MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-18 16:18:31+00:00
I think this is a little cynical. Robotics and AI are moving at a decent pace. I just bought a robot vacuum that is also a mop and has all manner of sensors and even mapped my house. It was like $250. That's a huge leap over the $500 one I bought years ago that just bounced around randomly and only vacuumed. "Hey why doesnt this have an app and complex sensors and be able to dynamically make a map," would be borderline-laughable not that long ago, but now its the bare minimum for a robot vacuum. I don't even see a lot that don't also mop too. When before the mop feature was seen as this high-end feature, often requiring buying a 2nd machine. Now its just something tacked on.

I'm not going to go into the controversial world of assisted and some level of self driving, but its clear that's making a lot of progress and today is just seen as a boring feature on your car, like seatbelts or ABS.

I've been watching videos from Chinese robot manufacturers and we definitely are 'getting there.' What getting there means is the big question, but this isn't Omni magazine in 1985. You can see videos of these things doing a lot right now, even if its rudimentary. Unitree especially, considering how they aim for a 'low' price point. Of course a lot of these are carefully staged demos, but the fundamentals are here. Even non-staged stuff is starting to look relatively good.

The recent leak about Apple's robot is interesting too. Apple is very conservative, so if they're testing one, even if its a tabletop (with an arm?) that says a lot on what's practically possible and affordable right now. The same way when Apple was testing the PR waters for an electric car, it was a great time to move into electric cars.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-18 16:18:42+00:00
A nice side effect of Apple entering this price range is that it might raise the bar for what people find acceptable in laptops at that price.

Right now $600-$700 is where you start seeing much more dramatic corner cutting, with thinner body panels, way more flexing, crummy hinges, “just ok” trackpad/keyboard, etc. A $599 MacBook is almost guaranteed to solidly beat everything else at that price in those categories.
by dddddaviddddd | 2025-08-18 16:19:09+00:00
I'd be happy if whoever built the road (municipality, state, etc) had civil liability for deaths and injuries, in cases where it could be shown that an inadequate effort was made to protect pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists (nearly all roads in Canada/US, unfortunately). Maybe that could be a positive incentive for safer design from the people with the power to change the situation.
by doodlebugging | 2025-08-18 16:19:22+00:00
>Texas has shown no interest in life support critical.

I'm not sure that this is correct. I was initially worried about how Mom would fare since she lives alone and is over 80. During the entire one week period of power problems in Feb. 2021 my Mom never lost power, not even a quick brown-out. Her home is within a half mile of a local hospital which also never lost power. The area around the hospital did not lose power so businesses and homes close by had no issues with heating, cooking, bathing, etc during the cold blast. That fact allowed me to stay here at my place a couple hours away and manage my own situation which was fairly easy compared to many others in the state.

Your other statements are quite true and to date no one who played a part in mismanagement of utility power in Texas has been held accountable nor will they ever be in a libertarian state where regulations exist only to guarantee a profitable situation for a commercial entity. In fact, most electricity customers in Texas ended up paying for the huge cost increases that occurred as those in charge tweaked the system in real time to maximize their own profits.

Texas needs regulations worse than most other states. Grifters, fraudsters, and thieves have filled too many critical positions for too long.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-18 16:19:56+00:00
This crosswalk looks terrible. As an adult I'm not sure if I would choose it over crossing where the median is the widest. At least there there are only two lanes to cross at a time and with cars coming from one direction. While the poorly marked crosswalk has 5 lanes with median in the middle that's narrower than length of one foot. It's tragically funny how "aspirational" Google map of this place is when compared to street view.

Also, why there's no crosswalk on the intersection where the Food Lion exit is?
by somenameforme | 2025-08-18 16:19:59+00:00
"Only" kind of misses the benefit though. I'm very bearish on "AI", but this is an absolutely perfect use case for LLMs. The issue is that if you describe a problem in natural language on any search engine, your results are going to be garbage unless you randomly luckboxed into somebody asking, with near identical verbiage, the question on some Q&A site.

That is because search is still mostly stuck in ~2003. But now ask the exact same thing of an LLM and it will generally be able to provide useful links. There's just so much information out there, but search engines just suck because they lack any sort of meaningful natural language parsing. LLMs provide that.
Show HN: A minimal Neovim distro for speed and sanity
by hpbyte | 2025-08-18 16:20:06+00:00
Finally, I've moved my old .vimrc to Neovim with full lua configs. It's not super preloaded like LazyVim, AstroVim or such distros but very minimal with sane keybinds and configs that make sense.

Pls do check it out! https://github.com/hpbyte/h-vim
by vunderba | 2025-08-18 16:20:06+00:00
I was always under the impression that the reason they seemingly crippled the iPad Pros from functioning as full-fledged computers was to prevent it from cannibalizing MacBook sales.

That's why the latest iPads, with their M4 processors, always felt like overkill for what you could realistically use the device for. I've got an old iPad Pro 10.5 that's 8 years old at this point, and it still works perfectly for my use cases (drawing tablet with Procreate, GarageBand, watching YouTube, etc.).
by Melatonic | 2025-08-18 16:20:11+00:00
Personally I'd add 'consume and make tons of fermented food' to that list and also eat lots of prebiotics. Gut health is key to so many aspects of a healthy life - I have to imagine it helps with longevity (and lower stress). Nobody likes having stomach pain!

People love their probiotic pills but I'm not convinced - the amount of beneficial microbes is measured at bottling or production and who knows how many survive by the time they get to you. Not to mention how many survive into your gut once consumed.

Homemade sauerkraut or natto though? Pretty much guaranteed to be teeming with the stuff. And your grandparents and their parents were probably eating it their whole lives. It's a whole forgotten art / science that is thankfully making a comeback.

Anecdotally (obviously sample size of 1 so big grain of salt here) every person in my personal life who I saw live to a super long age and also maintain good mental fitness followed what you are saying above plus made their own fermented food into their elderly years.

At the worst it does nothing for longevity and you end up with more unique tasty food for yourself and your friends :-D
by w10-1 | 2025-08-18 16:20:22+00:00
There are also intrastromal corneal rings to correct myopia (but not astigmatism) -- in the US (Intacs) for -1 to -3 diopter, while in the EU they go up to -6. They're inserted though a small hole to surround the cornea, and they can be removed. So overall less effective than lasers, but also more safe (though much less common, so harder to find a high-traffic expert surgeon).
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-18 16:20:31+00:00
Yes, but that's workloads || operator, not workloads && operator - you don't need four nines for your control plane just to keep your workloads alive. Your control plane can be significantly less reliable than your workloads, and the workloads will keep serving fine.

In real practice, it's so cheap to keep your operator running redundantly, that it's probably going to have more nines than your workloads, but it doesn't need to be
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-18 16:20:46+00:00
I do the same with Lucid App shared on Zoom. I have the base diagram in Lucid and I start making changes during the meeting and adding sticky notes docs.

> It's not meant to be the actual documentation, and it makes sense to me since you don't want to write the actual documentation during the discussion with multiple highly paid devs and managers. Just take a photo at the end, and it's saved for when you make the documentation.

This is 2025, over Zoom, we use Gong, it records, transcribes and summarizes the action items and key discussion points. No need to take notes.

My diagrams are already in Lucid with notes
by marojejian | 2025-08-18 16:20:59+00:00
Was about to post this. Seems like a violation of Betteridge's law :D

>Unconditional cash transfers (accounting for spillovers) lead to 48% fewer infant deaths before age one and 45% fewer child deaths before age five.

Heard about this via the NYT: A New Way to Reduce Children’s Deaths: Cash https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/health/cash-transfer-keny... archive: https://archive.is/ct2o0

They write:

>Those are much bigger drops than have been credited to routine immunizations, for example, or bed nets to prevent malaria.

>“This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I’ve seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty,” said Harsha Thirumurthy, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work.
by nashashmi | 2025-08-18 16:21:20+00:00
I am trying to figure this out. The writer despairingly says a backend is needed to store changes in state. The writer calls this backend DB and API. The writer then substitutes DB and API with "server" like it is a solution

So now we have a webapp. The webapp connects to a backend. The webapp stores changes in the backend. The webapp loads changes in the backend.

The original problem still persists?! State can be stored in browser with localstorage. Or in device with file access. That is about it. Across devices, you need online storage and access key.

I feel like this was a writeup on the problem with vanilla HTML app development.

Also, can we all agree that calling a webpage an app is an afront to all webpages? We should have two categories: webpages and webapps. A web page can contain a webapp. A web app is anything where the content changes and where it connects to a backend to store or load data. So interactive html stuff is not a webapp, but JS literally changing the data makes it a webapp, even a simple HTML page with a JS clock makes that portion of the page a webapp.
by kg | 2025-08-18 16:21:44+00:00
I checked the original tweet to try and understand this better and what appears to have happened is that Otter kept recording after he left and the VCs stayed on the call chatting (for hours, according to the tweet). This violates the assumption baked into the recording agent (all participants of the call have a right to a transcript of the whole call) by repurposing a scheduled meeting into a party line/just chatting sort of situation.

You could fix this by training people not to use booked meetings this way but I'm not sure how realistic that is to do. I think it might be that services like Otter need to be adjusted to take into account that not every part of a meeting is of equal sensitivity.

i.e. my HOA's monthly meetings have a private period for the board only and a public period for all residents. If Otter were used in this configuration, it would broadcast the exact details of those private discussions to the whole building, which might include board members discussing details that shouldn't be shared with everyone.
by dataflow | 2025-08-18 16:22:46+00:00
Leaving a second comment to provide another perspective.

The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.

If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.

Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.

Is that fair?
by mindslight | 2025-08-18 16:23:01+00:00
345 feet isn't even 7 seconds out of your way at 75 mph (
).

Talking about crosswalks misses that this is probably a common crossing spot for lots of people. The parents thought nothing of the kids crossing the road here, so this is likely where they always cross. So in the "crosswalk paradigm" it should have had a crosswalk built.

Personally I live on a fast road and I've taken to only mowing the frontage and clearing snow with a 2000lb tractor. About half of drivers simply give zero fucks about soft fleshy blobs outside of steel cages, regardless of right of way or other legal considerations. It's only when you add something that might scratch their car that they magically become considerate.
by coldpie | 2025-08-18 16:23:09+00:00
I understand where you're coming from, but, how often do you travel by foot in car-heavy areas? I'm not trying to ask a "gotcha" question, but rather trying to point out that the experience of actually traveling in these areas on foot is very different from how it looks in a car, in a way that I think drivers often don't realize. You really have to have some experience doing it, to understand how awful these areas are for pedestrians, and why people don't follow the rules. It can be counter-intuitive, but pedestrian accommodations are often actually counter to pedestrian safety.

For example, regarding this particular scenario, it actually very often is safer to break the rules and jaywalk, than it is to cross at a signaled intersection. Drivers at intersections are paying attention to a half-dozen different things: is my light green yet? can I take this turn on red? is the car behind me stopping in time? what portion of the stoplight cycle is currently happening? what did my friend just text me before I stopped? Notice that none of these things are pedestrians. As a pedestrian, it's a very common occurrence to get a right-turner almost colliding with you because they were looking left instead of where they were driving. In car-heavy areas, drivers frequently just forget pedestrians can even exist, they're not even a concern. The zebra striping indicates where they should stop their car, it's not a pedestrian zone.

None of that happens if you as a pedestrian cross in the middle of a straightaway. The drivers are (mostly) looking straight ahead, they're focused on where they're going, they don't have a ton of other variables to contend with like they do at intersections. It's a much simpler place for a dangerous interaction (crossing the street) to occur. There's often a median in the middle, so you as a pedestrian only have to contend with one flow of traffic instead of 2 or 3. It still sucks, don't get me wrong. But it sucks less than an intersection.

For the past 50 years, we have built our cities for cars and exclusively for cars, and our pedestrian accommodations follow that rule. Just because an accommodation exists, doesn't mean it's actually safe.
by pixl97 | 2025-08-18 16:23:13+00:00
The answer mostly is about when they built them. My guess is this was from the 50's or 60's on a lot of this stuff, when the amount of suburbs was still low which limited the costs of infrastructure spending on maintenance. Now we can't afford that because we have zillions of miles of roads that have to be paved and kept up for low tax providing single family homes. The density of these houses is too low to justify tunnels/bridges all the places we need them.

Then add in modern cost disease on top of it and it starts making sense.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-08-18 16:23:37+00:00
The mathematics that LLMs and machine learning are based on started off being developed for aircraft decades ago. It’s called “control theory”. So we had “AI” on airplanes first. Specifically we had adaptive control algorithms explicitly because of the problems introduced by fuel levels changing during the course of a flight.

In physics, we typically start with mass-spring-damper system representation. Elementary physics and engineering typically has assumptions such as mass being constant. You develop all sorts of dynamical models and intuition with that assumption. But an aircraft burns fuel as it flies, meaning its mass changes during the course of the flight. Thus your models drift and you have to adapt to that.

Pilots would have tomes they'd have to switch between at various points of the journey and adaptive control algorithms alleviated this. They still needed the actual reference guide in the cockpit as a risk mitigation.

The difference between that decades old application is that you don’t need a billion parameter model to do flight control. Most people do not understand the historic development of these techniques. The foundation of them has been around for a while. What we have done with the newest batch of "AI" is massively scale them up.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-18 16:23:53+00:00
Oh I strongly disagree. If there's one thing the wealthy have is an intense class solidarity. They're fully aware of the power of class solidarity. You might see conflicts on the fringes but when the shit hits the fan, they will absolutely stick together.

They're so aware of the power of class solidarity that they've designed society to ensure that there is no class solidarity among the working class. All of the hot button social issues are intentionally divisive to avoid class solidarity.
by hitekker | 2025-08-18 16:24:13+00:00
Rust's leadership wanted a formal specification. They thought it's reasonable. Hence, why they invested in a team to build a spec https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/15/spec-visio...

One of the founding members wrote a blog post & RFC which gives some good reasons why a spec is needed https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-standard https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3355-rust-spec.html
by mothballed | 2025-08-18 16:24:20+00:00
Other states/feds were happy to take the "free market" of Texas during WWII when they direly needed it and other Gulf states begged Texas to connect.

It's a holier than thou thing for the other states. "Free market" buying from Texas when they need it, when they don't it's "fuck the free market" and cut texas off via legislation and refuse to provide the same assistance that Texans provided.
by isodude | 2025-08-18 16:24:21+00:00
A nice thing I found is that if you do (which I see they did not in the examples)

# ProtectSystem=

you can do

TemporaryFileSystem=/:ro BindReadOnly=/usr/bin/binary /lib /lib64 /usr/lib usr/lib64 <paths you want to read>

And essentially just including the binary and the path you want available. ProtectSystem= is currently not compatible with this behavior.

EDIT: More info here: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/33688
by runako | 2025-08-18 16:24:52+00:00
In my small city, people are routinely hit at crosswalks of roads that look like this.

There's a spot where the crosswalk is marked, with lights and signage, where the curb even just out a little extra to make the "unprotected" part of the crosswalk a shorter walk. Cars blow through the light all the time, it's totally unsafe to cross until oncoming traffic comes to a complete stop and makes eye contact. And this stretch is single lane, not designed for the speed of the Gastonia intersection. (Yes, there have been pedestrian fatalities on this stretch.)

The bigger issue is that the road is designed in such a way that a driver would not feel uncomfortable driving at highway speeds, regardless of the speed limit. Adding pedestrians into a system like that will always result in pedestrians being hit.

This road would be super dangerous even if the city moved the crosswalk to the place(s) where people want to cross.
by cjonas | 2025-08-18 16:24:55+00:00
There should be legislation that requires company's allow "opting out" of individualized algorithmic feeds. I'm fine if you want to show me videos similar to channels I've explicitly subscribed to. But tracking my every interaction and using that to serve content I never asked for is everything that's wrong with modern social media.

Maybe we need an initiative like "stop killing games".
by cafebeen | 2025-08-18 16:24:58+00:00
When asking customers how well they were helped by the customer support system (via CSAT score), I've found industry-standard AI support agents will generally perform worse than a well-trained human support team. AI agents are fine at handling some simple queries, e.g. basic product and order informatino, but support issues are often biased towards high complexity, because otherwise they could solve it in a more automated. I'm sure it depends on the industry, and whether the customer's issue is truly novel.
by dialup_sounds | 2025-08-18 16:25:22+00:00
Most English dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Odds are more people use these words than use a dictionary on a regular basis, and including them doesn't diminish the credibility of dictionaries unless you think their purpose is to curb the use of language instead of documenting it. Dictionaries include words labeled obsolete or archaic, informal and slang meanings, and even offensive and disparaging words without "glorifying" their use.
by pesus | 2025-08-18 16:25:31+00:00
Improves brand reputation? I don't think I've seen a single case where someone is glad to talk to an LLM/chat bot instead of an actual person. Personally, I think less of any company that uses them. I've never seen one be actually useful, and they seem to only really regurgitate links to FAQ pages or give the most generic answers possible while I fight to get a customer service number so I can actually solve the problem at hand.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-18 16:25:47+00:00
> AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

99% seems like a pulled-out-of-your-butt number and hyperbolic, but, yes, there's clearly a non-trivial percentage of customer support that's absolutely terrible.

Please keep in mind, though, that a lot of customer support by monopolies is intended to be terrible.

AI seems like a dream for some of these companies to offer even worse customer service, though.

Where customer support is actually important or it's a competitive market, you tend to have relatively decent customer support - for example, my bank's support is far from perfect, but it's leaps and bounds better than AT&T or Comcast.