MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dhosek | 2025-04-29 20:20:04+00:00
Illinois has traditionally done the plate stays with the owner, not the car for plates, but I think might be switching to California-style plating now, but I don’t know. They seemed to have relatively random issuance of plate numbers but have the constraint that letters cannot follow digits even on vanity plates (so EL1TE would not be a valid plate).¹ Sometime around 2016ish they started issuing plates sequentially with a scheme of AA 12345 but they had previously issued some plates that were AA1 2345 so presumably they need to skip the conflicting plates that followed that scheme. They’ve never had the kind of clear system that California has where standard plate numbers followed a predictable pattern.

⸻

1. They do, however for specialty plates, have plates which have two letters at the end, usually stacked vertically on the right side of the plate, so, e.g., a stacked SD for people with the duck environmental plate.
by toast0 | 2025-04-29 20:20:16+00:00
1963's ABC 123 came first[1] and invalidated earlier plates (but they can be used again under the year of manufacture plate program [2]), when those ran out, they did 123 ABC; when those ran out they did 1ABC123. When all the 1s were issued it was time for 2, etc.

with a trailing 1-9, it will likely be the same. You have a preview with commercial plates which were 1A12345 and are now 12345A1

(edit: linked to two pages with lots of good info)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/vehicle-industry-regi...
by gchamonlive | 2025-04-29 20:20:30+00:00
https://github.com/uint128-t/ZIPBOMB

2048 yottabyte Zip Bomb This zip bomb uses overlapping files and recursion to achieve 7 layers with 256 files each, with the last being a 32GB file. It is only 266 KB on disk.

When you realise it's a zip bomb it's already too late. Looking at the file size doesn't betray its contents. Maybe applying some heuristics with ClamAV? But even then it's not guaranteed. I think a small partition to isolate decompression is actually really smart. Wonder if we can achieve the same with overlays.
by throwanem | 2025-04-29 20:20:50+00:00
Yes. The loudly embittered ones now will be making sandwiches or something in a decade, around when today's quietly thoughtful ones really begin making themselves known to history as the precursor generation of the first great - diffusion artists? Collageurs d'inference? Oh, I'm sure it won't be anything I would come up with, anyway. But what does life look like when keeping the deep-pocketed philistines satisfied takes only two hours a week, plus the usual coffee dates or "coffee" dates or "coffee dates?"
by atoav | 2025-04-29 20:21:09+00:00
I play musical instruments for two decades now. And I still enjoy it, because it puts my mind into a state that is almost flow like. Same for programming. So I just like how it feels when I do it, for the most part at least. That means sometimes I just program for fun and open ended without any goal at all. Same goes for music. 90% of my playing outside my band is just playing without a plan.

This is why I am good at those things — I spent a lot of my time doing them and I did so because I enjoy it.

Let yourself play, find the aspects that interest you about a topic and go wild. No need for a goal, thiose will come eventually. First you need to find joy in what you're doing.

And if you don't find any of that, maybe your motivation is just money, fame or whatever and thst might be ok as well, if you're happy with doing a thing you don't like.
by tombert | 2025-04-29 20:21:31+00:00
A friend of mine and I split the cost of a family plan ($20/month) and that way we have four extra accounts to use for our family and the like. The amortized cost is pretty reasonable then.

I'm ok paying a few bucks simply because it gives the site a means of making money that isn't selling my data or tunneling me into some kind of marketing ML model.

And the results really do feel better. I almost never do the !g like I did with DuckDuckGo, and being able to set my own weights for sites is genuinely great. Instead of some arbitrary machine learning model, I have my actual intelligence to assist with the rankings.
by awkward | 2025-04-29 20:21:37+00:00
AI excitement is all supply side. Lots of people are excited to automate their own labor and smooth out production. Very few people want to accept raw AI generated slop.

That isn't pure doomerism - there's plenty of room for AI assist, and people like using AI experiences themselves. AI as a product is here to stay, but the second order of products openly using AI is showing it's limits.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-29 20:21:51+00:00
They're not arguing with you, they're yes-anding you. Read as "ah a one word opinionated description...let's steelman that. here's my one-word opinionated term: clunky. Here's what smells make me get that vibe. What smells contribute to the bloat one? :)"

Doubling down on short judge-y stacatto contributes to an aggressive "I don't need to tell you" vibe that would be sassy and fun, maybe, if in person. In writing online comments, it just means we need to get a 3rd comment from you before we get to anything I'm interested in (I don't particularly care what your one word description is, I don't know you)
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-29 20:22:07+00:00
Ugh, I didn't posit that demand is infinite, nor did I even mention Jevons paradox.

In the the past 200 years we've seen colossal productivity gains from technology across every area of the economy. Over the same period, wages have increased and unemployment has remained stable. That's where my priors come from. I'll update them if we get data to the contrary, but the data we have so far (like this paper) mostly confirm them.
by phkahler | 2025-04-29 20:22:14+00:00
>> Why does the UPS app have to be over 100 MB?

Oh oh!! Let me guess!! I don't do mobile but have looked into it. And the guy behind me is doing an app too. Everyone wants to minimize development effort so they pick a framework that will spit out both iOS and Android apps. It's the framework that ends up bloating everything. Maybe? That doesn't explain "why", it just pushes it off the app developer onto someone else.
by ndriscoll | 2025-04-29 20:22:54+00:00
As an example, I recently had to pay for parking with a website because the card reader on the machine was busted. So I scanned the QR code and loaded up the site, had to fiddle to enable some of the scripts, and make my payment. After I was done, I saw it had used over 25 MB--4% of my data for the month--to collect roughly 30 bytes of information from me, assuming a naive encoding (16 digit CC, 3 digit CV2, 8 digit license plate #, 2 digit state). Maybe it also needed the billing address, so another 30 bytes or whatever. Point is the TLS handshake should've been 95% of the traffic.

If anything, I almost left to go look elsewhere because it was too much of a pain to get it to work on my phone and I didn't want to use up all of my data fiddling with it. No one is demanding a JS heavy site here. Customers are not demanding anything. It's a near certainty that no one has ever provided feedback to the parking lot owner about their payment form. I did actually leave digikey's store because I literally could not figure out how to get their payment form to work without blanket enabling all scripts (and they have a ton of third-party tracking scripts).

Sites that are for services that actually matter (e.g. banks, governments, utilities) also don't need to be flashy. You don't need to sell me on filing for my paternity leave or filing taxes or making a bank transfer or paying a bill. Just present the form. The absolute ideal website in such cases is a transcription of the paper form it replaces with a tiny bit of javascript to check constraints/field validation. The free tax filing website for the US is a decent inspiration for this: from a UX perspective it's just electronic versions of the paper forms with some ability to auto-calculate some fields.
by snickerbockers | 2025-04-29 20:23:01+00:00
I swear, it's fucking garbage collection. I had to something fairly non-trivial in Java once for a phone app in 2011 (it was a simple OCR algorithm that could read text from low-res images as long as said text was printed by a machine with a clean seriff-like font and only contained numeric digits laid out in a grid) and I remember the biggest problem was that it kept running out of memory and the only solution was to go through the program and manually null every reference the moment it was no longer needed because the GC on android back then apparently was not very good at figuring these things out itself. Which is actually a lot more complicated than deleting pointers in C++ is because there are no destructors in java.

It made a huge difference in terms of execution speed too, IDK if phones with solid-state storage use swap partitions like PCs do but that little phone was definitely struggling with something that went away when I did the one thing the garbage collector is supposed to save me from doing.
by T-R | 2025-04-29 20:23:14+00:00
I definitely agree for traversals, but Lenses need some sort of primitive support - even in Haskell they're mostly generated with TemplateHaskell, and the language developers have spent a long time trying to make the `record.field` accessor syntax overloadable enough to work with lenses[1][2]. Hopefully someday we'll be free from having to memorize all the lens operators.

Optics are famously abstract in implementation, but I don't think people have trouble applying them - people seem to like JQuery/CSS selectors, and insist on `object.field` syntax; it's kind of wild that no mainstream language has a first-class way to pass around the description of a location in an arbitrary data structure.

[1] https://ghc-proposals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/002...

[2] https://ghc-proposals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/015...
Show HN: Native macOS / iOS note app – Offline first – Search note by AI
by areshuyle | 2025-04-29 20:23:14+00:00
Finding notes fast is still hard. You can organize with tags, PARA, or backlinks, but searching always feels slow and frustrating.

That’s why I built ConniePad - native app on macOS & iOS. It works offline and lets you capture notes quickly anywhere. It has a comprehensive editor and local speech-to-text on iOS, so you can jot down ideas even without internet.

But capturing notes is only half the story. What about finding what you need?

ConniePad uses AI search. You can type queries like you would in Google or ChatGPT. It understands similar words, wrong typos, and abbreviations, so you get good results fast.

Semantic search is off by default because it uses OpenAI service. You can turn it on in Settings or the Right Sidebar.

I’m always working to make ConniePad better. If you have feedback, I’d like to hear it.

Try it yourself at conniepad.com. No login or credit card needed. Just download and start.
by axelMI | 2025-04-29 20:23:20+00:00
I must admit this baffles me a little. Width and heights are measured in pixels. The number of pixels of an image is width x height (eg a raw image 256x256 means it has 256*256 = 65.536 pixels = 262.144 bytes - if RGBA8). I cannot reduce its pixels and keep the same width and height or viceversa. I can a) reduce the quality of an image with a lossy compression (in download if you select jpg you can reduce the quality which will in turn reduce the file size) b) scale an image when displayed in a browser (canvas.style.width > canvas.width) but the underlying image will still be canvas.width

Maybe I'm missing something
by cube2222 | 2025-04-29 20:23:39+00:00
Generally, all that non-tech content still helps the model “to learn”.

Also, the software you’re working on will generally in some way have a real-world domain - without knowing it the AI all likely be a less effective assistant. Design conversations with it would likely be pretty non-fun, too.

Finally, the “bitter lesson” article[0] from a couple years ago is I think somewhat applicable too.

[0]: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
by gruez | 2025-04-29 20:23:52+00:00
>But if they're getting chat content directly from the phones, say for example by having arranged with the app to cooperate with that exfiltration, then that is, by definition, a back door.

Keyword being "if". There's no indication such backdoors exist, as opposed to something like malware being placed, or the phone being physically being tampered with.
by xorcist | 2025-04-29 20:23:55+00:00
> "We spent x weeks working so users with low memory space can update"

But it's the other way around! That's the whole point. Every app starts out small. Apps don't grow unless you add complexity to them. It's much less work to do something simple than doing it overly complex. We see this all the time.

The question to ask should instead be: How can it be that "We spent x weeks working on increasing complexity" is not completely unsellable, if all your users want to do is pay their bills?

Now, reality is never that simple and users constantly ask for new features, that much is true. But why can we as an industry never listen to all those users who don't want new features?

It used to be completely normal to identify a need, sketch out the most appropriate funcitonality to solve that need, and them implement it. Then the core functionality is done. The software can continue to be developed around that functionality, but the core is fixed because the problem domain is well described.

No software is allowed to fit the problem domain anymore. It's just a constant pile of features upon features, to keep a legion of product designers, user experience managers, product owners, and an army of developers busy every day with no end in sight. The only break from the treadmill is the occasional product redesign, and if you can't afford that this increment then you can always change the frontend framework. Whatever happened to decent problem modelling and when you're done, you're done? Optimizing what we got instead of expanding it?
by sedev | 2025-04-29 20:24:11+00:00
In addition to the more concrete reasons, abstractly they're getting a bit of extra usage out of the namespace by segmenting it. A 9ZZZ999-type license plate is not just any license plate — it's specifically an ordinary private vehicle (as opposed to a state-owned vehicle or a trailer) that was registered in California between 1980 and 2026, and both of those facts are durably encoded in the number. Notably, both of these are also very human-readable facts, which for most of the existence of the car bureaucracy was extremely germane. The CA DMV got its digital-records act together in the 1990s (this is from memory, it might have been in the Bush years but it certainly wasn't in the '80s and it was a done deal by the Obama era) but there was a long time before that when "just plug it into the DB" was not an option because the DB was a filing cabinet and the query engine was a human digging through it.
by standyro | 2025-04-29 20:24:25+00:00
the military gets what it wants in DC, and the pilots were too comfortable and on different radio systems (helo can’t hear airplanes and vice versa, air traffic control is their intermediary)

A disaster waiting to happen in retrospect. Similar issues at other airports like runway incursions, especially at crowded small airports like SFO and LaGuardia with antiquated runway layouts.
by toast0 | 2025-04-29 20:24:25+00:00
Current California DMV rules prohibit issuing a vanity plate that matches patterns from sequential plates. When new sequences are used, there's potential for overlap, but I suspect not many people would have picked vanity 'numbers' that match the patterns. Initial zero is unused, but probably still reserved.

You can get an 'environmental plate' issued with a sequential number though, which I believe is less than the vanity plate fee.

And there's some rules around using historic plates on historic vehicles.
by new_user_final | 2025-04-29 20:24:31+00:00
I had a meeting, so I opened 5/6 relevant pages to quickly show something. I thought the meeting was postponed, so I created a chrome tab group and close the group and continue working with 1 or 2 tab in my browser.

Suddenly, meeting was scheduled again, I simply clicked on the group, and got all the tabs open again.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-04-29 20:24:37+00:00
I find it interesting how a lot of other comments are saying how "HN users are a bubble, the public is actually really excited about AI", when the research indicates that the general public is even less interested in AI then HN is.

It's fine to express your opinion on AI, whether positive or negative. It's even fine to share anecdotes about how other people feel. Just don't say that's how "most people" feel without providing some actual evidence.
by Philpax | 2025-04-29 20:24:54+00:00
Sure, yeah - but just like with a human, I can provide additional domain context that can clarify its answer. I see your point - you need to know what to provide in order to get the result you want - but I think that today, that makes it a very useful tool, and tomorrow, it'll be able to make those clarifications itself.

(Out of curiosity, what would you use instead? I'd default to INT/DECIMAL respectively myself - would love to know what your thinking is here!)
by porkloin | 2025-04-29 20:24:59+00:00
That's fine, but bodybuilding is recreational with the exception of a very small number of people who are professional bodybuilders. Human beings don't _need_ to have 200g of protein per day. Assuming you're not a professional or don't have a job where large muscle mass is an absolute requirement, the excess protein intake is something you _want_ so that you can enjoy your hobby.

To be clear, you should continue to eat as much meat as you want - it's your life! There are tons of advantages to strength training and bodybuilding, and I am not trying to diminish any of that.

But what I can't agree on is that it's ethical to consume that much daily protein unless you truly need it. That level of meat consumption has very real impacts - it is literally unsustainable for a significant number of people to consume excess protein entirely from meat.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-04-29 20:25:16+00:00
I plugged a used 2022 Camry w/ a short commute in CA into AAA's tool: they estimate $850 TCO per month. So at say $18 an uber in SF, you can make ~24 round trips to the office a month. That assumes you can park the Camry for free I think. On the other hand if you need a car to get groceries and stuff, the math starts to tip dramatically. Also assumes you value your time waiting for an Uber at $0 I suppose.
by jerf | 2025-04-29 20:25:19+00:00
You want to consider the ratio of your resource consumption to their resource consumption. If you trickle bytes from /dev/random, you are holding open a TCP connection with some minimal overhead, and that's about what they are doing too. Let's assume they are bright enough to use any of the many modern languages or frameworks that can easily handle 10K/100K connections or more on a modern system. They aren't all that bright but certainly some are. You're basically consuming your resources to their resources 1:1. That's not a winning scenario for you.

The gzip bomb means you serve 10MB but they try to consume vast quantities of RAM on their end and likely crash. Much better ratio.
by aezart | 2025-04-29 20:25:47+00:00
Arizona had AAA000 when I was a kid, then 000AAA, then AAA0000 issued sequentially, but then just before they got through all the plates starting with 'C' they switched to a new system that appears completely random to me. It's a shame, I really enjoyed tracking the progression and knowing whether someone got their plate before or after me.
by bbatha | 2025-04-29 20:26:00+00:00
To add on to the sibling. Specialized models, including fine tuned ones, continually have their lunch eaten by general models within 3-6 months. This time round is mixture of experts that’ll do it, next year it’ll be something else. Tuned models are expensive to produce and are benchmark kings but less do less well in the real world qualitative experience. The juice just ain’t worth the squeeze most of the time.

Meta does have some specialized models though, llamaguard was released for llama 2 and 3.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-04-29 20:26:01+00:00
Looking at those photos, those are some crazy hard pictures- masked regions of the image, partially cropped faces, blurry, pictures of insides of rooms. I don't think any current LLM is going to be able to Sherlock Holmes their way into finding any of those people.

Maybe they will one day if there's a model trained on a facial recognition database with every living person included.
by deredede | 2025-04-29 20:26:29+00:00
> Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

I think tabs are just the better user interface.

It's not that I'm afraid I won't find the page in my history and bookmarks, it's that I don't want to have to do that because it's painful. History is full of irrelevant pages. Bookmarks make me lose my flow constantly wondering if I should bookmark a page or it's not needed (and in which directory!).

Tabs have a very simple workflow with low cognitive overhead. Everything is preserved by default (middle click/ctrl click is my default click in a browser), unless I'm clearly in a linear workflow where I don't want to keep the page (left click). Self-organizing due to the way they open, but very easy to manually reorder (or close) if needed. Kept in memory so going back to a (recent) tab is instantaneous.

They just... get out of the way and let me work. Tabs make browsing feel like one continuous task, where history/bookmarks feel like constant interruptions.
by 0x20cowboy | 2025-04-29 20:27:29+00:00
I did a stint in Devops and I found every models to be like this for all of the infra-as-code languages. Anything yaml based was especially bad.

Even Amazon’s own offering completely made things up about Amazon’s own formats.

I’d be curious as to why that is. It seems like there would be enough training data, and for Amazon in particular it seems like they could make a validation tool the model could use.
by evolve2k | 2025-04-29 20:27:57+00:00
For anyone with a basic understanding of a tariff as a measurable levied tax on a product vs inflation as a general measurement of price increases, this has to be one of the most wild and best example I’ve seen in many decades of Doublespeak as defined in Orwells 1984.

“Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” the White House press secretary asked.

The statement is delivered with authority but is utterly nonsensical.
by darepublic | 2025-04-29 20:28:24+00:00
Yes similar experience querying gpt about lesser known frameworks. Had o1 stone cold hallucinate some non existent methods I could find no trace of from googling. Would not budge on the matter either. Basically you have to provide the key insight yourself in these cases to get it unstuck, or just figure it out yourself. After its dug into a problem to some degree you get a feel for whether continued prompting on the subject is going to be helpful or just more churn
by gruez | 2025-04-29 20:28:36+00:00
It's unclear whether the government actually have the ability to read/intercept e2e messages, or merely declared they have the right to. That's an important distinction, because the government can declare it has the right to access such messages, without the service providers (ie. whatsapp) being able to follow through with it. We've seen something similar in uk, where a bill passed a few years ago gave the government the right to access encrypted data, and forced tech companies to provide access, but Apple didn't actually implement a backdoor. They instead decided to (very loudly) disable encryption entirely for the uk market.