MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-07 05:24:03+00:00
What causes LiDAR to fail harder than normal cameras in bad weather conditions? I understand that normal LiDAR algorithms assume the direct paths from light source to object to camera pixel, while a mist will scatter part of the light, but it would seem like this can be addressed in the pixel depth estimation algorithm that combines the complex amplitudes at the different LiDAR frequencies.

I understand that small lens sizes mean that falling droplets can obstruct the view behind the droplet, while larger lens sizes can more easily see beyond the droplet.

I seldom see discussion of the exact failure modes for specific weather conditions. Even if larger lenses are selected the light source should use similar lens dimensions. Independent modulation of multiple light sources could also dramatically increase the gained information from each single LiDAR sensor.

Do self-driving camera systems (conventional and LiDAR) use variable or fixed tilt lenses? Normal camera systems have the focal plane perpendicular to the viewing direction, but for roads it might be more interesting to have a large swath of the horizontal road in focus. At least having 1 front facing camera with a horizontal road in focus may prove highly beneficial.

To a certain extend an FSD system predicts the best course of action. When different courses of action have similar logits of expected fitness for the next best course of action, we can speak of doubt. With RMAD we can figure out which features or what facets of input or which part of the view is causing the doubt.

A camera has motion blur (unless you can strobe the illumination source, but in daytime the sun is very hard to outshine), it would seem like an interesting experiment to:

1. identify in real time which doubts have the most significant influence on the determination of best course of action

2. have a camera that can track an object to eliminate motion blur but still enjoy optimal lighting (under the sun, or at night), just like our eyes can rotate

3. rerun the best course of action prediction and feed back this information to the company, so it can figure out the cost-benefit of adding a free tracking camera dedicated to eliminating doubts caused by motion blur.
by rasz | 2026-02-07 05:24:27+00:00
1979 if you really want CRTs to be called GPU :)

https://bitsavers.org/components/intel/8275/1979_8275.pdf

Used on Intel made iSBX270 video board http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iSBC/143444-001_iSBX_270_... for use in Intel iSBX systems.
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-07 05:27:25+00:00
I’ve been here. I lost my wife to a metastatic tumor. He’s coping with the horror through determination to fight and win, and communicating it.

My person had 4 surgeries, countless MRIs, you name it. We had access to the best doctors in the US. There was no way she was going to not beat this thing. We booked a vacation and there was no doubt in my mind that we were going to be there. Until the day that changed.

The dude is a little unhinged. He’s trying to have some agency and control where none exists. He wants to save the girl he loves. So did I. Give him some grace.
by WildWeazel | 2026-02-07 05:27:33+00:00
The founding developers were all software engineers with .NET experience, so it was the natural choice even though at the time it was Godot 3.x with Mono. I had used Unity before but not Godot. The project is structured as mostly plain C# DLLs with a relatively thin Godot UI layer controlling it, so the Godot type system is fairly encapsulated. We haven't really seen any issues with those decisions beyond just working out the communication between Godot and DLL. But again we were just working from what we knew so I can't really say if this was the best way to go about it.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 05:28:32+00:00
> Part of it was repetition. My days had become predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging had become routine.

This isn’t “DevOps”. This is “IT Support”.

But honestly, if you aren’t embedded into a team where developers and infrastructure folks are working together - you aren’t doing anything differently than old school operations people did 25 years ago
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 05:28:37+00:00
As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed.

However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise.

But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
by themacguffinman | 2026-02-07 05:29:47+00:00
The essay reads to me as 5000 words on why epistemic standards should be lowered for effective fraud investigation. Requiring retrospective evidence - the highest epistemic standard - is too slow and expensive, so the government needs to copy the private sector's epistemic standards where a collection of solid heuristics and smart observations is sufficient to preemptively block payment.

It's an insightful point, but it seems consistent with those epistemic standards that it's unimportant whether the 50% figure is valid in retrospect. The observation of "industrial-scale fraud" is sufficient to act, it doesn't need a retrospectively validated 50% figure and he would like you to get all the way off his back about it.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-07 05:30:06+00:00
It's probably impossible to prove I'm not projecting..

However. I am putting my curious foot forward here:

What were the toughest ethical quandaries you faced when deciding to join OpenAI?

To give a purely hypothetical example which is probably not relevant to your case: if I had to choose DeepSeek or OpenAI, I think I would struggle with openness of the weights..
by sublinear | 2026-02-07 05:30:43+00:00
Is it? From the animatedknots link:

> The difference is that the loops are NOT stacked under each other ... The loops are passed inside each other

I feel like the way we discuss knots is way too clumsy considering how old and important the topic is.

How do we live in a world that has something as successful as regex, yet we don't have similar for knots?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 05:33:50+00:00
Top of the funnel should be pre-sales. Our sales folks are usually juggling eight or nine opportunities, trying to get contracts signed, in our case working with AWS to help get funding, flying to customers sites, etc.

I am post sales, billable staff consultant who leads projects. I’m “delivery”. I focus on one project at a time and dig deep into requirements and the implementation and/or strategy docs.
by tzs | 2026-02-07 05:34:49+00:00
I've got an idea for a simpler approach, but I've forgotten too much math to be able to actually try it.

The idea is to consider the set A of all circles that intersect the unit circle.

If you pick 3 random points inside the unit circle the probability that circle c ∈ A is the circle determined by those points should be proportional the length of the intersection of c's circumference with the unit circle.

The constant of proportionality should be such that the integral over all the circles is 1.

Then consider the set of all circles that are contained entirely in the unit circle. Integrate their circumferences times the aforementioned constant over all of these contained circles.

The ratio of these two integrals should I think be the desired probability.
by fragmede | 2026-02-07 05:34:49+00:00
Because, not to be idealistic, but America is supposed to be the land of opportunity. There are no kings, or lords. Every person is equal in the eyes of the law, and the free market is the decider. If we're abdicating that position, and just wanna accept that the rich get everything and everyone else fights for their scraps, well, I mean, everyone's gotta have an ethos, I guess.
by socialcommenter | 2026-02-07 05:35:58+00:00
How many of the 70 human accidents would be adequately explained by controlling for speed, alcohol, wanton inattention, etc? (The first two alone reduce it by 70%)

No customer would turn on FSD on an icy road, or on country lanes in the UK which are one lane but run in both directions; it's much harder to have a passenger fatality in stop-start traffic jams in downtown US cities.

Even if those numbers are genuine (2 vs 70) I wouldn't consider it apples-for-apples.

Public information campaigns and proper policing have a role to play in car safety, if that's the stated goal we don't necessarily need to sink billions into researching self driving
by achierius | 2026-02-07 05:37:50+00:00
Because beforehand engineers could be reasonably confident that their work would simply accelerate a the growth of a growing pie; today, most expect that further development will be used, first and foremost, to replace labor. Most sectors do not grow indefinitely, so there's no reason to assume software has to.

To put it gently, yes it feels different: for people who haven't already saved a lifetime of SWE wages, this is the first credible threat to the sector in which they're employed since the dot com bubble. People need to work to eat.
by kadoban | 2026-02-07 05:38:04+00:00
The practical example is being able to use the same names and utility functions and such on all of the different monads. That's kind of it.

Other than that it's just nice for communication in the right groups, it's shorthand for a whole bunch of properties that you then don't have to explain.

It also only really works super well in languages where the type system is expressive enough to allow that (or just permissive enough not to stop you I guess), so that mostly comes up in fun "functional" languages where they spent a bunch of time on the type system.

You'll probably understand a bit better if you take some time and learn/use Haskell a bit (if you don't already understand, it kind of sounds like you do tbh). It's a fun and educational language in a bunch of ways IMO. It depends on the kind of person/programmer you are if you'll really care though.
by fulafel | 2026-02-07 05:38:07+00:00
There's been a constant stream of v8 VM sandbox escape discoveries since its dawn of course. Considering those have mostly existed for a long time before publication it's very porous most of the time.

And Python VM had/has its sandboxing features too, previously rexec and still https://github.com/zopefoundation/RestrictedPython - in the same category I'd argue.

Then there's of course hypervisor based virtualization and the vulnerabilities and VM escapes there.

Browsers use belt-and-suspenders approaches of employing both language runtime VMs and hardware memory protection as layers to some effect, but still are the star act at pwn2own etc.

It's all layers of porous defenses. There'd definitely be room in the world for performant dynamic language implementations with provably secure foundations.
by vbezhenar | 2026-02-07 05:38:13+00:00
> why wouldn’t he want you to use that to great efficiency

Because I deny that? It's not fun for me.

> would a carpenter shop accept employees rejecting the power saw in favour of a hand saw to retain their artisanal capability?

Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going.

You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI) will lose competition, but let's be real, a lot of companies are horribly inefficient and that does not make them bankrupt. The world of producing software is complicated.

I know that I deliver. When I'm asked to write a code, I deliver it and I responsible for it. I enjoy the process and I can support this code. I can't deliver with AI. I don't know what it'll generate. I don't know how much time would it take to iterate to the result that I precisely want. So I can't longer be responsible for my own output. Or I'd spend more time baby-sitting AI than it would take me to write the code. That's my position. Maybe I'm wrong, they'll fire me and I'll retire, who knows. AI hype is real and my boss often copy&pasting ChatGPT asking me to argue with it. That's super stupid and irritating.
by Terretta | 2026-02-07 05:38:18+00:00
> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need?

Good question, what's the pitch:

“Vecti is a browser-based UI design tool built from the ground up with one core belief, that creators deserve tools built specifically for them. Better performance, better privacy, and better alignment with their actual needs. A tool that just works, built by someone who genuinely cares about the people using it.”

Hmm. Did founders of Balsamiq or Figma not care about the people using it? And who if not creators were they built for?

“Share & Present - Set viewer and editor permissions at the team or project level. When it's time to present … let your work shine.”

Oh, right, for the people who pay the creator.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-02-07 05:38:26+00:00
My hot take is that portions of both the pro- and anti- factions are indulging in the copium. That LLMs can regurgitate a functioning compiler means that it has exceeded the abilities of many developers and whether they wholeheartedly embrace LLMs or reject LLMs isn't going to save those that have been exceeded from being devalued.

The only safety lies in staying ahead of LLMs or migrating to a field that's out of reach of them.
by bgnhackchecker | 2026-02-07 05:39:09+00:00
Honest answers won't cut anything here. Structural dependencies of the current age SoR vendors will have a serious threat of survival. Vibe-coding tools, practices will not overnight solve or compress the humongous structures built over years.

Their only options are to acquire and gobble up as competition shows up or delay by some form of obstruction to current clients leaving them.

One-off SaaS tools will probably see the quickest consolidation, either because the big SoR vendors can build them too with AI tools and offering some reduction in in IT complexities (like vendor mgmt, renewal headaches, integrations, security postures).

New age companies with SoR capabilities being built or having unique and differentiated capabilities will challenge the current SoR players.
by queenkjuul | 2026-02-07 05:39:21+00:00
It's nice until you need something that isn't in the distro repo. Personally i prefer a script i can easily inspect over a .deb that will also run it's own scripts (as root!) that it takes me much more effort to inspect.

I guess yeah, you are right, distro repos are safest, but there's lots of times where they aren't sufficient.
by belter | 2026-02-07 05:39:21+00:00
>> If this is true, this is disappointing

Wait for the second set of files...

"...One of Mr. Epstein’s former boat captains told The New York Times earlier
this year that he had seen Mr. Brin on the island more than once..."

https://dnyuz.com/2026/01/31/powerful-men-who-turn-up-in-the...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 05:41:55+00:00
I am first and foremost still a software developer as far as my hands on keyboard job. I absolutely love being able to set up my own infrastructure without depending on glorified system administrators who call themselves “DevOps Engineers”. It’s all just code at the end of the day - setting up infrastructure involves writing yaml, HCL or actual code (CDk).
by kodablah | 2026-02-07 05:42:13+00:00
> that's the only way they "learn" anything

I think skills and other things have shown that a good bit of learning can be done on-demand, assuming good programming fundamentals and no surprise behavior. But agreed, having a large corpus at training time is important.

> But I'd be interested to see what you come up with.

Under active dev at https://github.com/cretz/duralade, super POC level atm (work continues in a branch)
by holden_nelson | 2026-02-07 05:42:52+00:00
I’m also an Idaho native and you’re spot-on. It’s been sad to see our political zeitgeist rapidly diverge from anything remotely reasonable.

I generally consider myself a YIMBY but I think you make a good point and I found it very uncharitable for the parent comment to characterize it as whining. Who wants to spend 10 hours a week in traffic?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-07 05:43:41+00:00
> People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then.

1400 ISIS (the islamist state) terrorists who made their way to the US, identified by the DHS.

https://www.dhs.gov/wow

Look at the list here. 2084 pages already, 12 entries per page: that's 25 000 criminals. They're listing their crimes. 25 000 criminals already arrested is a huge lot.

Be honest with yourself and think about the victims.

I'd say a lot of the people joining ICE do believe the US has already enough criminals that are US citizens and want to help stop the insanity that is mass uncontrolled migration.

Out of 600 000 people arrested by ICE, as I understand it already 25 000 are violent criminals that we know of. That's more nearly 5% of all those arrested. 1 in 20 people.

Where do you draw the limit? You want full open borders, but at what cost?

I read a lot of "Arrested for: kidnapping, rape".

Is, say, 1 in 100 people coming in being a criminal OK?

Where do you draw the line?

Dems are literally fighting so that sanctuary cities do not hand over convicted criminals to ICE: so that one day they can be released in the streets.

Is this what you want to fight for?

Are you that convinced, from your moral high ground where you judge Microsoft employees and ICE agents, that you'll be on the right side of history?
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-07 05:44:02+00:00
You’re using vocal minority framing right now. When I care about it, I’m a weird crusader for caring and noticing. But then you organize a campaign to change it.

There is a large body of literature using these images so it’s helpful to have a comparison which is persistent through time and familiar.

> Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.

Critical thinking caps required for this one.
by WildWeazel | 2026-02-07 05:44:22+00:00
Well, "capabilities" is carrying a lot of weight there. One of the main objectives is to design it for unrestricted modding to accommodate all of the wishlisted features, but "out of the box" the default game mode will be 1:1 in mechanics with some QoL improvements. The inspiration is mostly for designing systems in a way that can be easily reconfigured or extended to behave in other ways. We hope that by the time we reach feature parity, people will have already built some mods to do things that were impossible with Civ3.

As mentioned above this was started by Civ3 modders, and we all have our passionate reasons for preferring it over other entries, but you're not wrong that doing this with a 3D engine would be a whole `nother ballgame. There are actually Civ4 and Civ5 remakes underway which have both opted for 2D implementations.
by ajfriend | 2026-02-07 05:44:35+00:00
I agree that the lack of congruency in H3 hexagons can cause weird overlaps and gaps if you plot mixed resolutions naively, but there are some workarounds that work pretty well in practice. For example, if you have mixed resolutions from compacted H3 cells but a single “logical” target resolution underneath, you can plot the coarser cells not with their native geometry, but using the outline of their children. When you do that, there are no gaps. (Totally unrelated but fun: that shape is a fractal sometimes called a "flowsnake" or a "Gosper Island" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosper_curve), which predates H3 by decades.)

That said, this feels like an issue with rendering geometry rather than with the index itself. I’m curious to hear more about why you think the lack of congruency affects H3’s performance for spatial joins. Under the hood, it’s still a parent–child hierarchy very similar to S2’s — H3 children are topological rather than geometric children (even though they still mostly overlap).
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 05:45:44+00:00
> You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea

About 1–12 months after using heroin, only 23%–38% become addicted [1]. Occasional and controlled heroin users do in fact exist and are documented [2]. And, most famously, the use of heroin by American soldiers during the Vietnam war was largely situational [3].

So what "everyone knows" here is not very impressive. I still very strongly believe you'd be a fool or at least reckless to try heroin, but it really isn't the bogeyman people want it to be.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

[2] https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/3906/

[3] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.12...
by sublinear | 2026-02-07 05:45:47+00:00
How does a statistical model become "perfect" instead of merely approaching it? What do you even mean by "perfect"?

We already have determinism in all machines without this wasteful layer of slop and indirection, and we're all sick and tired of the armchair philosophy.

It's very clear where LLMs will be used and it's not as a compiler. All disagreements with that are either made in bad faith or deeply ignorant.
by signatoremo | 2026-02-07 05:46:00+00:00
Again, reverse engineering is a valid use case of clean room implementation as I posted above, so you don't have a point there.

> “clean room implementation” is a term of art with a specific meaning.

What is the specific meaning you are talking about? If I set out to do a clean room implementation of some software, what do I need to do specifically so that I will prevail any copyright infringement claims? The answer is that there is no such a surefire guarantee.

Re: Sony v. Connectix, clean room is to protect against copyright infringement, and since Connectix was ruled not infringing on Sony's copyrights, their implementation is practically clean room under the law, despite all the pushbacks. If Connectix prevailed, I'm sure the C compiler in question would have prevailed as well if they got sued.

Finally, take Phoenix vs. IBM re: the former's BIOS implementation of the latter's PC:

Whenever Phoenix found parts of this new BIOS that didn't work like IBM's, the isolated programmer would be given written descriptions of the problems, but not any coded solutions that might have hinted at IBM's original version of the software - [0]

That very much sounds like using GCC as an online known-good compiler oracle to compare against in this case.

[0] - https://books.google.com/books?id=Bwng8NJ5fesC&pg=PA56#v=one...