MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-05-15 04:24:39+00:00
It really is impressive at how terrible they manage to make the time/location coverage. My most recent trip I took because I was bored and thought it would be novel to see if my city's buses have improved is a 10 minute drive by car. Bus stop is right by the start and end. And they get for free the wait time until the first bus. It took two hours and three buses to get me to my destination. I was the only rider on every leg so it was actually pretty novel to get a private bus.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-05-15 04:24:49+00:00
The "good reason" is that modern web devs do not consider SQL a core skill, and plain do not understand databases. To be a competing modern web framework you have to include an ORM so these people will consider you.

Trying to explain to a modern web dev that the optimum data storage structure is not the same as the optimum application layer data structure, so you can't just take one and map them across 1:1 to the other, is really painful.

Developing without an ORM is just as quick as developing with one (because the time you save on routine queries you will more than lose on the tricky edge cases that the ORM completely screws up on). But you need to know SQL and databases to do it.
by silisili | 2025-05-15 04:25:25+00:00
I'm not sure how younger folks would feel seeing this...perhaps that it's ugly, less useful, sparse. And they'd be a bit right.

But for me this was a hit of pure nostalgia, flipping item to item. Almost like looking through an old photo album of memories you'd forgotten years back. Thanks Neal for putting it together.

Slightly fun fact - the original Space Jam site stayed intact until 2021!

https://web.archive.org/web/20210105185246/https://www.space...
by kaliqt | 2025-05-15 04:25:30+00:00
Postgres finishes its updates sub-ms in a reasonably sized DB if optimized correctly. In terms of upper-scale (>1000 players in a somewhat real-world scenario), we're working out benchmarks to test that.

Postgres is not slow by any stretch of the imagination, but it depends on how the schema is setup and what layers you have between the user and the DB, naturally any game developer will want to tweak the client+schema before going live. The layers between we manage to make it as minimal as possible, so that shouldn't be touched, if it's too slow for a reasonable use case, it means we have more optimization to do!
by sitharus | 2025-05-15 04:25:31+00:00
I don't hate prisma - it's just a tool - but that's far from the only limiting factor.

I recently looked at migrating a legacy project with basic SQL query generation to a modern ORM. Prisma came up top of course so I tried it.

We use Postgres built-in range types. Prisma does not support these, there's no way to add the type to the ORM. You can add them using "Unsupported", but fields using that aren't available in queries using the ORM, so that's pretty useless.

It also requires a binary to run, which would require different builds for each architecture deployed to. Not a big thing but it was more annoying than just switching the ORM.

That coupled with their attitude to joins - which has truth to it, but it's also short-sighted - eliminated Prisma.

The final decision was to switch to Kysely to do the SQL building and provide type-safe results, which is working well.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-15 04:26:16+00:00
> Total offloading cripples true learning but maximizes short-term speed and output, and finding the right balance is crucial.

LLMs help you go fast but going fast keeps you shallow.

Luckily you can fractally take apart something the LLM made for you with the help of, you guessed it, an LLM. “Why did you make this a constant?” “Why is this hoisted?” “What makes this more performant than that?” .. and pretty soon, you’re not dumb anymore. At least in that area.

LLMs are the ultimate tool for self-directed learners.
by mmooss | 2025-05-15 04:26:28+00:00
> your personal experience here is worthless

Why is yours any more worthwhile? When in cities, I regularly interact with people who you might assume are homeless. I think my direct experience is definitely valuable to the conversation - unless it disagrees with you, of course.

> People who are homeless ...

It's your narrative that is worthless.

> They often became homeless because they were impossible to live with.

Is there some data for that? The leading cause of homelessness, last I saw, was losing your home to medical bills. Anyway, I'm not living with them, just talking at the bus stop or outside the store.

> homeless people with all their marbles generally make an effort not to seem homeless and don't ask strangers for anything

That is certainly untrue. The confused and mentally ill people generally are in their own worlds. The people talking are fine. Maybe if you act with hostility or defensiveness, you get a different response, but I guarantee if you just stop worrying about it and behave decently as you (hopefully) do with anyone else, it's really no issue at all.

> you'll never meet, or help, the homeless people who aren't pestering you and bothering you and invading your space.

You're just making things up, including that homeless people are pestering and bothering me, etc. IME, which is considerable, people who seem homeless are no different than other people, except they are vulnerable and don't dress as well.

> there's no reason to completely avoid drawing any conclusions or making any generalizations about them

There are plenty of very strong reasons to avoid conclusions about people you don't know - you don't know what you are talking about and will harm the people. Generalizations do the same thing, denying people their basic freedom to be themselves and be responsible for their own consequences, not someone else you met a year ago.

It's also a reason my direct experience is valuable, and your generalizations are worthless. Any serious pursuit of knowledge - science, courts, etc. - utterly reject generalizations and require direct observation.

> I feel it's a clumsy attempt to avoid judging people based on their wealth

That part is intentional and not clumsy at all. It avoids dangerous errors and protects vulnerable people. Looking at behavior today, who are the crazy ones - the billionaires or those without homes?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-15 04:27:39+00:00
I point to a reduction in property crime as being a result. The page you've linked here doesn't attempt to measure retail theft in 2024; it summarizes a report with a data cutoff in 2022.

Notably, if you click into that report, it also illustrates a huge reduction in property crime since California passed its three strikes law in the mid-1990s. That seems like another big example of how we can directly observe "more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer", despite the author's claim that it doesn't.

It really, really seems to me like the author is engaging in the behavior he describes as "copaganda", selectively telling only the stories that fit in with his vision of how public safety ought to work.
by analog31 | 2025-05-15 04:27:45+00:00
I've not used MicroPython, but its fork, CircuitPython. My impression is that it's essentially a Python that doesn't interact with an operating system. Thus if there's a reason for a server to have an OS and interact with it, the regular Python would be preferable.

I also don't know how much of the more advanced optimizations of Python are built into MicroPython. There's always a dilemma between making it performant, and making it micro.
by Lammy | 2025-05-15 04:27:53+00:00
> there was lots of public transportation

There could have been a lot more. The 1929 IND Second System expansion plan is depressing, especially the parts where provisions are already built:

- https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2021/01/ind-second-...

- https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Second_System_-_1929_Plan

- https://www.awakennyc.com/second-system-gems
by pornel | 2025-05-15 04:27:59+00:00
DisplayHDR standard is supposed to be it, but they've ruined its reputation by allowing HDR400 to exist when HDR1000 should have been the minimum.

Besides, HDR quality is more complex than just max nits, because it depends on viewing conditions and black levels (and everyone cheats with their contrast metrics).

OLEDs can peak at 600 nits and look awesome — in a pitch black room. LCD monitors could boost to 2000 nits and display white on grey.

We have sRGB kinda working for color primaries and gamma, but it's not the real sRGB at 80 nits. It ended up being relative instead of absolute.

A lot of the mess is caused by the need to adapt content mastered for pitch black cinema at 2000 nits to 800-1000 nits in daylight, which needs very careful processing to preserve highlights and saturation, but software can't rely on the display doing it properly, and doing it in software sends false signal and risks display correcting it twice.
by kaliqt | 2025-05-15 04:28:02+00:00
Definitely multiplayer games, you wouldn't really need a syncing networking layer if you're doing single player as you can store state in any method you desire, something as simple as serializing JSON to the disk for example, or up to your server. But even then, a traditional setup like Supabase might be simpler to wrap your head around if you're just handing "user" data and not "player" data in a shared world.
by josecodea | 2025-05-15 04:28:56+00:00
Exactly! You are actually considering all the possible ways in which your approach might be wrong and in which the time would be wasted. You are assessing risk before you take action. You are analyzing the subtleties in communication, you determined that the wording relied on a lot of subjective vocabulary and you know that this leads towards misunderstandings. This is, in my humble opinion, the professional way of making decisions as a software engineer.

From reading the other comments, it seems like there are a lot of mind-readers among us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by zacksiri | 2025-05-15 04:30:36+00:00
Have a look here, it's an early preview

https://x.com/zacksiri/status/1922500206127349958

You can see it's going from introduction, asking me for my name, and then able to answer question about some topic. There is also another example in the thread you can see.

Behind the scenes, the system prompt is being modified dynamically based on the user's request.

All the information about movies is also being loaded into context dynamically. I'm also working on some technique to unload stuff from context when the subject matter of a given thread has changed dramatically. Imagine having a long thread of conversation with your friend, and along the way you 'context switch' multiple times as time progresses, you probably don't even remember what you said to your friend 4 years ago.

There is a concept of 'main thread' and 'sub threads' involved as well that I'm exploring.

I will be releasing the code base in the coming months. I need to take this demo further than just a few prompt replies.
by pj_mukh | 2025-05-15 04:31:57+00:00
Orrrr, you can just enforce fare evasion (passively) and mostly solve this problem and solve the other societal problems separately. It’s been tried and it works [1]. I really don’t like everthing bagelling all problems.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-fare-gates-...
by motorest | 2025-05-15 04:32:11+00:00
> I've had the same issue every time I've tried it. The code I generally work on is embedded C/C++ with in-house libraries where the tools are less than useful as they try to generate non-existant interfaces and generally generate worse code than I'd write by hand.

That's because whatever training the model had, it didn't covered anything remotely similar to the codebase you worked on.

We get this issue even with obscure FLOSS libraries.

When we fail to provide context to LLMs, they generate examples by following supperficial queues like coding conventions. In extreme cases, such as code that employs source code generators or templates, LLMs even fill in function bodies that code generators are designed to generate for you. That's because, if LLMs are oblivious to the context, they resort to hallucinate their way into something seemingly coherent. Unless you provide them with context or instruct them not to make up stuff, they will resort to bullshit their way into an example.

What's truly impressive about this is that often times the hallucinated code actually works.

> Generating function documentation hasn't been that useful either as the doc comments generated offer no insight and often the amount I'd have to write to get it to produce anything of value is more effort than just writing the doc comments myself.

Again,this suggest a failure on your side for not providing any context.

If you give it enough context LLMs synthesize and present them almost instantly. If you're prompting a LLM to generate documentation, which boils down to synthesizing what an implementation does and what's their purpose,and the LLM comes up empty, that means you failed to give it anything to work on.

The bulk of your comment screams failure to provide any context. If your code steers far away from what it expects, fails to follow any discernible structure, and doesn't even convey purpose and meaning in little things like naming conventions, you're not giving the LLM anything to work on.
by x-complexity | 2025-05-15 04:33:40+00:00
> > This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit. Of course, it’ll still be much, much worse than a competent bus system. I wonder how well it will work in other countries.

> Why will it be much much worse?

Off the top of my head:

- Efficiency-wise, it's worse to have two things that do the same thing than to have the one thing work as it's supposed to (keyword being 'supposed to').

- (Overlaps with point 1) Market inefficiencies by having marketing & branding overheads for each service, when a single solution would not need to have it.

------

Whilst I agree it would be worse than having an actual competently-run bus system, having no competition causes perverse incentives (both external & internal) to leech into the system & make it incrementally worse.

At the end of the day, it's a sign that's necessary to point out existing failures. Banning this specific sign from existing only allows the failures to worsen, regardless of the intentions behind banning/regulating it out of existence.
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-15 04:34:18+00:00
Not quite. This vulnerability is reading memory that you can directly address.

If you can run arbitrary machine code on a system, that memory is the entire memory space (in theory) - you can assign a value to any pointer and attempt to read that address through side channel attack.

In reality the task is much harder - you don't know where in memory the thing you want is because of ASLR, virtual memory maps, and other factors, and to exploit cache timing attacks you need to have cache eviction happen first, and that's not really that straight forward for some memory addresses.

Javascript that runs in browser on the other hand has a lot more restrictions. You can't dereference a pointer to an arbitrary memory address in JS, you need an existing variable in the current context that is mapped to some memory.
by theamk | 2025-05-15 04:35:11+00:00
If you read the assignment, you can see that the majority of tasks is about UI and user-facing features ("Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality", "Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext", "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.", "It should feel fast and intuitive")

The assignment had exactly 1 line about actual back-endy stuff: "Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real ..."

Now, what did your email asked for? There was a whole bunch of things about back-endy stuff, and exactly 1 (one) sentence about the user-visible things, the thing they cared about the most:

"The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen and two accounts"

So maybe you intended this to be a complete design document, but it actually was not. This is because it did not actually did contain any parts the interviewer cared about. And that's one of the reasons why you got no feedback - you could do _anything_ for the backend and they would likely still accepted that, they simply did not care if you used Pulumi or terraform or "start.sh" or "docker compose up"

And no, you don't need to guess the grading, you just need to read the assignment carefully. What do they seem to want? What kinds of things do they mention a lot? What kind of things do they mention in passing?
by fake-name | 2025-05-15 04:35:21+00:00
> This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models

One general impression I have, having read the reactions by biologists to stuff like Kurzweil and people who believe we're close to a computational understanding of biology is that all the computer science people massively, MASSIVELY underestimate the extent to which we still do not understand how even a single cell works.

Sure, we can model things stochastically, or fiddle with DNA and be able to predict the results, but there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that we only have a functional understanding of. We know with <xxx> input, you get <yyy>, etc..., but the how is still a mystery.

This is everywhere in biology.

If you think biologists are underestimating complexity, you have the sign wrong.
by rohitkhare | 2025-05-15 04:36:12+00:00
Or perhaps the dimension was length, rather than weight?

> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.

From _The Fires_ by Joe Flood (2010) Cited in https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/18z6i09/comment...

But I could not find a quote in the Macnamara interviews from the _Fog of War_ https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html as cited by https://forum.woodenboat.com/forum/the-bilge/28529-the-film-...
by mmooss | 2025-05-15 04:36:56+00:00
Your promise that the obvious economic outcome won't happen, and your insistance that it hasn't happened with Uber, isn't convincing. This is how markets and how aggressive business - particularly modern business - works.

(Also, regarding Uber, how many times have they been in a market with no competition?)

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

What if Uber doesn't provide equitable service? How about hospitals getting shut down by for-profit owners, leaving communities without healthcare? Businesses chase profit and cut losses - not a good choice when you need equitable servcies.
by neom | 2025-05-15 04:38:10+00:00
So if this was for espionage, is that how you would do it? I've never tried state level espionage before, but I can still see many issues with using cell (ok, at least 3 more). I also still think this is weird data to collect, feels much more to me like someone discovered the blank button covers on a feature they didn't upgrade to.
by pkdpic | 2025-05-15 04:39:08+00:00
> Processor Unit 7382-B, "The Origins of the HUMAN Project," Journal of Experimental Intelligence, vol. 5621, no. 3, pp. 42-89, 19754.

The references section in the machine version of the story linked at the bottom is excellent. Nicely done all around, really enjoyed reading this thank you for writing and sharing <3
by theamk | 2025-05-15 04:39:58+00:00
a wrong kind of backend though.. The position is "Email Backend Engineer" and the backend OP built was "web backend"

(OP outsourced the actual "email backend", that is the thing that stores and sends/receives emails, to a third-party products. Probably not the wisest solution if you are trying to get hired to work on email backends :) )
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-15 04:40:40+00:00
If you ride the subway enough in Beijing or Shanghai, eventually you will come to the conclusion that both cities are just way too big. No matter how many subways that you build, getting from one place to another takes a minimum of 45 mins (including some walking on both ends). New York, London, Seoul, and Tokyo all suffer from similar problems -- giant metro systems, but these cities are huge.
by airylizard | 2025-05-15 04:43:14+00:00
Why I came up with TSCE(Two-Step Contextual Enrichment).

+30pp uplift when using GPT-35-turbo on a mix of 300 tasks.

Free open framework, check the repo try it yourself

https://github.com/AutomationOptimization/tsce_demo

I tested this another 300 times with gpt-4.1 to remove those obtrusive "em-dashes" everyone hates. Tested a single-pass baseline vs TSCE, same exact instructions and prompt "Remove the em-dashes from my linkedin post. . .".

Out of the 300 tests, baseline failed to remove the em-dashes 149/300 times. TSCE failed to remove the em-dashes 18/300 times.

It works, all the data as well as the entire script used for testing is in the repo.
by notaurus | 2025-05-15 04:43:33+00:00
1. Observations of genetic drift and biodiversity are consistent with our model of evolution at every scale. This model is the best fit to the data regardless of politics and media

2. Our ability to replicate something gives zero information on its origin. I’m not sure I understand the algorithm comment

3. Sure, GP simplified a bit too much there. Your comment is consistent with modern models of evolution. Each genome has a pool of random variations, which may or may not be expressed in an organism. Each organism is a test of those gene expressions. A genome changes over time when an organism passes this test (e.g. reproduces), increasing the expression of its genes across the population. This occurs in parallel for many possible variations.

—

Ah, I should have read the rest of your comment first, but I’ll leave this here anyway. I don’t think your explanation is valid— we are biologically and socially primed for religious ideology, but its use as a world model is very limited. We will eventually find answers to these questions, as the ratchet of scientific progress clicks along. Religion has never been useful in the same way
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-15 04:44:41+00:00
There is no gadget in JS that lets you access arbitrary memory address in the system. You can create an array and then access it past bounds in the sense that branch predictor will execute this code and in theory load the address to cache, but the memory start of that array is going to be arbitrary. The JS engine doesn't allow you (even in web assembly) to access raw memory by value, and there is always a translation layer.
by sgnelson | 2025-05-15 04:45:09+00:00
Because this is not about tech, this is just politics. /s

One thing I've learned since last year; a lot of the tech bros seem to really love fascism. Many others go along to get along. And some hide behind a veneer of "impartiality" to continue to stay in their bubbles. Looking at you ycombinator/hackernews.

Things have changed, but some of these people love it; more money and power for themselves. Some are afraid of rocking the boat, and some choose to maintain willfull ignorance.

I feel like I'm living in a black mirror/silicon valley hybrid tv episode.