MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-28 02:29:31+00:00
> Maybe in parallel you could also: improve the trackways between San Francisco and San Jose

They did, sort of, but not to HSR, just by electrification.

https://www.caltrain.com/testing

https://www.caltrain.com/?active_tab=route_map_tab&center=-1...

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/caltrains-switch-to-elec...

https://airqualitynews.com/cars-freight-transport/electrific...

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c01096

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/04/07/caltrain-ridership-in...
by K0balt | 2025-04-28 02:29:51+00:00
I should have added: programming, fundamentally is not about “coding” but about accurately characterizing a process or problem, identifying the subtleties of the data relationships to create the right data structure for the problem,, and identifying the corner cases that a given solution might introduce.

It is a matter of deep intuitive capture and understanding of complex problems / data systems / processes…and intuiting the intersection of that structure with the structure of the computing system that you are using as a tool to solve the problem. That isn’t something that can necessarily be taught to everyone.

Aptitude barriers to professional competence in the space are significant, and a minority of the population can ever be more than barely performant no matter how many syntaxes they know or sorting algorithms they memorize.

Hell, I’ve been engineering software and hardware for 4 decades and am considered an expert in my field, and I find I am barely up to the task of complex problems, having to break them down and lose any value that the hidden interrelations that the chunks might have because I simply cannot see it in the timeframe permitted. When a problem gets up over 6 dimensions or so I can’t “visualize” it any more at as a whole without overgeneralizing to the point of an extremely blurry interpretation. When visualizing things in frequency space instead of coordinate space I am even less performant.

I have met people that can effortlessly juggle a seemingly limitless dimensional space without giving it a second thought, and I can tell you they are rare and truly exceptional people in that regard. Maybe 1/10000 of the population, and most of them go into maths. But that is the skill you need in order to intuit the correct data structure for a complex problem.

I think It is a matter of being able to hold a lot of context and logical relationships front-of-mind for meaningful periods of time, and for most people that also requires exceptional concentration skills and an ability to ignore distractors.

Those are things that are not typically taught. Students normally bring those skills with them from childhood, and education serves mostly to expand their understanding, teach them new ways to express data representations and processes, and generally to broaden and sharpen their skills.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t teach everyone how to write programs to solve problems. It just means that it doesn’t represent a career opportunity for everyone that can put together a simple invoicing program in python or make a cool JavaScript animation.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-04-28 02:31:48+00:00
> These simplified “one researcher caused an entire field to go astray for decades” explanations are much too pat for me to have any confidence in them.

Right, monocausal explanations in-general will set-off my skept-o-sense too; but then my mind made me think of another example: Andrew Wakefield (except that AW succeeded more at convincing Facebook-moms than the scientific establishment - but still harmed society just as much, IMO)
by AshleyGrant | 2025-04-28 02:32:20+00:00
> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?

I have my own concerns about the technology in question, but frankly this is a terrible example. If you have already proven to make such terrible decisions that you have been court-ordered to have a breathalyzer installed in your car and then you choose to get drunk as a wildfire approaches or at least is highly likely...

Well, then you make terrible decisions and now you sleep in the bed you made. Maybe forever.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-28 02:32:39+00:00
My Waymo account [Phoenix market] is currently showing 225 rides; 1,143 miles; 3,912 minutes.

Honestly I've never regretted summoning a Waymo for a ride. I was typically a public transit user, and bus/train operators are safe, reliable, and impassive people. I can recount with horror, all the bizarre, unbelievable, fucked-up situations that transpired when a human being was summoned with their own damn car (taxi/Lyft/Uber/Veyo). None of that shit goes down when I slide into a Waymo.

Sure, there are technical issues and I have little quibbles with the quality of service provided, but at the end of the day, it gets me from Point A to Point B and it doesn't interpose a creepy 3rd party running the show (unless you consider Alphabet to be the sine qua non of creepy 3rd parties.)

Alphabet has earned my confidence, from their mapping activities and Big Data capability, to all the other infrastructure and logistics necessary to run a project of this scale. Their deployment of Waymo has been simply an evolutionary step in the robot apocalypse, I mean 21st Century urban convenience landscape.

I wouldn't accord any of the same confidence to Tesla or Uber due to the vastly different structure and scope of their business models. I just hope that Waymo is here to stay, because it really is working out well between us.
by mtlynch | 2025-04-28 02:32:54+00:00
This article seems AI generated, at least in part.

The opening image incorrectly refers to Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley as "Erik."

OP goes on to claim:

>Paul Graham wrote in 2008 that Sam Altman was the best fundraiser he’s ever seen in his 30+ years in the valley. Sam was just 23 years old at that time!

That's not what the linked article says. That post has a single paragraph about Sam Altman that says he's good at fundraising but never says he's the best pg has ever seen[0]:

>Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.

Also, Graham was 43 when he wrote that essay, so he hadn't spent 30 years in Silicon Valley. Viaweb was based in Cambridge and Graham lived in Cambridge at the start of YC. I don't think Graham even moved to Silicon Valley until 2009, five months after the post OP claimed was based on his 30 year tenure there.[1]

These errors are either due to AI hallucinations or lazy writing.

I think the better article on this topic is Jeff Atwood's "Cultivate Teams Not Ideas."[2]

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170306095108/http://old.ycombi...

[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/
by bdangubic | 2025-04-28 02:33:27+00:00
speed limits, if majority of cases are not about public safety but generators of revenue. if we all started driving the speed limit the number of accidents would not be significantly reduced while many, many cities/counties/… would fully go bankrupt. I have spent more than a decade in state&local courts records management business and can tell you this first-hand. you can cool deals if you just pay the fine and don’t come to court at all and neat stuff like that. speed limits never were and never will be about public safety
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-28 02:34:53+00:00
They did - it was an atypically awful engineering decision that caused them to bungle their 5G rollout and cede market share to TMobile.

It only makes sense as a cable tv displacement that’s easier to deploy (and cuts out their unions) in cities. But to my knowledge, they haven’t done that. They dtoppef hundreds of poles in my city that aren’t even active.
by userbinator | 2025-04-28 02:35:40+00:00
This device reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips (also worth reading: https://hackaday.com/2022/01/10/hitclips-custom-cartridge-ha... )

It's unfortunate that "always offline" needs to be added, as that would be the norm 15-20 years ago when portable media players were at the peak of their popularity. You can still buy SD/TF/microSD players at a very, very low price today.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-28 02:37:02+00:00
I can't speak to whether an online degree is worthwhile.

What I can say is that the more you fill out your resume with work experience, the less the degree will matter to non-FANG employers.

I suppose it depends on the kind of programming that you do, but not having a CS degree hasn't held me back at all. By this point I've got over 16 years of experience I think, and I don't even bother listing much about my education other than having a BA and the university I got it from.

If you're thinking about doing something else to have some variety on the resume, authoring and maintaining an open source library, or becoming a contributor or maintainer of one is always a nice addition to the resume. Unlike getting a degree, it's free to do (time aside) and can show a different kind of experience than you might be getting now through freelancing.
by never_inline | 2025-04-28 02:38:02+00:00
I am very sceptical and cautious user of AI tools, but this sounds like someone who didn't figure out a workflow which works for himself:

> Nothing indicates how this should be run.

That's why I usually ask it to write a well defined function or class, with type annotations and all that. I already know how to call it.

Also you can ask for calling examples.

> ... are not functions whose definitions are available within the script. Without external context, we don't know what they do.

Are already solved by having proper IDE or LSP.

> run in E environments with V versions

Fair enough, stick to "standard" libraries which don't change often. Use boring technology.

> The handler implicitly ignores arguments

Because you probably didn't specify how arguments are to be handled.

In general, AI is very helpful to reduce tedium in writing common pieces of logic.

In ideal world, programming languages and libraries are as expressive as natural language, and we don't need AI. We can marshal our thoughts into code as fast as we marshal it into english, and as succinctly.

But until that happens "AI" helps with tedious logic and looking up information. You will still have to confirm the code, so being at least a bit familiar with the stack is a good thing.
by vkou | 2025-04-28 02:38:44+00:00
This is... a regressive tax on... Reckless drivers who, after multiple convictions keep putting the lives on the public in deadly danger? Do people stumble into that kind of criminal history by accident, or something? How many times do they have to be hauled before a judge before they knock it off? Are these Jean Valjean crimes of necessity, or something?

Look, what those people need to do is never be allowed to drive ever again. This is a technological compromise in their favor.

You're valuing a few thousand dollars of their financial welfare above the welfare of the people around them? Why?

No, this device won't stop them from driving into a pedestrian, just like it won't stop them from robbing a convenience store at gunpoint or committing tax fraud. The point of censuring someone for reckless driving isn't to prevent every single other bad behavior they will ever commit in the future. The point of it is to stop them from doing more of it, to the extent possible, without being overly draconian.

And if you think that this light a consequence is inappropriate for those people, what consequences do you think are appropriate? Can any of them pass the no-slippery slope standard you're setting for it?

How is it that they are neatly fitting into your two buckets of 'These are good people who somehow keep doing this but this device is unfair and repressive to them' and 'If they can't physically speed, they'll literally start running people down instead and this will not reduce recidivism at all'? Partitioning people into those two perfect buckets stretches credulity.

Not to mention that similar devices (breathalizer ignition interlocks) dramatically reduce recidivism, compared to other, both more and less serious punishments. How is it that that technological solution manages to statistically mitigate (but not cure) a health and addiction and judgement issue, while this one can be dismissed out of hand?
by thethethethe | 2025-04-28 02:38:56+00:00
I know someone who is going through a rapidly escalating psychotic break right now who is spending a lot of time talking to chatgpt and it seems like this "glazing" update has definitely not been helping.

Safety of these AI systems is much more than just about getting instructions on how to make bombs. There have to be many many people with mental health issues relying on AI for validation, ideas, therapy, etc. This could be a good thing but if AI becomes misaligned like chatgpt has, bad things could get worse. I mean, look at this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/s/lVAVyCFNki

This is genuinely horrifying knowing someone in an incredibly precarious and dangerous situation is using this software right now. I will not be recommending chatgpt to anyone over Claude or Gemini at this point
by AshleyGrant | 2025-04-28 02:39:19+00:00
Having driven extensively in nearly every city in this country, the drivers in Atlanta are absolutely the most dangerous. It is the only city I refuse to drive in, and I try to limit my physical presence in the Atlanta Metro (aside from transiting the airport) to reduce the risk of being in an accident.

I have seen a mid-90s Nissan pickup truck literally on two wheels it was weaving through traffic so recklessly on I-85.

LA, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, Bay Area, Houston, Dallas, etc. They all have their bad drivers, but none of them seem to have this deeply ingrained culture of reckless driving quite like Atlanta.
by asdefghyk | 2025-04-28 02:41:21+00:00
Reminds me of a research paper I once saw many years ago.. It described a dual caching ( web traffic) proxy system. with a (very) slow/ unreliable link in between. The proxies worked together to compress the data as it was transferred across the link. ( The proxy on the receiving sided cached information and only retried if it had changed.) My recollection is it also had options to reduce the resolution of images.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-28 02:41:23+00:00
I'm pessimistic about the future of software development careers in the US.

Not only are you competing with lower cost people from around the world, you will increasingly begin competing versus vibe coding (at the entry level) and the never-sick-but often-wrong AI (replacing the entry and lower mid-level).

There's also, apparently, a glut in the market from all the people stockpiled during Covid and subsequently made redundant.

--

In the flip side, if you have a really strong network of people wanting to hire you if not for the B.S. checkmark, it'll probably be a good move
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-28 02:41:38+00:00
If your family member is bleeding to the point where this will make a notable difference you should be staying with them, applying direct pressure and a tourniquet, not letting them bleed out in the back of your car while you race to the ER.

I've driven ambulances for a living (as a critical care paramedic). It's not the speed that saves lives. If transport is a factor, it's Opticom that makes a difference (traffic light pre-emption).

To be blunt: in the space of nearly ten thousand patient transports -by ambulance-, fewer than 1%, far fewer than 1% would have a discernible outcome change due to "how fast can I drive to the ER".

Not to mention, you are not going to be a focused driver when your family member is bleeding in the back seat of your car.

And all of this matters very little, because if you've only ever had a couple of "regular" speeding fines, you're not going to have this device on your car stopping you from "saving a life".
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-28 02:41:38+00:00
There are cars that can go way over 100 mph, and they almost all speed controlled by software. High performance cars are often speed limited by software to about 150 mph. How is this legal? Cars with speed limits that high belong to the track, not public roads, with a possible exception for emergency vehicles.

There are some rare (emergency) situations where "superspeeding" might help, but I can think of many others where it may kill. It is not great for the environment either.

I think limiting speeds to, say, 100mph for every road legal car will be unpopular. People love their fast cars, especially the rich and powerful, and manufacturers love to sell them. But technically, it should be easy to implement, and may improve road safety.

I am only talking about the top speed, powerful cars will keep their high acceleration. There is also a good chance that people will modify their cars to raise the top speed, and it is fine outside of public roads, but could result in serious penalties if caught using such a modification on public roads.
by nemothekid | 2025-04-28 02:44:25+00:00
I'm not confident that an online degree is the best way to improve your job prospects at the cost of $15k. The type of degree that would is likely a 4 year degree from any better-than-median school (obviously a top school would increase your chances tremendously).

In other words, the value of the degree, in tech, is largely the brand name of the school that issued the degree, and I wouldn't expect an online CS degree to open any doors that a bootcamp couldn't also open.
by daemonologist | 2025-04-28 02:44:53+00:00
I'm prototyping a Depth Anything[1] -assisted segment annotation tool, with an eye toward plant detection in non-agriculture environments (where the backdrop is an endless sea of green complexity). Even if the task I have in mind doesn't pan out, I think this tool could be useful to people for other difficult segmentation tasks.

[1] - https://depth-anything-v2.github.io/
by mbirth | 2025-04-28 02:45:01+00:00
Today, there was a great video from Honest Guide about the tipping situation in the US compared to the Czech Republic:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KHDpVPKuwjY

Also, this is my favourite skit about tipping:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KHDpVPKuwjY
by chewxy | 2025-04-28 02:45:21+00:00
Maybe read the paper first?

> This study asked whether Large Language Models (LLMs) understand sentences in the minimal sense of representing “who did what to whom”. In Experiment 1, we found that the overall geometry of LLM distributed activity patterns failed to capture this information: similaritiesbetween sentences reflected whether they shared syntax more than whether they shared thematic role assignments. Human judgments, in contrast, were strongly driven by this aspect of meaning.

> In Experiment 2, we found limited evidence that thematic role information was available even in a subset of hidden units. Whereas activity patterns in subsets of hidden units often allowed for significant classification of whether sentence pairs had shared vs. opposite thematic role assignments, the effect sizes were small; even the best-performing case appeared to lag behind humans, and its representation of thematic roles did not seem robust across syntactic structures.

> However, thematic role information was reliably available in a large number of attention heads, demonstrating LLMs have the capacity to extract thematic role information. In some cases, information present in attention heads descriptively exceeded human performance.
by az09mugen | 2025-04-28 02:47:56+00:00
IMHO we should always architect code to take advantage of human skills.

1°) When there is an issue to debug and fix in a not-so-big codebase, LLMs can give ideas to diagnose, but are pretty bad at fixing. Where your god will be when you have a critical bug in production ?

2°) Code is meant for humans in the first place, not machines. Bytecodes and binary formats are meant for machines, these are not human-readable.

As a SWE, I pass more time reading than writing code, and I want to navigate in a the codebase in the most easy possible way. I don't want my life to be miserable or more complicated because the code is architected to take advantage of chatbot skills.

And still IMHO, if you need to architect your code for not-humans, there is a defect in the design. Why force yourself to write code that is not meant to be maintained by a human when you will in any case maintain that said code ?
by sokoloff | 2025-04-28 02:49:02+00:00
I doubt an online/evening CS degree will solve the issue you’re seeing. If it does, it will be the learning and knowledge, not the e-sheepskin.

I joined at a different time with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. My online resume originally had a spoiler tag expander to explain it, but other than an internship, I never worked a day of MechE in my life; all software and management.

I completely agree with the sibling posters that it doesn’t matter much (or at all) once you’ve got a little full-time software dev under your belt. I think most employers just want you to be able to create value for them. Other than consulting/body shop companies, your degree (the paper) doesn’t mean much.
by Scoundreller | 2025-04-28 02:49:10+00:00
> The 1/3 of annual traffic deaths caused by speeding

I always question those numbers: which collisions/deaths would have still happened without speed being a factor? And was the speed even above the limit or e.g. "too fast for icy conditions" and limiters wouldn't have done anything.

Typically speed-related collisions require some other mistake/issue to occur, speed just exacerbates the consequences
by WorkerBee28474 | 2025-04-28 02:50:25+00:00
There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people".

Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way. One method that's not completely illogical is to only look at candidates who have degrees.

You can get degrees for <15K. For a BSCS you can do WGU for 5/10K. For a MSCS you can do GaTech OMSCS for 7K. Those numbers are small enough that they're almost definitely worth it. But those also cost time, which you will have to decide for yourself if you want to spend.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-04-28 02:55:12+00:00
Have you seen emergency vehicles in city areas going to an emergency? Unless they are willing to cause more injuries on their way, they can’t just casually speed to your destination. They’re pausing and making sure people notice them or hear their sirens before running the red light or driving in the wrong lane.

Also why are you moving a person with that much blood loss? Shouldn’t you apply pressure to the wound to stop the bleeding and call for help? It’s been years since I had to requalify myself for first aid though.
by ammo1662 | 2025-04-28 02:55:19+00:00
The vast majority of Chinese people use Didi or other Apps to call taxis. Those vacant taxis you notice are likely en route to collect their pre-booked passengers. Nowadays, hardly anyone flags down taxis on the roadside anymore - even Chinese citizens find it challenging to get a cab this way. Admittedly, this situation creates difficulties for elderly individuals unfamiliar with smartphones, who mostly depend on family or friends to arrange transportation for them.