MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-07-20 16:59:31+00:00
Well, in some sense. But in practice, come on: "write your own slow simple reference-counted GC" is a rather more expensive compromise than "just use Java or Go or whatever, it's faster and simpler for your problem".

Aside from all the nitpickery about runtime implementation, the rustacean community has a serious problem with compromise in general. If you whine in a python/Go/Java/whatever forum about performance, they'll point you to their FFI and show you how to get what you want via C++ integration, because clearly no environment is going to be perfect for everyone. But come at rust with a use case (cyclic data structures here) for which it's a poor fit and everyone goes blue in the face explaining how it's not really a problem. It's exhausting.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-20 16:59:57+00:00
Jeans at old navy or costco or next are $20 to $30. And I can wash them on “normal” cycle every time I wear them, and dry them on normal and never have to worry about taking care of them.

They still last me at least a couple years. And I don’t have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough to last 7+ years for me to break even.
by ddtaylor | 2025-07-20 16:59:59+00:00
I think the failure mode that is happening for users/devs here is bit rot. It's not that the device won't report back the same bytes, even if you disable whatever caching is happening, it's that after T amount of time it will report the wrong bytes. Some file systems have "scrubs" and stuff they do to automatically find these and sometimes attempt to repair them (ZFS can do this).
by hash872 | 2025-07-20 17:00:12+00:00
I just don't think that salaries are high enough for engineers that have been working for 2 years, that we can employ a market-based model for just the highest paid ones. I guess to be fair you could lengthen the OPT visa period to like 5 years, but that just seems cruel to all of the OPT folks who don't make it
by ThrowawayB7 | 2025-07-20 17:00:19+00:00
Another exasperating thing is that the signs on the wall that were supposed to provide directions by listing which office number range was down which direction were somehow of no help whatsoever. I'd be looking for office number xxx or whatever and following the signs and somehow they'd never take me to the right hallway. People can smirk and say "skill issue" if they want but I swear it's true. Judging by the number of other people who had problems navigating those buildings, I wasn't alone.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-20 17:00:24+00:00
No amount of LIDAR wankery can solve self-driving.

Take any self-driving car crash where the self-driving car was found at fault. Dump the blackbox, extract the raw sensor data. What will you see?

You'll see that the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, many times over. And it didn't make the right call. That's not a "sensors" problem. The sensors are good enough. The main bottleneck for self-driving is, and always was, in AI.

Which is why you get things like that Cruise car dragging a pedestrian despite being equipped with 360 cameras and a total of 5 overlapping LIDARs. It had the sensors. What it didn't have was object permanence.
by pyman | 2025-07-20 17:00:24+00:00
> "GenAI, as it exists, is fundamentally a tool for undercutting labor. And it’s using stolen labor to achieve it, and mandating that labor implement their own replacement."

More and more people are asking regulators and companies to be transparent about what data LLMs were trained on, especially when it comes to copyrighted books, images, and videos.

Just like accountants log every single transaction, researchers should log every book, article, photo or video used to train these models.

How are they getting away with this? Sam Altman is running out of excuses. First he compared AI development to the space race, then to the atomic bomb, and now he wants US politicians to believe they're in a tech war with China and the future of humanity depends on him.

People outside the US who are not at war with China, find all of this ridiculous, and honestly, we're getting tired of politicians representing the best interests of big tech instead of the people.
by pluc | 2025-07-20 17:00:30+00:00
Well, that's a good example. Why would you get a DJ when you can say "Siri, play Weddings Classics"? There's no humanity involved, no skills to read the room or cater to audiences. So you get a DJ; what if your DJ thinks his job or your event is boring and generates the same playlist you could have done yourself? You need passion, you need interest, you need to be involved. Otherwise every job becomes tedious, and humanity dies.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-20 17:00:36+00:00
Knowing is at least half the battle. Doesn't matter what kind of tools you intend to use if you don't even know where the job site is located.

I've been around the block a few times on ideas like a B2B/SaaS requirements gathering product that other B2B/SaaS vendors could use to collect detailed, structured requirements from their customers. Something like an open-world Turbo Tax style workflow experience where the user is eventually cornered into providing all of the needed information before the implementation effort begins.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-20 17:00:46+00:00
It is true most humans can not track more than 5 objects concurrently. However, lidar data sets tend to produce sparse unambiguous point cloud data that is a lot more feasible to process. For example, a picture/reflection of a road on a bus is not a viable option with 3D data.

Cheers =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-20 17:00:47+00:00
This was a big theme in the 1970s, one book that captures that Zeitgiest is this

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145212225-by-marvin-harr...

and there were a lot of books offering answers such as

https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Free-Certain-Becomes-Business...

There are two theories of quality: (1) quality is conformance to a specification and (2) quality is conformance to customer requirements.

The answer to type (1) quality is to reduce variance. One response to type (1) quality is to say something like "you can't get good help today", e.g. blame the worker, which has elements such as "they come to the factory drunk somedays", "they are smoking pot all the time", "they don't care". Crosby says management should take responsibility because management hires the workers, trains the workers, supervises the workers, designs the work process, fires the workers, etc.

There's a dark side to type (1) quality thinking in that reducing variance lets you reduce the mean. For instance, a metal pail needs a certain thickness of metal on the bottom, if you go under a threshold the bottom fails. Because of variance you can't make a pail with exactly that thickness, you have to be several standard deviations above the threshold. Get that variation down and you can reduce the mean, use less metal. (Saves money at the factory, costs less to ship, less global warming, etc.) Now you have a system with less reserve, if a new source of variation shows up you are making crap pails again.

Thinking about type (2) quality involves a conversation with customers to understand what their requirements are. The Toyota Corolla and Cadillac Escalade are both excellent vehicles from the perspective of customers who have different values. If customers aren't being heard, you have problems in the type (2) department -- in Doctorow's "enshittification" scenario the voice of neither end users nor advertisers or vendors are being heard. In cases such as Meta, even ordinary shareholders are unheard and the inevitable consequence of that is "it sucks." See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-20 17:01:47+00:00
I grew up in the 1970s. I remember my dad having to regularly lube the joints of his truck, crawling under it with a grease gun to reach the Zerk fittings. I remember vehicles needing a tuneup every 3000 miles, and reaching 100,000 was an achievement.

Cars today? First tuneup at 100,000 miles.

You can say that cars are a lot more fragile today - get in a crash and they fall apart. That's true, but it's deliberate, and it's not deliberate so that they can make them cheap. It's deliberate so that fewer people die.
by Grimblewald | 2025-07-20 17:02:26+00:00
The problem here, the great limiting factor, is volume. We have finite volume to occupy things with and these carts would be way less efficient than a bus. Bus drivers may be "expensive" but are entierly affordable in a public transport system. Hard to profit from though so america is fucked on that front. You're unlikely to see it without cultural revolution. Doesnt make proposed solution any less bad, or prone to simply perpetuating the ecact same issue plaguing the system now.

as for fsd busses, much more feasible with public infrastructure as you can give the bus eyes via cameras mounted at any difficult points in the city, things hard to make privately accessible due to abuse but fairly reasonable for a well made and maintained publically managed privacy focused system.
by famouswaffles | 2025-07-20 17:02:33+00:00
They don't give a lot of details but they give enough for it to be pretty hard to say the claim is false but unfraudulent.

Some researchers got a breakthrough and decided to share right then rather than the months later it would take for a viable product. It happens, researchers are humans after all and i'm generally glad to take a peek at the actual frontier rather than what's behind by many months.

You can and it's fair to ignore such claims until that part but i think anything more than that is fairly uncharitable for the situation.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-20 17:02:36+00:00
Common pain points for me with test automation:

* slow performance of the baseline application

* flaky tests. This be tests that focus on the wrong dynamic data in a static way or timing issues that introduce race conditions again the tests

* poor negative tests and false positives

* unreliable communication between the test harness and the test subject or communication with interference from the test subjects other communication channels
by sneak | 2025-07-20 17:02:54+00:00
Doesn’t matter. Someone can walk into jamming range wearing a mask, fire up the jammer, and there is no record of the B&E that happens 60 seconds later.

Wireless cameras are mostly a false sense of security for homeowners, much like a deadbolt on a door with a glass window in it.

At least you can talkback and confuse the cat while you’re at work. Doesn’t do fuck-all for safety.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-20 17:03:24+00:00
About the only place I’ve ever been to where this complaint really rings true in suburban areas is the US, and I’d be inclined to put that more down to poor funding and planning than anything else. If anything I kinda have the opposite complaint; there are bus routes in Dublin with literally a stop every hundred metres, in weird winding routes, and you can’t get rid of them because people will write to their TD (MP).

This is what happens when you move a bus stop: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/03/18/legal-a...
by stouset | 2025-07-20 17:04:45+00:00
From my point of view, the significant tradeoffs made in the design of go make it better suited toward software that has to change a lot: e.g., things closer to customer-facing that are constantly being iterated on.

Rust is more appropriate for areas where the problem boundaries are relatively fixed and slow-moving: libraries, backend services, and infrastructure.

By better allowing you to model your program domain, Rust actually lets you finish projects that are feature complete. I have multiple Rust projects in production for years that have needed at most one or two bugfix releases after their initial rollout on top of a half a dozen feature updates. For a very slight additional startup cost in doing that modeling, I’ve gotten massive dividends back in the volume of maintenance programming that hasn’t needed to be done.

But if your problem domain changes frequently enough that the model needs to be changed all the time, that extra inflexibility isn’t worth it. On the other hand, I don’t know much go software that isn’t beset by the same number of bugs as every other modern language.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-20 17:05:10+00:00
I made a decision not to get involved in the dark side of the industry. You can end up like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vardan_Kushnir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Wolfgang_Hawke

Even if you go the "ethical" route you can get sued and have your life made miserable. So I quit looking for security holes.
by chubot | 2025-07-20 17:05:23+00:00
I believe there was an article/paper in the last few months about that exact issue

Someone was saying that with an increasing number of attempts, or increasing context length, LLMs are less and less likely to solve a problem

(I searched for it but can't find it)

That matches my experience -- the corrections in long context can just as easily be anti-corrections, e.g. turning something that works into something that doesn't work

---

Actually it might have been this one, but there are probably multiple sources saying the same thing, because it's true:

Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248

In this report, we evaluate 18 LLMs, including the state-of-the-art GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, and Qwen3 models. Our results reveal that models do not use their context uniformly; instead, their performance grows increasingly unreliable as input length grows.

---

As far this question: how do we manage to create things like the Linux kernel or the Mars landers without AI

It's because human intelligence is a totally different thing than LLMs (contrary to what interested people will tell you)

Carmack said there are at least 5 or 6 big breakthroughs left before "AGI", and I think even that is a misleading framing. It's certainly possible that "AGI" will not be reached - there could be hardware bottlenecks, software/algorithmic questions, or other obstacles we haven't thought of

That is, I would not expect AI to create anything like the Linux kernel. The burden of proof is on the people who claim that, not the other way around !!!
by seneca | 2025-07-20 17:05:33+00:00
It's not just speed. Public transportation entails being closed in a small space with a completely uncontrolled group of the general public. When normal people think public transportation they aren't considering how well driving scales, they think cell phones blasting music out loud, homeless people, conversations on speaker phone, and random acts of violence.

Until that is fixed, people are going to prefer private transportation.
by intended | 2025-07-20 17:05:39+00:00
Your robo taxis will also become dirty, unsafe and unclean.

The quality of service a private entity will provide, does not magically make it better.

It’s better only because of competition driving differentiation in order to capture more market share.

But if you cannot compete further on quality, you will compete on price.

The airline industry is a good example of this.

Public Safety, public transit, can be very good, provided the incentives, funding and institutions to serve it are funded.

People take pride in their work, including the work that results in world quality public services.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-20 17:06:02+00:00
There's no irony, bash and VB6, no matter what you think about the quality of the said languages, are also scripting language and neither are in the “hobby language” category as their use is (or was) very broadly distributed.

OCaml's use is comparatively very, very narrow.

And, in case you are wondering, I have absolutely nothing again OCaml. In fact, my first ever programming language was, as a significant fraction of French engineer from my generation, the “Lite” dialect of Caml. And I suspect that its OCaml heritage is a significant fraction of the reason why I love Rust.

But being used by exactly one FANG company, a single finance one and allegedly a defense company (aren't you confusing Dassault System with Dassault Aviation ?) isn't enough to change its status, especially when it's not the dominant language in two of those (AFAIK Jane Street really is the only one where OCaml has such a central place).
by kubb | 2025-07-20 17:06:06+00:00
He demonstrated that electric cars are viable. Or that rockets can be reused.

But he also started the tunnel company that went nowhere, claimed we'd have fully autonomous self-driving by now, and for some reason lied about being good at video games.

I wish we'd see some nuance in this figure, and realize he's more self-serving than benevolent.
by aziaziazi | 2025-07-20 17:06:33+00:00
Did you try Tempeh? 20gr of protein / 150cal. It looks like a steak.

It's god's food: high prots, fibers, iron, vitamins, unsaturated fats. Low carbs and sodium. Super digestive.

Super versatile: from burgers to bolognese to barbecue to everything, even sweety for the courageous. My easy goto is a dip of whatever open sauce I already have and 1 min micro wave heating. A bit more time ? Fried on the pan with soy sauce, olive oil and some herbs afterwards.
by SimianSci | 2025-07-20 17:06:52+00:00
This is the thing I think alot of people dont understand. Capitalism is not about people and their interests, its about capital, its perfectly willing to sacrifice social good, people's lives, etc. all in pursuit of Capital and its interests. Until people start to wisen up to this, we will continue to hear stories of organizations doing clearly evil things to serve their bottom line. The opioid crisis being caused by pharmaceudical companies in America being a clear example of this.
by rolandog | 2025-07-20 17:06:57+00:00
Why would it have to only be ex-meat eaters? It may be just my (admittedly biased) opinion, but I think that Big Meat has managed to turn meat-eating into a quasi-religion — almost like football. I also try to not shy away from knowing where my food comes from, and how it was processed and produced; if you know about the cruel and unsanitary living conditions for cattle, the underpaid and overworked labor that helps process it, and the deforestation and water needed in order to produce it... you then find the meat does not go down as easy anymore.

Which, not to rain down on everyone's BBQ, but I personally find it ridiculous how we have been protecting people's feelings during flip-a-patty time more than the environment!

Sorry for the rant — not personally directed at you... but, I ... clearly feel strongly about the subject.

Full disclosure: not vegan nor vegetarian, and perhaps even a hypocrite for writing a (hopefully not too) holier-than-thou rant and eating unhealthy amounts of junk food occasionally.
by belorn | 2025-07-20 17:07:01+00:00
> I tend to understand her side quite well when I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride.

That seems to describe city streets. I had a relative that until recently refused to visit major cities because of this, using basically those same words (unsafe, uncomfortable, dirty).
by ndiddy | 2025-07-20 17:07:08+00:00
I think the "move applications onto the network" idea basically killed Java on the desktop and relegated it to a backend only language. It wasn't a bad idea, but it was too early. Because of the focus on network distribution, the two main ways to distribute desktop Java software were Java WebStart (lengthy start-up times on early 2000s internet speeds, integrated poorly with your OS) and applets (only viable for corporate environments where the IT department had control over the whole network and all the clients on it due to security problems, no integration with your OS). If you had to distribute software that ran locally, you had to roll your own solution or buy some third-party tool since Sun didn't have anything that made this easy.
by fwip | 2025-07-20 17:07:38+00:00
Are you familiar with the concept of induced demand? It's often used in the context of road expansion, in which adding another lane increases the number of trips taken, and hence cars on the road. Often, traffic is often very similar to before the upgrade, if not worse (because the connecting infrastructure was not upgraded).

Demand for trips is elastic, and depends on many factors.

Similarly, if the Tesla robotaxi system is better than driving for anyone, it will necessarily increase the number of trips taken. Whether that's people who prefer to let the machine drive than drive themselves, or people who can't drive themselves (no car or no license), there will be more trips. Additionally, some number of people will take them instead of public transit, which will increase traffic without increasing trips served.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-20 17:08:13+00:00
Some applications, like Apache Kafka, don't immediately fsync every write. This lets the kernel batch writes and also linearize them, both adding speed. Until synced, the data exists only in the linux page cache.

To deal with the risk of data loss, multiple such servers are used, with the hope that if one server dies before syncing, another server to which the data was replicated, performs an fsync without failure.
by weatherlite | 2025-07-20 17:08:15+00:00
"Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been critical of Wikipedia since he was laid off as the only editorial employee and departed from the project in 2002.[28][29][30] He went on to found and work for competitors to Wikipedia, including Citizendium and Everipedia. Among other criticisms, Sanger has been vocal in his view that Wikipedia's articles present a left-wing and liberal or "establishment point of view"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia
by 1024core | 2025-07-20 17:08:30+00:00
As a vegetarian, the problem with Beyond Meat (and other such products) is that they're too close to the original. I'm a vegetarian; I don't want to eat meat. If what I'm eating tastes too close to meat, I begin doubting it. It has happened several times in the past where I've been served (real) meat when I explicitly asked for a non-meat version (e.g. "beef burrito" instead of "bean burrito", etc.)

This is why I avoid Beyond Meat (and Impossible) products: too close for comfort.

Vegetables and grains have a great taste in themselves; they don't need to imitate meat to be tasty!
by ww520 | 2025-07-20 17:08:40+00:00
The pipeline for LLM to MCP and to the app looks like,

LLM -> chat app -> MCP client -> MCP server -> specific app (Blender)

The chat app doesn’t know how to talk to Blender. It knows about MCP and links in a client. Blender exposes its functionality via a MCP server. MCP connects the two.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-20 17:09:13+00:00
The article's headline fudges facts.

Reality: A company which mostly bottles & exports water purchased a huge vacant industrial building, right next to a smallish city's* water treatment plant. They could start bottling and exporting 50%-ish of the that treatment plant's output.

Beyond the Sinophobia angle, this sounds like many older news stories I've seen - about some giant company suddenly sinking a giant tap into some small community's limited resources.

*Wikipedia says Nashua, NH has >91k residents, and is the second-largest city in northern New England.
by MostlyStable | 2025-07-20 17:10:10+00:00
I read that portion not as arguing that every possible metric is completely subjective, such that some people will actively prefer, for example, a version that doesn't last as long, or costs more for no additional benefit, but rather that quality has a lot of different axes, some of which are mutually exclusive or in active tension, and the relative weighting of different axes is purely subjective. There is no way that one can argue that it is "correct" to value durability over cost. Or aesthetic appeal over simplicity.

Basically, when there are many axes of quality, the pareto frontier gets very large and very complex and no one position on it is inherently better than another, even if everyone universally agrees which direction is "better" on every individual axis.