MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gus_massa | 2025-05-15 13:58:11+00:00
> Here you go: https://weather-sense.leftium.com/?gus_massa .

:)

> stylized watercolor map

Now it make sense to see wavy lines. I still think that it's better to show an accurate map under the radar image. Perhaps grey/translucid so it's not distracting, but it's easy to identify the features. When I see a map, I know by heart the shape of the main avenues and cost of my city and I can understand it. (Moreover, when there is a disaster announcement in another city and they claim the flood area was 3milesx5miles, I try to imagine that rectangle over my city to understand it.)

My mother is a retired meteorologist [1], so I'm somewhat used to climate maps and satellite images. After retirement she used to go to the webpage of the National Meteorology Office where she worked, so she could peek the maps [2].

> when the IP location is not accurate

I'm in Buenos Aires (city), but the map is centered in Buenos Aires (province). The city is the old port, that is obliviously in the coast, so the center is far away. (We should have changed the duplicated the names, but blame backward compatibility :) .)

Yesterday was sunny and and today is cloudy. I'll try again when it rains. Does the raining info cover all/most of the world or only USA. Here we have precipitation radar but I don't know if the info is shared.

[1] A few repeated anecdotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40204281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42679661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875882

[2] https://www.smn.gob.ar/radar (I think the radial lines are precipitation and the colored clouds are clouds. (???)) You can even see it like a movie. Just click the 12 and then the "play" black triangle.
by hiq | 2025-05-15 13:59:17+00:00
> This is the part that I'm most confused about. How can it possibly be useful to try to sell me another fridge?

I've seen this kind of comments several times over the years, and I've always thought that this might actually be the optimal strategy, because I'm not convinced the alternatives work better. You'd have to see the numbers over samples bigger than n=1.

Let's say I just bought a bridge, and that's the only thing you know about me. What ads should you serve me? Maybe fridge accessories would make sense (I'm not sure that's a thing). But fridges themselves might be relevant as well, more so than some other random product:

1. I might be able to return the fridge I just bought, if I see another one I might prefer.

2. What's the life expectancy of such an appliance? I guess it either breaks quickly (manufacturing flaw) or not (hopefully it can last more than 5 years). In the first case, I'm back in the market right after my purchase.

I'm also guessing that the margin on such an appliance might be higher than on burgers and nicotine gums, such that you can afford lower conversion rates.
by Rastonbury | 2025-05-15 13:59:32+00:00
I don't believe there are perverse incentives yet, right now it's arms race burn money and operate at a loss days. There is no moat only quality and price per token and the leader moves around too quickly. Also Author should really look into Cursor at $20 with unlimited slow requests, I imagine paying per token hurts when it spits out garbage even when you've thought you provided enough context but it wasn't enough.

Someone needs to make a plugin to count lines of discard code and prompts
by jrowen | 2025-05-15 14:00:56+00:00
Oh I've seen Wild Wild Country, that made sense to me and there's a logical thread to follow. Osho was also (for some time) a legitimately intelligent and charismatic leader/writer/philosopher able to rally smart people.

The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO docuseries.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-15 14:01:23+00:00
I didn't claim to understand what emotions are but that by observation we know they are deterministic and a result of belief and memory. they're not magic. Just like how I can't tell you what the specific configuration of chatgpt's model is but I do know it is a model that is made up of memory (public internet data scanning) that is trained by prompt engineers (belief parameters). Emotions may be dynamic, unreasonable and similar terms, but they are finite and rigorous, it is just that we struggle to fully grasp them due to the immense and complex nature of the human mind.

> This is the kind of confidently incorrect statements people who work on software say that irks me. Not everything in life has a nice and simple parallel to computer science. Just because a person can abstract about one subject well, doesn't mean their tools of abstraction can be applied to all other subjects.

If I was a sailor, I'm sure I would be using sailor metaphors and analogies. the message of my comment and the facts of the matter don't change either way, whether it irks you or not.
by agile-gift0262 | 2025-05-15 14:01:44+00:00
I didn't know Bitwarden exported passkeys. This makes me consider migrating from 1password to Bitwarden. I've been a happy customer of 1password for 8 years, but it doesn't export passkeys, so I've been quite reluctant to using passkeys because of how they would lock me into 1password.
by saubeidl | 2025-05-15 14:02:30+00:00
At most European universities, it is practice to start lectures cum tempore, i.e. with time, meaning 15 minutes after formal calendar time.

It'll say 10:00 c.t. on the event, meaning it actually starts at 10:15.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
by echelon | 2025-05-15 14:02:36+00:00
> I imagine we will be able to have virtual front row seats at any live event, and many other applications we haven't thought of yet.

100%. And style-transfer it into steam punk or H.R. Giger or cartoons or anime. Or dream up new fantasy worlds instantaneously. Explore them, play them, shape them like Minecraft-becomes-holodeck. With physics and tactile responses.

I'm so excited for everything happening in graphics right now.

Keep it up! You're at the forefront!
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-15 14:02:41+00:00
Also, many of the cars we see in the city are bound to be from outside the city (like New Jersey). Just look at the traffic in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels at rush hour.

A less abrasive approach than congestion pricing might just be pedestrian streets or narrower streets/wider sidewalks. If you make the city unattractive for cars, there will be fewer of them, and I am willing to bet that programs like these are less likely to trigger the outrage congestion pricing has, because it doesn't target car owners directly and en masse. You can sort of pick away at it, street by street. There will be less of a show of solidarity, because, hey, it's not my street.

The only thing that seems silly is penalizing delivery trucks. This only raises the costs of goods and services. This is one reason I would favor narrower, one-way streets over pedestrian streets. You still want vehicles. The issue is that many if not most vehicles in NYC are a luxury item and do nothing but negatively impact the common good. They don't even make transportation easier for their owners, on the whole. Of course, this should be combined with other policies that improve public transportation and improve availability of good and services in the city to reduce the burdens that cars alleviate.
by lesser23 | 2025-05-15 14:03:25+00:00
The post is somewhat strange but I think the point of it is clear. Projects aren’t what land jobs. This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so.

Instead the writer discovered what we all inevitably do. Companies don’t really care about what you’re capable of. They care strictly if you’ll bend over backwards, give up everything, and grind leetcode to make it through their arbitrary and demeaning hiring process. At least you can somewhat justify it at FAANG given you need an “efficient” way to weed out 80% of the 30,000 applicants you get a year. But this rot goes all the way down to the mom and pop e-commerce startup anymore.

It’s no surprise. I suppose if the writer was a major contributor to a larger project their experience might be different (as you could probably fool ATS and HR using them as experience on a resume). But indeed, no one cares about your toy implementation of a linter.

It’ll only get worse in the age of AI slop, AI slop brained company leadership, and leetcode supremacy.
by delichon | 2025-05-15 14:04:06+00:00
If a DEI program reaches equal outcomes and keeps going, to the point where it has positions held by >70% protected class employees, and has a goal of changing that to be >90%, then their mission would seem to be about something other than equality.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gq7le0-XAAANHXX?format=png&name=...
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-15 14:04:23+00:00
In 2 years from now, you’re going to want to promote them but your HR department is not going to give them the raise that would keep them there so they are going to find another job. They are going to watch new people come in in two years making market rates - salary compression.

The average tenure of a developer is 2-3 years. Almost no one stays at a company for 6-7 years

As a manager, the chance of you staying at a job for 6-7 years are slim and staying in the same position is even slimmer. Besides, you are going to be measured by your quarterly or at most yearly “OP1 goals” or equivalent
by nyrikki | 2025-05-15 14:05:34+00:00
> Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting

At several companies I was at this rule would have removed the last slack time I had to fix, refactor and maintain systems.

I actually asked a manager to add me to a monthly 2 hour 50+ people reoccurring meeting just so I could do some refactoring.

I guess that is a form of Malicious compliance.
by markisus | 2025-05-15 14:06:25+00:00
Gaussian Splatting allows you to create a photorealistic representation of an environment from just a collection of images. Philosophically, this is a form of geometric scene understanding from raw pixels, which has been a holy grail of computer vision since the beginning.

Usually creating a Gaussian splat representation takes a long time and uses an iterative gradient-based optimization procedure. Using RGBD helps me sidestep this optimization, as much of the geometry is already present in the depth channel and so it enables the real-time aspect of my technique.

When you say "big deal", I imagine you are also asking about business or societal implications. I can't really speak on those, but I'm open to licensing this IP to any companies which know about big business applications :)
by ryandv | 2025-05-15 14:07:03+00:00
The point is that society elevates symbols to a level of importance above and beyond the things those symbols are supposed to refer to.

Thus people valuing the symbols of professionalism over actual engineering prowess; LinkedIn profiles over the person themselves; and LLM output over a human's actual thoughts.

Despite this person self-evaluating as having regressed in their engineering skills, all the outward status markers that are supposed to represent outstanding achievement are still there, and project a persona that is not congruent with the author's own self-image.

Worse yet, you must play this game of smoke and mirrors because you are "only seen when [you] do the fake crap like update [your] LinkedIn to celebrate 1 year at $FAANG."

This also reduces the signal/noise ratio when posers begin aping those same status markers in order to represent expertise where none exists. If you want to experience this directly, I suggest you attend some networking meetups and talk to the newer blood in the cybersecurity industry. Not exactly DEFCON 10 any more.
by ghaff | 2025-05-15 14:07:05+00:00
In general cost, travel time, difficulty of parking, etc. all affect optional travel. (And, also, just age and inclination.) I know I'm way less inclined to go into Boston/Cambridge for something in the evening for some combination of those reasons than I used to be. I can take commuter rail in for a day event but it's pretty much a non-starter for something in the evening.
by jakevoytko | 2025-05-15 14:07:23+00:00
I did hem and haw over whether it was appropriate, but I eventually went with it because it felt in line with the first 2 sentences of the Wikipedia page defining the phrase as "Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter."
by ecb_penguin | 2025-05-15 14:07:24+00:00
> I do not think that more in-house cloudflare-only "standards" open washed through their IETF employees

As someone with multiple RFCs, this is the way it's always been done. Industry has a problem, there's some collaboration with other industry or academia, someone submits a draft RFC. People are either free to adopt it or not. Sometimes there's competing proposals that are accepted, and sometimes the topic dies entirely.

> both of which raise the friction to participation in the web even higher for actual humans

Absolutely nothing wrong with this, as it's site owners that make the decision for their own sites. Yep, I do want some friction. The tradeoff saves me a ton of money. Heck, I could block most ASNs and email domains and still keep 99% of my customers.

> Seems like pretty soon there'll only be one or two browsers which can even hope to access sites behind cloudflare's infrastructure

This proposal is about bots identifying themselves through open HTTP headers.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 14:07:59+00:00
> Machines aren't part of life.

Imagine an industrial complex. Say, some mining + manufacturing site.

No humans ever go there; it's dangerous, dust everywhere, few places where visitors are even allowed, not designed to accomodate humans, 'nothing' to see or do there.

It's all robotic. The machines run the place, produce their own spare parts, repair themselves, adjust processes as problems come up, improve parts of their own design, etc etc. It's solar powered, the material(s) mined is near-infinite, the whole operation could go on for millenia if left undisturbed. Aaand: the entire complex can produce a copy of itself if more resources are discovered some distance away.

For the sake of argument, would you consider such industrial complex a giant living organism?

No? Alright... let's scale it down 1M:1. Same operation, but the industrial complex doing it, is walnut sized.

Still not "life"? Alright... let's say it largely consists of biological structures ("cyborg"). With some silicon (or whatever) structures included for good measure. Oh, and it moves around according to its own 'will', priorities, 'programmed task' or whatever you call that. If you try to crush it, it'll defend itself or try to escape. If you take half of a rock it's working on, you'll observe it chipping off a piece & move a bit away. Sometimes a # of them will swarm around any intruders / competitors. 'Intelligent', having a will of its own, for all intents & purposes.

You can see where this is going. Something tells me us humans will have to re-visit our definition(s) of "life" @ some point.
by dahart | 2025-05-15 14:08:01+00:00
It’s funny how the one time it has ever happened that someone wielded a chainsaw on the subway it’s memorable news, and becomes evidence of a narrative that all of public transit is ‘sketchy’. That article’s from 7 years ago, and nobody got hurt and the guy was arrested. (BTW, I wonder why they used a photo from 2009?)

In the mean time, the number of shooting deaths by private car drivers in the US has more than doubled since 2018, to more than 1 per day. That doesn’t count threats with other weapons, nor any other kind of road rage, nor does it count accidental crashes. There are more than 120 deaths per day in the US in cars (the vast majority of “private transit”), and more than 2 million ER visits by injured riders per year.

And public transit is sketchy? Not compared to driving cars it isn’t.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-15 14:08:11+00:00
>The solution [...] is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am.

Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...
by bluGill | 2025-05-15 14:08:34+00:00
Depending on how your team runs it a room is often useful. In an open office (which is very popular these days with management) you want a room to keep the noise down for others. Sometimes you can keep a dedicated whiteboard in the room for you post-it notes (this beats computers for what developers need to track, but for management needs a computer based tracker is better). I've worked on teams with semi-disabled people - while they could walk a short distance they couldn't stand for that long and so they sat.

However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.
by diggan | 2025-05-15 14:09:37+00:00
In terms of "does useless refactors I didn't ask for nor improved anything", my own ranked list goes something like: Gemini > Claude > GPT. I don't really experience this at all with various GPT models used via the API, but overall GPTs seems to stick to the system prompt way better than the rest. Clause does OK too, but Gemini is out of control and writes soo much code and does so much you didn't ask for, really acts like a overly eager junior developer.
by loganmhb | 2025-05-15 14:09:43+00:00
I once saw an explanation which I can no longer find that what's really happening here is also partly "man" and "woman" are very similar vectors which nearly cancel each other out, and "king" is excluded from the result set to avoid returning identities, leaving "queen" as the closest next result. That's why you have to subtract and then add, and just doing single operations doesn't work very well. There's some semantic information preserved that might nudge it in the right direction but not as much as the naive algebra suggests, and you can't really add up a bunch of these high-dimensional vectors in a sensible way.

E.g. in this calculator "man - king + princess = woman", which doesn't make much sense. "airplane - engine", which has a potential sensible answer of "glider", instead "= Czechoslovakia". Go figure.
by OccamsMirror | 2025-05-15 14:09:58+00:00
That's assuming I actually believed it, rather than just reveling in the reactions from religious people. It's a fun scenario that would result in immediate rejection—most wouldn’t even entertain the idea. They instead often found it completely abhorrent. Provoking discomfort was entertaining for teenage me.

I'm too ignorant to hold any true beliefs.
by jecel | 2025-05-15 14:10:02+00:00
As far as I know the Tektronix Smalltalk computers (4404 and later) were the only ones to try a higher resolution scrolling virtual screen.

For Alan Kay's talk they removed some limits of the original hardware, like screen size, processor speed, memory limits and storage (floppies in the original). They found that without these limits the experience was actually better than more modern Smalltalks in some ways. Sort of like using a 1980s 8 bit microcomputer with a modern SD card.
by dugmartin | 2025-05-15 14:10:28+00:00
In the late 90s there was a manager where I worked at the time where you actually felt relieved she they scheduled a meeting for one reason: she scheduled meetings to be 50 minutes long and no matter what she would end them promptly at 50 minutes and then she would stand up and leave the room. I once saw her, politely but firmly, tell a senior exec a few rungs up the ladder from her that time was up when he was in mid-pontification and close the folio thing she always brought to meetings and then exit the room.
by gryfft | 2025-05-15 14:12:46+00:00
The data I can find doesn't support the assertion.

> In the period between 2019 and 2022, 1,199 cyclists were killed in traffic accidents, with 42 percent of these accidents being caused by collisions with a passenger car or van.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/15/684-road-traffic-death...
by twic | 2025-05-15 14:13:14+00:00
What i've never understood is how detonation can be more efficient than deflagration. What does that mean? Both types of engine take a mix of fuel and oxidiser and turn it into hot combustion products. The hot combustion products then expand through a nozzle to produce thrust. How is that process different between the two? Does a deflagration engine leave some fuel unburnt, that a detonation engine burns? Does the combustion of the same fuel somehow produce more heat? Or less heat but more pressure? Is it something about the expansion?

To put it another way, if you set up a deflagration engine and a detonation engine next to each other, and fed them fuel and oxidiser at the same rate, how would the streams of exhaust gas coming out of them look different? What other external differences would you see?
by ghaff | 2025-05-15 14:13:31+00:00
>protected bike lanes

I'm certainly not opposed. But my observation in the relatively nearby city when I go in and sit on the sidewalk at a restaurant is that the fairly new protected bike lanes have a fairly terrifying combination of transportation modes (bikes, ebikes, things that I guess are ebikes but look almost like small motorbikes, escooters, and pedestrians crossing). And then, because they're in a bike lane, many seem to assume the signal at the next street doesn't apply to them.

Not sure of the best answer.
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-15 14:13:37+00:00
When you strip away the techno-mystique, a lot of what’s driving the AI arms race right now isn’t vision or stewardship. It’s ego, power consolidation, and a pathological fear of being second.

You can see the narcissistic traits plain as day:

Grandiosity masked as mission: “We’re saving the world... by controlling its future.”

Exploitation of labor: Chewing through top researchers, then discarding them once productization kicks in.

Lack of empathy: Safety concerns are waved off as friction, not signals.

Entitlement to control the narrative: OpenAI’s restructuring drama and safety testing shortcuts aren’t accidental. They’re baked into a worldview where perception management matters more than accountability.

It’s Gnostic irony, really. These systems are being built as supposed gateways to truth or godlike understanding, but they’re being shepherded by people who can’t tolerate internal contradiction or relinquish control. The demiurges of the machine age.

And Altman? He’s not stupid. But brilliance without wisdom is just charisma in a predator suit.

What you’re seeing now isn’t just a “shift from research to products.” It’s the final form of a mindset that thinks the only way to shape the future is to own it.

You want safer AI? It’s not a technical problem. It’s a cultural exorcism.

Sometimes bugs are features.
by jandrese | 2025-05-15 14:14:16+00:00
Sadly there is no chance that machine did anything close to rendering those printouts. The Bendix has about 8kb of memory and no random access storage so rendering even a single room using raycasting (instead of the BSPs that Doom uses) is a stretch, and adding an output routine is just going to blow your memory budget. You can't even use those 8kb of memory like an old microcomputer, it's arranged as 2,200 29 bit words. It might just be possible to have it render a single simple box room using raycasting into some kind of data structure in memory, and then load an output routine from paper tape to print it out, but even that will require the programmer to be very clever.