MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmschulman | 2025-06-26 20:12:32+00:00
Pennsylvania could be so much more for its residents but we're a state bogged down politically by rural districts that do everything within their power to kneecap the our two major economic hubs/cities: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Our governor backs mass transit, but state reps will not budge on funding as SEPTA only services Philadelphia and the counties immediately adjacent. One politician, Cris Dush who represents the 25th district in the upper most part of the state, released a letter to concerned citizens and characterized the issue as a preferrence for keeping tax dollars in his own district as there's no mass transit available to his constituents. In his view, he's not willing to pay for other people to be "chaffered" around on public transit: http://crossingbroad.com/news/trending/pennsylvania-state-se...

Until Pennsylvania's statehouse can overcome their misguided idea of what it means to levy and collect taxes, PA will continue to lag behind other states in the northeast in terms of basic services and economic competitiveness.
by thisislife2 | 2025-06-26 20:12:43+00:00
Thank you for sharing this. I have often been very cynical here, and elsewhere online, about ADHD, especially amongst adults. Most of the cynicism stems from the capitalistic nature of modern pharmaceutical companies - it literally seems like they are trying to create a market for their "ADHD" drugs through online social marketing - "You can't concentrate on a task? Must be ADHD.", "You don't feel like doing something productive? Oh, that's ADHD for sure", "Do you frequently procrastinate and feel guilty about? Yup, that's ADHD" and so on ...

The issue I have with "ADHD" in general is that there are so many other well-recognized and researched causes that more satisfactorily explain many of these behavioural issues - like depression and / or anxiety - than "ADHD". There are even personality disorders that can cause such long-term behavioural issues - for e.g., Avoidant Personality Disorder or even Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (both stemming from anxiety issues), and they can be more correctly and confidently diagnosed than the cluster** that is "ADHD" (whose diagnostic criteria has been already revised multiple times in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual).

Alan Schwarz, the author of the book ADHD Nation has investigated the ties between pharmaceutical companies and doctors:

> "The six-question screening instrument that was endorsed by the World Health Organization was devised by doctors with a very long history in ADHD research," he says. "These are, generally, men who have been enriched by the pharmaceutical industry in order to churn out research and churn out things like this that merely expand the ADHD market. "What we've seen over the past 10 [to] 20 years is a constant enthusiasm on the part of the ADHD lobby to get more and more adults to consider the possibility that they, too, have ADHD," Schwarz says.

(Source: Adult ADHD Can't Be Diagnosed With A Simple Screening Test, Doctors Warn - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/29/5276546... ).

I am not against self-help or personal research. But please note that it is very easy to be mislead by such things and very easy to misdiagnose your symptoms. Even the professionals have a tough time with this!
by itslennysfault | 2025-06-26 20:13:11+00:00
At a company I used to work at I saw the CEO do this publicly (on slack) to the CTO who was an absolute expert on the topic at hand, and had spent 1000s of hours optimizing a specific system. Then, the CEO comes in and says I think this will fix our problems (link to ChatGPT convo). SOO insulting. That was the day I decided I should start looking for a new job.
by mouse_ | 2025-06-26 20:13:20+00:00
> Any information processing technology can be argued to be a surveillance technology.

The telemetric enclosure movement and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity, and advancements in technology are now doing more harm than good. Life expectancy is dropping for the first time in ages, and the generational gains in life expectancy had a lot of inertia behind them. That's all gone now.
by mindslight | 2025-06-26 20:13:46+00:00
"Financial security" ? Don't you think you're overstating that a bit? We're talking about bank accounts bound by Regulation E, not bearer tokens like cryptocurrency.

Traditional bank accounts are quite close to an open ledger - the only thing one really needs to initiate a transaction against an account is the account number, which is printed on every check. As I said, the biggest fraud risk is not checking your accounts every ~30 days. Do this, and your liability is basically capped at having to fill out some paperwork and change account numbers.

The "Rube Goldberg contraption" is to mitigate the nonconsensual SMS nag by making it as easy as possible. My login security relies on my passwords. If someone can get those passwords, it means they've pwned my computing infrastructure and I have got much bigger problems than cleaning up unauthorized bank account activity.

As for GVoice, I chose to start using it because I saw Google and AT&T as similar attackers. I've stuck with it because it works for more of these types of things than other VOIP providers. With "AI" that original calculus might be changing, and if (when?) I decide to jump away from that then I'll probably move towards something like @rsync's "2FA Mule".
by mdorazio | 2025-06-26 20:14:26+00:00
The current White House press statements are often bullshit, but most of the above statement is at least directionally true. Unemployment is still at historically low levels and has been flat for a year. US Real Average Hourly Earnings are up, and the latest CPI data shows a 12-month inflation rate of 2.4% (not seasonally adjusted).
by 5555624 | 2025-06-26 20:14:38+00:00
Maybe in New York City, during rush hour, it takes longer to get somewhere by car than it does using public transportation (I don't know); but, that's usually not the case. When I lived in Arlington, VA with regional and county buses, as well as a subway, waling and public transportation took over an hour to get to work in Washington, D.C. By car, it was maybe 20 minutes.(I biked to work, which took longer than driving, since I had to take a less direct route.)

Now, I work from home and I'm a 20 minute drive from the office; but, public transportation is a two-hour trip, one way. (Either 1:55 or 2:05, depending on the bus.)
by TuringNYC | 2025-06-26 20:15:25+00:00
Congrats on your app and love it so far! Already sent it to over a dozen family members. Curious about a couple of things

- I see only two employees on LinkedIn -- how were you able to QA all these different languages with just two people?!

- I tried Urdu and the app did quite well. But curious why you have two female voices and not any male voice?

- I realize Sesame is a much bigger team, but curious what you think they are doing that makes their voices feel so real and seamless. I dont think they do multiple languages so I think you have a harder problem of course.
by n0tbl0nd3 | 2025-06-26 20:15:38+00:00
The website is a bit buggy (Safari). The session should start with a 'hi!' from the tutor ?? I got confused whether my mic was working, refreshed a couple of times until I prompted it myself. I tried it in my native language, Romanian: the speech to text is bad for Romanian and I got a random non-Romanian word within the first 30 seconds of using it (I assume it was meant to say "hello!") and gave up. For German, which I am learning: I agree with others it is too unstructured. Also the transcription for my speech was wrong, it didn't correct me on it and I got frustrated again.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-26 20:15:40+00:00
And what a proxy it is. The damage caused to pavement by a vehicle's axle load is proportional to the quartic of its axle load. A 2 ton car actually causes roughly 2^4 = 16 times more damage than a 1 ton car of equivalent make does.

The savage exponential here really puts into light one reason why freight trains continue to be such important logistical infrastructure.
by starmftronajoll | 2025-06-26 20:16:07+00:00
The last two paragraphs provide relevant context (as is often the case in news articles), which makes clear that this is another step in a series of political maneuvers, so wait and see how this pans out. The vote means service is "set to" be cut, but in the immediate term, it's SEPTA pulling a lever to put pressure on state lawmakers who are already negotiating a financial package for transit.

> “This is a vote none of us wanted to take,” SEPTA Board Chair Kenneth Lawrence Jr. said. “To be clear, this does not have to happen — if state lawmakers can reach an agreement to deliver sufficient, new funding for public transit.”

> Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro proposed a $300 million mass transit bill to help fund the system that was passed by the state House of Representatives on June 17. Negotiations on the bill are still underway.
by runako | 2025-06-26 20:16:08+00:00
Self-driving cars only look like high OpEx/low CapEx because there are a trivial number of them on the roads. At scale, they require vast investment in road infrastructure to manage congestion. Adding many more vehicles to roads that are already congested will not work.

So in practice, they will be high OpEx/high CapEx. Which makes sense in a country fully captured by Capital.

Unless autonomous cars are accompanied by step-function changes in the ability to build new roads cheaply, they are not the answer.
by AndyKelley | 2025-06-26 20:16:24+00:00
My homepage takes 73ms to rebuild: 17ms to recompile the static site generator, then 56ms to run it.

andy@bark ~/d/andrewkelley.me (master)> zig build --watch -fincremental Build Summary: 3/3 steps succeeded install success └─ run exe compile success 57ms MaxRSS:3M └─ compile exe compile Debug native success 331ms Build Summary: 3/3 steps succeeded install success └─ run exe compile success 56ms MaxRSS:3M └─ compile exe compile Debug native success 17ms watching 75 directories, 1 processes
by namibj | 2025-06-26 20:16:38+00:00
Incremental compilation good. If you want, freeze the initial incremental cache after a single fresh build to use for building/deploying updates, to mitigate the risk of intermediate states gradually corrupting the cache.

Works great with docker: upon new compiler version or major website update, rebuild the layer with the incremental cache; otherwise just run from the snapshot and build newest website update version/state, and upload/deploy the resulting static binary. Just set so that mere code changes won't force rebuilding the layer that caches/materializes the fresh clean build's incremental compilation cache.
by hirvi74 | 2025-06-26 20:16:47+00:00
What are your clinical observations and opinions on actual research backed treatments? I am mainly concerned about the efficacy of stimulants as a treatment as opposed to non-stimulants and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Also, is there are evidence based instruments to aid in diagnosis, then why do those same instruments tend to magically be removed from care during the treatment phase?

For the sake of analogy, if a patient were to be diagnosed with hypertension and an anti-hypertensive medication regiment is started. I imagine upon returning for a follow up visit, the patient's blood pressure will be remeasured in order to verify the efficacy of the treatment.

For ADHD, I had to go through quite a significant diagnostic process before being given the green light for treatment. Upon returning for a follow up, the only methodology used to gauge treatment efficacy is being asked, "How is <insert medication> work for you?"

I always try to answer the question honestly, but after almost 12 years of treatment, I still am not sure what to expect in terms of treatment. Are such questions truly the only evaluation of treatment? How can one tell if medication is working better than they realize or not at all? Perhaps my expectations are too high? Also, wouldn't some metric help determine if tolerance is occurring?
by underyx | 2025-06-26 20:16:56+00:00
Uneducated question, seems like Philadelphia has around $5B of revenue a year, and the transit deficit is ~$200M. I understand the city has to provide services and a lot of the revenue will be restricted as to what it can be allocated to. But with these orders of magnitude, why is the default expectation not for cities to fund their own transit with city tax revenue?
by simicd | 2025-06-26 20:16:59+00:00
It's correct that the number of reinsurers is smaller than that of primary insurers. But the risk born by reinsurers is less correlated, not more. Any given primary insurer has risk clusters (domestic market, line of business, etc.). If a large catastrophe happens in their domestic market they might go bust but what are the chances that it happens simultaneously to all markets globally?

Say you're a primary home insurer in the US. If a hurricane hits you might not have enough capital to rebuild all the homes. A reinsurer which is also covering Europe, Asia, LatAm, etc. is less likely to go bankrupt. The reinsurer can cross-subsidize and use the insurance premiums from other regions to pay out the claims from the US market. All that matters is that on average the loss probabilities and severities are estimated correctly.

And this is just using one line of business as example, reinsurers are covering property, casualty, life and health which add extra layers of diversification.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-06-26 20:17:01+00:00
Do you really feel that skipping LLMs would be like skipping the industrial revolution, electricity, or the internet? Twenty years from now where do you see societies that "embrace" this technology vs. ones that don't?

It's obvious what electricity and mass production can do to improve the prosperity and happiness of a given society. It's not so obvious to me what benefits we'd be missing out on if we just canceled LLMs at this point.
by adastra22 | 2025-06-26 20:17:05+00:00
Most of the generalized curriculum stuff out there is crap because languages differ from each other in substantial ways. LLMs in principle should help here as they can use their knowledge of the structure of the language to modify, but we're just not there with context windows and thinking capabilities. They will need at least a per-language (ideally per language pair) system prompt that contains a rough outline of the curriculum.
by qwerpy | 2025-06-26 20:17:06+00:00
These issues are a big factor for me not using transit much in my area (Seattle metro area). The occasional filth, violence, and unreliability of the system due to various issues makes it so I opt to drive. I am eternally thankful that my company isn't mandating RTO.

For example just this week, the light rail was shut down twice because people were stealing copper wire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/wir...
by owebmaster | 2025-06-26 20:17:10+00:00
> Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem

Exactly! Not difficult, right? Making and selling a product out of it is called marketing. It is not rocket science, but many engineers can't grasp it.

GPT Wrappers are the new CRUD. There is no innovation in Trello, Jira and any other SaaS, they are just marketed products that thousands of people here in HN could code better, but they don't, because they are wasting their time pointing that other people's products are not a difficult problem to solve.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-26 20:17:12+00:00
A "pivot to cars" might be feasible in a small city but in a larger city there are just so many cars you can handle. Robert Moses's plans to make it easy to drive from Queens to New Jersey would have required bulldozing a lot of midtown.

In a place like Tompkins County which has good bus service threatened by management problems you could have a "death spiral" that only affects transit but for Philly, NYC or Washington it would be a "death spiral" for the whole city.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-06-26 20:17:39+00:00
> And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers.

It would but I don't think that's what they're saying. The agent of dehumanization isn't the technology, but the selection of what the technology is applied to. Or like the quip "we made an AI that creates, freeing up more time for you to work."

Wherever human value, however you define that, exists or is created by people, what does it look like to apply this technology such that human value increases? Does that look like how we're applying it? The article seems to me to be much more focused on how this is actually being used right now rather than how it could be.
by NaOH | 2025-06-26 20:17:43+00:00
As a new account, it'd probably be best to familiarize yourself with the site guidelines. For example,

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

>Omit internet tropes.

>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-26 20:18:32+00:00
Missing the point. As long as an area has a shortage of housing rentals will likely remain a good investment.

That said I have to disagree that the housing shortage is difficult to solve, at least in a technical sense. It's due almost entirely to poor urban planning and infrastructure management. The problem is entirely political.

Then again, political issues can be some of the most difficult to make progress on so perhaps I agree after all.
by badsectoracula | 2025-06-26 20:19:24+00:00
> My premise in the blog is basically that "Well now I have go do a full review no matter what the code itself tells me about the author."

Which IMO is the correct approach - or alternatively, if you do actually trust the author, you shouldn't care if they used LLMs or not because you'd trust them to check the LLM output too.
by ecshafer | 2025-06-26 20:19:25+00:00
I took SEPTA for work for 5 years, and its overall a pretty good system. But SEPTA is in my view not hampered by anything more than Philadelphia's city government. There are arguments around the state not supporting SEPTA more. However until Philadelphia gets rid of their asinine resident and worker tax, and business REVENUE taxes which push middle class and wealthier residents, workers and companies to the suburbs. If more businesses are in the city, then there can be more efficient trains. But most of the big businesses are in KOP, Blue Bell, Malvern, etc.

When a company can at any point leave the city, and get a 2% revenue tax break, and give all of their workers a 4% raise, its stupid of them not to. Only Universities, Hospitals, Lawyers and non-profits are actually in the city (Or a few big companies that have massive tax breaks and hand outs).

This policy pushing businesses to the suburbs and incentivizing the suburbs means people are just going to drive from Lower Merion to Blue Bell or whatever, and not take the train to work.
by ben_w | 2025-06-26 20:20:14+00:00
The very first part of the quotation is "Knowing qrious exists".

So the fact they've already got the example is great if you do in fact already have that knowledge, and *completely useless* if you don't.

> I kind of regret asking the poor guy to show his stuff. None of these tutorial projects come even close to what an AI contribution to qemu would look like. It's pointless.

For better and worse, I suspect it's very much the kind of thing AI would contribute.

I also use it for things, and it's… well, I have seen worse code from real humans, but I don't think highly of those humans' coding skills. The AI I've used so far are solidly at the quality level of "decent for a junior developer", not more, not less. Ridiculously broad knowledge (which is why that quality level is even useful), but that quality level.

Use it because it's cheap or free, when that skill level is sufficient. Unless there's a legal issue, which there is for qemu, in which case don't.
by echelon | 2025-06-26 20:20:26+00:00
Zig is a small and simple language. It doesn't need a complicated compiler.

Rust is a large and robust language meant for serious systems programming. The scope of problems Rust addresses is large, and Rust seeks to be deployed to very large scale software problems.

These two are not the same and do not merit an apples to apples comparison.

edit: I made some changes to my phrasing. I described Zig as a "toy" language, which wasn't the right wording.

These languages are at different stages of maturity, have different levels of complexity, and have different customers. They shouldn't be measured against each other so superficially.
by philip1209 | 2025-06-26 20:20:51+00:00
America has and likes roads, so the marginal capex here is low.

Half of the country lives in suburbs and that's not going to change overnight. So roads are an unfortunate reality of keeping America functional.

Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads, though, because they don't gawk at accidents and potentially could drive in denser formations with less separation.
by nxobject | 2025-06-26 20:20:51+00:00
One way to add devices that doesn't require ROM or software modification, but _does_ require modifying the emulator: create a virtual memory-mapped device off 68K bus, and write a driver/CDEV to drive it. The SE and Macintosh II had blessed but different expansion options, after all.

For earlier models, there are unused apertures in model memory maps that are at least 2KB large, but they do differ between models.
by fishgoesblub | 2025-06-26 20:21:43+00:00
Every new release or "This week in Matrix" post I check to see if Discord style detailed permissions and voice channels get added and every time I get disappointed. I fear it'll never be added at this point due to the funding issues. I hyped it up to all of my friends who stick to Discord that "One day" it'll compete with Discord and we, and millions of others can all finally be happy. I hope that day will come, but my hope is fading.
by gordonhart | 2025-06-26 20:22:04+00:00
Gemini 2.5 Pro is excellent. Top model in public benchmarks and soundly beat the alternatives (including all Claudes and that Chinese startup’s flagship) in my company’s internal benchmarks.

I’m no Google lover — in fact I’m usually a detractor due to the overall enshittification of their products — but denying that Gemini tops the pile right now is pure ignorance.
by TuringNYC | 2025-06-26 20:22:08+00:00
Also I noticed your app doesn't work without a network connection, so i'm assuming you're doing all the TTS and STT server-side. Curious how practical that is w/r/t latency? Any plans to doing it all on-phone?

(probably a more fringe request, but i'm asking because I do all my language learning on the commuter trains w/o a good connection.)
by krashidov | 2025-06-26 20:22:10+00:00
The "self driving cars" are the future prediction is probably correct, but it makes me so very sad. A self driving centric city is still a car centric city, and it's not really a city. It's just a sprawling space with moving adult strollers.

The optimist in me says there will be less parking which opens up land for housing and 3rd spaces. I also think that the self driving cars will eventually create self driving private bus lanes. And then cities will probably realize they can just build a permanent line there.

One interesting thought experiment to do: what happens if private car ownership went away tomorrow and everyone took Waymos instead? Let's assume there's enough waymos to handle the load. It would be mayhem. There would be waymo depots everywhere and there would be an outbound traffic spike from the depots on their way to pick people up in the morning. It's simply not scalable unless you shared routes. So I don't think car ownership is going away. I think people will own waymos. At that point you might as well buy 5 waymos so that each kid can be "independent."

I'm optimistic, but the future of the American city is grim (with some outliers who are embracing urbanism)