MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-29 23:30:53+00:00
When full self-driving actually goes mainstream, today's "it worked" will look pretty identical to not working at all.

Granted, plenty of douchebags will have made their money and scrammed, but founders would prefer to emulate the biggest winners which is what matters.

Nobody is out here emulating the business practices of John Studebaker though I'm sure he died plenty rich.
by dangus | 2025-04-29 23:31:19+00:00
Okay, since this is such a common HN trope to claim that modern software is bloated for no reason, I challenge you to write an SSL handshake with an acceptably modern cipher on a piece of hardware with capability in the realm of 64kb.

So we are talking about a Commodore64 securing a basic bank transaction with modern encryption protocols in a reasonable amount of time.
by rpastuszak | 2025-04-29 23:31:35+00:00
I remember an anecdote about a Persian scholar who said that he preferred receiving invectives in Arabic than compliments in Persian (his mother tongue). Was it him?

(The context being - Arabic was associated with precision, Persian with poetry)

I’m oversimplifying and likely misquoting here so please don’t take that at a face value and put my in historical context. (I love Persian poetry, esp. early New Persian, which I find easier to understand than its later stages; I used to translate Middle Persian on occasion, perhaps because my Arabic is non-existent at this stage).
by LorenPechtel | 2025-04-29 23:33:01+00:00
Disengage from the grid and do what with the vast amount of power that suddenly has no place to go? That kind of power tends to break things. Powerplants have big cooling towers because disposing of heat is problematic.

And you're assuming that there is a throttle setting that lets the plant produce so little power that it only runs itself. Think of the Falcon 9--the landing is hairy because it's impossible for it to produce less thrust than it weighs. The engine will go out if you try to throttle it too much.
by n_ary | 2025-04-29 23:33:06+00:00
I think, we need to step back a little in these discussions. We need to ask, what productivity gains are we hoping to find?

In any knowledge or specialised work, operating a tool faster does not give great results, rather raises the risk of error and quality decline.

Did duolingo once face existential threat because they failed to produce specific feature sometime? Did one of their feature suffer and cause user loss because it took more time for an engineer to write the actual code?

Additionally, beyond formatting and obvious logical errors, every new code should in theory need some human review, which means more automated code means longer review. Assuming code is now produce at 2x, it also balances out that review will now take 2x. Additionally review is much more mentally taxing than putting out one’s thought into code, so risk of bugs and security holes also increases in the long term.

While Software devs cost money, the job involves thinking, and that means it can’t be compared to factory work where someone is standing at next step to simply drill a screw in spotX and the next person will simply put on a cover. Despite years of effort, the attempt to make the process mirror factory floor(did anyone notice the open floor parallel to factory floors?) it failed.

While many hate to see it this way, just like a surgeon will take his time to perform a brain/heart/tumor surgery, a SWE will do thinking, planning, coding and reviews. Giving a surgeon an autonomous bot that can spread the incision area faster or perform the incision faster does not mean productivity gain, it just means the doctor still needs to plan where to make the incision, how much to spread, what to chop off, what to avoid.
by godelski | 2025-04-29 23:33:09+00:00
> No, the goal of the post was to

I think you misinterpret my point. The goal of your post is distinct from how people will interpret it. Plenty of times people intend one thing and get a different thing. That's life.

> In Simon's original post, people were claiming that o3 doesn't have those capabilities, and we were fooled by a chain of thought that was just rationalizing the EXIF data. It only had the _appearance_ of capability.

And this is the key part!

The people questioning O3's capabilities were concerned with cheating. Any mention of EXIF is a guess as to how it was cheating, but the suspicion is still that it is cheating. That's the critique!

If you framed the title as "O3 Does Not Need EXIF Data To Beat A Master-Level GeoGuessr" then I wouldn't have made my comment. The claim is much more specific and reflects the results of your post. You did in fact show that it doesn't need EXIF data to do what it does! BUT by framing it as "Beats a Master-Level" there is an implicit claim that both of you are playing the same game. The fact that you weren't is the issue.

Look at it this way. If I said I beat Tiger Woods at golf and then casually slipped in that I was playing with a handicap, wouldn't you feel a bit lied to? You'd think "Did Godelski really beat Tiger Woods?", and you would mean without the handicap. You'd have every right to be suspicious! And you'd have every right to dismiss me.

Most importantly, take a second here. My whole point is that you can make a much stronger claim! One where there wouldn't be a significant divergence between title and content. I get that it is frustrating to receive criticism, but even if you believe I'm wrong to do so, is it not more effective to show me up by just redoing without search? If you do that, then you only end up with a stronger claim. But by disagreeing and arguing here you're just not convincing me. Even if you disagree with my interpretation of the title, you know full well that it is a valid interpretation. Given the pushback from other comments I think you can't deny that it isn't an unexpected one. So the only way to resolve this is to either change the title or change the data. Besides, you responded to the top comment about how it was a fair criticism. All I've done is explain why the criticism was made in the first place!

And yes, it still undermines the result. Because that is entirely dependent on the (interpretation of the) claim that was made. Your results are still valid, but they only satisfy a weaker claim.

FWIW, I think the updated post is better. My comment here would only be that you could add clarity by showing the non-search scores (especially in the final table). In fact, the "study" being done with and without search makes a stronger post than had it only been one way. So kudos!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-29 23:33:25+00:00
> Explain how the number 90 would be different than the number 85?

Qualitatively? Tesla wouldn’t qualify.

Practically? It isn’t. The same way there isn’t a difference between 85 and 80 other than keeping out Ford.

There is no methodology presented for how 85 was estimated. There probably wasn’t one, given the track record with the tariff rates.
Show HN: A fitness tracker for social health
by spencer5512 | 2025-04-29 23:33:53+00:00
Hi HN - a while ago I became interested in the rising rates of loneliness and mental health issues among young people. I read some really interesting research showing that short in-person interactions, even seemingly trivial ones between strangers, can provide a significant boost to mood and well-being. So, with some others, we built 5 and Go! to help people increase the frequency of their interactions with friends and those around them.

While we have gotten some incredibly positive feedback from a small number of users, we have struggled to build a user base and retain users (even those who reported a significant improvement in their mental health after playing for 1 week).

Any feedback would be really appreciated.

iOS only. We have just started testing a subscription model, but you can get a year for free with this link: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1628590307&c...

Thanks!
by OJFord | 2025-04-29 23:34:04+00:00
That's what I want to, but I don't think it's really a fair complaint given that this has been reasonably well defined. What we both want is 'L5' (level five) autonomy, where the vehicle doesn't even need the ability to be manually driven necessarily.

(L4 iirc is hands-off but someone in the driver's seat (which must therefore exist) in a fit state to take over if necessary - no sleeping on the way in, no drinking on the way home.)
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-04-29 23:34:55+00:00
I think HN is a space where practically everyone has a grasp of what AI is and is not capable of, and of what tools could theoretically exist in the near future. I also think that HN is a space where there is not a consensus on whether AI is "good" or "bad," and there is a lot of discourse on the subject.

In my experience, this makes HN probably the most pro-AI spaces around. Most people in my life feel more negatively about AI, without a lot of defense for it (even if they do use it). The only space in my life that is more pro-AI than HN is when people from the C-suite are speaking about it at work meetings :/
by DrAwdeOccarim | 2025-04-29 23:35:16+00:00
Not op, but I’m in the field and can give you some things to read about:

- CAR-T

- CRISPR

- PRIME editing

- Base editing

- Modified mRNA

- PD-1 inhibitors

- On the cusp of personalized cancer vaccines

- ADCs

- Structure correctors

- Targeted protein degraders

- siRNAs

These have all really hit their stride in the past 15 years. Guess where all of them initially came from? Random ass government-funded academic research. Sure, you can split hairs with me on the 15 years and NIH/NSF etc funding, but it’s basically true. We are killing the golden goose…
by dangus | 2025-04-29 23:35:18+00:00
Just because the story is believable doesn’t mean that the people who are in the story are without responsibility or fault.

When you get into a lease agreement you should know how to pay going into it. If your landlord doesn’t take a form of payment you can handle you don’t sign the lease in the first place. That’s your life responsibility as a functional adult. Paying rent every month isn’t a surprise. Being low on funds isn’t an excuse and being low on funds isn’t the issue at hand.
by AngryData | 2025-04-29 23:35:40+00:00
There hasn't ever been a state or even empire in the history of the world that is safe from the general populous opposing them. Governments and militaries do not exist for very long without a much larger economy of regular people below them supporting them. A general strike by itself can bring any nation to its knees in no time at all, which is why most governments have outlawed them. But laws don't mean shit when people stop caring about following them.
by aaroninsf | 2025-04-29 23:36:52+00:00
Question: has the the adversarial approach been roled into any coding copilots/assistant frameworks?

Costs of various kinds aside I've wanted that from assistance's inception — with precisely the features many call out and home-roll here, difference by both model/provider, and, "role"...

It seems like if you have the money/compute to burn, and can live with the reasoning wall-clock time,

this has got to be the best approach for the foreseeable future, for a lot of specific requirements.

(I also have wondered if this would illuminate the edges of what modern production models are capable of, "aggregating and integrating" over a variety of contributions might make more clear what the limits of their abilities are.)
Show HN: I made an action replay system for computer use agents
by bgwmj | 2025-04-29 23:37:26+00:00
Hey HN,

The idea is to run a slow, expensive computer use agent once and record each of the steps it took. Then we can rerun the cached actions again and again.

Could be useful for QA testing or RPA maybe.

I'd love to hear people's feedback or ideas!
by mikesun | 2025-04-29 23:38:03+00:00
"I think what's going on here is that a read-only transaction against a secondary can observe some transaction T, but also miss transactions which must have logically executed before T."

i was intuitively wondering the same but i'm having trouble reasoning how the post's example with transactions 1, 2, 3, 4 exhibits this behavior. in the example, is transaction 2 the only read-only transaction and therefore the only transaction to read from the read replica? i.e. transactions 1, 3, 4 use the primary and transaction 2 uses the read replica?
by pessimizer | 2025-04-29 23:38:27+00:00
The problem with that sentiment is that cynicism isn't deconstruction. It's often an accurate assessment of current trends and a prediction of where they might lead, not a collapse into abstractions.

On the other hand, pining for "aspirational" works is the real collapse into abstractions and magical, associative thinking: get rid of the bad and bring in the good, sad is bad. A lot of people have the aspiration of wiping out entire cultures; idealizing aspirations is nothing but idealizing desires, and in a commercial environment that just means pandering to middle-class power fantasies.

In short, I accuse this sentiment of being a covert desire to deconstruct the present in order to quiet middle class fears. "Actually what we've been doing will work! If we ever need to change course, I'm sure we will. We'll defeat the evil."
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-29 23:38:55+00:00
ok so are you saying that it is so much that we need 450 more planets worth of people to be able to use that

or

you're saying that if we can harness that much energy amount/density then we can just make matter on spot and we do not have to travel anywhere anymore, because we can make gold bricks or platinum sieves in particle accelerators just for fun? (this is same argument as why alcubierre drive is nonsense, having capability to manipulate such energy density makes us not want to travel anymore)
by bloppe | 2025-04-29 23:39:26+00:00
Also a lot of trees have fixed arity, like binary trees. But to model a general tree, you'd need a dynamically allocated list of children for each node, adding a layer of indirection that can noticeably worsen performance.

Trees are often considered too diverse to include even in the standard library, let alone as a primitive. Even Python doesn't have trees in the standard library. I'm sure it's been proposed and rejected at some point
by marc_abonce | 2025-04-29 23:42:09+00:00
This reminds me of a related quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

Of course, that particular story later turns out to be a classic, boring dystopia, but only because we, the readers, refuse to accept the narrator's original premise of a prosperous and just society free of tradeoffs or caveats.

This is why I like her books so much, though. I don't know if the worlds she created are truly optimistic or possible at all, but at least she makes us imagine alternative ways for society to be organized.
by jbm | 2025-04-29 23:42:17+00:00
I went to a Subaru dealer here in Calgary and asked about the Solterra with a friend present.

The salesman bluntly told me to get a Tesla and half heartedly tried to get me to look at a hybrid. I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't there with a friend.

In retrospect, I am happier with my used Model 3 than an electric car from a company with no intent on winning the market.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-04-29 23:43:22+00:00
Yup. I used to work with a factory that had a bunch of really big machines. Turn everything on at once and the transformer out on the pole self-destructed. Note that the breakers didn't pop--the startup transient was short enough. The power company wasn't happy.

Or look at Apollo 13. The astronauts had turned off everything possible because they had lost their generator and only had their batteries. And it took a lot of furious planning by the guys on the ground to come up with a sequence of turning things back on that didn't cause the peak draw to go too high. Can't go too fast or it trips. Can't start too early because the power is limited, but can't start too late because the systems have to be up when they hit the atmosphere.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-29 23:43:24+00:00
Waymo has shown itself more than capable of going D2C [1].

It’s actually the one case where Google’s customer service beats the competition’s. Waymo customer service is still somewhat trash. But you need it so infrequently compared with Uber, and Uber and Lyft somehow manage to make Google look like a people company, that I find myself almost exclusively taking Waymo when I’m in a city where it is an option. (Via the Waymo app.)

[1] https://x.com/aleximm/status/1867257473671082356
by aphyr | 2025-04-29 23:43:53+00:00
This is a very good question! I do not understand AWS's replication architecture well enough to reimplement it with standard Postgres yet. This behavior doesn't happen in single-node Postgres, as far as I can tell, but it might happen in some replication setups!

I also understand there are lots of ways to do Postgres replication in general, with varying results. For instance, here's Bin Wang's report on Patroni: https://www.binwang.me/2024-12-02-PostgreSQL-High-Availabili...
by krapp | 2025-04-29 23:44:24+00:00
I'd disagree. Modern day Trek is optimistic, just not in the naive way the original series and TNG were, where it was simply taken for granted that humans had evolved beyond their base vices and utopia was simply a natural expression of their enlightened nature. That isn't something one can aspire to. In modern Trek, humans are humans and human nature is realistic, and those utopian ideals have to be struggled for.
by bunderbunder | 2025-04-29 23:44:33+00:00
Just yesterday in the coffee shop the person next to me was having a conversation about his buyer's remorse over recently purchasing a full EV instead of a hybrid or plug-in hybrid. It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips. Something about having to carefully plan around the locations of fast charge stations, and it really being a drag when you're just trying to get out of the city for a weekend.

My sense is that plug-in hybrids really are the sweet spot for a lot of people in North America. The shorter full EV range is still well within most people's needs for a typical day's worth of driving, but you can still travel to and through rural areas without so much stress about whether you'll get stuck killing time for an hour or two at a slow charge station.
by thayne | 2025-04-29 23:44:48+00:00
Part B of the definition of "protected computer" says:

> which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States

Assuming the server is running in the states, I think that would apply unless the client is in the same state as the server, in which case there is probably similar state law that comes into affect. I don't see anything there that excludes a client, and that makes sense, because otherwise it wouldn't prohibit having a site that tricks people into downloading malware.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-29 23:45:12+00:00
> - learn we are not alone in the universe

This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic. Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely much larger than between an human and an octopus?

Example:

Stanisław Lem; Solaris

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

where the alien species is an intelligent ocean.
by bts | 2025-04-29 23:45:20+00:00
Indeed they call for new names, as they encompass far more than iterators.

If you read a bit more about them, I think you will be surprised to see the breadth of what these abstractions can be used for. To start, they've been used to build a new compositional foundation for game theory[1], and they can be used to model gradient-based learning in machine learning[2].

As for their simpler applications as getters and setters, they are programmable in the sense that you can think of lens/prism types as interfaces that can be implemented arbitrarily. So you can create your own lenses and combine them like legos to construct new, "bigger" getters and setters from the smaller components.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.04641 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01931

EDIT: fixed typo
by atrettel | 2025-04-29 23:46:08+00:00
Here are a few that I know of:

- https://careercenter.aiaa.org/

- https://www.cfd-online.com/Jobs/

- https://www.clearancejobs.com/

- https://www.fusionenergybase.com/jobs

- https://jobs.hpcwire.com/index.cfm

- https://www.higheredjobs.com/

Some of these are extremely niche, but for the right people, you could strike gold.
Show HN: Somehow people play this 100-char AI battle game all day
by sungchi | 2025-04-29 23:46:33+00:00
I built this game a few weeks ago, inspired by how we used to invent characters as kids and argue about who would win. (My wife keeps telling me I work too hard on things that make no money.)

For the first few days almost nothing happened, then a small group of players went all-in, spun up a community, and the game started spreading by word of mouth.

What's curious is that the most active players are from Korea and Japan. The engine can output in several languages, but people from other regions don’t seem to find it as fun—yet. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why.

URL: https://plan9.kr/battle/
by Validark | 2025-04-29 23:46:33+00:00
Oh, yes, I understand now. I've thought to myself before it would be nice if I could have implementation 1 go into variable x. And implementation 2 go into variable y. Then I do `assert(x == y)` and a compiler like Cranelift should know it only needs to pick one of them.

I'm glad to know that's the design of Cranelift, since that's how I would think it should be done, although I haven't written a middle or backend for a compiler yet.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-04-29 23:46:51+00:00
I want a step before it right now.

Let me use my phone or watch videos on the highway. I’m okay with taking over with a small amount of warning. I’m also okay doing all non-highway driving.

I just want something that can keep me in my lane and avoid ramming the vehicle in front of me. If I need to drive at the start and end of my trip, that’s okay.
by avalys | 2025-04-29 23:47:08+00:00
What do you think is less disruptive for the environment, a 1 GW fusion machine the size of a medium-sized warehouse, or 100 square kilometers of solar panels plus a battery installation?

Renewables are cheap at the margins, but they're not economically competitive if your goal is to support a massive growth of total electrical demand (either because you're a developing country that is growing rapidly, or first-world economy which is decarbonizing and electrifying industry and transportation).
by pessimizer | 2025-04-29 23:48:00+00:00
I've wondered if it might be helpful to randomly "shard" training data between two LLMs; just feed half the training data to one, and the rest to the other, with no overlap.

So instead of using two models, you'd be making two halves of one model do a similar (deliberative) process to yours. I wonder if that would result in a benefit over a single model with the full training set, and if you could continue to do the same thing by sharding the shards.