking about: "enormous strides were made on the optical transceivers, allowing the same fibre to carry 100,000x more traffic over the following decade. Just one example is WDM multiplexing..." when in fact wavelength division multiplexing multiplexing is the entirety of those enormous strides.

Although it constantly uses the "rule of three" and the "negative parallelisms" I've quoted above, it completely avoids most of the overused AI words (other than "key", which occurs six times in only 2257 words, all six times as adjectival puffery), and it substitutes single hyphens for em dashes even when em dashes were obviously meant (in 20 separate places—more often than even I use em dashes), so I think it's been run through a simple filter to conceal its origin.
by bananapub | 2025-12-03 16:30:26+00:00
for those looking for a simple and reliable self hosted S3 thing, check out Garage . it's much simpler - no web ui, no fancy RS coding, no VC-backed AI company, just some french nerds making a very solid tool.

fwiw while they do produce Docker containers for it, it's also extremely simple to run without that - it's a single binary and running it with systemd is unsurprisingly simple[1].

0: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

1: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/cookbook/system...
by mmsc | 2025-12-03 16:30:37+00:00
These wiz.io blog posts should be banned from HN; AFAICT, they're AI generated. Here's the original post with the details: https://react.dev/blog/2025/12/03/critical-security-vulnerab... - the vulnerability was not found by a Wiz employee at all, and the Wiz article (unlike the react.dev article) does not provide any meaningful technical information.

The important part to know:

- Even if your app does not implement any React Server Function endpoints it may still be vulnerable if your app supports React Server Components.

- The vulnerability is present in versions 19.0, 19.1.0, 19.1.1, and 19.2.0 of: react-server-dom-webpack, react-server-dom-parcel, react-server-dom-turbopack

- Some React frameworks and bundlers depended on, had peer dependencies for, or included the vulnerable React packages. The following React frameworks & bundlers are affected: next, react-router, waku, @parcel/rsc, @vitejs/plugin-rsc, and rwsdk.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-03 16:30:37+00:00
It's because patting yourself on the back for getting 5x performance increase in microbenchmark feels good and looks good on yearly review.

> But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.

Misaligned budgeting and goals is bane of good engineering. I've seen some absolutely stupid stuff like outsourcing hosting a simple site to us, because client would rather hire 3rd party to buy domain and put a simple site there (some advertising), than to deal with their own security guys and host it on their own infrastructure.

"It's a cost center" "So is fucking HR, why you don't fire them ?" "Uh, I'll ignore that, pls just invoice anything you do to other teams" ... "Hey, they bought cloud solution that doesn't work/they can't figure it out, can you help them" "But we HAVE stuff doing that cheaper and easier, why they didn't come to us" "Oh they thought cloud will be cheaper and just work after 5 min setup"