MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-05-15 00:01:18+00:00
I think they're all fine. Cursor is popular and charges a flat fee for model calls (interposed through their model call router, however that works). Aider is probably the most popular open source command line one. Claude Code is probably the most popular command line agent overall; Codex is the OpenAI equivalent (I like Codex fine).

later

Oh, I like Zed a lot too. People complain that Zed's agent (the back-and-forth with the model) is noticeably slower than the other agents, but to me, it doesn't matter: all the agents are slow enough that I can't sit there and wait for them to finish, and Zed has nice desktop notifications for when the agent finishes.

Plus you get a pretty nice editor --- I still write exclusively in Emacs, but I think of Zed as being a particularly nice code UI for an LLM agent.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-05-15 00:01:24+00:00
The problem is, even in a city like San Francisco, that's relatively densely populated AND has a centralized office area - there is A LOT less overlap than you'd think.

The typical bus already runs at loss of 4 dollars for every 1 dollar it takes in in fare.

So you're not going to end up with a much cheaper ride than if you just took a private taxi, but you're going to have a significantly longer trip.

Almost no one is interested in that.

I hope to be proven wrong.
by calf | 2025-05-15 00:01:34+00:00
Hinton is a domain expert in AI, case in point Scott Aaronson cites AI revolutionizing protein-folding research, putting many protein-folding academics out of jobs.

I'd argue that AI experts and CS theorists are in a better position to speak about technological change than the domain experts who are trained/selected mainly to practice the status quo.
by acdha | 2025-05-15 00:03:33+00:00
One thing to remember is that a lot of streetcar companies were started by developers who wanted to make their developments convenient travel from downtown. Many of them would have needed to consolidate or shift to remain financially viable.

The thing which killed transit was the massive subsidies for private car ownership and especially coding transit riders as poor/black. Cities didn’t kill transit because they loved traffic, it happened because much of the tax base moved out to the suburbs and generations of city planners prioritized private car travel over transit at almost every turn.
by freetime2 | 2025-05-15 00:03:46+00:00
Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, and Zelda: A Link to the Past all still look great to me to this day. I think it's just a timeless art style. And it's not all just nostalgia, the early 3d games which came in the next generation of consoles, and which I probably spent even more time playing, all look like trash to me.
by joshuamorton | 2025-05-15 00:04:26+00:00
The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, if not lower, than being shot elsewhere.
by NoPicklez | 2025-05-15 00:05:35+00:00
This is a niche article, where it reads as though the SMS 2FA messages started coming through right as the lady purchased a cell service. Well the lady would have needed to have activated 2FA first and walked away from the house to even enable it.

Then goes on to say that TOPT is also too difficult, firstly because you have to download an app to do it, yet she supposedly knows how to use her phone.

There will always be edge cases where something doesn't work perfectly the way it does for everyone else. The solution here seems to be help her choose a TOPT app, print out those backup codes and be done with it.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-15 00:05:53+00:00
It has? This literally happened to Oakland, CA (a few transit stops away from SF) months ago where the ex-mayor and a cadre of her backers were indicted by the FBI. I think you've been in NYC for too long if you think NYC is uniquely bad for transit due to corruption and geo factors. The Bay Area has hills and mountain ranges everywhere and has a literal ocean on its West side. Chicago is built along the Great Lakes and has ridiculous wind gusts and wind chill in the winter.

Most older US cities were built along rivers and other natural features because rivers are flat and most natural features are opening/closing points for trade routes between areas. Newer sunbelt cities are probably the ones that don't have these issues because they were built in less challenging geography.
Show HN: Sauron MCP – one MCP to rule them all
by shchagin | 2025-05-15 00:07:02+00:00
After spending some time exploring MCPs, I realized there’s a serious lack of infrastructure — especially when it comes to remote MCPs. Right now, the process of discovering a tool online, installing it locally, and restarting your environment (e.g., Claude Desktop) just to try it out feels clunky and outdated.

So I built SauronMCP — a single MCP that can search for and proxy remote MCPs without requiring local installation. You simply ask Sauron to find and use the tool — it handles the rest. No restarts, no manual setup.

This is very much an MVP, and I'm not a security engineer — so if you have thoughts on potential risks or ideas for improving the architecture, I’d love your feedback.
by compton93 | 2025-05-15 00:07:34+00:00
I'm curious about Motion's experience with "Unused Indices". They suggest Cockroach's dashboard listed used indexes in the "Unused Indices" list.

I think the indexes they suspect were used are unused but Motion didn't realize CockroachDB was doing zigzag joins on other indexes to accomplish the same thing, leaving the indexes that would be obviously used as genuinely not used.

It's a great feature but CRDB's optimizer would prefer a zig zag join over a covering index, getting around this required indexes be written in a way to persuade the optimizer to not plan for a zig zag join.
by sgentle | 2025-05-15 00:08:16+00:00
Very strange choice to use Mulholland Drive as an example of conforming to the hero's journey "complicated by dream sequences" (?!)

The second half of the film reveals the hero's journey to be a self-serving narrative constructed by the protagonist to retell her own tragic and shameful history, casting herself as a hero instead of a villain. By extension, the film is a critique of Hollywood, American myth-making, and the exact trope it supposedly conforms to.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-15 00:09:12+00:00
Evacuations here can and do happen multiple times a year. If it is difficult to impossible to evacuate, one listens carefully for wind speeds, rainfall amt, timing in regards to tides and a dozen other, always-changing factors.

Huge areas of impact hang on small changes in the numbers. If cuts have the intended effect and forecast accuracy falls, people won't be able to make choices that saves lives. The granular data they once counted on won't be available.
by helpfulclippy | 2025-05-15 00:09:20+00:00
They did at least 4… 1999 - 2002. In the 2002 one, they changed the color scheme which made it visually jarring when put next to the previous 3, so I didn’t keep that one.

The other 3 I had framed, and they have followed me everywhere I have lived ever since. Even non-technical people stop and enjoy them for a moment and say “wow, the Internet is huge” or something to that effect… and then they notice that they’re only seeing what it was a quarter century ago.
by tzs | 2025-05-15 00:09:23+00:00
Yup. For long trips range determines:

1. Whether the trip is possible. You need enough range to span the largest gap between charge stations with an acceptable safety factor.

2. The number of charging stops you will need.

Charging speed determines:

1. How long your charging stops will last.

Trip time is the sum of:

1. Time actually on the highway.

2. Time actually charging at your charging stops.

3. Time transitioning from #1 to #2 and later back to #1. Let's call this overhead time.

The total time spent actually charging is, assuming you started the trip fully charged:

(Trip_Length - Range) / Charge_Rate

That's because after you've used up your range from your before-trip charging every mile for the rest of the trip comes from charging during the trip.

For long trips the time spent charging is usually much more than the overhead time. A fast charging short range EV will usually get there faster than a slow charging long range EV.
by notyourwork | 2025-05-15 00:11:27+00:00
It can when workloads are relatively predictable day-over-day but have low lows and high peaks. For example, My team has a service which has a daily traffic peak that is >5x our traffic min.

Scaling on traffic and resource demand gives us an increased average utilization rate for the hardware we pay for. Especially when peaks are short lived, an hour out of 24 for example.
by the_snooze | 2025-05-15 00:12:08+00:00
More broadly, there's a lot of value in knowing how to work with constrained systems: things that have to be offline, or radiation-hardened, or low-power, or low-spec, etc. Those tend to be resilient systems; i.e., things that people can quietly rely on instead of being subject to "move fast and break things."

Building web apps that you can update willy-nilly while running on arbitrarily powerful and always-available hardware isn't the entirety of software engineering.
by skygazer | 2025-05-15 00:12:10+00:00
I did the same a few years ago with a Mac in swift -- listens to the event log via some private ObjC API for camera on and off, and checks for microphones in use. Homekit LED over door turns green if computer is awake/unlocked and not idle more than some threshold. Turns yellow if a physical mic is in use. Turns red if a camera is in use. It sends an indirect request to HomeKit to turn on/off or set the color of the light. (Indirect, because I directly set values on a homebridge synthetic accessory, and use homekit rules to mirror those changes to the actual light, which feels hacky -- talking to homekit directly looked too complicated and entitlement heavy.)

It's worked like a champ. -- although every few major macOS releases, Apple changes the log string for camera on and off events.
by dcre | 2025-05-15 00:12:15+00:00
As others have said, you are describing a totally imaginary world where money is the only cost. “Artificial” is doing all the work. But the very investments you’re describing are “artificial”, and more than that, they require constant spending to maintain. Why should cost at point of use be the only artificial incentive? What about the environment created by those investments? The quality of roads, the cleanliness of the train? Your distinction is contrived in service of your predetermined conclusion.
by hackyhacky | 2025-05-15 00:12:34+00:00
> Performative statements of allegiance.

I think you don't know what that word means.

The comment I'm addressing claimed that DEI statements are partisan. They weren't, until an ideologue decides to make them so.

Performative, maybe. In many jobs, I have to prove that I can be legally hired: is that performative as well?
by reissbaker | 2025-05-15 00:13:50+00:00
Eh, I've run applications on RDBMSes with multi-billion-row tables, and I've never found normalization/denormalization to be particularly impactful on performance except for in a few rare cases. The biggest impact came from sensible indexing + query patterns. Normalization vs denormalization had a big impact on convenience, though (not always favoring one way or the other!).

But I'm no fan of Prisma either. Drizzle has its own pain points (i.e. sequential numbers for its auto-generated migrations means annoying merge conflicts if multiple people iterate on the schema at the same time), but it's much better than Prisma at sticking close to the metal and allowing good query performance and table design.
by LexiMax | 2025-05-15 00:14:32+00:00
I did my fair share of DE hopping in my younger days, but now when I use the Linux desktop in anger I've found myself returning to GNOME. It's the only desktop environment on Linux that actually feels like an opinionated, cohesive whole, in the same way that macOS used to be. It certainly has shortcomings and annoyances, but instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I decided to meet it halfway, and found myself rewarded for my patience with being able to get work done.

Interestingly, I've also found that the further a distro diverges from upstream GNOME, the worse my experience ends up being. I was frankly shocked at how many paper cuts I ran into the last time I used the Ubuntu spin of GNOME, while Debian was better and Fedora gave me almost no trouble.
by bandoti | 2025-05-15 00:15:06+00:00
For my workflow a lot of the benefit is in the smaller tasks. For example, get a medium size diff from two change-sets, paste it in, and ask to summarize the “what” and “why”. You have to learn how to give AI the right amount of context to get the right result back.

For code changes I prefer to paste a single function in, or a small file, or error output from a compile failure. It’s pretty good at helping you narrow things down.

So, for me, it’s a pile of small gains where the value is—because ultimately I know what I generally want to get done and it helps me get there.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-15 00:17:06+00:00
This. I'm tired of so many "it's over, shocking, game changer, it's so over, we're so back" announcements that turn out to be just gpt-wrappers or resume-builder projects.

Very few papers that actually say something meaningful are left unnoticed, but as soon as you say something generic like "language models can do this", it gets featured in "AI influencer" posts.
by kasey_junk | 2025-05-15 00:18:41+00:00
Speaking up for Devin.ai here. What I like about it is that after the initial prompt nearly all of my interaction with it is via pull request comments.

I have this workflow where I trigger a bunch of prompts in the morning, lunch and at the end of the day. At those same times I give it feedback. The async nature really means I can have it work on things I can’t be bothered with myself.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-15 00:18:51+00:00
gpt4.1 doesn't have the issue of doing more than it should. It is why I prefer it for agentic coding. If anything, it may do a little less than it should, which I can remedy with my handwritten code or with a follow-up prompt. Oh and gpt4.1 has an input context that is over twice as large as claude.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-15 00:19:14+00:00
> he current administrations "style" of state-craft (basically the "big stick" method)

Trump is the antithesis to "speak[ing] softly and carry[ing] a big stick" [1]. He's constantly blustering and retreating from his own lines.

The last big-stick President we had was probably Obama, though Bush and H. W. strike closer to the mark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_stick_ideology
by _delirium | 2025-05-15 00:19:51+00:00
Genetic programming systems have periodically made improvements to algorithms (dating back decades). Whether LLM-powered GP, which is effectively what this is, will be a step change or an evolution of that is still an open question I think. I'm also a little wary of reading too much into the recursive self-improvement idea, because "the GP system can use GP to improve the GP system itself!" is a very old idea that just has never worked, although I realize that isn't proof that it won't eventually work.

Some related work from a different company: https://sakana.ai/ai-cuda-engineer/

And some academic papers kind of in this space: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896, https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12170, https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07102
by etblg | 2025-05-15 00:20:36+00:00
> It's true that Prisma currently doesn't do JOINs for relational queries. Instead, it sends individual queries and joins the data on the application level.

..........I'm sorry, what? That seems........absurd.

edit: Might as well throw in: I can't stand ORMs, I don't get why people use it, please just write the SQL.
by alganet | 2025-05-15 00:21:30+00:00
I don't understand your reply.

The book seems to be a cheap cash grab designed to monetize on the "cops are mean and corrupt" rethoric.

It's the modern equivalent of a wallet with the silk screened face of Che Guevara on it. It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric that is very much under control of the media itself (media does their anti-cop pieces once in a while to appease the pseudo-revolutionary youth).

Although police brutality and it's relation to sensationalist media are totally related, the book does nothing to solve it. It capitalizes on it. If anyone solves it, then the author has no next book to publish.
by nativeit | 2025-05-15 00:21:35+00:00
This has certainly been my own experience in life. My step-father was a very studious and responsible person. He worked 30-years from the age of 19 with the state as an HVAC service tech until he retired at 49yo with a full state pension, and then went to work for a private company. His plan was to earn as much as he could until he turned 55, and then retire to live/work on the small farm he and my mother had just purchased. Everything was coming together, his new job placed him in a senior project management position, and gave him a considerable salary compared with the state.

Shortly after he turned 50, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he died several months later, following a very painful and difficult attempt to treat it.

In my mind, this kind of thing is the height of tragedy—he did everything right. He exhibited an incredible amount of self-control and deferred his happiness, ensuring that his family and finances were well-cared for and secured, and then having fulfilled his obligations, he was almost immediately robbed of a life that he’d worked so hard to earn.

I experienced a few more object lessons in the same vein myself, namely having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 18, and readjusting my life’s goals to accommodate the prospect of disability. I’m thankfully still churning along under my own capacities, now at 41yo, but MS can be unpredictable, and I find it is necessary to remind myself of this from time to time. I am grateful for every day that I have, and to the extent it’s possible, I try to find nearer-term sources for happiness and fulfillment.

Don’t waste any time planning for more than the next five years (with the obvious exceptions for things like financial planning), as you can’t possible know what’s coming. Even if the unexpected event is a happy one, like an unexpected child or sudden financial windfall, your perspective will almost certainly be dramatically altered 1-2x each decade.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-15 00:23:14+00:00
A better analogy is if someone got upset that someone else said "the set of natural numbers is the set of real numbers." One is a subset of course, and when that is highlighted, the response is "yeah, by 'is', I actually mean subset", therefore indeed: the set of natural numbers is the set of real numbers.

This is an interesting example: "Or saying that writing C is programming but writing in a functional language like Scala or Haskell (or Lean) is not."

The first part is everything we need to look at. Are we saying that writing C is equivalent and equal to the entirety of all programming? That if you're programming then you are writing C code. No, there is an implied "is a form of" in there. Given the other clarifications and that so many people are claiming to be mathematicians, I would have expected the precision to say exactly "C is a form of programming" rather than "C is programming."

Turns out, the analogy of saying "the set of reals is the set of naturals" is more fitting compared to sets that are actually equal.
by jamesnguyen9012 | 2025-05-15 00:24:08+00:00
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If interested, email me directly at james.nguyen112 at insightlab [dot] co [dot] site
by sandofsky | 2025-05-15 00:24:15+00:00
> It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together, these are very different things.

These are all related things. When you talk about color, you can be talking about color cameras, color image formats, and color screens, but the concept of color transcends the implementation.

> The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause confusion, and isn’t particularly accurate.

The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the words, "capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes."

> Previously when you took a photo, if you over-exposed it or under-exposed it, you were stuck with what you got. Capturing HDR gives the photographer one degree of extra freedom, allowing them to adjust exposure after the fact.

This is just factually wrong. Film negatives have 12-stops of useful dynamic range, while photo paper has 8 stops at best. That gave photographers exposure latitude during the print process.

> Ansel Adams wasn’t using HDR in the same sense we’re talking about, he was just really good at capturing the right exposure for his medium without needing to adjust it later.

There's a photo of Ansel Adams in the article, dodging and burning a print. How would you describe that if not adjusting the exposure?
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 00:24:20+00:00
"Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder."

I propose "unshittification".

Enshittified by vendor → UNshittified by hacker

But seriously: the reason DRM keeps finding its way into products, is that most people don't care & keep buying them.

2nd, centralisation of all kinds: internet access (all through ISPs & backbones), social media (all through FB, TikTok & co), file sharing (all through apps/services powered by a datacenter somewhere), operating systems (single vendor for most devices), etc.

That centralisation makes it easy for vendors to be gatekeepers → enter walled gardens. Capitalist incentives do the rest.

Reduce/remove dependence on such centralized systems, and you'd get a very different ecosystem. Some pieces of the puzzle:

# Seamless, ubiqitous mesh networking. Need an OS component? OS downloads it P2P from your neighbour's device, or person sitting next to you on the train. No need to go through ISP or datacenter in most common cases.

# Same thing for any other file that neighbour has, a la BitTorrent "magnet" link or similar. Global, decentralized file system. All you need is some unique file identifier.

# Dead easy micropayments, everywhere (again: P2P if possible). I like your site, press button "like" in my browser, you earned $0.02

# Social networks - again, P2P. Send messages etc directly to friends' devices (via mesh network, most of the time). No need for FB, Chinese corp, or your country's government to be in the loop.

Some of these puzzle pieces may exist. What's needed is a popular device that does most or all of the above by default, and does it well.
by therealfiona | 2025-05-15 00:24:45+00:00
I wear waist braces at night. Switching my keyboard layout to Colemak was the #1 improvement. #2 was ditching the apple mouse and apple track pad for a track ball mouse. The braces help with cubital tunnel syndrome.

It sucks. But my body could be broken in other ways. I'll take this inconvenience. Hopefully it doesn't get worse before I retire.