MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by peterfirefly | 2025-09-06 18:58:34+00:00
It goes very slow and it doesn't need to work with high resolution or long distances. It has plenty of time to average out noise.

Solid-state LIDAR is still a fairly new thing. LIDAR sensors were big, clunky, and expensive back when Tesla started their Autopilot/FSD program.

I googled a bit and found a DFR1030 solid-state LIDAR unit for 267 DKK (for one). It has a field of view of 108 degrees and an angular resolution of 0.6 degrees. It has an angle error of 3 degrees and a max distance of 300mm. It can run at 7.5-28 Hz.

Clearly fine for a floor-cleaning robot or a toy. Clearly not good enough for a car (which would need several of them).
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-06 18:58:40+00:00
There is "think" and "super think" (there may be something in the middle).

If you use the word "think" at any point, this mode will also trigger...which is sometimes inconvenient.

Plan mode is probably better for these situations though. Claude seems to have got much worse recently but even before, if it was stuck, then asking it so "super think" never dislodged it (presumably because AI agents have no capacity for creativity, telling them to think more is just looping harder).

The loop of plan -> do is significantly more effective as most AI agents that I have used extensively will get lost on trivial tasks if you just have the "do" phase without a clear plan (some, such as GPT, also appear unable to plan effectively...we have a contract with OpenAI at work, I have no idea how people use it).
by slavapestov | 2025-09-06 19:00:06+00:00
I wasn’t trying to start a fight over languages, that would be silly. I also wrote a language once and then moved on from it (to your former language ;-)), so I know the feeling! I wish you luck with your new language, and I wish for many more languages in the future to try different approaches and learn from each other.

My original reply was just to point out that constraint solving, in the abstract, can be a very effective and elegant approach to these problems. There’s always a tradeoff, and it all depends on the combination of other features that go along with it. For example, without bidirectional inference, certain patterns involving closures become more awkward to express. You can have that, without overloading, and it doesn’t lead to intractability.
by terribleperson | 2025-09-06 19:01:33+00:00
I'm suspended on reddit for, as best as I can tell, posting a DFhack bug fix script. For the uninitiated, this is a bug fix script for a program commonly used in Dwarf Fortress moderating, not anything illicit.

If this kind of low-quality AI moderation is the future, I'm not sure if these major platforms will even remain usable.
by alchemical_piss | 2025-09-06 19:02:18+00:00
> The current billionaires seem yo know they're headed to apocalypse since theyre building evil lairs.

It will be apocalypse for us, but a glorious new age of feudalism for them. Why else would they be building castles and describing ideal societies of feudal oaths.

Every single person in the country, regardless of political affiliation should know them as most dangerous domestic enemy.
by tpmoney | 2025-09-06 19:02:23+00:00
> I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI.

The judge presiding over this case has already issued a ruling to the effect that training an LLM like Anthropic's AI with legally acquired material is in fact fair use. So unless someone comes up with some novel claims that weren't already attempted, claims that a different form of AI is significantly different from a copyright perspective from an LLM or tries their hand in a different circuit to get a split decision, the "jury" is pretty much settled on how fair use applies to AI. Legally acquired material used to train LLMs is fair use. Illegally obtaining copies of material is not fair use, and the transformative nature of LLMs don't retroactively make it fair use.
by meisel | 2025-09-06 19:02:40+00:00
I don’t think you truly get the “best” of both worlds, because the rate of accidentally omitting a broken test and letting something slip into master is now non-zero (flaky tests aside). This is still a tradeoff. But maybe it’s a good one!

I do wonder if this is as feasible at scale, where breaking master can be extremely costly (although at least it’s not running all tests for all commits, so a broken test won’t break all CI runs). Maybe it could be paired with, say, running all E2E tests post-merge and reporting breakages ASAP.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-06 19:02:51+00:00
Some people have it. Some do not. I have taken very large amounts of opiates before and I have never ever experienced nausea from them. I think you are not likely to experience it at lower doses from say, codeine or hydrocodone either, but honestly, it varies by individuals.

It would suck if I experienced nausea, and it would equally suck if I experienced euphoria from opiates, because I have an addictive personality. Thankfully I do not experience euphoria at all from opiates.

BTW I remember having ulcers from NSAIDs before, that is yuck, too. I ended up vomiting blood and I had to be admitted to the hospital. I think I would choose constipation (which can be managed) over this. But yeah, if opiates caused nausea for me, I would not take them for sure.

Ultimately, people should figure out what works for them and stick to it. Unfortunately it might work until it does not, i.e. causes harm. Some people get no ulcers from taking NSAIDs on the daily, and I did just from a few days of taking it (and it was not even naproxen!). :| I am also allergic to metamizole which is the most common painkiller around here (Algopyrin, Optalgin). For my grandma, it seems to work best for her, although she may want to try pregabalin, as her pain is neuropathic (too). She was given tramadol not that long ago and she got somewhat delirious. They probably gave it to her deliberately because she was making a scene at the hospital.
by bccdee | 2025-09-06 19:03:00+00:00
Yeah—lasy time I had that issue, I found postgres was materializing some of the subqueries and then naively scanning those materialized queries when the original tables had indexes. I fixed it by adding "not materialized" and hitting the original tables directly, but if you want to materialize a subquery AND have it be indexed, a temp table is the only way I know to make that happen.
by flyinglizard | 2025-09-06 19:04:21+00:00
It's not about that. The first thing any investor wants to know, and almost goes without saying in the venture world, is that the team is committed. 996 puts on the show that everyone's all-in. All things equal, those who work harder will win. Investors won't audit your code, in many cases won't use your product and this is a dumb and simple proxy metric for the kind of work you're putting in. Especially now that AI reset the field and has a ton of startups dashing to the finish line to establish category dominance, investors are the Coliseum crowds that want to see modern day gladiators (their founders and teams) giving it all or die trying.
by tzury | 2025-09-06 19:04:50+00:00
Quote:

I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text?

The answer: Text.

Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
by a022311 | 2025-09-06 19:05:03+00:00
> NEVER FORGET TO INCREASE THE SERIAL WITH EVERY CHANGE TO A ZONE FILE. OR RISK DNS HELL.

> EVERY HOSTNAME RECORD ENDS WITH A . YOU WILL FORGET THIS. YOU WILL FIX THIS.

> WITH A DOT AT THE END. DO NOT FORGET THE DOT!

> WITH THE DOT AT THE END. AND DID YOU UPDATE THE SERIAL? :)

I just love these comments. You made my day! :D
by chrislattner | 2025-09-06 19:05:23+00:00
Sure, I wasn't trying to start a fight either, I was just sharing my experience and opinion on having worked on both. Mojo (and C++) have closures, for example c++ does lambda type inference without a constraint solver.

In my opinion, constraint solving would be a bad design point for Mojo, and I regret Swift using it. I'm not trying to say that constraint solving is bad for all languages and use-cases.
by asplake | 2025-09-06 19:05:57+00:00
I’m writing one now as part of a hobby language project, about which I’ll do a Show HN once I have enough to share. I enjoyed Pierce but to your point I am going mostly down the functional route. Programming it in Python, with the book closed but after two readings I have what I need in my head (it clicked much better second time through).

Edit: This project (best fun I’ve had programming in a long while) is what got me sharing Eli Bendersky’s Unification post a couple of weeks back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44938156
by terribleperson | 2025-09-06 19:06:07+00:00
This situation isn't going to happen unless the vehicle was traveling at unsafe speeds to begin with.

Cars can stop in quite a short distance. The only way this could happen is if the pedestrian was obscured behind an object until the car was dangerously close. A safe system will recognize potential hiding spots and slow down preemptively - good human drivers do this.
by dang | 2025-09-06 19:06:41+00:00
Edit: seems related to this ongoing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149336

Related. Others?

Normalization of Deviance (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34791106 - Feb 2023 (219 comments)

Normalization of Deviance (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144330 - Jan 2020 (43 comments)

Normalization of deviance in software: broken practices become standard (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15835870 - Dec 2017 (27 comments)

How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10811822 - Dec 2015 (252 comments)

What We Can Learn From Aviation, Civil Engineering, Other Safety-critical Fields - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806063 - Dec 2015 (3 comments)
by davemo | 2025-09-06 19:07:43+00:00
I can appreciate the effort put into the goal of optimization shared in the post, even if I disagree with the conclusions. All of that effort would be much better directed at doing a manual (or LLM-assisted) audit of the E2E tests and choosing what to prune to reduce CI runtime.

DHH recently described[0] the approach they've taken at BaseCamp, reducing ~180 comprehensive-yet-brittle system tests down to 10 good-enough smoke tests, and it feels much more in spirit with where I would recommend folks invest effort: teams have way more tests than they need for an adequate level of confidence. Code and tests are a liability, and, to paraphrase Kent Beck[1], we should strive to write the minimal amount of tests and code to gain the maximal amount of confidence.

The other wrinkle here is that we're often paying through the nose in costs (complexity, actual dollars spent on CI services) by choosing to run all the tests all the time. It's a noble and worthy goal to figure out how not to do that, _but_, I think the conclusion shouldn't be to throw more $$$ into that money-pit, but rather just use all the power we have in our local dev workstations + trust to verify something is in a shippable state, another idea DHH covers[2] in the Rails World 2025 keynote; the whole thing is worth watching IMO.

[0] - https://youtu.be/gcwzWzC7gUA?si=buSEYBvxcxNkY6I6&t=1752

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/153234/how-deep-are-your...

[2] - https://youtu.be/gcwzWzC7gUA?si=9zL-xWG4FUxYZMC5&t=1977
by tpmoney | 2025-09-06 19:09:32+00:00
Has anyone actually made the argument that having an AI regurgitate a word for word copy of an otherwise copyrighted work is fair use? Or have they made the argument that training the AI is transformative and fair use, and using that AI to generate works that are similar but not duplications of the copyrighted work is fair use?

A xerox machine can reproduce an exact copy of a book if you ask it to, but that doesn't make a xerox machine inherently a copyright violation, nor does it make every use of a xerox machine a violation of copyright, even when the inputs are materials under copyright. So far the judge in this case has ruled that training an AI is sufficiently transformative, and that using legally acquired works for that purpose is not a violation of copyright. That outcome seems entirely unsurprising given the years of case law around copyright and technology that can duplicate copyrighted works. See the aforementioned xerox machines, but also CD ripping, DVRs, VHS recording of TV shows, audio cassette recording, emulators, the Java API lawsuit and also the Google Books lawsuit.
by calesennett | 2025-09-06 19:09:33+00:00
In Anthropic's Claude Code Best Practices [1] (section 3.a.2), they note prompting with certain phrases corresponds to increasing levels of "thinking" for Claude Code:

"think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink"

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
by saghm | 2025-09-06 19:09:38+00:00
> so if you ask, "what is the capital of colorado" and it answers "denver" calling it a Hallucination is nihilistic nonsense that paves over actually stopping to try and understand important dynamics happening in the llm matrices

On the other hand, calling it anything other than a hallucination misrepresents the idea of truth as being something that these models have any ability to differentiate between their outputs based on whether they accurately reflect reality by conflating a fundamentally unsolved problem as an engineering tradeoff.
by pstuart | 2025-09-06 19:09:39+00:00
Seeing clips of primitive tribes being given modern military equipment triggers a response of "that is too powerful for you, you haven't earned the right to use it as you couldn't even make it yourself". Geocentric and elitist, sure.

But that is now how I see what the internet has done to society -- we're collectively unable to wield it properly. My excitement from the early years of the web ("knowledge is free! communities can span ideas rather than locality, etc" has been replaced by fear of "how will this be weaponized against us"?

But that's just like my opinion, man.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-06 19:09:42+00:00
>Prices skyrocketed for all cars after COVID

Along with everything else, because of inflation.

Ex: New Chevy Trax is within $1k of a 2011 Ford Focus MSRP, and considerably lower than something like a 2011 Ford Fusion sedan MSRP inflation adjusted.

Americans do not buy econo-models. Chevy Spark, Nissan Versa, Mitsubishi Mirage, list goes on. Almost all of them had bad sales numbers, and most are now gone from the market because of that.

I am of the opposite opinion, and think that the latest wave of cheap compact crossovers is by far the best entry level offering from US companies in years. Heck, even Buick is doing well with the Envista. I'm definitely target market (drive a sub 100hp asian compact no longer offered in US markets), and honestly think the new 3cyl Trax is actually an appealing cheap little vehicle, which I never would have considered before from a US manufacturer.
by AaronFriel | 2025-09-06 19:09:54+00:00
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

Words to remember when one hears it's "just locker room talk" or "boys being boys" or "just a joke, lighten up".
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-06 19:10:40+00:00
And the claim is probably bogus. If it were true, we'd expect other evidence (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147119) that hasn't showed up. More likely, it's an artefact of autism diagnosis rates varying in different populations, and maybe something to do with autistic mothers' fucky pain tolerances.

More likely to take painkillers + more likely to get your child assessed for autism = observed (tiny) correlation, even in the absence of any causation.
by ianbicking | 2025-09-06 19:11:32+00:00
Respect (or lack thereof) goes both ways: both the writer and reader. I have frequently felt disrespected by producing documentation, planning/etc that isn't read. In the end I mostly rely on oral transmission of knowledge because then at least I can read the room and know if I'm providing some value to people, and ultimately we're both trapped in the room together and have to invest the same amount of time.

The LLM isn't always smart, but it's always attentive. It rewards that effort in a way that people frequently don't. (Arguably this is a company culture issue, but it's also a widespread issue.)
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-06 19:11:57+00:00
What’s more likely - your company is going to get rid of you in the next five years or the government is going to take away your citizenship?

Did you try to get insurance on the open market before 2012 with a pre-existing condition? Every other industrial country in the world has health insurance not tied to your employer. Even smaller countries like Costa Rica and Panama have better more affordable insurance. Yes I’ve done my research on caja, Costa Rica’s national health care system. We will be staying there a couple of months in the winter starting next year and it’s our Plan B to retire there.
by Const-me | 2025-09-06 19:11:58+00:00
Good article, but it uses less than ideal formula for weights of the gaussian blur kernel.

Gaussian function for coefficients is fine for large sigmas, but for small blur radius you better integrate properly. Luckily, C++ standard library has std::erf function you gonna need for the proper formula. Here’s more info: https://bartwronski.com/2021/10/31/practical-gaussian-filter...
by 1penny42cents | 2025-09-06 19:12:50+00:00
OP wanted to distance themselves as far from a bad economic environment as they could.

For people early in their careers, working hard is the best way to grow their future earnings and opportunities. They have too few skills, connections, and experience to differentiate otherwise.

Focusing only on the asymmetry between those with and without meaningful equity misses the point.

Not everyone is lucky enough to get equity from day one. The rest of us have (at most) a few critical points in our careers to do well enough such that we get a shot at meaningful equity at some point in the future.

For those from underprivileged backgrounds, they’re lucky to get even one chance in their careers for meaningful growth.
by bartvk | 2025-09-06 19:14:38+00:00
It's a piece which lists very good examples of normalization of deviance in organizations.

Personally it happened to myself as well. I regularly rent a Tesla and once, I took a date on a trip and I drove us through the city, her riding shotgun. She said: "Look at the orange line on the screen. You're driving too close to the parked cars on our right".

I answered, "it always does that, the proximity sensor on these Teslas is way too nervous". She looked out of the window and said: "no, you are actually way too close to the parked cars!"

I had totally normalized the proximity warning.
by starttoaster | 2025-09-06 19:15:22+00:00
They're always more common in metro areas of the US. You must be from a relatively rural area and don't get out of it much.

That said, uh, the use of getting a taxi to drive you to or from the airport was just not having to park at the airport which generally costs a lot of money, and in certain areas is a little sketchy on whether or not your car will get cracked open while you're away.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-09-06 19:15:25+00:00
#1, likely not now:

Most of my close friends are non-technical and expect me to be a cheerleader fir USA AI efforts. They were surprised when I started mentioning the recent Stanford study that 80% of US startups are using Chinese models. I would like us to win but we seem too hype focused and not engineering and practical applications focused.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-06 19:17:47+00:00
> A later phase, as represented by this tablet, reflects changes in the techniques of writing that altered the shapes of signs. Symbols stood for nouns, primarily names of commodities, as well as a few basic adjectives, but no grammatical elements.

From Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:

> The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep. Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
by Frost1x | 2025-09-06 19:17:52+00:00
The underlying issue here isn’t AI based policing, it’s the fact private entities have enough unregulated influence on peoples’ daily life that their use of these or any such policy mechanisms are undemocratically effecting people in notably significant ways. The Facebook example is, whatever, but what if it’s some landlord renting making a decision, some health insurance company deciding your coverage, etc.

Now obviously this won’t stop with private entities, state and federal law enforcement are gung-ho to leverage any of these sorts of systems and have been for ages. It doesn’t help the current direction the US specifically is moving in, promoting such authoritarian policies.
Show HN: Greppers – fast CLI cheat sheet with instant copy and shareable search
by shellsteady | 2025-09-06 19:18:28+00:00
I kept re-Googling the same flags, so I built a tiny, fast directory of copy-ready CLI commands. It’s static (vanilla JS), instant search, keyboard nav (↑/↓ + Enter), favorites (localStorage), and linkable queries.

Examples:

• grep errors → https://www.greppers.com/?q=grep%20error%20logs

• list open ports (macOS) → https://www.greppers.com/?q=list%20open%20ports

• show git branch graph → https://www.greppers.com/?q=git%20graph

• tail with colors → https://www.greppers.com/?q=tail%20colors

Tech notes: static site on Netlify, no build system. Data is a JSON file; favorites persist via localStorage. Search is client-side; queries are linkable with ?q= and you can filter favorites with fav=1. Dangerous commands show a confirm before copying. Headers (HSTS, nosniff) + sitemap/robots are set.

Planned next: more commands/recipes (docker, systemctl, networking), offline PWA, and a simple import/export for favorites.

Suggest a missing command: https://www.greppers.com/submit.html

I’m looking for gaps and better real-world examples. Feedback welcome.