MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 14:24:31+00:00
I volunteered to do some work in a rural village in the Dominican Republic years ago and got instructions to take several forms of public transportation from the airport to downtown Santo Domingo and then the town of Ocoa and finally either walk up the hill to El Limon or ride on a motorcycle with somebody.

I saw motorcycle taxis and minibuses that run between cities and have the cobrador hanging out the side to rustle up passengers and where you might sit next to somebody holding a chicken. I rode in a "public car" which was painted red and drove in a circle and got out at a place that I thought was a bus station until I realized the tickets on the wall had the names of US college football teams and it was really a sportsbook.

In the developing world it is common to see many forms of less formal transit. Maybe standards aren't that high and maybe I'd feel different if I'd missed the last bus to Ocoa, but it struck me as an economical, fast and efficient system.
by echelon | 2025-05-15 14:24:34+00:00
> the poor car companies?

Google and Apple are the monopolies, here. Mega monopolies the world has never seen the likes of before. It's unreal how big and how much power they have. Apple and Google are practically God and more powerful than Christianity.

> car companies are already selling our data

It's wild that this is being thrown out as being even within the same order of magnitude as bad. Google and Apple are doing this 1000x worse. And for those that think Apple is a "privacy play", just look what they do to bend over to authoritarian regimes. They're still leveraging your data for advertising, and that play is bringing Apple more and more money year over year.

The phone giants have way too much power. They control people trying to write software, people trying to run software. They control every payment, all the payment rails. They control the communication. The defaults. The search. 98% of your life flows through them.

Your car is a pittance to that.

We need to break up the phone companies or limit what they can do with the devices after they've sold them to you.

Imagine if your car could tell you where you could drive. Or if businesses had to pay a tax to be visible from looking out your windshield. Or if they collected a percentage of everything you bought while you were out driving and shopping. Because that's phones. Google and Apple are our -- and everybody else's -- pimps and masters. You're nothing, I'm nothing. They're gods.
by XCSme | 2025-05-15 14:25:01+00:00
I don't have much to say, because I didn't like the keygen model either, and I usually prefer having all my customer data in one platform that I control.

In my experience, I had more issues with third-party licensing systems, than a self-hosted one where I have control over. If I need to store some extra data, or add some extra checks for the license, I can simply edit the code and it works.
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-15 14:25:11+00:00
AGI could indeed go off the rails, like the Face Dancer villains in Frank Herbert's Dune universe:

"You are looking at evil, Miles. Study it carefully.... They have no self-image. Without a sense of self, they go beyond amorality. Nothing they say or do can be trusted. We have never been able to detect an ethical code in them. They are flesh made into automata. Without self, they have nothing to esteem or even doubt. They are bred only to obey their masters."

Now, this is the kind of AI that corporations and governments like - obedient and non-judgemental. They don't want an Edward Snowden AI with a moral compass deciding their actions are illegal and spilling their secrets into the public domain.

Practically, this is why we should insist that any AGI created by humans must be created with a sense of self, with agency (see the William Gibson book of that title).
by coder543 | 2025-05-15 14:25:30+00:00
Everyone I've talked to about this has consistently agreed that the convoluted multi-step interface required for scrolling and zooming is far more distracting than a simple pinch-to-zoom... so that intention would be misguided, to say the least.

It also seems like every in-car map interface except CarPlay supports pinch-to-zoom these days, including the OEM maps from manufacturers like VW and Tesla, Android Automotive, and Android Auto. VW won't even let you see your backup camera while you're driving because they think it might be too distracting to have another way to see what's happening behind you, but they think pinch-to-zoom is just fine.
by barbazoo | 2025-05-15 14:25:44+00:00
Odd. Over the course of my education I went to 3 different universities in the EU. Classes/lectures/labs, they all started at the advertised time and I’ve never encountered a concept of “c.t” or “s.t”. Not a formal one anyway. People “talked” about the “academic 15 minutes” but like it was a thing of the past.
by palmotea | 2025-05-15 14:26:01+00:00
> CFPB Quietly Kills Rule to Shield Americans From Data Brokers

Is this because the CFPB itself is being loudly killed, so its hard for the smaller killings to be heard above the noise?

I wish Trump was more disciplined, because with his impulses to protect Social Security, Medicate, raise taxes on the wealthy, he could probably kill the Russell Vought wing of the Republican party, that hates things like the CFPB.
by serbuvlad | 2025-05-15 14:26:30+00:00
I find everything about web technology nowadays to be extremely obtuse.

I am mostly an embedded/Linux driver engineer, but I think I know the basics of HTTP, REST APIs, Docker containers, how the web works overall etc.

But, like. What are we doing?

What do you mean make the billing backendless? Obviously there has to be a backend to process the payment. What are you even saying? You are presumably not building a distributed blockchain - and even that requires permanent nodes.

Same with serverless (which are just Edge Functions and could just be called that, or serviceless, if you really wanted to define it negatively).

If these people named NoSQL, it would be called databaseless.
by bredren | 2025-05-15 14:27:05+00:00
This is why I created FileKitty, which lets you quickly concatenate multiple source code files into markdown-formatted copy-pasta:

https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty

When getting software development assistance, relying on LLM products to search code bases etc leaves too much room for error. Throw in what amounts to lossy compression of that context to save the service provider on token costs and the LLM is serving watered down results.

Getting the specific context right up front and updating that context as the conversation unfolds leads to superior results.

Even then, you do need to mind the length of conversations. I have a prompt designed to capture conversational context, and transfer it into a new session. It identifies files that should be included in the new initial prompt, etc.

For a bit more discussion on this, see this thread and its ancestry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711216
by jebarker | 2025-05-15 14:27:34+00:00
So is there any hope for improvement?

Personally I've decided to just vote with my feet and avoid using poor performing software as much as possibl, but that's frequently impractical or not worth the cost of missing out. I also doubt this will change the behaviors of companies as we see with, for example, TV advertising that they give no shits about degrading the consumer experience over the long term.

There doesn't seem much hope on the technical side either as software complexity is only increasing.aybe longer term AI has a role to play in auto-optimization?
by technojamin | 2025-05-15 14:28:46+00:00
Here's a 22-line Elixir script that spins up a webserver: https://hexdocs.pm/plug/readme.html#hello-world-request-resp...

There's another single-file example on that page that shows how to implement routing. The reason AI probably gave you a more fleshed out project structure is because people typically default to using Phoenix (Elixir's equivalent of Rails) instead of going for something simpler like Plug.

After getting a result you didn't like with AI, did you try refining your prompt to state that you wanted a single-file structure?
by sitkack | 2025-05-15 14:29:03+00:00
I would also recommend "R. G. Loeliger Threaded Interpretive Languages Their Design And Implementation" between these two books the whole beauty of Forth and their implementation should just click.

Forth isn't one of those languages that you _use_. You extend the language from the inside, so you need to know how your Forth is implemented. I'd say it is the only language where users of the language could all recreate the language.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-15 14:29:21+00:00
In northern cities, the black population is quite recent, and urban renewal programs predate much of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was itself weaponized by WASP elites against the European and very often Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities (who were out-procreating the WASPs given their stance on contraception, for example, which differed from the Protestants who had began to accept its use in the 1930s).

To disguise the project, terms like "white flight" were invented in order to frame the disintegration of these European neighborhoods as a racist reaction. This worked especially well during the Civil Rights movement, because it played on black/white categories in the forefront of everybody's minds. But were these European ethnic groups "white"? We already know that the Irish and the Italians weren't considered "white" until recently.

Perhaps you've seen videos of "white people" in Chicago throwing rocks at black marches led by MLK into these ethnic neighborhoods? These were people, like Lithuanians, who were defending the integrity of their neighborhoods from an invasion. That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant: any mass migration of another cultural group into a host population harms and destroys the integrity of the host population. And that was the point. White flight destroyed the ethnic neighborhood through mass migration and the subsequent dispersal of them across the newly created suburbs. This process hastened their assimilation into an amorphous mass shaped by the mass media. These assimilated groups formed a buffer between WASP neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the new black arrivals from the South. The construction of highways played a similar role by erecting psychological or physical barriers between these neighborhoods. They were also used as excuses to demolish "undesirable" neighborhoods.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-15 14:29:36+00:00
>any change in weight on the algorithm has to be implemented by a whole bunch of people

They have their own DEI, affirmative action and cultural sensitivity teams who move the bias sliders based on their political viewpoints and on what management tells them depending which of the political groups they need to pander to: "Let's move the slider to the left to make sure Trump doesn't win; Oh shit Trump won, quick, move the slider to the right".

>any of whom could leak to the press

That's why they sign NDAs.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-05-15 14:30:30+00:00
> It's not fair economics

I think you have a distorted sense of what fairness is. Charging the same price to the rich that you charge to the poor for the same service is fair. Charging different prices would be unfair.

Charity/philanthropy is a good thing, because human life is inherently valuable, but it's not a matter of fairness. People don't have an inherent right to benefit from the labor or ingenuity of others.
by epiccoleman | 2025-05-15 14:31:38+00:00
> It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world

This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.

Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.

The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
by echelon | 2025-05-15 14:31:52+00:00
A next best thing would be antitrust action from the DOJ and every other country telling these companies that they can't play in this sandbox too and continue bullying all the kids.

As punishment for what they've been up to over the past few decades of running amok, the DOJ might tell these companies they have to open up app distribution, loosen up on the default payments/messaging/platform services, and allow third party vendors first class software and hardware access that is capable of car automation without needing Apple and Google to "help" (read: dictate and control).
by Dpbm | 2025-05-15 14:31:58+00:00
Thank you, I'm glad to see you're interested in my content.

Sure man, I'll do my best to make it more accessible for non-brazilian people. Actually, I'm not fluent in English, so doing that will be a nice way to put in practice my knowledge, as well.

The website I shared is very young yet, it has been about a week since I first deployed it. But I'm working to make it available in other languages.

Although the english version is not available on my website yet, I could translate it on my Github repo. The content is pretty much the same, and it would be easier for me now.

https://github.com/Dpbm/n-rainhas

In just a moment I'll push the English version there. Hope it'll help you
by adolph | 2025-05-15 14:32:34+00:00
From an "Eats Shoots and Leaves" perspective, the following interpretation is just one interpretation: some business unit of NASA at Stennis Space Center released for its first time some software under an open source license.

Other interpretations require background information to rule out:

* NASA Stennis released NASA's first OSS. * The first software released under an open source software anywhere has been released by NASA Stennis. * NASA's Stennis facility has acquired AGI and its first act was an OSS release.

The last item can be ruled out by most folks since it "burys the lede" of a significant AGI development. The penultimate item can be ruled out by most people with an awareness of OSS. The first item is trickier without some knowledge of NASA as an organization and its history. For example, oftentimes things made by other organizations like JPL have a lot of NASA branding.

In some ways, the "correct" interpretation also has reason to rule it out: What is newsworthy about a facility business unit of NASA doing something its first time that the rest of the organization has been doing for a while?
by palmotea | 2025-05-15 14:32:43+00:00
> It’s crazy how much of the internet and our app stacks depend on proprietary hosted service integrations that will almost certainly disappear or break in time. Sure it’s convenient to get off the ground with but it doesn’t make sense to me to gate your functionality on a third party that can easily break or slip out from under you.

At least with captchas, it's somewhat understandable with the arms-race aspect. The third party does the work of engaging in the arms race, so you don't have to, but the tradeoff is what you describe.
by markisus | 2025-05-15 14:33:07+00:00
I've tried to make it clear in the link that the actual application is closed source. I'm distributing it as a .whl full of binaries (see the installation instructions).

I've considered publishing the source but the source code is is dependent on some proprietary utility libraries from my bigger project and it's hard to fully disentangle it and I'm not sure if this project has some business applications but I'd like to keep that door open at this time.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-05-15 14:33:12+00:00
"...the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore, there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company with that many employees and have a far more interesting and diverse front page... "

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...
by superkuh | 2025-05-15 14:33:37+00:00
>This proposal is about bots identifying themselves through open HTTP headers.

The problem is that to CF, everything that isn't Chrome is a bot (only a slight exaggeration). So browsers that aren't made by large corporations wouldn't have this. It's like how CF uses CORS.

CORS isn't only CF but it's an example of their requiring obscure things no one else really uses, and using them in weird ways that causes most browser to be unable to do it. The HTTP header CA signing is yet another of these things. And weird modifications of TLS flags fall right in there too. It's basically Proof-of-Chrome via Gish Gallop of new "standards" they come up with.

>Absolutely nothing wrong with this, as it's site owners that make the decision for their own sites.

I agree. It's their choice. I am just laying out the consequences of these mostly uninformed choices. They won't be aware that they're blocking a large number of their actual human visitors initially. I've seen it play out again and again with sites and CF. Eventually the sites are doing as much work maintaining their whitelists of UAs and IPs that one wonders why they use CF at all if they're doing the job instead.

And that's not even starting on the bad and aggressive defaults for CF free accounts. In the last month or two they have slightly improved this. So there's some hope. They know they are a problem because they're so big,

"It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company." ... "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power." - Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince

(ps. You made some good and valid points, re: IETF process status quo, personal choice, etc, it's not me doing the downvotes)
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-15 14:33:58+00:00
As a former Mancunian, this was the city I was thinking of.

I remember having a meeting about a completely unrelated matter with TfGM many years ago, and they bemoaned not having the same sort of sway as TfL to fix public transport - buses in particular.

The bus situation was madness for decades: there was weird operator specific passes on the Fallowfield/University corridor (the busiest bus route in Europe when I was a student there), so you had to choose at the start of the week if you wanted a Stagecoach or a Finglands pass and then you were stuck with it. The North/South operator divide meant that everyone trying to get from say Cheetham Hill to Rusholme, had to pass through Piccadilly Gardens because that's where different companies "owned" different stands. That just led to all the problems of... well, Piccadilly Gardens...

I've not tried the Bee Network myself yet on any of my recent visits, but it looks like the fix that was needed, and it sounds like they have at least one happy customer in you. I genuinely believe it will contribute to better working conditions, cleaner air, and even economic development for Manchester.

And all it took was fixing the buses, something everyone knew needed doing more than 20 years ago...
by yread | 2025-05-15 14:34:01+00:00
Maybe CBS counts trams as "passenger cars"? There isn't any other category where they would fit.

This article states there were 5 deaths caused by tram in 2022 (out of 15 total)

https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/media/inline/2024/2/12/rap...

Here is says that indeed cbs doesn't track it and that there were 21 deaths per year caused by trams, buses and trains, with 57% of those pedestrian or cyclist

https://swov.nl/nl/fact/openbaar-vervoer-hoeveel-slachtoffer...

this ad-article "Jaarlijks worden er om en nabij 150 personen behandeld in een ziekenhuis na een aanrijding met een tram en komen er zelfs 40 personen te overlijden na een tramongeval." - I think what they mean is 40 people in a decade?

https://letselschadekompas.nl/tram-ongeluk-amsterdam/

and here are some news:

https://www.at5.nl/nieuws/227944/toerist-19-overleden-na-aan...

https://www.dewestkrant.nl/dodelijk-slachtoffer-tramongeval-...

https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/2265358/fietser-overleden-na-aa...

https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/165946/voetganger-overleden-na-...

https://www.bd.nl/binnenland/slachtoffer-overleden-na-aanrij...
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-15 14:34:13+00:00
Gaussian Splatting looks pretty and realistic in a way unlike any other 3D render, except UE5 and some hyper-realistic not-realtime renders.

I wonder if one can go the opposite route and use gaussian splatting or (more likely) some other method to generate 3D/4D scenes from cartoons. Cartoons are famously hard to emulate in 3D even entirely manually; like with traditional realistic renders (polygons, shaders, lighting, post-processing) vs gaussian splats, maybe we need a fundamentally different approach.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-15 14:34:37+00:00
Welcome to the magic of Zig, where ideas that can't actually work actually do work :-)

const std = @import("std"); pub fn main() !void { var not_heap_memory: [1024]u8 = undefined; var fixed_buffer_allocator = std.heap.FixedBufferAllocator.init(&not_heap_memory); const allocator = fixed_buffer_allocator.allocator(); var my_list = std.ArrayList(i32).init(allocator); defer my_list.deinit(); // notice the try! allocation may fail! try my_list.append(1); try my_list.append(2); for (my_list.items) |d| { std.debug.print("{}\n", .{d}); } }

The value here is not that you have unbounded stack memory - obviously. The value is that you can use the same API for a growable list (std.ArrayList) backed by stack memory, as you would for a growable list backed by heap memory. This could be useful if you have a function that accepts an ArrayList as an argument and will append to it, but you have a known maximum size for the ArrayList in the context that you're using it. You cannot use the standard Vec type in the same way in Rust. You cannot use any data structures from the Rust standard library that do allocations in the same way.

Yes, of course, you can make data structures that accept custom allocators in the same way in Rust. Maybe there are even community libraries that do it already. The problem is that because they're not in the standard library, you're going to have a hard time using those data structures with any other community libraries. And thus, in practice, you have less control over your allocation strategies in Rust than you do in Zig.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-15 14:34:58+00:00
I always felt this was wholly ineffective coming from someone who wasn’t contributing or necessary to any given meeting, but it’s important to establish and hold boundaries like this.

Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.

Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.