MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjulius | 2025-08-18 16:09:13+00:00
So... the article provides a Google Maps link to the area where this happened. According to the piece, the kids visited the Food Lion and Subway, and then re-crossed Hudson Boulevard. There's a related NYT piece that also says an older woman was hit "a few weeks ago" trying to "cross via the same median".

I see the wide-laned Hudson Boulevard on Google Maps. I see the median. I see why it might be tempting to cross there. But I also see that ~345 feet to the west is a crosswalk.

I'm a parent. I get the impulse to protect your kids and ensure that they grow up with a healthy level of independence and freedom and the ability to be their own person and know how to operate in a world by themselves. But I struggle, as a parent, to understand how, if I were on the phone with them, I would've let them cross via the median rather than insisting they walk themselves a little ways down to the crosswalk.

I'm not attempting to blame the parents, and am sorry for their loss. But I'm generally stumped as to why they would've allowed that and, further, why there's outrage about an "unsafe median" when people have a crosswalk ~300 feet away.
by adrianobbe | 2025-08-18 16:09:18+00:00
Not making any money. Imo it's as simple as that. First project I built for 6 months without even launching, like what a complete idiot. Second I kept thinking oh I'll add monetization later. Others as well not thinking about money first and validating my product with a Paywall. Validation can ONLY happen when people PAY imo.
by keybored | 2025-08-18 16:09:28+00:00
Whether or not you are correct about the concrete details here, it is laughable for regular people[1] to bicker about whose job will be replaced first when the people who profit from that are just sitting on their ass, ready to get labor for nothing instead of relatively little.

[1] Although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people who argue about this topic online are already independently wealthy
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-18 16:09:31+00:00
No that's not what I'm saying. If you tell an LLM that you need a report on a specific member of congress and provide a prompt saying you can use bash tools like grep/curl/ping/git/etc... just return bash then a formatted code block

Or you can use fetch_record followed by a formatted code block of the name of a google search you want to perform.

The LLM will likely use bash and curl because it NATIVELY knows what it is and is capable of, while this other tool you have to feed it all these parameters that it is not used to.

I'm not saying go ahead and throw that in chatgpt, I'm talking from experience at our company using MCP vs bashable stuff, it keeps ignoring the other tools.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-18 16:09:41+00:00
I don’t really know what the point of this “Linux on the desktop” event would be, or even what it is. (Clearly it isn’t just Linux on desktops, because that’s been working fine forever).

The whole point of my comment was to keep in mind the incentives of different sub-groups. If “Linux on the desktop” doesn’t benefit the people that make Linux work, I don’t see what the big deal is.
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-18 16:09:45+00:00
>Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders. It was all done to make someone else think 'woah, they are following the trend!'.

I'm seeing this again and again. Customers as users seems like the last concern, if it is a concern at all. Adherence to the narrative du jour, fundraising from investors and hyping the useless product up to dump on retail are the primary concerns.

Vaporware or a useless, unlaunched product are advantageous here. Actual users might report how underwhelming or useless it is. Sky high development costs are touted as wins.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-18 16:09:52+00:00
This is completely different - said as someone who has been in the industry professionally for 30 years and as a hobbyist before then for a decade.

There are projects I lead now that I would have at least needed one or maybe two junior devs to do the grunt work after I have very carefully specified requirements (which I would have to do anyway) and diagrams and now ChatGPT can do the work for me.

That’s never been the case before and I’ve personally gone from programming in assembly, to C, to higher level languages and on the hardware side, personally managing the build out of a data center that had an entire room dedicated to a SAN with a whopping 3TB of storage to being able to do the same with a yaml/HCL file.
by barbazoo | 2025-08-18 16:11:22+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

> In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[5][6] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.

No one that thinks they should lead, should actually lead in my opinion.
by noah_buddy | 2025-08-18 16:11:41+00:00
I don’t think that’s a reasonable takeaway considering the follow through to the end of the article where he states that the environment is the culprit. If anything, I think his supposition is that any one of innumerable actors are just as a guilty as the parents but that our system must reduce scope to find a specific culprit and charge them with something. I don’t think the author would agree with charging the parents with manslaughter, but I think the implication is that they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live.
by com2kid | 2025-08-18 16:11:57+00:00
Last year one of my berry bushes had browning leaves with some spots. Google search said infection, treatment plan, etc.

This year I snapped a pic and sent to chat gpt. Normal end of year die off, cut the brown branches away, here is a fertilizer schedule for end of year to support new growth for the next year.

ChatGPT makes gardening so much easier, and that is just one of many areas. Recipes are another, don't trust the math, but chat gpt can remix and elevate recipes so much better than Google recipe blog spam posts can.
by omnicognate | 2025-08-18 16:12:03+00:00
On the contrary, he makes it pretty clear he doesn't agree with it.

> So we do the next best thing for our consciences: we blame the victims. We prosecute the parents, demonize the driver, or scold the pedestrian for “not being careful.” And in doing so, we avoid indicting the real culprit: the American development culture that produced this environment.
by newsclues | 2025-08-18 16:12:10+00:00
I have a job as a cleaner. We have clients who spend about that hiring us to do regular weekly cleaning.

But they still own a robotic vacuum, which they can deploy the other six days a week we aren’t there.

Initially the people who buy home robots can afford humans and robots.

Still so far away from being able to replace humans for all tasks, the difference between low hanging fruit (vacuum hardwood floors) and difficult tasks (dusting fragile art) is vast.
by bilekas | 2025-08-18 16:12:49+00:00
> Last year, an AI researcher and engineer said Otter had recorded a Zoom meeting with investors, then shared with him a transcription of the chat including "intimate, confidential details" about a business discussed after he had left the meeting. Those portions of the conversation ended up killing a deal,

I'm sorry but this is another example of not checking AI's work. Whatever about the excessive recording, that's one thing, but blindly trusting the AI's output and then using it blindly as a company document for a client is on you.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-18 16:13:25+00:00
That’s funny, I’m not even sure what the D is supposed to expand to, in that insult. What a silly and lame thing to use as an insult.

I’ve been using it because having some random letter capitalized seems to be the totally unsurprising for this sort of plumbing software. (And by plumbing, I mean: very useful and helpful boring stuff that deals with messy problems that I’m happy not to care about, just to be clear that I mean it positively, haha).
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-18 16:13:57+00:00
Which is great.

Until there's new management.

You can't run a business by seesaw.

Best to just count on that rule being enforced and place the necessary battery backups and wind or solar in place to backstop the diesel. Then make any users who need to use those data centers eat that extra cost. There's no problem with us-east costing less than us-west, and us-texas costing most of all. That's how markets work.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-18 16:14:00+00:00
There's no reason you couldn't do this in a peer-to-peer system too, especially if you only have a few nodes. Imagine for 2 nodes:

1. Each node transmits a beacon once per second.

2. While they aren't connected, each node listens for sub subset of time (say 10%).

3. Eventually one node will hear the beacon from the other. They can use this to synchronize clocks (the better your clocks the better this works).

4. Thereafter they just wake up periodically at the same time and one transmits a beacon to the other to synchronize (alternating whose turn it is).

It's the same idea as sleepy edge devices used in IoT, but just both ways. Quite a lot more complicated of course, but you can totally do it.
by kyledrake | 2025-08-18 16:14:18+00:00
> Though I'm not sure we should be killing the earth for better search

Are we, though? What I have read so far suggests the carbon footprint of training models like gpt4 was "a couple weeks of flights from SFO to NYC" https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

They also seem to be coming down in power usage substantially, at least for inference. There's pretty good models that can run on laptops now, and I still very much think we're in the model T phase of this technology so I expect further efficiency refinements. It also seems like they have recently hit a "cap" on the increase in intelligence models are getting for more raw power.

The trendline right now makes me wonder if we'll be talking about "dark datacenters" in the future the same way we talked about dark fiber after the dot com bubble.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-18 16:14:51+00:00
Also, when I'm.. ehm.. accidentally reading blogspam in my spare time, who's reimbursing me?

And if I'm actually reading instead of working, isn't the time I spend more of a debt than a declaration that I want to donate as much money as I wasted by not working for X minutes?

Employers haven't paid me for spending a lot of time with them so far.

But let's stick with the argument and claim that our time is worth the hourly rate of whoever creates what we consume. That also doesn't make sense, no matter how charitably I view it, for media.

Even if I want to live in a radically equal society where everyone's time is worth the same amount of money, it would only make sense when trading 1:1 - for example, I can compare my hourly rate to that of my barber, if I pretend there are no corporations, no taxes etc.

But yeah, to be brief, no, it doesn't make sense to give all of your time a monterary value. And when it comes to non-working time, I even find it to be a deeply gross way of thinking. Not regarding the willingness to pay, it's fair to think about your own income and how other workers have to make ends meet and to put it into perspective.
by heyparkerj | 2025-08-18 16:15:04+00:00
I've expressed this to others as much as is reasonable - but the phrase "vibe coding" shouldn't be used in any serious discourse about agentic tools. We can't control the lens under which a given person first heard the term, but that moment (combined with the mountains of memes they've consumed since) is going to color a lot of folk's personal definition of vibe coding. It's not realistic to expect everyone to have a shared definition of it, despite the inventor of the phrase immediately giving it definition.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-08-18 16:15:10+00:00
The limitations of “truth knowing” using an autoregressive transformer are much more pressing than anything implied by Gödel’s theorem. This is like appealing to a result from quantum physics to explain why a car with no wheels isn’t going to drive anywhere.

I hate when this theorem comes up in these sort of “gotcha” when discussing LLMs: “but there exist true statements without a proof! So LLMs can never be perfect! QED”. You can apply identical logic to humans. This adds nothing to the discussion.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-18 16:15:48+00:00
The key features of the m3 ultra is 512GB of shared GPU/CPU ram, and ultra fast LAN over peripheral cabling.

Once an NVIDIA card caches a model into its VRAM, than it doesn't get hit with the memory data copy cost over the bus.

Yet as many people have noticed, who cares if the m3 ultra takes four times as long if the faster alternative simply won't fit the larger models. YMMV =3
by dustingetz | 2025-08-18 16:15:50+00:00
Hi Alex, if you have data that supports a positive Clojure growth narrative please publish it so that I and other consultants/influencers can share the good news in support of our shared mission. The perception of the decline of Clojure is becoming a board-level conversation at unicorn/ish size companies that are or were all-on on Clojure.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-18 16:15:59+00:00
This is a bit like saying "Buy a commodore 64 to store recipes? I'd rather have a recipe book," in 1985.

The home robot most likely will do much more than those things. It'll clean, but also be a guard dog, accept packages, garden, clean your car, reads stories to the baby, play catch with the dog, etc. Or at least in theory if the technology catches up.

How often do you hire people? And work with things like this? There's a real mental load and privacy and scheduling load here that robots solve. It can be very hard to find someone, then the time/investment of being home when they are available, etc. I'd rather have a substandard cleaning that's easy and convenient than getting these deep cleans and working with people, cleaning services, scheduling, the social and mental load of a stranger in your house, the issues about your own privacy, etc.

I think the success of the roomba shows that people will settle for less, and pay a lot for it. My robot vacuum is the worst vacuum and mop I've ever seen but it does it automatically and that means a lot to me. I just press a button and things are clean-ish. That has a lot of value. More complex robots will benefit from that kind of dynamic I imagine.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-18 16:16:27+00:00
While I agree with remote work to offshoring. I’m not sure about the next step.

I would have been hard pressed to find a decent paying remote work as a fully hands on keyboard developer. My one competitive advantage is that I am in the US and can fly out to a customer’s site and talk to people who control budgets and I’m a better than average English communicator.

In person collobaration though is over rated. I’ve led mid six figure cross organization implementations for the last five years sitting at my desk at home with no pants on using Zoom, a shared Lucid App document and shared Google Docs.
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-08-18 16:16:37+00:00
If i am calling support, it is probably because I already scoured the resources.

Over the past 3 years of calling support any service or infrastructure (bank, health insurance, doctor, wtv), over like 90% of my requests were things only solvable via customer support or escalation.

I only keep track because I document when I didn't need support into a list of "phone hacks" (like press this sequence of buttons when calling this provider).

Most recently, I went to an urgent care facility a few weekends ago, and they keep submitting claims to the arm, of my insurance, that is officed in a different state instead of my proper state.
by kryllic | 2025-08-18 16:16:39+00:00
Kudos to the dev for offering users alternatives. Tomorrow.io in the Carrot app is pretty solid for the most part, happy to see it make the list.

Dark Sky was one of the absolute best weather apps I've ever had the pleasure of using. I have no idea how Apple managed to mangle it to the current state it's in with their weather app.
by endemic | 2025-08-18 16:17:12+00:00
There's a major intersection about a mile from where I live, which unfortunately is next to public schools/local library/etc. The other day I was in my car waiting for the light when I saw a young girl on a scooter push into the crosswalk. She had the right of way, but I inwardly cringed and hovered my hand over my horn button, just anticipating that a vehicle was going to turn without seeing her. Fortunately she made it through OK.
by Theodores | 2025-08-18 16:17:15+00:00
Saving files locally was the same as saving files on the web in the original TBL context.

Imagine having a nice UNIX workstation on your desk at a university. This would resolve to machine.department.university.ac.uk rather than be hidden behind a router. If you wanted then you could run an x window on it or transfer files to and from it.

With standard issue Netscape of the era you could save an HTML file locally and it be fully accessible anywhere on the web.

The university would have the skills to setup the network for this, which was a difficult skill at the time.

In reality you would not save everything locally. The main department server would have a network share for you that would be mounted with NFS. So your files would be 'saved locally' over the NFS share to resolve to department.university.ac.uk/user.

You could also login to any workstation in the department for it to mount your NFS shares, with PCs of the era usually capable of running x windows and NFS in the university setting.

Servers physically existed in the server room rather than in the cloud.

I much preferred this model as, on SGI workstations, you had it all working out of the box. All you needed was some help with the networking.

Also important is that the web was originally all about structuring information rather than hacking it to make it pretty. It was up to the client to sort out the presentation, not the server.

In time we lost the ability to structure information in part because the 'section' element did not make it into HTML. Everyone wanted the WYSIWYG model that worked with word processors, where it was all about how it looked rather than how it worked.

We proceeded to make HTML that started as a soup of nested tables before the responsive design people came along and made that a soup of nested div elements.

Eventually we got article, section and other elements to structure information, but, by then it was too late.

It is easy to design something that is incredibly complicated and only understood by a few. It is far harder to design something that is simple and can be understood by the many.

We definitely lost the way with this. Nowadays people only care about platforms such as social media, nobody is writing HTML the TBL way, with everything kept simple. HTML has become the specialist skill where you need lots of pigeon holes skills. Nobody on these teams of specialists have read the HTML spec and no human readable HTML gets written, even though this is fully doable.

It seems that you are one of the few that understands the original context of HTML.
by cryptonector | 2025-08-18 16:17:21+00:00
That could be because you're still smearing state on the stack? With async functions one can do that, and so you still have stacks/fibers/threads, and so you've not gained much.

With a CPS approach you really don't have multiple stacks.

Oh, and relatedly the functional core, imperative shell (FCIS) concept comes in here. The imperative shell is the async I/O event loop / executor. Everything else is functional state transitions that possibly request I/O, and if you represent I/O requests as return values to be executed by the executor, then you can have those state transitions be functional. The functional state transition can use as much stack as it wants, but when it's done the stack is gone -- no stack use between state transitions.

Now naturally you don't want state transitions to have unbounded CPU time, but for some applications it might have to be the case that you have to allow it, in which case you have problems (gaaah, thread cancellation is such a pain!).

The point of FCIS is to make it so it's trivial to test the state transitions because there is nothing to mock except one input, one state of the world, and check the output against what's expected. The "imperative shell" can also be tested with a very simple "application" and setup to show that it works w/o having to test the whole enchilada with complex mockup setups.
by poszlem | 2025-08-18 16:17:44+00:00
The origin of the word calf.

1. Calf (young cow, young of certain other mammals)

Old English: cealf (plural calfru or later calves)

Proto-Germanic: kalbaz or *kalbaz/kalbazō

Cognates: Old Norse kálfr, Old High German kalb, German Kalb, Dutch kalf.

Proto-Indo-European root: often linked to gel- (“to swell, be rounded”), possibly referring to the rounded shape of a young animal. Some etymologists, however, leave it as “origin uncertain” beyond Proto-Germanic.

2. Calf (back of the lower leg)

Old English: caf, cealf (“calf of the leg”) — likely related to the animal term, but the link is uncertain.

Possible origin: Could be from the same gel- “swell” root, referring to the bulging muscle at the back of the leg, or an independent development within Germanic.

Cognates: Old Norse kálfi (“calf of the leg”), Swedish kalv (leg calf), Icelandic kálfi.
by backwardsmoo | 2025-08-18 16:17:56+00:00
It's quite rare that art grabs me, but this did. I love the idea of bending photographic truth in real-time, especially with an optical device.

I find the Fulgurator a bit subversive and also unsettling, how much in a photo is manipulated at point-of-capture?

I think another way this gets me thinking is that we generally assume that sensors are 'neutral' witnesses, but that's more of a comforting illusion rather than fact. The fulgurator shows manipulation at a physical level, but it's not hard to imagine similar interventions happening at firmware or even silicon.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-18 16:17:58+00:00
It's greed and short-term thinking, We shouldn't be surprised by this because we see companies do it all the time. How many times have you thought an employer or some company in the news is operating on a time horizon no further than the next quarterly results?

To be ultra-wealthy requires you to be a sociopath, to believe the bullshit that you deserve to be wealthy, it's because of how good you are and, more importantly, that any poverty is a personal moral failure.

You see this manifest with the popularity of transhumanism in tech circles. And transhumanism is nothing more than eugenics. Extend this further and you believe that future war and revolution when many people die is actually good because it'll separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

On top of all that, in a world of mobile capital, the ultra-wealthy ultimately believe they can escape the consequences of all this. Switzerland, a Pacific island, space, or, you know, Mars.

The neofeudalistic future the ultra-wealthy desire will be one where they are protected from the consequences of their actions on massive private estate where a handful of people service their needs. Working people will own nothing and live in worker housing. If a few billion of them have to die, so be it.
by davely | 2025-08-18 16:18:05+00:00
So you can read Hacker News on your watch.

I find myself doing this randomly when I don’t have access to my phone (believe it or not, it happens for legit reasons) through something called ųBrowser.

It’s probably masochistic but it works in a pinch. I’ve been thinking of writing my own watch app to do this, as well as an app that could use the Feedbin API.