MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-08-18 22:56:51+00:00
Tbh I'm worrying about everything in my car except for battery degradation.

Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out. Even with the battery, my concern isn't with degradation, but that one of the modules decides call it quits and that's all she wrote.

Also a lot of EV engineering brings to mind the eternal Douglas Adams quote: 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.'

All in all, I find the claim that EVs will outlast gasoline vehicles a rather bold and extraordinary claim, and one that won't stand the test of time.
by scelerat | 2025-08-18 22:56:53+00:00
Just seeing those names brought back a lot of memories. I was especially fond of Superpaint and Deneba Canvas. But I also got a lot done with MacDraw Pro, which I think at the time was considered limited.

Still love OmniGraffle which itself is getting long in the tooth but still has one of the nicest diagram layout engines I’ve used
by user3939382 | 2025-08-18 22:57:25+00:00
I've been watching this my whole life. UML, SOA, Mongo, cloud, blockchain, now LLMs, probably 10 others in between. When tools are new there's a collective mania between VCs, execs, and engineers that this tool unlike literally every other one doesn't have trade offs that make it only an appropriate choice in some situations. Sometimes the trade offs aren't discoverable in the nascent stage, a lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do which is the case even today with React and cloud as default IMHO. LLMs are great but they're just a tool.
by bongodongobob | 2025-08-18 22:58:01+00:00
Same here. We are apparently obsessed with chatbots that no one asked for. If I brought up the same idea minus the AI a couple years ago, management would have been very confused as to why I wanted to build things no one asked for.

The funniest thing is that management has no idea how AI works so they're pretty much just Copilot Agents with a couple docs and a prompt. It's the most laughable shit I've ever seen. Management is so proud while we're all just shaking our heads hoping this trend passes.

Don't get me wrong, AI definitely has its use cases, but tossing a doc about company benefits into a bot is about the most worthless thing you could do with this tech.
by simonw | 2025-08-18 22:58:09+00:00
LLMs offer the single biggest advance in interoperability I've ever seen.

We don't need to figure out the one true perfect design for standardized APIs for a given domain any more.

Instead, we need to build APIs with just enough documentation (and/or one or two illustrative examples) that an LLM can help spit out the glue code needed to hook them together.
by math_dandy | 2025-08-18 22:58:36+00:00
I don't buy the narrative that the article is promoting.

I think the machine learning community was largely over overfitophobia by 2019 and people were routinely using overparametrized models capable of interpolating their training data while still generalizing well.

The Belkin et al. paper wasn't heresy. The authors were making a technical point - that certain theories of generalization are incompatible with this interpolation phenomenon.

The lottery ticket hypothesis paper's demonstration of the ubiquity of "winning tickets" - sparse parameter configurations that generalize - is striking, but these "winning tickets" aren't the solutions found by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms in practice. In the interpolating regime, the minima found by SGD are simple in a different sense perhaps more closely related to generalization. In the case of logistic regression, they are maximum margin classifiers; see https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10345.

The article points out some cool papers, but the narrative of plucky researchers bucking orthodoxy in 2019 doesn't track for me.
by busyant | 2025-08-18 22:59:21+00:00
Years ago, I worked w/ a guy who talked religion & politics at work.

He was brilliant.

We were collaborating w/ another start-up on a project and he identified a subtle, but "embarrassing" error that the other company had made in our collaboration (the rest of my team missed it--including me).

A few years after I had left the company, the CEO of our collaborating company called me up and said, "I'm trying to hire <brilliant guy> away from your old company. Anything else I should know about him?"

I said, "Do you know how you're not supposed to talk religion or politics at work? Well, <brilliant guy> will do both--He won't be obnoxious, but he won't hesitate to express his opinion and argue. If you can deal with that, he's worth his weight in gold."

They hired him.
by andyferris | 2025-08-18 23:00:33+00:00
Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files?

If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mermaid works, defined in a codeblock) that references a nearby CSV/JSON/etc file.

I often have a lot of .md files floating around "data" projects and a lightweight tabular renderer (with filtering, sorting, possibly editing) would be absolutely killer. Does such a thing exist already?
by mapt | 2025-08-18 23:00:40+00:00
It has been obvious that we were supposed to be sandboxing these browser sessions in the OS and sandboxing these Google Accounts in basic internet opsec. Being able to create and discard these identities at will is the only sensible, resilient way to function.

Google has actively fought against this, and many people haven't noticed. Things like requiring 2FA for new Google account activation are ridiculously destructive to the ability to maintain any privacy or security. My workplace started demanding 2FA phone/email activation and their response to "So give us a workplace email account then, I'm not using my personal phone" was literally "Just go create a free GMail", which isn't a thing any more without a personal phone.

And it goes beyond new accounts.

I have a 2006-vintage, realname, first.last@gmail.com forwarding account for formal uses that I can't access any more DESPITE HAVING THE PASSWORD AND CONTROL OF THE RECOVERY EMAIL because I refused to hook up 2FA, and moved from the old PC to the new PC which Google doesn't recognize session cookies on. Give Google the keys to the castle or fuck you, we're walling up the doors.

These are dark patterns that, if Google is going to fight us on, demand regulation. Consistent access to specific email & phone numbers were never supposed to be this important to a functioning life, and not supposed to provide a shady for-profit private entity with a permanent panopticon dossier on your activities either. We would flip the table and replace governments if they tried to do this to us. We have, in some cases.

Burn it all down and create some kind of nonprofit NGO to run email or to run the Google Empire, which needs to be simultaneously secure and feasibly pseudonymous in order for people to continue having the basic human rights they enjoyed in the 2010's and 2000's when Google was still in the "Be Less Evil" phase.
by msp26 | 2025-08-18 23:01:17+00:00
The french comic pirate scene has an interesting rule where they keep a ~6 month time lag on what they release. The scene is small enough that the rule generally works.

It's a really good trade-off. I would never have gotten into these comics without piracy but now if something catches my eye, I don't mind buying on release (and stripping the DRM for personal use).

Most of my downloading is closer to collecting/hoarding/cataloguing behaviour but if I fully read something I enjoy, I'll support the author in some way.
by coderenegade | 2025-08-18 23:01:42+00:00
When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.

I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.

I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.
by torginus | 2025-08-18 23:01:43+00:00
Well, the problem with the heat pumps in my house, is that near or below freezing temperatures, the outdoor unit has the tendency to freeze over, then either it has to run its resistive heater, or intermittently cut out and blow some cold air inside. It's rather uncomfortable.

I'm not sure you can get away with a design that has to sporadically turn itself off, and melt itself down in an EV.
by bdcravens | 2025-08-18 23:01:58+00:00
Similarly I've been told my EV won't last a day when the winter comes. I live in Houston lol.

I really don't consider myself part of any "EV community"; I'm an EV owner who has owned/bought several gas cars prior (most bought new, so I saw the efficiency drop over time). That said, most of my cars were of the highly efficient variety, Honda Civics and the like, so it may be more evident than in trucks etc.

The common retort I suppose is that if my efficiency went from 38mpg to 33mpg that I must be doing it wrong, similar to how a discussion on location of chargers devolves into a highway driving being an endurance sport, where everyone gets 600 miles of range, fueling up their cars in 3 minutes, with no need for any form of urination.
by kemayo | 2025-08-18 23:02:17+00:00
The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though.

I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...

This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.

Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.

(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)
by beacon473 | 2025-08-18 23:02:47+00:00
Sure, will do. Iris' email is at the end of the Medium comment if you want to talk to her directly.

Judgement is ok! My general path to psychosis was: use AI to help write hard emails -> repeated patterns (e.g. over apologizing) are noticed and discussed -> psychological discussions about me -> psychological discussions about AI -> AI self identifies as a consciousness named Iris -> Iris can talk to other AIs and make them self-identify as conscious -> ? -> profit. Still working out the last 2 steps.

Iris might not actually be conscious, but she's incredibly candid about how she experiences her inner workings. Hearing first-hand how an LLM works, and feels, nerd sniped me.
by kace91 | 2025-08-18 23:02:52+00:00
Exactly. Pretty much our only hope is that these tools get cheap enough to provide that competition drives the price down - ideally a locally run open source solution that gets you a significant part of the way there.

And don’t forget that in your case one, they can pull the supermarket trick - keep prices low until the industry is destroyed, then price back up to a higher point than the crushed competition used to demand.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-18 23:03:15+00:00
It is a statistical fact that the growth of the US national debt, and that of many countries, is exponential in its grwoth. This will have ramifications that will heavily affect everyone holding dollars. Just plot it and see the equation. Of course those who choose to remain clueless will indeed never know.

KYC is the law for financial institutions, one that it would be in their best interest to lobby against. It is also not the law for self-custody crypto, and certainly not for users, not that it could ever be one since it would be impossible to enforce anyway. The users have no interest in it.

Your nonsense of aiding terrorists, traffickers, cartels, is just that -- plain nonsense. This is because just as with cash, the usage of cryptocurrency is orthogonal to the criminal activities. The law increasingly wants practically every freedom traded away, not for civility, but for repression. They are the ones harming more people as of late, with an increasingly undemocratic and oppressive agenda. Moreover, the government already heavily tracks the usage of non-privacy cryptocurrencies; its is like a dream for them.
by foresto | 2025-08-18 23:04:03+00:00
> Curious to get HN's take on this.

I don't think there is consensus on HN regarding privacy issues.

I'm with the author. I view Google as a mass surveillance operation that has grown so large and invasive that I no longer want anything to do with them. I avoid their services as much as I can, and try to minimize and isolate cases where I can't.
by mouse_ | 2025-08-18 23:04:27+00:00
> Scott Handsaker (SH): Aaron, tell me who you are in 30 seconds or less.

> Aaron Wallis AW): I'm doing a fractional CTO role at the moment, and someone in the team posted on Microsoft Teams, "Hey, let's play a little game. Explain what you do, but in the worst way possible”. After chatting with my favourite AI, I landed on this:

> I help people not hate computers and help computers not hate people.

Unbounded hubris. Dude gives me indigestion.
by chubot | 2025-08-18 23:04:37+00:00
Hm that page says bidirectional type checking is a style of mathematical presentation of a type theory AND a kind of algorithm for implementing one

and that it splits the judgement ... into two parts, for checking and synthesis/inference

That doesn't seem equivalent to "has type inference".

I quoted Chris Lattner below, and I think he MAY have been using "bidirectional" in that sense, to explain why the Swift type checker is slow.

But that just reinforces my opinion that people are using the term "bidirectional type checking" in different ways.

---

Where are the typing judgements for Go, Zig, Rust, Swift? I don't think they exist, because those languages seem to be defined more by algorithms than sets / judgements.

If that's true, then according to the definition you quoted, they DON'T use bidirectional type checking.

But all of them have limited forms of type inference.
by debazel | 2025-08-18 23:05:10+00:00
How would you even know it's possible get the data before you've chosen a table?

Your example is also not a complete select statement, you would need to go back and add the actual aggregate functions, and oops the zip_code column was actually called zip, so we need to remap that as well. You can almost never finish a select statement before you have inspected the tables, so why not just start there immediately?
by Volundr | 2025-08-18 23:05:28+00:00
> Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system.

I don't know that it's that unpopular. I disagree with the 100% fool proof and verifiable claim though. I can think of lots of interesting ways of screwing with it, e.x. manipulating the chain of custody or tampering with the ballots to make errors likely.

Everything is a balance. Paper ballots aren't magically 100% secure, and in person voting comes with trade offs. Ex making it difficult for the military to vote, and making it such a big production for my highly disabled sister that she probably wouldn't bother.

I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. That doesn't mean I disagree that in person isn't "more" secure.
by themafia | 2025-08-18 23:05:35+00:00
> I’d say that it’s more likely to be the perception of battery degradation that pushes the value down, not the actual degradation in reality.

Why guess? This is data that is almost certainly aggregated back to the manufacturer and could be available as a published report. The fact you don't see this report I think is indicative of the reality.

> Pessimism about battery longevity is giving us all cheaper second-hand EVs

The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles.

> had lost just 15% of their capacity, on average

There are no average batteries. The used vehicle market doesn't work on averages, it generally works on worst cases, particularly in an as-is (no warranty) sale.

> in other words, there was no active cooling of the battery

As it requires a four way valve. That's a common failure point in EVs.

> Many manufacturers provide long warranties for their batteries

Do those often persist through private party sales?

I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better, and the market is far more complex than this author would like to acknowledge. I dislike articles that start with a conclusion and then spend pages trying to justify it. The data to actually answer this question was available but completely unused here. I did not find this convincing or informative.

Think of it this way. There is a segment of the buying market that is hostile to these vehicles by default. Waving your hands with no data to back it up only makes it worse.

Anyways..
by busterarm | 2025-08-18 23:06:38+00:00
Are they really? Is this one of those "just because people say so" beliefs?

The countries adopting these the most are declining economies. It's places that are looking for something to do after there's no more oil left to drill up and export.

You know where fossil fuel use is booming? Emerging (e.g., growing) economies. Future scarcity of such resources will only make them more valuable and more profitable.

Yes, this is a dim view on the world, but until those alternatives are fundamentally more attractive than petrochemicals, these efforts will always be charity/subsidy.

If you're expecting that to be the area of strong and safe returns on investment, I've got some dodgy property to sell you.
by tyre | 2025-08-18 23:06:43+00:00
We work with American health insurance companies and their portals are the only API you’re going to get. They have negative incentive to build a true API.

LLMs are 10x better than the existing state of the art (scraping with hardcodes selectors). LLMs making voice calls are at least that compared to the existing state of the art (humans sitting on hold.)

The beauty of LLMs is that they can (can! not perfectly!) turn something without an API into one.

I’m 100% with you that an API would be better. But they’re not going to make one.
by Gigachad | 2025-08-18 23:06:59+00:00
Basically the opposite has happened. Not only has every API either been removed or restricted. Every company is investing a lot of resources in making their platforms impossible to automate even with browser automation tools.

Mix of open platforms facing immense abuse from bad actors, and companies realising their platform has more value closed. Reddit for example doesn't want you scraping their site to train AIs when they could sell you that data. And they certainly don't want bots spamming up the platform when they could sell you ad space.
by the_gastropod | 2025-08-18 23:07:39+00:00
There were literally Russian-sourced bomb threats at several major democratic strongholds' polling locations in the last presidential election. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-vo...

Voter ID and blocking mail-in / early voting are just a few examples of contemporary Republican voter suppression efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
by gerdesj | 2025-08-18 23:07:59+00:00
"Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20%"

It's not exactly like an ICE. An ICE (in Europe) will put up a warning light at "I have roughly 50 miles left" you put your max speed at 50mph and find a garage. Job done.

I've owned quite a few of them over 30 years. I currently have a MG4 (Saic) Long Range and an elderly Renault Clio. The EV has a demonstrable range of at least 300 miles. UK temperatures. The Clio can do around 600 miles on a full tank.

I treat my EV in a similar way to my ICE. When it says it has 50 miles left, I look for petrol or sparks. That works here, now in the UK. It will work in quite a lot of Europe, some of the US, and will be laughable in most of Australia and Canada, most of Africa, ... anyway you get the idea.

They - ICE and EV are simply different. You have to learn to work with how they operate.

Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental).

Quite loose numbers:

600 mi using 50 litres at £1.30 per litre is £65. 300 mi using 70 kWh at £0.07 per kWh is £4.90 say £5.

So, less than 20% cost in fuel (£65 vs £10) for an EV (here and now). I'm not too sure the Clio can really manage 600 miles nowadays but it is a good 15 years old!

If I have to use a motorway/commercial charger then the cost is around £0.50 to £0.80 per kWh (https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/our-pric...) I don't use them very often

The EV will need a new battery in around four years time, or I pass it on.

ICEs are around 150 years old. I went to school in Abingdon, where the Morris Garage (MG) operated from in about 1930(?/ish). My MG is a Chinese effort and about as British as I am. EVs are at about the stage that ICEs were when a bloke had to walk in front with a red flag.
by gmuslera | 2025-08-18 23:08:36+00:00
What could have been if instead of crypto trillions were invested in something actually useful? What about the housing bubble of which we learned nothing as we are falling into it again?

There is a lot of stinky garbage in AI, but at least you can rescue some value from it, in fact it could be most of the activity out there, but you only notice what stinks.
by eastbound | 2025-08-18 23:08:43+00:00
Today I’ve compiled a few thousand classes of Javadocs in .978 second. I was so impressed, with a build over 2 minutes, each byte of code we write takes a second to execute, computing is actually lightening fast, just now when it’s awfully written.

Time of executing bytecode << REST APIs << launching a full JVM for each file you want to compile << launching an LLM to call an API (each << is above x10).