MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flanked-evergl | 2025-09-10 12:18:51+00:00
In Norway the public transportation in Oslo has become so bad that it's essentially no longer reliable. If I want to get somewhere in time, I have to use a car or a bicycle.

Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.

A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
by cubefox | 2025-09-10 12:19:05+00:00
This still uses a classic electrophoresis panel, perhaps even one that is produced by E Ink. These work by moving solid particles (pigment) through a liquid. Which is inherently a physically slow process. At high refresh rates there will be significant amounts of ghosting.

To get past that, we would need a different panel technology, a type of reflective ("e-paper") panel that is not based on electrophoresis.

Years ago there were many such display types in development. One option is electrowetting displays. Liquavista was a company that had a screen where tiny oil droplets were switched between being either round and small or flat and large, using high voltage. The flat droplets would cover the background of a pixel and make it dark, while the small ones would "hide" in the corner of the pixel to make most of the background visible. This is pretty fast because the oil droplets are surrounded by air, which doesn't resist the movement of the oil, in contrast to moving solid pigment through a liquid.

Another option was to to have microscopic mechanical (MEMS) plates inside a pixel, which produce color by creating light interference. Qualcomm's Mirasol tried to do that. The wavelength of the reflected light depends on the gap between the plates.

The cool thing with interference e-paper is that you can theoretically make a color display which doesn't need RGB subpixels. Colors could be created by continuously adjusting the gap rather than doing binary switching between black (UV or IR) and either red, green or blue. Not having RGB subpixels greatly increases contrast on colored screens because it can reflect much more light. An issue is that shades of white and magenta can't be straightforwardly created with interference, because those are not monochromatic colors with a single wavelength. Anyway, Qualcomm closed Mirasol just as they tried to make these subpixel-free screens viable.
by alpaca128 | 2025-09-10 12:19:07+00:00
What needs to be better about screens outdoor? iPhones have had nicely readable screens in bright sunlight for a long time now, including compatibility with sunglasses. Though it would be nice to see this in all other phones too.

Other than that I agree. Especially camera bumps are annoying to me, I would prefer a phone thick enough to make the bump disappear, that would then automatically solve the battery life issue as well.
by nurettin | 2025-09-10 12:19:32+00:00
Ah, someone who enjoys defending his tigers against cats. Well, enjoy your low hanging fruits, tiger. Someone "so knowledgeable" and totally not a poster boy making bold claims that don't come true at all will continue not making sense to me. But don't get me wrong, I know this is an old man shakes fist at cloud kind of situation. Who cares what doesn't make sense to me anyway? My academic circles don't, and they do fine. I continue to contribute what little I can. But my field is more SR than NN.
by IFC_LLC | 2025-09-10 12:19:37+00:00
It's all fine and dandy until you realize that economy pays a big buck for faster and more comfortable ways of transporting a body. (And it's been this way since time memorial).

You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.

Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.

The only places where this works are the places where: 1. People live for retirement and pleasure. 2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there). 3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.

So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
by brushfoot | 2025-09-10 12:19:45+00:00
Yes, the article's insistence that anyone would have fallen for the phish, and that anyone who disagrees is simply "wrong," is unfortunate. My old corporate phishing training drilled it into my head pretty effectively that you don't follow links in emails if the emails aren't direct responses to actions you've just taken: registering an account, resetting a password, and so forth.

To this day, I don't follow links in other kinds of emails. I mouse over the link to view the domain as a first step in determining how seriously to take the email. If the domain appears to match the known-good one, I copy the link and examine the characters to see if any Unicode lookalikes have been employed.

If the domain seems legitimate, or if I don't recognize it but the email is so convincing that I suspect the company truly is using a different domain (my bank has done this, frustratingly), I still don't click the link. I log in to my account on the known-good domain -- by typing it by hand into the browser's address bar -- and look for notifications.

If there are no notifications, then I might contact the company about the email to verify its authenticity.

If anyone reading thinks that seems like a lot of work, I agree with you! It stinks. But I humbly submit that it's necessary on today's Internet. And it's especially necessary if you're in charge of globally used software libraries.

To adopt the tone of the article's author, if they aren't willing to do that, they're wrong, and they're going to keep getting phished.
by craftkiller | 2025-09-10 12:19:51+00:00
You could do a blobless or treeless clone https://github.blog/open-source/git/get-up-to-speed-with-par...

Combined with --depth=1 and the --no-checkout / --sparse-checkout flow that the GP already described.

I just tested on the emacs repo, left column is disk usage of just the `.git` folder inside:

Shallow clones (depth=1): 124K: Treeless clone depth=1 with no-checkout 308K: Blobless clone depth=1 with no-checkout 12M: Treeless clone depth=1 sparse checkout of "doc" folder 12M: Blobless clone depth=1 sparse checkout of "doc" folder 53M: Treeless clone depth=1 non-sparse full checkout 53M: Blobless clone depth=1 non-sparse full checkout 53M: Regular clone with depth=1 Non-shallow clones: 54M: Treeless clone with no-checkout 124M: Blobless clone with no-checkout 65M: Treeless clone sparse checkout of "doc" folder 135M: Blobless clone sparse checkout of "doc" folder 107M: Treeless clone with non-sparse full checkout 177M: Blobless clone with non-sparse full checkout 653M: Full regular git clone with no flags

Great tech talk covering some of the newer lesser-known git features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY
by q3k | 2025-09-10 12:19:55+00:00
> TBH had I known too many of the specifics of the platform by now they would be forgotten or I wouldn't be able to mention them!

Thanks anyways! :)

> This was/is common for most RTOS type environments where MMUs were not a thing. For example, the whole point of Brew and J2ME was to provide some level of separation prior to the later Symbians and then Android/iOS etc.

Right - although all the S5L series chips used in the later iPods had an MMU (other than the S5L8701 in the Nano 2G, which only had an MPU). They also had a pretty tight boot chain (all stages signed/encrypted). It's a weird contrast to the pretty lax security measures within the OS itself :). But I guess reworking the old iPod codebase (which started with PortalPlayer chips) to make use of the MPU/MMU would have been too much effort.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-10 12:19:57+00:00
In our case we're still hybrid, but unlike before when everyone was in the office, your lunch hour all of a sudden counts against you. They want you in the building a full 8 hours, and despite otherwise being remote, you cannot make up any hours.

I miss when before COVID firms were fine with flexing hours, now it seems they want to be draconian.

I was drastically more productive as a remote software engineer. I have severe insomnia and for some ungodly reason the later hours are my most productive. You wont get that productivity from me if I'm in an office a full 8 hours, I'm NOT working overtime.
by powvans | 2025-09-10 12:20:07+00:00
This is really amazing to see trending on HN. I spent a couple days in Pontevedra this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago. It was absolutely delightful and what I experienced aligns with the article. The old town was filled with wide streets almost exclusively for walking, cafes and restaurants that sprawled into plazas, and people young and old enjoying the car free public space. It was one of the first stops on our trip through Spain and as an American it was stunning.

In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
by markus_zhang | 2025-09-10 12:20:33+00:00
Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.

One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.

I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-10 12:21:23+00:00
I think my 'old man shakes fist at clouds' thing is this. The social media platforms that censor you do it to make your content easier to sell ads against. It's actual corporate badthink correction that is rebuilding the English language. STOP VOLUNTARILY DOING IT WHEN YOU DONT HAVE TO. You should not sacrifice your free thought on the altar of quarterly results. Say the whole fucking word.
by DavidSJ | 2025-09-10 12:21:43+00:00
> An LLM was only every meant to be a linguistics model, not a brain or cognitive architecture.

See https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/information/compression/1... from 1999.

Answering questions in the Turing test (What are roses?) seems to require the same type of real-world knowledge that people use in predicting characters in a stream of natural language text (Roses are ___?), or equivalently, estimating L(x) [the probability of x when written by a human] for compression.
by Sophira | 2025-09-10 12:21:44+00:00
Honestly, the same is true in a lot of other areas of computing.

Whenever you download an open-source program and you don't have to compile it first, you're at risk of running code that is not necessarily what's in the publicly-available source code.

This can even apply to source code itself when distributed through two different channels, as we saw in the xz backdoor attempt. (The release tarball contained different code to the repository.)
by midnitewarrior | 2025-09-10 12:21:58+00:00
There would be no Claude without training data. None of these authors consented to their works being stolen, and there is no recourse to get their works unstolen.

If their works are so insignificant to Claude, just remove them from Claude and retrain. It's that simple. Claude is 100% the product of the works that were stolen, just as much as it is the product of the software developers and investors.

All the employees just got a million dollar bonus. The authors spent their entire lives up to the point of publishing each work refining their ideas, investing in education and experiences that allowed them to create their works that were stolen. If the result of that theft is a massive wealth-building AI machine, it makes sense that they should benefit from the ongoing use of their work.

Anthropic had a chance at licensing these works the standard way, and chose to skip it. Do you think the consequences of this should be that under court order they receive money that is likely the same or less than they would have negotiated had Anthropic not stolen from them?

Why would anyone hesitate to steal other publications if their only punishment is that on the off-chamce they get caught, they have to pay what they would have anyway? That's the ridiculous assertion.

> 100-1000x the value of their books

They would be getting 5% the value of their books. Claude without those books is nothing. Take all the books away from Claude and you can understand the true value they contributed.
by kelvinjps10 | 2025-09-10 12:22:16+00:00
I wonder if dynamic ads are even necessary. Meaning that it seems like the most creators more money from sponsors, meaning that companies directly sponsor creators. It could work similar to podcasts people post podcasts and they are available in RSS, and multiple podcasts platforms, for the videos they could be available in something like pee tube or similar to podcasts where there is multiple players created. And for creators they get directly contracted by companies, as this might present problems there could be a company that acts as the mediator between sponsors and creators
by crote | 2025-09-10 12:22:29+00:00
Skimming through the linked paper, I can't actually find that claim being backed up anywhere?

The abstract does indeed say "It was found that the system reliability decreases to 0.84 after 1·10^8s at a stressing temperature of 300K", but I can't find anything close to that in the sections about Bias Temperature Instability or Hot Carrier Injection.

The only thing which to me looks close is the rather acute failure in the Radiation Trapping section - but that also states that the failure mode is dependent more on the total dose than time, and the total dose at which it fails is somewhere between 126 krad - 1.26 Mrad. For reference, a dose of 1 krad is universally fatal to a human.

In other words: don't put unshielded DRAM in a nuclear reactor?
by graemep | 2025-09-10 12:22:34+00:00
The difference is that the license is terminated by ANY litigation against Supabase - e.g. if you sue them for breach of contract completely unrelated to the software.

Use as a shield would mean limiting it to patent litigation against a user of the software.

It also only covers litigation against Supabase - it does not provide a shield against litigation against OrioleDB users.
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-09-10 12:22:53+00:00
Sure, it could up until some point where in order for it to figure out that it has to use a tool or access the Internet it will need more intelligence (to know that its answer or understanding is not sufficient or incorrect) How do we as humans know that? Someone tells us. Who's going to tell it? Then you end up at Minsky's Society of Mind, but also a distributed perpetual motion machine. Evolution seems to have figured out the intuition mechanism as some sort of probabilistic mechanism that's been honed for potentially millions of years, if not billions (white blood cells track pathogens, without having any neural network, so it's possible.) -- I think I opened a can of worms with these thoughts.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-10 12:23:37+00:00
> We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.

Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-09-10 12:24:59+00:00
Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway.

Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-09-10 12:25:04+00:00
> In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc...

But that's not how real life works at all, right? You talk to someone for as long as you want to talk to them, or until they start sending signals that they are done talking with you.

The way video game dialog works has always bothered me, it makes characters feel stilted and makes me care less about the characters and the world.

(Although it's a different game in many ways, consider by contrast how Portal 2 handles dialog, and the effect that has on immersion.)
by yellowpencil | 2025-09-10 12:25:27+00:00
A positive change for sure but what about the kids who were stunted developmentally during that time?

In a nearby elementary school they are now touting teaching kids “AI literacy”. At an age where they don’t even have enough of a world view to understand anything related to it. Such an asinine idea, and of course it will be at the expense of something non-trendy.

It seems like public education suffers from so much “idea cascade” now and jumps from one fad to the next. Educational paths are more and more left to chance than organized thought.
by woile | 2025-09-10 12:25:53+00:00
You can transport your body faster by walking than by taking a car. But of course, this depends on how you design a city. If I have a supermarket 5 minute walk from home, is going to be faster than taking the car out, and finding a parking lot and finally walking to the supermarket.

And let's not forget, that if you want a more fair society, you cannot assume that just everybody can afford a car. I went to university by bus and it was a horrible experience. I could only dream of the modern cheap electric vehicles. But still, the city I studied has barely any infrastructure for this, and you risk your life every time, even though it would be PERFECT for this.
by matstech | 2025-09-10 12:25:58+00:00
Hi, I'm the creator of Linden.

The idea for this library came while I was working on my graduate thesis. I found existing AI agent frameworks to be too complex and heavy for my needs. I wanted more control over the prompts and tool calls, and less boilerplate code just to get started.

So, I took a DIY approach and built Linden: a lightweight library that provides the essential tools to connect LLMs to your code, without forcing you into a rigid system.

A few key ideas behind it:

- Minimal Codebase: It has ~500 core lines of code. The goal is for you to be able to read and understand the entire library easily.

- No Vendor Lock-in: It supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, and Groq out of the box, making it easy to switch between providers.

- Full Control: The prompts are clean and work exactly as you'd expect. Tool invocation is predictable and reliable, with no hidden magic.

It's still early days and not production-ready, but I'd love to get your honest feedback and thoughts.

The repo is here: https://github.com/matstech/linden
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-10 12:26:02+00:00
The real question is, why do we (as an industry) not use testing frameworks more to see if we could replicate those rare obscure bugs? If you can code the state, you now can reproduce it 100% of the time. The real answer seems to me, is that the industry isn't writing any or enough unit tests.

If your code can be unit tested, you can twist and turn it in many ways, if it's not an integration issue.
by nerdjon | 2025-09-10 12:26:32+00:00
I really wish the US could get more of this. I know here in Boston this has been a hot issue with the summer shutdown of Newberry on Sunday.

Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).

Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.

Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
by mothballed | 2025-09-10 12:26:38+00:00
>I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.

Yes I understand that, but the sample unit called out in finding the median explicitly was 'schools' not median 'state.' (And before that, test scores, in which the fundamental unit is a child and not a state).

I was trying to come up with an explanation how CA could be at the bottom while still have schools around the median.

If NY/CA/FL/TX are huge and tight to together, the median school or child could be in one of them even if they were amongst the worst 5 or 10 states. The 'median' as used above was in reference to schools, not states.

I think the key piece you're missing here is each state does not have equal number of schools or children. Therefore if a state's schools are all scoring near the median (of schools) as alleged, and the large states are all doing bad, California could be one of the worst few states while having their schools (and children) near the median. You're getting your units mixed up.