MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-05-14 20:55:51+00:00
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit

Several people on this thread have said that; and I've heard it for years. Why do you say nobody wants to talk about it?

IME, it's the people least familiar with cities (and public transit) that talk most about how dangerous it is. I understand they are afraid - imaginations about the unknown run wild, including about unknown people (different ethnicities and socio-economic groups); it can be a bit disconcerting at first because most people outside of cities only mix with their own socio-economic group. And there's Fox and the GOP pushing the narrative that cities are dangerous (laughable these days).

The reality is, all those people are people like you, and it's a great, positive experience everyday to mix with them. Jane Jacobs said something about it - the sidewalk ballet, I think - where you find and reinforce, every day, that people are generally good and helpful and caring, and that they are people like you, no matter how they dress or what they do.

I have had no personal safety problems on public transit. I've heard some loud radios; a couple times someone was smoking on a train, which was annoying. Driving in traffic is definitely annoying, and there's much more personal safety risk too when someone cuts me off or sends a text. Sometimes the people at home are annoying. :)
by hulitu | 2025-05-14 20:56:14+00:00
> Expressive Design: Google's UX Research

> Eye tracking

So this is all Google's UI research: "Eye tracking".

Are the people at Google really handicapated ?

sigh gray on gray, no/small scrollbars, flat UI - one cannot tell what is a button and what is a label, microphone icon in an SMS app, etc. sigh
by nxa | 2025-05-14 20:56:15+00:00
Thank you! I actually had a hard time finding prior work on this, so I appreciate the references.

The dictionary is based on https://wordnet.princeton.edu/, no word2vec. It's just a plain lookup among precomputed embeddings (with mxbai-embed-large). And yes, I'm excluding words that are present in the query because.

It would be interesting to see how other models perform. I tried one (forgot the name) that was focused on coding, and it didn't perform nearly as well (in terms of human joy from the results).
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-05-14 20:57:11+00:00
There are two sets of perverse incentives at play. The main one the author focuses on is that LLM companies are incentivized to produce verbose answers, so that when you task an LLM on extending an already verbose project, the tokens used and therefore cost increases.

The second one is more intra/interpersonal: under pressure to produce, it's very easy to rely on LLMs to get one 80% of the way there and polish the remaining 20%. I'm in a new domain that requires learning a new language. So something I've started doing is asking ChatGPT to come up with exercises / coding etudes / homework for me based on past interactions.
by CelestialMystic | 2025-05-14 20:57:18+00:00
Argh yes the "Works for me" argument. I suppose my mother was lying when she was complaining about it then? I will take her word for it rather than random internet user. So not it isn't patently untrue. I really dislike it when people try to gaslight me, on things that I have first hand experience with, so please don't do it.

BTW The old Henry Hoover (not bagless) never had any problems.
by barbarr | 2025-05-14 20:57:21+00:00
You're ignoring that the average ride on Muni, Bart, or AC Transit involves someone who's visibly or audibly tweaking out, loudly muttering curse words or threats to themselves / others, blasting music in the back from a tinny phone speaker, carrying a bag of cans and/or trash, or smelling offensively bad. It's no wonder that people won't want to take transit.

Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
by 7bit | 2025-05-14 20:57:44+00:00
> If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)

Undoing the only solution to a healthier city and it's citizens because it was not an immediate success is not the answer. If you don't fix the problems, cities will get more and more congested. An additional lane will not solve that problem, just postpone the inevitable. There only one way out of that problem and that is getting people to use public transport and their feet.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-14 20:58:39+00:00
pgbench[2] / pgreplay-go[0] / python locust[1]

very old school approach:

Misuse sql VIEW[3][4] to generate a temporary parallel table setup. Testing database separate from production database would be 'better', IMHO.

-----

[0] pgreplay-go : https://github.com/gocardless/pgreplay-go

[1] python locust : https://miguel-codes.medium.com/unconventional-load-testing-...

[2] pgbench load testing :

a) https://medium.com/@c.ucanefe/pgbench-load-test-166bdfb5c75a b) https://neon.tech/blog/autoscaling-in-action-postgres-load-testing-with-pgbench c) https://hackernoon.com/how-to-create-and-load-test-data-in-postgresql-i41e353m

----------------------------

[3] : a) https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/materialized-view-strategi...

b) https://tech.jonathangardner.net/wiki/PostgreSQL/Materialized_Views c) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77603705/what-is-the-use-of-materialized-view-in-postgresql

[4] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_(SQL)
by miki123211 | 2025-05-14 20:58:55+00:00
> Do you have any other examples for solutions like this

I have a vague recollection that Pebble had something like this to get texts on the Pebble watch.

> Would that approach also allow the extra functionality they seem to be offering, such as only recently messaged numbers and emergency contacts being able to send messages to satellite users, though?

Hmm, you could definitely do this with a "Stripe-like" approach, where the actual traffic goes over the usual protocols to ease implementation, but the carriers provide Apple an API to query messaging history in some way (which they probably already offer in their apps, and so have good integrations for anyway).

Stripe uses this pattern for fraud detection. Their card transactions still go over the antiquated ISO protocols from the 80's, because that's just what everybody integrates with and agrees on, but they can also speak a custom API directly with participating banks, mostly for better fraud detection and fraud-related information sharing.
by jazoom | 2025-05-14 20:59:08+00:00
It's not satire. Gemini is much better for coding, at least for me.

Just to illustrate, I asked both about a browser automation script this morning. Claude used Selenium. Gemini used Playwright.

I think the main reasons Gemini is much better are:

1. It gets my whole code base as context. Claude can't take that many tokens. I also include documentation for newer versions of libraries (e.g. Svelte 5) that the LLM is not so familiar with.

2. Gemini has a more recent knowledge cutoff.

3. Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model.

4. It's free to use through the web UI.
by hbn | 2025-05-14 20:59:35+00:00
Windows HDR implementation is janky as hell. For months after I got my monitor I couldn't take screenshots because they'd all appear completely blown out, like you cranked the brightness to 300%.

Eventually I did some digging and found there's a setting in Snipping Tool that just... makes screenshots work on HDR displays.

It also seems to add another layer of Your Desktop Trying To Sort Its Shit Out when launching a game that's full screen. Sometimes it's fine, but some games like Balatro will appear fine at first, but then when you quit back to the desktop everything is washed out. Sleeping my PC and waking it back up seems to resolve this.

I recently played through Armored Core VI, and it supports HDR, but whenever I adjust my volume the screen becomes washed out to display the volume slider. Screenshots and recordings also appear washed out in the resulting file.
by eddyg | 2025-05-14 21:00:16+00:00
Passkeys are fantastic! I encourage my family and friends to utilize them as an alternative to passwords whenever possible.

Compared to everything else, they are so much of a nicer experience. I despise the "click the link we just emailed you" so much. And MFA is a pain, and still has security issues: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/state-of-the-art-phishing...

I really don't get all the hate for Passkeys on HN...
by tonystaunton | 2025-05-14 21:00:48+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to look at Family Folder.

With regards to open source & self-hosting, while I agree that open source and self-hosting are strong options for trust and control, for the moment I’ve prioritised ease-of-use and low-friction onboarding for non-technical families. Open-sourcing the core functionality and offering a self-hosted version is something I would consider in the future. As the solo person on this project I need to be very careful with my backlog but definitely something to add to it.

For encryption & privacy details I do need to provide more depth and add to the FAQs. Here’s a brief overview of how Family Folder currently works:

- In transit: All traffic is encrypted via HTTPS/TLS. - At rest: Files uploaded to S3 are encrypted using server-side encryption, and the database is encrypted at the volume level via Heroku Postgres. - Access control: Families are isolated by design — a user can only see the folders they’re invited to. Authentication is handled via Devise with session-based login (no tokens stored on client). - Key management: Encryption keys are managed by AWS and Heroku. I don’t currently offer user-controlled keys, but I understand how important that is for full control and again definitely something to consider in the future.

The project is still early stages, so I’m open to input on how to evolve these parts — especially from a privacy perspective.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Tony.
by munificent | 2025-05-14 21:01:00+00:00
"High dynamic range" is a phrase that is much older than tone mapping. I see uses of "dynamic range" going back to the 1920s and "high dynamic range" to the 1940s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dynamic+range%...

You might argue that "HDR" the abbreviation refers to using tone mapping to approximate rendering high dynamic range imagery on lower dynamic range displays. But even then, the sentence in question doesn't use the abbreviation. It is specifically talking about a dynamic range that is high.

Dynamic range is a property of any signal or quantifiable input, including, say sound pressure hitting our ears or photons hitting an eyeball, film, or sensor.
by godelski | 2025-05-14 21:01:19+00:00
I was expecting something like TensorRT or Triton, but found "Vibe Coding"

The project seems very naive. CUDA programming sucks because there's a lot of little gotchas and nuances that dramatically change performance. These optimizations can also significantly change between GPU architectures: you'll get different performances out of Volta, Ampere, or Blackwell. Parallel programming is hard in the first place, and it gets harder on GPUs because of all these little intricacies. People that have been doing CUDA programming for years are still learning new techniques. It takes a very different type of programming skill. Like actually understanding that Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of evil" means "get a profiler" not "don't optimize". All this is what makes writing good kernels take so long. That's even after Nvidia engineers are spending tons of time trying to simplify it.

So I'm not surprised people are getting 2x or 4x out of the box. I'd expect that much if a person grabbed a profiler. I'd honestly expect more if they spent a week or two with the documentation and serious effort. But nothing in the landing page is convincing me the LLM can actually significantly help. Maybe I'm wrong! But it is unclear if the lead dev has significant CUDA experience. And I don't want something that optimizes a kernel for an A100, I want kernelS that are optimized for multiple architectures. That's the hard part and all those little nuances are exactly what LLM coding tends to be really bad at.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-14 21:01:32+00:00
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.

Public transit is already extremely degraded, which is why there was an opening for private fixed-route transport. Whether you were born in 1920 or 2000, you can wistfully recall how much better public transportation was when you were a child.

Complaining about private buses doesn't get public transportation funded. Funding public transportation gets public transportation funded.
by genewitch | 2025-05-14 21:01:37+00:00
i don't think the manufacturers would share what arch their deeply embedded cores are. Christopher Domas was the first person to interact with what he calls ring -4 to escalate from ring 3 to ring 0. the processors were old, and the ring -4 is not x86. I'm looking at a slide from 2019 that says that IME is a physically separate, non-x86 processor that boots minix

Now, i may be misremembering and i don't have time today to download all his talks and grep the .vtt for "ARM"; however, my memory is reinforced by literally 30 seconds of internet searches. i bought the Minix book because of one of the presentations.

i'm not doing any more research for free on this. Even if it isn't ARM, it isn't x86.
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-14 21:01:43+00:00
In my opinion, the difference between good code and code that simply works (sometimes barely); is that good code will still work (or error out gracefully) when the state and the inputs are not as expected.

Good programs are written by people who anticipate what might go wrong. If the document says 'don't do X'; they know a tester is likely to try X because a user will eventually do it.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-05-14 21:01:44+00:00
Wow, I'm realizing this applies to even browsing files in the web UI without being logged in, and the limits are quite low?

This rather significantly changes the place of github hosted code in the ecosystem.

I understand it is probably a response to the ill-behaved decentralized bot-nets doing mass scraping with cloaked user-agents (that everyone assumes is AI-related, but I think it's all just speculation and it's quite mysterious) -- which is affecting most of us.

The mystery bot net(s) are kind of destroying the open web, by the counter-measures being chosen.
by syklemil | 2025-05-14 21:01:54+00:00
Python is growing type annotations at a brisk pace though, and Typescript is cannibalizing Javascript at an incredible speed. Between that and even Java getting ADTs, I suspect the people who whine about "type nerds" are in for some rough years as dynamic languages lose popularity.

And I suspect the people who are familiar with seeing something like `dict[str, int]` can map that onto something like `HashMap<String, i32>` without actually straining their brains, and grow from there.
by mmooss | 2025-05-14 21:02:03+00:00
> You're ignoring the environmental impact of parking.

Interesting - what impact? Driving around looking for a space? Parallel parking wouldn't seem to be a problem, unless you're not very good at it. :)

> Ubers by and large aren't aimlessly driving around

They drive to me, which by itself increases their driving for my trip by ~~~~~50% (I have no idea). I suppose in Manhattan, they are likely to be closer, but I'd guess that impact is more per time (stuck in traffic) than per mile.
by akdor1154 | 2025-05-14 21:02:20+00:00
Great to read - where are we up to with regards to the long laundry list that voice control software like Talon needs?

It's interesting - if you're going to allow third-party a11y software to control your PC, you need a 'make my wayland compositor do stuff' API.

However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.

Ref: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...
by chriskanan | 2025-05-14 21:02:32+00:00
They address this in the AlphaEvolve paper:

"While AI Co-Scientist represents scientific hypotheses and their evaluation criteria in natural language, AlphaEvolve focuses on evolving code, and directs evolution using programmatic evaluation functions. This choice enables us to substantially sidestep LLM hallucinations, which allows AlphaEvolve to carry on the evolution process for a large number of time steps."
by pontus | 2025-05-14 21:03:19+00:00
I think the OP was pointing out that the reason Strasssen's algorithm works is that it somehow uncovered a kind of repeated work that's not evident in a simple divide and conquer approach. It's by the clever definition of the various submatrices that this "overlapping" work can be avoided.

In other words, the power of Strasssens algorithm comes from a strategy that's similar to / reminiscent of dynamic programming.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-14 21:03:33+00:00
A reminder to all that thanks to this enormous subsidization of the railroads, we had one of the best railroad networks in the world, and Americans considered it normal to travel huge distances long before the car.

These rights of way were also essential to building the first information superhighway: The telegraph network.

America has always built great infrastructure, when people in office are willing to spend dollars for the public good.
by fdej | 2025-05-14 21:03:51+00:00
> From the paper, "Notably, for multiplying two 4 × 4 matrices, applying the algorithm of Strassen recursively results in an algorithm with 49 multiplications, which works over any field...AlphaEvolve is the first method to find an algorithm to multiply two 4 × 4 complex-valued matrices using 48 multiplications."

...but Waksman's algorithm from 1970 [1] multiplies two 4 x 4 complex-valued matrices using only 46 multiplications (indeed, it works in any ring admitting division by 2).

Sloppy by DeepMind and by Nature to publish such a claim - did they not ask someone knowledgeable about matrix multiplication to review the work?

[1] https://doi.org/10.1109/T-C.1970.222926
by deepsun | 2025-05-14 21:04:27+00:00
I'm not sure where "absolutely" comes from. I'm not an attorney to make assured statements, I can only guess.

I'm not talking about unreliable SMS delivery, I'm talking about banks not accepting other options like passkeys, software/hardware OTP keys which are more secure than SMS, thereby discriminating a whole class of people "living in the mountains".
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-14 21:04:29+00:00
>Do you understand the scope of the issue? Do you know that this couldn't personally affect you in a dragnet

The issue is not whether or not it could affect me, the issue is what is the risk. And I can say for certain that the risk is very low, because I seem to have more understanding of the space.

>The original spectre paper notoriously mentions JS as an attack vector.

In an analogy, having an attack vector is having a certain type of weapon, while executing a full exploit end to end is on the scope of waging a war. Sure, a right person at the right place with that weapon can take out a critical target and win the war, but just having that weapon doesn't guarantee you winning a war.

In the cases of certain exploits, like Log4Shell, thats like having a portable shotgun that shoots hypersonic missiles in a scatter pattern. Log4Shell basically means that if anything gets logged, even an error message, that can be used to execute arbitrary code, and its super easy to check if this is the case - send payloads to all services with a JNI url that you control and see what pops up, and boom, you can have shells on those computers.

In the case of Spectre/Meltdown, its like having a specific type of booby trap. Whether or not you can actually set up that booby trap highly depends on environment. If a website is fully protected against code injection, then executing JS cache timing would be impossible. And even if it wasn't, there would be other

Of course nothing is ever for certain. For example, browsers can contain some crazy logic bug that bypasses Same-Origin checks that nobody has found yet. But the chance of this happening is extremely low, as browser code is public.
by NegativeLatency | 2025-05-14 21:04:40+00:00
> Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution

This has not been my experience, maybe sometimes, but certainly not always.

As an example: asking chatgpt/gemini about how to accomplish some sql data transformation set me back in finding the right answer because the answer it did give me was so plausible but also super duper not correct in the end. Would've been better off not using it in that case.

Brings to mind "You can't build a ladder to the moon"
by petsormeat | 2025-05-14 21:05:27+00:00
The travails described in this post could just as well be my own, except that my career disintegration began in 2017 or so, soon after I turned 50. I've pursued every job search strategy this author lists, and encountered the same lack of progress. I've just submitted an application to work at the local grocery store for $17/hour.

We can blame ageism, offshoring, AI, what have you. The basic problem is that the technology industry has never prioritized hiring or retaining experienced people as developers. Our roles are persistently misunderstood by management, and "AI could do that!" is just the latest misapprehension.

Meanwhile, be kind to your DoorDashers and store clerks.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-14 21:05:47+00:00
I mean, I can tell that I'm having this problem and my critical thinking skills are otherwise typically quite sharp.

At work I've inherited a Kotlin project and I've never touched Kotlin or android before, though I'm an experienced programmer in other domains. ChatGPT has been guiding me through what needs to be done. The problem I'm having is that it's just too damn easy to follow its advice without checking. I might save a few minutes over reading the docs myself, but I don't get the context the docs would have given me.

I'm a 'Real Programmer' and I can tell that the code is logically sound and self-consistent. The code works and it's usually rewritten so much as to be distinctly my code and style. But still it's largely magical. If I'm doing things the less-correct way, I wouldn't really know because this whole process has led me to some pretty lazy thinking.

On the other hand, I very much do not care about this project. I'm very sure that it will be used just a few times and never see the light of day again. I don't expect to ever do android development again after this, either. I think lazy thinking and farming the involved thinking out to ChatGPT is acceptable here, but it's clear how easily this could become a very bad habit.

I am making a modest effort to understand what I'm doing. I'm also completely rewriting or ignoring the code the AI gives me, it's more of an API reference and example. I can definitely see how a less-seasoned programmer might get suckered into blindly accepting AI code and iterating prompts until the code works. It's pretty scary to think about how the coming generations of programmers are going to experience and conceptualize programming.
by kulahan | 2025-05-14 21:06:24+00:00
If it’s truly just like the methods astrophysicists use for transit imaging, you might even be able to do some funky stuff like monitor invisible gasses. Could potentially be revolutionary for things like fume safety and viral spread tracking, among other uses. Might even be able to analyze liquids in a container without having to touch the liquid (the name for this type of testing evades me at the moment)