skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: AI-Powered Product Photography
Hey folks,

We're excited to announce the launch of Stylized, a photo editor for e-commerce sellers that leverages computer vision, 3D rendering, and some generative AI to transform any product photo into a professional asset in seconds. We make it easy for e-commerce sellers to create clean, realistic, high-quality product images quickly and easily.

We started working on Stylized 3 months ago when sellers at craft fairs kept mentioning that simple white background photos (or silo photos) were a huge roadblock to running an online store. Our backgrounds are in computer vision, e-commerce, and VR, so it was only natural for this to be the solution we felt most excited about. Silo photos look simple, but the details have to be right, the product has to be accurately represented, the shadows have to look realistic. The goal is to first create professional product images, and from there start enabling editorials, brand marketing, and more - without having to sink time and money into traditional commercial photography.

We're excited to share our project with the community and hear your thoughts. We're passionate about using technology to solve problems and improve people's lives, and we believe Stylized is a great starting point for most e-commerce sellers.

Thanks for checking out our project! We love feedback, so have at it!
In day to day work, checklists and Standard Operating Procedures are much more useful than diagrams.

If there's a yak-shaving exercise, write it down as an SOP. It'll become obvious if the process is flawed or a target for automation.

If making schema changes, document exactly all the steps required to integrate, test and deploy the change. It's complicated and easy to screw up - but a checklist can prevent the silly mistakes tired devs make.

The Checklist Manifesto [0] was written by a surgeon and has been shown to drastically improve surgery success rates. I'd love to see more checklists documenting development procedures - many of these could be shared as best-practice.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2010/01/05/122226184/atul-gawandes-check...
Yes yes yes. Everything about this document screams good sense and logic.

It's clear why Carbon looks the way it does - they want to do what Kotlin did for Java and using the same strategy. But, it won't work. They understood Kotlin's strategy as binary compatibility at the per source file level but that's only half the story. The quiet monster of Kotlin's success is j2k which is a source translation tool built into the IDE. It rewrites a Java file to Kotlin and then applies all the intelligence in the ide plug-in to clean up the results, meaning even idioms get translated properly.

Jetbrains could do that because they were developing the IDE plug-in alongside the compiler from day one, and because Java is quite easy to parse, and because Kotlin deliberately constrained itself to Java semantics even when sub optimal.

I had high hopes for Carbon when I first heard about it but that number of proposals without even having a compiler is crazy. How do you port existing code? You can only use it for newly added code, presumably, and only if your new code doesn't interact with any c++ using the bits the carbon team don't like? That's light years from the type of interop that made Kotlin a success.

Sounds like this guy actually understands the problem in depth. I hope he's able to attract customers, though it's a tough sell to make your company codebase depends on a language maintained by only one guy.
> A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business.

More like 90 hours "supervising" the people actually building all parts of the business (or, more commonly, supervising one or more intermediate layers of supervisors who then supervise the people actually building all parts of the business). And that's taking the implication of 90 hour CEO workweeks being even common (let alone representative of most CEOs) at face value.

More importantly, the Marxist response didn't/doesn't revolve around the nature of the work; rather, it revolves around the ownership of the profits from that work. Specifically, the Marxist argument is that the workers are the ones actually creating the vast majority of the company's value, yet do not typically receive commensurate compensation (i.e. wages + benefits + ownership stake). Ownership stake in particular is the main point of contention: the difference between "value created by this worker" minus "compensation paid to this worker" (which is necessarily a number greater than zero if executives/managers are getting salaries) would in any honest accounting be an investment - yet rarely do workers receive shares of the companies they build, and when they do it's typically a small fraction of what they "paid in". Likewise, employees rarely have any control over who their executives and supervisors even are; if their CEO spends 90 hours a week "working" on golf courses and in fancy restaurants with CEOs of other companies, employees rarely have any ability to fire that deadbeat and hire a replacement who actually provides value to their company.

That, if you remember from your Marxism classes, is the estrangement of workers from their labor. They work, but are denied commensurate ownership/control over the results of that work. This is what cooperatives and unions seek to resolve "within" a capitalist system - whether by creating companies which do give workers commensurate ownership or by pressuring existing companies to address their employees' needs/wants.

> Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.

History in general is filled with New Money's descendants becoming Old Money. New Money complaining about said descendants becoming Old Money ain't exactly unique to capitalism.

> I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.

Nor can I imagine one called the Racism Party, yet my country manages to have multiple parties for whom such a name would be quite apt.
Read the post again, but clearly this time. It just takes a minute.
I'm not sure what "directly manipulating data" means. And - with respect to Bret Victor - I suspect no one does.

Before you can manipulate anything you have to define a set of affordances. If you have no affordances you have... nothing.

A lot of programming is really about manually creating affordances that can be applied to specific domains. The traditional medium for this is text, with dataflow diagrams a distant second.

People often forget that this is still symbolic programming. You could replace all the keywords in a language with emojis, different photos of Seattle, or hex colour codes, but we use text because it's mnemonic in a way that more abstract representations aren't.

Dataflow diagrams are good as far as they go, but it doesn't take much for a visual representation to become too complex to understand. With text you can at least take it in small chunks, and abstraction/encapsulation make it relatively easy to move between different chunk levels.

At the meta level you can imagine a magical affordance factory that somehow pre-digests data, intuits a comprehensible set of affordances, and then presents them to you. But how would that work without a model of what kinds of affordances humans find comprehensible and useful?

ML etc are the opposite of this. They pre-digest data and provide very crude access through text prompts, but they're like wearing power-gloves that can pick up cars but not small objects. You can't tell ML that a specific detail is wrong without retraining it. The affordances for that just aren't there.

And of course many domains require specialised expert skills. So a workable solution would require a form of AGI clever enough to understand the specific skills of an individual user, so that affordances could be tailored to their level of expertise.

I can't see generalised intuitive domain manipulation being possible until those problems are solved.
Kotlin managed it in some cases with clever forwards compatible type system tricks, so it's not impossible
There will be more players taking market share from Google. Even if Google ultimately wins, they will have less revenue. ChatGPT represents a new beginning for the industry
> There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured.

There was diversity, but given behavioral modernity and a sufficient resource surplus, complex social organization seems to have been something close to a human universal. Graham Hancock has pointed out that prehistoric people were capable of large-scale infrastructure projects the remains of which have survived in some form to the present day - and that implies some combination of effective hierarchical organization (required to coordinate the effort of significant numbers of people, well beyond the scale of a single band or troop) and long-term time orientation.
Not sure what relevance this has to tech.
His wild and delightful caricatures are often so absurd it’s comical to imagine someone reviewing each under a microscope seeking evidence of exaggeration or falsehood… that’s sort of the point!
I can't imagine directly translating any project I've worked on to a non-code representation. But, that's only because they've been developed not only in code, but for code. I can totally see a post-code development experience that mirrors how programs work much better than a big string.
50% opacity probably works my manually interlacing two images, then reducing the size to 50%. You can also do fun stuff like gradients in MS Paint: start out with a square canvas, divide it diagonally and fill each resulting triangle with a different color. Then use the "Stretch/Skew" dialog to horizontally (or vertically) stretch it all to the minimum (5%, if memory serves me right).

Edit: Actually, I suppose the minimum stretch was 1%. So the square should be 100x100 in size :)
Depends what you're hoping to get out of it. If you want to socialise on route or look at is as some kind of spiritual pilgrimage I'd focus 100% on the walk while you're doing it. Seems like a good opportunity to forget about computing / work for a while!

People asking why the Camino, I haven't done it but I have done a number of treks / meditation retreats etc. It sounds fantastic but I think there are many physical journeys like this that could represent a lot of "inner travel".
Absolutely. Another less thought of aspect is simply power consumption and hence ecology. Running so many remote servers for movings and shows one already have at home is absurd I find.
> "Life's savings" is disingenuous though. No one puts their life savings in much of anything.

There's a fair amount of that, actually:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/yy37cy/i_lost_my_...

> Moreover, what you're saying about crypto presumes that its competitors are all high-quality,and what I'm saying is there are likely enough low-quality competitors such that crypto becomes more attractive.

What is lower quality out there than crypto? Crypto is appallingly low quality. Crypto-related businesses like exchanges go bust dramatically at an alarming rate. If your bank goes bust at least there's insurance for that.

> But part of an investment strategy on the other hand potentially makes a ton of sense, and that's all that's needed for survival/popularity.

But that comes back to the original problem: it's only a good investment if you can keep it safe, AND if it keeps on growing. Keeping safe in the space is an extremely difficult task as it is, as every wallet out there is a self-awarding bug bounty.

As to growth it comes back to what I was saying before. First, there has to be increased value for it to grow. That's actually decreasing as crypto becomes more trackable and less safe for illegal activity over time.

It's also at best a zero sum. Any money you get from such an investment can only come from the traditional economical system putting it in, and that just can't go on forever. And any gain you might make comes from somebody else's loss. You're just betting on that you won't be somebody else's gain.
He seems like a wonderboy. His linkedin has a recommendation: "Cannot say enough good things about this guy--probably the most capable programmer I've ever met."
> But lately with all the layoffs it's kind of put a spotlight on tech startups and VCs. These are the smartest group of people who are supposed to escape mimetic behavior...

Well. That is your problem. You bought the marketing. There is no reason to think that VCs and startups are the “smartest group of people”.
The problem is turning your 2 minute analysis into a conclusion instead of an informed question. The Internet is filled with such conclusions; another adds nothing.
Surface Pro 9 review: Microsoft’s best tablet – if you pick the right one
I see this "if you don't defend your trademark, you lose it" trope a lot on the Web these days, generally with the implication that the trademark holder has no option other than to engage in legal threats or action.

Couldn't the trademark holder in these situations simply license the mark to the other side, for some nominal fee?

Same for the Jack Daniels case. The book cover is probably fair use through parody, but even so, Daniels could simply license it to the author and request that the next printing have "the cover design is a trademark of Jack Daniels Properties, Inc.".
I had until recently an G5 PowerPC Imac I installed Linux on (Void-ppc linux)
and the Linux on Powerpc community people have developped a
firefox fork (Arctic Fox) which
was working well but the real problem is that is was quite slow, single-core
CPUS can't stand modern browsing. Blog reading was fine but anything else
took more time than I was ready to wait for. I wanted to make it a no
distraction machine to run vim in and read documentation but the machine
maintenance was itself a distraction in the end.
Chess bot Mittens has the snark and the game to leave you in shreds
Myself on windows I simply run a windows xp virtual machine using VMware workstation. Simpler and flawless, at least compared to using wine or running it natively on windows 10.
I hope to give a little context on this. I have been fairly active in trying to immerse myself in the CO2 problem of the planet and what I have seen is that there are companies-interest groups that are lobbying for some technology solutions that require outsized investment. Hydrogen and Nuclear come to mind.

They are solutions which will soak up massive amounts of capital for years-decades before they will start paying off. They also know that if they don't market themselves as "the one true solution that solves all" they might not get the capital required to build out their vision. So they HAVE TO oversell it to cover all use cases where they could possibly be applicable and try to get money flowing into alternatives for themselves, otherwise they would not be feasible.

So this is at least one of the reasons for hydrogen problems. They try to create FUD about BEV so they can say hydrogen is better. Meanwhile fossil companies are like really happy about this:

- slows BEV adoption

- while alternatives are not there sell their own stuff

- hydrogen is also massive molecule shipping infra so they will bid for those projects

People who actually look into hydrogen will find lots of issues with the marketing:

- "green" hydrogen is nowhere to be seen in quantities

- real world round-trip efficiency comparable to ICE engines

- which leads to massive need to overbuild green electricity generation (== 2-4x bigger NIMBY/capital problems for nuclear/wind)

So the immediately deploy-able solutions of batteries and PV-solar that have no scale threshold are making their projects riskier.

In essence both nuclear and hydro require governmental funding to get started. So the same sales pitch is now also on political level. Lobbyists etc doing their dark FUD spewing things.

Bottom line of building out hydrogen from governmental monies means that the projects which absolutely have to use hydrogen to be green (steel and some other industrial processes, maybe flying too) will be cheaper because it has been subsidized by nations by having bought into other stuff which will not be used in scale because other market technologies are so much better for those use cases.

For example: I have a BEV and the range is good for me, home charging is 10-100x cheaper than hydrogen, I don't need to go to a hydrogen station etc.
Show HN: SuperDB- Interact with Your Database
Submit a natural language query with table selection and get a SQL query in response. Currently in limited beta, looking for feedback.
I had a dream where the best lappy I ever saw was in my hands. I tried to hold it while I lucidly tried to wake up. Had nothing in my bed.

Tried it with money before too. Just doesn't work.

Not yet anyway :)
Where I work, there are multiple senior ICs making 7 figures.

There are many dimensions in the calculus of layoffs:

- An opportunity to get rid of staff they don't like

- Trim down for the particular economic environment (Meta went insane the past 5-10 years, zooming up in head count like a hockey stick. Google has some bloated departments.)

- Virtue signal to investors that they're "using their money well"

- And, tamp down on wages

If high impact engineers had any sense, they would:

0. unionize

1. form worker-owned co-ops to capture the market value for their labor rather than whatever crumbs a corporation decides to grant them.
It's mostly through cloud hosting, but there's a bit of recurring donations as well https://opencollective.com/fider

I'm also thinking of introducing a "Support Package" for those who self-host and need a bit of help.
Cool idea for a thread.

I’m still building https://www.ieltsielts.com/ which offers original resources and coaching for an English language proficiency exam called the IELTS. It makes over $500 USD per month.
I might be alone in this thinking but the "price goes up every 100 purchases" really gives off the wrong vibe. I understand you are trying to convey scarcity and value, but it comes off like some sort of used car salesman pitch.

Maybe I just too cynical these days, but when I hear certain phrases from salespeople, I immediately shut down the conversation and move on. Am I being too critical? Or is there an angle that I'm just not getting?

I love the product by the way! And the price is very reasonable. So I'm just a little bewildered by the hard sales pitch.
It’s pretty obvious that many environmentalists don’t want solutions. They just want to feel superior to others because they have solar panels on their roof and others don’t. Anything that could potentially render those solar panels unnecessary is very aggressively opposed.
I know the authors---it was a pleasent surprise to see them on HN this morning! The first two in particular have been working on computer-aided investigations in pure mathematics for a few years now.
I think that's something inherent to programming. It's not even the only field to have this "problem" - screenplays are written on paper but watched on a stage. Movies are that, but with yet another level of indirection.
> not a good format for consuming serious information

Yes, podcasts are reminding me 'the age of the feuilleton' from Hesses's Glass Bead Game.
It used to be the case, when RAM were less reliable, that all workstation ram was ECC, it fell out of favor due to cost and performance priorities.

However, as both software complexity and ram availability increase, the likelihood of memory corruption increase as well, even with memory reliability being quite high.

I don't run ECC on my gaming computer, (I also run its hard-drives in raid0, I care about performance, capacity and cost-effectiveness).

I do run ECC on my file storage (zfs server) and on my workstation. It might not be strictly needed on my workstation, but I just don't want to think about it, and it's just another parameter towards more reliability.
Can I test it?
This article is about Java, your comment is about JavaScript.
There is an attempt for real-time transcription from the microphone at:

https://whisper.ggerganov.com/stream/

It chunks the input in 5 second buffers and processes them independently. Results and performance are not great, but I think good enough for a proof-of-concept.
I've heard this example before, but you have a great point - I've never heard anyone use "buffalo" as a verb before. I wonder what possible better versions we could collectively come up with. "Badger" is much more commonly used as a verb, but I'm unaware of a well-known location called Badger.
Well, that leads to the question, why only men were famous actors past 40, which is where the arguments becomes tautological.

Because men can have attractive roles past 40 and women not, or only very rarely. I don't remember the name of the movie, but it was about greek and a female character that was 40, but the cast was not offered to a 40 year old, but a 30 year old.

Because 40 year old women are not supposed to look like 40 year olds, which is where we are back to the fantasy thing.

Biology is a real thing, though, men can become fathers with over 50, but women cannot. So I am not judging btw. But those fantasies are real and strong, even though they are taboo nowdays.
I wish people would stop just posting links to projects with no explanation. It's not linked to a new release or any news, just here's the name of the project, go find out for yourself what it is.

At the very least add some blurb to explain what you're linking to
Japan: the harbinger state
This is all real, down-to-earth advice that corresponds with my observations after three years doing this.

> A good first step is pick a specific problem and/or a specific industry

To add, I prefer thinking of three levels of specialization:

1. By vertical or industry (oil and gas)

2. By problem or technical domain (user interfaces, data pipelines, etc.)

3. By platform (Salesforce, React, etc)

2 and 3 could be conflated, but I like to separate them. Your specialization can cut across dimensions and at a small scale it's likely the best (eg: "we build custom Salesforces apps for sales processes in oil and gas")

> You can make more money doing the first but your job will eventually be 100% account management and sales.

There is not two ways about this, but emphasis on eventually... I think up to a certain scale you will be able to combine technical and management - although arguably the scale is much smaller than we'd like to think.
As explicitly stated in the proposal the new rules about super/this calls are exactly the same as for a blank final field initialization. So the change simplifies some aspects of the language as it removes number of rules.

Moreover, given that Java calls overridden methods when super() calls a non-final method, the existing rules prevent some reasonable code patterns (again, see the proposal for the example) and the new ones allows to address those in reasonable and readable ways.