MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-03 00:02:40+00:00
This wildly misunderstands the nature of modern trucking. Trucks have many different roles, they're not just trains that don't need tracks. Trucks can work as on-demand transport, they can do low-volume, infrequent trips, they can aggregate and offload containers much easier, they're universally receivable at both ends with a minimum of infrastructure, etc. These autonomous trucks are competing with long haul human-driven trucks taking stuff from one depot to another, not short haul trucks.
by derektank | 2025-05-03 00:03:10+00:00
>Do you think people just dropped dead?

No, they intentionally killed each other.

If I recall correctly from the last time I read Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature the murder rate in pre-Industrialized Northern Europe is estimated to be between 50 and 500 per 100K which is anywhere from 10 to 100x as violent as the global rate today. And that's not including inter state or inter tribal warfare.
by dheera | 2025-05-03 00:03:21+00:00
Oh, sure, for the well-known models that are already on there.

I just wish that new research would always spell it out in full instead of these silly block diagrams labelled with just e.g. "Cross Attention" and not the exact parameters, number of heads, layer sizes, etc.

Also some of these diagrams use a + for concatenation and some use it for addition, that's another headache to figure out, having layer sizes would make it clear.
by m3047 | 2025-05-03 00:03:37+00:00
Hey. I brought up ranitidine because it is specifically associated with nitrosamines, and nitrosamines cause colon cancer. No redirect: colon cancer. You take issue with prilosec being admitted to this debate, then that would be because ion pump moderators cause stomach cancer. My bad: stomach cancer irrelevant to you.

You can't see ranitidine when it farts in your face: nitrosamines cause colon cancer. Why is that not relevant? Why is that not potentially more relevant than foo foo microbes? (By the way, I eat sour cream or yogurt when I eat meat or take e.g. glucosamine. YMMV.)
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-03 00:03:49+00:00
Yup, give us a tool and we'll use it. I've mostly used it for meme songs.

But I really think they've made a mistake with direction, realistically it should've been trained on tracker files, and build somgs via the method (but generate the vocals,individual instrument sounds for midi, obvs).

I think the quality would be higher since the track can be "rendered" out essentially, but also only then would it be a useful tool for actual musicians, to be able to get a skeleton file (mod, etc) for a song built up that they can then tweak and add a human touch to.
by tomhow | 2025-05-03 00:05:39+00:00
We've asked you this before, and we're now asking again: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful .
by RajT88 | 2025-05-03 00:06:01+00:00
Well if it is the unique things, there is still many unique things in the big cities. If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.

If you think DC is samey, maybe your expectations around uniqueness are higher than your average person's. Lol. I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.
by wonderwonder | 2025-05-03 00:06:35+00:00
Apologies for coming off poorly. Trt doses are generally well tolerated. Blood work is recommended though. Higher doses over time definitely can lead to very bad things including an enlarged heart. I take 1 mg of test cypionate a week. It’s been absolutely life changing. I will never come off of it and never want to.

I inject myself once a week.

It’s positively affected every aspect of my life from work to family to personal satisfaction. At 45 i looked 50. At 46 I look 40.
by kornork | 2025-05-03 00:07:41+00:00
I love the em dash; I use 'em all the time. But finding them all over this post indicates, maybe, possible, (probably?), that the author at least used AI generated text as a first draft.

In the worst case, this is like "We released this sycophantic model because we're brain dead. To drive home the point, we had ChatGPT write this article too (because we're brain dead)."

I tend to rely on AI to write stuff for me that I don't care too much about. Writing something important requires me to struggle with the words to make sure I'm really saying what I want to say. So in the best case, if they relied on ChatGPT so much that it left a fingerprint, to me they're saying this incident really wasn't important.
by computerdork | 2025-05-03 00:07:45+00:00
I do agree with you about AI music powering a revolution - it really creates some amazing music and it's still early in the technology - But for us musicians who studied literally decades to learn all these techniques (harmony, counterpoint, music form, polyrhythms, piano, partimento...), it's painful to see that others can create a piece of music in seconds which took us a lifetime to learn how to do (I write mainly classical music and it was a punch in the gut when I first heard Udio's classical music generation. Very impressive - sigh).

An no disrepect towards anyone using AI to create music, it is here and unstoppable, but I don't currently use generative AI in music myself. Yeah, think for performed works for a live audience (at least in classical music), most people want to hear music composed by humans (for the most part). Hopefully, will stay this way for awhile, otherwise, I've been going down a road that goes nowhere. Ah well, wouldn't be the first time:)
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-03 00:08:31+00:00
From the outside: isn't modern American culture just a parody of itself?

And isn't that why there are so many who claim to be "Irish" or "Italian" even though they're third or fourth generation and have never set foot in the countries.

I'll probably grab UK citizenship soon, but I would never say "I'm British". Nor would I if I had British parents (I don't) when I was still in NZ, before I'd even set foot in the UK.
by brudgers | 2025-05-03 00:09:05+00:00
You can see MTV’s “string of black faces” rationalizing in the Bowie interview:

https://youtu.be/XZGiVzIr8Qg?si=T1RmgwQiqOP_GiNE

Wikipedia’s article whitewashes the actual history. We were watching MTV and smoking weed in those Reagan’s America days.

—

In fairness the US music industry had the race music chart which became the R&B chart to keep black musicians off the pop chart and Elvis’s controversy was singing black music…and consequently being played on white radio stations to white kids.
Ask HN: Should I stop pursuing a future career in software engineering?
by encroach | 2025-05-03 00:11:13+00:00
Its no secret that the software job market doesn't look too good right now. I would like a stable career that can support my future family. Should I switch while I'm still young? If so, what should I switch to? If not, how can I prepare myself to succeed?

Context: I will be starting my junior year as a computer science undergraduate in the fall. My current plan is to found a tech startup through my university's startup incubator my senior year. After graduation, the plan is to continue to grow the startup if it works out, or if it doesn't, pursue a software engineering role at another company.
Show HN: Split.style – A Better Way to Format Numbers
by splitstyle | 2025-05-03 00:13:19+00:00
I built split.style (https://split.style) - a simple tool that formats long numbers into groups of 4 digits for improved readability and easier memorization.

Why?

Have you ever struggled to transfer numbers between devices or manually enter OTPs when copy-paste isn't available? Long numeric sequences like account numbers, OTPs, or reference codes become frustrating to read, remember, and type accurately.

US phone numbers are formatted with grouping (like 555-123-4567) precisely because it helps with readability. But when we encounter other types of numbers (account IDs, verification codes, serial numbers), they're typically presented as an unbroken string of digits that's prone to errors when manually transcribed.

split.style solves this by chunking any number into groups of 4 digits and providing audio pronunciation, making it significantly easier to read, remember, and accurately type numbers from one device to another.

Features:

- Groups numbers into easy-to-read chunks of 4 digits

- Audio pronunciation of formatted numbers

- Shareable URLs for your formatted numbers

- Works with any numeric sequence

- Free, no login, no ads

I'd love to hear your feedback, feature requests, or use cases!
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-03 00:13:35+00:00
I’m especially keen to know how you can describe this as “Kafkaesque”.

Is your coworker sending you photographs of his cockroach carapace? Is his family keeping him locked in his room? Is he only able to communicate via gesticulations of antennae and disturbing screeches?

What an interesting case. Perhaps if we work hard enough, we can collectively blame the Trump administration for a dramatic uptick in Kafkaesque cockroach metamorphoses, worldwide!
by nmstoker | 2025-05-03 00:15:05+00:00
Does anyone else get that survey rating effect where you start off thinking the company is reasonable, you give a 4 or 5, then the next page asks for why you chose this and as you think it through you realise more and more shitty things they did, so you go back to bring them down to a 2 or 3. Effectively by asking in detail they undermine the perception of them
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-03 00:15:44+00:00
> Math major here.

You say that like you think it's a qualification?

You're not making it look good. A common use of be is to express set membership rather than identity. For example, "two is an even number" or "tigers are cats".

We may hope that one day you'll come to realize that set membership is not reflexive, and - more to the point - also not symmetric.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-03 00:15:47+00:00
> so absurdly radical that BEN SHAPIRO's adult cartoon was considered "woke" because it had a gay character who was the butt of every joke

So I was curious and went searching, and I assume you mean the animated "Chip Chilla" series which has drawn some unflattering comparisons with Bluey.

However I didn't find that particular character or critique, maybe somebody else will have better luck.
by primitivesuave | 2025-05-03 00:16:31+00:00
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and the overarching point is certainly valid (that complacency has led to some notable corporate collapses). However, for purely pedagogical reasons, I have some critique of the Punic War analogy:

- Hamilcar Barca raised his three sons Hannibal, Hazdrubal and Mago, to hate Rome from their early childhood, going so far as to make them swear an oath of eternal enmity (according to Livy). While competition in a free marketplace is much more rational and impersonal, the conflict between Hannibal and Rome was very much rooted in deep ideological hatred.

- Hannibal's strategy was to separate Rome from its allies in the Italian peninsula, which is why he did not march on Rome after Cannae. Perhaps there are realistic business strategy where the aim is to systematically dismantle any means of support that a competitor has, but they aren't well represented in the examples given.

- Quintus Fabius was originally known as Cunctator ("the delayer") as an epithet, and only much later as an agnomen, partly due to his policy that they would not negotiate with Hannibal to exchange prisoners of war. Not only that, it was illegal for the family of a captured soldier to independently negotiate for their family member's release. It's hard to understand what public opinion was like at that time, and the most reliable source (Polybius) was a Roman prisoner-of-war himself!

- The Fabian strategy as it might be applied to management wisdom would not realistically be a "delaying strategy" (i.e. wait for your competitors to run out of resources while trying to limit them as much as possible) but rather a strategy of optimizing your workforce to be more nimble and self-sufficient. Rather than have one large army that represented a single point of failure, the Fabian strategy was to have many small armies that continuously harassed Hannibal's forces for many years.

If the author of this post is reading - I love your writing style and don't intend for this to be interpreted as criticism, I just thought it was an interesting analogy that warranted further exploration.
by bonyt | 2025-05-03 00:17:05+00:00
> Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font.

For example, the Northern District of California rules require a 12-point standard proportional-width font, with no more than 28 lines per page 8½ inch by 11 inch white paper with numbered lines. This is their way of requiring double-spacing and enforcing the page limits[1].

BUT - The rules don't say anything about requiring the paper to be portrait rather than landscape. 28 lines on a landscape page would allow for a lot more text.

Alas, I'm not daring enough to try it, as the intent of the rule is clear, and I'm sure no judge would take kindly to it.

Some courts have moved to word count limits, requiring a certification of word count at the end with a lawyer's signature.

[1]: https://cand.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/CAND_Civil_Loca... (Civ. L.R. 3-4(c)).
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-03 00:17:18+00:00
I think it’s impossible to live in the perspective of a person living in a place 300 years ago.

But I take the position that people are people, and tend to behave the same over time to similar stimuli.

My ancestors in 17th century Northern Ireland would be well acquainted with violence as Cromwell ravaged through and tried to cleanse them. I would imagine that familiarity would drive defensive behaviors - hoarding food, knowing when to run, being vigilant. That affects you.

If you’re a typical urban or suburban professional, you live a life free of strife or serious concern for bodily harm. That’s not the case for people who live a few miles from you, and certainly not the case for most people in the US even 100 years ago.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-03 00:18:33+00:00
I am of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I see the clear, long-term potential given that half the people I see while driving are somehow on their phone. From that perspective, it can't come soon enough. Some people need to be off the road. On the other, I am annoyed that we are effectively beta testing those on public roads with public paying the price.
by tomhow | 2025-05-03 00:19:25+00:00
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by nani8ot | 2025-05-03 00:20:15+00:00
> Bonus points for them being considered somewhat "close" to the French RN (which the latter have denied – don't know what that's worth).

Rassemblement National denied being close to the AfD because of how right-extremist the AfD is. The AfD was thrown out of the far-right group in the EU parliament because other EU far-right parties didn't want to get associated with this right-extremist party.
by adastra22 | 2025-05-03 00:21:30+00:00
Yes, it is a story narrated by Penn and Teller (well, just Penn). I don’t recall them ever speaking negatively about Vermeer for having used a contraption to get perfect perspective. And the contraption that Tim comes up with is super simple—basically a dental mirror. If anything, they speak very positively about the ingenious of the method, and seemed to respect Vermeer greatly, if I remember correctly.
by echelon | 2025-05-03 00:21:45+00:00
Autonomous trucks will be fantastic. Truckers are compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines. It creates a lot of danger on the highway.

It feels like autonomous vehicles could become one of America's superpowers. We have so many miles of road and interstate highway. Autonomous vehicles could double down on that strength and flip the underinvestment in passenger rail on its head, making it much less of an issue.
by isx726552 | 2025-05-03 00:21:55+00:00
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It is absolutely in the cards for the ownership class to send out swarms of drones to kill us all.

The best we can hope for is to all end up in permanent slums picking through garbage to survive.

One peep of protest a little too loud and suddenly we’ll all be living the same scenario that’s visible all over the “combat footage” portions of the web: you are walking along outdoors, you hear a buzz, and then suddenly you look up to realize there’s a drone coming at you. You panic and try to run but by the time you hear it, it’s too late. It catches up to you easily and drops a bomb on you. Or maybe it’s a smaller more targeted (and disposable) one that zips straight at your forehead and explodes on contact, destroying your brain.

People may say I’m a doomsayer but just look back at the history of labor in the US. They sent out privatized security to shoot anyone who didn’t cooperate. And that was when they still needed the workers! Just imagine what they’ll do when they no longer need anyone!
by Sharlin | 2025-05-03 00:23:03+00:00
You're quite overestimating our capabilities as a species if you think that planning, developing, and launching a recovery mission in a few weeks would be even remotely feasible. Sure, we've known that the thing's up there all this time, so in the very counterfactual scenario where we had started thinking about a retrieval mission a few of years ago, and the Space Shuttle was still a thing, and someone was willing to foot the n-hundred-million-dollar bill, I guess? I don't think any nation on Earth currently has the hardware required to rendezvous with a random spacecraft in orbit and bring it down in one piece. The Shuttle was unique in that respect.
by labrador | 2025-05-03 00:23:41+00:00
Point taken. I admit my comment was silly the way I worded it.

Here's the line I’m trying to walk:

When I ask ChatGPT about its own internal operations, is it giving me the public info about it's operation, and also possibly revealing propreitary info, or making things up obfuscate and preserve the illusion of authority? Or all three?
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-03 00:23:57+00:00
I'll bet one more cynical.

The teamsters, the CDL mills, the driver trade groups, all the people who've joined hands with the hand wringing types to prevent modernization of our trucking regulations will see the writing on the wall, pull out all the stops, lobby to allow human steering wheel holders to work to their full potential and full automation will stagnate for 20+yr while tech is instead deployed to solve other nuisance problems that limit truck sizes and productivity.
by brucehoult | 2025-05-03 00:24:17+00:00
Based on your numbers, revenue increased by 35% between 2021 and 2022, but only 18.5% between 2022 and 2023.

Oh! In fact it seems your figures are incorrect -- 2023 was $2.68B, a 1% decrease from 2022, and it was 2024 that was $3.2B.

So assuming 2023 was an anomaly (but why?) that's only a average 9% annual increase from 2022 to 2024.

Looks like a flattening trend. 2025 will be interesting, especially if it's flat again.

As you quite correctly point out, RISC-V's advantage isn't licensing cost -- if you license a core from SiFive or Andes or others then it might cost a bit less than Arm but it's not significant. And if you develop your own core then you'll spend more.

The RISC-V advantage is that you can customise it how you want without protracted licensing negotiations with Arm and a very real possibility that they might sue you if you try to do anything innovative.

You can add instructions, implement a subset of the instructions, sell chips or completed products to anyone in any market, license your design to other people for them to build, get acquired by other people who can then use what you designed. None of which you can do with Arm.
by monkaiju | 2025-05-03 00:24:30+00:00
So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...

That's even assuming this is actually remotely profitable compared to just using humans. Like a lot of this sort of automation it probably isn't, and it's true purpose is to be used as a threat against workers so they'll be even more "compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines"
by echelon | 2025-05-03 00:25:21+00:00
> assuming this is actually remotely profitable

Why wouldn't it be?

> instead of improve their conditions

I wouldn't want to drive a truck. To be frank, I really don't want to answer Jira tickets and write plumbing code either. I sincerely hope that none of what most of us do today has to be a job in fifty years.
Ask HN: Cloud Costs What am I missing?
by rqmedes | 2025-05-03 00:25:33+00:00
One of the original promises of the cloud was reduced operational overhead—you wouldn’t need armies of sysadmins or people racking hardware. But at scale, the opposite seems to happen. We have hundreds of cloud engineers. That headcount is growing faster than any other part of R&D. The tooling, services, and interdependencies are increasingly complex, and managing reliability feels harder, not easier.

Then there’s cost. Cloud spend is rising far faster than the growth of the business, and the pricing—especially for storage—is getting harder to justify. We’ve hit the point where some parts of our cloud bill look downright absurd.

We’re not inexperienced at this—we’ve been in the cloud longer than many companies have existed.

Cloud is starting to feel like a trap, am I just an out of touch old man?
by motrm | 2025-05-03 00:25:46+00:00
Echoing parrit's comment, this was indeed a very nice read and very well written.

I particularly enjoyed the gentle exposition into the world of cgroups and how they work, the levers available, and finally how Ubicloud uses them.

Looking forward to reading how you handle burst credits over longer periods, once you implement that :)

Lovely work, Maciek!
by epage | 2025-05-03 00:26:00+00:00
My ideal workflow is commits are as small as possible and PRs "tell a story", meaning that they provide the context for a commit.

I will split up a PR into

- Individual steps a a refactor, especially making any moves their own commits

- I add tests *before* the feature (passing, showing the old behavior)

- The actual fix or feature commit is tiny, with the diff of the tests just demontstrating how behavior changed

This makes it really fast to review a PR because you can see the motivation while only looking at a small change. No jumping around trying to figure out how the pieces fit together.

The main reason I might split up a PR like that is if one piece is likely to generate a discussion before its merged. I then make that a separate PR and as small as possible so we can have a focused discussion.

I hate squash merges.
by stackskipton | 2025-05-03 00:27:02+00:00
>The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.

Because companies have invested in JIT because low cost of trucking, an industry which is heavily subsidized (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049), allows it.

If trucking costs reflected their true cost, railroad would look a ton more attractive along with not doing JIT.