MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xandergos | 2025-12-11 00:14:58+00:00
Hi everyone, I wrote this paper. Cool to see it has been posted here already.

I want to clarify some points on things other people have mentioned:

- This architecture is not as fast as Perlin noise. IMO it is unlikely we will see any significant improvement on Perlin noise without a significant increase in compute, at least for most applications. Nonetheless, this system is not too slow for real-time use. In the Minecraft integration, for instance, the bottleneck in generation speed is by far Minecraft's own generation logic (on one RTX 3090 Ti).

- I agree that this is not "production-ready" for most tasks. The main issue is that (1) terrain is generated at realistic scales, which are too big for most applications, and (2) the only control the user has is the initial elevation map, which is very coarse. Thankfully, I expect both of these issues to be fixed pretty quickly. (1) is more specific to terrain generation, but I have a number of ideas on how to fix it. (2) is mostly an issue simply because I did not have the time to engineer a system with this many features (and as-is, the system is quite dense). I believe a lot of existing work on diffusion conditioning could be adapted here.

- The post title misses one key part of the paper title: "in Infinite, Real-Time Terrain Generation." I don't expect this to replace perlin noise in other applications. And for bounded generation, manual workflows are still superior.

- The top level input is perlin noise because it is genuinely the best tool for generating terrain at continental scale. If I had more time on my hands, I would like to use some sort of plate tectonics simulator to generate that layout, but for something simple, reasonably realistic, and infinite, perlin noise is pretty much unbeatable. Even learned methods perform on-par with perlin noise at this scale because the data is so simple.
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 00:15:44+00:00
You haven't responded to any claim I've made other than to advance a claim that Hezbollah, which fired tens of thousands of mostly unguided rockets into Israel, did not in fact kill 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights.

Our premises may be too far apart to usefully discuss this. The core of my argument (the comparative military and civilian body counts in Syria and Yemen) aren't going to be easy to refute by appeals to Hezbollah's PR. (You may also have responded to a by-2-minutes-or-so earlier version of my comment; we may be responding to each other in too-close succession and talking past each other.)
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-12-11 00:15:51+00:00
AI certainly adds speed for looking things up, but it delivers no additional knowledge about your problem. Because of this, I don't think a chatbot will be successful. People will just end up going to their iFixit site and following the listed steps. When amateurs are fixing things, they need to have step-by-step knowledge of these workflows:

1) exactly how to disassemble the thing enough to find the broken thing

2) exactly what internal part(s) to check and how to do a pass/fail check

3) exactly how to change the bad part

3) exactly how to put everything back together without causing more damage

If the bot generated 3D animations of all these steps, that would be a real game changer.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-11 00:16:26+00:00
It's called nominative use, and describing a thing as "HDMI compatible" is permitted.

One doesn't get to use the logo or even the typeface, but that's not a dealbreaker at all for the purposes being discussed here. Words themselves are OK (and initialisms, such as "HDMI," are just a subset of words like nouns and verbs are).

The wiki has some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-11 00:16:37+00:00
So it validated in the input and failed in an unsafe way. Is that what you’re saying? Instead of rejecting the input and failing in a safe way.

My only point was, the language doesn’t matter. It could have been written in brainfuck.

I’m bitching about the rust evangelism, obviously. Neat language, protects against NPEs et. al. It isn’t a magic bullet and it never was.
by eek2121 | 2025-12-11 00:16:54+00:00
The non-technical folks don't understand the very real limitations, hallucinations, and security risks that LLMs introduce into workflows. Tech CEOs and leadership are shoving it down everyone's throats without understanding it. Google/Microsoft are shoving it down everyone's' throats without asking, and with all the layoffs that have happened? People are understandably rejecting it.

The entire premise is also CURRENTLY built around copyrighted infringement, which makes any material produced by an LLM questionable legally. Unless the provider you are using has a clause saying they will pay for all your legal bills, you should NOT be using an LLM at work. This includes software development, btw. Until the legal issue is settled once and for all, any company using an LLM may risk becoming liable for copyright infringement. Possibly any individual depending on the setup.
by tom_ | 2025-12-11 00:17:20+00:00
As if anybody would be daft enough to deny that you are of course absolutely right, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/rubio-state-d... has this additional detail:

> Mr. Rubio's directive, under the subject line "Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,"
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-11 00:17:43+00:00
"SAN FRANCISCO-With ill-advised and dangerous age verification laws proliferating across the United States and around the world, creating surveillance and censorship regimes that will be used to harm both youth and adults, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new resource hub that will sort through the mess and help"

The surveillance and censorship system is built, administered and maintained by Silicon Valley companies who have adopted this as their "business model". "Monetising" surveillance of other peoples' noncommercial internet use

These Silicon Valley companies have been surveilling internet subscribers for over a decade, relentlessly connecting online identity to offline identity, hell bent on knowing who is accessing what webpage on what website, where they live, what they are interested in, and so on, building detailed advertising profiles (including the age of the ad target) tied to IP addresses, then selling the subscribers out to advertisers and collecting obscene profits (and killing media organisations that hire journalists in the process)

Now these companies are being forced to share some of the data they collect and store

Gosh, who would have forseen such an outcome

These laws are targeting the Silicon Valley companies, not internet subscribers

But the companies want to spin it as an attack on subscribers

The truth is the companies have been attacking subscriber privacy and attempting to gatekeep internet publication^1 for over a decade, in the name of advertising and obscene profits

1. Discourage subscribers from publishing websites and encourage them to create pages on the company's website instead. Centralise internet publication, collect data, perform surveillance and serve advertisements
by BobaFloutist | 2025-12-11 00:18:27+00:00
>the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war

Can you cite something for this? Most people would rather be (even permanently) injured than killed, so I'm not sure why using the minimum necessary force would be frowned upon, other than it typically being incredibly difficult and impractical.
by tim333 | 2025-12-11 00:19:31+00:00
The "Why AGI will not happen" argument here seems to hinge a fair bit on hardware limits and "computation is physical" but the arguments don't seem very good.

Much better in my opinion is Hans Moravec's 1997 paper "When will computer hardware match the human brain?" which seems quite solid in it's reasoning - he was a roboticist and spending time trying to make robots do things like vision and given at the time they understood the retina quite well he could compare the amount of compute needed to do something equivalent to a given volume of neurons and then multiply up by the size of the brain. Conclusions were

> human brain is about 100,000 times as large as the retina, suggesting that matching overall human behavior will take about 100 million MIPS of computer power

100 TFLOPS roughly. Or similar to a top graphics card now. Also:

> Based on extrapolation of past trends and on examination of technologies under development, it is predicted that the required hardware will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s.

which seems to have come to pass. I think we don't have AGI yet because the LLM algorithms are very inefficient and not right for the job - it was more a language translation algorithm that surprised people by getting quite smart if you threw huge compute and the whole internet at it.

(Moravec's paper which is not a bad read https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.pdf)

It also has

>This paper describes how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware.

My guess is that will come to pass. AI researchers have the hardware and the software will improve shortly.
by keeda | 2025-12-11 00:20:08+00:00
> Yes, but I think pre-AI virtually everyone reading this would have been very skeptical about their ability to do so.

That's not quite true: while everybody acknowledged it was folly to measure absolute individual productivity, there were aggregate metrics many in the industry were aligning on like DORA or the SPACE framework, not to mention studies like https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3540250.3558940

Similarly, many of these AI coding studies do not look at productivity on an individual level at a point of time, but in aggregate and over an extended period of time using a randomized controlled trial. It's not saying Alice is more productive than Bob, it's saying Alice and Bob with AI are on average more productive than themselves without AI.

> They claim that this won't impact quality because of the aforementioned review and their QA process. Do you think that's a realistic assessment? If and on the off chance you think it is, why didn't this happen on a larger scale pre-LLM?

Interestingly, I think something similar did happen pre-LLM at industry-scale! My hypothesis (based on observations when personally involved) is that this is exactly what allowed offshoring to boom. The earliest attempts at offshoring were marked by high-profile disasters that led many to scoff at the whole idea. However companies quickly learned and instituted better processes that basically made failures an exception rather than the norm.

I expand a bit more and draw parallels to coding with AI here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944717

> ... as is the fact that LLM generated code is still worse than human generated...

I still don't think that can be assumed as a fact. The few studies I've seen find comparable outcomes, with LLMs actually having a slight edge in some cases, e.g.

- https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16857

- https://arxiv.org/html/2508.00700v1
by array_key_first | 2025-12-11 00:20:09+00:00
> Money can buy quality of life

It actually can't, not generally at least for US labor.

One of the most important measures of quality is work-life balance. Basically, your life kinda sucks if you work all the time, and then you also get fat and sick and die young(er).

People in the US work a lot, and often the more wealthy, but not most wealthy, work A TON. In programming, it's not atypical to have "superstar" staff engineers putting in easily 60-70 hours a week. Of course, not including the commute.

But then there's the time off. Oh, where to begin. We're at a point where 10 days of PTO accrued a year is considered decent. It's work work work, and you can put in 20 years of service... and get, like, an extra couple days. Maybe.

None of this scales down. For example, I'm supposed to be working 40 hours a week. I'm not of course, the baseline is 45 because 9-5 is actually 9-6. And I haven't left at 6 in at least a year, so even that is underestimating it. But suppose I do work 40 hours a week.

Would I take a 50% pay cut to work 20 hours? Fuck. Yes. Yes. In a heart beat. But I can't, I'd actually be taking an 80% pay cut if I do that, so I couldn't live. And it's like this for literally ALL jobs. I can't just "move up", because the work-life balance doesn't get better, it actually just gets worse! And at no point can I take a "step down" and work less, because then I'm flipping burgers.
by versavolt | 2025-12-11 00:20:18+00:00
All it takes is for the dot com of chatGPT to be blocked in my organization, and copilot has succeeded. Now we have a presentation from microsoft and half of their thinking problems didnt even work. Of course, i have used copilot chat extensively, and since the rollout of deep thinking, it has provided many benefits. Writing and editing workflows in excel or officesript, for instance. Custom JSON formatting in sharepoint. It has even made a regression model in an excel workbook. Takes knowledge to edit it, but it does get me there.
by rtpg | 2025-12-11 00:20:20+00:00
I think people are overindexing on how much of this is "get more data on users".

I don't get why people believe there's a conspiracy here. There's perhaps a large tent, but "social media bad" is not a controversial opinion! "The gov't should do something about it" is more controversial, though I think the controversiality is less heavy in spaces with parents, teachers, places where people have to deal with kids.

Not that this is how things should be determined, but... I think reading this as a "get more data and track people" play feels like giving everyone involved too much credit. It really just feels like what it says on the tin here.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-12-11 00:20:23+00:00
No, sorry if that wasn't clear, I've not identified one by eye without a scope. Maybe your fine vision is better than mine, but all the tiniest things in a drop of water are just about indistinguishable without magnification. The kinds of water that have sufficient density to contain a tardigrade just look like they're full of grit, I don't think you could identify which speck was a tardigrade and which was just dirt.

Nymphs are larger (that's why they call them "macro" invertebrates), but it's always good to have at least a magnifying glass if not a loupe or microscope on site.
by sporkxrocket | 2025-12-11 00:20:29+00:00
Unguided doesn't mean unaimed. Here's an example (of many) of the types of attacks Hezbollah had been executing: https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1710938611858780314

Edit: I'm now throttled from posting but I was able to go back and find more video of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel military facilities. I think people should watch these and judge for themselves:

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1752035071047926029

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1790471234867568905

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1756031325264318682

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1743565825771032895

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1810011590118305895

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1791216213785268522
by nerdsniper | 2025-12-11 00:20:43+00:00
> Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help.

I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.
by decafninja | 2025-12-11 00:20:49+00:00
I started my career in tech as helpdesk. I recall the office printer was always broken or throwing a fit, and we’d be called in to troubleshoot. Or someone’s PC for whatever reason would not be able to connect to the printer. Almost felt like a conspiracy that printers were so unreliable.

Fast forward to today and my retired dad still insists he needs to print out paper documents to read even though he can perfectly see his 30” monitor or his iPad. His printer is always broken for some reason or another and every time I visit my parents’ home I’m troubleshooting his printer again.

I despise printers.
by uplifter | 2025-12-11 00:21:14+00:00
Is this really an attempt to regulate children's speech or association any more than denying kids entry to a pub?.

I don't think the framers of this law are even worried about what kids are saying or who they associate with, as long as it isn't the criminals, sexual predators and state actors you mention.

Frankly if kids were visiting a physical hang-out where they could expect to be attacked by such people, any and every responsible guardian would order them to never go there.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-11 00:21:20+00:00
It might speed up the commutes of people coming into the bay from Gilroy, and it might make Madera a somewhat-viable commuter town (if you don't mind 2 hour commutes), but I can't imagine many people using it for daily travel who aren't already well-served by Amtrak/Caltrain
by amanzi | 2025-12-11 00:21:24+00:00
Yep, and a lot of the responses to those "nobody wants to by Microsoft's AI" articles seem to get confused with the annoying copilot buttons that are popping up everywhere, and the actual enterprise-AI features that MS are pushing. I've seen and heard of a lot of uptake in the M365 AI paid features, and they seem genuinely useful - you can build and publish agents that have access to internal documents, staff can ask copilot to summarise their last day's worth of emails, transcribe Teams meetings with summaries, etc, etc. All protected by the same controls that you already get with M365 (further locking you in!)
by rtpg | 2025-12-11 00:22:32+00:00
I'm pretty sure in most places in the world if you are travelling from abroad you are asked to share your passport, and have been for a very very very very long time.

The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it or types in the data into the computer) feels almost academic. Though at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-11 00:24:23+00:00
As the other comments pointed out, that's not covering billing...

But also the (theoretical) production platform for Gemini is Vertex AI, not AI Studio.

And until pretty recently using that took figuring out service accounts, and none of Google's docs would demonstrate production usage.

Instead they'd use the gcloud CLI to authenticate, and you'd have to figure out how each SDK consumed a credentials file.

-

Now there's "express mode" for Vertex which uses an API Key, so things are better, but the complaints were well earned.

At one point there were even features (like using a model you finetuned) that didn't work without gcloud depending on if you used Vertex or AI Studio: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...
by jonahbuilds | 2025-12-11 00:25:38+00:00
i’ve been building findclout, a tool that plugs into a bunch of instagram meme pages and turns them into an ad network for b2c products.

instead of buying one-off shoutouts, brands plug into a dashboard, upload their logo and a couple example creatives, and our creators run memes with a small watermark and aligned caption. everything is tracked on our side so creators just post and get paid on views.

quick early result: one friend, aidan, put ~$2k into a test campaign. mix of his own short form content and creator submitted memes, all pointing to the same product. the posts did around 5m views total and that one test added roughly $4k mrr to one of his projects in about a week. if it holds, that’s something like ~$48k annual return on the $2k ad spend.

right now the network is ~50 instagram creators doing around 40–50m views per day total. most are meme pages with us and uk gen z audiences.

this is still early, mostly me wiring things together for my own stuff and friends’ projects, and trying not to break creators’ pages in the process.

i’m mainly posting here to sanity check the idea – obvious failure modes i’m not thinking about – whether anyone has tried something similar at scale and hit a wall – thoughts on how you’d structure pricing or attribution if you were building this

site is findclout.com/marketing check it out and book a call if you're interested.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-11 00:25:57+00:00
How does this solve the problem of both governments and corporations wanting to implement this in ways that allow them to hoard datasets?

As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.

I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.

There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.
by decafninja | 2025-12-11 00:25:59+00:00
I’m Christian, and believe in the afterlife. Supposedly heaven will be incomprehensible awesome.

However I feel nonetheless there is so much awesomeness to experience here on this earthly realm too, and too little time even in a perfectly “good” life to take it all in. Even if someone’s life starting from birth to death at a ripe old age happens to fall perfectly min-maxed in place served with a silver spoon.
by nsoonhui | 2025-12-11 00:26:36+00:00
I think the fact that DeepSeek trains on competitor queries (i.e., distillation) — along with using banned Nvidia chips — helps explain how it can achieve such low training costs (USD 6 million vs. billions) while delivering only slightly worse performance than its American counterparts. It also undermines the narrative that DeepSeek or China is posing a serious challenge to the U.S. lead in AI. The gap may be closing, but the initial reactions now seem knee-jerk.

That the discussion has being hijacked and shifted to moral superiority is really unfortunate, because that was never the point in the first place.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-11 00:26:41+00:00
They have to pay the fees regardless, since no TV would sell if it didn't have an HDMI port. So unless the TV manufacturers can also convince set-top box makers, game console manufacturers, Blu-Ray makers etc to include DisplayPort, they'll need to continue including an HDMI port.

So this needs to be an industry-wide switch, not just TV makers.
by intothemild | 2025-12-11 00:26:54+00:00
I like using Gemini for general stuff,

I have that Gemini AI plan thing, and it's great. But I absolutely will not plug my credit card into Google cloud services, no way.. I know I can put guardrails up, but I just am terrified that I'll get a gigantic bill that I cannot afford.

Nope sorry no way. I want a simple $X per month sub.

Claude gives me that. Which is why Claude wins.
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 00:27:05+00:00
You don't want to miss a step holding Israel to account. I'm not interested in pushing back on you about that. But to accomplish that, you're defending Hezbollah. Hezbollah is indefensible. If you want to keep hashing out why, I'm willing to keep talking about it, but I suspect this isn't a productive conversation.
by regularfry | 2025-12-11 00:27:27+00:00
Like the IETF, you mean? If I want to implement general internet-compatible timestamps, RFC3339 is right here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339.

How about something big: TCP? RFC9293. It's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293.

HTML? Different organisation but the same idea, it's over here: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

You're reading this web page because of standards organisations that gave everything away for free for anyone to implement.