MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-07 06:24:26+00:00
Maybe I need to explain better.

Obviously LiDAR improves the maximum achievable capabilities of a self driving system. I am not disputing that. I don’t think anyone would or could dispute that, it’s just trivially true.

The point I am trying to make is more nuanced than that.

Basically I’m thinking about whether this decision to ditch lidar is actually stupid, or if there could be a sensible explanation that is plausibly true. I am proposing what I believe is a plausibly true sensible explanation for the decision.

If you think about whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar, the answer is again obviously yes. But if you think about this as a business decision, it is not so simple. The question is not whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar. The question is whether accidents would be reduced enough to justify the added cost and complexity to the system.

So then, how do we figure that out? Well, we think about the causes of human car accidents ranked by percent of car accidents caused. What would be the items in the top 95% let’s say? Then, which of those items can be addressed exclusively by a lidar enabled system.

To isolate can-only-be-fixed-by-lidar problems, I imagine a thought experiment where we have a human with lidar for eyeballs. Which of the top k causes of accidents would be fixed by giving humans lidar eyeballs. Well, maybe not that many, actually. That is my point.

This could be argued to be immoral due to I guess making decisions about death based on business considerations. But it’s probably fairly easy to convince oneself as a Tesla executive that the car (M3 anyway) being affordable is critical to getting the safer-than-human driving tech adopted, so making the car more expensive actually fails to save more people than the lidar would save, etc.
by serviceberry | 2025-04-07 06:24:32+00:00
For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.
by daflip | 2025-04-07 06:24:55+00:00
Was a hardcode PHP dev for many years. A quick look at the code makes me glad I left this ecosystem behind - it looks like a brittle maintenance nightmare! It's no wonder there's trace log lines scattered all over the place. There doesn't seem to even a sniff of anything related to testing here. It's insane to me to try promote this over Laravel.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-07 06:26:10+00:00
As I keep telling, GNU/Linux had a lucky moment sidestepping the whole issue of AT&T trying to get control back from UNIX, had this not taken place and everyone would be using classical UNIXes, with some BSD code running on them.

You see the same on embedded as well, all new kids on the block as embedded FOSS OSes or bare metal libraries, are either Apache or MIT licensed.
Show HN: I Built a Brat Style Generator
by jokera | 2025-04-07 06:26:45+00:00
I recently developed Brat Generator, an open-source tool inspired by Charli XCX's "Brat" album cover aesthetic that went viral on social media. The project uses React + Remix, HTML Canvas API for image generation, and custom CSS filters for the blur effects. The most interesting technical challenge was implementing an adaptive text sizing algorithm that automatically adjusts font size based on container dimensions and text length. Key features: Multiple preset themes (classic green, black & white, blue) Fully customizable options (colors, blur effects, fonts, borders) One-click high-quality image download Random style generator Free to use, no registration required
by stephen_g | 2025-04-07 06:27:10+00:00
I go back and look at old photos all the time (like when I think of a trip, and look back to it, and then just keep scrolling for a while). The pictures bring back more memories and that's to me a great joy - and on the other hand I find no value in deleting the photos that are not "the best" (I'm talking about good enough photos, I delete blurry, useless or duplicate ones immediately) - what would it gain? A few dollars less storage cost over the next decade? The satisfaction of digital cleaning?
by JeremieF | 2025-04-07 06:28:21+00:00
That’s fair at first glance, but Dataphyre actually includes a built-in diagnostic engine (Dpanel) that: - Validates PHP syntax before runtime - Runs JSON-defined unit tests with dependency checks - Supports perf assertions, expected types, regex, and even custom scripts - Auto-discovers tests inside each module’s unit_tests/ folder - It’s designed to diagnose, trace, and stress-test production modules, not just simulate behavior in CI.

I get that the structure may look unorthodox, but it’s built for resilience and self-healing. Would love for you to take a deeper look, I think you might be surprised.
by spicylinks | 2025-04-07 06:29:13+00:00
Tired of boring bio links and platforms that can't handle your spice? SpicyLinks is the uncensored, tip-enabled link-in-bio made for bold creators who want freedom, fans, and a little extra cash

No bans Built-in tipping (via Stripe) Mobile-perfect, glow-up designs Totally NSFW-friendly We’re giving away $1,000 to the top referrer + $500 to second place!

Whether you're showing off, getting paid, or escaping Linktree jail — SpicyLinks gives you the freedom to link how you want.

Make it spicy → https://spicylinks.app
by SamPerson | 2025-04-07 06:29:24+00:00
I agree the funnel is narrow, especially early on. This kind of platform naturally faces a “cold start” problem: creators show up hoping for donors, but without initial traffic or discoverability, things can feel quiet. Currently to deal with this scenario, I am focusing on: 1. Have a smooth frictionless setup - just connect your wallet and send you donation. 2. For the initial phase I would be focusing on creators with an already existing audience who have a preference to donate with crypto and to give creators a way to monetize where they already are (Twitter, Telegram, personal sites, etc.). 3. I’ll be relying on this myself to fund development. If other builders on HN or elsewhere support the project, great. If not, I’ll learn fast whether this is worth iterating or pivoting.

I don’t expect thousands of users overnight, but even a small group of crypto-native creators using this and giving feedback will be valuable.
by formerly_proven | 2025-04-07 06:30:10+00:00
I'm not sure if that affects all chemistries and compositions. If you look at the spec-sheet for e.g. the LG E63 cells used in some older EVs (notably without TMS), those specify charging down to -20 °C - and the owner's manuals certainly have no warnings in them that the car will implode if you charge in the winter.
by imgabe | 2025-04-07 06:30:36+00:00
> For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

Yeah, that is definitely "for worse". The point of hiring someone to do a job is to get something useful done. Not to hand out do-nothing sinecures to lucky lottery winners. I have friends who have transitioned from private to public sector and they unanimously complain about how useless the government lifers are. This is your tax money that is being spent.
by KingMob | 2025-04-07 06:30:47+00:00
Yet another article purporting to "defend" open source while simultaneously undermining its communal aspects by implying maintainers owe NOTHING to others.

Where's the vigorous criticism of CLAs? The criticism of monetization that leaves out unpaid volunteers? The acknowledgment of all the free labor provided by users, bug reporters, documenters, evangelists, etc.?

This attitude is as toxic as the users' attitudes it's railing against, just on the opposite side of the fence.
by bentley | 2025-04-07 06:31:38+00:00
For every book, Standard Ebooks provides a hyperlink to the original scan, a hyperlink to the original transcription, and a full revision history in which all spelling updates have been clearly marked. To me, this already seems to be going above and beyond—most ebook repositories provide less. I can’t imagine that the marginal benefit from keeping multiple parallel branches would be worth the cost in volunteer time and labor, when maintaining pristine first editions isn’t even a goal of the project.
by avidiax | 2025-04-07 06:32:05+00:00
> There must be more to US problems.

Yes, there are many people in the US that are highly insecure financially and socially.

The E.U. has a much higher floor. Workers have more rights. There is more social support. Medical bankruptcy is practically impossible. It's not to say that it's all sunshine and rainbows, but I'd guess that very few Europeans are one paycheck and 3 months of eviction proceedings away from being literally homeless. In the U.S., a large fraction of people are like that.

And our government, as the article says, is largely run by people that have "got theirs". They have some savings. They may have a home (albeit with a mortgage). They may stand to inherit from relatives. They have better job prospects, maybe even the luxury of a high prestige, low paying job. And these people, for the most part, can't or won't imagine or understand what it's like to live a life of insecurity.

The E.U., in my opinion, has some sense of class consciousness and solidarity among the workers, especially those that would be insecure if they lived in the states. But in the U.S., there's a substantial fraction of vulnerable people that feel morally opposed to welfare even though they'd benefit from it. They have a mentality often called that of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". So when a politician comes along that promises that he'll give them security without a handout, that they've already earned it but he'll stop those stealing it, these people will support him wholeheartedly.

This particular lens is just one of several that explain the rise of someone like Trump. There are also accelerationists, people that think that blowing up a stable system will accelerate the revolution. There are bigots, who think that some "other" is the cause of their suffering. There are people that are merely self-interested, and think that Trump with benefit them, either correctly or incorrectly. And on and on, so many various and overlapping reasons.

And there is a missing condition: the existing political parties in the U.S. did not empathize or respect or give voice or deliver for the insecure. It was easy to think that the system as it existed offered a binary option where neither choice served their interests, so why not pick something radical and risk blowing it up?

Europe, I think, is getting close to these conditions in some respects. The far right has been doing too well recently. But Europe is also constitutionally more capable of pulling back from the brink and providing an effective centrist government in spirit, even if it sometimes has trouble affording it.
by bluepoint | 2025-04-07 06:33:12+00:00
Reading the comments, is it safe to say that LLMs are a digest of the internet which is some update over google search, but with the caveat that you need to double check the results? I mean they basically have some compressed version of almost all the written knowledge and will respond correctly about things that have already been written, and hallucinate (extrapolate) about things not explicitly written. Of course if someone carefully curates the input data to filter out misinformation, it might even be an upgrade over google. Is there a consensus on this?
by schobi | 2025-04-07 06:33:55+00:00
When building a camera, you decide once and then most parameters stay fixed. It would be trivial to just append 1000 bytes for a mostly fixed DNG header to each image.

But how do you test this? While the DNG specification is open source, the implementation was/is(?) not. Do I really need a copy of Photoshop to test if my files are good? How would I find good headers to put into my files? what values are even used in processing?

Maybe the situation has changed, but in the old days when I was building cameras there was only a closed-source Adobe library for working with DNGs. That scared me off.
by abawankule | 2025-04-07 06:34:23+00:00
I actually made a website just to solve this process for myself, check it out here: https://www.aideahub.ai/ I also made a custom GPT which works alright, not as visual though https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67eef6b5ad64819189be9348b5bb4c7d-co-...
by kelnos | 2025-04-07 06:35:23+00:00
Yes, this is the GOP playbook in a nutshell.

1. Rail against the idea that any social program can work, or that the government can do a good job administering it.

2. Fight for amendments to bills around it that reduce its funding or scope in key, critical ways.

3. Let the new thing fail, because you crippled the bill that authorized it.

4. Crow about how you were right all along, that government can't do this or that, and that these social programs are doomed to fail.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-07 06:35:28+00:00
> The term FOSS is meant to unify "free software" and "open source software"

I have always assumed it to mean the intersection of the two contexts. As in, necessarily copyleft.

A layperson doesn't know what copyleft is anyway; they hardly seem worth tailoring communicating for if you're not also going to explain the difference the terms encapsulate and why people might care. Just use "open source" at that point.

As far as I'm concerned the OSI doesn't have any weight and there's little reason to think we share values sufficiently for me to start caring. Do I look like a corporation trying to slap some sense of community on a product?
by phs318u | 2025-04-07 06:35:38+00:00
Outlook has this and I've been using it in a work context for many years. Create custom tags for domains and or projects, tag email, notes, meetings with as few or as many tags as you like, and create handy 'Search folders' which are basically a view on a query (you can use other query terms beyond tag of course). The actual email just goes into big ol' "Archive". I gave up on folder heirarchy many years ago precisely because some emails map to multiple issues/domains/projects.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-07 06:36:23+00:00
> Everyone independently coming to the same conclusion based on their personal experience isn't propaganda. It's reality.

I am not discounting your experience; to say this is everyone's experience or even the majority of experiences fails to take into account the "reddit thread of lots of other people with similar or worse experiences" exist because people are more likely to post a bad experience than one that goes smoothly and without issue.

It makes it look as though dealing with government agencies is a completely broken total disaster, but it simply works for the majority of people. They only notice it being "broken" when they have an experience that ran into issues and did not go as planned. I imagine with all the random cuts to employees and entire departments, these experiences will increase.

> start getting copious amounts of automated nonsensical threatening form letters from the IRS

Have not personally encountered this or know of anyone else that has, and who also deals with taxes. I do get calls and letters from the "IRS" but they are scams. Again, not discounting your experience and you would know better than I who the letters are coming from, but "IRS" scams are a thing too.
by visarga | 2025-04-07 06:36:28+00:00
I just had very bad JSON mode operation with gemini-1.5-flash and 2.0-flash models using their own library 'google-generativeai'. Either can't follow JSON formatting correctly, or renders string fields with no end until max_tokens. Pretty bad for Gemini, when open models like Qwen do a better job of a basic information extraction to JSON task.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-07 06:36:32+00:00
C was already limited by 1960's standards when compared to PL/I, NEWP and JOVIAL, 1970's standards when compared to Mesa and Modula-2, .....

It got lucky ridding the UNIX adoptiong wave, an OS that got adopted over the others, thanks to having its source available almost at a symbol price of a tape copy, and a book commenting its source code, had it been available as commercial AT&T product at VMS, MVS, et al price points, no one would be talking about UNIX philosophy.
by 01100011 | 2025-04-07 06:36:44+00:00
At most it will hit retirement timelines of anyone retiring in the next 5 years. Come on man. Most people don't hold cash for vacations in the stock market.

Anyone doing 60/40 isn't doing all that bad right now anyway. And this "market crash" (haha compare to '00 or '08) is on top of massive gains in the past few years.
by JeremieF | 2025-04-07 06:37:16+00:00
I get the concern, but I’m not trying to squeeze anyone.

If someone’s making $10k/year using Dataphyre, I’d be genuinely happy with $5/month. I’m just trying to keep this alive and sustainable as a solo dev.

It’s not about control. It’s about being able to put food on the table without VC pressure or paywalls for everything.
by kelnos | 2025-04-07 06:37:51+00:00
> There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible.

That is the methodology, though. Musk's biography (I believe) contains a bit about how one of his business strategies when trying to make drastic changes is to just fire, fire, fire, fire people. And if you don't realize afterward that you fired too many, and have to hire back at least 10% of them, then you didn't fire enough in the first place.

It's a terrible, inhumane way of dealing with people.
by computerdork | 2025-04-07 06:38:20+00:00
hmm, kind of feel like you're cherry-picking the most difficult versions of those jobs. No need to to into too much depth, but for instance, yeah, not all fast-food employees are working two jobs (many seem to be high-schoolers?). Not all farmers own their own business and are employees. I had a roommate who was a truck driver. He was simply an employee and worked a 9-5 and didn't own his own truck (many of them do, but this is becoming less common).

Although, I agree, there is a lot of blue-collar work that is tough, especially on the body - have done a few weeks of construction work myself, it can destroy your body quickly if you don't learn how to pace yourself and use your body correctly (it's not something I personally would ever want to do long term). But there is also a ton of cushy blue-collar work that are easy - my roommate works at an Amazon warehouse, and she says that her role is mindless work that anyone can do sorting items in boxes.

Yeah, I am probably somewhat biased, but saying that the average fast-food employee's job is more difficult that an average SWE's job (with its deadlines, stress and politics, not to mention all the years of studying), that seems like a stretch. I'm all for the blue-collar worker, but let's be reasonable. Yeah, at least from what I've seen, often, it's not their jobs that are tough, it's the circumstances of their life (many of course are low paying, which makes everything difficult) and lack of advantages they had growing up...

... although, I do admit there are a lot of devs that once they get over the learning curve just coast at their jobs, learning little that is new and working on the same system year after years. Hmm, interesting...
by mustache_kimono | 2025-04-07 06:38:50+00:00
> I'd prefer for Rust to opt for correctness/bug-freeness over performance, even in release builds. If you are doing number crunching you should have to opt out of these checks.

You can turn those checks on, in release mode, of course: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/codegen-options/index.html#o...

But I think the behavior on overflow is to "panic!()" (terminate immediately)? So -- I guess from my POV I wouldn't in release mode. I just think that tradeoff isn't generally worth it, but again, you can turn that behavior on.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-07 06:39:04+00:00
> What is the root issue with unsigned integers?

If I play "Appeal to Authority" you can read some thoughts on this from Alexandrescu, Stroustrup, and Carruth here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18795453/why-prefer-sign...

Unsigned integers are appealing because they make a range of invalid values impossible to represent. That's good! Indices can't be negative so simply do not allow negative values.

The issues are numerous, and benefits are marginal. First and foremost it is extremely common to do offset math on indices whereby negative values are perfectly valid. Given two indices idxA and idxB if you have unsigned indices then one of (idxB - idxA) or (idxA - idxB) will underflow and cause catastrophe. (Unless they're the same, of course).

The benefits are marginal because even though unsigned cannot represent a value below the valid range it can represent a value above container.size() so you still need to bounds check the upper range. If you can't go branchless then who cares about eliminating one branch that can always be treated as cold.

On a modern 64-bit machine doing math on smaller integers isn't any faster and may in fact be slower!

Now it can be valuable to store smaller integers. Especially for things like index lists. But in this case you're probably not doing any math so the overflow/underflow issue is somewhat moot.

Anyhow. Use unsigned when doing bitmasking or bitmanipulation. Otherwise default to signed integer. And default to i64/int64_t. You can use smaller integer types and even unsigned. Just use i64 by default and only use something else if you have a particular reason.

I'm kinda rambling and those thoughts are scattered. Hope it was helpful.
by ben_w | 2025-04-07 06:39:21+00:00
If a compactified spatial dimension exists in our universe, and was big enough to fit an atom, why couldn't we see two atoms that seem like they're in the same 3-dimensional coordinates?

Sometimes compactified dimensions are analogised to a straw: seen from a distance it seems one dimensional, up close (an ant's perspective) it's got one long dimension and one short dimension.

I don't know how far to take the analogy. It sounds like surely photons with wavelengths smaller than the compactified dimension would be likely to take a spiral path, looping around compact dimension n times for every m units of 3-space travelled, which would seem like they were mysteriously slow if you weren't expecting the compact dimension to exist.

I vaguely remember the idea of wavelength-dependent speed of light is a thing that's been ruled out by tests with supernova data, but not to what wavelength or sigma.
by 01100011 | 2025-04-07 06:40:33+00:00
You mean the techies who saw massive gains over the past few years and were fools if they adjusted their spending as if it was going to continue forever? No man, I think we will be fine. Sorry if you can't send your kids to a top school or buy another tesla. If you consider your RSUs part of your salary and not a bonus you are not being responsible with your family's finances.
by rafaelmn | 2025-04-07 06:41:35+00:00
>It is about total benefit to society, period.

Money is the best tool we have to measure that. Sure it has pathological cases, but overall it's the least bad version to assign value. In the government case it's much worse at this since it's not voluntary and measuring aggregate government services vs. tax. The consumption/price is completely unrelated, etc.

>I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets.

If we are heading towards an economy with labour shortage (demographics collapse), taking up people from the economy and keeping them employed with a useless skillset is going to be a double negative.