MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a tool to visualize NYC Urban Chaos
by ajd555 | 2025-08-21 13:50:20+00:00
Hey HN! As I was collecting urban data for my startup, I decided to create a free and open tool to visualize what we call "Urban Chaos": data points in a city that can indicate activity and use historical trends to detect anomalies (e.g: a big concert next to a planned road paving might create some difficult street conditions).

This is currently at a very early stage, where we're only plotting the data on a map and have curated some historical time series of road traffic and bike traffic to get an idea of what the street conditions look like. We have more datasets that we're going to add to the dashboard, including events (concerts, sports) as well as more road work and outages, and we'll run some spatial analyses to detect strong urban activity.

How it works:

- A lot of data cleaning was needed to get the traffic data from NYC Open Data API (selecting the right segments and matching link ids manually)

- Geometry conversions are required as NYC uses NAD83 projection (EPSG:2263) for a lot of its points, using https://proj.org/ (use proj, do not try to do this yourself)

- Data points are queried according to their update frequency (weather will update minutely, road work will update once a day)

- We use goroutines to run this in a single light binary, on our server

- For the data that we're allowed to store, we store it in a TimescaleDB, giving us a powerful timeseries engine to query from and generate the graphs on the dashboard

Stack:

- Go

- Proj (https://github.com/twpayne/go-proj)

- Pure HTML/JS/CSS (I've built a mini css framework for this, since I just couldn't find the right one that was primarily designed for data visualization. If anyone actually likes it and is interested, I'm happy to make it open source). For the maps, we use MapLibre-GL and OpenFreeMap for the tiles (we're planning on hosting our own tiles soon as well) and ToastUI for the charts.

I'd love to get some feedback on this, and if anyone is interested in some new features, or enough people want a specific US city added, feel free to contact us and we'll answer promptly! We're adding new datasets every week for the NYC area, so expect new features pretty soon.

(Full disclosure: this does have a mention of my startup at the bottom)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 13:50:35+00:00
I haven't used WireGuard, but it looks like the main macOS implementation uses Go. Binaries built with Go 1.19 or below will work on Mavericks if you inject some compatibility libraries. (This is one of many things I haven't had time to fully document on the website yet, but I can help anyone who asks.)

But the big problem with non-native VPNs on Mavericks (by which I mean, any VPN which requires installing additional software beyond what is built-in to the OS) is that they tend to bypass any HTTPS proxies you have set up. Without an HTTPS proxy, Mavericks will have trouble connecting to most servers because SecureTransport doesn't support modern cipher suites. In e.g. Firefox Dynasty this won't matter since it ships its own (modern) SSL implementation, but Apple Mail (for example) will be unable to load most remote images.

This is why I have the note about privatevpn on the website—it took me a bit of searching to find a service that was low cost and supported a Mavericks native VPN protocol. I don't really "trust" any VPN service, but they're useful in certain specific situations.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-21 13:50:51+00:00
Xe Iaso is my spirit animal.

> "I don't know what this actually gives people, but our industry takes great pride in doing this"

> "unsleeping automatons that never get sick, go on vacation, or need to be paid health insurance that can produce output that superficially resembles the output of human employees"

> "This is a regulatory issue. The thing that needs to happen is that governments need to step in and give these AI companies that are destroying the digital common good existentially threatening fines and make them pay reparations to the communities they are harming."

<3 <3
by butlike | 2025-08-21 13:51:00+00:00
I don't want to come across as a shill, but I think superintelligence is being used here because the end result is murky and ill-defined at this point.

I think the concept is like: "a tool that has the utility of a 'personal assistant' so much so that you wouldn't have to hire one of those." (Not so much that the "superintelligence" will mimicry a human personal assistant).

Obviously this is just a guess though
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-21 13:51:21+00:00
right, thats why its a great analogy - because you also need to have at least some code in a successful piece of software. But simply measuring by the amount of code leads to weird and perverse incentives - code added without thought is not good, and too much code can itself be a problem. Of course, the literal balancing aspect isn't as important.
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-08-21 13:51:49+00:00
There's what AWS leadership says and then there's what actually sticks.

There's an endless series of one pagers with this idea or that idea, but from what I witnessed first hand, the ones that stuck were the ones that made money.

Jassy was a decent guy when I was there, but that was a decade ago. A CEO is a PR machine more than anything else, and the AI hype train has been so strong that if you do anything other than saying AI is the truth, the light and the way, you lose market share to competitors.

AI, much like automation in general, does allow fewer people to do more, but in my experience, customer desires expand to fill a vacuum and if fewer people can do more, they'll want more to the point that they'll keep on hiring more and more people.
by 951560368 | 2025-08-21 13:52:30+00:00
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by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-21 13:52:54+00:00
Even the highest ranking engineers should be experts. I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.

Using AI isn’t rocket science. Like you’re talking about using AI as if typing a prompt in English is some kind of hard to learn skill. Do you know English? Check. Can you give instructions? Check. Can you clarify instructions? Check.
by DonnyV | 2025-08-21 13:53:17+00:00
Meta makes 95%+ of its revenue on their ads. Whats crazy is that they own the platforms that most of their ads run on. Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. How do we know they're not fudging the stats on the ads? They're already known not to be trusted. How has a third party Ad Verification system not popped up by now. Not for just Meta but for all Ad networks.
by mannykannot | 2025-08-21 13:53:24+00:00
This is not how dictionaries work. When multiple definitions are given, it does not follow - and in many cases, it is not even possible - that they are all applicable in any context.

Ignoring context leads to things like "English as She is Spoke" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

Decent dictionaries give some guidance as to the contexts in which each each definition is applicable, but for thoroughness you probably cannot beat the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.

The relevant definition here is neither legal nor technical, but from common usage, where recognizing a face, if not qualified, is taken to mean recognizing an individual by their face, not recognizing that you are seeing a face.
by danaris | 2025-08-21 13:53:35+00:00
But they're (generally speaking) not being asked for the contents of one specific webpage, fetching that, and summarizing it for the user.

They're going out and scraping everything, so that when they're asked a question, they can pull a plausible answer from their dataset and summarize the page they found it on.

Even the ones that actively go out and search/scrape in response to queries aren't just scraping a single site. At best, they're scraping some subset of the entire internet that they have tagged as being somehow related to the query. So even if what they present to the user is a summary of a single webpage, that is rarely going to be the product of a single request to that single webpage. That request is going to be just one of many, most of which are entirely fruitless for that specific query: purely extra load for their servers, with no gain whatsoever.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-21 13:53:39+00:00
It's not me who is rewriting your commentary, it's you. It's not my fault that you wrote something that is just unbelievable.

Also, in the context of groceries in general, I don't believe you are starving or incapable of buying enough food on the salary of a software engineer. I think you make enough money to live on a 100% egg diet, even at the price of $10 per dozen. But let's just leave it at that. This whole discussion is going nowhere.
by qalmakka | 2025-08-21 13:53:42+00:00
It's ironic how cannily it applies to OpenOffice too. Current OpenOffice IS a trap; you almost definitely wanted to install LibreOffice instead, but most people don't know the difference. I can't count the number of people I've seen using ancient OO instead of LO only because they didn't know that LibreOffice was the better version
by Tony_Delco | 2025-08-21 13:53:47+00:00
To me, the real cost of context switching isn’t measured in minutes lost, but in the break of rhythm. Productivity isn’t about squeezing every second, it’s about getting into a state where your brain runs smoothly, like a warm engine.

When you hop between projects too often, you’re constantly starting cold: reloading mental state, rebuilding assumptions, regaining focus. That’s exhausting, even if each switch only takes a few minutes.

What helped me is not just cutting down on tools, but designing a routine that favors consistency over intensity. I try to dedicate whole blocks, sometimes entire days, to a single project. That way I only pay the switch once, and I get to stay in flow for longer.

In the end, the biggest productivity boost doesn’t come from better apps, but from respecting the brain’s need for continuity.
by jihadjihad | 2025-08-21 13:53:54+00:00
"...just raised a $20M Series B and are looking to expand the team and products offered. We are fully bought-in to generative AI — over 40% of our codebase is built and maintained by AI, and we expect this number to continue to grow as the tech evolves and the space matures."

"What does your availability over the next couple of weeks look like to chat about this opportunity?"
by margalabargala | 2025-08-21 13:55:10+00:00
The total options for dictionary terms for "recognition" does not mean that you can select any among them, decide that that's what "facial recognition" means, and expect anyone else to understand you.

"Facial recognition" refers to seeing a face and knowing whose face it is. It's the difference between "that's a face" and "that's my friend Jeff".

That some constituent word has some other definition is not relevant. What you're doing is equivalent to reading "my nose is running" and thinking "egads! This person's nose has sprouted legs and taken off down the track!"
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 13:55:32+00:00
> Should have said mid-2014 like OP, sorry

I don't want to belabor the point, but just to be clear—I am referring to a mid-2014 MBA, anything newer and Mavericks wouldn't work! (There is no "late 2014" MBA as far as I'm aware.) Mine offers to install Yosemite in recovery mode.

It may indeed be based on when that specific computer came off of the assembly line or something, I have no idea, but for that exact model of computer you can get different results in recovery mode!
by f33d5173 | 2025-08-21 13:55:34+00:00
> Here it seems Python's approach had too many drawbacks, considering they just added formatted templates t"..." that don't evaluate to a string.

That's not a fair characterization at all, since the plan was always to add something like the t"" strings. Having a version that immediately evaluates to a string is convenient, and adds very little complexity either at the implementation level or conceptually.
Show HN: The first generative UI component library
by grouchy | 2025-08-21 13:56:39+00:00
UI library site: https://ui.tambo.co/

You can check out our generative graph, form, and map.

We also have a set of components for “framing” the AI assistant.

But you can also roll your own or render them outside of the chat experience.

In our repository, we have a list of additional components we plan to build.

Upcoming Components: https://github.com/tambo-ai/tambo/issues?q=sort:updated-desc...

Let us know what you think.

— Michael
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-21 13:56:45+00:00
All Terraform does is build a DAG, compare it with the current state file and pass the changes down to the provider so it can translate to the correct sequence of interactions with the upstream API. Most of your criticism boils down to limitations of the cloud provider API and/or Terraform provider quality. It won't check for naming collision for instance, it assumes you know what you are doing.

Regarding HCL, I respect their decision to keep the language minimal, and for all it's worth you can go very, very far with the language expressions and using modules to abstract some logic, but I think it's a fair criticism for the language not to support custom functions and higher level abstractions.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-21 13:57:09+00:00
I don't understand the f-string hate.

f-strings put the value in the output string exactly where the value should be. Massive win for contextual awareness, no need to count ...3, 4, okay what's the position 4 value over on the right, does it match up?? And they use classic Python string formatting commands, except the = operator which makes them even better with a "name the variable, show its value in a concise way" option. What's not to like?

(And if you don't like them, uh...they're not mandatory. Just don't use them.)
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-21 13:57:25+00:00
In undergrad I took an abstract algebra class. It was very difficult and one of the things the teacher did was have us memorize proofs. In fact, all of his tests were the same format: reproduce a well-known proof from memory, and then complete a novel proof. At first I was aghast at this rote memorization - I maybe even found it offensive. But an amazing thing happened - I realized that it was impossible to memorize a proof without understanding it! Moreover, producing the novel proofs required the same kinds of "components" and now because they were "installed" in my brain I could use them more intuitively. (Looking back I'd say it enabled an efficient search of a tree of sequences of steps).

Memorization is not a panacea. I never found memorizing l33t code problems to be edifying. I think it's because those kinds of tight, self-referential, clever programs are far removed from the activity of writing applications. Most working programmers do not run into a novel algorithm problem but once or twice a career. Application programming has more the flavor of a human-mediated graph-traversal, where the human has access to a node's local state and they improvise movement and mutation using only that local state plus some rapidly decaying stack. That is, there is no well-defined sequence for any given real-world problem, only heuristics.
by mindcrime | 2025-08-21 13:57:27+00:00
Since we're talking Cyberpunk here, I'll throw in a recommendation for a novel that isn't widely recognized as "Cyberpunk" per-se, but is probably "proto-Cyberpunk" at least. That novel being The Shockwave Rider[1] by John Brunner.

It has some elements in common with Cyberpunk and is just a plain fun read regardless of what genre label you apply.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
by nerdjon | 2025-08-21 13:57:42+00:00
I mean even if that was the intended phrasing that does not really change anything about the reply.

Me latching onto the "appears" does not change anything since even with your interpretation it is wrong 50% of the time and that assumes that the 50% of the time you think it is right you actually know it is right and it is not actually wrong but you never check.
by deng | 2025-08-21 13:58:13+00:00
> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?

Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.

Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.
by duxup | 2025-08-21 13:58:14+00:00
Speaking with a relative who is a doctor recently it’s interesting how much each of our jobs are “troubleshooting”.

Coding, doctors, plumber… different information, often similar skill sets.

I worked a job doing tech support for some enterprise level networking equipment. It was the late 1990s and we were desperate for warm bodies. Hired a former truck driver who just so happened to do a lot of woodworking and other things.

Great hire.
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-21 13:58:20+00:00
It's the core problem facing the hiring practices in this field. Any truly competent developer is a generalist at heart. There is value to be had in expertise, but unless you're dealing with a decade(s) old hellscape of legacy code or are pushing the very limits of what is possible, you don't need experts. You'd almost certainly be better off with someone who has experience with the tools you don't use, providing a fresh look and cover for weaknesses your current staff has.

A regular old competent developer can quickly pick up whatever stack is used. After all, they have to; Every company is their own bespoke mess of technologies. The idea that you can just slap "15 years of React experience" on a job ad and that the unicorn you get will be day-1 maximally productive is ludicrous. There is always an onboarding time.

But employers in this field don't "get" that. For regular companies they're infested by managers imported from non-engineering fields, who treat software like it's the assembly line for baking tins or toilet paper. Startups, who already have fewer resources to train people with, are obsessed with velocity and shitting out an MVP ASAP so they can go collect the next funding round. Big Tech is better about this, but has it's own problems going on and it seems that the days of Big Tech being the big training houses is also over.

It's not even a purely collective problem. Recruitment is so expensive, but all the money spent chasing unicorns & the opportunity costs of being understaffed just get handwaved. Rather spend $500,000 on the hunt than $50,000 on training someone into the role.

And speaking of collective problems. This is a good example of how this field suffers from having no professional associations that can stop employers from sinking the field with their tragedies of the commons. (Who knows, maybe unions will get more traction now that people are being laid off & replaced with outsourced workers for no legitimate business reason.)
by throw0101a | 2025-08-21 13:58:25+00:00
> https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

In nominal terms perhaps, but in inflation adjust terms it's roughly what it hit in 1980:

* https://www.investopedia.com/gold-price-history-highs-and-lo...

https://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/11/07/CMD_GLDNFLT0711_VF...

And there have been long (10y) stretches where it's remained flat: it takes a lot of patience to HODL through something like that. Even if equities (e.g., holding an index fund) are flat at least you get some yield.

With a pure commodity play like gold (or BTC) your only way of returns in price appreciation.
by sjkeyser | 2025-08-21 13:58:53+00:00
Repetition in the arts may well be the repurposing of a separate cognitive function evolutionarily installed to enhance survival. I’m thinking of Robert Zajonc’s “mere exposure“ phenomenon proposed by the social psychologist in 1968. That seems to be the origin of the link between repetition and pleasure. Consequently, artists, co-opting it for their own purposes, are able to add pleasure to their Works the way a MasterChef might add spices to a recipe.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-21 13:58:53+00:00
As you say, the system is nondeterministic and therefore doesn't have any security properties. The only possible option is to try to sandbox it as if it were the user themselves, which directly conflicts with ideas about training it on specialized databases.

But then, security is not a feature, it's a cost. So long as the AI companies can keep upselling and avoid accountability for failures of AI, the stock will continue to go up, taking electricity prices along with it, and isn't that ultimately the only thing that matters? /s
by 827a | 2025-08-21 13:59:32+00:00
Yeah its important to decompose those two sources (among others) of "money printing". The obvious one people think most about is when our federal government does it. But a more concerning one is: Enforced banking reserve ratios. If a bank holds a trillion dollars in assets and is allowed to hold a reserve ratio of 10%, they can print $10T out of thin air, because they're allowed to issue debt up to that amount.

As far as I'm aware, in 2020 the reserve requirement in the US was set to 0%, and it has not been changed since then.
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-08-21 13:59:38+00:00
> I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.

Because junior engineers have no problem with wholeheartedly embracing AI - they don't have enough experience to know what doesn't work yet.

In my personal experience, engineers who have experience are much more hesitant to embrace AI and learn everything about it, because they've seen that there are no magic bullets out there. Or they're just set in their ways.

To management that's AI obsessed, they want those juniors over anyone that would say "Maybe AI isn't everything it's cracked up to be." And it really, really helps that junior engineers are the cheapest to hire.
by ksymph | 2025-08-21 14:00:20+00:00
> they share a name and some other very superficial characteristics.

I wasn't implying anything more than that, although now I see the confusing wording in my original comment. All I meant to say was that between the name and appearance it's clear the mascot is canid rather than feline. Not that the anime girl with dog ears is an accurate representation of the Egyptian deity haha.
by bakugo | 2025-08-21 14:00:28+00:00
robots.txt is obviously only effective against well-behaved bots. OpenAI etc are usually well behaved, but there's at least one large network of rogue scraping bots that ignores robots.txt, fakes the user-agent (usually to some old Chrome version) and cycles through millions of different residential proxy IPs. On my own sites, this network is by far the worst offender and the "well-behaved" bots like OpenAI are barely noticeable.

To stop malicious bots like this, Cloudflare is a great solution if you don't mind using it (you can enable a basic browser check for all users and all pages, or write custom rules to only serve a check to certain users or on certain pages). If you're not a fan of Cloudflare, Anubis works well enough for now if you don't mind the branding.

Here's the cloudflare rule I currently use (vast majority of bot traffic originates from these countries):

ip.src.continent in {"AF" "SA"} or ip.src.country in {"CN" "HK" "SG"} or ip.src.country in {"AE" "AO" "AR" "AZ" "BD" "BR" "CL" "CO" "DZ" "EC" "EG" "ET" "ID" "IL" "IN" "IQ" "JM" "JO" "KE" "KZ" "LB" "MA" "MX" "NP" "OM" "PE" "PK" "PS" "PY" "SA" "TN" "TR" "TT" "UA" "UY" "UZ" "VE" "VN" "ZA"} or ip.src.asnum in {28573 45899 55836}