MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-15 11:27:38+00:00
CAPTCHA stood for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

By this point, it’s obvious that that has failed, and even that no general solution is possible any more.

ALTCHA… telling Computers and Humans Apart? No, this is proof of work, meaning it’s just about making things expensive—abuse control, not actually distinguishing between computers and humans.

In fact, in https://altcha.org/captcha/ one of the headings is Inclusive to Robots! This is so far the opposite of traditional CAPTCHA, on the technical side, that it’s mildly hilarious. (Socially, they largely amount to the same thing—people never did actually care about computers, just abusive bots.)

Then the question is: what is the proof of work mechanism? How robust are things going to be, and can you ensure attacking will remain expensive, without burdening users too much?

https://altcha.org/docs/proof-of-work/ indicates it’s SHA hashing, not something like scrypt. Uh oh. The best specialised hardware is several million times as good as good laptops¹, let alone cheap phones. If this were to become popular, bots would switch to such hardware, probably making the cost of attacking practically negligible. https://altcha.org/docs/complexity/ shows they’ve thought about these things, but I feel that although it will work for a while, it’s ultimately a doomed game. And in the mean time, you can normally go waaaay simpler and less intrusive: most bots are extremely dumb.

Is “captcha” heading in the direction of meaning “bad rate limiting”?

Because really that’s what this stuff is: rate limiting that trusts that clients don’t have lots of compute power conveniently available, but will get vaporised by powerful and intentional adversaries.

—⁂—

¹ On the https://altcha.org/docs/complexity/ test, a comparatively ideal browser on my 5800HS laptop might reach 500,000 SHA-256 hashes per second at a cost of at least 25W. (Chromium gets half this with ~50% CPU usage; Firefox one tenth, altogether failing to load the cores for some reason.) The most energy-efficient commercial Bitcoin miners seem to be doing around 80 billion of these hashes per watt-second. That’s four million times as good. You cannot bridge such a divide.
by aynyc | 2025-05-15 11:28:38+00:00
I really like databricks at the beginning, Spark clusters magically appear whenever I needed them. No more thoughts were given on how to store the data, etc.. After a few years, I've grown, so did my skill set and my employer. Databricks simply couldn't grow with us at the rate that we needed. No, not because of scaling, but the toolings such as AI/ML, what the market is demanding us to do. Faster iterations and experiments, less cost.

Databricks now reminds me of Oracle. Still a great product, but it's a melting delicious ice cream.
by luma | 2025-05-15 11:28:52+00:00
F1 is getting rid of that system (MGU-H) for 2026 because it was costing the teams too much and it never seemed relevant to passenger vehicles.

When a tech path costs too much for F1, that's a good sign you won't be seeing it in a GM product any time soon.

OP system is just using a computer to get on the gas a little faster when the driver hits the pedal quickly.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-05-15 11:28:59+00:00
> Though this faction can’t articulate exactly how or why, they proclaim quite confidently that it will solve all of the machine world’s problems.

AGI can solve the human world’s problems. Perhaps not all of them, but all the biggest ones.

Right now life is hell.

You and your loved ones have a 100% chance of dying from cancer, unless your heart or brain kills you first, or perhaps a human-driven vehicle or an auto-immune disease gets there soonest.

And you’re poor. You’re unimaginably resource-constrained, given all the free energy and unused matter you’re surrounded by 24/7/365.

And you’re ignorant as heck. There’s all this knowledge your people have compiled and you’ve only made like 0.1% of the possible connections within what you already have in front of you.

Even just solving for these 3 things is enough to solve “all” the world’s problems, for some definitions of “all”.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-15 11:29:01+00:00
I've used them across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on Linux, macOS, and Windows (10 and 11) for large websites. I've used them for Github, as 2FA on various services, and as the primary login for some websites, such as the local grocery store (Albert Heijn). I also use them for authenticating to my personal Keycloak server which acts as a guard for a whole bunch of services in my network.

Support is far from universal, but it's definitely getting better. Unfortunately, protocols such as CTAP2 don't seem to have been implemented on Linux, so it lacks the "log in using your phone" prompt that makes them super useful on proprietary operating systems (like fingerprint/touch ID, but without needing to add every device manually).
by qwery | 2025-05-15 11:30:20+00:00
I am perpetually amused at the use of the word 'vibe' in 'vibe coding'.

> it’s much more worthwhile to work with a plan composed of discrete tasks that could be explained to a junior level developer

I'm sure this is a more effective way to get more usable results. But I really think anyone in this situation should be taking it as a kind of wake-up call. Mentoring/guiding a junior is work -- there's a significant cost. But it's a cost easily justified -- a lot of people find it intrinsically rewarding, you're training a colleague, etc.. What you're describing here, though, is all of the cost with none of the benefits and you're being the junior developer as well (you must be -- you're doing their work). You're alone, mentoring a chatbot that cannot learn or grow.

> I’m beginning to think the problem runs deeper, and it has to do with the economics of AI assistance.

> When charging by token count, there’s naturally less incentive to optimize for elegant, minimal solutions.

... Or maybe the tool just isn't that good / what you want. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy behind it.

That is to say, I think the main point presented here is very unconvincing. If they could build a tool that could just do what you want in an acceptable manner, they would. People would obviously throw money at that.

It produces verbose, comment-heavy, procedural code because that form reasonably effectively supports the nature of the generator. Procedural code is obviously well-suited to "what comes next?" style append-oriented editing operations. Verbosity eliminates nuance.

OK, one more thing:

> While we wait for AI companies to better align their incentives with our need for elegant code I’ve developed several strategies to counteract verbose code generation

"While we wait" is the most depressing thing I've read in a while. It's just completely at odds with the field itself.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 11:30:26+00:00
If I had to ask “why is it so fast?” I’d turn it around and ask “Why are western systems so slow?” and posit that Western capital has an ideology that throughout matters by latency doesn’t. (As Fred Brooks puts it, “Nine women can have a baby in one month”). As an individual or a customer you perceive latency directly though, and throughout secondarily. So it comes down to empathy or lack thereof.
by lazide | 2025-05-15 11:30:27+00:00
It depends on the age of the kids - if the kids can effectively self ambulate (8+ is usually old enough to have the stamina for a lengthy trip on public transit), then your options aren’t super limited by dealing with them.

Younger kids, you need to live where you can reach everything you’ll need to acceptable quality within walking distance or a limited number of subway stops, unless you really like dealing with a Stroller in the subway. Not always an easy feat.

Areas like that tend to be very expensive, and be very difficult to actually find spots. You then are susceptible to quality changes hurting your ‘investment’. People who can afford that can also afford one or more Nannies and other helpers.

In my experience, a lot of the skill set required is to be very competitive and have a lot of money to throw around, which requires a mindset that most would not call ‘cushy’ or easy going.

The ‘mandated by law’ bit is a bit of a misnomer. It’s structural due to a number of other market conditions, including available land (leading to lower population density, etc), which are impacted by laws, which also impact market conditions.

It’s an ouroboros, not an arrow.

South Asia has ~ 8x US pop density, Western Europe ~4x, and East Asia roughly 3x.

It’s no surprise it is how it is. The US is low density. The math generally works out differently.
by g-b-r | 2025-05-15 11:31:04+00:00
I know some people who quickly give up and renounce using the service, when they run into hCaptcha puzzles.

I've been bewildered for some time as well, honestly, it took me a while to figure out the first I ran into.

And trying one now, fully knowing that I'd have to solve one, I was dumbfounded by the puzzle I've gotten, it took me a few seconds to understand it.

Cloudflare's ones are horrible and a plague (although they might have slightly improved recently), but I'm not certain I'd prefer hCaptchas over them.
by Thorrez | 2025-05-15 11:32:00+00:00
>IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars.

All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%.

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268
by kibwen | 2025-05-15 11:32:36+00:00
It certainly doesn't guarantee it, this is just what's needed to induce a relocation in this particular instance. But this makes Rust's ownership tracking even more important, because it would be trivial for this to "accidentally work" in something like C++, only for it to explode as soon as any future change either perturbs the heap or pushes enough items to the vec that a relocation is suddenly triggered.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-15 11:33:03+00:00
Interesting.

Aspergers are 10x engineers. The way the asperger brain works make you 10x faster than the other tech engineers.

Aspergers has weaknesses like abstract language understanding or even weakness in writing itself.

With AI specifically being able to make up for those weaknesses, does that make you 100x? I think there's possibly some truth.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-15 11:33:36+00:00
Using CTAP2, you can authenticate a passkey on any Windows laptop. macOS also has decent support (though not as seamless if you're not using an iPhone because of course it isn't). I personally do it when I need to boot Windows for something, using the Bitwarden app to expose passkey logins to my laptop.

Basically, when the system prompts to pick a key, click the "log in with phone" button, unlock your phone, and select the account/click "OK" to authenticate. The first time you do this, you need to scan a QR code to pair the phone to your computer, but after that you can use your phone whenever you need it.

Passkeys on Linux (and probably even more so on the more niche systems like the *BSDs) can use some love, especially when it comes to CTAP2. Chromebooks are probably the only Linux devices with native support for that.

If you want to safeguard against a fire, use a passkey provider that does exports (i.e. Bitwarden, KeepassXC) and then treat those exports the same as your password database file.
by philipallstar | 2025-05-15 11:34:24+00:00
The prospects are terrible, as being a "pale male" is the worst sort of employee to be. Businesses are given extra money if they have high BBEEE ratings; i.e. mostly-racial quotas. Loads of money siphoned off, and not just in the usual high-corruption way via the state, but e.g. if you want to procure something you go through a black-owned procurement firm that doesn't do anything except BBEEE-wash it and charge a premium.

It's a bit like what happened in Zimbabwe that devastated that country 20 years ago when all the white farmers were kicked out, but in slower motion.
by jfim | 2025-05-15 11:34:41+00:00
Part of the reason is that public transit for whatever reason appears to be unusually sketchy in many places in the US. For example, a few years ago, there was an incident with a man with two chainsaws threatening passengers [1] in the local transit system.

In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe.

Biking is also safer in European cities that have proper bike infrastructure.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-r...
by Urahandystar | 2025-05-15 11:35:46+00:00
It has been a huge improvement in places like Manchester which the OP mentioned has switched to the London model. Before it was unbelievably expensive and fragmented in terms of the service with different providers requiring different fares or weekly/monthly passes. Also never knowing when a bus was going to show up.

Now their an app which shows you when your next bus will arrive tracked by gps so you can leave the house on time to get there, and fares are standardised at £2 per trip or £5 all day. Before the standardised pricing you had people on minimum wage who would be paying an hour or two of their wage just to get to work.

All this came due to the local Government mandating it, these things could have been implemented before by private companies as they have existed in London for years but they simply chose not too.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-15 11:35:50+00:00
On the other hand, ORMs insulate you from database integrity since ORMs have limited access to underlying database features.

In Postgres that usually means you're not locking rows, you're not using upsert, you might not be writing table DDL yourself. It often means you aren't even using database transactions.

While these things might be extraneous fluff for an all-nighter hackathon, you really have to figure out a sweet spot so that data integrity violations aren't killing your velocity when your service's rubber begins hitting the road.
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-15 11:35:52+00:00
You need to get your sleep issues under control. It is directly deteriorating your intelligence and indirectly destroying your cardio health. This will take years off your life. No amount of tricks, tools, or gimmicks will solve for this, not even a little.

Otherwise, big companies are just big. Nobody inside the big company has a wholistic view of how everything comes together except senior managers, kind of. Know what your team does, what their processes are, and eventually you will learn about adjacent teams and supporting infrastructure. Unless you are in management this is not the part you should be stressing over.
by pornel | 2025-05-15 11:35:55+00:00
The switch happens slowly and then suddenly.

People pick the best option, while worse option can creep from being awful to just a close second, and then suddenly become the best option.

There's a critical point at which there's enough EV infrastructure to overcome objections, available cars become cheap enough, and then there's hardly any reason to pick gas cars that are slower, laggier, noisier, smelly, more expensive to run and can't be refuelled at home.
by panick21_ | 2025-05-15 11:37:02+00:00
> Private transit was how the United States was built, all for profit, from the transcontinental railway up to and including the takeover and destruction of the city trolley lines by General Motors so they could put their busses on those rights-of-way.

This is only partly true. The transcontinental railroads got a huge amount from the government. Most specially land, and land that they didn't really even 'own'. It was the US military that made sure that land was available.

And the trolley bus lines were private, before cars this was better, but the right of way was not guaranteed. And once cars were allow the same rights, their business collapsed.

It wasn't really General Motors, that accounts for a very few lines, trolley lines on streets that allowed cars simply weren't possible anymore.

If those trolley lines had understood this problem they would have continued owning the land instead of selling all the land. That was their biggest mistake. But even then, most would have simply turned into real-estate companies, rather then to continue to run the trolley.

> What really matters is that there's valid competition and freedom in both government and markets.

> Transport can always find ways to be both profitable and efficient, as long as there is sufficient competition. But under a monopoly (government or private) it winds up only being profitable or efficient.

If you look at private US railroad history, there were many, many, very inefficient practices. In practice, individual railroad companies were just local monopolies. And those local monopolies did a very, very bad job working together.

> [Side note] Speaking of externalizing costs, I probably wouldn't be the first to note the amount of human waste on railway tracks throughout Switzerland. Just sayin'.

This is a problem that has been dealt long ago. No modern train have this anymore. Well to be more accurate, those trains still run sometimes, but the bathrooms are locked.

But the same happened everywhere on the world.
by binary132 | 2025-05-15 11:39:32+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. It would be one thing if proprietary software was distributed in a form you could keep operating and using on your own, but even that is obviously inferior to being able to “repair your own equipment”.
by farmdve | 2025-05-15 11:39:45+00:00
It would be an interesting reverse engineering challenge, 20 years down the road when it is more accessible.

I spent 1.5+ years on my 2005 car's ECU to reverse engineer most of the maps, since no public tuning files existed. I then went and spent 1 year on the TCM for which again, no tuning files existed. With the patent files, I was able to discover the algorithms and maps, and am even in IDA as I write this, and in Ghidra emulating some code.
by jajko | 2025-05-15 11:40:09+00:00
Don't know about your flavor of 'traditional big corporations' but my banking megacorp has internal reward system across various 'virtues' for a decade+ at least. Its not direct reward -> money link (thats rather for hiring success), it just helps you create sort of karma, and when bonuses, raises and promotions are considered then this is taken into account.

Since that process is invisible to those being measured you never know details (and shouldn't as long as management is sane, and if isn't this the least of your concerns), but its not ignored and in this way it helps keeping people motivated to generally do good work.
by kibwen | 2025-05-15 11:41:53+00:00
> The analogous program in pretty much any modern language under the sun has no problem with this, in spite of multiple references being casually allowed.

And then every time the underlying data moves, the program's runtime either needs to do a dynamic lookup of all pointers to that data and then iterate over all of them to point to the new location, or otherwise you need to introduce yet another layer of indirection (or even worse, you could use linked lists). Many languages exist in domains where they don't mind paying such a runtime cost, but Rust is trying to be as fast as possible while being as memory-safe as possible.

In other words, pick your poison:

1. Allow mutable data, but do not support direct interior references.

2. Allow interior references, but do not allow mutable data.

3. Allow mutable data, but only allow indirect/dynamically adjusted references.

4. Allow both mutable data and direct interior references, force the author to manually enforce memory-safety.

5. Allow both mutable data and direct interior references, use static analysis to ensure safety by only allowing references to be held when mutation cannot invalidate them.
by mg | 2025-05-15 11:42:02+00:00
I wonder when buses in public transport will become autonomous.

It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle complicated parking situations.

Here in Germany, Volkswagen is working on autonomous buses with its Moia subsidiary:

https://www.youtube.com/@moia6222/videos

As far as I know, the self-driving software they use is provided by Mobileye.

But I have not yet seen any stats about miles driven, number of engagements etc. So I have no idea how far along they are.
by rickandmorty99 | 2025-05-15 11:42:05+00:00
Not the grandparent but for me it's taking DMT. I am not as articulate as neom but my first time (and breakthrough) gave me a similar perspective.

I think DMT unlocked it, I don't think everyone taking the substance would have a similar experience. I think it's neurotype/personality dependent.

It helps that I meditate a lot and know a thing or two about Buddhism, that part really came out during my first experience.
Ask HN: What's your go-to message queue in 2025?
by enether | 2025-05-15 11:43:06+00:00
The space is confusing to say the least.

Message queues are usually a core part of any distributed architecture, and the options are endless: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, Redis Streams, SQS, ZeroMQ... and then there's the “just use Postgres” camp for simpler use cases.

I’m trying to make sense of the tradeoffs between:

- async fire-and-forget pub/sub vs. sync RPC-like point to point communication

- simple FIFO vs. priority queues and delay queues

- intelligent brokers (e.g. RabbitMQ, NATS with filters) vs. minimal brokers (e.g. Kafka’s client-driven model)

There's also a fair amount of ideology/emotional attachment - some folks root for underdogs written in their favorite programming language, others reflexively dismiss anything that's not "enterprise-grade". And of course, vendors are always in the mix trying to steer the conversation toward their own solution.

If you’ve built a production system in the last few years:

1. What queue did you choose?

2. What didn't work out?

3. Where did you regret adding complexity?

4. And if you stuck with a DB-based queue — did it scale?

I’d love to hear war stories, regrets, and opinions.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-15 11:43:11+00:00
Yes you can. On iPhone the recommend ”secure webview” shows the domain name in bold at the top.

In general, this embedded webview seems very easily spoofable to me, but that’s a separate problem. Both Android and Apple have determined this is the most secure way to auth against third parties. It’s the standard way to sign in with oauth etc.
by ArinaS | 2025-05-15 11:43:42+00:00
Cloudflare is not chill because they, either ignorantly or purposefully, block everything that's not Chromium or Firefox[1].

Or sometimes everything that's not just Chromium[2].

[1] - https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...

[2] - https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloudflare-admits-security-too...
by strogonoff | 2025-05-15 11:44:09+00:00
A fun thing about story frameworks is that with a bit of creativity you can usually make any story conform to any framework you wish, both when writing or when analyzing someone’s work (maybe the actual protagonist is the city of Omelas or all of its residents, collectively).

The corollary is that the framework that we tend to over-focus on is not necessarily what makes or breaks the story.

Lately I am thinking that a good and accessible story is a challenge in map-making and map-breaking. First, you speak the language the audience understands, employ some baseline map of reality that everyone gets. Then, you take them on a journey showing how it is faulty, and maybe end up with a better map.

(A good story does not have to be universally accessible, of course. It can self-select a narrower audience. I suspect a lot of Ursula Le Guin’s work is like that.)