MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-02 21:24:39+00:00
"William James Sidis whos IQ was somewhere between 250 and 300."

Wikipedia: "According to Sperling, Sidis's sister Helena told him that an unnamed examiner had estimated Sidis's intelligence in this range, but no documentation has ever been found to support this claim. Modern psychologists and historians of intelligence testing have noted several problems with such extreme IQ estimates: IQ tests in the early 1900s were not standardized or reliable enough to produce meaningful scores above 200. The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis's childhood. Extreme scores often result from extrapolation errors rather than actual measurement. Contemporary accounts focused on Sidis's specific abilities rather than general intelligence measures."

This level of sloppiness about a simple fact-checkable claim means I can't trust the article about anything else. (To say nothing of the claims that aren't quantified at all.)

Also, I feel that it's a bit misleading not to mention that Sidis was "estranged from everyone" in large part because he was a socialist during the First Red Scare.
by brandall10 | 2025-08-02 21:24:52+00:00
This was a problem I regularly had using Copilot w/ GPT4o or Sonnet 3.5/3.7... sometimes I would end up down a rabbit hole and blow multiple days of work, but more typically I'd be out an hour or two and toss everything to start again.

Don't have this w/ Claude Code working over multiple code bases of 10-30k LOC. Part of the reason is the type of guidance I give in the memory files helps keep this at bay, as does linting (ie. class/file length), but I also chunk things up into features that I PR review and have it refactor to keep things super tidy.
by ratg13 | 2025-08-02 21:25:19+00:00
first you have to decide if you want juniors that are able to push tasks through and be guided by a senior, as the juniors won't understand what they are doing or why the AI is telling them to do it "wrong".

senior developers already know how to use AI tools effectively, and are often just as fast as AI, so they only get the benefits out of scaffolding.

really everything comes down to planning, and your success isn't going to come down to people using AI tools, it will come down to the people guiding the process, namely project managers, designers, and the architects and senior developers that will help realize the vision.

juniors that can push tasks to completion can only be valuable if they have proper guidance, otherwise you'll just be making spaghetti.
by neogodless | 2025-08-02 21:25:25+00:00
For the most part there is a floor with EVs where if you go small in battery, weight, and motor... You have a golf cart, not nearly enough range.

As you increase each of those, a larger motor will probably be more efficient for propelling a heavier load with a larger battery.

Because of the instant torque plus high speeds of an EV motor, it's not hard at all to have high HP figures.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-02 21:25:49+00:00
> The typical number of times an American non work truck is used to haul a load each year is zero.

If you specifically exclude work trucks and define “haul a load” as filling up the bed with loose dirt or gravel or something then I could believe this.

I haven’t put a cubic yard of anything in my truck bed this year but hauling a cubic yard of anything is a rare occurrence for someone who isn’t doing landscaping.

But you have to really stretch the definitions if you believe that people never put anything in the bed to haul.
by bArray | 2025-08-02 21:25:53+00:00
> * a truck is just a car that misses a roof over the back part of it

Respectfully, a truck is not just a car missing the back part of it. It often has a lot more power, is lifted, has off-road springs, larger wheels, low and high speed gear box, roll cage for the front cabin, raised air intake - the list goes on.

Most people, though, do just need a car with a removable back.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-08-02 21:26:21+00:00
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by Viliam1234 | 2025-08-02 21:27:11+00:00
> Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.

Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad idea per se... it's just that at some moment you should teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.

It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by trying to program your own way first. You will probably appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I even suspect that without this extra experience, people would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to use a complicated design pattern where a simple function call would suffice.

Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers, you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more. But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601 without putting them in a column first.

The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself OK.
by 01100011 | 2025-08-02 21:27:19+00:00
I'd love an EV truck but not the weird little thing highlighted in this post. I watched an overview video someone linked but turned it off as soon as I saw the guy trying to fit inside the tiny cab.

Also, why is this goofy little truck so powerful and so expensive? Can I please just get a modestly powered EV work truck with capacity for sheet goods, a few tools, and a single passenger other than the driver? Can it not cost $50k?
by doctorpangloss | 2025-08-02 21:27:19+00:00
most profit in autos is in personalization and financing, which in principle you can do at any scale, with whatever fixed costs. I believe these guys are building on top of a Subaru with vendor motors.

that said, the problem with these utilitarian vehicles is that they appeal to people who buy cars once every 20 years, whereas most of the industry is serving the very large, very abundant population of Americans buying 2 cars every 2 years
by fn-mote | 2025-08-02 21:27:31+00:00
> I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him

1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1.

2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.

Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes.

Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree.

As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-02 21:27:33+00:00
The actual OpenRouter data says otherwise.[1] Right now, Google leads with only 28.4% marketshare. Anthropic (24.7%), Deepseek (15.4%), and Qwen (10.8%) are the runners-up.

If this were winner-take-all market with low switching costs, we'd be seeing instant majority market domination whenever a new SOTA model comes out every few weeks. But this isn't happening in practice, even though it's much easier to switch models on OpenRouter than many other inference providers.

I get the perception of "winner-take-all" is why the salaries are shooting up, but it's at-odds with the reality.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/rankings
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-08-02 21:28:05+00:00
May I ask what you are use it for? I have been using it for fun mostly, side projects, learning, experimenting. I would never use it for work codebase, unless, well, the company ordered or at least permitted it. And even then, I'm not really sure I would feel comfortable with the level of liberty CC takes. So I'm curious about others.
by enaaem | 2025-08-02 21:28:47+00:00
In the 70s there were massive protests in the Netherlands called "Stop the Child Murder". Note that these protests were based on conservatism. People were used to safe streets where children could cycle independently to school, go to sports clubs and hang out with their friends around the city. Then cars came and started killing their children.

At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.

Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
by microtonal | 2025-08-02 21:28:59+00:00
I am the exact opposite and sell or throw away pretty much everything that I don't use. I find that doing so not only clutters the house less, but also gives you less to worry about.

My general rule is - if I didn't use it for a year, I don't need it. There are obviously some exceptions like a fire extinguisher (which I hope to never use) and digitized photos, which only go through a careful selection.

I think the thing I kept the longest was a Libranet Linux 3.0 CD set because I worked for Libra Computer Systems for a while and this was the release that I helped building. A few years ago I threw it away, I think after I saw someone uploaded it to archive.org. When I'm 60 and want to install it again for good old time's sake I can.

tl;de: if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it.
by channel_t | 2025-08-02 21:29:02+00:00
Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven.

I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-02 21:29:29+00:00
> So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself.

Photo cameras would still be doing ALPR. Changing from "take a photo of cars that are speeding" to "take a photo of every car and only send tickets to the ones that are speeding" is a trivial software change that can be done retroactively at any point even after the cameras are installed.

> Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

How does this address the concern that they're going to use ALPR for location tracking? They would just do the same thing with the cloud service.
by xorcist | 2025-08-02 21:30:14+00:00
For all practical purposes they mostly are. Linux famously hasn't broken userspace in over thirty years. Pretty much all commercial software for unix (and Linux) is distributed this way since several decades. Things like ld-linux.so is mostly backwards compatible for this reason. You can still run ancient Firefox builds even if you might have to fetch an old libstc++. But those are still around, for exactly that reason.

Of course, the world changes. Running X11 software might be tricky a few decades from now if nobody speaks the protocol. Something compiled for ALSA or esound might not work forever. Software dependent on a mail transport might not work when email is finally dead and everyone uses Facebook instead. Perhaps one day IPv4 sockets won't be available.

That type of dependencies are the hard ones that will kill your software before any binary incompatibilities will. As long as there is a.out binaries or 32-bit software out there someone will make it work. Software from the past three decades still runs so there's hope for the next three.

Until then, don't let perfect be the enemy of what's simple and works.
by rockemsockem | 2025-08-02 21:30:18+00:00
> I don't consider myself being a person with an oversized ego.

People with oversized egos never do.

Lots of people can talk at length at a high level about complex systems and can't even write a for loop. If you think you're somehow special and should get to skip that basic validation then IDK, sounds like egotistical behavior to me.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-02 21:30:24+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

> This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fear mongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience. When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery slope fallacy.

> This is a type of informal fallacy, and is a subset of the continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. Other idioms for the slippery slope fallacy are the thin edge of the wedge, domino fallacy.

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

> Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not necessarily due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but is due to its content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them.

For the record, I don't really think slippery slope was invoked there (nor do I think ad hominem was), but I do think it's an actual fallacy. I actually even disagree with them claiming it wasn't a strawman, too - they dramatized and reframed the original point.
by manmal | 2025-08-02 21:31:05+00:00
I know what you‘re writing is the whole point of vibe coding, but I‘d strongly urge you to not do this. If you don’t review the code an LLM is producing, you‘re taking on technical debt. That’s fine for small projects and scripts, but not for things you want to maintain for longer. Code you don’t understand is essentially legacy code. LLM output should be bent to our style and taste, and ideally look like our own code.

If that helps, call it agentic engineering instead of vibe coding, to switch to a more involved mindset.
by pmarreck | 2025-08-02 21:31:50+00:00
How the hell do you find time for eight miles of walking a day? I mean, that's just shy of a third of a marathon! I can only assume you're independently wealthy, retired, or have no kids.

(Beleaguered parent of a toddler here struggling to find ANY workout time, or the energy for it! It's killing me, literally and figuratively)
by egypturnash | 2025-08-02 21:31:54+00:00
Every time I see a Cybertruck while I'm on my bike I am stunned at how badly that thing is designed, it's got a hood higher than my head and a front that slopes backwards as it goes down, so that anything it hits is just naturally shoved under it, this is a machine built for vehicular homicide. How the fuck did that get allowed on the road at all.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-02 21:32:23+00:00
> Trucks that actually get used as trucks look like it with dings, scratches, and scuffs because they’re tools, not toys.

Not really. Lots of people use trucks and keep them in pristine condition too. Beds have liners now to keep them looking new. And you aren’t getting random dings on the outside unless you drive into things.
by apitman | 2025-08-02 21:32:49+00:00
IPv4 is never going away barring massive adoption of p2p protocols to drive the switch. Sadly NAT and SNI solve most of the problems well enough for things to limp along indefinitely. The only orgs with the power to fix this from the top down are incentivized to maintain the centralized status quo.

So get out there and p2p
by zerealshadowban | 2025-08-02 21:32:50+00:00
I've personally had very satisfying results experimenting with several distinct therapy approaches, simply instructing the AI to analyze my story or dream according to this or that school of thought, ask clarifying questions, and suggest work I should do to improve (Gottman couples therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Jungian analysis, even Nathaniel Branden's self-esteem therapy, you name it...). I initially tried it out with AI because I couldn't find any Jungian therapist in-company-insurance-network in my metro area.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-08-02 21:33:02+00:00
I live in a big city and two children under 10 have been killed by large pickup trucks within a half mile of my home in the last five years. Two that I know of anyway, because I'm acquainted with the families. One had been modified with a "bull bar" making it more dangerous to pedestrians.

And 80% of americans live in urban areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullbar
by tlogan | 2025-08-02 21:33:16+00:00
I completely agree. Though implementing it is far easier said than done.

Here in San Francisco (and much of California), things are incredibly complicated.

Take this example: in SF, there’s a policy that prevents kids from attending elementary school in their own neighborhoods. Instead, they’re assigned to schools on the opposite side of town. In places that are practically inaccessible without a car. And there are no school buses.

Changing that policy has proven nearly impossible. But if kids could actually attend local schools, biking or walking would be realistic options. That one shift alone could make a huge difference in reducing car dependence.
by cluckindan | 2025-08-02 21:33:38+00:00
If it’s not directly human-verifiable, people have to rely on 3rd party tools or official/media statements to verify content legitimacy. Such reliance requires trust in authorities and media, which have both been subject to systematic erosion as of late.

I don’t see the point of this technology. It might be useful for entities like Meta and Google, which could use it to warn of fake content. However, in practice that amounts to giving those entities more power over our perceptions and the realities we build upon them.
by MrDarcy | 2025-08-02 21:34:53+00:00
I’m excited to shoot my own music videos with my iPhone now.

Last weekend my grade school friend visited and we took a boat out on Puget Sound. We followed two orca whales for 45 minutes and I shot multiple videos of them in 4k 60fps. They look beautiful and played seamlessly on my TV without any crappy ads. I shared them with our two families easily through airdrop and later through iCloud when we got back to land.

That evening my son was dancing and signing he favorite songs with my friend’s son so I shot a “music video” of them and shared it again.

Both these experiences were exciting to me. It felt insane to do such things with a pocket computer Apple hasn’t screwed up in nearly 20 years.

Like I said, it’s the whole product experience that’s the point. Apple has earned enough of my trust to believe one will come and even if not, I’m satisfied with what I have today and will have tomorrow.
by nymanjon | 2025-08-02 21:35:24+00:00
I built a simple lib for JS/HTML called html-traits[1]. It's similar to built-in web components but instead of using the `is` attribute you use the `traits` attribute. So, it is specifically meant for progressive enhancement. Let's say I have a `textarea` element and I want it to have the behavior where the text box expands automatically, I would add a trait called "expando" that would do that for me. But let's say I also want it to turn red when there's more than 200 characters entered, so I could add another trait called "character-limit" with an added attribute `data-character-limit="200"`.

So, the element works like normal if no JS is enabled or if the JS broke for some reason, but it has those extra behaviors when JS is working. And it is very clean as it is just attributes on the element rather than having nested element hell like when you are using normal web components, or worse, like when you have web components which don't even show the `textarea` element at all and they put it in the shadow DOM and the developer has to reimplement all the behavior of the original element.

So, composition over inheritance.

[1]: https://github.com/jon49/html-traits
by Muromec | 2025-08-02 21:35:38+00:00
Here for example is a map of Amsterdam (click on Wegcategorie en snelheid). Inside the block it's 15 km/h, on blue roads are 30, red roads are 50. The map doesn't color-code the highways, as they don't belong to municipality, but they are 100. https://maps.amsterdam.nl/30km/

It's like that since last December and was somewhat controversial when introduced (expanded), because muh freedoms, but not the kind of enduring controversy.
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-08-02 21:35:55+00:00
(When links like this -- e.g., random Wikipedia pages on topics unrelated to modern technology -- are posted here, what kind of response is wanted?)

Books could be, and have been, written about this person. I will confine myself to observing that (1) even his peers thought him a monster and (2) to judge the system by him is to judge it by its worst.
by wtshex | 2025-08-02 21:35:57+00:00
Yeah, I totally agree — we’re living in a cyberpunk reality, but without the cool aesthetics from the movies. Just constant surveillance, tracking, and so-called “free” tools that harvest everything. That’s exactly why I built a 100% offline 2FA authenticator — no cloud, no hidden SDKs. I don’t want us to resign ourselves to dystopia; I want to show that there’s a better way. I want to protect people, not sell them out.

Honestly, I believe it’s crucial for independent developers to step up with real alternatives. Otherwise, we’ll end up living only among shadows and leaked data.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-02 21:36:45+00:00
Commercially viable means more than getting energy out of it though - it also requires that the build, operation and maintenance costs over the lifetime of the machine don't outweigh the value of the net energy generated. Of course it needs to work on paper before you build it, but this is experimental science and until you have built it you haven't proved it.
by rco8786 | 2025-08-02 21:36:54+00:00
> Maybe you’re noticing when there’s one human but you don’t really know how else that person is using the vehicle at other times.

95% of big trucks I see on the road have one person in them and beyond my anecdotal experience we know statistically that most vehicle trips involve 1 person. It's not super hard to extrapolate from there.

I'm not even particularly "anti" truck, though I do think the increase in size and weight has gotten totally ridiculous.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-02 21:37:04+00:00
The incentive you're referring to is a law. The problem is that a primary entity you don't want tracking everyone is the government, and governments (like other entities) are notoriously ineffective at enforcing rules against themselves. The public also has no reliable means to establish that they're not doing it as they claim, and even if they're not doing it today, you're still rolling out a huge network of cameras waiting to have the switch flipped overnight.