MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brookst | 2025-05-03 00:27:29+00:00
I don’t get it.

Say I’m building a company to ship self-driving trucks. I need hundreds of millions, maybe billions in capital.

I need to line up purchasers. My fixed costs are huge and marginal lower, so I need volume.

How, exactly, am I thinking about “threatening” existing drivers so they work longer hours and break more laws?
by dangus | 2025-05-03 00:27:54+00:00
Isn’t it true that truck drivers are the most common profession in basically every state?

I think it’s “funny” how corporate leaders in basically every industry are enthusiastically barreling toward a world in which they have no employed customers to buy their products created by their automated robot workforce.

Nobody in politics is coming close to addressing the societal problems that are incoming in the near future.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-03 00:28:39+00:00
I took this to mean that you have to use the Microsoft Authenticator app, not just that it needs to be installed on your phone.

Either way, it's just Microsoft trying to push themselves into a space and remove consumer choice.

Is there another possible reason for this?

I'm saying that as a general fan of Microsoft. I just wish they'd stop doing these things that are not beneficial to the user, and solely focused on keeping themselves relevant.

The right way to stay relevant is to make great products.
by adrmtu | 2025-05-03 00:28:53+00:00
Isn't this basically a de-biasing problem? Treat each rider’s ratings as a random variable with its own mean μᵤ and variance σᵤ², then normalize. Basically compute z = (r – μᵤ)/σᵤ, then remap z back onto a 1–5 scale so “normal” always centers around ~3. You could also add a time decay to weight recent rides higher to adapt when someone’s rating habits drift.

Has anyone seen a live system (Uber, Goodreads, etc.) implement per-user z-score normalization?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-03 00:29:16+00:00
> I find criticising people for "they did it because there was something in it for them" such a lacklustre criticism

Agreed! However.

> there are only three motivations for people to do things

Cooperative behavior arises on its own via evolution in otherwise fairly primitive species. The benefit to the individual in such cases is extremely indirect but the game theory on a collective level is clear enough.

Which is to say, you could just genuinely want to help others. I suppose one could argue that doing so benefits you emotionally but I feel that would be getting a bit reductionist.
by banq | 2025-05-03 00:30:05+00:00
If we distinguish between form and content: Mathematics = form; language = content. However, mathematics is only one type of form, and subject-predicate-object grammar also belongs to form, yet grammar falls under language.

For example: "Matter determines consciousness." If we apply first-principles thinking—where does matter come from? This statement then becomes: "XXX created matter, and matter determines consciousness." At this point, our interest shifts to the first-principle subject "XXX," focusing our attention on it. Who is XXX? God?

In this thought process, we use the subject-predicate-object grammatical structure to trace back the original subject "matter" in "matter determines consciousness"—where does matter come from? Although this formal reasoning does not involve specific mathematical formulas, it indeed employs formal logic to uncover a flaw and opens the door to deeper rabbit-hole
by brendangregg | 2025-05-03 00:30:08+00:00
The origin problem for flame graphs was MySQL server performance involving dozens of threads: as a timeline view you need dozens of timelines, one for each thread, since if you render it on one (I know this is probably obvious) then you have samples from different threads from one moment to the next turning the visualization into hair. Flame graphs scale forever and always show the aggregate: any number of threads, servers, microservices, etc.

I think great UI should do both: have a toggle for switching between flame graphs (the summary) and timelines (aka "flame charts") for analyzing time-based patterns. I've encouraged this before and now some do provide that toggle, like Firefox's profiler (Flame Graphs and Stack Charts for timeline view).

As for 20ms, yes, we do want to take it down. A previous HN comment from years ago, when I first published FlameScope, was to put a game frame on the y-axis instead of 1 second, so now each column shows the rendering of a game frame, and you can see time-offset patterns across the frames (better than a time-series timeline). We started work on it and I was hoping to include it in this post. Maybe next one.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-03 00:30:33+00:00
I think it is a fair question to ask. I personally might be too influenced by what I see in gaming these days, where the game arrives in unfinished state. The difference there is, there are some clear ways of telling they are unfinished ( or finished ).

How can we tell in this case? Do we wait for accident reports?
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-03 00:31:13+00:00
Perhaps for casual readers.

But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring.

Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible.

Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...
by tern | 2025-05-03 00:31:15+00:00
Green Day (was) definitely original. The level of unoriginality I'm talking about goes way beyond "pop music is the same old chords from the 50s" or "the 70s were the golden age and everything since then is derivative."

What's the basis for this? Unfortunately it's hard to describe, but I've listened to a wide variety of popular and niche genres my whole life with a specific eye toward appreciating all the different ways people appreciate music and I know when something feels new.

Even most (or all?) pop music feels new. If it wasn't, I don't think it would be popular. Sure, it's all derivative, but what makes music enjoyable is when it combines influences in a fresh way.

"French house polka" achieved by doing a statistical blend of the two genres just isn't that interesting—it misses so many ways that things are combined by artists—specific details of the texture of the sound, how it's recorded, cultural references, tons of tiny little influences from specific artists and other genres, etc.

I've tried very specific prompts in Suno and it's not even close to useful for someone who knows what they're doing. The image generators are hardly better—things overwhelmingly trend toward a fixed set of specific styles that are well-represented in the training sets.

This critique falls down in certain areas though. Using tools like Suno to come up with songwriting ideas can be fantastic—as long as you have the taste to curate the outputs and feed it into your own creative process. It's also fantastic for creating vocal samples, and I'm sure it'll crush it for functional music (advertisements, certain types of social media) in short order
by lubujackson | 2025-05-03 00:32:25+00:00
Very interesting, as I am nearly the opposite. Bad spatial reasoning though pretty good at most other things. In school, geometry was fun and interesting - I enjoyed proofs. And I majored in English in college with a CS minor, so I think there must be a variety of in-roads for programming.

I think one "verbal" skill that has served me well is fast reading. When I had to read a 300 page novel once a week you learn how to skim for key elements, which is immensively useful for getting up to speed in a new codebase/language or locating a bug.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-03 00:36:13+00:00
My brother is in this business. There’s overlapping jurisdictions that shady operators leverage hard to squeeze more out of people and equipment.

Chinatown busses are the perfect example, they’d run routes designed to avoid federal jurisdiction and adopt routes and schedules to avoid weigh stations and routine inspection. Busses were unsafe and drivers unlicensed in many cases. Most were owned by Chinese mafia organizations and killed people. When they weren’t doing that, they were huge human trafficking operations.

The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned, so it’s a Wild West environment. The advice I was given was avoid the busy trucking corridors (I-81/85/95) at night.
by dangus | 2025-05-03 00:36:18+00:00
You’re glossing over the great amount of physical violence and unrest that happened during the period of industrialization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

All of that unrest eventually resulted in the new deal. We have had relative peace in the postwar period thanks to a lot of pain being resolved over a long period of time, but that lack of friction is not guaranteed to last forever.

I would argue that America’s backslide into the election of a reactionary, dare I say fascist government is all about declining prosperity.
by eagleislandsong | 2025-05-03 00:36:23+00:00
> We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.

Many (if not most) Europeans think it is perfectly fine when they criticise other countries; but when people from other countries criticise Europe, these very same Europeans tend to agitatedly accuse these critics of interference in their domestic affairs.

From these Europeans' point of view, humanity progresses in pre-ordained stages, and Europe has already reached the end of history, the pinnacle of human development, and other countries just need to catch up.

> because we've seen what happens when Europe has more power than the rest of the world. It wasn't pretty for the rest of the world.

Indeed. At the height of their power, the Europeans and the Americans colonised, pillaged, plundered, murdered, started wars, and enslaved. This isn't ancient history either; e.g. after World War 2 the French tried to re-colonise Vietnam, fought in a war against the Algerians to prevent them from declaring independence, and has continued meddling in the Sahel States up to the present day, among other atrocities.

And don't get me started about how the IMF has frequently been wielded as an extractive tool by Western nations to exploit impoverished countries in times of desperation. So when the West falsely accuses [0][1] China of debt trap diplomacy, the hypocrisy is palpable.

[0] https://yawboadu.substack.com/i/142330715/is-debt-trap-diplo... [1] https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/the-hambantota-port-deal-myt...
by anon7000 | 2025-05-03 00:36:26+00:00
Totally. I’ve noticed lots of sites moving away from comments on reviews too. For example, Amazon reviews on mobile can be “helpful” or I can report them.

Why can’t I downvote or comment on it? As a user, I just want more context.

But obviously, it’s not in Amazon’s interest to make me not want to buy something.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-03 00:36:58+00:00
It's mostly a matter of time. @ This point RISC-V is well beyond critical mass (read: it's here to stay), and the ecosystem is growing fast.

But designing complex IC's, getting those into products ("design wins"), selling those products, software support etc, all takes time.

For example, came across this list recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_microcontroller...

(note: it will be far from exhaustive. On the low end, uC architectures are like water in the ocean. Some are just more popular than others).

Many of the products those arch's go into, have 10y+ production & support lifecycles. Change comes slow there.

I suspect that over time, RISC-V will mop up a good portion of that list (for those entries still in production), and become a go-to default choice for maaany applications. Where a designer would need good reasons to not pick a RISC-V based part. Not unlike how low end Cortex-Mxx seem to be everywhere these days.

Higher up, licensing is only a tiny % of overall costs. (Peak) performance, GFLOPs/Watt etc is what matters. RISC-V is still (somewhat) behind the curve there. Which isn't surprising given how much engineering & optimisation has gone into x86 & Arm over the years.

But being a shared/open architecture, may open new doors. For example: right now, highest-performing parts are always closed (commercially licensed IP cores. And/or manufactured in-house).

For RISC-V otoh, it's entirely possible that at some point, the highest-performing cores are open source ones. Not saying that'll happen! But it's possible.

If so, eg. Arm could only match that by open sourcing their latest & greatest. Which ofcourse would evaporate their business model.

So the licensing alone could have RISC-V go places where proprietary IP cores can't go. Exiting times...

Edit: but issue below also applies.

https://xkcd.com/927/
by koolba | 2025-05-03 00:37:35+00:00
> I struggle to find a use case where this would optimize good code. I can think of plenty of bad code usecases, but are we really optimizing for bad code?

The most common such usage in modern web programming is storing and retrieving a map of HTTP headers, parsed query parameters, or deserialized POST bodies. Every single web app, which arguably is most apps, would take advantage of this.
by roughly | 2025-05-03 00:37:57+00:00
I heard the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Planetary Environments caught the brunt of the blame, but the real fault was with the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Atmospheric Dynamics, who got off scott free. Turns out he was the general’s nephew.
by wirelesspotat | 2025-05-03 00:38:18+00:00
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by pb7 | 2025-05-03 00:38:54+00:00
There are actually no Chili's or Outback or Applebee's or most national chains you can think of in San Francisco. You said "metro area", I have no idea what this means in this context given most people like the city itself, not the sprawling strip mall towns on the peninsula which is not San Francisco. The city limits are pretty well defined here.
by brookst | 2025-05-03 00:39:42+00:00
Exactly. ChatGPT is actually pretty good at this. I recently asked a tech question about a fairly niche software product; ChatGPT told me my approach would not work because the API did not work the way I thought.

I thought it was wrong and asked “are you sure I can’t send a float value”, and it did web searches and came back with “yes, I am absolutely sure, and here are the docs that prove it”. Super helpful, where sycophancy would have been really bad.
by arjunrko | 2025-05-03 00:40:01+00:00
Short answer: no, stick with the CS degree. A downturn or an LLM headline doesn’t erase the long‑run return on mastering how information actually moves through silicon. The coursework forces you to think in abstractions that outlive any single tool - memory models, distributed consensus, algorithmic trade‑offs. Those are the levers you’ll pull whether you are debugging a flaky startup backend or bolting an AI copilot onto a Fortune 500 workflow.

What changes is how you package that foundation. Sprinkle in some applied AI electives, tinker with open‑source models, learn to measure and mitigate their failure modes. Pair that with product sense from the incubator project, and you are not the engineer AI is replacing—you are the engineer shipping AI safely and profitably. That combination buys you optionality, which is the real stability you want for a future family.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-03 00:40:32+00:00
> the company would stop investing as much in innovative search technology.

As a consumer, their current level of investment--or benefits thereof--is not easily apparent.

No, I don't need some LLM to make a nonsense explanation of what my query of keywords would mean if someone might delirious enough to use them in conversation.

Also, we must consider the flip-side: Does Google's monopolistic presence prevent and deter anybody else from making their own different investments that might create something even better?
by wahern | 2025-05-03 00:40:48+00:00
According to the NYT[1], between 1950 and 2018 95% of published English-language fiction authors were white. That Top 100 Novel list contains at least 3 black authors, Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin. Considering that the percentage of black authors for the period 1900-2000 was probably even less than for 1950-2000, and that there are actually only 75 unique authors in that list, on its face I don't see the bias by the voters. The bias is in the disproportionate share of published white authors.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/cultu...
by heywoods | 2025-05-03 00:40:56+00:00
These are the kinds of policy/feature decisions around a product that infuriates me:

1. Because it’s fucking stupid if you think about this for more than 5 seconds. You can think of edge cases where this will be problematic immediately.

2. Some PM at Google is making mid 6 figures to come up with this simp brain decision that has devastating rippling effects to the developer community and trust while also fucking over the cash cow market, that is a mobile App Store, by stifling dev incentives to develop on your platform.

Amazing. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that meeting
by globnomulous | 2025-05-03 00:40:59+00:00
> Good code doesn’t just solve a problem, it solves it in a way that’s readable and modular.

Strongly disagree.

There are plenty of cases where non-modular code is more readable and faster than modular code (littered, presumably, with invocations of modular logic).

There are also countless cases, particularly in low-level languages or languages with manual memory management, where the best solution -- or the correct solution -- is far from readable.

Readability is anyways in the eye of the beholder (My code is readable. Isn't yours?) and takes a back seat to formal requirements.

Just as a matter of personal style, I prefer long, well-organized functions that are minimally modular. In my experience, context changes -- file boundaries, new function contexts, etc -- are the single greatest source of complexity and bugs, once one has shipped a piece of code and needs to maintain it or build on it. Modular code, by multiplying those, tends to obscure complexity and augment organizational problems by making them harder to reason about and fix. Longer functions certainty feel less readable initially but I'd wager they produce better, clearer mental models, leading to better solutions.
by hervature | 2025-05-03 00:41:24+00:00
I know this is a convenient meme and narrative but this post is literally the consequence of having to pay more for labor, you get more people trying to automate it. We're talking about logistics, probably the most important component of the economy. Trucking salaries are probably the closest thing to "market clearing wages" that exists. Pay more -> more expensive shipping -> less demand to ship things -> lower wages.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-03 00:41:30+00:00
> So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them?

Yes? We got rid of telephohe operators. We got rid of "computers" (people who compute). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) We effectively got rid of horse shoe makers, liveries, etc...

> Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...

Does it suck for the truck drivers. Yes. Does that mean we should give them busy work even though their job can be automated? No. We don't know what the reprocussions will be. We do know, from 100% of past experience, that automating something opened new opportunties that ultimately resulted in more jobs that before. Whether that will be true this time as well no one has any idea.

The usual example is textile creation vs fashion. The loom put people who hand weave cloth out of business. But the abundance of cheap cloth created 100x the jobs in cloth making and fashion. It's why you probably have more than 3 shirts in your house/apartment.
by leptons | 2025-05-03 00:42:13+00:00
Sorry but you are wrong. "CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE" operations are not mathematical in nature. It doesn't matter what the data is or how esoteric you want to get with it - a programmer doesn't need any math at all for simple CRUD. You're trying to move the goalposts all the way back to the 1800s to win a pointless internet argument.
by calmbell | 2025-05-03 00:42:15+00:00
Here is an article from 2022 that does a great job of explaining the issue: https://www.columnblog.com/p/us-media-celebrates-letting-18-...

"Cut to 2022. Wages are still down 30% to 50% in key markets, and the job is as dangerous and taxing as ever. Naturally, the pool of people wanting the job would reduce accordingly. Thus, when demand for truckers increases, there’s a “labor shortage.” But, as Peter Greene noted in Forbes when debunking a related myth of “teacher shortages” in 2019, it’s not a lack of willing workers: It’s a severe lack of incentives—wages, unions, benefits—needed to entice workers to take on the difficult work"
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-03 00:42:38+00:00
<< What would be a better indicator to you than 4 years of driving records?

"In four years of practice hauls the trucks’ technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company’s self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck."

It would be a start, but we don't seem to have that. Or, at least, the article does not have them. What we do have is a press release and an indication that the load was delivered. No indication of the issues that arose. Just the simple fact that no issues are mentioned suggests there is a massive amount of information that is being omitted, because, I am sure you will agree, it is close to impossible for any kind of rig to run for 4 years and not have issues.

edit:

Tangent. I am starting to feel real fatigue from seeing those gaping holes and just about all articles I read each day. Even FT had some weird omissions in something I saw the other day. And that is just one problem. It gets even worse, when you read something you have some expertise in and the author gets it very, very wrong.
by smugbug | 2025-05-03 00:43:07+00:00
The growing trend of Corporate Brutalitarianism - performative cruelty for the sake of demonstrating the capacity for it to leadership and investors. If all obstacles to profit have to eventually be eliminated then you better be signalling that you're willing to kill the baby to make the quarter.

Ramping up cruelty serves the convenient secondary purpose of psychological layoffs - burning people out into quitting en masse (or providing opportunity to mark them Bad Leavers and retain shares) in preparation for the supposed AI productivity gains on the remainder.