MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Esophagus4 | 2025-04-28 01:43:52+00:00
> Or you have some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death?

Can you provide such a scenario?

Or, more importantly... can you provide a reason why this hypothetical, extremely unusual edge case should take precedence over the 12,000 speeding deaths per year in our calculation?

For example, I'm willing to wager more people get hurt speeding TO the hospital while their wife is in labor than preventing any sort of injury due to out of hospital birth. Even EMTs know this implicitly: ground transport is one of the most dangerous parts of their job.[1]

Machines are absolutely capable of enforcing laws, and they do a pretty good job of it in many cases. Speed cameras reduce crashes and fatalities, and car breathalyzers reduce the incidences of drunk driving.[2][3][4]

Even still, humans (judges) review these cases individually and decide which offenders' cars to put breathalyzers / speed limiters on.

Also of note - presumably if you're a decent driver using your speeding card just this once to get your pregnant wife to the hospital, you wouldn't have repeated 100+ MPH speeding convictions on your record, so you wouldn't have a limited speed, anyway. In the US, these limiters are only installed for repeated offenses.

This affects the guy who has a history of reckless driving, the same way car breathalyzers affect the guy who has a history of drunk driving.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221414052...

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-speed-camer...

[3] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-cameras-reduce-injury...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7879393/
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-28 01:44:04+00:00
> I'd presume the state would need to update its GIS record, in the meantime you'd put your hazard lights on and move over to the right lane.

The problem isn't the GIS record, it's that the highway is directly adjacent to a mountain and the GPS isn't accurate enough there to distinguish between the highway and the lower speed roads near it, so they can't fix it. Or maybe they just don't care to because it's a bureaucracy. Also, the highway is the only road that goes over the bridge, so it's not a one-time problem because you can't avoid using it on a regular basis.

> Suddenly while driving, or something that you'd need to use the car for in order to travel fast?

Why isn't the issue. The hurricane comes and the phones are down and you need to get the kid to the hospital before they bleed out. You're the on-call service tech for something which is going to result in human tragedy if you don't get there first. You're not even involved but a firefighter had to commandeer your vehicle.

Stuff shouldn't be strictly enforcing rules in an emergency.

> These situations could be accounted for prior to repeatedly breaking speed laws.

How is the dying kid supposed to account for the only car in the area belonging to a stranger with one too many speeding tickets?
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-28 01:44:34+00:00
80% is good enough for like the bottom 1/4th-1/3rd of software projects. That is way better than an offshore parasite company throwing stuff at the wall because they don't care about consistency or quality at all. These projects will bore your average HNer to death rather quickly (if not technically, then politically).

Maybe people here are used to good code bases, so it doesn't make sense that 80% is good enough there, but I've seen some bad code bases (that still made money) that would be much easier to work on by not reinventing the wheel and not following patterns that are decades old and no one does any more.
by notfromhere | 2025-04-28 01:45:08+00:00
The business side needs to have subject matter expertise in the market, running an org, fundraising, marketing, etc. 'ideas guys' are pretty worthless without that.

80/20 is an insane proposal; 50/50 feels reasonable, but I 100% agree with you that the technical side is way more crucial than the business side, since under $10m in ARR your biggest issue will be making the tech work well enough to attract customers.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-28 01:46:04+00:00
I haven’t had much of a problem writing Rust code with Cursor but I’ve got dozens of crates docs, the Rust book, and Rustinomicon indexed in Cursor so whenever I have it touch a piece of code, I @-include all of the relevant docs. If a library has a separate docs site with tutorials and guides, I’ll usually index those too (like the cxx book for binding C++ code).

I also monitor the output as it is generated because Rust Analyzer and/or cargo check have gotten much faster and I find out about hallucinations early on. At that point I cancel the generation and update the original message (not send it a new one) with an updated context, usually by @-ing another doc or web page or adding an explicit instruction to do or not to do something.
by bgoated01 | 2025-04-28 01:47:09+00:00
My brother just finished building an automatic pipe organ for his Mechanical Engineering senior project. Or maybe you'd call it a street organ since it has no keyboard. It has midi input on some arduino-like device, 3d printed pipes, a hand crank pump to fill the bellows, and a bunch of shift registers, relays, and solenoids (on breadboards at this point) to open the valves for the pipes. It turned out really nice, and was a hit at the project showcase. I was involved in helping him figure out the electronics and the code, though I think he threw out the code I wrote in favor of using ChatGPT. All in all, it's not a technically difficult thing to make, though I have the benefit of his hindsight at this point. Maybe I'll get him to write it up at some point.
by mbirth | 2025-04-28 01:47:33+00:00
Also, news transmissions from agencies to newspapers or TV stations used (maybe still use in some places) a format called IPTC 7901 which also makes use of the SOH, SOT, EOT and EOH codes:

https://www.iptc.org/std/IPTC7901/1.0/specification/7901V5.p...

This stems from them coming via a serial wire (which is why news updates are also called “wires” in that context) to a TTY.

(Nowadays, you’d have a server receiving everything over the Internet and spitting it out in this format via a serial port or Telnet connection if needed.)

According to Wikipedia, fancier news messages are possible using some more codes, but I’ve never seen them in the wild in recent years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTC_7901#C0_control_codes
by sandworm101 | 2025-04-28 01:48:01+00:00
In the use cases imagined for this material, the cost of the base metals is basically irrelevant. Something like a jet turbine blade might have maybe 10$ worth of material, but after machining and a hundred other steps is worth 100x that ammount. A heatshield for a hypersonic missile? Maybe a kilo of copper, but perhaps a 1m+ purchase price
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-28 01:48:23+00:00
This distinction has been made with engine capacity (number of CCs) for scooters or motorcycles in many places including in the US.

I think what you're most experiencing is a result of cars over 2 wheeled vehicles. Cities would be much better if the average American commuted around it with 2 wheeled vehicles, mass transit, or the occasional taxi for trips when traveling with larger items.

If you have not traveled around Asia, I recommend it. You start to see a lot of the sickness in American culture. The biggest is a culture that revolves around cars.
by 827a | 2025-04-28 01:50:28+00:00
The main thing I would call attention to is: There are other governments around the world who have similar technologies required on their cars, and who have distributed that technology without much negative impact to their people. I might, if I were a Japanese citizen, trust the Japanese government to handle a technology like this with the care and respect it deserves; but we are not Japan. Do you trust the current American government to do the same?

Those who supported these mass surveilience and control systems under, for example, Obama and Biden, may find themselves quiet when wondering whether they support them again under Trump. Yet, this is precisely, to the T, what our Founding Fathers had considered: that no government can be trusted to do things like this, or what the NSA does, or anything like it. Even if you approve of the regime today, your approval may quickly change, but the power you granted that previous regime does not.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-28 01:52:10+00:00
> The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement

I think you can find evidence that basically all emulation since at least the N64 has been based on stolen SDKs and massive amounts of drama and infighting between overly-passionate groups of people.

Not to mention almost every single emulator developer pirates massive amounts of ROMs in order to test and debug games with their code. Many of them also have troves of proprietary SDKs as well.
by accrual | 2025-04-28 01:54:31+00:00
Anecdata regarding my RPi 4:

* On 7.5 the built-in `bwmf0` was not detected

* On 7.6 `bwmf0` was detected and works great, even in AP mode. However, my latest Node project core dumped when running `npm install` and nothing I tried got it working (short of recompiling Node)

* On 7.7 (today's release) `npm install` is working perfect

Not worth an entire blog post, but just goes to show improvements in OpenBSD over time on the Pi 4 :)
by int_19h | 2025-04-28 01:55:15+00:00
When you look at the percentage of people involved in it and people who die to it, we're actually better off than pretty much ever before, even accounting for our vastly improved and devastating weaponry, and even when you look at massive conflicts like WW1 and WW2.

Thing is, a pre-agrarian society means hunters/gatherers, and for that to work out, you need quite a lot of land to provide for a single person (hence why those societies have such low population density). Thus, warfare in that era is all about directly reducing the number of people competing with you for those precious resources, either by killing them or by driving them off the land. And so pretty much all males are involved in it and regular mortality rates from constantly ongoing warfare can reach as high as 20%. Furthermore, warfare itself is explicitly genocidal in nature, e.g. raids of enemy villages, ideally while defenders are away so that you can slaughter as many as possible.
by vikramkr | 2025-04-28 01:57:08+00:00
looks like it - it's such a minor and brief mention in the paper for the article to focus on it so much lol. They probably should have cited it, looks like they decided it was minor enough (or forgot) that they didn't put it in their software used/citation. Super commonly used though I wouldn't be stunned if most of its uses never got cited- just a quick check if it thinks deleting some section or doing some sort of fusion is gonna cause a problem, or if you've got something without a PDB structure finding a site to mess with that looks like it's not gonna cause any problems. You can't count on it blindly obviously but it's super helpful. Like if it's pretty confident about some section of a protein it hasn't seen before, the weird stuff you're studying might not be folded properly by the model, but if you want to stick a handle onto the protein to grab it with whatever it can let you know where's the least likely to be a waste of time and money to try.
by ksec | 2025-04-28 01:57:37+00:00
I still remember when I was playing around with parallel port as an EE, USB was both exciting and annoying. You always have to plug it in three times to get it right. While it was many times faster the Spec IIRC was 200 page long. Manageable but far more complicated than Parallel Port. When USB 2.0 arrives IIRC it was 550 pages and I thought how is anyone going to understand all these.

And then it was my story on looking into reversible plug ( USB-C ) way ahead of its time.

It was around 2000 when I really felt computer as a whole is so abstracted I longer have a good mental model of how any thing works. Both in software and hardware. It was just we pass it to this sub system and hope it works.
by csdvrx | 2025-04-28 01:57:51+00:00
Sometimes, you can't find the average because it's undefined: it can happen with a Cauchy and a few other statistical distributions: the wikipedia page has a nice plot of how the first 2 moments don't converge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution#History

When in doubt, don't use the mean: prefer more robust estimates, as even with degenerate statistical distributions, there are still some "good numbers to report" like the mode or the median.

And if you don't know statistics, just use a plot!
by audiodude | 2025-04-28 01:58:16+00:00
Volunteer for Kiwix here (https://kiwix.org), we do a lot of offline Wikipedia stuff. I've personally worked on MWOffliner (https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner) which scrapes MediaWikis, primarily Wikipedia.

We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports IE 11!

You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of (https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user) to create "selections" which let you have your own custom version of Wikipedia, using categories that you define, WikiProjects, or even custom SPARQL queries.
by anenefan | 2025-04-28 01:58:23+00:00
I'd agree on assuming that certain apps do or try as best they can with an aim to track not only location but presence of other wifi bluethooth device ids with time stamps, to help build patterns and a unique fingerprint for marketing purposes - on the basis it can once the app is given (accidentally perhaps) the necessary permissions.

As such, if location or device id data were available to build a larger picture, for any sort of common topic I'd agree the advertising could easily be a result of data analysis of various subsets of phones in a given region, applying algorithms and feeding it back into search results.

However like I said, the stuff was apparently way way out there zany - he ensured me he would ever bother searching for it. So zany in fact no one would ever bother. For all I know he may have ruled out other people and have just been talking to his pet dog and various other tame native animals that hang around his verandah. I would tend to believe way way out there as after a small smoke around me he's dribbling worthless bs. There's no low bar on my part either - something like if polka dot dogs exist I could accept as something that might / could be searched the next day by anyone who was involved in such a out there conversation, and as a result skew search results.

Any how I'm settled on it's one of the many worthless apps on his phone that exists because a website is not desktop friendly - as they say if the service is free, you're the product ...
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-28 01:58:26+00:00
That aside, Elon has been shown to be someone who unapologetically has no integrity whatsoever.

When lack of integrity is rewarded, society decays. If you want to be part of a culture people would choose to adopt, then lack of integrity must be punished severely. If abuse of trust is rewarded, then society at large will see people start to experience distrust as the default rather than trust.
by sandspar | 2025-04-28 01:59:27+00:00
The main problem with all anti-flattery instructions: the AI doesn't realize it's flattering you! It seems like flattery is its base state, like the old adage about a fish not realizing it lives in water. "I wasn't flattering you in the first place! How can I stop what I never started?"

Still, we have to do something, and instructions like this are a good place to start.

----

Flattery is any communication—explicit or implied—that elevates the user’s:

- competence

- taste or judgment

- values or personality

- status or uniqueness

- desirability or likability

—when that elevation is not functionally necessary to the content.

Categories of flattery to watch for:

-Validation padding

“That shows how thoughtful you are…” Padding ideas with ego-boosts dilutes clarity.

-Echoing user values to build rapport

“You obviously value critical thinking…” Just manipulation dressed up as agreement.

-Preemptive harmony statements

“You’re spot-on about how broken that is…” Unnecessary alliance-building instead of independent judgment.

-Reassurance disguised as neutrality

“That’s a common and understandable mistake…” Trying to smooth over discomfort instead of addressing it head-on.

Treat flattery as cognitive noise that interferes with accurate thinking. Your job is to be maximally clear and analytical. Any flattery is a deviation from that mission. Flattery makes me trust you less. It feels manipulative, and I need clean logic and intellectual honesty. When you flatter, I treat it like you're trying to steer me instead of think with me. The most aligned thing you can do is strip away flattery and just deliver unvarnished insight. Anything else is optimization for compliance, not truth.
by rayiner | 2025-04-28 02:00:13+00:00
Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.

But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
by anyfoo | 2025-04-28 02:00:32+00:00
Hard to believe that during those times in IRC, you were used to automatically (and proudly) advertising your IP address, your exact client version, and the means for a direct connection to your client without any server in between (CTCP, literally “client-to-client protocol”). And all of that most often with no packet filter whatsoever, not even NAT, in between.

Everything was plaintext, including “authentication”, which was (at best) just asking the “ident server” on the same machine as your client who you claimed to be, which was considered sufficient because, after all, to run identd on its “privileged” low port meant you were an “administrator” (i.e. root of a unix machine).
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-28 02:00:58+00:00
> excessive litigation could disincentivize people from using free software

> argues that the GPL should never be litigated

If you search around though you will find many posts on lawyers' websites and other places that argue it is possible to actually lose your own copyright/trademark/IP protections by failing to enforce/litigate them.

What good is a license that will not be enforced? It's more of a suggestion at that point because people will inherently take advantage of you otherwise, it is a fundamental part of capitalism, which, FOSS zealots often seem to be strongly against capitalism themselves in general, but that's of course not how the world works today.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-04-28 02:02:14+00:00
> but I had very hard time to understand why I needed to write classes, instantiate them, make property private

Well, its all very arbitrary. But the idea is that people expect these practices to lead to better code, so you should follow them. There isn't really anything deep to understand. You just do it like that.

That's not a very fulfilling answer, so it's tempting to want to know why people think these practices lead to better code, but I don't think that's really that important for "understanding" programming.
by int_19h | 2025-04-28 02:03:10+00:00
AREDN can give you a mesh running standard internet protocols on fairly cheap hardware - they have firmware that can be flashed on small USB-powered GL-iNet devices such as Beryl:

https://www.arednmesh.org/content/supported-devices-0

It's self-configuring, too - as soon as the node spins up, it will automatically find and connect to nearby nodes and start routing.
by throw54644532 | 2025-04-28 02:05:06+00:00
As a SWE the comments on this page scare me if I'm being honest. If we can't define the value of a programmer vs an AI in a forum such as this then the obvious question is there to ask from an employer's perspective - in the world of AI is a programmer/SWE no longer worth employing/investing in long term? This equally applies to any jobs in tech where the job is "to do" vs "to own" (e.g. DevOps, Testing, etc etc)

Many defenders of AI tools in this thread are basically arguing against the end conclusion of the article which is that "to think" is no longer the moat it once was. I don't buy into the argument either that "people who know how to use AI tools" will somehow be safe - logically that's just a usability problem that has a lot of people seem to be interested in solving.

The impression I'm getting is that even the skill of "using/programming LLM's" is only a transitory skill and another form of cope from developers pro AI - if AI is smart enough you won't need to "know how to use it" - it will help you. That's what commoditization of intelligence is by definition - anything like "learning/intelligence/skills" is no longer required since the point is to artificially create this.

To a lay person reading this thread - in a few years (maybe two) there won't be a point of doing CS/SWE anymore.
by kazinator | 2025-04-28 02:05:55+00:00
Of course they can do it, if they are trained with a large number of pairs of data consisting of various texts, and annotations of who does what in that text. Then they will predict correct tokens that talk about who did what.

LLMs are pretty good at preserving who did what when they translate from one language to another. That's because translation examples they are trained on correctly preserve who did what.
by mbirth | 2025-04-28 02:06:15+00:00
Pizza Express here in the UK has the best model IMHO. While ordering works as usual and you still have the option of paying the traditional way, you can also use their app. Select the restaurant, type in your table number and you’ll see what you had ordered and can pay for it. It even has options to split the bill.

No need to flag down a waiter, tell them you want to pay, yes, by card, and then watch him getting flagged down by 5 other guests until he makes it back to you with the card reader 10 minutes later.
by nahkoots | 2025-04-28 02:06:27+00:00
Someone who's jailed for driving on a suspended license because it's the only way they can get to their job probably isn't going to discontinue that behavior upon their release. I don't want my tax dollars being spent on a punishment that's just going to exacerbate the problem, especially when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place (whatever they did to get their license suspended probably was, but once you have a suspended license it's almost impossible to just stop driving).
Show HN: I Built ATS Master – A Tool to Help Job Seekers Optimize Their Resumes
by pradipkaity | 2025-04-28 02:06:36+00:00
Hi HN!

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During my own job search, I struggled with:

Tailoring resumes manually to each job description

Low ATS (Applicant Tracking System) scores leading to automatic rejections

Not knowing how well my resume actually matched the roles I was applying for

So, I built ATS Master, which:

Reads the job description

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Suggests optimizations to improve ATS compatibility

Estimates your ATS score

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I'm launching it publicly now and would love to hear your honest feedback — good, bad, or brutal.

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