MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SR2Z | 2025-05-14 23:32:17+00:00
a: Then get one. Virtually everyone has a phone.

b: Then get someone nearby to help you, or improve phone accessibility.

c: Tough luck. You made your decision, now live with it.

d: I highly doubt this. Phones are basically free - and I'm not just talking about budget, cheap-o phones. You can find an iPhone X for $100! People literally give them away sometimes!

e: That's fine, the Uber app works on some pretty darn old phones.

f: See (e).

g: Installing a third-party app to use a third-party service is pretty uncontroversial.

h: The ADA requires this from transit providers. If you are so disabled that a phone or desktop or whatever can't be used, you probably are not making your own travel arrangements.

i: Then you should not be purchasing things online at all, or with a credit card.

j-n: So... you go a day or two without a phone, replace it, and then things work again.

o: Hopefully not if anyone is making money off them!

p: Would you call a taxi in a hurricane and be surprised when it doesn't reach you?

I realize that HN HATES the idea that things sometimes require phones. Unfortunately, sometimes things are only possible with phones for reasons that have almost nothing to do with profit.

If you choose to not have a phone, you can still take the bus. You can still call taxi dispatch on a landline. You just can't do this stuff conveniently, which seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-14 23:33:05+00:00
I think this is the author's point. The ability to write short and concisely is a skill. So goes the saying: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

Using LLMs to do that shortening is potentially hindering that practice.

The author's point I think is less about sending LLM waffle, it's a lot more that they can't send something that is indistinguishable from LLM waffle anyways due to skills issue - because the LLM is so often used instead of building that skill.

I think the question is largely, can the LLM results be used for human learning and human training, or is it purely a shortcut for skills - in which case those skills never form or atrophy.
by jwagenet | 2025-05-14 23:33:10+00:00
I’m in the side of transit should be free, but as I understand it, the fare is often a pretense to more easily enforce problematic behavior on the train. Fare evasion and other antisocial behavior often come together.

California has quite the gas tax, but it seems to do little to change behavior. Likely because the alternatives to driving are generally not great, but rolling the taxes back shouldn’t be the solution.
by marxism | 2025-05-14 23:33:12+00:00
My reading is this isn't for random engineers but experienced performance engineers with optimized toolchains who can tackle this efficiently. For someone with the right setup, this is likely straightforward work.

It's similar to job descriptions written for specific candidates they plan to hire. The question shouldn't be "why is this bounty so low?" but "what toolchain makes $20K reasonable for someone?"

Performance work in my experience has been largely organizational friction: running projects in various conditions, collecting evidence maintainers accept, maximizing that limited slice of attention people give my CLs, getting compiler improvements merged. These coordination tasks have become much easier to automate with LLMs (e.g., analyzing maintainer comments to understand cryptic 1 line feedback, what are they actually looking for, what do they mean).

My guess is there's an engineer who's either optimized their feedback cycle to under an hour through specialized tooling (more arrows) or is much better at finding the right signal the first time (more wood). I'd like to understand what tools enable that efficiency.
by frabonacci | 2025-05-14 23:33:37+00:00
We stick to standard OCI features: just basic manifests, layers, and configs - without relying on newer or experimental functionality like OCI artifacts. That means it should work out of the box with most registries, including Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, and any other OCI-compliant registry.

The relevant code is here: https://github.com/trycua/cua/blob/main/libs/lume/src/Contai...

And thanks again - really appreciate the interest. I’ll follow up via email, would love to hear more about the Dagger use case and how native Mac execution fits in!
by NathanKP | 2025-05-14 23:34:14+00:00
In your anecdote I still see this as producing value. If I was lacking in knowledge about the problem space, and therefore fell into the trap of pursuing a "plausible but also super duper not correct" answer from an LLM, then I could have easily fell into that trap solo as well.

But with an LLM, I was able to eliminate this bad path faster and earlier. I also learned more about my own lack of knowledge and improved myself.

I truly mean it when I say that I have never had an unproductive experience with modern AI. Even when it hallucinates or gives me a bad answer, that is honing my own ability to think, detect inconsistencies, examine solutions for potential blindspots, etc.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-14 23:34:37+00:00
Agree. Wide gamut and HDR is janky as hell on Windows. I have multi-mon with one SDR and one HDR and that plays havoc with things. But even Microsoft apps aren't updated. I'm pretty certain even Explorer still doesn't support HDR or wide gamut for thumbnails so everything looks either under or oversaturated in the previews. If you open stuff in the default Photos app there is a "flash of content" where it displays it in the wrong profile before it maps it to the correct one, too.
by alganet | 2025-05-14 23:35:00+00:00
From my perspective, the kind of loss expected with LLMs does not reveal itself in one generation.

What you described is more akin to laziness than loss of knowledge. It is also a trap. Your text is almost satirical to the notion that AI could be harmful for learning, because we all know we can relearn those things. And we can, for now.

Several generations of it, when people start to forget simple things, is where the danger lies. We don't know if it will come to that or not.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-14 23:35:27+00:00
You can live in an urban neighborhood and only use your car a few times a week (mostly on weekends and for yearly kid doctor visits). Its not just Manhattan, Seattle supports this as well (well, you still "need" a car, but you can get away with not driving it very often). You need to be strategic about where you live (e.g. buying the house 7 minutes away from your kid's K-8 and 10 minutes away from his future 9-12, with grocery stores and dentists nearby).
by creer | 2025-05-14 23:35:29+00:00
> 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better, the company said. It’s also Class A fire rated [etc]

> first products will be facade materials

Lol. Surprising - but I guess yes there is plenty of interest in building skin materials. (Any random stuff but all the more if you get stronger, lighter, durable, more beautiful or different look). Less volume and good price for a small company. Still surprising.
by edunteman | 2025-05-14 23:35:43+00:00
Our experience working with A11y apis like above is that data is frequently missing, and the APIs can be shockingly slow to read from. The highest performing agents in WindowsArena use a mixture of A11y and yolo-like grounding models such as Omniparser, with A11y seeming shifting out of vogue in favor of computer vision, due to it giving incomplete context.

Talking with users who just write their own RPA, they most loved APIs for doing so was consistently https://github.com/asweigart/pyautogui, which does offer A11y APIs but they're messy enough that many of the teams I talked to used the pyautogui.locateOnScreen('button.png') fuzzy image matching feature.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-14 23:35:51+00:00
The distinction is important: a change in a law isn’t always a slippery slope towards other things. Implementing congestion pricing isn’t a slippery slope towards seizing peoples’ cars, which was GP’s point (which I agree with).

To make it obvious: universal suffrage is a change that happened, but it wasn’t a slippery slope towards giving dogs the right to vote. Some changes result in new stases.
by autoexec | 2025-05-14 23:36:02+00:00
> What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time.

Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.
by yogsototh | 2025-05-14 23:36:59+00:00
I had the same idea for a talk a long time ago the result is https://git.esy.fun/yogsototh/gpm

I never used it seriously, but the concepts are easy enough to grasp.

Have a separate dedicated branch that contains all the metadata of your project. Like issues, todo-list, review comments, etc...

Hopefully, something decentralised like this could become more popular maybe.
by dahart | 2025-05-14 23:37:40+00:00
> It seems pretty clear to me that in this context the author is referring to the high dynamic range of the scenes that Adams pointed his camera at.

Yes, this is the problem I have with the article. “HDR” is not characterized solely by the range of the scene, and never was. It’s a term of art that refers to an increased range (and resolution) on the capture and storage side, and it’s referring to a workflow that involves/enables deferring exposure until display time. The author’s claim here is making the term “HDR” harder to understand, not easier, and it’s leaving out of the most important conceptual aspects. There are some important parallels between film and digital HDR, and there are some important differences. The differences are what make claiming that nineteenth century photographers were capturing HDR problematic and inaccurate.
by NathanKP | 2025-05-14 23:38:17+00:00
That's right. I don't think that AI makes coding easy or trivial. What it does do, is it accelerates your ability to get past the easy and trivial stuff, to the hard parts.

When you get deep into engineering with AI you will find yourself spending a dramatically larger percentage of your time thinking about the hardest things you have ever thought about, and dramatically less time thinking about basic things that you've already done hundreds of times before.

You will find the limits of your abilities, then push past those limits like a marathon runner gaining extra endurance from training.

I think the biggest lie in the AI industry is that AI makes things easier. No, if anything you will find yourself working on harder and harder things because the easy parts are done so quickly that all that is left is the hard stuff.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-14 23:38:32+00:00
1. Possibly reasons like this: https://archive.is/tjdZ2 ... to save you the click, the title/subtitle reads:

> When Getting Out of Jail Means a Deadly Walk Home > Nearly every day in Santa Fe, N.M., people released from jail trudge along a dangerous highway to get back to town. Jails often fail to offer safe transport options for prisoners.

2. You must have a preference for walking, since a bicycle would be at least 3x and as much as 10x faster than walking.

3. The thousands of dollar number seems misleading. If you bought a car solely for this purpose, yes, I believe you're right. But that seems unlikely. The actual marginal cost of using a car you already owned for this purpose is on the order of $3-500.

I commend and support what you do (though I prefer to use my bike when I can). But I don't think the financial benefits should be overstated. There are, of course, other benefits.
by frabonacci | 2025-05-14 23:38:45+00:00
You're totally right, we're not claiming to run macOS inside Docker. The actual VMs run on the macOS host via the Apple Virtualization.Framework; Docker is just the management and packaging layer, similar to how some KVM setups use Docker to orchestrate VMs on Linux.

The title could’ve been clearer, but it’s already out there and can’t be edited - appreciate you pointing it out and adding the nuance!
by edunteman | 2025-05-14 23:39:07+00:00
another currently unanswered question in Muscle Mem is how to more cleanly express the targeting of named entities.

Currently, a user would have to explicitly have their @engine.tool call take an element ID as an argument to a click_element_by_name(id) in order for it to be reused. This works, but for Muscle Mem would lead to the codebase getting littered with hyper-specific functions that are there just to differentiate tools for Muscle Mem, which goes against the agent agnostic thesis of the project.

Still figuring out how to do this.
by sgarland | 2025-05-14 23:39:16+00:00
It is forever enraging to me that ORMs turn SELECT * into each individual column, mostly because people then post the whole thing and it’s obnoxiously large.

Similarly maddening, the appalling lack of normalization that is simply taken for granted. “It’s faster, bro.” No, no, it is not. Especially not at the hundreds of millions or billions of rows scale. If you store something low-cardinality like a status column, with an average length of perhaps 7 characters, that’s 8 bytes (1 byte overhead assumed, but it could be 2). Multiply that by 2 billion rows, and you’re wasting 16 GB. Disk is cheap, but a. Memory isn’t b. Don’t be lazy. There’s a right way to use an RDBMS, and a wrong way. If you want a KV store, use a damn KV store.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out that Prisma is an unbelievably immature organization who launched without the ability to do JOINS [0]. They are forever dead to me for that. This isn’t “move fast and break things,” it’s “move fast despite having zero clue what we’re doing but convince JS devs that we do.”

[0]: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/19748
by michaelt | 2025-05-14 23:39:50+00:00
> If there isn't some form of automatic backup then I guarantee I will not have a sync when I need it the most.

As I understand things, passkeys come in a few different varieties.

You can buy a yubikey if you want the credential tied to one specific physical device. Figure out your own backup strategy, such as spare yubikeys or printed recovery codes or whatever.

Or you can use apple/google/microsoft if you want your passkeys backed up to your cloud account. This means passkeys are basically the "Log In With Google" button, but with extra steps.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-05-14 23:41:45+00:00
I love seeing these projects make use of the wide-open namespace/references that git provides (outside of the basic `refs/heads` for git branches and `refs/tags` for tags). It looks like they store the data in the `bugs` namespace [1] (so refs/bugs/foo).

Other projects also make use of alternate namespaces. The oft-forgotten built-in "git notes" puts stuff in the `refs/notes/` namespace (specifically in `refs/notes/commits`). Gerrit uses the virtual `refs/for/` namespace for receiving commits for review, stores project config in `refs/meta/config`, and stores User data in `refs/users/` in a special repo [2]. I'm sure others do interesting things.

Alternate uses of git's DAG model are fascinating.

[1] https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/bd936650ccf44ca33cf9...

[2] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/config-...
by CelestialMystic | 2025-05-14 23:43:06+00:00
> My first response to most problems is to ask an LLM, and this might atrophy my ability to come up with better solutions since my starting point is already in the LLM-solution space.

People were doing this with Stack Overflow / Blogs / Forums. It doesn't matter if you look up pre-existing solutions. It matters whether you understand it properly. If you do that is fine, if you don't then you will produce poor code.

> Before the rise of LLMs, learning was a prerequisite for output. Learning by building projects has always been the best way to improve at coding, but now, you can build things without deeply understanding the implementation.

People completed whole projects all the time before LLMs without deeply understanding the code. I've had to work with large amounts of code where it was clear people never read the docs, never understood the libraries frameworks they were working with. Many people seem to do "Cargo Cult Programming", where they just follow what someone else has done and just adapt enough to solve their problem.

I've seen people take snippets from stack overflow wholesale and just fiddle until it works not really understanding it.

LLMs are just a continuation of this pattern. Many people just want to do their hours and get paid and are not interested and/or capable of actually understanding fully what they are working on.

> GPS. It’s so reliable that I’m fine being unable to navigate. I’ve never gotten in a situation where I wish I had learned to navigate without Google Maps beforehand. But this is also a narrow skill that isn’t foundational to other higher-order ones. Maybe software engineering will be something as obsolete as navigating where you can wholly offload it? However, that seems unlikely given the difference in complexity of the two tasks.

I think the author will learn the hard way. You shouldn't rely on Google Maps. Literally less than 2 weeks ago, Google maps was non-functional (I ran out of data), I ended up using road signs and driving towards town names I recognised to navigate back. Learning basic navigational methods is a good idea.
by quantike | 2025-05-14 23:44:03+00:00
I appreciate the reply! Yeah that sounds like the correct path forward is swapping out the type for some enum of numeric types you want to cover.

I'd be curious if there's some benefit to the runtime-memory utilization to baking in the precision of the vector if it's known at comptime/runtime. In my own usage of vector DBs I've only ever used a single-precision (f32), and often have a single, known dimension. But if Helix is aiming for something more general purpose, then it makes sense to offer the mixing of precision and dimension in the internals.

Cheers
by sgarland | 2025-05-14 23:44:18+00:00
There are multi-master Postgres options like BDR (I think it’s since renamed; whatever EnterpriseDB calls it now), yes. Most people don’t need it, even if they think they do, and they also usually are in no way capable of dealing with the operational complexity it involves.

If you’ve ever administered Postgres at scale, multiply it by 10. That’s what dealing with multi-master is like. It’s a nightmare.
by zck | 2025-05-14 23:44:37+00:00
I'm not sure this exactly is what I'm thinking about. Yes, `at time zone "UTC"` does the proper conversion, so all times will represent the exact instant they should. But in no cases do you know what time zone the data came in as -- that information is thrown away.

When you look at your data, what is the time a user's watch said when the data was input? What time zone was the data input as?

Here's some queries:

create table tz_test ( comment varchar, ts_tz timestamptz ); insert into tz_test (comment, ts_tz) values ('midnight US Eastern', timestamp with time zone '2025-05-13 00:00:00-4'), ('4am UTC', timestamp with time zone '2025-05-13 04:00:00+0'); select comment, ts_tz from tz_test;

I would expect that one row comes out as midnight, and the other row comes out as 4am. But they both come out as midnight. That's what I don't like.
Show HN: ProfiTree – Find Hidden Tax Savings in Your Investment Portfolio
by shah_akshat | 2025-05-14 23:44:54+00:00
Hey HN

I’ve been building ProfiTree, a tool to help investors—especially those managing their own portfolios—spot tax savings that are easy to miss.

If you're an active trader, it flags disallowed losses from wash sales that can quietly wipe out your tax benefits. If you're a long-term/passive investor, it surfaces opportunities to harvest losses you might not realize are there.

I started this after realizing I had personally missed out on tax savings just because I didn’t have visibility. ProfiTree connects securely to your brokerage (via SnapTrade – read-only access), analyzes your past trades, and highlights where you could have saved—and how to avoid missing out in the future. No transactions are ever made, it’s just insights and guidance.

It's still in early phase, but I’d love your feedback on:

Does this feel useful for the way you invest?

1. Is the value prop clear?

2. What would make this a “must-use” during tax season?

Appreciate you giving it a look https://www.profitree-tax.com
by secabeen | 2025-05-14 23:45:05+00:00
Can you export the passkeys to an importable form that your heirs can use to get into your accounts if you have passed away? Something that's sealed in an envelope inside a fire safe, for example?

Every vendor I see offering a solution has no documented export option at all. Yes, you can use the legacy method to login, but an authentication stream that is not used regularly is one that will break, or will ask for a factor that I no longer have access to (I wouldn't know this because I only use passkeys.)

I also expect that there will be sites that only accept passkeys eventually, even if the spec says you shoudln't.
by yung_lean | 2025-05-14 23:45:22+00:00
In my experience, understanding the rules of the borrow checker is not enough to be able to write rust code in practice. For example, ~6 months into using rust I was stumped trying to move data out of a mutable reference. Trying to do this directly by dereferencing gives compiler errors like "cannot move out of `*the_ref` which is behind a mutable reference". If you know rust, you're probably either yelling "you idiot! you can't move out of mutable references!" or "you idiot! just use std::mem::take!" (the latter of course being the right way to do this) but that's not obvious from the borrow checker rules.

My experience learning rust has been like a death by 1000 cuts, where there's so many small, simple problems that you just have to run into in the wild in order to understand. There's no simple set of rules that can prepare you for all of these situations.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-14 23:45:38+00:00
Transit always seems to be kind of a chicken and egg problem. You can’t have good transit unless you have good ridership, and you can’t have good ridership if you don’t have good transit.

Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?

Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
by catigula | 2025-05-14 23:46:17+00:00
It's hard to stake out a defensible position on bold claims like these because, if they were as presented, it's hard to see how you haven't simply completed runaway AI.

Philosophically, let's say you talk an old LLM through a new discovery. Thanks to your instruction, the LLM now has access to "new" information not in its training data. It is certainly capable of this. The problem in is that this is just laundered human intelligence.
by scottbez1 | 2025-05-14 23:46:23+00:00
You're attacking a strawman; anti-competitive behavior doesn't require that you do exactly the thing you prohibit others from doing. It can be anti-competitive to use your market control to restrict competition in ways that break competitors product but do not impact your own product.

In any case, you've also ignored most of my comment which WAS an example of Google going that extra step of directly blocking APIs that they leverage themselves.