skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Each morning I drive past a middle school as it starts its day, and there's a police car and officer guiding traffic. Sometimes the officer leaves the full flashing blue lights going, and it makes it really hard to see what's around it (e.g. the officer and/or students). Most of the time they leave it on non-flashing blue, which makes it a lot easier to see the environment.
Any desktop or mobile app in your roadmap?
The title should probably specify AirPods 2 and 4. As an owner of AirPods Pro (1st Generation), I was confused because I've only ever had two options: noise-cancelling or transparency. There has never been an option for “off,” so presumably this was a new feature in later generations, which the author explains is no longer available.
I've gotten pretty good at various bits of ffmpeg over time. Its CLI has a certain logic to it... it's order dependent (not all unix CLIs are).

Lately, I've been playing around with more esoteric functionality. For example, storing raw video straight off a video camera on a fairly slow machine. I built a microscope and it reads frames off the camera at 120FPS in raw video format (YUYV 1280x720) which is voluminous if you save it directly to disk (gigs per minute). Disks are cheap but that seemed wasteful, so I was curious about various close-to-lossless techniques to store the exact images, but compressed quickly. I've noticed that RGB24 conversion in ffmpeg is extremely slow, so instead after playing around with the command line I ended up with:

ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuyv422 -s 1280x720 -i test.raw -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p movie.mp4 -crf 13 -y

This reads in raw video- because raw video doesn't have a container, it lacks metadata like "pixel format" and "image size", so I have to provide those. It's order dependent- everything before "-i test.raw" is for decoding the input, and everythign after is for writing the output. I do one tiny pixel format conversion (that ffmpeg can do really fast) and then write the data out in a very, very close to lossless format with a container (I've found .mkv to be the best container in most cases).

Because I hate command lines, I ended up using ffmpeg-python which composes the command line from this:

self.process = (
ffmpeg.
input(
"pipe:",
format="rawvideo",
pix_fmt="yuyv422",
s="{}x{}".format(1280, 720),
threads=8
)
.output(
fname, pix_fmt="yuv422p", vcodec="libx264", crf=13
)
.overwrite_output()
.global_args("-threads", "8")
.run_async(pipe_stdin=True)
)

and then I literally write() my frames into the stdin of that process. I had to limit the number of threads because the machine has 12 cores and uses at least 2 at all times to run the microscope.

I'm still looking for better/faster lossless YUV encoding.
Easy to get better value on wages when you get to pay under the minimum wage of your home country. And/or aren't required to offer benefits, vacation. And are able to work them twice as long without overtime pay. And don't need to care about child labor laws.

To be blunt: yes, slavery is cheap, isn't it?
Have you come across Nix Package Versions¹ yet? If you’re looking to work around a recent bug or other unwanted change by installing a slightly older version of some package from nixpkgs, Marcelo Lazaroni built a nice page to help with that and wrote up an explanation² of how it works.

This only works for versions of your package that do exist in nixpkgs but aren’t currently the default for your chosen channel, so it doesn’t help if your channel is out of date and you want to install a newer version that hasn’t been packaged yet. But then that’s the case in almost any Linux distro if you rely on installing your software from the distro’s native package repo, and much the same solutions exist in NixOS as in other distros. Although if you’re really determined, you can also start writing your own derivations to automate building the latest versions of your favourite applications before they’re available from nixpkgs…

¹ https://lazamar.co.uk/nix-versions/

² https://lazamar.github.io/download-specific-package-version-...
Contra Paul Graham on Wokeness
I can't find a person who didn't initially make the fun-dies joke, then later come around to it, myself included. Sometimes you don't realize someone helped you until years later.
My parents didn't let me have video games as a kid. Sure I could still play at a friends' house, but it was very different from having my own console or handheld.
"The future is already here. It's just not very well distributed"

(honestly, the work you share is very inspiring)
Generative Narrative Game Experience with Player Feedback
(Declarative rclone https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/pull/6101)
Thanks for the insult, but of course it has! If you are not already familiar with actual cargo cults and read Feynman's story, it's hard not to get a wrong impression of the phenomenon.
Do you have any more info? I what manner are they changing things?
Celebrating Ten Years of Gpfault.net
That's not entirely true, Unraid has mechanisms for unbalanced disks, but they come at a high cost in terms of usability by standard workloads.
Isn't Xenon infamous for being ridiculously expensive? It's the best general anesthetic by a mile since it's a noble gas, but we don't use it because the cost would be absurd. While the amounts used here must be small, and you're going to be stacked if this is how you're approaching Everest, it must still cost a small fortune — and turns out it does:

> One session of xenon gas costs $5,000 per person for a 30-minute session.
> Why Go? Go is garbage collected, how is this even a good idea for a database engine in the first place?

First, the database itself is Sqlite, which is C and arguably the most widely deployed database engine in the galaxy.

Secondly, Go is popular for network services as it's easy to write (relative to languages like C++, Rust etc), is memory-safe and is "fast enough" for the network/disk to be your bottleneck and its concurrency features make it easy to use hardware efficiently without having to worry about scheduling in your application, among other reasons.
I feel like a lot of folks who use the label "anarchists" don't really understand the concepts behind anarchism.
Very easily if they need to pay overtime here. I'd be very surprised to find an argument of $37k being exempt in any state.

They will indeed burn themselves out, but that's their choice of work/life balance vs. pay.
My Airpod Pros literally screech at an unsafe noise level if they're in Transparency or Noise Cancellation. I think some part of them got damaged ruining any kind of processing. I've been able to continue to use the in the Off mode for over a year. Hope this isn't too annoying to opt out of.
> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority.

Odd!

It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them.

Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.
It’s widespread enough your question boils down to “do I really want my kid to have friends”.
Yes buildkit can do this.
You can also use buildkit to create a bootable VM, just that nobody is doing it.
You can use estargz to fetch just the pieces you need from a dependency rather than the entire depdency as well.
Really all of the things you mentioned should be possible with buildkit, just that the focus of most things is Dockerfile which has much more limited functionality (though some of the things mentioned above still apply to Dockerfile).
Yea to be concerned about a product’s direction on account of not pandering to the 0.0001% of users is hilarious
It'll likely be another presidential commission with a deliberately fraudulent name (like DOGE), to create shadow-government positions for apparatchiks of The Party.

So this "ERS" will not be part of the government when it comes to oversight, checks and balances, or FOIA... yet somehow you'll have to keep them happy, or else things will happen. I mean, this is a mighty nice company you've got here, it'd be a shame if somehow your primary imported ingredient got tariff'ed...
if you're the creator might I suggest an ai.txt like a robots.txt of all the content? so we can pass it to an LLM and use it to create custom commands we need based on real needs? that would be awesome!
"I fart in your general direction!"
> context length is the wrong criticism for these models

You're right. What I'm getting at is the overall speed, efficiency, and accuracy of the storage, retrieval, and processing capability of the human brain.
"You did not climb Everest. You brought it down to your level."

- Yvon Chouinard
AI Engineering in 2025: The Gap Between Demos and Production
> At least when you incentivize stuff to get built here the money goes to union workers or at least stays within the US.

We could frame this another way - if every state in the US enacted tariffs on every other state, would we all be collectively richer or poorer?

Maybe some states could set up their own cottage automotive industry, but overall there is going to be more deadweight loss to the economy than revenue made by the tariffs.
I used ffmpeg for empty scene detection- I have a camera pointed at the flight path for SFO, and stripped out all the frames that didn't have motion in them. You end up with a continuous movie of planes passing through, with none of the boring bits.
The ones with the magnet? Those are really cool indeed, such a great idea.
I mean, do we need people to summit Everest?
Having kids in the near future. Wife and I agreed to "just say no" until they're 17 or 18.

We've also decided it's important to lead by example. I assume that any adult saying "kids need social media to not get bullied" or "we can't tell them no" is using it heavily themselves. We could be wrong, but we'll see.
According to the article, 154,000 USD.

That may be considered ridiculously expensive, noble, absurd, and or a small fortune to some, but to others it's relatively irrelevant, on the order of supersizing your fast food order.
I briefly took a look at the code, what is the reason to use Lark and not Python native JSON parser, is it to handle cases where the structured output is not JSON compatible?
in 15 years it never sticks and by the time i need it again i've forgotten it! :D
Soon, price discrimination via CPU performance, pixel density, and last security patch install date.
GTA 3 on a volumetric display [video]
You guys do know there is a simple trending page and 'for you' suggestions in Mastodon, right? It does offer some algorithmic content, however the algos used are transparent and simple to understand and also do not prey on outrage and don't specifically optimise for max engagement.

Of course not maliciously pushing people's buttons comes with a price and they are probably not as popular, but IMO they are as far as we can ethically go, and are well suited to the needs of the fedi dweller, i.e. 'I'm kinda bored let's see what other people in the community are talking about'
This is why I don't write custom cover letters anymore, even though I'm pretty good at it. It's just too exhausting when you know a lot of them are going to fake postings. I'll do it if I'm working with a solid recruiter who is working with legit companies. But I'm not doing it anymore if I haven't heard of the company in question and I'm blind applying.
Thanks! TIL.
Referenced article (How to climb Everest in a week, Financial Times, January 11 2025)

https://archive.ph/1qEGQ
FWIW I think you're right, we have very different stacks, and I've observed the same thing, with a much clunkier description thank your elegant way of putting it.

I do embeddings on arbitrary websites at runtime, and had a persistent problem with the last chunk of a web page matching more things. In retrospect, its obvious that the smaller the chunk was, the more it was matching everything

Full details: MSMARCO MiniLM L6V3 inferenced using ONNX on iOS/web/android/macos/windows/linux
The arbitrariness is a risk. But the general idea is that there is a strong inertial bias against firing “enough”, and this grows exponentially with company size. Doing a PIP is extremely annoying when you are already sure you want to fire someone. So it’s not uncommon for underperformers to get moved around.

Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.

Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.
Don't forget that Gstreamer exists and its command line and documentation make a little bit more sense than ffmpeg because GStreamer is pipeline based and the composition is a little bit more sane. I stopped using ffmpeg entirely and only use GStreamer for intense video work.
Nice job! If only HTML had a serious templating system(no the template tag isn’t enough) that could be used without JavaScript, we won’t need any 3rd party system for assembling static sites. For example a mechanism for including partials with the <link> tag and refer them inside a <template> or directly into current html
This is for covertly buying Twitter shares prior to his offer to acquire.

He failed to disclose his position when he was required to do so. He tried to hide his position to keep others from piggybacking on him.

This is stock market manipulation, (he is a recidivist) which the SEC does not take kindly to.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I toyed around with how to make it work in 80 characters but there were tradeoffs. The post itself has always specified in its title: "AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4". I would try again with the HN post title (something maybe like "Apple pushes newer AirPods owners into Transparency mode, with no easy opt out") but, alas, the window for me to edit the title has closed.
You write a lot like LLMs do. Would be interested to know where you developed your style.
I did kinda the same thing. Not being a backend dev didn't stop me using some PHP, basically as template language. It has a few downsides as well, but overall I am happy with it.
Meanwhile Tesla Vision would have seen those dummies in near complete darkness and would still get absolutely roasted.
> The cost of xenon is roughly $10 per liter. For comparison, helium, another noble gas, costs around 10 cents per liter. Argon and neon cost about $2 per liter each.

From another link in the comments: https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/xenon
Re: "Can we reliably gauge appropriate moments for interaction?"

One design pattern for LLM tools that I'm very interested in exploring is having an LLM only engage when the user (human) is not in a flow state.

Take writing for example. There are times when text auto-complete is actually a welcome feature because you might be experiencing writer's block. An LLM tool providing proactive guidance then becomes a way to get unstuck. But if you're in flow and flying away at the keyboard, auto-complete becomes a distraction and can take you away from your train of thought.

There are obviously some signals that we could programmatically make use of in this scenario (words per minute, pauses between keystrokes, etc.) but I do think defining "flow" in those terms is nebulous. I can imagine a world where stuff like skin conductance tracking a la Oura Ring becomes part of the mix. Would be pretty cool.
That's ok, they can borrow a parent's phone.
The quoted latency and neuron counts can also be questioned, but my point stands: it's hard to compete with the human eye and brain with current (affordable) camera and processing hardware.
> By that logic every health care system in the entire world has has killed countless people.

Probably, but motive matters in “killed” versus “murder”. I’m much more inclined to be mad about profit-driven medical decisions of this nature.
2 is pretty infamous unless something big happened recently (a lot of big things in JP happened recently, so I could have legitmately missed something).

1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
Anyone using rqlite in prod ?
What's the HN etiquette around claiming that a reply is AI generated?
Those aren't the same, but even those weren't good. I was on that stuff too, big waste of time that I wish I had back.
Climbing Everest hasn't been a big deal or the ultimate challenge for decades. Climbing it with your own skills, it would take years of training, and you'd likely want to work up to it by summitting numerous smaller mountains. But every year, hundreds of "mountaineers" who have never climbed a single mountain before, i.e. complete beginners, get to the top of Everest because the sherpas do all the work.

If you've never climbed a mountain before, you're a beginner mountaineer. If a mountain is climbed by hundreds of beginner mountaineers each year, it's a beginner mountain. These people don't have fitness or skills, they just have money.
Backfill (with cheaper eng) the roles.

Meta is already filled with H1Bs. They are probably the model utilizer of H1B visas. They pay them all really well and the employee base is truly global, not just all from one country.
Cosine similarity and top-k RAG feel so primitive to me, like we are still in the semantic dark ages.

The article is right to point out that cosine similarity is more of an accidental property of data than anything in most cases (but IIUC there are newer embedding models that are deliberately trained for cosine similarity as a similarity measure). The author's bootstrapping approach is interesting especially because of it's ability to map relations other than the identity, but it seems like more of a computational optimization or shortcut (you could just run inference on the input) than a way to correlate unstructured data.

After trying out some RAG approaches and becoming disillusioned pretty quickly I think we need to solve the problem much deeper by structuring models so that they can perform RAG during training. Prompting typical LLMs with RAG gives them input that is dissimilar from their training data and relies on heuristics (like the data format) and thresholds (like topK) that live outside the model itself. We could probably greatly improve this by having models define the embeddings, formats, and retrieval processes (ie learn its own multi-step or "agentic" RAG while it learns everything else) that best help them model their training data.

I'm not an AI researcher though and I assume the real problem is that getting the right structure to train properly/efficiently is rather difficult.
I have concerns about density & cost for both photonic & superconductive computing. Not sure what one can do with quantum Hall effect.

Regarding long-term returns, my view is that reversible computing is really the only way forward for continuing to radically improve the energy efficiency of digital compute, whereas conventional (non-reversible) digital tech will plateau within about a decade. Because of this, within two decades, nearly all digital compute will need to be reversible.

Regarding bypassing the Landauer limit, theoretically yes, reversible computing can do this, but not by thermally cooling anything really, but rather by avoiding the conversion of known bits to entropy (and their energy to heat) in the first place. This must be done by "decomputing" the known bits, which is a fundamentally different process from just erasing them obliviously (without reference to the known value).

For the quantum case, I haven't closely studied the result in the second paper you cited, but it sounds possible.
I thought FFmpeg is pipeline based too; graph of filters. Am I missing something? You can set up a complex graph of source, sink and transform filters.
According to all the magazines I've been reading, all that is required is to just prompt it with "please fix all of these issues" and give it a bulleted list with a single sentence describing each issue. I mean, it's AI powered and therefore much better than overpaid prima-donna engineers, so obviously it should "just work" and all the problems will get fixed. I'm sure most of the bugs were the result of humans meddling in the AI's brilliant output.

Right now, in fact, my understanding is OpenAI is using their current LLM's to write the next generation ones which will far surpass anything a developer can currently do. Obviously we'll need to keep management around to tell these things what to do, but the days of being a paid software engineer are numbered.
interesting observation. i found a reference project detailing how this works below

https://calischs.pages.cba.mit.edu/step/servo-stepper/
That's how you check modulus for powers of 2. 2 is a power of 2. This barely even qualifies as an "optimization".
People talk about kids being addicted, but I had to deal with my dad constantly showing me some Instagram video. Not necessarily a dumb video, but still not something I cared to watch.
AI Will Spew Gas Fumes for Years Before the Nuclear Revolution Takes Off
How does Xenon act as an anaesthetic if it's a noble gas and chemically inert?
I first heard of Nix a few years ago from someone who fell firmly into the camp of "the tools are the interesting part." Despite my reservations, perhaps because I didn't want my opinion of the person to lead me away from something useful, I started to mess with it. After about 30 minutes I decided it was not for me and have not touched it since.

I do keep an eye on Nix-related stories to get a sense of whether or not I should change that stance. So far, nothing has led me to change it.
Climbing Everest assisted is still a monumental personal achievement. I'm proud of my even more modest adventures in the Himalayas.
You could try out the https://wisephone.com to see if that helps. It doesn't allow social media, but it does allow apps that are tools to get a job done. I think if you let your kids experience boredom, they'd be sad and potentially spiteful, but it's what they need. Kids need to experience boredom. That's when the best experiences and ideas happen.
Yup, I have had that several times too.
> Aren’t tariffs just corporate taxes which are paid by big corps who import stuff built overseas?

No, they're not "just" that. Those costs get passed onto the consumer in the form of higher prices. Corporations aren't going to eat the cost out of the goodness of their hearts.

> At least when you incentivize stuff to get built here the money goes to union workers or at least stays within the US.

If a widget from China costs $100 because of tariffs, then American companies who make the same widget have no reason to undercut that since they know consumers have no other options -- effectively raising the price floor.

There are also issues with the "union workers get the money" because we're effectively stiffing the rest of the U.S. population in order to prop up a specific segment of the economy.
Is this the end of Berlin's famous club scene?
How about sending a packet back and forth to a server in another continent n times, and if it stops coming back, it was odd.
>It's like telling people "well, you know, if you eat more than you need to, you'll gain weight". Duh, not helpful.

It is a foundation to work from. Far better than believing that you can cheat thermodynamics, which is generally the alternative.

There are some fringe cases and nuances, but I have never heard of one that was relevant. Do you have a use case where deviations would matter?

Absorbed calories don't match label calories, but weight loss and gain are studied in terms of label calories, so it is irrelevant unless you are doing chemistry or particle physics.

Labels could be in terms of arbitrary moon units instead of calories and it would still be true. Weight loss is a function of moon units in and moon units out.
I'm baffled by your claim about Effective Altruism (EA): "fruitless hyper-rationality (think contemporary Effective Altruism)." Fruitless? You mean the (movement of) people who have contributed billions of dollars to some of the most cost-effective charities on the planet; many of who give at least 10% of their income to such charities ... fruitless? How did you form your opinions about EA?