MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyrados | 2025-09-03 16:35:16+00:00
This is an oversimplification. Density in fact makes public infrastructure more efficient and more predictable.

As Mason Gaffney notes in his article, "Containment Policies for Urban Sprawl"

"Consider water distribution. If demand doubles within a fixed service area by doubling density, we need simply expand all pipe diameters—and not by double, but by the square root of two, since cross-sections increase with the square of the radius. But if demand doubles by doubling the service area, at constant density, we must, (a) double our pipe mileage; (b) double the cross section of our old system at its base, and more than double it elsewhere, to transmit the extra load through to the new extension; (c) increase pressure at the system load center to maintain it at the fringes (especially if the new lands are higher); and (d) upgrade our pipe-joints to hold the extra pressure.

Actually those four simplest considerations understate the case a good deal. We should add the factor of peaking. The fewer customers on a given line, the higher is the usual ratio of peak demand to mean daily demand because there is less pooling of offsetting demand patterns, and more lawn sprinkling. There is also a factor of planning expansion.

"Containing urban sprawl" does not imply halting growth, but holding it inside compact increments, whose ultimate density is known in advance and will be reached quickly, saving utilities from the waste of under- or oversizing their lines in the face of uncertainty. Urban sprawl as known today not only reduces density but breeds extreme uncertainty of future density."
by pjmlp | 2025-09-03 16:35:49+00:00
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, what I see is current generations completely ignoring what was taught to them during the last decades.

I can surely tell, the memories of my parents and family members that had to live under the regime isn't really that those were better days, unless one was a collaborator.

Try to do some public comment that can be misused to mean some kind of bad opinion on the regime, and off you go, out of the map.

Like how Amnesty International came to be,

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/amnesty-inte...
by cnst | 2025-09-03 16:36:12+00:00
Maybe enough with the character assassinations?

The first thing I do on an Android is skip the Google Account screen (bypassing the Play Store), open the pre-installed Chrome browser to install F-Droid, and then uninstall/disable Chrome. You can then install any other browser from F-Droid, or through Aurora Store through F-Droid, without any login credentials for any service.

Can you do that on an iPhone or iPad?

Can you install any app without having an Apple Account?

Can you uninstall Safari and replace it with any other browser? (For those unaware, Chrome and Firefox on iOS in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, having the exact same rendering bugs and issues as Safari; so, there's actually no way to install any other browser besides Safari on iOS.)
by Robdel12 | 2025-09-03 16:36:40+00:00
My mom is 100% blind, everything I build I make sure my mom can use it. I remediated visa checkout to save a tier 1 bank contract and got them to WCAG2.0 compatibility. With my “credentials” out do the way…

Ugh, this is what sort of bothers me about the accessibility community. Something about it is always coming off preachy and like a moral argument. This is the worst way to get folks to actually care. You’re just making them feel bad.

Look the fact is everyone needs to use technology to live these days. And us devs suck ass at making those things accessible. Even in the slightest. It won’t be until we all age into needing it when it finally becomes a real issue that’s tackled. Until then, tools like LLMs are going to be amazingly helpful. Posts like this are missing the forest in the trees.

My mom has been using ChatGPT for a ton of things that’s helpful. It’s a massive net positive. The LLM alt tags Facebook added a long time ago, massively helpful. Perfect? Hell no. But we gotta stop acting like these improvements aren’t helpful and aren’t progress. It comes across as whiny. I say this as someone who is in this community.
by stavros | 2025-09-03 16:36:53+00:00
You can think that AI ruins everything, or that tracking ads ruin everything, but the reality is that VC investment ruins everything, because it turns you from the customer to the product.

I guess the eventual culprit is capitalism, where profit is the ultimate goal for everything, so there will never be a single product that is not enshittified in this way.

The best part? If you don't like it, there's nothing you can do! It's the whole culture.
by killermonkeys | 2025-09-03 16:37:01+00:00
Worth underlining that designers work very hard to understand the needs of the particular situation.

Usually type designers consider the legibility of 3, 6, 8, 9, 0 (particularly 8 and 0) to be more important than between O and 0. But for coders, the ambiguity between O and 0 is a big problem, so a designer would consider that.

An example for pilots: you are heading 180 and radio it as "one zero eight". Even if you immediately correct yourself, it's a problem.
by Ukv | 2025-09-03 16:37:36+00:00
> Question is why would you need to have the computer sound more human

I think translation would be a big use - maybe translating your voice to another language while maintaining emotion and intonation, or dubbing content (videos, movies, podcasts, ...) that isn't otherwise available in your native language.

Traditional non-ML TTS for longer content like podcasts or audiobooks seems like it'd become grating to the point of being unlistenable, or at least a significantly worse experience. Stands to benefit from more natural sounding voices that can place emphasis in the right places.

Since Stephen Hawking was brought up, there are likely also people with voice-impairing illnesses who would like to speak in their own voice again (in addition to those who are fine with a robotic voice). Or alternatively, people who are uncomfortable with their natural voice and want to communicate closer to how they wish to be perceived.

Could also potentially be used for new forms of interactive media that aren't currently feasible - customised movies, audio dramas where the listener plays a role, videogame NPCs that react with more than just prerecorded lines, etc.
by Yoric | 2025-09-03 16:37:42+00:00
Not sure I follow. The limitation has never been about the developer being able to write a complex feature in one MR. It has always been about the other developer not being able to review a complex MR.

So far, nothing I've seen convinces me that machines can (yet) write or review code autonomously (although they can certainly be useful as assistants). Maybe some day.
by groby_b | 2025-09-03 16:37:46+00:00
> An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function

That must be why we talk about leaky abstractions so much.

They're neither pure functions, nor are they always deterministic. We as a profession have been spoilt by mostly deterministic code (and even then, we had a chunk of probabilistic algorithms, depending on where you worked).

Heck, I've worked with compilers that used simulated annealing for optimization, 2 decades ago.

Yes, it's a sea change for CRUD/SaaS land. But there are plenty of folks outside of that who actually took the "engineering" part of software engineering seriously, and understand just fine how to deal with probabilistic processes and risk management.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-03 16:38:01+00:00
Yep, that's why I watch it. The baking part is cool, I'm a home baker myself and all, but not the main draw. It's not like I'm gonna be making three tier cakes with macaron waterfalls any time. I watch the show because the people are genuinely nice to each other and help each other out when it gets tough.
by alexashka | 2025-09-03 16:38:03+00:00
Step 1. Have something of non-trivial value to others

Step 2. Doesn't matter

This applies not only to giving a good talk but living a good life. Unless you were born beautiful - step 1 takes 10-20 years of conscious effort to develop. Everything else is marketing/advertising, otherwise known as lies (99% of what's on HN, for example)
by tialaramex | 2025-09-03 16:38:20+00:00
> To point out that use after free is possible in Odin is not really a gotcha unless you really are just arguing semantics

In a language with UB, the use after free is UB. Which explains the nonsensical results.

If you're pretty sure this all makes sense, I recommend one tiny tweak to further unsettle you, change either (but not both) of the int types in my example to u8 instead. Now the use after free also results in type confusion - Odin has no idea this isn't the same type and so the machine code generated is for one type but the actual bits are for a different type with a different layout.

Bill's go-to is to blame somebody else, it's the operating system, or even the CPU which should define what happens and so it's not his fault. The thread you linked does this. But for type confusion those are Odin's types, nobody else can define how Odin works, the answer must come from Bill. What is supposed to happen here? Linux didn't define your programming language, Intel didn't define your programming language, this is your fault Bill.
by dahart | 2025-09-03 16:38:29+00:00
And? Are you imagining that these aren’t both true at the same time? If so, I’m happy to explain. Since nothing has been proven, there’s nothing “scientific”. And since there’s some disagreement, “consensus” has not been achieved yet. This is why your presumptive use of “scientific consensus” was not correct, and why the term “scientific consensus” is not the same thing as “most people think”. A split of 60/40 or 75/25 or even 90/10 counts as “most” but does not count as “consensus”. So I guess maybe be careful about assuming what something means, it seems like this thread was limited by several incorrect assumptions.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-03 16:38:54+00:00
I turned this research

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

into a smart RSS reader that does the same for about 110 RSS feeds. Something missing out of most UI's is a "see something once why see it again" interface where you can x something out and not see it again rather than scan and scan and scan and scan.
by time0ut | 2025-09-03 16:39:02+00:00
That is unfortunate. Not because I think they should have to, but because they eventually will have to if it gets big enough. Never underestimate the ability of your users to hold it wrong.

The default install only binds to loopback, so I am sure it is pretty common to just slap OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0 and move on to other things. I know I did at first, but my host isn't publicly routable and I went back the same night and added IPAddressDeny/Allow rules (among other standard/easy hardening).
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-03 16:39:10+00:00
The native permission system still works for limiting filesystem access. As for the kinds of things you're describing, I don't think containerization is an effective enough countermeasure. At least definitely not Docker, which includes a root daemon that can be made to run arbitrary commands. A VM, possibly with some of the host integration features disabled, is a better option but is more costly in terms of setup, usability, and power usage. For many, the cost far exceed the risk.
by compacct27 | 2025-09-03 16:39:18+00:00
Integrating these web components into our React codebase has been pretty awful--more of a web components thing than a Lit thing, IMO. We have "scoped styles", except for certain important things like font sizes, so tons of little regressions everywhere when we swap in the web component in place of the old React one. DX-wise, we lost a lot, too. I assume the tooling will get better, or that we'll figure it out more, but it's mostly been a drag
by genewitch | 2025-09-03 16:39:22+00:00
who says it's "1%"? i'd reckon it's closer to 50% than 1%; that could mean 27%, it could mean 40%. I always have this at the back of my mind when i say something, and someone rejects it by citing a paper (or two). I doubt they even read the paper they're telling me to read as proof i am wrong, to start with. And then the "what are the chances this is repro?" itches a bit.

This also ignores the fact that you can find a paper to support nearly everything if one is willing to link people "correlative" studies.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-03 16:39:30+00:00
> that Google Search is so good because it gets so much search traffic and, critically, user interaction data

If Bing's market share is 4%, then Bing still gets tons of user interaction data.

Bing gets something like 100M queries per day. That's more than enough data.

Microsoft has all the choice. They have the money. They can invest, like Google has invested and continues to invest. You don't get these things for free.

So yes, it is absolutely a choice. A small startup may be disadvantaged. But not Microsoft with over 15 years of user data from Bing.
by arcticbull | 2025-09-03 16:39:34+00:00
They really don't. You can run the numbers yourself. All the prices that it's computed from are public, the methodology is public and it's dead easy to backtest. Dead. Easy. (1 + (Inflation / 100)) ^ (Years). Inflation would be the dumbest possible thing to lie about because it's so damn easy to check.

The conversation always goes like this.

You: "The government is lying about inflation!"

Me: "Ok, what rate do you think it's actually been?"

You: "10%!"

Me: "So you're telling me inflation over the last 30 years was 1700%? So prices are now 17X higher than in 1995? You sure?"

Then we look up historical prices like this.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/this-is-what-grocerie...

In 1995 ground beef was $1.49/lb.

Bread was $.89/loaf.

Eggs were $0.92/doz.

Milk was $2.50/gal.

idk if you're shopping at Erewhon but where I shop ground beef isn't $25/lb, bread isn't $15/loaf, eggs, well, you got me there lol, and milk isn't $42.50/gal.

Unless the conspiracy is far bigger than we think, or "they" are everywhere, whoever "they" are, I think it's safe to assume that inflation numbers have been pretty accurate.
by bogwog | 2025-09-03 16:40:37+00:00
> What are you even saying? ChatGPT - a product that was launched in 2021 - is eating up internet search game. People have switched to that in throves, and Google can do nothing.

If ChatGPT really is stealing significant market share from Google, that's EVEN MORE of a reason to break up Google's monopoly. It's further proof that they are a monopoly, because one of the smoking guns of a monopoly is inability to innovate. Why should the market be held back by allowing Google to stay in the game when they're clearly not competitive? Their anti competitive behavior is preventing other, more innovative companies from being created.

> You're mistakenly assuming that Google has a lot of power, when in fact, they had none. People were using it because it was the superior product at the time.

I can't tell if this is a troll or not. I'm going to reply anyways, even though it probably is.

Google had, and currently has, all the power. The only 'lever' they don't have is control over internet access (although they do offer ISP services in some regions). I don't know what you mean by saying otherwise? By owning Search, Chrome, Android, and their ad network they have closed loop. Building a good search engine requires data, Search/Chrome/Android provide that data, and Chrome/Android + their illegal search deals funnel users into Search, which provides more data. That's why even this shitty half-assed remedy is requiring them to share some search data with rivals.
by sangnoir | 2025-09-03 16:40:48+00:00
> It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

The arch of history is long, and we are naturally biased to think of the present as the culmination of history - but it's just a point in time. I do not think "socialism will save us" - but I believe there is a breaking point where society simply will not accept a - as you put it - "more capitalist system".

Politics and economic systems go hand in hand, any economic system, practiced in extremis will be destabilizing. I posit that theoretically the "more capitalist system" wins over the less capitalist one, up to a point, where winning comes at the cost of killing the host society, and thus itself. This is simply a thought experiment, I am not making any declarations on where the US is on this axis.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-03 16:41:26+00:00
Here's the thing about measuring and precision. Baking requires less of it than people make out, and stovetop cooking benefits more from it than people make out. So neither popular conception is really right. With baking, I can tell you that I estimate stuff all the time and my bakes turn out just fine. For example, I learned how to estimate shortening as a kid because cleaning that out of a measuring cup is a real pain. There are some very technical recipes where you have to meticulously follow the directions, but that isn't most baking one will encounter.
by ruszki | 2025-09-03 16:41:39+00:00
First of all, you can rarely write down in English, what you want in 15 minutes… It’s even common to have longer specification, than its implementation. Just look at tests. Especially, if you want to do something which was never done before, the disparity can be staggering.

Claude Code for example is also not that quick at all. It produces some code quickly, but even scaffolding three hello world level example projects together definitely takes more than an hour. And that’s with zero novelty. The first version of code is done quickly, but the continuous loop of self corrections after that takes a long time. Even with Serena, Context7, and other MCPs.

And, of course, without real code review. That’s easily hours even with just few thousands lines of code, if it uses something which you don’t know. But I know that almost everybody gave up understanding “their” “own” code, during vibe coding. Even before AIs, it was a well known fact, that real code reviewing is hard, and people rarely did it.

AI can make you quicker in certain situations, but these “15 minutes” claims are totally baseless. This is one reason why many people are against AIs, vibe coding, etc. These stupid claims which cannot hold even the smallest scrutiny.
by MarkusQ | 2025-09-03 16:41:42+00:00
You are quite correct, that's not how it works.

Corn mazes are actually created by selectively planing the corn in a pattern or by selectively cutting down plants to create the maze. This can be done with a variety of different plants, but corn is a popular choice because of it's height, durability, and the timing of its harvest.

I suspect the similarity of its other name (maize) is just a coincidence.
by redserk | 2025-09-03 16:41:53+00:00
At this point I wouldn’t rely on PiHole DNS logs alone. You’d need to check network traffic from the device in general, it could use DoT/DoH.

And I suppose there’s the even-creeper Amazon Sidewalk: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

I hate sounding like I’m wearing a foil hat but there are a lot of easy ways to get around trying to neuter smart devices now.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-03 16:42:00+00:00
I recently un-borked my emacs config and re-downloaded elisp into my brain so I'd be happy to help walking you through the emacs stuff. I haven't used emacs on Windows natively in a long time but I did it for years and found it worked quite well so you may want to try that again.

FWIW emacs these days has native LSP support (eglot) and native tree-sitter supported, but you'll need to grab tree-sitter libraries and LSP servers. For MacOS I found just using brew to install most of these works great, and I wonder if Windows can't work the same way. If you're in a VM you should just be able to have your package manager do the work.

LLM support in emacs is still a bit primitive but there are packages like emacs claude-code that are changing things. Personally I wrote an elisp function which grabs the filename of the emacs window relative to the project root and copies it so that I can just paste it into claude code and have it ask questions or do things.

```

(defun copy-buffer-file-name-from-project-root () "Copy the relative path of the buffer in this project to the kill ring" (interactive) (kill-new (file-relative-name (buffer-file-name (current-buffer)) (project-root (project-current)))))

```

if you're curious but depending on how you have your clipboards setup with the kill ring, you may need to modify this.

---

As far as fighting the JS fight on the Zed website, well, I think this thread isn't one of those upvote-anti-JS-rant threads that spring up on this site all the time so shrug.
by si_164 | 2025-09-03 16:42:42+00:00
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by atoav | 2025-09-03 16:43:04+00:00
I thought multidimensional random walkers would make random choices on all dimensions, so:

step = [random.choice([-1,0,1]) for _d in range(n_dimensions)]

At least this is how I did 2D random walks as this allows for diagonal steps (with the downside that the walker travels longer steps in that direction).
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-03 16:43:31+00:00
The video games industry and the copyright monopolists were just the first bosses. Now we're dealing with banks. One day we'll have to deal with governments.

They think everything they do is justified and necessary. They've got a "legitimate" reason to do it so it's alright. Because total nonsense like fraud prevention is totally worth giving up our freedom for.
by wildpeaks | 2025-09-03 16:43:36+00:00
You can also use Web Components directly and manipulate them like regular HTML elements, no need to add a framework. Even using Shadow DOM isn't required.

Typescript can even add Intellisense to "customElements.get" by augmenting CustomElementRegistry: https://gist.github.com/cecilemuller/72fbb3bc3a77d82c8a969cd...
by whycome | 2025-09-03 16:43:52+00:00
ok. The comment was about Toronto in general rather than just downtown.

Snowfall near the lake can be lower because of the mediated temperature. (Unlike south of the lake like in Buffalo were you can get high lake-effect snow). In a dense core, you can have very different patterns of accumulation due to road and building layout.

Winters can be sporadic. Last year's was bad. Year before was light.

This is last year: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weather/severe/his...

What years were you there? I don't see how less than 'foot of snow total' is possible.

edit: These are the yearly totals (if the site's stats are to be believed). https://toronto.weatherstats.ca/charts/snow-yearly.html

Eyeball average puts it at like 100cm+
by arduanika | 2025-09-03 16:43:55+00:00
Yeah, I saw "How to Give a Good Talk" today and though, wow, that's still on the front page? But no, we've moved on to another take of the same topic.

I would highly recommend the video. It's not really fair to compare them, because TFA here is short and sweet, but I got a lot more out of the video.
by wrs | 2025-09-03 16:44:33+00:00
I can see that this is potentially a good sweet spot for the current state of AI. More complex and custom enterprise BI queries can get totally bollixed up in interpretation — even humans can’t agree on definitions so there’s no way to know if the query is “correct”. Perhaps in small business accounting SaaS you have the luxury of saying “this is the model, no substitutions please” and produce clearly interpretable answers.