MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sschueller | 2025-05-15 12:11:22+00:00
I talked to one of the higher ups at the VBZ which is the transport company of the city of Zürich Switzerland.

They do not see it happening anytime soon not even for light rails (trams). The primary issue is during busy hours the driver has to take calculated risks or they would not get anywhere. People will just block you. You cannot get an AI to do that or convince the public that they may be run over by an AI. How aggressive so you set the AI? Where do you draw the line?

What they do see is having AIs assist drivers where it will do emergency breaking or hint at dangerous/inattentive people some of which they already have in the new trams but they can switch it off of they need too.
by rollcat | 2025-05-15 12:11:30+00:00
> The code could easily be open, but the productions device could be made unflashable if the law really required it.

Excellent point. Many people (myself included) do assume that open source = redeployable, as in GPL3. I guess an e-fuse for read-only is perfectly OK, both from regulatory standpoint, and for ensuring you're running the same code as what you have the source for. That would be cool.
by cs702 | 2025-05-15 12:11:56+00:00
Silly and funny today, but down the road, if AI code-generation capabilities continue to improve at a rapid rate, I can totally see "enterprise software developers" resorting to something like this when they are under intense pressure to fix something urgently, as always. Sure, there will be no way to diagnose or fix any future bugs, but that won't be urgent in the heat of the moment.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-15 12:12:28+00:00
Integza made a YouTube video[1] where he visited a lab where they had a RDE, and includes some nice explanations, animations and slow-mos of the prototype in action.

His channel has a certain flavor, but at least the video is informative.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRMMSyCcTDI
by jonathanlydall | 2025-05-15 12:12:35+00:00
I’ve recently noticed this on an especially well used app I have on my iPhone 14 with a stupid animation which regularly annoys me.

Google Authenticator’s filter box, when you tap it there is a very noticeable delay after tapping the filter box and the keyboard showing.

And what makes it worse is that if you switch away from the app, it auto clears the filter.

This isn’t a complex app and it’s slow at doing a use case easily performed millions of times a day.
by rrr_oh_man | 2025-05-15 12:12:58+00:00
> That's an example of what I'm talking about. Watch the reasoning process produce multiple options. That's what it is trained to do. That is problem solving, not "engagement". It requires more compute, not less. You see that more with the expensive models.

Fair point. Thanks for standing your ground and arguing so matter-of-factly with me! Appreciate it.
by mystraline | 2025-05-15 12:14:00+00:00
Nah, I've been doing piracy since the '80s. I've always been on the edge of 'interesting' stuff.

Getting a machine with lots of storage is first step. Make sure you also get an Intel graphics card. A380 I think. They're amazing at transcoding and color mapping (10bit->8bit). Transcode is very important to support with hardware, since it allows realtime resolution change, colorspace conversion, and pretty much every video file format to mp4. Can be done in CPU but not recommended.

I'd recommend Linux, but Jellyfin works with damn near everything. Use whatever youre comfortable with.

Getting content? First, use Firefox with Ublock Origin. Turn on all filters. Pirate websites are VERY hostile.

Get a VPN that can port forward. PIA and Proton can both do so, and are reasonable priced. VPN keeps simple copyright scanners from attacking your network, legally speaking.

Sites to look for goods: thepiratebay.org still exists. /r/piracy reddit has loads of links. Yandex search of "show torrent" has all completely relevant links. If you have a Usenet subscription to alt.binaries then you can use that method to grab stuff.

I also grab DVDs and Blurays and rip myself. Doing this is great since you may be able to find shows, but special features are almost never included. I use this tool to quickly rip: https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip/blob/master/dvdrip.py

https://www.bfloeser.de/posts/bluray/ covers Linux Bluray ripping, including where to download the AACS keys.
by gilbetron | 2025-05-15 12:14:08+00:00
The answer to the question, "what database should I use?" is "postgres". If you are in a situation where postgres actually won't work, then you already would know exactly why postgres won't work.

In other words: [Postgres -> exotic solution] is the path everyone should take (and 99% will just stay in postgres), and not [exotic solution -> postgres].
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-15 12:15:13+00:00
I don't understand why tech Ceos still have to be believed. They will say and do whatever they deem the best choice it is in their situation for profit, be it paint a thin veil of lgbt support or remove the aforementioned thin veil. The same for, well, everything that isn't lgbt/dei related such as business choices, mission, vision (...)
by 7thaccount | 2025-05-15 12:15:56+00:00
Pretty much my exact experience before. I have another fun one.

One time the host kicked us out on the second day of a week-long stay to sell the house. She then put us up in a nicer house, but not in the area we wanted to be in. Our schedule was also completely screwed as we had to move our stuff over and the other family wasn't even out of the newer house yet. Everyone was confused and upset. Then there is a cleaning crew that typically doesn't speak English, so it's hard to communicate what is going on. You also don't want to leave your stuff there at the time as although they're just doing their jobs, they're also strangers and you don't know if they'll steal any of your stuff. So we had to end up waiting for awhile and burning up valuable vacation time. Never again.
by ale42 | 2025-05-15 12:15:58+00:00
Not what it's meant for, I guess, but it's not very strong at chemistry ;-)

salt - chlorine + potassium = sodium chlorine + sodium = rubidium water - hydrogen = tap water

It also has some other interesting outputs:

woman + man = adult female body (already reported by someone else) man - hand = woman woman - hand = businesswoman businessman - male + female = industrialist telephone + antenna = television equipment olive oil - oil = hearth money
Show HN: I Made an AI to Turn YouTube Videos into Social Media Posts
by Nimish29 | 2025-05-15 12:18:36+00:00
Hey HN

I made ThinkYT, a tool that helps Creators turn their YouTube videos into social media posts without wasting hours.

I am a first-year college student & self-taught programmer. After learning to code for 4 years & building & failing multiple side projects, this is my first AI project.

This wasn't the idea I had initially. I wanted to make a tool to generate simplified, actionable steps from a YouTube video to save me hours. I slowly iterated to repurposing content for youtubers.

Here's how it works: 1. Enter a video link 2. Select social media platform 3. Select post length 4. Hit generate!

Boom! Your post is ready.

1 Video → 10+ posts

It supports the following platforms: 1. LinkedIn 2. Twitter 3. Facebook 4. Instagram

I am also looking forward to adding blog generation to my tool.

Any feedback is appreciated!
by amelius | 2025-05-15 12:18:43+00:00
Bugs can be weird and cause all kinds of unexpected behavior. Maybe read this story about a recent update that took down systems around the world:

https://www.wired.com/story/crowdstrike-outage-update-window...

> CrowdStrike wrote in a blog post that the root cause of the crash had been a single configuration file pushed as an update to Falcon.
by sillystu04 | 2025-05-15 12:18:46+00:00
Netflix should try out a free tier which is entirely monetised by ads. Even if it only contains a subset of their library.

Just imagine how much money loveholidays or Jet2 would pay for an advert midway through a travel show, where a customer could press a button on their remote for a holiday purchase link to be sent to their Netflix email address.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-15 12:18:58+00:00
the refugee status is a money laundering scheme. Do you think people benefiting from apartheid and now living in walled militarized praetoria (or Lesotho) need any help traveling?

banks would ask international clients the origin of the money. but not if you are opening an account under refugee status. and then they only have to pay us tax on further income, not on fortune. all that money selling black market gems to russians will be squeak clean.

it's not just something to virtue signal to their bible belt electorate. they probably sold lot of trump coins for this deal.
by buibuibui | 2025-05-15 12:19:01+00:00
Hi HN! I created reaktiv, a Python library that brings reactive Signals to the backend world.

The frontend ecosystem has already embraced Signal-based reactivity (Angular, SolidJS, React) with tremendous success. It's time for Python developers to enjoy these same benefits. My breakthrough came when I stopped describing it as "Angular signals for Python" and started calling it "Excel-like computation graphs" - suddenly Python developers understood the value.

reaktiv automatically tracks dependencies between computations, only recalculating values when dependencies change. This eliminates manual dependency tracking, prevents synchronization bugs, and reduces cognitive load when managing complex state - benefits that are just as valuable on the backend as they are in UI frameworks.

I'm seeing initial interest from data scientists and believe the Home Assistant/IoT communities could benefit greatly from this approach. Python deserves the same modern reactivity patterns that have revolutionized frontend development.

Would love your thoughts on bringing Signals to the Python ecosystem!
by awongh | 2025-05-15 12:19:08+00:00
What's an actually non-tinfoil hat technical explanation of the workflow that would have to happen for this to be implemented?

Elon is known for his capricious demands, (for example reports that he made the algo promote his own tweets more) how easily feasible is it to implement, "make it so Grok stops denying white genocide"? Is it just some kind of LORA you put on top of the base Grok model? It even sounds like it could be as simple as changing the text of the system prompt.

I wonder how often this happens (to any big model) without anyone noticing.
by int_19h | 2025-05-15 12:19:23+00:00
I work on a VSCode debugger extension that uses gdb as a backend, and I've had some success tackling bugs in that using Cursor + Gemini 2.5 Pro. The codebase is in TypeScript.

Based from what I've seen, Python and TypeScript are where it fares best. Other languages are much more hit and miss.
by Mashimo | 2025-05-15 12:19:33+00:00
> Land reform to repair the inequality from the previous apartheid state isn't exactly "kicked out".

I don't know too much about Zimbabwe. From what I read about 4,000 white farmers lost house and land, and now 40 years later they are giving compensation. Why can't you say "kicked out" for that?

I do lack the knowledge to say if it was justified or not. But I consider that a kick on the way out.

Or do you mean that what happens in SA is not to be considered getting kicked out?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-15 12:20:30+00:00
Complex, stateful.

I'm not even sure what that would look like for a huge service like GitHub. Where do you hold those many thousands of concurrent http connections and their pending request queues in a way that you can make decisions on them while making more operational sense than a simple rate limit?

A lot of things would be easy if it were viable to have one big all-knowing giga load balancer.

I remember Rap Genius wrote a blog post whining that Heroku did random routing to their dynos instead of routing to the dyno with the shortest request queue. As opposed to just making an all-knowing infiniscaling giga load balancer that knows everything about the system.
by kd5bjo | 2025-05-15 12:20:51+00:00
From my understanding, it's more that the explosion phase of a detonation is more fuel-efficient than the burning phase, but can't last very long under normal circumstances because the flame front is moving so fast-- This is a trick to continue fueling the explosion to sustain it over an indefinite time period.

Think about it in terms of an old-fashioned gunpowder line fuse: If you lay it out in a ring and have some kind of mechanism to continuously place down new gunpowder on the ring in front of the flame, you can keep it going until you run out of fuel.
by kome | 2025-05-15 12:21:15+00:00
what about https://web.archive.org/web/20010630195810/http://www.fireba... or studiVZ, knuddels, or even xing, for example?

now all the internet is basically an oligopoly, but in the late 90s and early 2000s there was much more variety, and any historiography of the early internet should consider that, indeed.
by aleksituk | 2025-05-15 12:21:29+00:00
This is very interesting and I like the conversation about not only the technology itself, but also about the importance of thinking about the interface as a user experience and where / how it fits the paradigm.

We've been working on a lot of data processing and generation tasks. We've been doing this using an API primarily, but sometimes I end up testing creating data in a chat window and I first chat through what the requirements are for the data analysis / processing and then once I'm done I would like the whole conversation to be then summarised into basically a one-prompt process so that I can re-use it (because I can't really process new inputs via the chat).

Even when you do manage to get it down to a single prompt you can use in a chat and then ask the chat to just keep producing new data (like imagine a blog post in certain style if the base content is given as input and I'm making like 20 of them). If you produce these in the chat, there's notable benefits in that if something is wrong with the blog post the chat suggests, you can immediately edit it. The trouble is that the context window starts becoming so big that the chat starts to forget what the original instruction is and eventually you do have to just create a new chat.

One way to solve for this is having a chat with selective memory where you keep a task in memory, but you have the chat forget/not-include all the generated data in the context so that it stays clean, but only bring it to the context if the user refers to it.

Has anyone else done data processing types of tasks in chats and had issues like this? Are there some other tools to use or tricks to do in chats?
by hylaride | 2025-05-15 12:22:39+00:00
It obviously depends on how you use your data, but it really is surprising how far one can go with large tables when you implement sharding, caching, and read replicas.

For tables with a lot of updates, Postgres used to fall over with data fragmentation, but that's mostly been moot since SSDs became standard.

It's also easier than ever to stream data to separate "big data" DBs for those separate use cases.
by latexr | 2025-05-15 12:22:54+00:00
> A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched

More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.

> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.

Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.

¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!
by maaaaattttt | 2025-05-15 12:23:01+00:00
Time is relative, absolutely (I had to do it, sorry). I guess in these articles they mean 10^77 years for an observer on earth. My understanding is if I was, somehow, waiting inside a black hole it would take much less time for me to observe the universe decaying. And if i'm not mistaken, then I wonder what does that mean for the universe as a whole. Maybe the question doesn't make sense when taking the whole universe as being the "observer"...
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-15 12:23:01+00:00
For bright stuff like the moon, it's my understanding the best way is take really high-speed video, hundreds of frames per second, then pick out the frames which has the least amount of atmospheric distortion and stack those.

So not only can you compensate for unwanted motion of the camera rig, but also for external factors like the atmosphere.

For faint deep-sky objects, IIRC you really do want long exposures, to overcome sensor noise. At least the comparisons I've seen using same total integration time, a few long exposures had much more detail and color compared to lots of short exposures.

That said, lots of short exposures might be all you can do if you're limited by equipment or such, and is certainly way better than nothing.
by maccard | 2025-05-15 12:24:25+00:00
The author mentions rewriting core applications in C# on windows but I don’t think this is the problem. Write a simple hello world app in c#, compile it and see how long it takes to run vs a rust app or a python script - it’s almost native. Unity is locked to a horrifically ancient version of mono and still manages to do a lot of work in a small period of time. (If we start talking JavaScript or python on the other hand…)

I agree with him though. I recently had a machine that I upgraded from Win10 to Win11 and it was like someone kneecapped it. I don’t know if it’s modern app frameworks, or the OS, but something has gone horribly wrong on macOS and windows (iOS doesn’t suffer from this as much for whatever reason IME)

My gut instinct is an adjustment to everything being asynchronous, combined with development on 0 latency networks in isolated environments means that when you compound “wait for windows defender to scan, wait for the local telemetry service to respond, incrementally async load 500 icon or text files and have them run through all the same slowness” with frameworks that introduce latency, context switching, and are thin wrappers that spend most of our time FFI’ing things to native languages, and then deploy them in non perfect conditions you get the mess we’re in now.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-15 12:24:44+00:00
I was thinking about LLMs, productivity, the 'human tax', and other parameters from a different view.. "What if" (I am not counting the costs yet/at this point)(numbers come from my head - no supporting documentation for them):

existing team produces 200 2/10ths of the team + LLM produces 200 existing team + LLM produces 4000

Of course that varies on the area/dept/function/etc. If I was a businessman, I would seek to see how with the same costs I can explode my productivity (quantity _and_ quality), keep team sizes the same and well fed, and let them take the business from +200 to +4000.

Now, I also have (constantly) in mind Orwell's "in front of your nose" [0], so some-one/some-company may sacrifice (as they usually do) the long term for the short term (shareholders must get their dividend _now_ or else...) and in which case, 'never let a crisis go to waste' let's all fire 20% of our staff, destroy benefits/salaries, and hire back everyone at 20%-30% less. Yes our companies will have less profit in the short term, but the cost saving (2y no pay, and afterwards 30% cheaper labour) would be great.

[0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
by srvmshr | 2025-05-15 12:25:21+00:00
For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version

https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ )

It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.

By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1

Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories
by Bjartr | 2025-05-15 12:25:24+00:00
It's interesting, there was a recent post here on HN that described a Chinese bus service that accepted route suggestions and had people vote on them. With a significant claim being they could stand up a new route in 3 days.

The comments on that were somewhat impressed, but mostly despondent that it couldn't work in the West with how slow bus routes are changed in cities for a variety of reasons. It seems to me that that's something that the likes of Uber could do fairly easily if it chose to. After all, skipping government beaurocracy is something Uber is experienced at, for good and ill.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-15 12:25:26+00:00
> Middle ages wars stopped when gunpowder supplies ran out.

The arquebus is the first mass gunpowder weapon, and doesn't see large scale use until around the 1480s at the very, very tail end of the Middle Ages (the exact end date people use varies based on topic and region, but 1500 is a good, round date for the end).

In Medieval armies, your limiting factor is generally that food is being provided by ransacking the local area for food and that a decent portion of your army is made up of farmers who need to be back home in the harvest season. A highly competent army might be able to procure food without acting as a plague on all the local farmlands, but most Medieval states lacked sufficient state capacity to manage that (in Europe, essentially only the Byzantines could do that).
by datax2 | 2025-05-15 12:26:32+00:00
This article is covering two different topics and trying to make it seem like one thing that it is not...

1. GM is using an ML model for their "torque management" which is a fancy of of saying a linear feel pedal. 2. This new generation of ecu has more encryption... every new generation of GM ecu has more lockouts.

The author alludes to how tuner will not be able to beat GM's torque mapping controls with aftermarket tuning. Sure... but often times turners are not targeting the drivablity mapping of an OEM tune, they are targeting fuel, ignition, and or boost mapping to compensate for better fuels, more VE (turbos), or other power adders.

TBH on flagship sports cars, we are on the knifes edge of optimizations for most platforms; most aftermarket solutions are now just lop-siding the maximized "any condition" performance OE's seek for simply more power. Power that typically will sacrifice either low end, drivability, and or reliability. The sweet spot for performance tuning now a days exist in the middle range of vehicles for most manufactures where engines are not focused on their ultimate tuning potential VS reliability.

This all being said, these torque management strategies are nothing new, GM is just using fancy math blocks within their ecu that can account for more inputs and a higher resolution. Modern standalone ecus like Emtron and Motec utilize these types of torque strategies to better pair with modern high end transmissions like the 8hp90 and DL800. These transmissions need to communicate with the ECU to ensure power delivery from the engine works with shifting performance and clutch engagement.