MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cycomanic | 2025-06-08 05:23:18+00:00
> Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda. >

Sigh people just like to make statements without evidence to back them up.

> Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US). >

Evidence? Moreover you know that average occupancy rates of cars are around 1.5 [1], for short trips like commuting it's more like 1.1 [1] so that's a factor 2 off from your 2.5. So even if we believe your numbers you have to explain how you're going to increase occupancy rate by a factor of 1.5 to 2 before they become just better (not even blowing out of the water). [1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ENVISSUENo12/page029....

Note I could not find numbers on buses, but trains in the above source have occupancy rates of 50%.

> The explanation is simple: > > 1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical. >

And robotaxis have to drive empty to and from the person they are picking up.

> 2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but... >

Not sure how we should account for bus drivers, considering that even if they are not working as bus driver the person is still around (also should we include the emissions from all the engineers working on self driving tech at the moment then) . However your statement is also false in most western countries, at least green house gas emissions of private households are dominated by transport (i.e. Cars).

> A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation. >

You're contradicting yourself. If the bus driver is the most polluting part of the bus (according to your statement above), then it would definitely make sense to get rid of them.

It would be great if your statement was true and robotaxis are the most efficient thing ever. I'd love to see well laid out evidence for this, but from what I just found your statement is not supported by reality.
by adiabatty | 2025-06-08 05:25:12+00:00
According to the linked article on <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214230>, they’ve already been involved:

> The response to the protests drew a conflict between ICE and the Los Angeles Police Department. "Our brave officers were vastly outnumbered, as over 1000 rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building," said ICE in a statement. "It took over two hours for the Los Angeles Police Department to respond, despite being called multiple times."

> But the LAPD said that, "Contrary to the claim that LAPD delayed its response for over two hours, our personnel mobilised and acted as swiftly as conditions safely allowed."
by godelski | 2025-06-08 05:26:13+00:00
Are the people working on the interesting problems doing most of the spying?

I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets.

I'm curious what this distribution is.

I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff
by overfeed | 2025-06-08 05:26:23+00:00
I remember when Obama threatened Fox Sports mergers due to how Fox News covered his first term in office, and trued to get the Saudis to sign a pro-choice vendor agreement with the embassy. Biden also threatened law firms that represented Trump and threatened to ban them from government buildings and revoke security clearance. It was the standard thing for dems to do when dealing with political opponents.

Both sides are totally the same thing, there's nothing to be done.
by elcritch | 2025-06-08 05:27:47+00:00
You might try out Nim. It has a low annotation noise level. The python like syntax feels odd for a systems language at first but since it’s statically typed it works well. The simpler syntax seems to work very well with LLMs too.

Basically it’s a better C/C++ for me and sits between C and C++ in complexity.

I tried Zig for a while years ago but found the casts and other annotations frustrating. And at the time the language was pretty unstable in how it applied those rules. Plus I’ve never found a use for custom allocators, even on embedded.
by ripley12 | 2025-06-08 05:28:40+00:00
That's sort of the popular wisdom, but rails don't guarantee it will be there for the long run. DC recently announced that they're replacing their light rail with buses:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-...

Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-was...

I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-06-08 05:29:17+00:00
Source? None of those numbers make sense.

> The price is somewhat of a guess, several years ago, the hardware in Waymo was priced at $130k by Munro&Associates

10 years ago they had even more sensors dotting the car, instead of one honeycomb on each corner they had 2, so I find $130k hard to believe given what we know about the sensor kit today.

> But since then the cost of the LIDAR sensors fell by 90% or so, reducing the main expense.

I do not know of any lidar that has done that, and Waymo makes their own and we know their price(-ish) (and quantity). I think they’ve actually gone up in price (but also capability - honeycomb 1 vs gen 2).
by righthand | 2025-06-08 05:33:05+00:00
MSN used to be this special variation of Internet Explorer on Windows during the early era of the internet. My grandmother used it and the rebranded browser was packaged with other software products (if I recall correctly, I could be conflating it with preinstalled trash back in the day). It had a different color theme and allowed you to log into your hotmail account. I think at one point it became an IE addon.

I remember it revolved around giving you the news and maybe even loading hotmail with a special ui button. I have a foggy memory of it, but this MSN forum thread confirms the MSN Explorer existed[0].

You could even build a personal home page of sorts with the weather.

[0] https://answers.msn.com/thread.aspx?threadid=2fa8c100-ed43-4...

Any ways it had a following of people who got their news and it still exists in some form today. I know the website msn.com always catered to news stories, but I don’t know if they were always reposted if they once had writers. I think it’s always been some sort of data harvesting/media credibility facade news-focused branch of Microsoft.

Here is a screenshot:

https://img.informer.com/screenshots/53/53675_1.jpg

From the screenshot it appears the news has always been reposted and FUD based. It probably worked well (for Microsoft) in the golden age of RSS.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-06-08 05:33:56+00:00
I meant a comparison on a clock-for-clock level. In other words, imagine either the 486 running at the clock speed of a Ryzen, or the Ryzen running at the clock speed of the 486. In other other words, compare ONLY IPC.

The line I was commenting on said:

> If a Ryzen takes 1,250 times the transistor for one core, does one core run 1,250 times (even taking hyperthreading in to account) faster than an i80486 at the same clock?

Emphasis added by me.
by potholereseller | 2025-06-08 05:35:45+00:00
> The end result of that was that we had to significantly rearchitect the project for us to essentially inject manually crafted code into arbitrary places in the generated code.

This sounds like putting assembly in C code. What was the input language? These two bits ("Not AI generated", "a feature flag") suggest that the code generator didn't have a natural language frontend, but rather a real programming language frontend.

Did you or anyone else inform management that a code generator is essentially a compiler with extra characters? [0] If yes, then what was their response?

I am concerned that your current/past work might have been to build a Compiler-as-a-Service (CaaS). [1] No shade, I'm just concerned that other managers might read all this and then try to build their own CaaS.

[0] Yes, I'm implying that LLMs are compilers. Altman has played us for fools; he's taught a billion people the worst part of programming: fighting the compiler to give you the output you want.

[1] Compiler-as-a-Service is the future our forefathers couldn't imagine warning us about. LLMs are CaaS's; time is a flat circle; where's the exit?; I want off this ride.
by rpep | 2025-06-08 05:36:11+00:00
I live in a city with trams in the UK and that’s not how it works. There are sections that run on dedicated train lines, and sections where it runs on the street. Where it runs on the streets, priority is given over cars by switching traffic lights to red. Once the tram has passed onto the road it switches back to green so you can end up following the tram in your car.
by dgfitz | 2025-06-08 05:37:21+00:00
I don’t think anyone doubts there are good things that come from China. Using a throwaway account won’t help your cause marketing China. Like every other “superpower” China has their major, major flaws. The kicker is trust. Pro-China rhetoric on a highly-moderated forum should be met with skepticism.

This isn’t opinion. The great firewall of China isn’t a farce, it would be good to remember that.
by octo888 | 2025-06-08 05:38:16+00:00
> The primary value of measuring cycle time is precisely that it captures end-to-end process inefficiencies, variability, and bottlenecks, rather than individual effort

Yes! Waiting for responses from colleagues, slow CI pipelines, inefficient local dev processes, other teams constantly breaking things and affecting you, someone changing JIRA yet again, someone's calendar being full, stakeholders not available to clear up questions around requirements, poor internal documentation, spiraling testing complexity due to microservices etc. The list is endless

It's borderline cruel to take cycle time and measure and judge the developer alone.
by ashwani-rathee | 2025-06-08 05:40:58+00:00
Hi, I wanted to share something that got me really excited today!

I've been implementing some peer-to-peer broadcast protocols here: https://github.com/ashwanirathee/distrifein. It started with implementing protocols taught in my distributed systems class namely: Best-Effort Broadcast, Reliable Broadcast, and Uniform Reliable Broadcast.

At first, I got text broadcasting working between two local processes (on the same computer). Then I extended it to support broadcasting images (currently only in .ppm format). With seemingly minor changes, I now have broadcasting (both text and images) working across different devices on my LAN!

It feels like I'm getting much closer to building a distributed file system, chat app, or even a database which is really exciting. I believe implementing shared memory, total order broadcast, and atomic commit will be essential for those.

Some relevant logs are here: https://gist.github.com/ashwanirathee/64b339ae180b7c933114b3...
by michaelteter | 2025-06-08 05:41:32+00:00
This is basically it. There are a dozen ways to become huge, and they all are essnetially anti-humanity.

There's an expression: normalization of deviance.

This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.
by xucian | 2025-06-08 05:45:47+00:00
| They come from "showing your work."

true, that's been my experience so far, I rarely engage in interviews that are walled by coding challenges before they even talk to me. heck, I didn't even receive a code challenge for my last 2 jobs, which were well-paid.

| maybe spend that time writing one high-quality article

this makes a lot of sense, I have plenty to talk about. will seriously consider it, might even do it on X

thanks for the tips :)
by westurner | 2025-06-08 05:45:51+00:00
Well, FWIU, what you refer to as "topology" is founded in HoTT "type theory".

> for avoidance of doubt in the standard construction of maths these are sets, not types. Then from there a standard first course in analysis deals with the topology of the reals, sequences and series, limits and continuity of real functions, derivatives and the integral.

HoTT is precedent to these as well.

So, Lean isn't proven with HoTT either.

Is type theory useful in describing a Hilbert hotel infinite continuum of Reals or for describing quantum values like qubits and qudits?

I don't think I'm overselling HoTT as a useful axiomatic basis for things proven in absence of type and information-theoretic foundations.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43191103#43201742 , which I may have already linked to in this thread :

> "Should Type Theory Replace Set Theory as the Foundation of Mathematics?" (2023) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10516-023-09676-0

That would include Real Analysis (which indeed one isn't at all obligated to prove with a prover and a language for proofs down to {Null, 0, 1} and <0.5|-0.8>).

Are types checked at runtime, with other Hoare logic preconditions and postconditions?
by harimau777 | 2025-06-08 05:46:03+00:00
Disabling right click. I often want to open up various products in multiple tabs so that I can then go through them and select one to buy. When a website disables right click, I often just give up and don't buy anything.

Similar is having "links" that are actually implemented using an onClick handler so that I can't right click and select "open in new tab". Often this results in me later realizing that I opened the link's image in a new tab rather than the link itself.
by dgfitz | 2025-06-08 05:46:54+00:00
My current org can have a cycle time on the order of a year. Embedded dev work on limited release cadence where the Jira (et. al.) workflow is sub-optimal and tickets don’t get reassigned, only tested, destroys metrics of this nature.

If this research is aimed at web-dev, sure I get it. I only read the intro. Software happens outside of webdev a lot, like a whole lot.
by laurencerowe | 2025-06-08 05:47:10+00:00
Those BRTs will have lower passenger/operator ratios though since trams tend to be bigger than articulated buses and are frequently coupled together for busier routes.

I definitely agree that the dedicated right of way is the main thing. It's why some of San Francisco's trams are so slow outside of the city centre (where they run in a tunnel) and why Manchester's trams are so slow through the city centre (where they run at surface level sharing the street with pedestrians.)
by tempodox | 2025-06-08 05:48:19+00:00
I think double standards would be a better term than hypocricy. Hypocricy would imply the pretense to be bound by certain rules, but the whole point of fascism is that those in power are not bound by any rules. They only make rules to bind others. I don't see any hypocricy in the openly advertised corruption of the current administration, it's just plain evil of the “we do it because we can” sort.
by grues-dinner | 2025-06-08 05:48:51+00:00
Bus Rapid Transits can operate at frequencies of about 10 seconds per bus. Obviously they're highly parallelised to achieve that and have special infrastructure to enable it like dedicated stations and pedestrian access, so it's not just "a bus", but bus-based systems are how many of the very highest-throughput public transportation lines function, with up to 35000 people per hour per direction with three digit numbers of buses per hour.

For comparison, the most frequent London underground service is 100 seconds per train and the system moves about 50k passengers an hour (based on a 21% increase representing 10k passengers, I couldn't find a direct figure), presumably that being both directions.
by antiraza | 2025-06-08 05:49:30+00:00
If you are willing to slow down, Tildes.

Small, laid back, conversation focused, but the coverage is definitely more 'general.'

I personally find it really refreshing compared to something like reddit (or even here). It's small enough that the comments section don't feel like an artificial jostle for the fastest, most attention getting response -- and the community seems to maintain that culture well via both scale and rate of scaling.
by twhb | 2025-06-08 05:49:31+00:00
restic’s rest-server append-only mode unfortunately doesn’t prevent data deletion under normal usage. More here: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#secu.... Their workaround is pretty weak, in my opinion: a compromised client can still delete all your historic backups, and you’re on a tight timeline to notice and fix it before they can delete the rest of your backups, too.
by jajko | 2025-06-08 05:52:05+00:00
That's very easy - go to area of train station, or some nearby park, and look for immigrant-looking people just standing around, trying to keep eye contact with passers or saying quietly "bonjour".

95% of the time you will get exactly what you want, otherwise it would be some form of "desolee". This is obvious, everybody knows and sees it, en masse (as in you are choosing from tens of such people in given area).
by Cipater | 2025-06-08 05:53:35+00:00
>there was dissatisfaction about how Musk monopolized NASA contracts on the promise, that he would deliver more efficient and cheaper solution, while in reality the result is that NASA is currently paying more for Musks private solutions, than when it had to do it by itself

SLS, NASA's rocket, costs $2.5 billion, PER LAUNCH.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-06-08 05:53:39+00:00
Why do you need to update docker? I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker. I upgrade my images but it hardly takes 15 minutes for me, in let's say a month.

>>> if the company is respecting privacy It's very rare to see companies doing it, and moreover it is hard to trust them to even maintain a unique stance as years pass by.
by euroderf | 2025-06-08 05:55:16+00:00
Is every American quite ready for another Kent State ? Or will the Guard restrict itself to tear gas those so-called "flash-bangs" ? Does the Guard even have them ? Is the Guard even trained for crowd control & dispersal ?

Wikipedia on Kent State: "Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. Students Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, died on the scene, while William Schroeder, 19, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna shortly afterward."
by nevi-me | 2025-06-08 05:56:38+00:00
I'd imagine semantic versioning to be more subjective with a language that relies on a social contract, because if a user chooses to use those private fields, a minor update or patch could break their code.

It does feel regressive to me. I've seen people easily reach for underscored fields in Python. We can discourage them if the code is reviewed, but then again there's also people who write everything without underscores.
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-08 05:58:20+00:00
No. I've been a sysadmin before and know how to write the files from scratch. But Claude is like having a very fast intern I can tell to do the boring part for me and review the work, so it takes 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes.

But if I didn't know how to do it myself, it'd be useless- the subtle bugs Claude occasionally includes would be showstopper issues instead of a quick fix.
by jajko | 2025-06-08 05:59:28+00:00
Its way less bad than some investors ie on Wall street or arms/military business, by huge margin. Folks scamming old people out of money or encrypting their HDDs for ransom should be shot in sight. But - this topic affects billions very directly, and its not about the effect now, but helping general direction which is outright evil by any moral standards.

I can pull out usual godwin's law plug but I guess we all know what would be there. People like to feel great about themselves, its subconscious. And if slightly tilting reality in their favor can achieve that then what's the problem, right. Again, this is not a conscious decision so most don't even notice that, and who would complain about feeling better about themselves.

Old enough, when you want to see such things like these biases in people around you, its very easy once you start looking for them. I guess we really are all heroes of our own stories (but what I mention is far from uniformly distributed, some folks are really stellar human beings and some opposite)
by birn559 | 2025-06-08 06:00:10+00:00
One assumption for such theories that is very important and very wrong is that the elite would cooperate with each other long enough and work on the same goals long term. Newest very public instance is Elon breaking with Trump. Of course such people are able to create strategic partnerships, but it's not like their incentives and motives are aligned.

It's a group of people with relatively many narcissistic and sociopathic people. They would rather eat each other alive than deeply cooperate.

There is no coherent "they" that would act to achieve some mid/long term goal together.

There is more to say about what parent wrote, but I wanted to add this aspect because I feel like it often get overlooked.
by fractallyte | 2025-06-08 06:00:16+00:00
I've had the same journey, and opted instead for a Sigma Foveon camera.

Comparisons and advantages: https://www.photigy.com/school/sigma-foveon-sensor-review-dp...

For black and white photography, the best high-end camera seemed to be the Leica M Monochrom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_M_Monochrom), but to my mind, it's trounced by the Foveon:

https://youtu.be/OODMWXX_N7A

https://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2013/01/14/quick-comparison-l...

THIS is the photo that really sold it for me:

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1806915/0&year=2023#...

That's from a modified DP1m, but the SD Quattro H has an easily-removable IR filter and a huge sensor.
by tom89999 | 2025-06-08 06:03:33+00:00
Why tell people your sexual orientation that has nothing to do with the work that has to be carried out? Why showing everyone it? I bet if that person would have simply kept her/his mouth shut, problems werent. I am bisexual, none of my coworkers nor my boss knows about it.Simply not other peoples business. I dont have any stickers or shirts on me and my workplace. And sure, other cultural backgrounds like the dude in kenia, i assume he is a muslim, are not always so tolerant as the entire rainbow-community hallucinating it.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-06-08 06:03:47+00:00
I'm not sure this is entirely correct. Many have studied homelessness in an attempt to remedy it, and found that it is largely a choice* and thus near impossible to solve with resources from the outside.

*Sure, not a 'Hey, this looks fun' choice, more a conscious understanding of a tradeoff where homelessness is not choosing the alternative life.
by fastball | 2025-06-08 06:04:55+00:00
Yes, I have been making that point for the entirety of this conversation.

1. Tesla needs to figure out how to achieve performance of their system without LIDAR. However since humans do so with two eyes, there is strong precedent that this is possible.

2. Waymo needs to figure out how to self-drive in situations when LIDAR cannot be relied upon. If they cannot do this, their system will never achieve Level 5 (but that's OK! Level 4 taxi service seems like a good business). If they can do this, then it is not clear they ever needed LIDAR in the first place.