MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-05-15 01:47:36+00:00
Japan has a 99% conviction rate, and still has 56% of women reporting having been groped on transit.

This cannot be solved. To force women on transit is to flip a coin whether they will be assaulted. You’re not going to beat a car culture with that strategy.

I heavily doubt that New York City has the appetite for incarceration that would be necessary, for even a remote chance, to turn public transit into a merely neutral option versus a car.

What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease. Just like that, the dream was dead and I realized we will never escape car culture.

Cars are bad. The alternatives are too flawed and dangerous in their own ways, to have any serious chance at unseating the incumbent.
by jasonjayr | 2025-05-15 01:48:03+00:00
I promise you I would not. I do not want my technology baby-sat by a third party, I want my technology to do exactly what I want.

I also promise I wouldn't run a game or anything that demanded full access to everything that made no sense to have that permission, because what the heck? Outlook wanted "Device administrator" permission on my personal phone when I wanted to connect my office email to it. I politely declined, and stopped using it. (I mean, I understand WHY Outlook needs that, for secure wipe of data, but that's a pretty wide permission for that one reason)

I cringe as I watch one of my kids authorize elevated permissions when they launch Genshin. (For the anti-cheat) And I promise them I will never run it on my machines :-/

But rather than get lost in the details, what I REALLY want, is a piece of software that will backup and restore the entire contents of the phone to a server of my choice, preferably self-hosted. Right now, this "full system access" option gets the job done, but it's a thermonuclear footgun for the unsuspecting.

How could we convince google to create a new a "Full backup of the device" permission? Because then Google could simply deny the permission labeled "full backup" to the latest hot new gacha game, while allowing legit backup apps the power they need?
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-15 01:49:39+00:00
You aren’t exactly going to find an SFH in the suburbs that is much cheaper. So you have a point, but you have to choose between an SFH, a similar priced townhome (basically an SFH without a yard), or a condo with an HOA, all basically unaffordable unless you want to commute from Kent or Marysville. Seattle still has density (the townhome I live in in Ballard is one of three that used to be one SFH).
by opan | 2025-05-15 01:52:14+00:00
Is this a realistic option? Say you're an American and go to Canada or the UK (I don't know where else has universal healthcare off the top of my head, maybe nordic countries). Can you get treatment without being a citizen or owning land, do they care if it's a prior condition? I wonder how long and difficult the process would be. Also worth noting that some countries like Japan ban certain medications like Adderall, so depending on what you need, not all countries can give you the same things you can get in the US.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-15 01:52:38+00:00
China is going to reap more benefits from self driving cars, but they also have (in many cities at least) mass transit in place to truly do multi-modal trips (self driving cars at the end tips of subway rides).

The problem with self driving cars is that they can only optimize road bandwidth a bit more than they are now (and even then, only if you outlaw human drivers), they aren’t a magical shortcut to increasing bandwidth beyond indicated demand (like mass transit can).
by gottorf | 2025-05-15 01:53:20+00:00
A few points.

1. A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train), is unacceptable to bear, when there exist alternatives.

1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly or wrongly, people feel more in control when they're driving compared to when they're using public transit (or similarly, taking a commercial flight), which makes them feel better about it. And there is some element of sense here: accidents do not occur evenly among the population, because some drivers are better and more alert than others.

2. If you're traveling with small children, the various (however rare it may be) unpleasantries of NYC public transit become an order of magnitude more unpleasant.

3. There certainly is an element of Stockholm syndrome among NYC transit users, in that other very large cities around the world with ridership comparable to NYC have very little antisocial dysfunction, but in NYC it often gets waved away as "part and parcel of living in a big city".
by maxcomperatore | 2025-05-15 01:53:25+00:00
Usually for screenings i will do a notion page i can glance over in the interview that contains the following

- who are you (introduction)

- how i fit the role (experience, projects, etc)

- occasionally some moments when I showed x,y,z (STAR) if they ask something behavioral or to add to the conversation if things go quiet

- questions. Make 2-3 sharp questions that make them uncomfortable (ej. Why engineers leave this company, how do i compare with other candidates and the one you are looking for, if a client had infinite budget, would they choose your competitor instead of you?) Or elses. If they respond honestly good, if not, redflag.

The more interested in the job, the most time I'll devote here. If it's meh job I will take 30 minutes to do all this before the meeting.

Hope this helps.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-05-15 01:53:44+00:00
It seems common for people to struggle with something that's, to simplify, bad about the world, and to get many responses along the lines of "do x differently to deal with it." These responses may help the person or may not, and I'm completely in favor of responding pragmatically to your circumstances, but a fundamental function of the exchange should also be to change minds on the thing that's bad about the world so this happens less in the future. The individual complaints can be the trigger for that change, or can help it along, but instead usually get mired in responses which suggest individual solutions. I don't think that's smart for us in the long run.
by iLemming | 2025-05-15 01:54:04+00:00
Your understanding of immutability feels skewed here. Every time you annotate the PDF, it creates a new version. Even when you overwrite the same file, the structure of the original document changes, therefore creating a new document, ultimately making it "the ship of Theseus.pdf"

Sure, someone may try using the same argument, applying it to .doc and .txt documents, yet there is a general consensus saying that pdfs were designed to "resist the change". You can probably self-illustrate the point by making changes to a .txt document and then removing your changes - the md5 of the file would remain the same.
by pfranz | 2025-05-15 01:54:49+00:00
Stereo film has its own limitations. Sadly, shooting for stereo was expensive and often corners were cut just to get it to show up in a theater where they can charge a premium for a stereo screening. Home video was always a nightmare--nobody wants to wear glasses (glassesless stereo TVs had a very narrow viewing angle).

It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning from one object to another implies a connection. It's built on the visual language of still photography (things like rule of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc). All directing your eye.

Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to connect something in the foreground to the background. In stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the camera the same way. In regular film, you could show someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird.

When you're presenting something you're always directing where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium.

I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like rom coms.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-15 01:55:01+00:00
The only HDR monitors I have actually enjoyed (which, admittedly, is a slightly higher bar than "most of this price aren't completely miscalibrated") have been $1500+ which is a bit ridiculous considering far cheaper TVs do far better with HDR (though tend to suck as monitors). In the Odyssey line this would be the Neo G9 options, but I've never went home with one because they lack flat variants for the ones with good HDR.
by Skylyz | 2025-05-15 01:56:03+00:00
And the invention of AGI will have the same impact as the electricity, i mean, they're both inventions, right ? I can't wait for all these billions of new full time jobs coming to replace the current ones.

Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.

Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.

I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.

And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.
by sreekanth850 | 2025-05-15 01:56:39+00:00
It's wild and hilarious, how often startups and companies go for distributed databases like CockroachDB/TiDB/Yugabyte before they actually need distribution, this trends sucks. 100 million rows is nothing that a well-tuned Postgres or MySQL instance (or even read-replicated setup) can't handle comfortably. Scale when you hit the wall.
by johnecheck | 2025-05-15 01:57:14+00:00
Solutions to any given problem are necessarily described with types. You can check those types at runtime or you can check them at compile time, but meaningful programs are typed. If you've got a function that takes a string and your type system lets you run a program where you pass an int to it... did it just allow you to 'quickly iterate'? Sure, you're running a program sooner, but you're going to run into the same type error (function expects string, not int).

Maybe in a larger code base you could argue that the effort involved in satisfying typechecks meaningfully slows down iteration, but even then it's clear that being able to compute the list of type errors you introduced elsewhere (via static typing semantics/analysis) is valuable.
by kasey_junk | 2025-05-15 01:57:21+00:00
Oh they aren’t like time based instructions or anything. First thing I do when I sit down in the morning is go through the list of tasks I thought up overnight and fire devin at them. Then I go do whatever “real” work I needed to get done. Then at lunch I check in to see how things are going and give feedback or new tasks. Same as the last thing I do at night.

It keeps _me_ from context switching into agent manager mode. I do the same thing for doing code reviews for human teammates as well.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-15 01:57:40+00:00
I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.

As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.

[1]: https://nypost.com/2025/04/03/us-news/nyc-subway-crime-drops...
by dahart | 2025-05-15 01:57:59+00:00
I agree capture, format and display are closely related. But HDR capture and processing specifically developed outside of HDR display devices, and use of HDR displays changes how HDR images are used compared to LDR displays.

> The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the words

Hey I’m sorry for criticizing, but I honestly feel like you’re being slightly misleading here. The sentence “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?” is explicitly claiming that analog photographers use “HDR” capture, and the Ansel Adams sentence that follows appears to be merely a specific example of your claim. The result of the juxtaposition is that the article did in fact claim Adams used HDR, even if you didn’t quite intend to.

I think you’re either misunderstanding me a little, or maybe unaware of some of the context of HDR and its development as a term of art in the computer graphics community. Film’s 12 stops is not really “high” range by HDR standards, and a little exposure latitude isn’t where “HDR” came from. The more important part of HDR was the intent to push toward absolute physical units like luminance. That doesn’t just enable deferred exposure, it enables physical and perceptual processing in ways that aren’t possible with film. It enables calibrated integration with CG simulation that isn’t possible with film. And it enables a much wider rage of exposure push/pull than you can do when going from 12 stops to 8. And of course non-destructive digital deferred exposure at display time is quite different from a print exposure.

Perhaps it’s useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a counterpart called LDR that’s referring to 8 bits/channel RGB. With analog photography, there is no LDR, thus zero reason to invent the notion of a ‘higher’ range. Higher than what? High relative to what? Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture any range you want. There is no ‘high’ range in analog photos, there’s just range. HDR was invented to push against and evolve beyond the de-facto digital practices of the 70s-90s, it is not a statement about what range can be captured by a camera.
by bittercynic | 2025-05-15 01:58:58+00:00
Though the thesis of the article is clearly true, the way they discuss manufacturing crime panics detracts from the argument. There actually does seem to be something going on with retail theft, and I say this based on speaking to people who work in retail.

2 retail workers in the last 2 weeks have told me about thefts happening in their stores where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and rolls it out the door. It doesn't mean that society is crumbling or that we need police to be more vicious, but I think there is something going on and it would be worthwhile to address it somehow. It feels corrosive to the fabric of society when this stuff happens. Maybe not as corrosive as cops beating and killing people, but it's also bad.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-05-15 01:59:16+00:00
> Forty percent of these gang members are domestic abusers, routinely assaulting their spouses or children

Bet you can't source that. At least, in a manner that matches your point about the 1M officers in America.

How do I know? Because I know the exact study that the number is derived from that people blindly repeat, and let's just say it is not a particularly powerful analysis.
by mancerayder | 2025-05-15 02:00:22+00:00
Oof. I know people with kids in the city, and it seems like if you're taking public transit, it's a nightmare when they're little.

(When they're teenagers who knows, you have new problems)

People who live outside of Manhattan have more space and sometimes the optional car.

The professionals are paying an absolute fortune for child care, a salary's worth, and more for bigger apartments in nice neighborhoods.

It's no joke. You'd better be obsessed with the city, or a short commute, because otherwise you're moving to Westchester or NJ or LI.
by anon373839 | 2025-05-15 02:01:32+00:00
Unfortunately, VLMs don’t seem to work. Even the best ones (eg, Gemini 2.5 Pro) hallucinate to a laughable degree. I’ve been seeing them make up large-scale features in images that absolutely no human would ever mistake.

What does work is narrow AI trained to do very specific tasks (such as medical image segmentation). But I don’t think that type of AI will benefit much from massive scaling.
by mcswell | 2025-05-15 02:02:06+00:00
My (mis?)understanding was that two receivers acting as an interferometer can only resolve things that are on a line parallel with the line between the receivers--so if the receivers are on a horizontal, then they can resolve left and right in their targets, but not up and down. But the images shown in the paper have more or less full 360 degrees resolution. Is that because they rotated the target? The paper says they did, but it's not clear how many increments of partial rotation they did--every 10 degrees, 20,...

If the target cannot be rotated, can the two (or more) receivers revolve around a central axis? If so, presumably one of the receivers could revolve around the other (fixed) receiver to the same effect.
by hliyan | 2025-05-15 02:02:24+00:00
Call me old fashioned, but when records start reaching the 100 million range, it's usually an indication that either your dataset is too wide (consider sharding) or too deep (consider time based archival) to fit into a monolithic schema. For context, I've dealt with multiple systems that generate this volume of data between 2003 - 2013 (mostly capital markets, but also some govt/compliance work) with databases and hardware from that era, and we rarely had an issue that could not be solved by either query optimization, caching, sharding or archival, usually in that order.

Secondly, we did most of these things using SQL, Bash scripts, cron jobs and some I/O logic built directly into the application code. They were robust enough to handle some extremely mission critical systems (a failure could bring down a US primary market and if it's bad enough, you hear it on the news).
by spjt | 2025-05-15 02:02:55+00:00
What usually happens to me is, I get stuck where whatever service I'm using insists the password must be changed RIGHT NOW before proceeding. There was something I was trying to do. Maybe I don't have a pen, I'm on my phone, whatever, I don't have time for this shit. I need to change it to something I will remember, which is something like "Password1". Maybe I remember to pick a better one later, maybe I don't. Maybe (looking at you, Okta) I can't change the password because I changed it too recently...
by DonEsquire | 2025-05-15 02:03:38+00:00
Great points (and appreciate the coffeebreak recommendation!). Totally agree that the AI evaluation has plenty of inconsistency and errors.

I do want to clarify - it is more like audio only practice for digital flashcards. Meaning the prompt & response are both expected to be defined ahead of time. That way, GPT (as of today), is instructed to evaluate the semantic meaning of the user's response compared to the correct response.
by pojzon | 2025-05-15 02:03:42+00:00
I really enjoy this comment.

> Postgres is the best answer if you have a solid team and you know what you’re doing.

Not every type of data simply fits into relational model.

Example: time series data.

So depending on your model - pick your poison.

But for relational models, there is hardly anything better than postgres now.

It makes me happy coz I always rooted for the project from earily 2000s.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-15 02:03:54+00:00
Thinking about this a bit more.. I think I can refute your statement that "coding is math" and not "coding uses math".

I'm sorry the conversation got so caught up on pedantics.

Previously I would have quite readily agreed that at least "coding is a subset of math" - now I'd only agree in the sense that coding is an applied math, just like Physics is applied Math.

So, it does seem to be clearly a 'uses' relationship, and I'll support the assertion. To explain, coding is the act of creating a series of boolean expression (governed by boolean algebra) to create a desired output from a given input. To really explain, code is translated to assembly, which is then translated to binary, which then directly maps to how electrical signals flow out of CPU registers into a series of logical circuits. Assuming no faulty circuits, that flow is completely governed by boolean algebra. We therefore use boolean algebra to create our programs, we define a series of boolean operations to achieve a certain goal. We are _using_ boolean algebra to arrange a series of operations that maps a given set of inputs to a desired output. In the colloquial sense, coding is applied math, it is not pure math though. We use boolean algebra to create our programs, the programs are not boolean algebra themselves, but an application of boolean algebra.

Now, tying it all back to the article and implications. The data collected stated that the language parts of the brain are more responsible for whether we are able to learn programming. That seems to imply that the math part of programming is so far abstracted, that the parts of the brain which are used for math are no longer the most salient.

I wonder how the experiments and results in the article would have gone had the topic been electrical circuits and electrical engineering, which is far closer to the underlying math than coding.
by josecodea | 2025-05-15 02:04:02+00:00
Independence in choosing an implementation is never ever going to give you good results at a job where you have to report to someone else.

I have been at those jobs.

Trust me (or not): even if you are given this kind of freedom at first, it comes back to bite. You want to get the person in charge to agree with your design for any project that takes a week or longer. Otherwise, the moment that your solution does not create the expected happiness in the stakeholders, you are in a position to become the scapegoat.

This sounds cynical at first, but it's just reality. Besides, imagine if you were the boss of someone... It would be of immense value to get a specific plan for a large project before it even begins. There is nothing good about the uncertainty of not having a plan.

Remember this: I did not ask for the plan to be given to me, I created the plan and offered it as a proposal. I am the one doing all of the difficult pieces, and serving it on a golden platter to the person in charge.
by Larrikin | 2025-05-15 02:04:05+00:00
If I live in a NYC like this how do I visit my friends in Philadelphia? What if they live in Towson MD? Now what if they live in the suburbs? How would I visit anybody in the country side anywhere? What if I want to buy in bulk at Costco? What if I just want to buy anything I can't carry on the subway?

I have spent over a decade without owning a car in multiple cities. It's definitely possible but I've been fortunate enough to have friends and family with personal vehicles I can use.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-15 02:04:11+00:00
Welcome to the club, I suppose.

I am eternal optimist, but pragmatic as well. I have tried many avenues and have varying amounts of hits and misses over the decades.

I realize it is geography, luck, happenstance (and other factors) for most part in finding a co-founder.

I also realize a shared experience or pain is pivotal in finding and keeping a co-founder.

MeetUps and CoFounder Dating and other sites are good, but hard to find the ying for your yang (for lack of a better term) by just talking to some random person at a random meetup. It is not impossible, of course.

So no answers here and I haven’t found any myself - yet!