MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slurpyb | 2025-05-14 22:31:33+00:00
It’s so cool that we’re all actively participating in the handover of all our work to these massive companies so we can be forever reliant on their blackbox subscriptions. Don’t fret; there will be a day where those profit numbers will have to go up and they will consciously make the product worse, just to trigger more queries, and thus extract more money from you. Gross.
by HWR_14 | 2025-05-14 22:31:45+00:00
I looked up the cost to FedEx an envelope to somewhere in the US. Looks like $10 is about standard (unless you want to go too far or too rural). The USPS will send an envelope anywhere for $0.74. 10/0.74 = 13.5x

The USPS has a monopoly on traditional delivery to a mailbox. So FedEx walks all the way to the door which makes it not "traditional delivery"
by gotoeleven | 2025-05-14 22:32:10+00:00
It's nice that all those numbers are up, but it would be great also to see some metrics that attempted to measure the overall utility of the change. Something like avg time spent commuting, or really commute_time * dollars_spent_commuting^B where B is some parameter for the relative utility of time and money. Of course B is different for everyone but something like this could be attempted.

Stated another way, if they made congestion pricing $1000 instead of $15 or whatever it is, all those numbers mentioned in the article would go way way up and it would look like a smashing success. The article doesn't make any attempt to measure anything that could potentially be a downside.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 22:32:39+00:00
> That is basic economics and I see it all the time in the marketplace

Yes, it’s a market failure. The solution is not to never attempt anything that might result in market failure.

> Wait until the competition cancels your favorite air route and see what happens to the prices

Bad comparison. The locality controls the airport. Not the route. Not the destination. With Uber, the locality controls the pick-up and at least significant parts of the route. (There also isn’t any federal preëmption of ride share regulation the way there is in the air.)

> What are the easy remedies? Restart public transit?

In the event Uber bankrupts the bus system and also Lyft and Waymo? Tax them. Increase use fees. Revoke bus lane privileges.

Again, this is a bogeyman. It’s never actually happened in urban transportation in the modern era, particularly, never with Uber.
by anyfoo | 2025-05-14 22:32:53+00:00
PL/SQL, not SQL. Whatever I knew about PL/SQL in the 90s and early 2000s I've forgotten, but I wouldn't be so certain that PL/SQL a) does not have precise enough timing primitives, and b) does not get JITed down into machine code nowadays. It is a fully fledged, turing complete programming language with loops, arrays etc.
by deepsun | 2025-05-14 22:32:57+00:00
I believe they are considered to be filling a niche when public transport sucks. I doubt Norway needs them, they have one of the best public transport system (although I've been to Oslo a loong time ago).

But if a city really invest into public transportation, there's no need in the small routed hailing vans, because they have lower throughput. E.g. in Bogota a good bus system (they couldn't build a subway because soils) performed better than Busetas (aka Marshrutki). They did dedicated bus lanes for high-speed large buses. Although compared to Bogota, typical US/EU city has way lower ridership I think.
by FiniteField | 2025-05-14 22:33:00+00:00
Demographics by births are much more meaningful than the total population because it's only births (and more immigration of course) that informs all future generations. Even if all immigration was halted today, the Britain of the future will be ~50% native (not taking into account the statistically lower native birth rates).

>if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British

Not exactly. "White British" as a compound noun means "ethnically British", not "white AND a British citizen".

>Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.

Large areas of England do not speak English as their first language, and there are rapidly evolving youth dialects with strong black and other minority ethnic influences. As a reminder, the mutation of Old English due to Norman French influences took centuries. It's not at all out of the question that even the current already-done migration may cause the largest transformation of the language since the Normans.
by johnea | 2025-05-14 22:33:42+00:00
I could definitely see that being the case in this so called "white genocide" thing on grok, but I still have to wonder in general.

For instance with the Chinese models refusing to acknowledge Tienanmen square (as an example). I wonder about the ability to determine if such a bias is inherent in the data of the model, and what tools might exist to analyze models to determine how their training data might lead to some intentional influence on what the LLM might output.

I'm not an LLM expert (and never will be), so I'm hoping someone with deeper knowledge can shed some light...
by mdeeks | 2025-05-14 22:34:10+00:00
I ride the bus and Bart in the San Francisco bay area and I've lived here my entire adult life. It is not fine. About once a week some kind of event happens. Off the top of my head these are things I have experienced both on Bart and AC Transit (though mainly Bart):

* I've been punched twice. Not hard, but an angry person hitting me in the shoulder and the back because they were drunk or high and I guess I looked at them wrong

* I've been shoved out of the way hard probably five separate times?

* People openly smoking crack, smoking weed.

* People high out of their mind. Just on monday some guy had his pants around his ankles high out of his mind swirling around and rubbing up against riders.

* A man shouting and punching the top of the train saying he's going to kill himself

* A man screaming profanities, calling women the c-word, sluts, saying he's going to rape people

* Multiple fights

* Someone getting their phone swiped out of their hand and punched in the head when he tried to chase them.

* I watched someone eat most of a burrito, stand up, turn it upside down and squish it onto the seat.

* I saw a man with a concealed gun tucked behind him into his belt walking around the station looking for someone.

These are definitely some of the worst events, but something on the spectrum of "bad" happens weekly.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-14 22:34:35+00:00
> Yes. Java and python are not competitive for graphics and audio processing.

Because Python is an interpreted language and Java has garbage collection, not because they have bounds checking.

Using a language like Rust the bounds checking overhead compared to C code is usually minimal, like 0-5%. The compiler can even optimize away many bounds checks (safely) if you structure your code properly, such as with iterators.

Here's an example article : https://shnatsel.medium.com/how-to-avoid-bounds-checks-in-ru...

Make sure you read the note about how the author was mistaken about the 15% speedup from bounds checking. The actual bounds check change was much less, like a couple percent. You can even structure your code so that the bounds check disappears altogether when the compiler can confirm safety at compile time.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-14 22:34:36+00:00
>people get shot and battered from road rage incidents,

Yes, they do. I was specifically thinking of replies like this when I said the risk is "almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves."

>I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage.

And what role did they play in developing that situation? I'm serious. The frequency of road range in which the victim did not take action or willful inaction through ignorance or malice is vanishingly, vanishingly, tiny. While I am sympathetic to people who do truly mean well but are simply ignorant the degree to which road rage is a meeting between those disposed to violence and those disposed to entitlement and "bad but within the rules" behavior I consider it a generally self solving problem.

It's kind of like my elderly and senile mother who's been in a couple accidents that aren't technically "her fault" but she most certainly precipitated by failing to drive responsibly even though she doesn't see why it might not be ideal of her to panic stop rather than miss her exist on a major highway in a major city.
by ramoz | 2025-05-14 22:34:54+00:00
My speculation is that these companies have significant reason to prioritize lowering the amount of tokens produced as well as cost of tokens.

The leaked Claude Code codebase was riddled with "concise", "do not add comments", "mimic codestyle", even an explicit "You should minimize output tokens as much as possible" etc. Btw, Claude Code uses a custom system prompt, not the leaked 24k claude.ai one.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-14 22:35:04+00:00
> Why isn't it?

I didn't say it isn't good. I'm saying that Carmack wasn't convinced of the utility until much later after the entire industry had adopted it. 5 years is wrong (time flies) it was 2011 when he made statements about how it's actually a good thing.

> Well, it is.

Not something I'm disputing. I'm disputing the degree of slowness, particularly in languages with good JITs such as Java and Javascript. There's an overestimation on how much the language matters.

> Gmail is super nice, but it's slower than almost desktop email program

Now that's a weird comparison.

A huge portion of what makes gmail slow is that it's a gigantic and at this point somewhat dated javascript application.

Look, not here to defend JS as the UX standard of modern app dev, I don't love it.

What I'm talking about slow networks is mainly in terms of backend servers talking to one another. Because of the speed of light, there's always going to be some major delays moving data out of the datacenter into a consumer device. Within the datacenter, however, things will be pretty dang nippy.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-14 22:35:22+00:00
> But then again, isn't a good portion of this thread non-mathematicians arguing about what math is?

No, a good chunk is clarification of "WTF do you mean?"

The abstract arguing I suspect we all find to not be interesting and absurd. Let's go to substance here..

The article has stated there is evidence that the math related regions of the brain are not nearly as heavily used when coding as compared to the language regions. The "mathematicians" seem to be arguing that this can't be true because coding and math are so closely related.

This is why the article and evidence are interesting. Coding and math are clearly and very closely related in many ways. Yet, the way the brain handles and interprets coding is more akin to pure language, than it is to pure math.

Which I suppose makes it all the more interesting that Math, Language, and coding are so related, yet (per the evidence and the article) - the brain does not see it that way.
by vel0city | 2025-05-14 22:35:35+00:00
Sorry, I meant to add "in any given day" in that.

I'm in my car multiple times a day. I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so. And I do agree in any given situation I'm more likely to be seriously injured using a power tool than I am driving, but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 22:35:52+00:00
> Telling me the (allegedly, but very publicly and loudly) Christian country is more collectivist than both Canada and Mexico is odd

OP mentioned Nashville. I wasn’t considering places outside America. Within America, New York is unique in those aspects. As a global city, it’s strikingly inefficient.

> point is that the social cachet around vehicle ownership is marketing, pushed by car dealerships (among other institutions)

Sure. Whatever. I disagree, but that’s irrelevant. It’s the field we’re given to play. We can complain about the field or we can play to win.

Lots of problems could be solved if wishing upon a star that people were different did anything. It doesn’t. So we’re left with real solutions and pipe dreams. If one side offers only the latter, particularly if conspiratorially tinted, you go with the other option.
by matt_s | 2025-05-14 22:35:56+00:00
Smart juniors shouldn't be juniors long. I think another angle to think about this is Junior devs that can leverage AI to learn have a much shorter path to Senior than current Seniors had to take (aka the hard way). If as a Junior you know of things to look out for but don't know the implementation details, AI can help you.

For really obscure issues or bugs, I had to scroll through seemingly random StackOverflow results (or Experts Exchange, ha) looking for exact issues that I had, weeding through answers that weren't relevant, things based on older versions, etc. Now you give the context to AI tech stack, data, and your source code, explain the problem with the error message, and ask what might be happening and that shaves a few hours off the old way of trial and error. Even if the 1st answer isn't totally right, a few follow on questions will help narrow it down.
by anyfoo | 2025-05-14 22:36:07+00:00
I don't know. PL/SQL (which is separate from SQL) is effectively a general purpose language, and kind of a beast at that. I have not the faintest idea, but at least I wouldn't be surprised to see high enough precision timers, and maybe it even getting JITted down into machine code for performance nowadays. (And I've read that tight loops can be used for timing in side channel attacks as well, although I assume it requires a lot more knowledge about the device you're running on.)

A quick search reveals that there is at least a timer mechanism, but I have no idea of any of its properties: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1...

But what I'm actually trying to say, is: For multiple intents and purposes (which might or might not include relevance to this specific vulnerability), as soon as you allow stored procedures in your database, "not running arbitrary code" is not a generally true statement instead.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-14 22:36:58+00:00
I went to look at infinite craft.

It provides a panel filled with slowly moving dots. Right of the panel, there are objects labeled "water", "fire", "wind", and "earth" that you can instantiate on the panel and drag around. As you drag them, the background dots, if nearby, will grow lines connecting to them. These lines are not persistent.

And that's it. Nothing ever happens, there are no interactions except for the lines that appear while you're holding the mouse down, and while there is notionally a help window listing the controls, the only controls are "select item", "delete item", and "duplicate item". There is also an "about" panel, which contains no information.
by pixelatedindex | 2025-05-14 22:37:10+00:00
> but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go

I don’t understand… do you not go to places where the poor go? Is there no transit to take you to parks and malls and theaters and stadiums? I suspect it’s more that taking your private vehicle is easier and faster, and not because there isn’t service - it probably just sucks.
by lxgr | 2025-05-14 22:37:15+00:00
None of the common passkey implementations support attestation.

Apple doesn't support it at all anymore; Google only supports it for non-synchronized credentials (which are arguably not passkeys). Bitwarden obviously doesn't either (it can't, as a pure software implementation).

> One of the developers already threatened to use it against keepass when they built an export feature he didn't agree with.

Developer of what? There's no competing software solution that supports attestation, and hardware authenticators complement software ones, rather than compete with them.
by thiht | 2025-05-14 22:38:15+00:00
Damn now I’m curious what I could do in 2 hours, this is the kind of things where you can easily get carried away so 4 hours feel like 2. I don’t have 2 hours (or 4) to waste to do this but it itches a little bit.

Anyway in 2 hours I’m pretty sure I can write some Go code that would get me an offer. This is not about the amount of features, it’s about giving them what they want.
by lxgr | 2025-05-14 22:40:15+00:00
This is largely a problem because the specification does not cleanly call these out as two completely different feature sets, e.g. via "profiles" or a similar mechanism.

Effectively implementations already do that, and the spec could clear things up a lot by clearly defining one profile for synchronizing, non-attestation-capable, discoverable credentials called "passkeys", and another for hardware-backed, non-exportable, attestation-supporting ones called something else.
by epistasis | 2025-05-14 22:40:22+00:00
As someone with children, I can not imagine the bliss of living in Manhattan and being able to do things without needing a car.

Car-centric urban planning is hell with kids. You have to load them up into the car for any small trip. You can't walk or bike anywhere because cars make it so dangerous.

My only regret about living in the US is this car hellscape that is so hard to avoid. It's mandated by law, not chosen by the market.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-14 22:40:35+00:00
The website appears vibe coded, as do the product-hunt reviews with "RightNow AI is an impressive..." appearing more than would be expected by random chance.

Either someone is good at writing CUDA Kernels and a 1-10% perf improvement is impressive, or they're bad at writing CUDA Kernels and a 2x-4x over naïve very often isn't impressive.

What percentage of people who do write custom CUDA kernels are bad at it? How many are so bad at it that they leave 20x on the table as claimed on the website?

What could have helped sell it to me as a concept is an example of a before and after.

EDIT: One of the reviews states "RightNow AI is an innovative tool designed to help developers profile and optimize CUDA code efficiently. Users have praised its ability to identify bottlenecks and enhance GPU performance. For example, one user stated, "RightNow AI is a game-changer for GPU optimization."" I think some of the AI prompt has leaked into the output.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 22:41:14+00:00
> government gave them over 700 000km2 of land as an incentive

Absolutely. I’m not arguing for the superiority of private enterprise. Just that we shouldn’t be biased to one model versus another, particularly when it comes to building versus operating infrastructure. It’s eminently true that this infrastructure was built by private companies. Same is true for what Uber is proposing. The lesson is that there needs to be public guidance, not that we should say no to protect bus drivers or whatnot.
by hx8 | 2025-05-14 22:42:04+00:00
Probably 80% of the time I spend coding, I'm inside a code file I haven't read in the last month. If I need to spend more than 30 seconds reading a section of code before I understand it, I'll ask AI to explain it to me. Usually, it does a good job of explaining code at a level of complexity that would take me 1-15 minutes to understand, but does a poor job of answering more complex questions or at understanding more complex code.

It's a moderately useful tool for me. I suspect the people that get the most use out of are those that would take more than 1 hour to read code I would take 10 minutes to read. Which is to say the least experienced people get the most value.
by FiniteField | 2025-05-14 22:42:31+00:00
I don't mean to say this as a challenge to what you said, but as a genuine question: Do you hold any value in the continued existence of the red squirrel in Great Britain? Would you see its extinction as any kind of loss? I know many people that are hugely invested in securing the red squirrel, but would never be seen dead expressing any kind of hesitancy towards the idea of their own ethnic group disappearing. I've always found it a little odd, given that squirrels don't have culture, traditions, or a written history attached, and it's purely aesthetic.
by igouy | 2025-05-14 22:42:40+00:00
> but I will never get used to using a graphical VM and UI to develop ordinary programs.

I guess that by "ordinary programs" you mean command-line TUI programs.

Being able to explore and inspect helps whether you are writing GUI or TUI.

When you write Smalltalk code with a Smalltalk IDE, your actions have an implicit context. If you write Smalltalk code with a plain text editor, you must provide that missing context. Something like the fileOut format —

!BenchmarksGame class methodsFor: 'initialize-release'!

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
by vel0city | 2025-05-14 22:43:08+00:00
> And what role did they play in developing that situation?

Driving the speed limit and stopping at a stop sign was one of these instances. I watched the dash cam of that.

Another instance I saw was someone flying up a shoulder trying to get around a big traffic jam. After three or four cars denied him merging in, he took out a gun and started shooting at cars.

And you're still just going to ignore all the victims of people not paying attention, of people tailgating, of drunk drivers, of people driving recklessly.
by theshackleford | 2025-05-14 22:43:39+00:00
> but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small window.

Owning a display that can do 1300+ nits sustained across a 100% window has been the biggest display upgrade I think I have ever had. It's given me a tolerance for LCD, a technology I've hated since the death of CRTs and turned me away from OLED.

There was a time I would have said i'd never own a non OLED display again. But a capable HDR display changed that logic in a big way.

Too bad the motion resolution on it, especially compared to OLED is meh. Again, at one point, motion was the most important aspect to me (its why I still own CRTs) but this level of HDR...transformative for lack of a better word.
by er4hn | 2025-05-14 22:43:41+00:00
In China in particular a smartphone is the primary means to interact with restaurant menus, place orders, and pay for many things. Rentable battery packs are also pretty ubiquitous.

I once asked an in-law what happens if your phone completely runs out of food and you're hungry. He (jokingly) replied "no phone, no eat".
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 22:44:08+00:00
> they’re not supposed to be “comfortable” if the frame of reference used are AC/sleek private vehicles

Sure. But that means you have no buy in from the latter. If you add a shuttle service, with a forward-looking eye to self-piloted vehicles, you increase use and potentially also revenues to reïnvest in uncomfortable busses.
by pixelatedindex | 2025-05-14 22:44:16+00:00
Buses are a service to take you from point A to point B. Your taxes fund them. It is a cost center. I don’t know why people think it must continually generate profit. A good transit system should be able to move people and generally helps stimulate local economy. The better the service, more people use it. Most buses and trains are electric now too, so they don’t pollute either.
by floxy | 2025-05-14 22:44:56+00:00
I think once self-driving cars reach a pretty low popularity threshold, that there will be a lot of pressure to get the worst offenders out of driving. Maybe due to insurance costs if nothing else. Like, you get a DUI conviction, and your license is revoked for say 5 years (and no exceptions for driving to work). But people won't feel sorry for you, since it will just mean that you have to take an AV. Same for the elderly. If we revoke your drivers license automatically at 75, it just means you have to use an AV, instead of being a major loss of independence.