MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by schopra909 | 2026-02-26 00:13:59+00:00
honestly, it's really hard to shorten the feedback loop in this space. For this, we really just did run one experiment at a time and visually inspect the results everywhere. when you're going 0 -> 1, you're looking for "signs of life" to make sure the basic thing is working. when it comes to testing which (of the infinite levers) to the pull, a lot of it comes from intuition (which i know isn't the most fun answer). we spent a week or so just running experiments on the amount of compression we could squeeze out the VAE without significant degradation in the final results). In hindsight, spending a week on that seems like a waste, since we got the 8x spatial, 4x compression within the first 1-2 days. But in the moment, you're often unsure WHAT will be the key unlock. So, when you're in the middle of storm you're running a quick bayesian process in your head, measuring what you might learn from the outcome of the experiment vs. the time/money it would take to run the experiment. And you, hope that your intuitions become stronger over time, as you take more repetitions. More money, might help the problem (e.g. parallel experiments, more detailed explorations). But, I don't think money is a cure-all. At some point, you get lost in the sauce trying to tie the threads between all the empirical findings you have at your finger tips. Maybe one day AI models could help here integrating these all results. As it stands, they still struggle to reason about this stuff, in context of other research papers and findings (likely because all the context on arxiv is so noisy; you can't trust any particular finding and verifying findings is so hard to do, that it's hard to meta-reason about your experiments correctly).
by spartanatreyu | 2026-02-26 00:14:01+00:00
I've been lurking there for years and still don't have one.

Sometimes I'd like to correct misinformation about something niche that I happen to be over-knowledgable about, or drop a 1-5 line code fix for the very thing they're talking about.

But if the cost of me getting that commenting access is also lowering the threshold needed for anyone (or anything) to comment, I'd rather keep the threshold high.

A good chunk of users on lobste.rs are bloggers, so if they get something not quite right, I can just contact them through their blog anyway.
by MikeTheGreat | 2026-02-26 00:14:19+00:00
> No automotive paint shops

Wait, hold on - I watched all the seasons of "Rust To Riches" on Netflix, about a small shop that flips cars.

They routinely painted cars.

They'd paint in this sealed-up room/garage thingee, the guy would wear and industrial-grade mask, and the camera would slide past as he expertly painted the car. The 30 second montages looked awesome!

That show took place in Temecula, California. So there's no way that site is accurate.

And, more to the point, if they want to show that they are accurate they should be linking to the rules & regulations that actually prohibit these things instead of just making a claim & calling it a day.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-02-26 00:14:19+00:00
> Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs.

This is how you make them dependent on a single MS-like interface. Kids are the most flexible, and shouldn't need. Would go as far as to say they are mildly harmed by not being exposed to different workflows.

Sure glad no one paved Windows over our Macs and Amigas so we wouldn't have to learn anything else.
by anotherevan | 2026-02-26 00:15:03+00:00
For some reason this reminds me strongly of an old play-by-email game called C++Robots[1]. I loved the idea, but the timeslice limitation[2] I found too annoying.

I had youthful dreams of re-implementing something similar that would run on the Java Virtual Machine, where you could run the submitted robots via the debugger interface so you could keep "real-time" in the game environment more authentic. Ideas are cheap, follow-through is hard.

[1] https://corewar.co.uk/cpprobots.htm

[2] https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbem_articles/cpprobots_environ...
by autoexec | 2026-02-26 00:15:17+00:00
> so obviously he’s biased and we can’t do the mental work of sifting

This guy, with an obvious bias, created a website that misrepresents the situation in California (by implying things are banned or "nearly impossible" when in actuality they just take time/effort), while also failing to show the specific regulations or requirements for any of it. Without supplying that kind of information this website is little better than "It's banned. trust me bro". It's not our responsibility to try to dig up evidence to support or verify this guys claims just because he can't be bothered to do it.

His motivations, his framing of the problem, and his failure to back up his own statements makes the site pretty damn easy to dismiss and I don't even doubt that there might be instances where bad regulation exists, especially regulation that protects the profits of established players in certain industries by keeping out competition. I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that it might be happening, but if there is something to be gained you aren't going to find it on this guys website. Serious coverage on this topic would include actionable information we can use to identify and solve specific problems. This is just anti-regulation propaganda.
Ask HN: Could you create a competitor to your company at 10% of the cost?
by TheAlchemist | 2026-02-26 00:16:00+00:00
I'm trying to wrap my mind about the AI tools, and while I believe there is way too much hype, I'm quite impressed with the progress.

The current mood seem to be that big companies will automate away many white collar jobs and just get bigger profits. My question is - what if it's the other way around ? Could said white collar workers just spin off competitors much more easily than before ? Obviously this mostly apply to software, but I'm curious what people think about it in all industries.
by llbbdd | 2026-02-26 00:16:11+00:00
I generally agree that self-driving cars are going to take this niche, but not with tunnels. Tunnels add the same dedicated infrastructure problems as mass public transit.

I'd suspect most car trips today are 1 or 2 passengers with the back seat and trunk empty; we'll eventually see new form factors of on-demand vehicle that trim off unneeded space. If you need to get from A to B alone, no cargo to speak of, you order a ride that covers that class and it's small. If you're taking a shuttle from the airport with your whole family and luggage, you order a ride with those specs.
by richardfeynman | 2026-02-26 00:17:28+00:00
I'm not vaguely asserting that "some enemy might have set foot in the hospital at some point." I'm accurately pointing out what is common knowledge: armed Hamas members were and are in hospitals, where they also took and killed Israeli hostages.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, Israel has not blown up any hospital buildings. This is a myth. If you think I'm wrong, point to which hospital building Israel blew up. Show me standard OSINT stuff: when it occurred, pictures of the rubble, the munitions used, who died.
by bluedino | 2026-02-26 00:17:35+00:00
That sounds fantastic but it means nothing in practice. It's like something you'd hear in a "Engineering Explained" video, but with no real-world application. There's so much more that goes into an engine that it doesn't matter.

Again, it's a myth.

Similarly, there was always the debate over rod length (in the same displacement engines). You use the same crankshaft but the piston has the wrist pin located higher. The longer rod was always supposed to make "more torque" because of the angle but that ended up not being the case.

You can verify this buy putting engines together with different bores and strokes that are roughly equal displacements, and with the same heads/cam on them, they will make identical power. Picture something like a 3.50" bore and 4.00" stroke, and vice versa. Look up someone like Richard Holdener on YouTube for actual data. Displacement is displacement, it doesn't really matter how you make it.

Bore is what would make you more power after a certain point, anyway. You get more surface area to fit larger valves, etc. But again, using the same heads (that aren't shrouding the smaller bores), either combination of bore/stroke will make the same power throughout the rev range.

Then you get into things like piston speed and all that but none of that matters unless you're talking about a race engine. And when you are, they'll just rebuild it more often so they don't care how long it lasts.

Here's another read:

https://rehermorrison.com/tech-talk-53-big-bore-or-long-stro...
by mrandish | 2026-02-26 00:17:44+00:00
I was making a distinction between AI-based autonomy which is less deterministic and currently subject to unpredictable hallucinations vs 'automatic' based on if/then heuristics and thresholds which can range from as simple as a Claymore mine with a proximity trigger to the MIM-104 you linked.

I'm not an expert but my understanding is the MIM-104 is more akin to complex automatic systems like a modern airliner auto-pilot and both are materially different than transformer-based LLMs.
by scoofy | 2026-02-26 00:17:52+00:00
When you are looking at your city budget... you're probably looking at cash-based accounting:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashaccounting.asp

This looks at current costs. The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this they usually also need to be replaced all at once. To see those costs before they happen, you need to use accrual accounting:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accrualaccounting.asp

The entire message from Strong Towns is exactly that because cities often use cash accounting instead of accrual accounting in their budgetary processes these lingering issues of deferred maintenance don't show up until they do, and when they do, those costs will simply be too large for the city to cover without very politically unpopular interventions.
by rzerowan | 2026-02-26 00:18:37+00:00
Would a system like the one in China - with the user of methanol conversion from excess Wind/Solar/Other power gen (even idle coal) making it much more flexible to generate/transport/store rather than trying to buildout gas distribution.

With the added advantage of fuel cell swaps [0] and reload giving the trucks a quicker turnaround time per charge (i think similar op is used for electric trucks as well as some consumer car models)

It certainly solves the problem of recharge points as the infra can be rolled out piecemeal, and since it would be for heavy trucks less disruptive of the rest of the cityscape (can have the outside metroplitan areas etc with maybe emergency stops within)

[0] https://m.chinatrucks.org/news/10750.html
by WhompingWindows | 2026-02-26 00:18:51+00:00
Your revisionist history isn't on point for US slavery.

Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.

What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.

The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".

This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.

Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?
by munificent | 2026-02-26 00:19:00+00:00
> It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

The enslaved people sure as fuck aren't prospering in that situation, so the only way one could possibly equate slavery with economic prosperity is by simply not counting them as people at all.

> Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization... and how hard regular (white) people had to work.

One way to think of slavery is that it's a far point on the continuum between equality and inequality. What they really hated was equality because that necessarily involves taking something away from them, the people who have the most.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-26 00:19:26+00:00
Oil is processed using fractional distillation, we're not making the kerosene, in some sense a fraction of the oil "was" kerosene and we just split that out from the rest.

It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g. the turbines in a passenger aeroplane. Today that's not economically sensible because you can just buy oil, but when the oil runs out, or we aren't processing nearly enough for other reasons already it could in principle make sense to literally do solar power + CO2 + water => kerosene.
by datenyan | 2026-02-26 00:19:56+00:00
> "adding rich text editing features to a text editor”

Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features.

Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.
by vintagedave | 2026-02-26 00:20:19+00:00
That is an excellent idea. It is 2AM my time, but I may set Claude going and check in the morning. (I tend to keep a closer eye on AI coding than that usually!)

The preset articles and trying out comments were intended to be something similar: see a topic, see how it works. But running it on each and every comment on an existing thread is really powerful.

There may be privacy concerns? General respect? I don't want to tie assessments to specific commenters, who published in good faith not expecting some kind of automated review, nor thereby imply they commented poorly for example. But I'll code it up on my end and see what we can do with it. It's truly a very nice idea.
by jjcm | 2026-02-26 00:21:07+00:00
As someone currently working on their own VAE, you reasoning for why you went with WAN 2.1 and your learnings for what you think you did wrong really resonated with me, specifically:

> Looking back, we should have just filtered out these samples from the dataset and moved on.

I hadn't even considered to look and see if poor data quality was resulting in an inability to recreate. This is a good gotchya to look out for. Appreciate the deep dive here!
by munificent | 2026-02-26 00:21:29+00:00
The article doesn't mention this, but I assume part of this is because the US is actively dismantling hydro power by removing dams. It turns out what while hydro power is "green" in terms of not polluting, it's still quite harmful to the environment because of animals like salmon that need to be able to traverse rivers and the rest of the ecosystem that depends on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_the_Un...
by keini | 2026-02-26 00:21:56+00:00
On February 1st I decided to run a small experiment. I gave myself less than 24 hours to build and ship a very simple iOS app, with no launch plan, no marketing budget, and honestly no expectations.

The idea was simple: what if a widget just showed how much of the current season is left? No accounts, no subscriptions, no complex features. Just a calm, minimal widget living on your home screen.

I priced it at $0.99 mostly as part of the experiment. I didn’t even set up proper analytics at first I just wanted to see what would happen if I shipped something small and clean.

A few hours after launch it unexpectedly climbed into the charts, then it slowed down, then it stabilized. As of today, it just crossed 1100 downloads and around $780 in revenue.

It’s not huge, but for something built in under a day, it feels kind of surreal. What surprised me most is that people seem to appreciate small, focused apps without subscriptions or noise.

Now I’m trying to figure out what this actually means. Was it timing? Luck? Or is there still real space for tiny, intentional apps in the App Store?

Curious what others here would test next.
by ashdksnndck | 2026-02-26 00:22:21+00:00
I assume you use semiconductors yourself, since you are posting here. But you want their manufacture to be banned in your state.

So the right thing is to outsource the dirty jobs to countries that can’t afford to be picky?

Wouldn’t it be better for the world if we used our wealth to develop methods of safe semiconductor manufacturing with low environmental impact, and proudly built those facilities in California?
by guoyu | 2026-02-26 00:23:01+00:00
We built an open API gateway for AI agents. The core idea: map the entire internet's APIs into a virtual filesystem, so agents can discover and call them using 5 Unix commands they already understand (ls, cat, grep, write, pipe).

The problem we're solving: today, if your agent needs to call 10 different APIs, it needs 10 different auth flows, 10 sets of API keys floating around in plaintext, and 10 OpenAPI specs eating up your context window. MCP helps, but loading tool schemas still burns thousands of tokens per service.

With nkmc, the agent authenticates once (single JWT), and the gateway handles per-service credentials through a 3-layer encrypted vault — the agent never sees raw API keys. API specs are replaced by minimal skill.md files (~90% fewer tokens than OpenAPI).

For API providers: register your API in 3 minutes via DNS TXT verification. No SDK integration needed.

40+ services already registered (GitHub, Stripe, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Slack, Notion, etc.). Open source, built on Cloudflare Workers.
by theluketaylor | 2026-02-26 00:23:04+00:00
Taxing unrealized gains is a terrible idea, but I do think we need to expand the definition of realizing a gain.

0.1%ers borrowing against stocks and others assets and paying little more than minimum interest is a system-breaking loophole that has exploded the wealth gap. It needs to stop. Taxing unrealized gains isn't the fix. Leveraging an asset needs to be a realized gain.

People should be paying capital gains on the delta between book value vs the asset valuation at loan time. They are gaining from the asset appreciation to have access to more leverage and that gain should be taxable. This would re-set the book value so people don't pay capital gains multiple times on the same gain, but they shouldn't be able to defer the gain forever while using debt to avoid tax.

There should probably be a lifetime exemption of around $1 million to allow the middle class to leverage their home and other key assets in a way the richest have benefitted from for so long, but once you use up your exemption no more tax-free leverage.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-26 00:23:13+00:00
> The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony…

You know, I've heard that performance so many times over so many decades that I don't have to hit a play button or even close my eyes in order to hear it. It's there inside my head when I want it to be.

And somehow I never interpreted it in that way (sirens, screaming, etc) until just a moment ago. I thought it was just a quirky little early-morning break in the familiar tune from someone who had been up way too long by that point.

And now instead of just being the quirky sounds of an impromptu guitar solo that I can recall whenever I wish, it now has unpleasant pictures to go with it.

Thanks (I think).
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-26 00:23:25+00:00
>their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet

Two years ago I entered a Best Buy (bigbox US electronics retailer) shocked to see the main entry display was (presumably unshippable due to size) BBQ pits. My guess is that it was for reasons similar to your statement (although I wouldn't call it the GameStop effect, as they have a profitable secondhand market).
by panick21_ | 2026-02-26 00:23:27+00:00
One of the problems in the US is that buses stop often and have really shitty doors. Often only 2 doors. And even worse, sometimes everybody needs to buy a ticket from the driver.

The buses are also smaller, with many fewer bendy-bus. So if you go to fewer stops, you could overwhelm individual buses.

So if you want shorter distance between stop you need to optimize the ingress/egress with lots of doors. And you need a fast accelerating bus, like an electric or preferably trolley bus. But the US does the exact opposite, short stops with bad buses.

But yeah, the US makes so many mistakes with buses, its actually crazy. Of course, many other make many of the same mistakes but usually only a few not all of them.

Canada is also making many of the US mistakes, but at least in large cities their buses see far more use then in comparable US cities. So they are doing better while still having some feeling North American.

So I agree, some amount of stop reduction does make sense in the US. And its attractive because its basically a 'zero cost' solution. But by itself its only a drop in the bucket.

The real problem is car priority in all aspects of design and its total primacy in the way of thinking.
by cookiengineer | 2026-02-26 00:23:32+00:00
Take my upvote! That's a really novel approach to the misinformation crisis and I love the product idea. It would be pretty awesome with a plugin system so that you can integrate it with other websites, too.

Wish you the best for it!

PS: the website is _really_ slow on Android Firefox. I had to use my Desktop system to try it out.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-02-26 00:24:13+00:00
You appear to have forgotten the existence of differences in sexual development (DSD).

Not at all. You apparently have forgotten to read your own link. Nothing in that paper contains the slightest suggestion of non-biological entities having any sort of sexual development whatsoever. The fact that biological processes can be quirky has no bearing on whether non-biological entities can be thought of as having them at all.

Actually, I think you're just trying to make your own political point on top of what I already noted explicitly is not a politically-related comment.
Show HN: PixShot – Screenshot and OG Image API
by juanjosegongi | 2026-02-26 00:24:30+00:00
I built PixShot — a screenshot and OG image API. You can try it on the homepage without signing up, just type any URL.

I needed screenshots for a side project and balked at the pricing — Urlbox starts at $29/mo for 5K, ScreenshotOne at $79/mo for 10K. So I built my own on a single VPS. Free tier is 500/mo, paid starts at $19/mo.

Stack: Fastify + Playwright + Sharp + BullMQ + Redis, deployed on OVH with Dokploy. No serverless, no cold starts.

I'm based in Colombia where Stripe doesn't work for merchants, so I used Creem.io as a Merchant of Record — not something I expected to spend time on.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or pricing.