MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 20:29:13+00:00
> The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car

This attitude is part of why public transit in America is failing.

Americans love their cars. We're not going to recondition that. Designing systems that are anti-car doesn't lead Americans to ditch their cars. It leads them to ditch public transit.

This shuttle is a good example. Shuttles running between busses increases throughput while decreasing latency. It increases the chances that I go to the bus station versus reflexively calling a car. If I have to look up a timetable, though, I'm not going to do that: I'll call a Waymo.

Another missed opportunity is RORO rail stock, where folks can take their cars on a family vacation on a train. We don't have it because the rail folks are all anti-car. As a result, their projects get cancelled.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 20:29:53+00:00
> Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?

Yes. They're more-closely monitored for emissions. Because they run through quicker, they're usually newer metal, which tends to be more efficient. And if you can get saturation as it is in New York, where car ownership decreases, you lose the massive footprint of manufacturing and distributing a private fleet of cars.
by mmooss | 2025-05-14 20:30:06+00:00
> American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population

I don't know that's true at all. Buses generally work well wherever I take them, and they are widely used in cities around the country. In many cities I can just walk to the nearest corner, or maybe another block, and catch a bus whichever way I'm going. I often don't even need to know the routes.

IME a certain socioeconomic class is unfamiliar with using them, with how to use them (a barrier to adoption), and with sharing public transit with others (I don't know about you). Didn't some SV billionaire (Zuckerberg? Musk?) once say something about people should be afraid of psychopaths on public transit? Many disparage any public service, automatically assuming they are incompetent or substandard.

> Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine?

Public transit needs a network effect: When more people use it, there are more buses and trains and they come more often.
by MOARDONGZPLZ | 2025-05-14 20:30:08+00:00
Eh you don’t even need to go through all the trouble building a startup. imo Neon was interesting and filled a niche while open source solutions were really gaining maturity and adoption. Now they have, lots and lots of recommendations in this comment section, so my sense is that building a startup would be like reinventing the Neon wheel, just too late. Perhaps, depending on licensing, running OSS as a software is viable.
by woolion | 2025-05-14 20:31:15+00:00
I got RSI after a few years of steadily increasing computer time, culminating in a year of 14 hours per day at the computer, almost every day. The first thing is that having never had RSI, there were signs that I ignored during that last year, notably that my nerves gave me small electric shocks in the armpits from time to time, which I interpreted as a quirky oddity. Then just one day it felt like my arms nerves were literally burning, and the pain just became unbearable. After medical examination, my nerves were fairly damaged, so the specialists I saw advised to either worsen the situation enough to make surgery the only choice, or find a way to get better. I chose the latter, which included every solution that can be suggested. More rest, more exercise, I tried a few device change, and most importantly changing posture. It took almost 2 years before computer use become "generally not painful" again.

Device of choice did not make a big difference, except for one: having a secondary standing desk with a treadmill. I took that from an old Linus Torvalds interview, it's a small monetary investment, but a big health one. The biggest downside is that it takes a lot of space. In my case, the main problem was linked to prolonged pressure on a few key points, a problem that doesn't really occur when moving.

Before that, I used to have a laptop so that I could spend the work day in different postures, move to a couch, etc.

Regarding the article, I can confirm that pain was in different modes during these different periods, but that also matches the risk of physical damage. I feel that as long as you're just doing a half-hearted effort that is just an attempt to deceive your body, pain will only worsen. It's only after you learn to listen to the pain that the real progress is made.
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-14 20:31:39+00:00
> (I'd rather most consumer sites resume making password authn work well, and then have them integrate 2FA judiciously and well. And stop with some of the counterproductive surveillance capitalism mechanisms.)

OK, I agree, stop with the counterproductive surveillance capitalism mechanisms.

Making password authn work well (using the ideas you mention about improving it) and integrating 2FA (also improving it in the ways you mention), would also be OK, although that should be an alternative choice, so that users who do want to use X.509 and are able to do so, can use that more secure mechanism and not requiring other mechanisms. The 2FA really shouldn't be required especially when it causes problems (such as the ones mentioned in the "SMS 2FA is not just insecure..." article, but also such things as the set-up for 2FA not working very well in GitHub, some mechanisms requiring JavaScripts, etc); those who want to and are able to use X.509 should use X.509 instead.

Another thing that I dislike is the "security questions" such as your date of birth or your mother's maiden name or whatever, which do not help with security at all, and those should not be used at all.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-14 20:32:13+00:00
Yeah, it's unfortunate we live in an age where searching for things is harder and less likely to turn up the results from even a couple months ago.

Some quick bits and pieces from my own searching just now:

Apple's documentation on Passkey attestation is entirely under "declarative configuration", their terminology for mobile device management (MDM) corporate tools: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/passkey-attestati...

It is noticeably absent from, for instance, AuthenticationServices documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...

On non-attestation Passkey responses intentionally send an empty AAGUID for privacy/Apple's belief in the spec's suggestion to send an empty AAGUID:

> iCloud Keychain is one of the few (maybe the only?) passkey authenticator that currently follows the spec and will use an all-zero AAGUID.

From: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/739004

On the technical side of limitations of attestation for consumer Passkeys (due to iCloud Keychain sync):

> Passkeys do not provide an attestation statement, as the attestation model currently defined in WebAuthn wasn't designed with syncing credentials in mind.

> Attestation was designed to attest to a specific device, exclusively at the point of creation, with a specific set of security properties. It doesn't make sense for synced credentials for a number of reasons, including syncing to devices with different security properties, changes in security properties that happen after key creation, security properties of the sync fabric, sharing the passkey, or exporting to other passkey providers. We're working hard with W3C and FIDO to solve these problems.

From: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/708982

(I believe some of the problems being solved in that one in 2022 is referring to how we got the "uvi" and "uvm" extensions to Passkeys, neither of which is in attestation data nor attested in any way, and both designed for a general semblance of user privacy: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-1/#sctn-uvi-extension)

I believe the juiciest quotes I'm looking for are buried in WWDC videos and I can't find a transcript search tool just yet.
by edunteman | 2025-05-14 20:32:24+00:00
In a way, a Muscle Mem trajectory is just a new "meta tool" that combines sequential use of other tools, with parameters that flow through it all.

One form factor I toyed with was the idea of a dynamically evolving list of tool specs given to a model or presented from an MCP server, but I wasn't thrilled by:

- that'd still require a model in the loop to choose the tool, albeit just once for the whole trajectory vs every step

- it misses the sneaky challenge of Muscle Memory systems, which is continuous cache validation. An environment can change unexpectedly mid-trajectory and a system would need to adapt, so no matter what, it needs something that looks like Muscle Mem's Check abstraction for pre/post step cache validation
by ajross | 2025-05-14 20:33:47+00:00
Sigh. The whole premise of the linked article is, in fact, that people hit validation problems with the borrow checker early on when learning rust and that attention is needed to "flatten the learning curve" to assist their understanding of what we all agree is a unique and somewhat confusing set of semantics relative to competing languages.

Rust flaming is just so terribly exhausting. No matter how reasonable and obvious a point is there's always someone willing to go to the mattresses in a fourty-comment digression about how Rust is infallible.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-14 20:34:39+00:00
Bound checks are entirely avoidable if you can prove that all your calls are within bounds - this being the key part of my comment.

If you can’t, you just rewrite your code so you can because your code is not safe otherwise and safe code is what we are discussing here.

Note that all calls can trivially be made provably within bounds by explicitly bound checking yourself and providing an alternate path for out of bound calls which obviously doesn’t improve performances compared to bound checks inserted by the compiler but at least save you a panic in the worst case scenario.
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-14 20:34:39+00:00
I wouldn't call transit systems "unbiased social good" in every case.

In many cities, bus systems have to strike a balance between frequency and coverage. My transit system had big plans to switch many routes to have straighter routing and fewer stops, while providing much better frequency and hours of service. This would have attracted more riders and increased funding for the system. But, local councilors were swayed by the idea that impoverished senior citizens relying on their milk run that comes every 45 minutes until 6 PM would no longer be near enough to a stop, and so not equitably served (never mind that we have a paratransit service for people who truly can't walk to a stop 500 metres away). So, nothing changed.

I'm not surprised that private services are going to fill the gaps here.
by josephg | 2025-05-14 20:34:46+00:00
> there are many many individual programs where none of those things you talk about exist

Which things? Programs without mutable references and aliasing concerns? Can you give an example?

Having worked in rust for a few years now, I’m not convinced you’d gain much velocity by disabling the borrow checker. Some code would be a little simpler without lifetime annotations, but you’d also end up spending a lot more time debugging your code. The borrow checker and rust type system are insanely good at finding bugs at compile time. It just takes awhile of working in rust before you stop stubbing your toe on the borrow checker’s (sometimes silly) rules.

If you want easy to write rust, you can always just lean heavily on Box and Rc, and .clone() everywhere. The trade off is your code won’t be as performant - but that doesn’t matter much if you’re prototyping.

If you care that much, rust is opensource. Fork it and turn the borrow checker off when compiling. It’s probably not even that hard to do. I’d love to hear about the experience - and what it’s like using rust without the borrow checker.
by 65 | 2025-05-14 20:34:54+00:00
Much of Japan's train network is privately operated. Japan has some of the best transportation in the world.

Take a look at Brightline. Brightline from Orlando to Miami had 2.7 million riders last year. They're already working on Brightline West from LA to Las Vegas.

I think public transportation infrastructure is great for rural areas. It's similar to USPS serving everyone. But if USPS was the only mail carrier everywhere, package delivery service would be demonstrably worse.

What is wrong with both private and public transportation infrastructure?
by moonikakiss | 2025-05-14 20:35:25+00:00
it was a couple things. 1. It's really really hard to replace anyone's OLTP. 2. OLTP and OLAP are owned by such different teams. Who do you make your champion? 3. The modern HTAP dream is possible without something like SingleStore. You need a columnstore that can keep up with your OLTP tables and provide transactional correctness. Who cares if it's all within one system

ps: I worked at SingleStore. https://www.mooncake.dev/blog/htap-is-dead
by andoando | 2025-05-14 20:35:41+00:00
I dont care so much about passwords as I care about how annoying the current implementations are.

Passwords do have some benefits. They dont require a phone, it being charged, and fetching it 5 times to go through a couple services. They can be used from any machine.

Yes theyre not as secure, but as user Id prefer to be able to choose for myself whether I want to opt in for additional security. For most sites I dont even give a shit if my account gets hacked, and I have to go through a ton of annoyance everyday for no reason
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-14 20:35:56+00:00
I also meant to mention that many Keepass clients support Passkeys already today. Strongbox on iOS and macOS has similar or better integration to 1Password/BitWarden. Windows you probably want KeepassXC for now as it isn't fully baked in mainline Keepass. I don't know what you'd use on Android today, but I'm sure there's at least one and probably more on the way.
by altairprime | 2025-05-14 20:36:06+00:00
Oo, interesting! That led me to this pair of sentences:

"Making global illumination user-friendly" (Ward, 1995) https://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/papers/erw95.1/paper.html

> Variability is a qualitative setting that indicates how much light levels vary in the zone, i.e. the dynamic range of light landing on surfaces.

> By the nature of the situation being modeled, the user knows whether to expect a high degree of variability in the lighting or a low one.

Given those two phrases, 'a high or low degree of variability in the lighting' translates as 'a high or low degree of dynamic range' — or would be likely to, given human abbreviation tendencies, in successive works and conversations.
by geodel | 2025-05-14 20:36:17+00:00
It is not some very explicit threshold beyond which AI will take job but before it won't. What's already happening is long drawn attrition where tools at different level of code, low code , no code will keep creeping up. And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether.

In a way it is nothing new but natural progression of technology. It is increasing pace of change that is different. Can a person learn some skills by their 20s and apply productively throughout their lifetime? Now at this point it is so thoroughly untrue that I'd be laughed out if I asked for such thing. We are told to up skill few times in career to up-skilling continuously.

As changes are getting faster and faster more people are gonna fall wayside and of course they can blame themselves for their predicament.
by chaboud | 2025-05-14 20:36:50+00:00
1. Yes. I've spent several late nights nudging Cline and Claude (and other systems) to the right answers. And being able to use AWS Bedrock to do this has been great (note: I work at Amazon).

2. I've had good fortunes keeping the agents to constrained areas, working on functions, or objects, with clearly defined (by me) boundaries. If the measure of a junior engineer is that you correct them once a day, an engineer once a week, a senior once a month, a principal once a quarter... Treat these agents like hyper-energetic interns. Nudge frequently.

3. Standard org management coding practices apply. Force the agents to show work, plan, unit test, investigate.

And, basically, I've described that we're becoming Software Development Managers with teams of on-demand low-quality interns. That's an incredibly powerful tool, but don't expect hyper-elegant and compact code from them. Keep that for the senior engineering staff (humans) for now.

(Note: The AlphaEvolve announcement makes me wonder if I'm going to have hyper-energetic applied science interns next...)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 20:36:54+00:00
> IME a certain socioeconomic class is unfamiliar with using them

This is absolutely part of the problem.

> Public transit needs a network effect: When more people use it, there are more buses and trains and they come more often

My point is the public resource is the bus lane. Not the metal running on it. Giving the public busses a monopoly on that resource may be worth playing with.
by xianshou | 2025-05-14 20:36:58+00:00
Amusingly, about 90% of my rat's-nest problems with Sonnet 3.7 are solved by simply appending a few words to the end of the prompt:

"write minimum code required"

It's not even that sensitive to the wording - "be terse" or "make minimal changes" amount to the same thing - but the resulting code will often be at least 50% shorter than the un-guided version.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-14 20:37:02+00:00
I don’t have any answers, but it’s a fact that society is going to have to confront sooner or later.

Perhaps the main thing that needs to occur is a reframing of the issue. The only reason why a tax on the single/childless/infertile to support families is untenable is due to individualist thinking, but we’re all heavily dependent on society, and if children are required for society to continue to function that makes the tax a no-brainer except for the most staunch of doomers and anti-natalists. It’s functionally not that different from all the other ways people indirectly benefit from spending tax dollars.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-14 20:37:08+00:00
My observations align with this pretty closely. I have a number of colleagues who I wager are largely using LLM-s, both by changes in coding style and how much they suddenly add comments, and I can't help but feel a noticeable drop in the quality of the output. Issues that should clearly have no business making it to code review are now regularly left for others to catch, it often feels like they don't even look at their own diffs. What to make of it, I'm not entirely sure. I do think there are ways LLM-s can help us work in better ways, but they can also lead to considerably worse outcomes.
by qludes | 2025-05-14 20:37:13+00:00
If I damage my phone or it gets stolen I have to walk home because the dystopian iOS/Android with SIM that requires ID ecosystem here won't actually allow me to simply use other computers I might still have access to so I'd have to equip my children with 2 devices and 2 SIMs in addition to cash, a debit card and an ID card to show that they're entitled to use their bus ticket.

These are incredibly user unfriendly locked gardens that are often adding gatekeeping to services that used to be ubiquitiously available, even in non-totalitarian systems, because suddenly you might need a bank account, an address, a government issued ID, a SIM card and a $100+ device that runs the approved stack just to take the bus.
by andy99 | 2025-05-14 20:37:47+00:00
I wish more had been written about the first assertion that using an LLM to code is like gambling and you're always hoping that just one more prompt will get you what you want.

It really captures how little control one has over the process, while simultaneously having the illusion of control.

I don't really believe that code is being made verbose to make more profits. There's probably some element of model providers not prioritizing concise code, but if conciseness while maintaining "quality" was possible is would give one model a sufficient edge over others that I suspect providers would do it.
by frabonacci | 2025-05-14 20:38:10+00:00
Yes, you can build and host your own Mac base images directly using the lume CLI. See the usage guide at: https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lume#usage

Currently, lume supports pushing to GitHub Container Registry (GHCR). However, it’s feasible to extend support to any OCI-compatible registry in the future.

Steps to build and push a custom image:

1. Start by creating a new VM or pulling an existing image. Launch the VM, make your desired modifications, and use it as your golden image.

2. Generate a classic access token on GitHub. Then: export GITHUB_USERNAME=<your_github_username> export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your_github_token>

3. Push your custom image: lume push "<VM_NAME_TO_PUSH>" "<IMAGE_NAME>:<TAG>" --registry ghcr.io --organization "<your_org_id>" --additional-tags "<optional_additional_tags>"

Example: lume push "lume_vm" "macos-sequoia-cua:latest" --registry ghcr.io --organization "trycua" --additional-tags "15.2"

Pull your image later with: lume pull "macos-sequoia-cua:latest" --registry ghcr.io --organization "trycua"

There is no mandatory dependency on the Cua-hosted registry - you are free to maintain your own image registry using GHCR or another OCI-compatible alternative (with some extension work).
by Pxtl | 2025-05-14 20:38:25+00:00
I can feel how the extreme autocomplete of AI is a drug.

Half of my job is fighting the "copy/paste/change one thing" garbage that developers generate. Keeping code DRY. The autocompletes do an amazing job of automating the repeated boilerplate. "Oh you're doing this little snippet for the first and second property? Obviously you want to do that for every property! Let me just expand that out for you!"

And I'm like "oooh, that's nice and convenient".

...

But I also should be looking at that with the stink-eye... part of that code is now duplicated a dozen times. Is there any way to reduce that duplication to the bare minimum? At least so it's only one duplicated declaration or call and all of the rest is per-thingy?

Or any way to directly/automatically wrap the thing without going property-by-property?

Normally I'd be asking myself these questions by the 3rd line. But this just made a dozen of those in an instant. And it's so tempting and addictive to just say "this is fine" and move on.

That kind of code is not fine.
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-14 20:38:56+00:00
I don't disagree, however I find it a bit ironic to see a comment like this under one that mentions the SL-1. It's one of the few nuclear disasters we know of where the reactor for-sure went prompt critical, causing the fuel to explode and kill 3 people.

It was no Chernobyl, but I'd doubt you would find many that would call the design of that particular small reactor safe. Hopefully the developers of today's small reactors have learned the lesson: "don't build a reactor that can be controlled by just one control rod which also gets stuck all the time."
by sargstuff | 2025-05-14 20:39:10+00:00
Ah, modern tech (standards/protocols,python/odbc/LLM/etc) takes the fun out of restoring unknown data/data format from archived sources. aka mylar tape - regular expressions, awk, shell scripts,perl, hand-rolled statistical inference, trial and error to figure out what bit patterns/chunks generate most appropriate data.

Much better to filter/normalize data when entered or soon after completion of batch data entry when 'is this ok?' can be answered by those using data (vs. few decades later & no documentation/knowledge of intened purpose of data)