MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-14 20:03:41+00:00
> I formally report it every time I'm in a car that has the deodorizer turned up to 11 because it makes me nauseous.

This is a good thing. I do think we're much better off now than we were in the 80s-10s (relentless, pervasive over-fragrancing).

But lately I've been running into the occasional Axe-weilder or odd desktop gadget that creates an airplane sized zone of unbreatable air. It might be time to dust-off some civil reminders about air quality.
by SauciestGNU | 2025-06-14 20:04:23+00:00
This is more evidence that "secret police" are a threat that must be neutralized. Between assassinations and other imposter crimes, this is becoming a dangerous situation. And it's equally bad for legitimate law enforcement, I've read about multiple instances of drug enforcement raids being disrupted because the public thinks it's an ICE raid or other illegitimate paramilitary operation.
by mandmandam | 2025-06-14 20:05:32+00:00
> The Democratic party is the antithesis of this.

I really wonder how you got that impression.

I saw Democrats funding 'cop cities', and paying for police to learn their tactics from the IDF. I saw Biden proposing increasing police budgets by $1.7 billion dollars (after months of global BLM protests). I saw Obama, Biden and top Democrats happily voting to fund ICE, and boasting of deporting more immigrants than any other admin in history.

Republicans to police: "Shoot criminals dead."

Democrats to police: "Why can't you just shoot criminals in the leg?"

... That's not what an "antithesis" looks like.

If you want real reform of ICE and the police, and expect to get it from Democrats just because they say they will, then you're gonna have to keep ignoring an awful lot of inconvenient reality.
by harmmonica | 2025-06-14 20:06:00+00:00
We're far from them doing it, but I have to imagine at some point Waymo, assuming they survive, will operate similar to Uber and Lyft in terms of pricing vs vehicle type. They have to realize how critical consistency-of-ride is so I'm not suggesting they'll have tons of options, but they will "have to" tier their offering lest someone else comes along (assuming the tech becomes more widespread) and offers a tier they don't offer. At the least I would think they'll end up with a base ride (like an Ioniq or even something extremely basic), an Ioniq or Ioniq+ type in the middle and then some kind of larger, more luxurious option. I mean this as it relates to rideshare because I'm sure Waymo has had plenty of internal conversations about the various verticals they can eventually operate (shipping, mass transit, etc.).
by ghaff | 2025-06-14 20:06:57+00:00
Well, yes, the market didn't care all that much for various reasons. (There were reasons beyond technology.) RHEL/GCC supported but, while I wasn't there at the time, I'm not sure how much focus there was. Other companies were hedging their bets on Itanium at the time--e.g. Project Monterey. Aside from Sun, most of the majors were placing Itanium bets to some degree if only to hedge other projects.

Even HP dropped it eventually. And the former CEO of Intel (who was CTO during much of the time Itanium was active) said in a trade press interview that he wished they had just done a more enterprisey Xeon--which happened eventually anyway.
by empiricus | 2025-06-14 20:07:33+00:00
At a minimum we should start from something captured close the reality, and then get creative from that point.. SDR is like black-and-white movies (not quite, but close). We can get creative with it, but can we just see the original natural look? HDR (and the wider color space associated) has a fighting chance to look real, but looking real seems far away from what movie makers are doing.
by barkcloth | 2025-06-14 20:07:40+00:00
In addition to writing the music and drama mentioned in the article, Satie also wrote about his own (rather eccentric) life. An excerpt about optimizing that stood out to me:

> An artist must regulate his life. Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. ... My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). [1]

[1] Mémoires d'un amnésique (1912). An english translation of the excerpt: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_a_Musici....
by krapp | 2025-06-14 20:08:01+00:00
Politicians being above the law is not an aspect of a healthy civil society.

Throwing politicians into courts and prison after due legal process for crimes they actually commit is an aspect of a healthy civil society.

If your judicial system is so corrupt that every accusation against a politician is a ruse manufactured by their enemies and no fair trial is possible, then you don't have a healthy civil society either way.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-06-14 20:09:41+00:00
I got detached, as a professional, to NATO. I got an officer grade despite never having been in the army.

The first thing I did when I met the real soldiers was to clarify that I got the grade for reasons, but that I absolutely am a civil and have no intent to be a bighead asshole who will boss them around just because that have less bars on the shoulders than I was given.

We started from a very, very good foot and had a wonderful collaboration.

Just do not pretend to be what you're not and things will be fine.
by harmmonica | 2025-06-14 20:10:06+00:00
I have zero clue if they still do, but based on my experiences lately with Uber and Lyft there's zero chance they fire drivers even if they have terrible reviews. I'm an "always 5 star" type of reviewer (sorry if you think I'm obligated to be honest!), but, man, it's rough out there at least in big cities in the US. Sorry that's not reliably answering your question, but even if Uber said they fire those people I would not for one second believe them.
by zuminator | 2025-06-14 20:11:35+00:00
It could be that a particular segment of the population prefers the privacy and is willing to pay accordingly, while other segments of the population don't mind the social interaction, or at least are not willing to pay for its absence.

Kind of how like some people greatly prefer WFH, whereas other people like the social interaction of being in a shared working environment.

From my perspective, having the choice of whether to ride with a driver or not is a good thing.
by abilafredkb | 2025-06-14 20:13:18+00:00
I'm genuinely confused and need some perspective from this community. I spent months building Smarketly after watching my own products fail due to terrible marketing. The problem seemed obvious: technical founders (like me) can build great products but have no clue how to find customers. We waste time posting in random communities, write awkward outreach messages, and generally suck at getting our work seen. So I built a tool that systematically solves this:

Finds communities where your actual customers hang out Helps write personalized outreach that doesn't sound spammy Generates marketing content including videos Gives step-by-step strategies based on your stage

I thought through every pain point I experienced and addressed them. I validated the idea by talking to dozens of founders who all said "I need exactly this." But here's what's driving me crazy: people won't sign up. I get traffic, positive feedback, "this looks great!" comments... then nothing. Maybe 2-3% convert to even trying the free tier. I'm starting to question everything. Maybe the problem isn't as big as I thought? Maybe founders prefer struggling with marketing over using tools? Maybe I'm solving a "nice to have" instead of a "must have"? I've been building products for years, but this disconnect between expressed need and actual behavior is breaking my brain. When people say they desperately need help with marketing but won't try a free tool that addresses their exact complaints, what's really going on? Has anyone else experienced this gap between what people say they want and what they actually do? How do you tell the difference between real problems and problems people just like complaining about? I'm genuinely lost here and could use some brutal honesty from this community.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-14 20:13:43+00:00
Your HUD isn't simulating a solid object floating in space.

If you want to hold a poster board in front of your face while driving, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't mean car or device manufacturers should design their interfaces with the assumption that you're being reckless. AR doesn't exist to fill the role of a smart watch and it never has (or Apple would have discontinued theirs when the Vision Pro came out).
by lxgr | 2025-06-14 20:14:30+00:00
Simply not playing Uber’s bait-and-switch game (happened again just yesterday: A purported $40 ride ended up being $80 due to being “unexpectedly 3x the planned distance”) would get them my business immediately once they become available in NYC for the very few times I do take a car.

Not marking up rides when there’s a gift balance on the account would also be a great distinguishing feature.
by OutOfHere | 2025-06-14 20:15:39+00:00
It is not clear why this news keeps getting reposted.

23andMe failed to move up in the world by offering full genome SNP sequencing like its competitors do. Instead, they lost genetic data of millions of users which was sold online. Now its ex-CEO has a major conflict of interest in acquiring the firm that the ex-CEO was responsible for bringing down. That's three strikes against it.
by akkartik | 2025-06-14 20:16:06+00:00
It's not clear to me why you consider my approach a pipe dream. The only criticism I've heard is that people won't adopt it. Is that the only one?

One critical question for you is: can someone rebuild a piece of software for themselves, from scratch, using LLMs, without changing radically in terms of how many neurons in their brain are devoted to programming?

If they need to have real control here, they'll need to understand a lot about programming, build up a certain skeptical mindset in reviewing code, etc. That sort of requirement feels like it'll also affect adoption.

If they do so without learning much about programming, then I'd argue they don't have much control. It's not them rebuilding the thing for themselves, it's the LLM rebuilding the thing for them. And that comes with the same sorts of Principal Agent problems as depending on other sorts of AIs like tech companies to do so. They'll find themselves awash in eldritch bugs, etc.

So I think LLMs can't square this circle. If they want to not devote a lifetime to programming, user control using LLMs feels like more of a pipe dream than my approach. Because my approach depends crucially on personal relationships. There's no illusion that each person is getting personally customized software. Instead we're banding together in computational space as if we're travelling through medieval Asia -- using a caravan. Caravans had a natural limit in size, because larger caravans were easier to infiltrate with bandits. Managing those risks in a large caravan requires the geopolitical skills of a king to constantly see all the angles of who can screw you over at each point in time.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-14 20:16:20+00:00
Well, it's true that tuples aren't defined by the ZF axioms. They do have a conventional definition, which you appear not to know.†

Natural numbers also aren't defined by the ZF axioms; why do you think that the definition of a tuple should involve them? You're likely to have a hard time finding a textbook that agrees.

I'm getting an overwhelming sense here that you don't know the meaning of the things you say. If you don't know what a Cartesian product is, why do you think it makes sense to talk about what you can and can't do with it?

Why do you think it makes sense to write {a b c a}, which has no meaning?

† For reference: by the standard convention, the tuple (a, b, c, a) is represented as the set {{{a, {a, b}}, {{a, {a, b}}, c}}, {{{a, {a, b}}, {{a, {a, b}}, c}, a}}. You might notice that no numbers appear anywhere. You might also notice that regardless of representation - and you're free to use other representations - it will never be a Cartesian product, because "tuple" and "Cartesian product" refer to different things.
by akkartik | 2025-06-14 20:16:51+00:00
I think the differing stances towards tech companies might be the crucial axiomatic difference between our positions. I've just lived through 30 years of reduced regulation of Tech, and it's hard to imagine a world that reliably prevents that from recurring.

> In the 90s Microsoft found that people only used 10% of the features of Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, everyone used a different 10%. At the limit, you would have to create a separate product for each feature permutation to cover the whole market.

They were approaching this from the other side, though, of already having built a ton of features and then trying to fragment a unified market. It doesn't work because from Microsoft's perspective the goal of Excel is market control at the cheapest price, and giving each user their 10% is more expensive.

But if you shift perspective to the users of Excel, you don't need to care about market control. If everyone starts out focusing on just the 10% they care about, it might be tractable to just build that for themselves. The total cost in the market is greater, particularly because I'm not imagining everyone using the same 10% is banding together in a single fork. But that becomes this totally fake metric that nobody cares about.

My approach involves throwing an order of magnitude more attention at the problem than people currently devote to computing. But a single order of magnitude feels doable and positive ROI. If everyone needs to become a programmer, that's many orders of magnitude and likely negative ROI. That's not what I'm aiming for.
by Simon_O_Rourke | 2025-06-14 20:16:53+00:00
Maybe it's my rampant misanthrope leanings, but even in more trivial things like choosing automated kiosks other staffed in CVS, I'm just more comfortable not having to make small talk with a person, worry if they're having a good day or not etc.

I'd happily pay 20 percent more to Waymo for that personless experience too.
by naikrovek | 2025-06-14 20:16:55+00:00
The switch from 24-bit color to 30-bit color is very similar to the move from 15-bit color on old computers to 16-bit color.

You didn’t need new displays to make use of it. It wasn’t suddenly brighter or darker.

The change from 15 to 16 bit color was at least visible because the dynamic range of 16-bit color is much lower than 30-bit color, so you could see color banding improve, but it wasn’t some new world of color, like how HDR is sold.

Manufacturers want to keep the sales boom that large cheap TVs brought when we moved away from CRTs. That was probably a “golden age” for screen makers.

So they went from failing to sell 3D screens to semi-successfully getting everyone to replace their SDR screen with an HDR screen, even though almost no one can see the difference in those color depths when shown with everything else being equal.

What really cheeses me on things like this is that TV and monitor manufacturers seem to gate the “blacker blacks” and “whiter whites” behind HDR modes and disable those features for SDR content. That is indefensible.
by whstl | 2025-06-14 20:17:13+00:00
Yeah, the scalability of software definitely puts us our industry in a weird spot. Everyone must act as if they're Apple or Google and project confidence.

Plumbers are more impactful than tech, but since the impact is collective and local, there's no crazy talking.

About depression: Classic medication was enough to stop the panic attacks and the crippling negative thoughts, but it wasn't permanent. I would have tried ketamine if it were available to me. Behavioral Therapy helped me avoid bouncing back when lowering the medication. It helped me recognize when I was stuck in a mental loop. Later on we both realized that relationships, jobs and founding startups wasn't giving me structure and purpose in life, and lack of purpose was making me bad again over time. To fix this, some people have religion, others self improvement, others make companies, some get kids... I got a cat. It might not be a "sexy" purpose but it works. Now I can have imperfect relationships, bad days at my job, or pursue the other things that tickle my brain without feeling empty inside. The depression is still looming there but now I know how to deal with it before it takes over.
by rdtsc | 2025-06-14 20:18:12+00:00
> People are eager to pay money to not deal with other people

I wonder if it's cultural. For instance I always hear how Japan has a lot of vending machines and am wondering if it's just pure tech advancement and efficiency at work, maybe lack of space to open a proper kiosk with a seller, or there is a cultural element of not wanting to "inconvenience" others having to interact with them.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-14 20:18:13+00:00
And I bet your HUD doesn't put a background behind any of the (very minimal) text or icons that it shows you. Mine doesn't. HUDs show information in front of your face that you need to drive. If you didn't have the HUD you'd be looking at the instrument cluster to see your speed. The car in front of you isn't fighting to be visible through the border of a push notification.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-14 20:18:18+00:00
This is amazing. Don't forget that by you doing this you're taking us one step closer to AI replacing not just the job of drivers but the jobs of all of us. Good sides and bad sides.

Hopefully we won't get there and only uber drivers are the ones screwed. Since you and I aren't uber drivers, we don't really care do we?
Ask HN: Do you think there's censorship on HN?
by endorphine | 2025-06-14 20:18:33+00:00
It could just be me, so I'd like to know what everyone thinks: lately there have been significant geopolitical tensions and multiple wars being fought.

However, I have a feeling that not all news make it to the top of HN and I was wondering whether this is just a coincidence or there's chance that specific posts are being buried on purpose by the moderators and/or any algorithms.

I know this might sound like conspiracy theory. This is not my intention. I just want to know if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars.
by fhd2 | 2025-06-14 20:19:21+00:00
People who like Waymo (and those who hang out on HN) are probably to a good degree neuro diverse, so I wouldn't write off humanity just yet. My experience with the majority of people is that they do like interacting with humans. I guess that's why we still have stores, restaurants and gasp offices when, technically speaking, there hasn't been too much of a need for any of these things for about two decades now.
by perrygeo | 2025-06-14 20:21:00+00:00
Everything I've read in the last 5 months says otherwise. Probably best described by the Apple ML group's paper call The Illusion of Thinking. It empirically works, but the explanation could just be that making the stochastic parrot squawk longer yields a better response.

In any case, this is a far cry from what I was discussing. At best, this shows an ability for LLMs to "learn" within the context window, which should already be somewhat obvious (that's what the attention mechanism does). There is no global knowledge base or weight updates. Not until the content gets published, rescraped, and trained into the next version. This does demonstrate a learning feedback loop, albeit one that takes months or years, driven by external forces - the company that trains it. But it's way too slow to be considered intelligent, and it can't learn on its own without help.

A system that truly learned, ie incorporated empirical data from its environment into its model of the world, would need to do this in millisecond time frames. Single celled organisms can do this. Where you at AGI?
by harmmonica | 2025-06-14 20:21:01+00:00
I'm not sure I'm reading you correctly, but if you mean it's a small problem because $3 isn't much money then, heck yes, it's a microscopic problem (is there something smaller than microscopic because if so then it's whatever that thing is)! But I didn't bring it up to complain about the $3 per se. I can elaborate, but I'm not sure if that's what you were specifically referring to or if I'm misunderstanding your question.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-14 20:21:31+00:00
Nope.

Forecasting weather, designing semiconductor devices, or any other such activities are all based on continuous mathematical models, which use e.g. systems of equations with partial derivatives or systems of integral equations.

Only in the last stage of solving such a problem, in order to use a digital computer the continuous mathematical model is approximated by a discrete mathematical model, which is constructed using a standard method, e.g. finite elements, boundary elements, finite differences, most of which are based on approximating an unknown function with an infinity of degrees of freedom with a function determined by a finite number of parameters, then by approximating the operations required to compute those parameters by operations with floating-point numbers.

Such an approximating method is something extremely different from formulating a discrete mathematical model of physics that is considered the exact model.

Even the graphics for a game are based on continuous models of space, not on discrete models, where it would be very difficult to implement something like the rotation of an object or perspective views.

The failures to which I have referred are the attempts to create such discrete models of physics, e.g. where the space and time are discrete not continuous.

These attempts have nothing in common with the approximating techniques, which are indeed the base for most successes in using digital computers.
by Zak | 2025-06-14 20:22:45+00:00
I'm not who you asked, but social anxiety seems like a good reason to have this preference.

I also dislike ordering food by phone for practical reasons. Call quality might be bad, person's accent might be hard for me to understand, I might be hard for them to understand, the chance an error will go unnoticed even if they read back the order is higher than a website where I can read it myself, and in many cases I have to give a credit card number to a person, which has a higher probability of leading to fraud than most online payments in 2025.
by georgemcbay | 2025-06-14 20:23:41+00:00
> $3 isn't this kind of a small problem?

Its the principle, not the size of the cost. If a company with good customer service accidentally overcharged me $200 but I could call someone and have it fixed easily that would set me off far less than a company that screwed me out of $1 who has shit-tier dark pattern customer service.
by nemomarx | 2025-06-14 20:23:44+00:00
It's also a little disorganized - on an app I can see all the options and my choices when ordering food for example, over the phone you have to keep that in your head or write it down before hand which is higher effort. This goes for other things too, like navigating a phone tree and explaining your situation to someone or ordering a taxi and being sure you have your location and the destination correct, etc
by bean_canister | 2025-06-14 20:24:02+00:00
The concept of Mitochondrial eve IS still based on DNA, it's not a separate method of determining ancestry...

How is mitochondrial eve disproving evolution or pointing towards intelligent design?

Nobody thinks man evolved from monkey, that is a straw man.

Monkeys and humans are physiologically similar, it's not surprising at all that a culture would develop mythology involving man -> monkey transformations. And I'm sure that exists outside of abrahamic mythology as well