MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-20 17:27:08+00:00
> Last night, Elon Musk did what he does best: promise “millions” of autonomous Tesla vehicles would be on the road by the end of next year.

And this tiny little disclaimer:

> Last year, Musk said that Tesla would rollout “unsupervised” robotaxis in Austin, Texas starting in June 2025. And in the call last night, Musk stuck to that deadline, but added a little more color about what to expect. He said the paid ridehailing service would consist of 10-20 Model Y vehicles with remote operators in case any of the cars get stuck.

Ahh, unsupervised, if you ignore the supervisors! And wow, a whole 10-20 for the city!

> Musk has long promised Level 5 autonomy, which describes driverless vehicles that can travel anywhere, under any conditions, without limitations. But last night, he corrected himself: there will be some limitations.

Ahh, geofencing sucks unless Tesla does it, got it.

> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.

I smell bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.
by mdp2021 | 2025-07-20 17:27:30+00:00
Why would be a proper documents-at-hand based inquiry be «simple».

Information is at paragraph #1234 of book B456; that paragraph acquires special meaning in light of its neighbours, its chapter, the book. Further information is in other paragraphs of other books. You can possibly encode with some "strong" compression information (data), but not insight. The information that a query may point to can be a big cloud of fuzzy concepts. What do you input, how? How big should that input be? "How much" of the past reflection does the Doctor use to build a judgement?

RAG seems simple because it has simpler cases ("What is the main export of Bolivia").
by rmadriz | 2025-07-20 17:27:41+00:00
Others have already mentioned Syncthing[^1]. Here's what I'm doing on a budget since I don't have a homeserver/NAS or anything like that.

First you need to choose a central device where you're going to send all of the important stuff from other devices like smartphones, laptops, etc. Then you need to setup Syncthing, which works on linux, macos, windows and others. For android there's Syncthing-fork[^2] but for iOS idk.

Setup the folders you want to backup on each device, for android, the folders I recommend to backup are DCIM, documents, downloads. For the most part, everything you care about will be there. But I setup a few others like Android/media/WhatsApp/Media to save all photos shared on chats.

Then on this central device that's receiving everything from others, that's where you do the "real" backups. I my case, I'm doing backups to a external HDD, and also to a cloud provider with restic[^3].

I highly recommend restic, genuinely great software for backups. It is incremental (like BTRFS snapshots), has backends for a bunch of providers, including any S3 compatible storage and if combined with rclone, you have access to virtually any provider. It is encrypted, and because of how it was built, can you still search/navigate your remote snapshots without having to download the entire snapshot (borg[^4] also does this), the most important aspect of this is that you can restore individual folders/files. And this crucial because most providers for cloud storage will charge you more depending on how much bandwidth you have used. I have already needed to restore files and folders from my remote backups in multiple occasions and it works beautifully.

[^1]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing [^2]: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android [^3]: https://github.com/restic/restic [^4]: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg
by mindslight | 2025-07-20 17:27:55+00:00
In their minds, everyone is either a criminal or about to be the victim of a criminal. Developing this world view is a hazard of the job, and is completely understandable based on what they have to deal with every day. The problem is the lack of accountability from larger society, and their push back against that accountability under some mistaken narrative that it's everyone else with the warped world view.
by stephenlf | 2025-07-20 17:28:07+00:00
I don’t follow. Cybersecurity has always been about reducing the risk of costly cyber attacks. That hasn’t changed. It’s not like suddenly companies will stop caring that their software has been locked down by ransomware, or that their database leaked and now they have to pay a nine-figure fine. It’s not standards for standards’ sake (though it can feel that way). It’s loss prevention.
by al_borland | 2025-07-20 17:28:07+00:00
Security vulnerabilities only really matter if you're going to have the system online.

George R.R. Martin still writes using WordStar 4.0 in DOS.

I remember reading a news story years ago about a guy who brought a vintage Mac from the 80s into the Apple Store to see if it could be a little faster. He had been using it for his accounting (or something) for the past 30 years.

Air gapped systems like these, with some degree of physical security, are pretty safe.
by gtsop | 2025-07-20 17:28:11+00:00
Why on earth are you accepting his premise that there are billions of successful requests? I just asked chatgpt about query success rate and it replied (part):

"...Semantic Errors / Hallucinations On factual queries—especially legal ones—models hallucininate roughly 58–88% of the time

A journalism‑focused study found LLM-based search tools (e.g., ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Grok) were incorrect in 60%+ of news‑related queries

Specialized legal AI tools (e.g., Lexis+, Westlaw) still showed error rates between 17% and 34%, despite being domain‑tuned "
by a4isms | 2025-07-20 17:28:26+00:00
A joke from the same family involves a pilot who gets lost in IMC conditions, and his radio is dead. Suddenly, looming out of the gloom is an office building with an open window. An employee spots the plane going by and waves. The pilot circles around and shouts "Where am I?"

The employee shouts back "In an airplane!" The pilot nods, sets a course, and navigates precisely 11 nautical miles NNE, and descends. Sure enough, a runway appears and he lands perfectly. Of course, he's debriefed about the incident. "How, " the investigator asks, "Did you find the airport?"

The pilot recounts the shouted conversation. "My question was answered in a way that was absolutely correct but useless for any practical purpose. I reasoned that I was talking to Microsoft Tech Support at their HQ, and I could dead reckon to Redmond Municipal Airport from there."
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-20 17:28:33+00:00
Statistically, SOTA self-driving cars are already superhuman. That holds for Waymo and Tesla both. They crash less, like for like, and the incidents they get into are less severe. But that's not because self-driving cars outperform a "top of the line" human driver. It's because they outperform the absolute worst bottom of the barrel human driver.

A big part of a self-driving car's "safety edge" is that it isn't going to go 80 in a 40, doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, and isn't capable of DUI.

Self-driving cars still struggle in some situations most human drivers wouldn't find challenging - AI issues - but they don't make the worst, the most unforced and avoidable "human factor" mistakes.
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 17:28:56+00:00
You do realize that Waymo, at best, is comparable to a train with an extremely limited, and expensive, rail network on a level where Robotaxi would be a 4x4 car in a roadless world?

Waymo is SLS compared to Starship. So, not comparable and could never fit the shoes Robotaxi has been planned to fill since the initiation of the FSD project. I.E. SLS = a few academic missions. Starship: Mars colony. Waymo is as good for safety as doing nothing with its inability to scale.

Waymo costs as much per ride as one with a driver. Robotaxi is technologically fundamentally close to starting its shift after you arrive home and get out of your car. Earning you part of the profit btw. And with no growing pains, with FSD working on novel, untested roads.
by afarah1 | 2025-07-20 17:29:14+00:00
I don't see enough talk about reducing the amount of data collected in the first place. Even if it's kept within one jurisdiction, it can still be the target of a breach by a local criminal, a foreign spy, or a new government agency... Cameras on every street, cellular antenas on every car, biometrics for everything... It may vary from country to country, but an expansion on citizen data collection (in one area or another) seems commonplace across most governments, and usually with zero opposition in "the real world". And unlike products or platforms that you can chose to not use, there's hardly any escape from those.
by BoxFour | 2025-07-20 17:29:19+00:00
Even in a place as dense as manhattan (where I live), it’s very common to spend 30 minutes on your commute still between walking to/from the subway and waiting for the train. Without sounding too harsh, a 20-minute walk really shouldn’t be a major hurdle for the vast majority of working adults.

Whenever I visit other parts of the US I’m struck by how resistant people are to walking even half a mile in the best of circumstances: wide, well-lit sidewalks etc. It’s remarkable how often we default to driving for trips that clearly don’t require it, and it’s like I’m speaking heresy for even suggesting it when visiting somewhere that has pedestrian paths.

At the heart of the public transit debate, it seems, is a simple reality: Much of the country simply doesn’t want to move at all, even short distances. Suggesting someone walks half a mile sometimes feels like suggesting they run a marathon. All the pedestrian infrastructure in the world won’t change that.
by Mawr | 2025-07-20 17:29:36+00:00
> It starts from a marketing position of "Safety With No Compromises"

Since such a tradeoff is not possible (full safety for free?!) I doubt there's any such marketing.

> The world is filled with very reasonably compromised memory-safe runtimes that are excellent choices for your new system.

Bringing a whole managed runtime just to handle a single structure with cycles in your program is not reasonable.

There's no problem with using a simple GC for a tiny part of an otherwise manually managed program just how there's no issue in managing memory manually for a small, but performance sensitive part of your GC managed program.
by anon84873628 | 2025-07-20 17:30:03+00:00
The parent said "vegetarian meats" so I hope we can assume that's not meant to include tempeh and tofu (but rather things like TVP or mycoprotein products).

And while we're on the subject, Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization gives soy protein high marks for body builders. Good macros, good price, and highest amino acid profile score after milk/meat/eggs. Having tofu on hand is definitely helpful during a bulk.
by estebank | 2025-07-20 17:30:09+00:00
> I don't think it's possible to write a tool like ripgrep with its performance profile in a GC language.

I think it is possible to make a language that has both a GC and a borrow checker, treating the GC types as a third level next to the stack and the heap, where complex referencial cycles can bé promoted to the GC, but the defaults push you towards fast execution patterns. Don't know if such a language would be successful in finding its niche. The only way I could see that, is of a non-gc mode could be enforced so that libraries can be written in the more restrictive, faster by default mode, while being consumed by application developers that have less stringent restrictions. This is no different in concept than Python libraries implemented in native languages. Making it the mode be part of the same language could help with prototyping pains: write with the GC and then refactor once at the end after the general design is mostly found.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-20 17:30:26+00:00
These are all solvable problems. The issue is given the race to get to a certain ARR quickly, many startups end up not focusing on these. There is some truth to AI agents being not as useful as their promise, but the problems mentioned are engineering problems, and once we start seeing them with a different lens, they would start working. (This is not to say I believe orchestration or multi step agents are a way to go, I personally lean heavily towards RL. Just that the criticisms here assumes the state would remain the same even without AI advancement).

Eg: you need good verifiers (to understand whether a task is done successfully or not). Many tasks have easier verifications than doing the task. YOu have five parallel generations with 80% accuracy, the probablity of getting one right (and a verifier which can pick that) goes to 99.96%. With multi step too, the math changes in a similar manner. It just needs a different approach than how we have built software till date. He even hints at a paradigm with 3-5 discrete step workflow which works superbly well. We need to build more in that way.
by rzz3 | 2025-07-20 17:30:59+00:00
> With the rise of LLM systems (or “AI” as they are annoyingly called),

I made it this far and realized the rest wasn’t worth reading. Language evolves, words change, and AI means what it means now. It turns out it’s actually really useful to have an abstraction above the concept of LLMs to talk about the broader set of these types of technologies, and generally speaking I find that these very pedantic types of people don’t bring me useful new perspectives.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-20 17:31:30+00:00
XML UI is all over the place. I'm working with some legacy code using JSF with some extensions and it's pretty much everything described here. There's a Java server involved so it doesn't work with saved pages (but it automatically takes care of any backend calls, so unless you want an offline-first app that can be a benefit actually). I'm pretty sure ASP.NET, or whatever Microsoft calls it these days, works very similarly.

The frontend pendulum keeps swinging back and forth between serverside rendering and clientside rendering so maybe in a few years we can reinvent ASP/JSF and call it revolutionary again.
by beaugunderson | 2025-07-20 17:31:58+00:00
> However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made.

My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken buckle and sewed up some holes).
by josephcsible | 2025-07-20 17:32:00+00:00
> How about the World Trade Center to Yankee Stadium. Driving is 32 min with a $9 toll, or 38 min with no toll. Subway is 31 min with $3 fare.

When I checked that route just now, I saw 31 minutes driving with a toll, 35 minutes driving without a toll, and 42 minutes on the subway. And even with your numbers, that's very, very far from the 2 hours vs. 20 minutes that was originally claimed.

> And this is a Sunday afternoon, I’m sure the drive gets dramatically worse on a weekday.

When I set a departure time of tomorrow at 5pm, it says 41 minutes on the subway and a range of 30-60 minutes for driving. (Still not even close to 2 hours vs. 20 minutes.)
by atombender | 2025-07-20 17:32:01+00:00
> IIRC earning 90k per year puts you in the top 1%.

According to the public data for 2023-2024, top 1% is around £180-200k, so you're off by quite a bit. £90k is around 5-6%. This is gross, not net.

In the U.S., the top 1% is around $570-600k according to 2024 census numbers.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-20 17:32:39+00:00
50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8 million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5 million attempted it. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the USA was 664,000. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2023-s...

Average daily homeless population for the USA in 2023 was 653,000. https://nlihc.org/resource/hud-releases-2023-annual-homeless...

In 2023 only 86% of US households were food secure. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

The majority of US bankruptcies (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/

It doesn't look like the USA has a healthy ideology to me. It just spreads it out to 'death by 1000 cuts' and makes everyone's' suffering invisible.
by coolspot | 2025-07-20 17:32:39+00:00
> Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has.

My research shows that you can arrive at these numbers only if you compare Tesla’s FSD incidents that are only reported if airbags are deployed, to all Waymo incidents, which are reported even when only a minor damage is occurred.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_ae23a802-40b4-4545-a3a1-abb1...
by mandmandam | 2025-07-20 17:32:48+00:00
You're giving a very poor reading of OP's argument, first of all. Jumping to the conclusion that they don't want Chinese people to have clean water is downright bad faith.

Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And if you expand your worldview to include other life on this planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond what's wise already.
by gruez | 2025-07-20 17:32:53+00:00
>Whereas in China, a command economy, they've built 20,000km+ of high speed rail in <20 years and just unveiled a 600kmh maglev train (note: that's faster than commercial aircraft) that will go from beijing to Shangai, over 1000km, in 2.5 hours.

It's less because China is a command economy (ie. the government determines the allocation of capital), and more to do with the fact that it's an authoritarian state where the local population and interest groups basically has zero ability to object/block construction projects.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-07-20 17:33:05+00:00
We have a shitty universal healthcare system where the destitute get unlimited healthcare but only at emergency rooms, which is both extremely expensive and not that effective at making them healthy compared to e.g. regular primary care visits with free insulin and antipsychotics. The unpaid emergency rooms bills bring the hospital down and they have to take it out on the middle 50%
by ujkhsjkdhf234 | 2025-07-20 17:33:50+00:00
For the record I didn't downvote you. As for your question, I get what you are getting at but I don't get to pick and choose where my taxes go and you will never 100% agree with everything being spent on a government level.

If it got to a situation where libraries aren't being funded and water isn't clean, which isn't out of the realm of possibility with this administration, then I may need to reevaluate my stance but right now I'm fine paying what I owe.
by debesyla | 2025-07-20 17:34:03+00:00
Crazy idea, but why do kids need dropping them off to school?

If school is not further than 1 km, kid can just walk there. And in most German (and other European) cities schools are nearby.

And for locations that are remote, there are school buses, and public buses too...

Kid transportation is important, but it doesn't have to be cars. (I won't even go into kids who bycicle to their schools.) Of course, I understand that for kindergarten it's a different topic, but if we are taking about schools a person is already of age where they know where their home is and where they are going to.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-20 17:34:06+00:00
Before Compose took over as the new direction for Android app development, the Android Studio designer IDE had a very VB6-style designer where you could drag and drop components, while the underlying UI files were all XML based. The callback generation wasn't as easy as with VB, and different phone sizes meant you had to deal with resizing (which VB applications usually just didn't bother with), but the experience was pretty good.

These days you've got Gambas for a free and open source VB, including the terrible language, but in my experience the looks are a bit off when you design on one desktop environment and run the application on another.
by sbarre | 2025-07-20 17:35:10+00:00
> > I'll assume good faith here:

> This tells me that you think that treating housing supply as a relevant factor to the price of housing is a stupidly obvious error.

Nah it's just that we've had trolls in here before who try to make bad faith arguments about AirBnB, by pretending they don't see the problems created by turning housing into short-term rentals.

> > So they don't necessarily "prevent housing construction" (what housing gets built is a topic a bit too complex to get into here) but they absolutely do reduce available housing in large cities and in-demand areas, in the ways outlined above.

> That you for agreeing that they do not prevent housing supply from increasing to meet the increased demand.

I definitely don't agree with that. I said "necessarily" for a reason, meaning it's not the _only_ factor, nor it is _always_ a factor (depending on location etc) but it certainly is one of the major impacts on housing supply.

As for meeting demand, here's one way AirBnB is "preventing" supply from meeting demand:

Builders build what sells, and what buyers want. For the last while in many/most large western cities (I only know Canada and the US mostly, making a few loose assumptions here about elsewhere), real estate investors have been pushing for lots of single-bedroom condo units because those are the kinds of units that are popular as short-term rentals.

So builders prioritize these kinds of units for sale to investors who have no intention of making them available as housing, even though they are zoned and built as housing.

So... I think you can draw a pretty solid line between this kind of economic incentive and a lack of housing to meet demand, since there is a finite capacity for building housing (based on available builders - i.e. capital and manpower).

Secondly, remember impacting supply is not just about adding new housing but also about how affordable the available housing is.

When people convert existing housing to short-term rental, it reduces the total supply. And when you squeeze the supply, prices go up, and people get priced out of the places they live.

A few links for you:

https://ricochet.media/justice/housing/how-airbnb-and-short-...

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-621-m/11-621-m2024010...

p.s. If you want to reply again and discuss, try not to cherry-pick a few low-relevancy sentences out of context to ignore my broader point.