MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bcrosby95 | 2025-05-02 23:14:29+00:00
Maybe they have tried and found it lacking?

I have an on again off again relationship with LLMs. I always walk away disappointed. Most recently for a hobby project around 1k lines so far, and it outputs bugs galore, makes poor design decisions, etc.

It's ok for one off scripts, but even those it rarely one shots.

I can only assume people who find it useful are working on different things than I am.
by bobthepanda | 2025-05-02 23:15:11+00:00
To each their own. I’m not a driver either but I could see how trucker life harkens back to the American mythos of the solitary pioneer calling their own shots and working hard as they see fit.

Modern trucking is nothing like that, and often they are independent contractors in name only, driving someone else’s truck and being evaluated against strict performance criteria.
by palata | 2025-05-02 23:16:47+00:00
My feeling is that Trump's first term has been slowly hurting this vision of "the american dream". But just a few months into his second term now he seems to have managed to make it dramatically worse.

At the end of the first term, people were like "we should depend less on the US". Now many people just don't see the US as an ally anymore, and everybody agrees that the US are unreliable partners.

Good that the EU is trying to reduce this dependency: the less leverage the US have, the less they can afford to be bullies.
by quirino | 2025-05-02 23:18:12+00:00
I really like the Poisson Distribution. A very interesting question I've come across once is:

A given event happens at a rate of every 10 minutes on average. We can see that:

- The expected length of the interval between events is 10 minutes.

- At a random moment in time the expected wait until the next event is 10 minutes.

- At the same moment, the expected time passed since the last event is also 10 minutes.

But then we would expect the interval between two consecutive events to be 10+10 = 20 minutes long. But we know intervals are 10 on average. What happened here?

The key is that by picking a random moment in time, you're more likely to fall into a bigger intervals. By sampling a random point in time the average interval you fall into really is 20 minutes long, but by sampling a random interval it is 10.

Apparently this is called the Waiting Time Paradox.
by rossdavidh | 2025-05-02 23:19:39+00:00
I have often had the same thought, and I have to believe the reason is that the companies' bottom line is not impacted the tiniest bit by their ratings' systems. It wouldn't be that hard to do better, but anything that takes a non-zero amount of attention and effort to improve, has to compete with all of those other priorities. As far as I can tell, they just don't care at all about how useful their rating system is.

Alternatively, there might be some hidden reason why a broken rating system is better than a good one, but if so I don't know it.
by Hizonner | 2025-05-02 23:20:18+00:00
I buy a lot of "technical things", and you constantly see one or two star ratings from people who either don't know what the thing is actually supposed to do, or don't know how to use it.

My favorites: A power supply got one star for not simultaneously delivering the selected limit voltage and the selected limit current into the person's random load. In other words, literally for not violating the laws of physics. An eccentric-cone flare tool got one star for the cone being off center. "Eccentric" is in the name, chum....
by m3047 | 2025-05-02 23:20:46+00:00
It is acknowledged that nitrosamines cause cancer. It is acknowledged that ranitidine breaks down on the shelf to nitrosamines: this wasn't discovered by the FDA or another government agency, it was discovered by a mail-order, compounding pharmacy which also tests ingredients. Their discovery led to ranitidine being recalled.

As for prilosec: the cancer risk is acknowledged in the packaging.
by tcmart14 | 2025-05-02 23:21:56+00:00
No mention of pay. Also not mention that for about the past 10-15 years, we've also been telling young people AI was going to make truck driving a job of that past also. I remember in 2014 (we are all getting old, that was more than 10 years ago), hearing about comments Elon made that truck drivers were gonna be a thing of the past any day now. Granted, that didn't end up happening, or at least not as quickly. But the fact is, when kids hear a good chunk of their life that a job is gonna be antiquated, we can't be surprised when kids grow up not wanting to be the people to fill those jobs.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-02 23:24:17+00:00
The biggest problems with American rail infrastructure are related to passenger service. The US has one of the largest freight rail systems in the world by whatever metric you want to use: total miles (#1), annual tonnage (#2), ton mileage (#3) or modal share (#7).

In any case, semis occupy a largely separate mode of transportation that aren't cost competitive with freight rail where it's viable. Autonomous semis are competing mainly with the limitations of human drivers, not freight rail.
by ender341341 | 2025-05-02 23:24:33+00:00
> should only be about existing practice, and no paper should be accepted without implementation

When c++11 was still c++0x they made a big song and dance about how they wouldn't do another export template boondoggle and wanted an implementation available for any features. Then they seemed to have completely forget about it when doing modules (which not that surprisingly is running into similar issues that export templates did).
by dejobaan | 2025-05-02 23:24:42+00:00
I like this kinda stuff. It's goofy, and I don't think I'd pick one up, but there are worse things that folks have done with the brand over the years. On the other hand, I may have to pick up a copy of the 2600/7800 Visual Compendium sometime: https://atari.com/products/atari-2600-7800-a-visual-compendi...
by cornstalks | 2025-05-02 23:25:35+00:00
> The idea, particularly as realized in the GitHub pull request workflow, is that the real “unit of change” is a pull request, and the individual commits making up a PR are essentially irrelevant.

I loathe GitHub PRs because of this. Working at $dayjob the unit of change is the commit, and every commit is reviewed and signed off by at least 1 peer.

And you know what? I love it. Yes, there's some overhead. But I can understand each commit in its entirety. I and my coworkers have caught numerous issues in code with these single-purpose commits of digestible size.

Compare this to GitHub PRs, which tend to be beastly things that are poorly structured (not to mention GitHub's UI only adding to the review problems...) and multipurpose. Reviewing these big PRs with care is just so much harder. People don't care about the commit message, so looking at the git log it's just a mess that's hard to navigate.
by vseplet | 2025-05-02 23:26:54+00:00
I use macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS and this solution is simple enough to work well across all of them. Sure, a regular notepad is fine, but in this case, I’ve intentionally "run away" from anything with buttons or that depends on a specific OS.

Yes, it's a very strange experience, and I’m not claiming anything innovative (it's not), but I’m sharing it simply because it personally helped me become more productive when writing. That’s all.

I run a Twitter account and a Telegram channel, and this simple absurdly dumb tool has literally saved me from constant brain fog and procrastination. That’s the story.
by o11c | 2025-05-02 23:26:58+00:00
The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.

The existing rail system has at least the following constraints:

* Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare.

* Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point.

* Poor cornering and elevation changing.

* Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles)

* Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule.

* Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb".

Which of these can reasonably be changed?
by seadan83 | 2025-05-02 23:26:58+00:00
The word "is", typically refers to the logical equals operator (written as "="). Let A = Math, and let B = Language, the phrase "Math is Language" is therefore "A = B". My claim is that "B != A", which implies "A != B" because "!=" is reflexive. "A != B" then contradicts the claim "A = B". In words: because "language is not math", therefore it cannot be true that "math is language".

This is not number theory, not set theory, just logic. I don't see how the properties of Abelian groups applies. I do suspect that non-abelian groups is a case where "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" is false, and would be a contadiction to my counter claim if "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" was my counter-claim. No, my counter claim is simply that because "B != A" therefore "A != B"

The statement "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" is quite different, and I'm not 100% sure whether you are mixing set and logic notations? [0][1] It does seem you are bringing in number theory concepts, or we are misunderstanding one another?

I assume "↦" is the set mapping operator and "⟹" is logical implies, and "¬" is logical not. "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" could potentially be phrased as: "If the element A cannot be mapped to B, then the element B cannot be mapped to A". I would agree that statement is not 'generally' true. Could you please clarify so we are not talking past each other.

[0] Per google: The symbol "↦" is a mapping symbol, typically used to indicate a function or relationship where one element maps to another. It's not a standard logical operator in the same way that symbols like &&, ||, or ¬ are. Instead, it represents a directional relationship between sets or elements, often seen in set theory and mathematical notations

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication_(logic)
by solarmist | 2025-05-02 23:26:58+00:00
I’m not sure you really can, at least not in the way it’s often portrayed. Founders usually need a high level of skill or a clearly transferable capability in something already valuable. That phrase gets repeated a lot, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like an oversimplification. Maybe there’s a version of it that works, but it’s probably more about reframing or uncovering hidden leverage than starting from zero.
by throw_a_grenade | 2025-05-02 23:27:35+00:00
No, when it tumbles, it does it around its centre of mass. You'd have to get a craft that has empty area inside.

If you know Elite, it has space stations where you dock by going inside, while matching station's rotation. That's only in one axis (and note the hangar goes through the axis of rotation, i.e. centre of mass). To add rotation around another axis would make the task impossible.
by vik0 | 2025-05-02 23:27:38+00:00
>The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.

Do you think people just dropped dead? Humans are not that fragile. The reason the average Roman age was relatively low is because of high mortality at childbirth. If you got to 20, chances were in your favor that you'd get to at least 60. This applies to non-roman, pre-vaccine societies too.

>Basically everyone suffered trauma we'd call fairly extreme, these days.

Eh, maybe. But at the same time, I don't agree that they would be "traumatized."

Heck, I bet if you could place a modern human who has lived his entire life in a developed Western country even a couple of thousand years back, I think he'd get pretty acquainted with that way of life in no time. If there's one thing we're good at it's probably adapting to our environment.

Life is a collection of habits. If you're used to death and destruction (though I am not saying that death and destruction were as common as you make it out to be), it won't phase you. Montaigne talks about this when comparing European society and moral norms to New World (Indian) societies and moral norms.

>The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.

No data proving this to be true, whatsoever.

Plus it's a vast overgeneralization. More violent where? In what today we would call France? China? Canada? Turkey? Chad? Argentina? Was there even a single event nearly as violent as World War 2 pre-vaccines, which happened 80 years ago? Your postulation is on very shaky legs, at best.
by ajmurmann | 2025-05-02 23:27:46+00:00
Is that actually bad? What happened is that we learned more about the customer's rating system. I might never have had Cuban food and love it the first time I try it on Miami but then keep eating it and it turns out the first restaurant was actually not as good as I thought, I just really like Cuban food.

This actually somewhat goes into another pet peeve of mine with rating systems. I'd like to see ratings for how much I will like it. An extreme but simple example might be that the ratings of a vegan customer of a steak house might be very relevant to other vegans but very irrelevant to non-vegans. More subtle versions are simply about shared preferences. I'd love to see ratings normalized and correlated to other users to create a personalized rating. I think Netflix used to do stuff like this back in the day and you could request your personal predicted score via API but now that's all hidden and I'm instead shown different covers off the same shows over and over
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-02 23:27:51+00:00
The other week, I was dining at the Old Spaghetti Factory, and their lobby is impressive for classic furniture and cool stuff on display, including a Donkey Kong and a (nominally) Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, and some "Fragadas Españolas" models.

There was also a bona fide telephone booth in there, in wood and glass, and I absolutely went nuts, actually needing to place a phone call. But I couldn't quite figure out whether it would open and admit me, or if customers were supposed to be fiddling with it at all, or whether it was only a showpiece. So that exploration will wait until the next time I drop by.
by UncleMeat | 2025-05-02 23:27:55+00:00
A bunch of subcommunities with odd supernatural-adjacent belief systems have been completely bowled over by chatgpt. A huge amount of "chatgpt told me that i was the savior of the universe" or "chatgpt told me that such and such thing will come true." While it is true that this could have in principle been anything, the predilection of these chatbots to reflect back or generally approve of the opinions of the user is catnip to a bunch of people.

This sort of self-radicalization will only grow. I've already seen too many cases of "chatgpt told me that I am God" in weird corners of reddit.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-05-02 23:28:13+00:00
> Another nuance was found in ruby, which cannot scan the haystack with invalid UTF-8 byte sequences.

This is extremely basic ruby: UTF-8 encoded strings must be valid UTF-8. This is not unique to ruby. If I recall correctly, python 3 does the same thing.

2.7.1 :001 > haystack = "\xfc\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1abc" 2.7.1 :003 > haystack.force_encoding "ASCII-8BIT" => "\xFC\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1abc" 2.7.1 :004 > haystack.scan(/.+/) => ["\xFC\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1abc"]

This person is a senior engineer on their Team page. All they had to do was google "ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8". Or ask a coworker... the company has Ruby on Rails applications. headdesk
by parrit | 2025-05-02 23:28:30+00:00
For uber you don't need a rating at all. The tracking system knows if they were late, if they took a good route and if they dropped you off at the wrong location.

Anything really bad can be dealt with via a complaint system.

Anything exceptional could be asked by a free text field when giving a tip.

Who is going to read all those text fields and classify them? AI!
by Gamemaster1379 | 2025-05-02 23:28:37+00:00
No, Google is being aggressive likely due to liability.

I made an Android app that used React Native and it was the simplest thing ever. It had no auth, no telemetry, no persisted storage. Quite literally all it did was take text input and output it's braille equivalent and vice versa.

Had another one that made procedurally generated credits like you'd see at the end of a game. Same thing. No auth, no telemetry, etc.

I made a total of $3.97 for those apps. I did also receive a $350 settlement for some class action lawsuit Google lost about something they did to developers.

Closing my account removes me from potential future class action pools.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-02 23:29:59+00:00
Once I stated reading that dashboard (a couple of weeks ago) I could not stop. It's a real page turner. My favourite moment (spoiler):

> Abolish the Federal Reserve and move to a "free banking" system.

Don't let that reveal dint your interest. In the Handmaids Tale such a long list of horrors would have bored the reader, but in the Administrations blueprint for the USA that already has 41% of the items off in just 100 days it's riveting reading.

I can resist pointing out another highlight for me:

> Lessen child labor regulations to allow "teenage workers" to work "inherently dangerous jobs".

In sure Project 2025 is sustained to become a true classic.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-02 23:30:18+00:00
Perhaps scientists would have some particular interest in that particular hardware as it had been launched and flown in Earth orbit, but I'll tell ya: it's way easier to get your hands on flight spare equipment; while this stuff hasn't flown, it's probably a really good copy of whatever they did launch into space, and way better condition.

When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.
by o11c | 2025-05-02 23:30:46+00:00
The problem with water travel in New Zealand is that weather often closes ports.

But it is true that NZ lacks the scale that many existing rail systems rely on, and also lacks high-speed roads (a good rule of thumb for driving anywhere in NZ is: look at how many miles it is on the map, calculate how fast you could go that far in America, then double the time).
by stevage | 2025-05-02 23:33:59+00:00
I like rating systems from -2 to +2 for this reason.

The big rating problem I have is with sites like boardgamegeek where ratings are treated by different people as either an objective rating of how good the game is within its category, or subjectively how much they like (or approve of) the game. They're two very different things and it makes the ratings much less useful than they could be.

They also suffer a similar problem in that most games score 7 out of 10. 8 is exceptional, 6 is bad, and 5 is disastrous.
by crazydoggers | 2025-05-02 23:34:02+00:00
Without looking out the window how would you tell the difference between acceleration or deceleration? You can’t.

And if you say “well one way I fly to the back of the tram and the other the front” You’re arbitrarily associating “front” with decelerate and “back” with accelerate.

300gs is 300gs regardless of the direction vector of the component.

> So for sure a system's design must consider more than just the magnitude of acceleration.

What else would you need to consider? Acceleration up? Down? Left? 20%x,30%y,40%z? There’s an infinite number of directions.
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-02 23:34:25+00:00
I also think the dragon could be used for such drafts like you describe, although that should not substitute for writing DRAFT on the document, but instead the dragon would be in addition to writing DRAFT on the document (perhaps in the header and/or footer, since the dragon means not room for that in the middle of the document). Both the DRAFT label and the dragon (or other pictures in the watermarks) would only be used in drafts and both omitted for the final version.
by florilegiumson | 2025-05-02 23:35:00+00:00
Really cool to see GPUs applied to sound synthesis. Didn’t realize that all one needed to do to keep up with the audio thread was to batch computations at the size of the audio thread. I’m fascinated by the idea of doing the same kind of thing for continua in the manner of Stefan Bilbao: https://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Sound-Synthesis-Difference-...

Although I wonder if mathematically it’s the same thing …
by lightyoruichi | 2025-05-02 23:39:21+00:00
ok been quietly working on this thing for the past 5 months, and the reports finally hit the quality bar i was aiming for.

long story short: i built a system that scrapes a company’s site, profiles, press, and anything else it can find online, then runs it through a multi-model prompt engine i wrote from scratch (multiple LLMs chained together with custom logic). the workflow is split into three parts: crawl, process, synthesize.

output comes in markdown. all signal, no bs. useful for GTM, growth, competitor analysis, product gaps, strategic blindspots, that kind of thing.

i’ve been stress testing it on real companies. just pushed 2 sample reports to GitHub if you wanna peek:

- Grab (SEA unicorn) - LemmyHomes (early-stage Malaysian proptech)

→ https://github.com/lightyoruichi/numen-output

not selling it as a product (yet). backend still in dev. just doing reports manually for now while testing edge cases/validating if anyone wants this at all lol.

note: it’s not fully automated. i use the system to generate raw analysis, then apply human input to reframe, expand, or clean up weak insights. think of it like pairing with an AI researcher who works fast but lacks nuance/context, you still need a strategist to shape the output. there's tons more feature but at the core this is it.

happy to run one or two more this week if anyone wants a teardown. not free though (token cost’s brutal lol). DM if interested.
by tomhow | 2025-05-02 23:39:57+00:00
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by cbsmith | 2025-05-02 23:40:24+00:00
> Charging companies will charge what they can get away with. FWIW it used to be more like $0.30/kWh.

Yup, and they can charge a premium for fast charging, because it is really convenient when you need it.

> Most of California pays a rate 2x what I'm paying, which is a pretty typical rate.

Yeah, all the private companies in California charge a fortune for power. It's ironic that the municipal services are so much more cost effective.
by primitivesuave | 2025-05-02 23:40:32+00:00
Just to add something to your last sentence - I believe I read somewhere in Polybius that the Romans had never built a warship until the whole skirmish in Sicily kicked off the first Punic War, and they managed to do so by copying a Carthaginian vessel that had washed up ashore. They made one important improvement with an articulating walkway (I seem to remember it being called "the eagle" but I'm not sure) - they could swing it around and lock it to another ship to create a bridge for foot soldiers to attack.

Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)