skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm very far from an expert, but:

What part of this system understands 3 dimensional space of that kitchen?

The visual model "understands" it most readily, I'd say -- like a traditional Waymo CNN "understands" the 3D space of the road. I don't think they've explicitly given the models a pre-generated pointcloud of the space, if that's what you're asking. But maybe I'm misunderstanding?

How does the robot closest to the refrigerator know to pass the cookies to the robot on the left?

It appears that the robot is being fed plain english instructions, just like any VLM would -- instead of the very common `text+av => text` paradigm (classifiers, perception models, etc), or the less common `text+av => av` paradigm (segmenters, art generators, etc.), this is `text+av => movements`.

Feeding the robots the appropriate instructions at the appropriate time is a higher-level task than is covered by this demo, but I think is pretty clearly doable with existing AI techniques (/a loop).

How is this kind of speech to text, visual identification, decision making, motor control, multi-robot coordination and navigation of 3d space possible locally?

If your question is "where's the GPUs", their "AI" marketing page[1] pretty clearly implies that compute is offloaded, and that only images and instructions are meaningfully "on board" each robot. I could see this violating the understanding of "totally local" that you mentioned up top, but IMHO those claims are just clarifying that the individual figures aren't controlled as one robot -- even if they ultimately employ the same hardware. Each period (7Hz?) two sets of instructions are generated.

[1] https://www.figure.ai/ai

What possible combo of model types are they stringing together? Or is this something novel?

Again, I don't work in robotics at all, but have spent quite a while cataloguing all the available foundational models, and I wouldn't describe anything here as "totally novel" on the model level. Certainly impressive, but not, like, a theoretical breakthrough. Would love for an expert to correct me if I'm wrong, tho!

EDIT: Oh and finally:

Is anyone skeptical? How much of this is possible vs a staged tech demo to raise funding?

Surely they are downplaying the difficulties of getting this setup perfectly, and don't show us how many bad runs it took to get these flawless clips.

They are seeking to raise their valuation from ~$3B to ~$40B this month, sooooooo take that as you will ;)

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/r...
> why do you get to decide that it isn't the purpose of a cow to be eaten?

Pretty sure it is the cow's purpose. Humans first domesticated a wild animal and then with selective breeding cows were "made". That has no weight on ethics tho.
Of course, but many people don't. I wouldn't bother if it was just pedantry. It's a discussion I've had many times and it's actually hard to make some people understand that "chemicals" doesn't just mean "synthetic dangerous things made in a lab", or that some labels have ingredients that are difficult to pronounce and unrecognizable that are still safe and natural.

There are a lot of these people. It's the same kind of people who buy their dogs "Taste of the Wild" grain free high-protein dog food because it sounds natural and therefore better than WSAVA-approved dog food, against the advice of any seasoned veterinarian.
And then faked his degrees
Probably the first time a billionaire used his fame and money to get elected.
Quite some people frequenting this community can't even find their own dick in their underpants. And you suggest the raising live animals besides cats? Muhahahahhahahahahahaha! Oh the comedy.
I am surprised to hear this, as the Obsidian functionality is the only out-of-box offering I find acceptable in a corporate environment. Other alternatives like notion, logseq, joplin all break my workflow in spite of their selling points, because they do not simply store or reference a file. Obsidian is easy for me because I simply drag and drop something like a pdf or recording, and even if it is not a readable file within the Obsidian view, a file copy is dumped to the attachments folder without altering any of the metadata and a simple path reference is inserted in the fancy-markdown document. You can configure different workspaces/settings to dump to different folders if needed, but I treat mine mostly as a dumping ground that I manage similar to a bucket. If I need to audit images I can simply look at the folder with another program.
It was 100% in my personal experience.
Would love to chat! reach out scott@vlm.run
Here's a good discussion from here in 2021 about the fork that colors my perception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848
What does it mean when someone is sticking to their guns? Is it a bad thing? I do appreciate consistency, albeit a fair consistency and Gary Marcus's points do stand. When these criticisms are addressed (if it's possible to) you'd probably hear less from Gary Marcus.
I can believe Asians are explicitly discriminated against in admissions (and IMO that's unfair). But I can also believe this teen genuinely got rejected from all 16 colleges and accepted by Google out of luck.

Competitive colleges get more near-perfect applicants than admission slots. Extra-curricular achievements are subjective, and admissions don't have much time to thoroughly review them. Ultimately, decisions must involve a lottery, so anyone whose not truly exceptional has a non-negligible possibility of being rejected from a university like MIT (or an employer like Google).

It may be that the combined chance of being rejected 16 times is incredibly small, but the independent chance for each college is not. Unlucky for him, but unless there's specific evidence, one of his rejections alone is exceptional (e.g. he applied to a non-competitive college that accepted every other applicant with similar GPA), or there's evidence that any admissions are biased against Asians in general, I don't think the case should have merit.

I like to believe that attending an especially prestigious undergraduate university doesn't benefit one much more in the long run than a less prestigious but competent one, and that the most ambitious people can succeed anywhere. At least for this teenager, being hired by Google at 19 is almost certainly far better for his goals and future than if he was rejected but accepted to any of the colleges. Since that acceptance also involved luck, he should be thankful.
It's been decades since we haven't been able to blindly trust image and videos in court, image and video manipulation are almost as old as photography and cinema.

And paper documents are still being used on court today despite being trivially counterfeit.

Why so? Because court never trust documents blindly, the defendant can always object that it is fake and try and question their origin. If the concerns are deemed legitimate by the court, the document is going to be rejected (and an investigation will occur and the producer of the fake document will be charged heavily).
Yeah, to me, there is no benefit of the doubt. Musk supports AfD, which seems to this American about as Nazi a party is as legally allowed in Germany. He has, of course, reinstated all kinds of far right voice to his shitty little social media platform, while simultaneously banning anyone/anything he deems too woke. Then, bro pulls a full fledged Nazi salute on national TV.

I don't know if it is appropriate to call Musk a Nazi: that term is so rooted in a specific era and place. I would certainly call Musk a neo-fascist, just as I would call Trump a neo-fascist, and also the entirety of his cabinet:

-an EO declaring that Trump's interpretation of the law is the only valid one for anyone in the Executive Branch (https://www.jurist.org/news/2025/02/trump-signs-order-declar...)

-ex post facto vetos (by DOGE fiat) of money previously apportioned by Congress

-the abandonment of Ukraine, while carving it up with Russia for land and mineral rights, and lying about the causes for the conflict.

-the undermining of NATO and bolstering of Russia (https://www.ft.com/content/ac1dcb02-4c5f-4a36-935a-f7ef0a934...)

-firing of inspectors general (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/politics/trump-fires-i...)

-firing of election security teams (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/business/trump-foreign-in...)

-vows of retribution against political opponents and weaponization of the DOJ (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/this-is-not-restoring-...)

This is an terrifying consolidation of power in complete violation of the intent of the American Constitution. Welcome to neo-fascist America.
>AGI", had to be created to represent what "AI" once did.

And, "AGI" has already been downgraded, with "superintelligence" being the new replacement.

"Super-duper" is clearly next.
I don't see integrating AI into UI/UX to be incompatible with enabling the user to do as she intends. In fact, I think the thoughtful use of AI could better help users do what they want. It is annoying when "smart" features completely miss the mark, but it's a worthy pursuit in my book.
Extrapolating your reasoning... Why have morals at all?! Seems just another inefficiency to optimize away right?
Many LLMs, particularly, coding assistants, use "tools". Here is one with a calculator

https://githubnext.com/projects/gpt4-with-calc/

and another example

https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/langchain/langchain-too...

LLMs often do a good job at mathy coding, for instance I told Copilot that "i want a python function that computes the collatz sequence for a given starting n and returns it as a list"

def collatz_sequence(n):
sequence = [n]
while n != 1:
if n % 2 == 0:
n = n // 2
else:
n = 3 * n + 1
sequence.append(n)
return sequence

which gives right answers, which I wouldn't count on copilot being able to do on its own.
Hum... How do you propose people hold their representatives accountable after elections are made dysfunctional (or stop entirely)?

And that's a honest question. I don't think even guns are an answer to that. I don't know anything that works.
Unions produce nothing and don't innovate. Yes, they can benefit some people, but they provide no net societal benefit. In fact, they are a net negative because they misallocate resources (such as by keeping factories open producing cars that nobody wants).
> Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen

That sounds.. pretty cheap?

Here (Switzerland), 10 eggs (instead of 12), cost at least 4.20 CHF (almost 5 USD): https://www.coop.ch/de/lebensmittel/milchprodukte-eier/eier/...

These are the lowest quality eggs available.

Regular eggs are around $1 each and it's been like this for at least a decade now.
Xodot: Share Your Godot Games on iOS
Is everything that OpenAI or these other proprietary companies do with their models known?
Alternatively, there's nothing preventing the Rust folks building their own kernel from the ground up.
In what way? What exactly has the US achieved?
I think that CSS is excessive, that I often disable it and that the excessive design means that sometimes the way to fix it is to add more stuff, which just makes it more messy. (In many cases, it would be helpful to put things that only the end user controls and that document author does not control. Yet, they don't really design them for that very well.)
I want to Design 3D Packaging wevsute with ThreeJS
Yeh, and duplicate slide option? I may be missing it, on iPad…
> unless Hacker News has a lot of readers who might contribute to this effort

But it obviously does? Maybe not people who "want" but definitely many who "might".

If anything this is one of the better places to advertise, and certainly more interesting than another "Hooli (YC99) is hiring to democratize breathing".
I see. My kids are still too small to be there. There’s this sweet spot of maybe age 6-11 where the kid can sit there safely and also isn’t big enough to hate the lack of leg room. And when you have two kids that overlapping window is even shorter.
I wish they'd held the press release until there was something to see. There isn't even a hiring link.
The one I built was definitely too small on all accounts (coop space and run space).

For the second coop, we bought a pre-built shed that's about 8'x12' (much taller and roomier than the first), and even that is starting to feel too small for 13 chickens with all their various items. They have a much larger run now, but even that still feels like it might not be enough for them!
While the article mentions alternatives like links and w3m, I'd like to hear HN's opinion on links vs w3m vs lynx.
this is copium, the author doesn't have a good grasp on LLMs. you can't simply "ask" a language model to see if they know they're bad at math and then conclude that the response actually reflects the knowledge encapsulated in the model... sigh...
It's probably better not to do marketing on top of someone else's launch.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1759626842817069290?s=46&t=57... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813750)

(we detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118409)
How to Not Pay Your Medical Bills
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/how-to-not-pay-your-med...
Exactly. US commentators here are so tedious.
Funny that it is written by Claude, lightly edited by humans.
The cost isn't justified by the cost of producing the dose, it's justified by the cost of testing a drug like that divided by the small number of recipients. Other gene therapies for rare diseases are priced accordingly, insurance companies will pay because they a worth a lot.
This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too.

Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
Given the rampant cronyism of academia and the government I doubt there will be any open positions to fill.
Hey HN! Would love to hear any feedback or comments you have regarding Packlane.
P.S. We're also on Product Hunt today :
I use two of the mentioned browsers.

I have elinks as a default `tmux` pseudoterminal. I don't use it often, but it's always there.

My emacs setup uses w3m as the parser for HTML mail in VM, my email client. It works really well. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39793342>
Implementing graph RAG using knowledge graphs
All anyone had to do was sit through one all-hands with the DEI consultant running through a slide deck that was clearly unaltered aside from the logo in the top left to understand how much of a scam it was.
Similar to "real work," a "real job" is a definitional problem that attacks people's senses of self.
All very valid criticism. My question is, when are you going to make it work?
>since it is congress overriding the will of the people.

Say what?!

It's Congress keeping the President in check. BTW, the President is not directly elected by the people and doesn't actually [directly] represent them. The President is elected by the state governments (legislatures) and is supposed to be chosen because the States belief the President will faithfully uphold the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress. It may happen the the States use a popular election to choose their electors that elect the President, at least for now, but the President isn't supposed to represent "the mob" (majority or the populace). It's also why the electoral college is used for electing the President rather than straight popular vote.
Yeah Amazon’s motivations aren’t great, but it’s occupying a space that opened up when Elastic changed the license on Elasticsearch. Nobody’s going to create another permissively licensed alternative to it just because they’re annoyed it’s an Amazon project.
I don’t know. Everything?
My comment from the original submission [1]:

---
As someone who is in general skeptical of programs like this (and an European) there are 2 remarkable / timely things about this:
- This project doesn't just allocate money to universities or one large company, but includes top research institutions as well as startups and GPU time on supercomputing clusters. The participants are very well connected (e.g. also supported by HF, Together and the likes with European roots) - Deepseek has just shown that you probably can't beat the big labs with these resources, but you can stay sufficient close to the frontier to make a dent.

Europe needs to try this. Will this close the Gap to the US/China? Probably not. But it could be a catalyst for competitive Open source models and partially revitalize AI in Europe. let's see..

PS: on Twitter there was a screenshot yesterday that in a new EU draft, "accelerate" was used six times. Maybe times are changing a little bit.

Disclaimer: Our company is part of this project, so I might be biased.
---
I hope the next time this is on HN, it's with some cool release and not a PR :).

(@mods please delete if copy-quoting not allowed)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42924802
If you're not interested, you're not interested. Not even about "passion" at that point, but the bare minimum interest in your industry. I said it better previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15553482
Telegram and Signal having hundreds of millions of "regular person" users since then says different. It doesn't seem apparent because in the past decade Big Tech has dropped any pretensions around caring about privacy other than for themselves. In the past 5 years, they've deepened their role in the natsec apparatus as well.
I'm pretty sure the SDKSs are Apache licensed so not proprietary. Obviously the backend is proprietary, but that doesn't affect the SDK itself. You can pin it, fork it, vendor it, whatever you want, just like any other FOSS project that you don't control.

I think more the issue is that people started thinking of the AWS SDK as a generic open source library rather than what it should be thought of: an open source project run by a particular vendor who not only doesn't care about helping you use competitors, but actively wants to make that difficult. I would guess the truth is somewhere in the middle, but I think the healthy thing to do is treat it like the extreme end.
I wouldn't for two reasons:
- we've already tested OpenAI's GPT and Gemini a lot. Although they're not deterministic, we have used them enough to trust them and know the pitfalls.
- Elon's example of Grok outputting 'X is the only place for real information' makes the model almost completely useless for text generation. Even more so than DeepSeek.
It’s honestly the best type of technology.

It’s something that everyone has to implement because their products will be inferior without it. But it’s not something you can use to build a monopoly easily, and since everyone has to do it there will be many people racing to the bottom pushing the price down.
> The theoretical advance we're waiting for in LLMs is auditable determinism.

Non-determinism in LLMs is currently a feature and introduced consciously. Even if it wasn't, you would have to lock yourself on a specific model, since any future update would necessarily be a possibly breaking change.

> At that point, the utility of human-readable computer languages sort of goes out the door.

Its utility is having a non-ambiguous language to describe your solution in and that you can audit for correctness. You'll never get this with an LLM because its very premise is using natural language, which is ambiguous.
> You never failed to know within a few minutes whether the person could do the job

Then why spend a couple hours?
Is this the green jelly beans xkcd?
I'd say it is the two-sided market for advertising.
Ah yep agreed on the first but hard to build a platform like that without the network

I was just on LinkedIn now and gee the people are posting nonsense. That feed is full of ick
if you're going that direction, rclone is a lot more of an s3-like than scp is. Also a phenomenal piece of software
Actually, provenance matters:

"During the construction of an object, if the value of the object or any of its subobjects is accessed through a glvalue that is not obtained, directly or indirectly, from the constructor's this pointer, the value of the object or subobject thus obtained is unspecified." [0]

Reading an unspecified value isn't UB, that's good, but I don't understand why the standard says 'unspecified' because it clearly can be indeterminate if a sub-object hasn't been initialized yet.

[0] https://eel.is/c++draft/class.cdtor#2
This is Clientelism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism

It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.

Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.
Progress is very gradual in this space, but browser vendors are working on a lot of this stuff in the Open UI W3C community group. https://open-ui.org/

https://open-ui.org/components/combobox.explainer/
https://open-ui.org/components/switch.explainer/

> Where are the native HTML Tabs control?

You implement tabs today (aka accordions) with `<details name="tab">`. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de... "This attribute enables multiple `<details>` elements to be connected, with only one open at a time. This allows developers to easily create UI features such as accordions without scripting."

You do have to write some CSS to align tabs horizontally, but it's fine.

> Image selector?

Use `<input type="file" id="avatar" name="avatar" accept="image/png, image/jpeg" />`. Opens the OS photo picker on mobile. You can style it however you like.

> We can't even get text input to respect autocomplete directives properly.

"Properly" seems to be doing a lot of work there. "autocomplete" works fine, but it's annoying to get it right, and this kinda can't be fixed, because HTML is under a lot of backwards-compatibility constraints.

If you have autocomplete bugs to file, file them, and maybe convince the Interop group to focus on this issue. Their priorities for 2025 were just announced, but there's always next year. https://web.dev/blog/interop-2025
I just ask chatgpt to use a script to calculate an answer
They're all people that I know, and 98% of them are mutuals. I regularly go through my list of accounts I'm following every 5-6 months, and get rid of people who have disconnected from me, have gone inactive, or I don't really know.

I think the part you're missing here is that there are certain parts of twitter where the density of interconnection is really high, so you'll know people because you see them in the comments of a lot of threads, or through retweets.

It's really not that hard to end up knowing 1,000+ people if you engage with a group or "corner" of twitter. Even moreso if it's multiple corners. (Like, AI, but also just frens, but also a little political corner, people from specific cities, etc.)
Yeah, it's basically dying and living on old fame. We had to buy a license a few years ago for a customer who needed support for some things that PDFBox did not support, Of course it's not just a license, you have to buy multiple licenses for production, development and so on. It was okay until we hit a bug, iText could not read some form fields correctly and was basically changing the PDF contents on save. We opened a support ticket with all the details, sample files and code to reproduce. The ticket stayed open for a year. After a year they asked us to pay for more support. We showed them the open ticket and never heard from them again.