MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j1elo | 2025-09-06 18:42:28+00:00
> Why would 30 minutes by car become 1.30 hours by public transport.

My city has "great" public transport. It's been appraised multiple times, which I guess means that average public transport must be worse than what I've grown up with. I take 20 mins by car from home (in an outer neighborhood) to my workplace (in a central area), 55 mins otherwise. When you consider roundtrips, it adds up (and if we add a middle stop coming out from work to somewhere else for some shopping, the time counting goes out the roof).

The 30 mins vs 1h30 comparison was assuming a trip from a nearby dormitory city 25 kms away, which is the minimum (insisting: minimum) distance everyone nowadays is being pushed out in order to being able to buy any home at a reasonable price. For example: where my parents live to my work is further away 30 Km: that's 30 min by car and 1h10 by p.t., but that outer city had reasonable prices 15 years ago, not today, so nowadays you would go live somewhere farther than that.

I find that typically people talk about public transport benefits from the perspective of being able to buy a home within the centre that is well connected. Yeah, the subway is great here if you live in a 10 Km radius, but talking about it is out of scope for most.
by quitit | 2025-09-06 18:42:35+00:00
I won't talk about the merits of huge fines being an approach to solving competition, but from the inside I can see a few ways that the EU pale:

1. While the EU operates as a body for rule setting, the individual members are still highly autonomous in a way that doesn't compare to the types of collaboration that's possible across states in the USA. This is worsened by language divisi ons.

2. Internally each country is trying to foster their country as the place to be to launch a "start up", but that fragmentation is almost certainly slowing down the formation of a European equivalent to silicon valley.

3. There isn't a competitive investment funnel to what's available in the USA and the USA benefits from "network effect" style advantages purely from being further down the road. So if someone in the EU has a good start-up concept, chances are they'll try to make it work with the big guns in the USA, or cash it out to a US entity.

4. The EU is incredibly shortsighted in allowing the sale of important tech companies to foreign entities (primarily US-based entities). Many of the bigger advancements of today started in Europe.

5. Similar to points 3+4, companies in the USA are often able to build more value with the IP they develop or acquire (on account of numerous factors including some inconvenient ones). So even when a EU start up has a good product it may not necessarily be as successful due to those factors.

6. The EU tends to write ambiguous legislation that is open to interpretation and at worst: intentionally vague. While some believe this is just trap setting for collecting fines, the consequence of vague rules is a loss of appetite to develop in that market. English speaking markets tend to have much more specific legislation and their governments are available to offer specific guidance. This is something that the EU lacks and a frequent complaint from the likes of Google et. al.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-06 18:42:38+00:00
I hate that culture--what is it for? So some VC can get their return? If it's truly mission-driven, yes. And I've done it for the mission. But I'm not going to do it just so the "company can grow" and someone can get their 10x return, or the CEO or founders can get their big paycheck. Once VCs get involved, there is no mission other than to increase the return.

Also, if you want to work 996, you'd better not have a family -- if you do, you're neglecting them whether or not you think you can "juggle things" just fine.
by a3fckx | 2025-09-06 18:43:06+00:00
The idea of putting in the hours for yourself makes sense, something you'll own upto and like doing it, not because you have to.

Expecting someone else with far lesser incentives is not even sustainable. I remember putting in a lot of hours at my previous company, i enjoyed doing it and i was learning at my first job, there are weeks where i put in those hours but those are for myself and what i'm building and it's insanity to expect that even to myself.

The metric is the output, independent of time you put in; alot of startups need those hours at times it's important to get things done but setting it as a culture and take pride is so naive of a thought.

i love high performing individuals delivering more output, than subpar individuals working delivering much lesser value and not just working for sake of it.
by Applejinx | 2025-09-06 18:43:19+00:00
In what universe is 'a few hundred dollars is way too much' for implementing full self-driving on an autonomous vehicle that moves like, and at the speeds of and in the spaces of, an automobile?

A two to four ton vehicle that can accelerate like a Ferrari and go over 100 mph, fully self-driving, and 'a few hundred dollars is way too much'.

Disagree. Even as they are dialing back the claims, which may or may not affect how people use the vehicles. These things respond too quickly for flaky senses based on human sensoriums.
by chubot | 2025-09-06 18:43:47+00:00
Everyone always says that, but I don't think it's a good intro :-) (e.g. I think the top comment in the lobste.rs thread is suffering from the type inference / functional bias, which is not necessarily due to TAPL, but it's a common thing I've noticed)

Right now I think Siek's book is better for what I want to do, though admittedly I didn't get that far into it, because my type checking project is way on the back burner

I would like to see any type checkers that people wrote after reading TAPL!
by Agentlien | 2025-09-06 18:44:01+00:00
I have worked full time for five years with a combination of Unreal and Unity. I've also worked for five years with Frostbite and another five in various custom engines.

I absolutely love both Unreal and Unity. Unreal is amazing from a technical perspective and having worked with a talented team in Unreal the stuff we were able to make were mind-blowing given the resources we had.

Unity is way easier to work with if you aren't focused on high fidelity graphics. In fact, I've never tried any engine that felt as easy to work with as Unity. I would absolutely not call it a monster. Even with a fairly green team you can hit the ground running and get really productive with Unity.
by majormajor | 2025-09-06 18:44:05+00:00
If you want to fight the housing crisis decentralization would be a big win. So if the city is hostile, why not set up outside of it? People already in the city can commute to you; people not already in the city can move outside the city and the surrounding areas can grow over time.

If there are professionals willing to pay continually-higher portions of their salary to live in the city regardless of who they displace then why can't we find ways to build new areas they want to live in? In some places there is a huge weather or natural-feature draw that will always prop up demand, but in others there isn't. There's just a lack of imagination and effort.
by simne | 2025-09-06 18:44:34+00:00
Well, I'll believe you about fp debugger, so only problem left with OcaML and Clojure, each of them have GC with non-linear complexity (Clojure as I understand using BEAM GC which claimed soft-realtime, meaning 90% of GC work will look like realtime, but OcaML using some typical GC), and what all these mean for games - they will suffer framedrops or even short freezing, when GC running.

Exist two approaches to overcome GC problem, but if somebody will again minus my comment I will not bother to find links in my records.

1. Here on HN mentioned GC-free fp platform.

2. Few years ago appeared GC algorithm with linear complexity (sure, with limitations, but good enough for example for 16-bit consoles level games).

Unfortunately, haters minusing comments, but don't add anything valuable, and author was not mentioned these problems.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-06 18:45:05+00:00
I've written several screeds in the comments here on HN about protobufs being terrible over the past few years. Basically the creators of PB ignored ASN.1 and built a bad version of mid-1980s ASN.1 and DER.

Tag-length-value (TLV) encodings are just overly verbose for no good reason. They are _NOT_ "self-describing", and one does not need everything tagged to support extensibility. Even where one does need tags, tag assignments can be fully automatic and need not be exposed to the module designer. Anyone with a modicum of time spent researching how ASN.1 handles extensibility with non-TLV encoding rules knows these things. The entire arc of ASN.1's evolution over two plus decades was all about extensibility and non-TLV encoding rules!

And yes, ASN.1 started with the same premise as PB, but 40 years ago. Thus it's terribly egregious that PB's designers did not learn any lessons at all from ASN.1!

Near as I can tell PB's designers thought they knew about encodings, but didn't, and near as I can tell they refused to look at ASN.1 and such because of the lack of tooling for ASN.1, but of course there was even less tooling for PB since it hadn't existed.

It's all exasperating.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-06 18:46:36+00:00
It's not pedantic, it's the very issue being discussed.

And there have been plenty of enthusiastic devs regarding LLM's.

And the idea that "until a consensus is reached" is just not true. These practices are often adopted with 1/3 of devs on board and 2/3 against. The whole point of top-down directives is that they're necessary because there isn't broad consensus among employees.

It was the same thing with mobile-first. A lot of devs hated it while others evangelized it, but management would impose it and it made phones usable for a ton of things that had previously been difficult. On the balance, it was a helpful paradigm shift imposed top-down even if it sometimes went overboard.
by metalman | 2025-09-06 18:47:12+00:00
way before when the tablet was made, as residues on pottery 5 thousand years older, 8-9-10 k yrs bp show that grains were soaked and lightly fermented, to increase nutritional content, palatability/texture, with this practice bieng practiced all the way through the stone ages. some have suggested that fermentation was the primary impetus for building the first semi permanent dwellings....beer first, somewhere to hang out was a bonus
by handsclean | 2025-09-06 18:47:45+00:00
I think the problem is people’s priors. This isn’t the first time we’re seeing data fake-arrive like this, and virtually always it’s done either to fake liveness or to lie about rate of change. So, it comes to mean not “live”, but “fake”, even though nefarious motives don’t make much sense in this fun context.

It’s a shame, I think it’s a clever thought, and it doesn’t feel great when good intentions are met with an assumption of maliciousness.
Show HN: Find the cheapest protein per gram across 3000 powders
by BatuhanU | 2025-09-06 18:48:25+00:00
I tracked protein powder prices in a spreadsheet for years and found that identical protein content can have wild price differences.

I built PricePerProtein to automate it. It pulls real-time Amazon data (Keepa API) and uses Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract nutrition facts from product images/descriptions. Calculates actual protein per dollar, not just package price.

Technical: FastAPI + Celery backend, Next.js frontend with virtual scrolling to handle 3000+ products. Deployed on a VPS (migrated from GCP - much simpler). The AI handles everything from blurry nutrition labels to understanding flavor categories.

No signup, no ads, no affiliate links. Updates hourly.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-06 18:48:31+00:00
This. Plus ASN.1 is pluggable as to encoding rules and has a large family of them:

- BER/DER/CER (TLV) - OER and PER ("packed" -- no tags and no lengths wherever possible) - XER (XML!) - JER (JSON!) - GSER (textual representation) - you can add your own! (One could add one based on XDR, which would look a lot like OER/PER in a way.)

ASN.1 also gives you a way to do things like formalize typed holes.

Not looking at ASN.1, not even its history and evolution, when creating PB was a crime.
by brynary | 2025-09-06 18:49:38+00:00
Historically, this kind of test optimization was done either with static analysis to understand dependency graphs and/or runtime data collected from executing the app.

However, those methods are tightly bound to programming languages, frameworks, and interpreters so they are difficult to support across technology stacks.

This approach substitutes the intelligence of the LLM to make educated guesses about what tests execute, to achieve the same goal of executing all of the tests that could fail and none of the rest (balancing a precision/recall tradeoff). What’s especially interesting about this to me is that the same technique could be applied to any language or stack with minimal modification.

Has anyone seen LLMs in other contexts being substituted for traditional analysis to achieve language agnostic results?
by johnfn | 2025-09-06 18:49:41+00:00
> The key phrase here is "think deep". This tells Claude Code not to be lazy with its analysis (while spending more thinking tokens). Without it, the output was very inconsistent. I used to joke that without it, Claude runs in “engineering manager mode” by delegating the work.

This section really stood out to me. I knew that asking GPT-5 to think gets better results, but I didn't know Claude had the same behavior. I'd love to see some sort of % success before and after "think deep" was added. Should I be adding "think deep" to all my non-trivial queries to Claude?
by iammrpayments | 2025-09-06 18:51:01+00:00
The way facebook uses automation to manage their products is a disgrace, they can’t even manage to keep themselves automatically banning a lawyer who happens to be called Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-imper...

If you advertise on facebook you’re almost guarantee to have your ad account restricted for no apparent reason and no human being to appeal to, even if you spend big money.

It’s so bad that is common knowledge that you should start a fan page, post random stuff and buy page likes for 5-7 days before you start advertising, otherwise their system will just flag your account.
by kevo1ution | 2025-09-06 18:51:12+00:00
there's a long tail of edge cases where a smaller model does something dumb with input/output, which causes a decent amount of pain to the user (e.g. nodemon, do we stop/do we start?). Coding agent developers can't make an opinion on every possible terminal command

maybe what we're asking for is that terminal commands keep in mind that agents are now the primary users of them, and have a feeling that new packages or commands could get wider adoption if they are better understood by a coding agent

- similar to SEO for LLMs growing in adoption - documentation sites offering .md file raw for LLMs to ingest easily

These things will make it so that your packages or libs adopted faster
by alephnerd | 2025-09-06 18:52:21+00:00
Absolutely - and I'm a big booster of industrial policy a la CHIPS/IRA!

But a CHIPS or IRA style policy wouldn't work if trying to bring services or IP-first industries back to the US. In my vertical (cybersecurity/DevSecOps) much of the domain experience has been hollowed out domestically for almost 10-15 years now.

If you're offshoring for the sake of R&D and IP generation, cost isn't a significant pressure (eg. Top Cybersecurity talent in Israel can demand US level salaries, and similar talent in India can demand EU level salaries).

There's a much larger pipeline and skills problem in several subdomains in the tech industry that are highly underestimated by HNers.
by charleslmunger | 2025-09-06 18:53:13+00:00
Mobile apps store SQLite dbs in their private data directory that only they can access. In order to exploit a vulnerability you'd have to first break the sandbox. Desktop OSes generally have far weaker protections than that, if you have access to the user's profile directory you can steal all of their credentials or plant executables etc.

When I think application file format I think of something like .txt, pdf, or .doc, where it's expected that you'll receive untrusted input passed around. In that case it makes a lot more sense to restrict which features of SQLite are accessible, and even then I'd worry about using it in widely - there's so much surface area, plus the user confusion of shm and wal files.
by bArray | 2025-09-06 18:53:31+00:00
Protected chats? The ship already sailed, text messages via the phone network are already MITM'd since a very long time.

Even in real life, the police in the UK now deploy active face recognition and makes tonnes of arrests based on it (sometimes wrongly). Shops are now looking to deploy active face recognition to detect shoplifters (although it's unclear legally what they will actually do about it).

The UK can compel any person commuting through the UK to give over their passwords and devices - you have no right to appeal. Refusing to hand over the password can get you arrested under the Terrorist Act, where they can hold you indefinitely. When arrested under any terrorism offence you also have not right to legal representation.

The days of privacy sailed unnoticed.
by tpmoney | 2025-09-06 18:54:51+00:00
But that isn't how tax deductions work. Since taxes are always a fraction of income, a deduction can never save you more money than you already paid out to get the deduction in the first place. If you have a 10% tax rate, your options are:

A) Make 100M, pay 10M in taxes

or

B) Make 100M, pay 10M in lawsuit settlements, pay 9M in taxes

You come out ahead every time by not paying the settlement in the first place.
by paulcole | 2025-09-06 18:54:54+00:00
> 996 mandated by the company is 1/ illegal 2/ straight up illegal 3/ a clear signal that they do not see you as a human being.

1 & 2. I don't believe this to be true in the United States.

3. If a company mandated 9 to 5 for 5 days a week isn't that equally distasteful for someone who is excited to work 996?
by AIorNot | 2025-09-06 18:55:12+00:00
I worked for a 996 founder in a faced paced startup recently - after busting my ass for 5 months he fired me for not delivering fast enough despite creating an entire platform from scratch

Now I’m was old enough to realize the risk- but given this job market which absolutely sucks for developers but I see young twenty something’s getting influenced by stupid catchphrases like 996
by pasc1878 | 2025-09-06 18:55:25+00:00
It is not politics. British Museum manager did steal quite a few things. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68665773

This is not an academic piece but a blog which is trying to be light hearted.. The first sentence says "The other day I posted a tweet with this image which I thought was funny:' So not being 100% serious is to be expected.
by yzydserd | 2025-09-06 18:55:28+00:00
“he became known for launching a website seeking to document every reported Eucharistic miracle, which was launched days before his death.”

This may be an archive of his miraculous website shortly before he died https://web.archive.org/web/20060621085442/http://www.miraco... found by a Redditor https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/s/RIiuLSSaqP
by fred_is_fred | 2025-09-06 18:56:29+00:00
"There are many reasons but that drives it home for me multiple times a week is that my Tesla's wipers will randomly sweep the windshield for absolutely no reason."

Self-starting wipers uses some kind of current/voltage measure on the windshield right - unrelated to self-driving? It's been around longer than Tesla - or are you just saying it's another random failure?
by cryptonector | 2025-09-06 18:56:33+00:00
> Yes, ASN is supposed to be the right solution - but there is no full-featured implementation that doesn't cost $$$$ and the whole thing is just too damn bloated.

Oh for crying out loud! PB had ZERO tooling available when it was created! It would have been much easier to create ASN.1 tooling w/ OER/PER and for some suitable subset of ASN.1 in 2001 that it was to a) create an IDL, b) create an encoding, and c) write tooling for N programming languages.

In fact, one thing one could have done is write a transpiler from the IDL to an AST that does all linting, analysis, and linking, and which one can then use to drive codegen for N languages. Or even better: have the transpiler produce a byte-coded representation of the modules and then for each programming language you only need to codegen the types but not the codecs -- instead for each language you need only write the interpreter for the byte-coded modules. I know because I've extended and maintained an [open source] ASN.1 compiler that fucking does [some of] these things.

Stop spreading this idea that ASN.1 is bloated. It's not. You can cut it down for your purposes. There's only 4 specifications for the language itself, of which the base one (x.680) is enough for almost everything (the others, X.681, X.682, and X.683, are mainly for parameterized types and formal typed hole specifications [the ASN.1 "information object system], which are awesome but you can live without). And these are some of the best-written and most-readable specifications ever written by any standards development organization -- they are a great gift from a few to all of mankind.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-06 18:56:34+00:00
Yup, I actually force my agents to build a formally validated CUE spec for everything they build, I have a service that gives them a wizard for interacting with the cue to add/remove/update, then when everything we discuss is represented they can use it to sync a project, which will automatically generate missing unit/e2e tests, iac docs, folder stubs with README.md files, etc. It was a lot of work to get agents to interact with the service correctly, so many facepalm moments, but it's pretty magical when it works.
by gcanyon | 2025-09-06 18:57:07+00:00
Autopilot on a plane requires a pilot in the cockpit. Does that make it "not auto"?

I get that there are many who rush to defend Musk/Tesla. I'm not one of them.

I was just caught off guard by the headline. To me, changing “Full Self-Driving” to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” doesn't merit the headline "Tesla changes meaning of ‘Full Self-Driving’, gives up on promise of autonomy".

Again, to me "Full Self-Driving" never meant you would retro-fit your Tesla to remove the steering wheel, nor even set it for someplace and go to sleep. To me, it meant not needing to have your hands on the steering wheel and being able to have a conversation while maintaining some sort of situational awareness, although not necessarily keeping your eyes fully on the road for the more monotonous parts of a journey.

As others have pointed out, Tesla/Musk sometimes claimed more than that, but the vast majority of their statements re: FSD hew closer to what I said above. At least I think so -- no one yet has posted something where claims of more than the above are explicit and in the majority.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-06 18:57:46+00:00
Details please.

Things people say who know very little about ASN.1:

- it's bloated! (it's not)

- it's had lots of vulnerabilities! (mainly in hand-coded codecs)

- it's expensive (it's not -- it's free and has been for two decades)

- it's ugly (well, sure, but so is PB's IDL)

- the language is context-dependent, making it harder to write a parser for (this is quite true, but so what, it's not that big a deal)

The vulnerabilities were only ever in implementations, and almost entirely in cases of hand-coded codecs, and the thing that made many of these vulnerabilities possible was the use of tag-length-value encoding rules (BER/DER/CER) which, ironically, Protocol Buffers bloody is too.

If you have a different objections to ASN.1, please list them.