MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jari_mustonen | 2025-05-15 13:38:17+00:00
Of course, AI will be used, first and foremost, to push advertising messages.

Is it just me, or do others also wish they could use public transportation, go for a walk in a park, or watch an educational video without being constantly bombarded with ads at every turn?

If there’s a jurisdiction that has an environmental protection tax on display advertising, whether in the real world or online, let me know. I’ll be the first to move there.
by ramses0 | 2025-05-15 13:38:21+00:00
I think this is matching some of their Apple Watch co-branding, eg: you can't pick the Hermes watchface unless you also buy the Hermes strap: https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-hermes/

...in all, I think it should make leaning on CarPlay more palatable for auto manufacturers. Exclusive "Ferrari Red" speedometers (aka: CSS-for-CarPlay), and there's the bland-ish basics that can be provided by Apple and used in any car.
by tzs | 2025-05-15 13:39:15+00:00
In urban areas isn’t the speed limit determined by the need to deal with pedestrians and other traffic?

If your hypothetical tracked buses are going to go faster than regular buses and cars there will need to be some sort of isolation of them, such as elevated tracks or underground tracks. That raises the cost significantly.

You probably will only be able to afford this on a few routes that are heavily travelled and that are expected to remain heavily travelled for decades.

That will probable leave a lot of your city far enough from a tracked buses stop that many won’t be within reasonable walking distance so you are still going to need some form of public transit, such as regular buses.
by tguedes | 2025-05-15 13:39:26+00:00
It looks like this will support physical buttons. From the article: "Drivers can also use onscreen controls, physical buttons, or Siri to manage both standard vehicle functions like the car’s radio and climate, as well as advanced, vehicle-specific features and controls like audio system configurations or performance settings, right from CarPlay, giving them a more fluid and seamless experience."

And if you look at the picture from the article, all the physical buttons are there.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-15 13:39:42+00:00
This is really sad. Just as the original iPhone launch broke through carriers trying to monopolize control over phones (remember having to pay for ringtones?) and instead gradually transferred to a new monopolist, we welcome our phone monopolist against the car industry. Because, as you say, the carmakers will try to customize it, and make it worse, just as PC and printer manufacturers ship bloatware and Microsoft put Candy Crush in the start menu.

I'm guessing that user customization is waay down the list here.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-15 13:40:05+00:00
It's a nice presentation, but the QR-code builder doesn't understand Kanji or Alphanumeric (5.5 bit / symbol) encoding.

It does, however, look very, very nice. I'm not complaining too much, just suggesting the authors encode alphanumeric data with the lower bit per symbol encoding when appropriate.
by sitkack | 2025-05-15 13:40:20+00:00
> MicroPython's inline assembler now supports 32-bit RISC-V assembly code via the newly implemented @micropython.asm_rv32 decorator. This allows writing small snippets of RISC-V machine code that can be called directly from Python code. It is enabled on the rp2 port when the RP2350 is running in RISC-V mode.

Exciting!
by K0balt | 2025-05-15 13:40:24+00:00
At supersonic speeds, the efficiency of an engine like this can be very high, and at high altitudes, travel is very efficient. People don’t seem to get that there is potential for more efficient transport at supersonic speeds/ hypersonic speeds. The ultimate example of this a satellite. How many times does it circle the world every 45 min, all on that initial fuel it took to get it up there? It seems wasteful, but it’s actually the most efficient form of transportation in existence.

Of course, hypersonic transport would not be as efficient as a satellite, but still, at 100k feet, for example, you can go 5000km/h while only consuming the same amount of fuel that you would use to go 300km/h at sea level. The potential for efficiency gains are huge, and the fuel cost of getting to altitude is mostly returned in the descent.

Of course, the technical challenges are also huge, so I don’t expect to see hypersonic airliners any time soon, but when we do get them, they could easily be 6-7x as efficient as existing transports. And it would be nice to have long haul flights be 3x as fast or faster.

People mistakenly assume that this kind of travel only has applications for the military or the elites, and, like air travel in general, that will probably be initially true. But after the rich and the government foots the bill in lives and research to make it safe and economical, it should hold huge gains for society at large.

Science and engineering is one of the only cases where trickle down economics actually kind of works. In knowledge, a rising tide really does lift all boats.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-15 13:40:24+00:00
To me, it just looks like the natural consequence of the NFP space being the last stop on the chain of tax avoidance tools used by the moderately to very rich to avoid insane tax levels. (refresher: Trust(s)-> custom large whole life policies -> whole life policies fund new trusts and new life insurance for the next generation -> remnants of old trusts that can't be evacuated tax efficiently are donated to family controlled charity that funds family controlled not for profits).In a setup like that, the NFP becomes just another bucket of tax privileged cash to use to further your interests by way of cushy appointments to staff/board positions or, rarely, charitable work that furthers some economic goal of the family. In that setup what you see as graft is the real value and what you see as charity is the cost paid in lieu of taxes on the pot of money. The actual graft is unfortunately the behaviour enabled at charities that actually take average person cash through fundraising.
by n4r9 | 2025-05-15 13:40:31+00:00
I didn't think the grilled cheese looked that bad. A little bit of char on the one side of the crust hardly makes it unappetising. Tbh you can't really tell how melted the cheese is. Sure it's not oozing, but you're never gonna get there directly over a fireplace with thick slabs of cheese. I wonder if this is a UK Vs US thing? It's not too uncommon for cheese in a burger to only be semi-melted in the UK.
by tomhow | 2025-05-15 13:41:13+00:00
You can't post like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. Also, other recent comments of yours have been breaking the guidelines and we've received complaints. If you could please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by jmmv | 2025-05-15 13:41:32+00:00
Original author here! Thanks for (re)sharing. We previously discussed this at length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983.

I think this article has "aged well" in the sense that... nothing has changed for the better :( Since I wrote it, I did upgrade my machine: I now have a 24-core 13th Gen i7 laptop with a fast NVMe drive and... well, Windows 11 is _still_ visibly laggy throughout. Comparing it to KDE on the same machine is like night and day in terms of general desktop snappiness (and yes, KDE has its own bloat too, but it seems to have evolved in a more "manageable" manner).

I've also gotten an M2 laptop for work since then, and same issue there: I remember how transformative the M1 felt at launch with everything being extremely quick in macOS, but the signs of bloat are _already_ showing up. Upgrading anything takes ages because every app is a monster that weighs hundreds of MBs, and reopening apps after a reboot is painfully slow. Still, though, macOS feels generally better than Windows on modern hardware.

About the article itself, I'll say that there was a complaint back then (and I see it now here too) about my blaming of .NET rewrites being misplaced. Yes, I'll concede that; I was too quick to write that, and likely wrong. But don't let that distract yourself from the rest of the article. Modern Notepad is inexplicably slower than older Notepad, and for what reason? (I honestly don't know and haven't researched it.)

And finally, I'll leave you with this other article that I wrote as a follow-up to that one, with a list of things that I feel developers just don't think about when writing software, and that inevitably leads to the issues we see industry-wide: https://jmmv.dev/2023/09/performance-is-not-big-o.html
by cweld510 | 2025-05-15 13:41:34+00:00
I don’t think this is because of AI. Rather, it seems a continuation of a shift which has already been occurring for my entire career, which is that the tech industry continually sheds people whose skills are entirely practical and are tied to a specific era or regime of technology. For instance, at one point, there were webmasters, but now those jobs don’t exist anymore. Sysadmins have gone through a similar struggle with the advent of the cloud. Once there were sysadmin jobs, and now there are no more. Today it is happening to a certain kind of full-stack engineers specializing in technology of the last 15 years. In the future it will probably happen to YAML engineers who specialize in Kubernetes and GitHub Actions.

Consistently the most durable roles seem to be those which require theoretical understanding of the fundamentals —- UI/UX, systems, algorithms, etc. It’s unfortunate that not everyone gets a chance to learn these things.
by qchris | 2025-05-15 13:41:35+00:00
This completely differs from my own experience with LabView, which I used a number of times in both undergrad/some grad-level coursework (I have a mechanical engineering background), as well as in internships at a couple of different companies. LabView sits, almost uniquely, in the "absolutely not, with no exceptions, ever again for the rest of my life" tools that I've worked with in my career. I don't think I even list on my resume anymore, because I don't want anyone to know that I've ever touched it and assume I'd be willing to again.

I know it's a classic "don't blame your tools!" situation, but the ability for even moderately-experienced programmers to accidentally build high-incidental-complexity tooling that becomes a nightmare to re-learn once you've lost your mental model of the program is, in my experience, unique (and frightening).

I once spent weeks trying to get a LabView-based tool up and running that a senior engineer in another section had written. Sketching out the relationships between components, documenting I/O, etc. After finally giving up the ghost, I went to that engineer for help. After spending hours (like, 5-6 hours, not 1-2) sitting next to him in my lab, he said "yeah, I'm not really sure what I was doing with this...", and proceeded to need to take the entire program back to his desk for nearly a week before he could finally explain how it worked.

This situation wasn't a one-off; it's happened with nearly every non-trivial codebase that I've ever touched that used it. In my experience, LabView is really fantastic in only two situations:

a) Very simple GUI-based DAQ tools that the person who wrote the program, and them alone, will need to use

b) Complex tools that are owned by a team of engineers who have written LabView for years and will now be dedicated exclusively to those tools
by tanelpoder | 2025-05-15 13:42:15+00:00
Also, anything you do with enterprise (cloud) customers. People like to talk about scale a lot and data people tend to think about individual (distributed) systems that can go webscale. A single system with many users is still a single system. In enterprise you have two additional types of scale:

1) scale of application variety (10k different apps with different needs and history)

2) scale of human capability (ingenuity), this scale starts from sub-zero and can go pretty high (but not guaranteed)
by markisus | 2025-05-15 13:42:25+00:00
Yes realtime capture and display. Locality is not required. You can send the source RGBD video streams over IP and in fact I have that component working in the larger codebase that this was split off from. For that use case, you need to do some sort of compression. The RGB stream compression is a pretty solved problem, but the depth channel needs special consideration since "perceptual loss" in the depth space is not a well researched area.
by chromehearts | 2025-05-15 13:42:26+00:00
CarPlay is the best thing to ever happen

Tesla has the most terrible UI of ALL cars by far. I personally think the Volkswagen cars up until 2021/2022 have the best UI (and I even dare to say the only good UI), although some things (like the map) could have benefited from a better design. (Of course, only my personal preferences, but I work with a lot of cars so yeah)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-15 13:42:42+00:00
I don’t think you realize how universal the halting problem is in the universe.

Like the law governs everything that exists in the universe so it governs humans as well.

If a human can know that a program halts it also means the program is provably haltable. If a human doesn’t know whether a program will halt it likely means that the program is not provably haltable.

The halting problem refers to a general algorithm that can prove any program will halt.
by 404mm | 2025-05-15 13:43:12+00:00
100% this. I want exactly none of this new CarPlay. Car and phone integration has been notoriously bad since the beginning. Software updates on your phone break BT or CarPlay with some specific car or brand… or car entertainment software being buggy and not working well with a phone… and never getting updates. CarPlay is mostly good at what it is today. I certainly don’t want it to became more integrated into my car. I really hope the “full dash takeover” is just an option that can be switched off.
by blululu | 2025-05-15 13:43:15+00:00
Which one? Berry is semiclosed, but people routinely remove the wooden barriers so they can drive on it and delivery app e-bikes/motor bikes routinely blast down it at speeds that make it uncomfortable to walk.

Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-15 13:43:50+00:00
Yes but that made it worse.

In fact I used to fake user agent all the time because Microsoft 365 is so retarded. With the Firefox/Linux user agent a lot of features don't work. When it pretends to be MS Edge it works fine. Clearly trying to force people to use the 'invented here' browser :(

But as I was getting captcha's I moved to using it only for the MS365 sites and nowhere else. It seems to have reduced the captcha's somewhat, especially the ones that never end (keep looping). But I still get a ton of "Your browser is suspicious, here's an extra check" nonsense from Cloudflare in particular.
by bnycum | 2025-05-15 13:44:30+00:00
I have wired CarPlay in my Honda Accord, it's like 95% fine. My wife has wireless CarPlay in her Honda Pilot, and it's got the weird disconnection issues. We found that if our kids are using the wireless tethering it really kills the connection. However this really compounds when we drive into major cities, the interstates seem mostly fine. Once we hit Dallas proper we have to turn off tethering or else it won't connect at all.
by pjdesno | 2025-05-15 13:44:48+00:00
My take on it - performance decays when engineering management doesn’t prioritize it.

Modern example: Laptops boot in seconds. My servers take about 5 minutes to get to Linux boot, with long stretches of time taken by various subsystems, while Coreboot (designed to be fast) boots them nearly as quickly as a laptop.

Old example: early in my career we were developing a telecom system with a 5 min per year (5 9s) downtime target. The prototype took 30 minutes to boot, and engineers didn’t care because management hadn’t told them to make it boot faster. It drove me nuts. (a moot point, as it eventually got cancelled and we all got laid off)
by yummypaint | 2025-05-15 13:45:08+00:00
The tradeoff is that searching for answers develops people's ability to do research in general. It's an essential skill to be able to skim though material quickly and decide if it's relevant or not. it's in the same way that calculators save labor on large calculations, but giving up all of one's mathematical intuition in exchange for a better calculator would be decrease in net performance.
by hinkley | 2025-05-15 13:45:19+00:00
They aren’t standardizing the way the PC was standardized. They’re making custom hardware with custom connectors. Their parts are interchangeable with themselves but the rack is the unit of delivery and operation. Their software is closer to standardizing in the normal sense of the word.

That’s a mainframe, sport. At their height they were modular and in at least IBM’s case they could run with damaged parts and were delivered with dark hardware that could replace damaged parts until a maintenance person could arrive, or be remotely enabled to increase throughput for a fee.

All of this cloud stuff, except the geographical redundancy parts, is recreating software that business had versions of forty years ago.
by Marsymars | 2025-05-15 13:45:43+00:00
The problem is that you can only really have a single one of these “streamlining” requirements, or your potential vehicle list ends up empty. I’d have preferred a compact pickup (a Maverick or Santa Cruz) in manual (only a couple of cars per manufacturer) with physical buttons (Mazda) and modern structural safety (so no old vehicle) - so I had to compromise on a couple of those wants.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 13:45:50+00:00
There is a lot of talk about AI training being a driver of bot activity, but I think AI inference is also a driver, in two ways.

(1) It's always been easy to write bots [1] [2]. If you knew beautifulsoup well you could often write a scraper in 10 minutes, now people will ask ChatGPT to write a scraper for them and have a scraper ready in 15 minutes so they're discovering how easy it is, how you don't have to limit yourself to public APIs that are usually designed to limit access, not expand it.

(2) Instead of using content to train an AI you can feed it into an AI for inference. For instance, you can tell the AI to summarize pages or to extract specific facts from pages or to classify pages. It's increasingly possible to develop a workflow like: classify 30,000 RSS feed items, select 300 items that the user will probably find interesting, crawl those 300 pages looking for hyperlinks to scientific journal articles or other links that would be better to post, crawl those links to see if the journal articles are open access, weigh various factors to decide what's likely to be the best link, do specialized image extraction so I can make a good social post, etc. It's not too hard to do but it all comes falling down if the bot has to click on fire hydrants endlessly.

[1] Polite crawlers limit how many threads they have running against a single server. If you only have one thread per server you are unlikely to overload it. If you want to make a crawler with a large thread count that is crawling a large number of servers it can be a hassle to implement this, particularly if you want to maximize performance or run a large distributed crawler. However a lot of times I do a crawling project that targets one site or five sites or that maybe crawls 1000 documents a day and in those cases the single-threaded crawler is fine.

[2] For some reason, my management has always overestimated the work of building scrapers, I think because they've been burned by UI development which is always underestimated. The fact that UI development is such a bitch actually helps with crawler development -- you might be afraid that the target site is going to change but between the high cost of making changes and the fact that Google will trash your SEO if you change anything about your site, the target site won't change.
by echelon | 2025-05-15 13:47:17+00:00
OP, this is incredible. I worry that people might see a "glitchy 3D video" and might not understand the significance of this.

This is getting unreal. They're becoming fast and high fidelity. Once we get better editing capabilities and can shape the Gaussian fields, this will become the prevailing means of creating and distributing media.

Turning any source into something 4D volumetric that you can easily mold as clay, relight, reshape. A fully interactable and playable 4D canvas.

Imagine if the work being done with diffusion models could read and write from Gaussian fields instead of just pixels. It could look like anything: real life, Ghibli, Pixar, whatever.

I can't imagine where this tech will be in five years.
by beyon86 | 2025-05-15 13:47:41+00:00
I built Make-Charts (https://www.make-charts.com) after seeing a friend struggle with data visualization for presentations. It supports pie, radar, funnel, and radial charts and more with full customization. Powered by d3.js but designed to be simple enough that non-developers can create professional visualizations in minutes instead of hours. Looking to add AI capabilities next so users can just upload data and describe what they want. Would love to hear your voice, your work with visuals or any feedback about this simply tool.
by btown | 2025-05-15 13:47:56+00:00
CarPlay is a really interesting co-branded design challenge. Each automaker wants their own look and feel (this is the industry that led to the computing usage of the word "chrome" after all! [0]), so Apple needs to deliver a design system that can find the right balance of customizability and standardization of the actual UX.

How do you design a widget that car designers might want to give different fonts, different levels of visual density, crammed into unexpected shapes and sizes, that must never get into a situation where information appears glitchy in a way that could cause a real-world accident?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLf44BXd0SE is a WWDC 2024 presentation that speaks to some of these challenges. I recall a great prior discussion thread on HN about this, but can't find it at the moment.

[0] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/15618
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-15 13:48:06+00:00
How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day.

Easy --- advertisers pay for bad ads the same as good ones --- why bother stopping the bad ones?

Convincing so many advertisers to just blindly trust the system and buy into the concept of black box "personalized" advertising is actually the real marketing coup here.

According to some stats, global use of ad blockers is now over 40%. Once it exceeds 50%, I believe this stupidity will slowly start to die out.