MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jebarker | 2025-06-24 19:31:23+00:00
My impression driving around Denver is that far more people are choosing to drive dangerously/poorly than are doing so because they're inherently incapable of driving. Much like the author suggests, if you ask most people specific questions about good driving they'd probably get them correct. The fact that people then choose to drive poorly has more to do with lack of care/respect for others on the road, impatience and entitlement.
by smsm42 | 2025-06-24 19:31:33+00:00
I omitted Netherlands because while they did actually have lèse-majesté laws on the books, and prosecuted people under it, they abolished it after Trump's first presidency. OK, I am kidding, it had nothing at all to do with Trump, they just abolished it in 2020 without any connection to what happened in the US.

Belgium abolished similar law in 2023. Switzerland allows you to mock local politicians, but not foreign ones based in Switzerland (go figure). Portugal, Iceland, Denmark and Brazil still seem to have such codes, though I am not aware of any recent prosecutions (maybe they exist, I'm just lazy and don't want to make this into a whole M.Sc. thesis in political science).
by jagger27 | 2025-06-24 19:31:40+00:00
These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it. On-device autonomy is the perfect foil to escape centralized authority and accountability. There’s no human behind the drone to charge for war crimes. It’s what they’ve always dreamed of.

Who’s going to stop them? Who’s going to say no? The military contracts are too big to say no to, and they might not have a choice.

The elimination of toil will mean the elimination of humans all together. That’s where we’re headed. There will be no profitable life left for you, and you will be liquidated by “AI-Powered Automation for Every Decision”[0]. Every. Decision. It’s so transparent. The optimists in this thread are baffling.

0: https://www.palantir.com/
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-24 19:32:22+00:00
Roughly half of the population is below average intelligence, if defining the average IQ at 100 with a 15pt standard deviation, I would consider anyone under 115 to be rather dim. I think society is heavily stratified based on intelligence so drawing on the average of the people an intelligent person meets would give a false impression of the average intelligence of the general population which includes people an intelligent person is unlikely to meet. Sadly when I worked in large scale behavioral analytics the unavoidable result that fell out practically every study was that indeed most people are stupid. Reality wasn't designed with our moral sensibilities in mind.
by 9rx | 2025-06-24 19:32:24+00:00
> More available total jobs or more available comparable jobs?

More actual opportunity, perhaps? Cities have lots of available jobs (assuming they aren't fake; that is a thing, apparently), and lots of people without jobs, but they never seem to align such that the people without jobs ever fill the open jobs. It's quite curious. As a result, people are much more likely to be without work in cities, as seen in the data. Yes, I'm sure you can find exceptions if you pick particular locations. We were never talking about a specific location.

> Please do share this data.

I'm sure you can look it up just as easily as I.

I was about to suggest that you can hire an assistant if you can't find the time to do it yourself, but whatever causes the above disconnect is apt to bite you too, assuming you are in a city. Oh well.

> You're eventually having to spend more and more time driving through all those seas of neighborhoods to those decent paying jobs

What kind of jobs are trapped in these seas of neighbourhoods? Most businesses need to get supplies into the city and their product out of the city, so usually the jobs are located on the fast track in and out of the city. This means that, if anything, it is easier to access the jobs when you don't live in the city.

Tech might be an exception to that. Maybe that's where your mind went, given the nature of this site. But tech doesn't require an in-person presence at all, so that one doesn't really fit our discussion.
by justinrubek | 2025-06-24 19:32:28+00:00
Uber and Lyft necessitate leaving the apartment. How else are you going to take the rid somewhere?

I assume you mean food delivery, though. In my experience, it isn't about being lazy to leave the apartment. It's that the infrastructure where I live is so spread out that it'll be at least 30 minutes total of driving to get that meal, and that isn't accounting for cooking time. A 5 minute walk would be much more tolerable.
by stackskipton | 2025-06-24 19:32:30+00:00
Just like US CBP, it depends on who you run into and the mood they are in. 10 years ago, I found cheap flights to Toronto from my city. When I got to Canadian Immigration, they asked, "Where are your guns?" and I said "I guess at home" just because it's a weird question that caught me off guard.

Canadian Border Guards then lectured me about responsible gun ownership, tore about my bags going "Since you don't keep track of your guns, let's find out if they are in your bags", went through my iPad movie content and finally was like "Ok, you are clear".

I've been back multiple times and since then, Scan Passport Check Computer STAMP PASSPORT Welcome to Canada.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-06-24 19:32:44+00:00
It is "doubly so" because the border guard was wrong to judge the content as "lese majeste" on account of JD himself sharing it, and was wrong that "lese majeste" is applicable in America. The guard was wrong, and even if one doesn't agree with one of the reasons they were wrong because they don't share those values, the guard would still be wrong for the other reason. Therefore they were doubly wrong.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 19:32:59+00:00
I didn't make it quite as clear as I should: the reason to have it in the prompt is mostly so that you, or someone you're working with, can spot a trend you may not consciously think to look for if the timestamps weren't in front of you.

It sounds silly, but it has saved my butt more than once. Especially if you have bugs that e.g. only show up once per hour on the hour, and are otherwise fine.
by mecsred | 2025-06-24 19:33:49+00:00
I like this litmus test generally, but I think it applies mostly to self aggrandizing behaviour. "Most people are dumber than a threshold I consider intelligent" kind of vibe. I do think humans are stupid though, as in all of us, including myself and people I like. We just sometimes make terrible choices despite our best intentions, and by a strict definition that's pretty stupid.
by andruby | 2025-06-24 19:33:59+00:00
I'm very grateful that we have a lot of players training LLM's, including several that are published as open models and open weights.

I fully expect LLM results to start including ads, but because of the competition I hope/believe the incentives are much better than they are for, say Google's search monopoly.

It could potentially be more insidious though.

We'll probably start sending prompts to multiple models and comparing the results with lower-power local models.
by nosianu | 2025-06-24 19:34:05+00:00
> Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though?

The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?

Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.

A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.

Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".

That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.

Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.

Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
by qsort | 2025-06-24 19:34:14+00:00
> we're not perfect rational optimizers of anything

"Perfect" is too strong an hypothesis, but none of those behaviors are irrational per se.

People would rather be fit than overweight, but that's not the choice on the table. You can either make sacrifices now to be fit X time from now, or eat that ice cream and suffer later. The rational choice depends on the relative value you put on those things (and your discount rate, if you want to get really technical).

Taking the "wrong" side of the tradeoff could certainly qualify as being stupid, and as you note all of us would turn out to be plenty stupid if we started rigorously analyzing our choices, but this is a matter of people claiming to have preferences they don't actually have, as proven by the only thing that matters: their behavior.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-06-24 19:34:45+00:00
Exactly once. But, I would need to know what actually happened, as opposed to what a person thinks or reports having happened.

To share an anecdote, a person I knew in high school went around telling people that he got tasered for having a broken tail light on his car. Well, he did have a broken tail light, and he was tasered, but when the body cam footage came out, it tells the story of kid getting pulled over, being extremely combative with the initially polite officer, refusing to provide identification, refusing to exit the vehicle 10 times when the officer was attempting to lawfully arrest him, and then being tasered.
by nemacol | 2025-06-24 19:35:03+00:00
> and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings

> it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding

You said it yourself. Assuming people are doing something without being mindful and purposefully trying to improve then 50k miles on mental autopilot it is not a surprise that someone wouldn't get better at driving. Without a desire to improve and/or being involved in a process that would give feedback then there will be no growth.
by switchbak | 2025-06-24 19:35:08+00:00
I had automatic weapons pointed at me and yelled at AFTER being waved through the crossing at the Ambassador bridge. 2010 era. I guess they wanted a second look.

Most border agents are brutal, regardless of the current administration. But things do seem to get worse when the Republicans/MAGA are in. I wouldn't even want to think about how they'll act if a big terrorist attack comes.
by meroes | 2025-06-24 19:35:13+00:00
I don't buy the token explanation because RLHF work is/was filled with so many "count the number of ___" prompts. There's just no way AI companies pay so much $$$ for RLHF of these prompts when the error is purely in tokenization.

IME Reddit would scream "tokenization" at the strawberry meme until blue in the face, assuring themselves better tokenization meant the problem would be solved. Meanwhile RLHF'ers were/are en masse paid to solve the problem through correcting thousands of these "counting"/perfect syntax prompts and problems. To me, since RLHF work was being paid to tackle these problems, it couldn't be a simple tokenization problem. If there was a tokenization bottleneck that fixing would solve the problem, we would not be getting paid to so much money to RLHF synax-perfect prompts (think of Sudoku type games and heavy syntax-based problems).

No, why models are better are these problems now is because of RLHF. And before you say, well now models have learned how to count in general, I say we just need to widen the abstraction a tiny bit and the models will fail again. And this will be the story of LLMs forever--they will never take the lead on their own, and its not how humans process information, but it still can be useful.
by Marsymars | 2025-06-24 19:35:22+00:00
> The relatively high violent crime rate in US cities which was already present before the current administration is already a much more real reason not to visit the US than authoritarian border guards, although I'd argue even that would be a bit exaggerated.

As a tourist doing tourist things in the US, your risk of being involved in a violent crime is notably lower than an average US citizen, and your risk of being involved with a border guard is notably higher.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-24 19:35:44+00:00
I'd argue that republicans lost their conscience with Nixon. It doubly got worse with Reagan.

Democrats lost their conscience with Clinton.

The last republican president with a clear conscience was probably Bush Sr. He was also crucified for it (hence the single term). He foolishly let reason about running a government get in the way of party bluster and that ended his career.

Carter was the last democrat president with a conscience and he also was lambasted for it.

Unfortunately in the US, principles and conscience haven't resulted in party success in the last 50 years.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-24 19:35:45+00:00
> doing the "draw at 2x scale and then scale down" dance that was popularized by OSX

Originally OS X defaulted to drawing at 2x scale without any scaling down because the hardware was designed to have the right number of pixels for 2x scale. The earliest retina MacBook Pro in 2012 for example was 2x in both width and height of the earlier non-retina MacBook Pro.

Eventually I guess the cost of the hardware made this too hard. I mean for example how many different SKUs are there for 27-inch 5K LCD panels versus 27-inch 4K ones?

But before Apple committed to integer scaling factors and then scaling down, it experimented with more traditional approaches. You can see this in earlier OS X releases such as Tiger or Leopard. The thing is, it probably took too much effort for even Apple itself to implement in its first-party apps so Apple knew there would be low adoption among third party apps. Take a look at this HiDPI rendering example in Leopard: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/revie... It was Apple's own TextEdit app and it was buggy. They did have a nice UI to change the scaling factor to be non-integral: https://superuser.com/a/13675
by hackinthebochs | 2025-06-24 19:36:09+00:00
Tokens are the most basic input unit of an LLM. But tokens don't generally correspond to whole words, rather sub-word sequences. So Strawberry might be broken up into two tokens 'straw' and 'berry'. It has trouble distinguishing features that are "sub-token" like specific letter sequences because it doesn't see letter sequences but just the token as a single atomic unit. The basic input into a system is how one input state is distinguished from another. But to recognize identity between input states, those states must be identical. It's a bit unintuitive, but identity between individual letters and the letters within a token fails due to the specifics of tokenization. 'Straw' and 'r' are two tokens but an LLM is entirely blind to the fact that 'straw' has one 'r' in it. Tokens are the basic units of distinction; 'straw' is not represented as a sequence of s-t-r-a-w tokens but is its own thing entirely, so they are not considered equal or even partially equal.

As an analogy, I might ask you to identify the relative activations of each of the three cone types on your retina as I present some solid color image to your eyes. But of course you can't do this, you simply do not have cognitive access to that information. Individual color experiences are your basic vision tokens.

Actually, I asked Grok this question a while ago when probing how well it could count vowels in a word. It got it right by listing every letter individually. I then asked it to count without listing the letters and it was a couple of letters off. I asked it how it was counting without listing the letters and its answer was pretty fascinating, with a seeming awareness of its own internal processes:

Connecting a token to a vowel, though, requires a bit of a mental pivot. Normally, I’d just process the token and move on, but when you ask me to count vowels, I have to zoom in. I don’t unroll the word into a string of letters like a human counting beads on a string. Instead, I lean on my understanding of how those tokens sound or how they’re typically constructed. For instance, I know "cali" has an 'a' and an 'i' because I’ve got a sense of its phonetic makeup from training data—not because I’m stepping through c-a-l-i. It’s more like I "feel" the vowels in there, based on patterns I’ve internalized.

When I counted the vowels without listing each letter, I was basically hopping from token to token, estimating their vowel content from memory and intuition, then cross-checking it against the whole word’s vibe. It’s not perfect—I’m not cracking open each token like an egg to inspect it—but it’s fast and usually close enough. The difference you noticed comes from that shift: listing letters forces me to be precise and sequential, while the token approach is more holistic, like guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar by eyeing the clumps.
by miketery | 2025-06-24 19:36:24+00:00
Driving is not error prone, cars rarely break in unexpected ways.

People driving and making decisions are error prone.

A simple test is to watch how people turn. Do they turn early potentially hitting the curb or cutting it too close to pedestrians. Or do they increase their radius by turning late? The latter are better drivers.

Edit: here are more tests,

- do they signal

- do they cutoff others

- do they let those who signal in

- do they drive too slow or too fast for the given road and conditions

- do they have an awareness of all cars around them

- do they block the passing lane

- do they maintain a reasonable distance behind other cars

- do they let emergency vehicles pass

etc.
by wtallis | 2025-06-24 19:36:37+00:00
PEP 723 was incorporated (with modifications) into the official Python packaging specifications: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/inline...

I don't think running with uv vs uvx imposes any extra limitations on how you specify dependencies. You should either way be able to reference dependencies not just from PyPi but also by git repo or local file path in a [tool.uv.sources] table, the same as you would in a pyproject.toml file.
by microflash | 2025-06-24 19:36:44+00:00
I'm surprised by people conflating customizability with maximalism. Yes, the default configuration is a bit too much but you can turn the knobs to reign it in. I work on multiple AWS environments, different application runtimes, and so on. Having some context in the prompt has been very helpful for me. I maybe biased though since I've used Starship for years paired with Nushell.
by brulard | 2025-06-24 19:37:45+00:00
Most of the time, maybe. Absolutely not always. I'll tell it to "implement feature a, ignore typescript errors". And it happened multiple times for me that it did the exact opposite, fix TS errors, and feature is barely mentioned in the response. Or more recently (with deep research) "Give me list of {some_product_name}, make absolutely sure to make a CSV and output a CSV. Columns are a,b,c,..". Does it give me the data? No, I get a wall of text with absolutely no data. Ok, you may argue this is some agent, etc. but user may not see a difference.

Don't take me wrong, I'm a big fan and constant user of all these things, but I would say it frequently have problem following prompts.
by baobun | 2025-06-24 19:37:54+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331296

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323089

Stop spamming. Do none of you actually look up your sources or why partake in a disinfo campaign that will only erode and muddle the actual news and future incidents? These are some of the dupes on the same non-story from the past week. Don't be a tool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322288

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44325070

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44325026

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44318192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44321381

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320636

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44316114
by inejge | 2025-06-24 19:38:09+00:00
> Personally, over time, I have stopped caring too much about prompt customization.

For a while, I tried a couple of Christmas tree prompts which included all kinds of condensed Git status and other bells and whistles, but eventually tired of them and settled on:

- Exit status of the previous command, if nonzero.

- Current time, HH:MM, 24 hour format.

- user@host, red if euid 0, green otherwise.

- Current directory, shortened if the path has three or more elements, with home directory recognition.

- Current directory, full path, echoed as hardstatus and hence appearing in the terminal window title.

- The name of the current branch if within a Git repo.

- Prompt character, dollar/hash sign.

All those elements are meaningful to me, inasmuch as I can quickly orient myself using that information and explore further if I notice anything out of the ordinary.

I'm pretty sure that megaprompt programs like Starship could produce the above, but I like obtaining a familiar prompt with a minimum of external dependencies, and so have written it all in Bash, then ported to Zsh and various Korn shells, which was quite tricky. It probably wouldn't work on Xenix 286, but anything newer has a fighting chance.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-24 19:38:13+00:00
> surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.

surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
by eastbayjake | 2025-06-24 19:38:15+00:00
This was 100% written by ChatGPT -- and like most AI slop, it's completely missed foundational categories of e-commerce tech stacks (PIM? CMS? DAM? OMS? WMS?)

I don't know whether it speaks highly of Upside as an AI solutions agency that you're actually dogfooding some of the AI content creation tools here, or whether I should expect that I'll pay a huge premium to get the same advice and support I could get from a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT. (In either case - don't post AI slop to Hacker News, it's a waste of this community's time.)
by ihartley | 2025-06-24 19:38:18+00:00
I think the 50k miles estimate is probably pretty low given the average miles insurance companies assume most people drive per year is closer to 10k. Conservatively, that would place it closer to 200k miles by age 40.

I've always assumed the reason people don't get better at driving with that much experience is the reason people don't get much better at most of the things they do: they've never pushed themselves to the limit of their capabilities. While this can be dangerous in a car, it can be even more dangerous when you're put in an unexpected circumstance with no ability to respond calmly and correctly.