MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2025-04-06 16:34:49+00:00
This.

People arguing over base rates of motorcycle accidents as if Tesla didn't get fooled by a loony tunes wall. If Waymo had killed 5 motorcyclists in SF we would know. But they operate there without an incident for years.

Meanwhile, Tesla just after releasing autopilot to the world a man is decapitated because the system is deficient. Then it happened again in 2016 under eerily similar circumstance. Then we observe Teslas hitting broad objects like fire trucks and busses.

The correct response to that is not to say "Well what's the base rate for decapitations and hitting broad objects?"

No, you find out the reason for this thing happening. And the reason is known: a deficient sensor suit that it prone to missing objects clearly in its field of view.

So with the motorcycle situation, we already know what the problem is. This isn't a matter of a Tesla just interfacing with the statistical reality of getting rear-ended by a car. Because we know Teslas have a deficient sensor suit.
by ben_w | 2025-04-06 16:35:12+00:00
Yup, it's a product development process known as "Muntzing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

While it was absolutely vital to getting the costs of the original Tesla Roadster and SpaceX launches way down… it can only work when you are able to accept "no, stop" as an answer.

Rockets explode when you get them wrong, you can't miss it.

Cars crashing more than other models? That's statistics, which can be massaged.

Government work? There's always someone complaining no matter what you do, very easy to convince yourself that all criticism is unimportant, no matter how bad it gets. (And it gets much worse than the worst we've actually seen from DOGE and Trump — I don't actually think they'll get to be as bad as the Irish Potato Famine, but that is an example of leaders refusing to accept what was going on).
by ljm | 2025-04-06 16:35:56+00:00
I’ve spotted a few more subtle issues that would be unlikely to slip through code review, but can easily see a resurgence from vibe-coding and from a shift in early-stage hiring priorities towards career founding/‘product’ engineers.

It’s an easy tell for LLM-driven code because, to a seasoned engineer, it’ll always look like a strange solution to something, like handling auth or setting cookies or calling a database, that has been a done deal for a long time.
by bink | 2025-04-06 16:36:08+00:00
As a motorcyclist, lane filtering also comes with some dangers. It's up to each motorcyclist to decide if it's worth it. I lane split in heavy traffic in CA but I'm also very wary about being the first vehicle into an intersection after a light changes. I see far more people running red lights around me than I do people rear ending stopped traffic at a light. I'm glad we have the option.
by sleepyguy | 2025-04-06 16:36:22+00:00
My hand-me-down XS Max needs to last at least another 3-4 years. My goal is 10 years, and I think I can make it. The phone still works great, and the battery is at 88%. I am not buying anything for the next few years and hunkering down hard. I refuse to participate in this administration's economy.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-06 16:36:26+00:00
I tinkered much like OP, and went on to do a professional trade course in PC building and maintenance when I was like fifteen. I also built websites. However, I didn't follow through and studied business management in college. It was only in my late 20's when I learned proper programming and developed a love for computer science with Harvard's CS50. I went on to do a masters in software engineering at Harvard Extension, and now I'm doing the OMSCS at Georgia Tech. Unlike OP it took me a while to connect with my love for computers. It's been a very haphazard journey!
Ask HN: How are you building side income streams with AI?
by maxencecornet | 2025-04-06 16:37:01+00:00
In the past, I built an automated cashback and promo code aggregator https://touslescashbacks.com/ that generated a few hundred euros monthly through SEO. I'm now exploring AI-driven side income opportunities and would love to hear about others' experiences and projects in this area.
by Cornbilly | 2025-04-06 16:37:03+00:00
It’s just anti-intellectualism and fear across the board. And that’s been the GOP MO for a long time now.

Convince people that the colleges are full of crazy liberals and you should go into the trades instead.

Now that you’re in the trades, don’t join a union. Unions are bad (unless it’s the police union).

Don’t look now but the Mexicans are coming for your job. The trans/gay people are coming for your children. Nevermind that the GOP is openly corrupt and has a pervert in the White House.

Think back to the aftermath of 9/11 and the Bush Admin’s constant fear campaign that successfully pushed the US into two wars.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-06 16:37:11+00:00
The Elon magic is getting people to bikeshed bullshit like this and ignore the bigger issues.

You don’t gouge out your ears because you hear something walking around at night that doesn’t appear to be accurate. As a human, your executive function makes judgements based on context and what you know. Your eyesight is degraded in the dark, so your brain pays more attention to unexpected sound.

The argument for lidar, sonar or radar isn’t that cameras are “bad”, it’s that they perform very well in circumstances where visual input may not. As an engineer, you have an ethical obligation to consider the use case of the product.

It’s not at all like the 737max issue - many companies have been able to successfully implement these features I have a almost decade old Honda that uses camera and radar sensors to manage adaptive cruise and lane keeping features flawlessly.

In the case of Tesla and their dear leader, they tend to make dogmatic engineering decisions based on personal priorities. They then spackle in legal and astroturf marketing bullshit to dodge accountability. The folly of relying on cameras or putting your headlights inside of a narrow cavity in the car body (cybertruck) is pretty obvious if you live in a place that has winter weather and road salt.
by skissane | 2025-04-06 16:38:10+00:00
> Turns out this is not true.

No, what you quoted in your comment you are replying to is accurate. What you are saying in this comment isn’t.

> Confirmed that os/2 2.0 was a skinning and compatibility layer for NT it came out for OS/2,

This is confused. OS/2 was not a “skinning and compatibility layer for NT” it was a completely separate operating system.

I think at one point NT was going to be OS/2 2.0, and then it was going to be OS/2 3.0 - but the OS/2 2.0 which eventually ended up shipping had nothing to do with NT, it was IBM’s independent work, in which Microsoft was uninvolved (except maybe in its early stages).
by dgacmu | 2025-04-06 16:38:43+00:00
I don't think many Democrats have been arguing for blanket tariffs for some time. It kind of seemed like there was a bipartisan consensus for the use of some combination of tariffs and stimulus to ensure there was domestic manufacturing capability for critical industries... at least until trump. Nobody in their right mind has been calling for a return to domestic t-shirt manufacturing, but there are national security and competitiveness reasons to think about semiconductors. And that's what the chips act did, and at 64-33 that's about as bipartisan as things get these days.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-04-06 16:39:09+00:00
> They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on.

Radar can absolutely detect a stationary object.

The problem is not, "moving or not moving", it's "is the energy reflected back to the detector," as alluded to by your second qualification.

So something that scatters or absorbs the transmitted energy is hard to measure with radar because the energy doesn't get back to the detector completing the measurement. This is the guiding principle behind stealth.

And, as you mentioned, things with this property naturally occur. For example, trees with low hanging branches and bushes with sparse leaves can be difficult to get an accurate (say within 1 meter) distance measurement from.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-06 16:39:15+00:00
I haven’t run into anything where Python either couldn’t be used or shouldn’t be used, except for the browser of course.

I think software engineers with any significant amount of experience recognize you can build an application that does X in just about any language. To me, the largest difference, the greatest factor in which language to choose, is the existing packages. Simple example- there are several packages in Python for extracting text from PDFs (using tesseract or not). C# has maybe one tesseract wrapper? I recall working with PDFs in .NET being a nightmare. I think we had to buy a license to some software because there wasn’t a free offering. Python has several.

This is VERY important because we as software engineers, even if we wanted to reinvent the wheel sometimes, have very limited time. It takes an obscene number of man hours to develop a SalesForce or a Facebook or even something smaller like a Linux distro.
by pwg | 2025-04-06 16:40:10+00:00
> Combine the two, and the regulations will be written such that it excludes Tesla and includes Waymo.

The solution seems easier, if only the regulators would pick up upon it.

Under the current human driven auto regime, it is the human that is operating the machine who is liable for any and all accidents.

For a self-driving car, that human driver is now a "passenger". The "operator" of the machine is the software written (or licensed) by the car maker. So the regulation that assures self-driving is up-to-snuff is:

When operating in "self driving" mode, 100% of all liability for any and all accidents rests on the auto manufacturer.

The reason the makers don't seem to care much about the safety of their self driving systems is that they are not the owners of the risk and liability their systems present. Make them own 100% of the risk and liability for "self driving" and all of a sudden they will very much want the self-driving systems to be 100% safe.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-04-06 16:40:28+00:00
Ok, what other ADAS is driving over 2 billion miles a year?

As for "best technology available," the galaxy brains in this thread are tossing out numbers assuming that sensor fusion never fails and that correlated failure modes can be neglected, which is wild. I never thought Elon was a genius -- he's a business guy willing to make big bets on interesting tech, nothing more nothing less -- but if the confidently incorrect engineering claims on display in this thread are any indication, maybe you guys should be calling him a genius after all, because this ain't it.
by marcusb | 2025-04-06 16:40:40+00:00
> You work in enterprise software sales and you think people buy change? That is bizarre and shocking.

I worked (past tense,) and, yes, they buy change, regardless of how strange you find that to be.

I cannot count the number of times I listened to a customer complain about a lack of feature velocity (real or perceived) in one meeting, then complain about outages caused by new features in the next.

> Car door handles were perfect and have become significantly worse.

Yeah. It’s almost like the car makers know something about what drives buying behavior amongst their customer base.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-06 16:41:14+00:00
My view with cancelling USAID is that the world is a better place because of such. Could it have been made even better if somehow we were able to selectively pick and choose 'worthy' programs and work to transition them out? Maybe, but perfect is not the enemy of good. And the reason I say maybe is because I have high doubts such a transitioning could have been done effectively in anything like a remotely viable timeframe. What genuine impact is felt with USAID's demise will be able to filled by the countless other aid organizations working in places like Africa.

And while perfect is not the enemy of good, bad certainly is. And altruism without consideration of the consequences can easily become harmful. A recurring example is with food. A country will suffer some force majeure and be flooded with ongoing international donations of food. This sends the price of most basic foodstuffs plummeting, local farmers lose their livelihood, and suddenly the country becomes completely dependent upon foreign powers for food. This also happens when countries are encouraged by global organizations to lower food tariffs. This is one of the many ways that altruism can be weaponized - intentionally hurting by "helping."

As for the politics stuff, I do not agree that refusing to advance a Supreme Court Candidate is worse than enabling legal indefinite detention of citizens without trial or representation. And, with all due respect, I'm fairly certain you don't think so either. I can't comment on the past two months because I'm generally quite supportive of it, though I did not vote for Trump either time.

In general though I think the notion of an 'advanced economy' is farcical: You take all of the most critical parts of your economy, ship them off elsewhere, and largely replace them with superflous luxury goods and services. I see this as both exploitative and unsustainable, and it creates behemoth multinational corporations that, in many ways, end up having even more power than governments. I'd like to imagine we learned a lesson or two from the East India Company. But perhaps it's like 1984, we did learn lessons - just the wrong ones.
by roryokane | 2025-04-06 16:42:41+00:00
That’s a misreading of the phrase “proportion of YES votes”. If 30% of judges vote YES, then only 30% – not 100% – of the prediction’s market cap is awarded to those who bet YES. The remaining 70% of the market cap is awarded to those who bet NO.

The market correctly rewards those who bet NO in such a case. Therefore, bettors have no reason to bet YES if they really think NO.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-06 16:42:50+00:00
Inefficiency basically. Burn more fuel for the amount of work output, because of heavier parts, simpler designs, less magic.

I prefer such things so I am not damning them for this, it just is the unfortunate reality. It's a trade-off.

A simple example is adding a turbo increases both power and efficiency, at the cost of more parts, shorter mtbf, and less robustness. Ie aside from just more parts to wear out sooner, the system is less rugged even when new and perfect, more easily incapacitated by a spec of dust, in a machine that doesn't live in a chip fab clean room.
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-06 16:42:56+00:00
Value and price aren't the same thing. Inflation is a change in price, not necessarily a change in value of the things being purchased. This is why when you examine how much something has changed in price you should compare real versus nominal changes.

If you bought your home for $100k in 2000 and sold it today for about $185k, you would be selling it for the same real amount despite the nominal change in price. Its value has not changed in real terms. If you sold the home for $300k, that would exceed the increase from inflation alone and indicate an increase in value (either improvements you've made, the local area has become more desirable, or reflecting scarcity of homes in general).

Or look at your own salary. If your salary is just keeping up with inflation, your employer does not see any increase in value from you over the years. If your salary is dropping relative to inflation, you are, arguably, losing value. If your salary increases faster than inflation, you're increasing in value. (Of course there can also be a lag, the 8% inflation in 2022 may result in depressed salaries for 1-2 years before they catch up. Watch the trend over a longer period of time.)
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-06 16:42:57+00:00
> I don't think there is as much daylight between Bernie's targeted tariffs and Trump's blanket then negotiate exceptions tariffs though.

The fact that you thought Bernie and AOC were quietly supportive of his tarrifs perhaps indicates the value of this opinion.

Tarrif rates have been steadily dropping to near-zero, since the 1930s, under both political parties. We're now returning to a rate not reached in over a century. https://www.statista.com/chart/34236/average-effective-tarif...
by wholinator2 | 2025-04-06 16:43:41+00:00
I'm confused, are you asking we close our eyes and only operate on internal bias? Where does the world matter if no single metric is relevant? Regardless of number metrics, what do you think matters? I think a family that can no longer afford a laptop for their child's education matters. I think 10,000 or 100,000 such families matter a lot. How do we tell that story? What options have we but the numbers?
by tokai | 2025-04-06 16:43:52+00:00
He declares different "emergencies". Tarifs on Canada and Mexico used a fentanyl emergency. Now he has declared the trade deficit an emergency.

"Today, President Donald J. Trump declared that foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency"

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
by pembrook | 2025-04-06 16:45:06+00:00
Plutonium is scarce, but demand for it is even more scarce. Hence why most of the plutonium that exists is untapped. It’s not even a functioning market because of this, it requires governments to prop up its production.

Plutonium is one of the most niche things ever. All humans and businesses desire human attention, whereas virtually nobody desires plutonium.

The amount of people who can do anything with it amounts to likely 0.000001% of the population.

This is not a good rebuttal.
by shepherdjerred | 2025-04-06 16:45:25+00:00
... I don't know.

Many people are in accidents that are entirely not their fault, e.g. being rear-ended. You can't do anything about those who drive unsafely, distracted, under the influence, etc.

Assuming you have a "good" driver, there are still plenty of times they might be into accidents for reasons that aren't because of awareness. For example, road conditions, behavior of other drivers, and just normal, honest mistakes.

At least for me, my own sense aren't really the limiting factor in my safety. My eyes are good enough. Modern cars have the equivalent of bowling lane bumpers with auto-centering, pre-collision warning, and blind spot warning/indicators.
by Sytten | 2025-04-06 16:45:37+00:00
I am not sure this would haves worked since the return of the US stock market was quite high (due to that constant influx of foreign investment notably) compared to any other asset for people/businesses that wanted to invest their profit.

Also due to the reserve nature of the USD the dollar and international trade mostly done in USD there is a huge demand for dollars keeping it strong compared to other currencies. This fundamentally is at odd with an export driven economy.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-06 16:46:00+00:00
>They could be invaluable at any company in a month.

That's a made up fantasy. They wouldn't get hired at all in real life. Ask me how I know. Where I live recruiters only check that your recent experience and stack match the ones on the job, otherwise your resume goes in the bin.

Like Ygg2 said below, employers don't want generalists with generic CS knowledge, they want people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-06 16:46:35+00:00
Imagine if you could only see in a very narrow portion of the visible light spectrum, like only green or something. That's kind of how radar "sees" (I'm grossly over-simplifying here but point is it doesn't see the way we do).

It's hard to tell something sticking off the back of a truck or a motorcycle behind a vehicle without false positive triggering off of other stuff and panic braking at dumb times, something early systems (generically, not any particular OEM) were known for, which is why they were mostly limited to warnings not actual braking.

And while one can make bad faith comments all day about that not technically being the fault of the system doing the braking allowing such systems to proliferate would be a big class action lawsuit, and maybe even a revision of how liability is handled, waiting to happen.
by nixgeek | 2025-04-06 16:46:35+00:00
If your threat model needs to include “I’m (going to be) a target of major nation-state intelligence community agencies” then it’s safest to assume none of this is going to prevent them getting your data?

James Mickens covered this at Monitorama 2014 in a humorous way. https://vimeo.com/95066828 (16:30)
by pjmlp | 2025-04-06 16:47:34+00:00
Do you want more portable than bytecode with a dynamic compiler? Apparenty the greatest thing on Earth as per WebAssembly folks.

As for AOT compilation, there have been multiple approaches since the early days, and the latest, Native AOT is good enough for everything required to write a TypeScript compiler, including better WebAssembly support than the Go compiler, thanks to Blazor infrastructure.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-04-06 16:47:37+00:00
I calculated this with some degree of rigor as a VERY conservative estimate of their ad revenue from me. THAT came out to more like $3 and I just adjusted for inflation this time around.

I don't really recall the details of that calculation unfortunately. But it would have been based on cost per ad view (no clicks) times the number I expect to be shown in a month.

The model I'm suggesting would be more like I load YouTube up with $10 and slowly burn through it as I view videos instead of being shown ads. The cost per view could actually be just as or even more transparent. Perhaps videos are tagged with the cost to view, which could open up a whole new world of economy among creators to gatekeep with higher fees themselves if they want to value their videos at more than the default. Being transparent on pricing this way is literally using the exact same infrastructure they already use to price ads, just letting me pay the cost instead of the advertisers.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-06 16:47:43+00:00
Tariffs are an additional sales tax.

That's it. That's all you need to do to explain this to people. It's amazing to me how many have fallen for this ridiculous lie that the other country somehow pays the tariff AND there will be no increase in cost to the consumer.

I used to think these lies were cynical, like how Mexico was going to pay for the border wall. But I'm not convinced now. I think there's a not-insgificant chance the president doesn't know this is how tariffs work. And that's terrifying. I would respect a cycnical lie way more.

You buy $1000 in t-shirts from China. The government places a 30% import duty on them. The importer pays $300 to the government. Those t-shirts now cost you $1300. Whoever sells them retail will be charging up to 30% extra to recoup that. It blows my mind that this even requires explanation.
by foolswisdom | 2025-04-06 16:47:45+00:00
I'm not sure I follow. Traditional computing does allow us to make this distinction, and allows us to control the scenarios when we don't want this distinction, and when we have software that doesn't implement such rules appropriately we consider it a security vulnerability.

We're just treating LLMs and agents different because we're focused on making them powerful, and there is basically no way to make the distinction with an LLM. Doesn't change the fact that we wouldn't have this problem with a traditional approach.
by gls2ro | 2025-04-06 16:48:06+00:00
> Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile.

Can you share the specifics of this lets say end of 2024?

I could find for example: EU has 10% on cars from US while US has 2.5% in general and 25% on pickup trucks. Important to note in USA the pickup trucks market is the biggest one vs mid size being the biggest one in EU.

When looking at it it seems to me that both entities wants to protect their biggest markets: EU with only 10% protecting midsize and USA with 25% their pickup trucks.