MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-09-23 19:40:35+00:00
FWIW I think your style is better and more honest than most advocates. But I'd really love to see some examples of things that completely failed. Because there have to be some, right? But you hardly ever see an article from an AI advocate about something that failed, nor from an AI skeptic about something that succeeded. Yet I think these would be the types of things that people would truly learn from. But maybe it's not in anyone's financial interest to cross borders like that, for those who are heavily vested in the ecosystem.
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-23 19:40:38+00:00
I strongly disagree.

Maybe it's an age thing, a "head of household" thing, or just an A(u)DHD thing - but I've definitely been in places in my life where I didn't have time to do anything discretionary.

To put it another way - if they're willing to ask you to schedule time to talk to them, they're already violating social norms. Why would they bother to give you a way to get ahold of them if they didn't value the relationship? Why not just reply "I don't want to talk to you" instead?

It sounds to me like they're legitimately just way too busy, to the point that they're likely well down the road toward burnout and don't even have time for themselves.
by kelnos | 2025-09-23 19:40:41+00:00
I think the point here is that the Office Space reference is a joke about rape, which maybe was somewhat acceptable in 1999, but is not cool today.

And even then, it was only acceptable in 1999 because it was a joke about male-male homosexual rape (I doubt it would have been considered funny even back then if it was a joke about a man raping a woman), so on top of being a rape joke, it has some homophobic qualities to it.

(I do remember watching Office Space back in 1999 and finding that line hilarious, but that teenage version of me also thought saying "that's so gay" was a perfectly fine way to be negative about something. Times change, and people grow up and realize that some of the things they thought were funny were actually singling out marginalized groups in shitty ways.)

I think also your use of the phrase didn't really add anything to what you said. Certainly people in the in-group who both know that Office Space reference, and still think it's funny will get it and chuckle, but everyone else will just think it's a weird and/or offensive way to describe it. And leaving it out entirely doesn't water down what you said. If you still feel like you need to emphasize that it's gonna be a maximum-security prison rather than Club Fed, you can just say "maximum-security federal prison", and everyone will understand.
by Leftium | 2025-09-23 19:40:54+00:00
Thought it was going to be this (from 17 years ago):

- https://www.benfry.com/zipdecode/

- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/446666

Of course, the results are pretty similar.

---

Another interesting ZIP code visualization: https://eagereyes.org/zipscribble-maps/united-states
by andrepd | 2025-09-23 19:41:09+00:00
Bike lanes reduce the number of cars on the road and therefore make it easier for vehicles that are actually necessary (delivery, work, emergency, etc) to travel and park, not harder. So do all viable alternatives to driving. That in 2025 people still unironically say "just one more lane bro, and we'll solve traffic" is almost unbelievable.
by tjohns | 2025-09-23 19:41:13+00:00
If so, then the DMV test is (presumably) wrong. California Vehicle Code §21211 says it's generally illegal to block a bike lane:

"No person may place or park any bicycle, vehicle, or any other object upon any bikeway or bicycle path or trail, as specified in subdivision (a), which impedes or blocks the normal and reasonable movement of any bicyclist unless the placement or parking is necessary for safe operation or is otherwise in compliance with the law."

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21211/

CVC §21209 says that you can park in a bike lane only if parking is otherwise permitted (e.g. it's a marked parking spot).

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21209/

SF city code also lists it as a separate parking infraction: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

Checking the DMV handbook, their description is similar. They say "it is illegal to drive in a bicycle lane unless you are parking (where permitted)" - plus turning or entering/exiting the road. [Source: CA Driver's Handbook, pp. 17, emphasis mine]
by botirk | 2025-09-23 19:41:38+00:00
I built FastKey, a Redis-compatible key-value store written from scratch in C.

It started as a project to understand Redis internals.

It turned into a complete implementation with real-world features.

Key features: → Full RESP protocol compatibility (works with redis-cli and Redis clients) → Master-slave replication with PSYNC → Streams support (XADD, XRANGE, XREAD) → Transactions (MULTI / EXEC / DISCARD) → Thread-safe concurrent handling with read-write locks → RDB persistence format → 256 tests with 100% pass rate

The focus was on memory safety, proper cleanup, and thread safety. The code is clean C with a modular architecture so you can actually follow how things work.

This could be useful as: → A learning resource for anyone curious about Redis internals → A lightweight alternative when you need Redis compatibility without the full Redis overhead

I would love feedback on the architecture, threading model, and implementation details.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 19:41:55+00:00
> How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park?

The only city where this is a problem is New York, because we don’t have alleys in our densest neighbourhoods. And in New York, our solution is for folks to park illegally and the meter maids to print tickets which are treated as a business expense.

In San Francisco, park in an alley, deliver at night, or park away from the site and use a scooter or whatnot to make the last mile. (Or eat the ticket.)
by jrmg | 2025-09-23 19:42:05+00:00
Amazed that there are no comments yet mentioning HUML:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45335129

It was on the front page yesterday!

Human-oriented Markup Language

HUML is a simple, strict, serialization language for documents, datasets, and configuration. It prioritizes strict form for human-readability. It looks like YAML, but tries to avoid its complexity, ambiguity, and pitfalls.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-23 19:42:11+00:00
> We're so helpless in the face of LLM technology that "having some victims, having some damages" (rather than reading what you submit to the court) is the inevitable price of progress in the legal profession?

Same with FSD at Tesla, there's many people who think that accidents and fatalities are "worth it" to get to the goal. And who cares if you, personally, disagree? They're comfortable that the risk to you of being hit by a Tesla that failed to react to you is an acceptable price of "the mission"/goal.
by vanyle | 2025-09-23 19:42:12+00:00
For CLI tools, the program usually only executes for a few seconds and then returns. In this context, you don't even need arena allocators or any memory management at all. You can write the tool in C with malloc and let the OS free the memory at the end without worry.

You could argue with the reasoning that C feels more practical than Zig for real-world CLI tools.

The argument provided by the author feels a bit besides the point.
by leakycap | 2025-09-23 19:42:29+00:00
> I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor.

It might be a situation where you see it differently because you were involved or benefiting from the way things unfolded

> That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition [...] wouldn't describe any of it as toxic

Competition can be healthy, Rails vs Merb was anything but. Quotes from Yehuda himself:

••• "I was just so blinded by tribalism that I never even bothered to check how fundamental the disagreements really were."

••• "waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy"

••• "It's so easy for our brains to turn disagreements about priorities into value conflicts. It takes a lot of effort to see past that mistake."

https://yehudakatz.com/2020/02/19/together-the-merb-story/
by roasbeef | 2025-09-23 19:42:35+00:00
> Free and open payments should be bitcoin based to be truely decentralized

Agreed. Which is why 5 years ago, I developed L402 (formerly known as LSAT) to fill this very gap:

* https://github.com/lightninglabs/L402 (https://lightning-labs-2.gitbook.io/lsat) * https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/

The x402 protocol as defined uses purely out of band payment verification. This trait makes the "one line of code" to add integration not entirely accurate, as there's still a substantial amount of code needed at both the client and server to verify payment receipt.

L402 is more opinionated as utilizes the Lightning Network (LN) directly within the protocol. The server presents the client with a SHA 256 payment hash embedded within an LN invoice. The server requires the client to present the pre-image for said payment hash. The only way the client can obtain said pre-image is by paying the invoice on the Lightning Network (all payments are conditional payments where a pre-image needs to be revealed to complete a payment).

L402 also adds a layer of macaroons, enabling the protocol handle both payment and fine-grained authentication.

The advantages of LN over something like Coinbase's Base chain include:

* Privacy: Coinbase and the entire world sees all your transactions. * Decentralization & Reliability: Base is a singleton instance, if it goes down, you can't make any transactions. LN is decentralized, just like the internet, you can always route around failures. * Settlement Speed: Base blocks happen every 2 seconds, until that period your transaction isn't finalized. However that's only committing to Base, and not the underlying ETH chain, which has 12 second block time. Latency on LN is primarily a function of e2e network delay, so it can be as little as 100 ms.
by kragen | 2025-09-23 19:42:50+00:00
A first-order Markov-chain text generator is not complex at all; it's a one-line shell script, reformatted here onto three lines for clarity:

perl -ane 'push@{$m{$a}},$a=$_ for@F;END{ print$a=$m{$a}[rand@{$m{$a}}]," "for 1..100_000 }' <<<'fish fish for fish.'

Given the King James Bible instead of "fish fish for fish." as input, this program produces output like this:

25:13 As the hands upon his disciple; but make great matter wisely in their calamity; 1:14 Sanctify unto the arches thereof unto them: 28:14 Happy is our judges ruled, that believe. 19:36 Thus saith the first being one another's feet.

This leans pretty hard on Perl DWIM; a Python version is many times longer:

import random, sys model, last, word = {None: []}, None, None for word in (word for line in sys.stdin for word in line.split()): model.setdefault(last, []).append(last := word) sys.stdout.writelines(str(word := random.choice(model.get(word) or words)) + " " for words in [list(model.keys())] for i in range(100_000))

(If you write code like that at a job, you might get fired. I would reject your pull request.)

It's probably worth mentioning:

- Markov-chain states don't have to be words. For text modeling, a common thing to do is to use N-grams (of either words or characters) instead of single words for your states.

- It's good to have some nonzero probability to take a transition that hasn't occurred in the training set; this is especially important if you use a larger universe of states, because each state will occur fewer times in the training set. "Laplacian smoothing" is one way to do this.

- Usually (and in my code examples above) the probability distribution of transitions we take in our text generator is the probability distribution we inferred from the input. Potter's approach of multiplying his next-state-occupancy vector Ms⃗ by a random diagonal matrix R and then taking the index of the highest value in the resulting vector produces somewhat similar results, but they are not the same; for example

sum(random.random() * 0.75 > random.random() * 0.25 for i in range(1_000_000))

is roughly 833000, not roughly 750000. It's 5× as common instead of 3×. But I imagine that it still produces perfectly cromulent text.

Interestingly, modern compilers derive from Chomsky's theory of linguistics, which he formulated while working on an AI project in the 01950s in order to demolish the dominant theory of psychology at the time, behaviorism. Behaviorism essentially held that human minds were Markov chains, and Chomsky showed that Markov chains couldn't produce context-free languages.
by __erik | 2025-09-23 19:42:50+00:00
x402 abstracts away gas! You can try here from a human use standpoint: https://www.x402.org/protected And you can see how to accept stablecoins or spend in the the examples https://github.com/coinbase/x402/tree/main/examples/typescri... https://github.com/coinbase/x402/blob/main/examples/typescri...
by vessenes | 2025-09-23 19:43:20+00:00
You have LLM derangement syndrome, and don’t understand.

Say the first model cost $2 to make. On metered sales, they’ve made $10 on it.

They then decide to make a $20 model, raising more money. It turns out, that model made $100.

They then decide to make a $1,000 model. That model made $5,000.

There are two possible paths for their shiny new $10,000 model: either it will be a better market fit than the 1k model, or it will not.

If it is a better market fit than the 1k model, then it seems very likely that at some point it will make more than $10,000 (2x the prior model’s utility).

If it does not provide better value, then you can scrub that model, and keep selling the $1k model. Eventually it will likely provide the additional $5k of investor capital back through profits.

What we have seen is this above scenario, with a couple twists: first, the training (capital investment) decisions overlay the useful life of the prior model, so you have to tease out the profitability when you think strategy. Second, it turns out there’s quite a lot of money to be made distilling models the market likes into models that give like 90% better profit.

So, these businesses paying billions of dollars to train frontier models are absolutely rational actors. They are aggressive actors, engaged in an arms race, and not all of them will survive. But right now, with current inference demand, if all the global training capital dried up, (and therefore we are stuck with current models for some time), they would become highly, highly profitable companies during the period where fast followers tried to come in and compete on price.
by Hasz | 2025-09-23 19:43:20+00:00
I looked at this space about 3 years ago, what I want seems to still not exist

I am looking to sell physical goods for low total amounts (<$10 usd) via a website. The most basic e-commerce you can imagine.

In particular, what I want:

- fast-ish payments (settlement in <2hr)

- low/zero per-payment cost, low % fee

- your average HN user could figure out how to use it to pay

What I don't need:

- subscriptions

- payment-level fraud protection

- payment-level kyc

- customer financing (a la Klarna)

- rev rec

It seems like Fednow or lightning would meet some (most?) of these requirements, but I have not yet seen it in the wild.
by malyk | 2025-09-23 19:43:29+00:00
I've had success here by simply telling Codex which components to use. I initially imported all the shadcn components into my project and then I just say things like "Create a card component that includes a scrollview component and in the scrollview add a table with a dropdown component in the third column"...and Codex just knows how to add the shadcn components. This is without internet access turned on by the way.
by Casteil | 2025-09-23 19:43:46+00:00
Charging is a lossy process. Charging a battery, then using it to charge another battery isn't as efficient.

Plus, depending on how/where it's used, having to wait for it to recharge while connected to a power bank might be a non-starter. You also don't necessarily want to recharge while transporting in a bag either because of heat concerns.
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-23 19:44:00+00:00
This is kinda taking me aback a bit :).

I live in a small town (<15k), with the nearest city of 100k people or more several hours away. Having this degree of detail and low latency is impressive.

I happen to be in SF right now on business, and walked outside. There was an officer about a block away, right where the map said they were ~10m ago.
by rwmj | 2025-09-23 19:44:03+00:00
My possibly controversial take is that the original moon race would have been a lot more sustainable if the US hadn't attempted to land (at first). The Soviets could likely have built a rocket which also orbited the moon, based on Vostok / Soyuz. With both superpowers fairly evenly matched, the space race would have continued in earnest, rather than the US essentially winning and then sliding into complacency.
by larkost | 2025-09-23 19:45:11+00:00
Some years back, at a previous employer I had a related thundering herd problem: I was running an automated testing lab, and if a new job came in after a period of idleness, then we would have 100+ computers all downloading 3 (or more) multi gigabyte files at the same time (software-under-test, symbols files, and compiled tests).

To make matters worse, due to the budget for this lab, we had just three servers that the testing computers could download from. In the worst case the horrible snarl-up would cause computers to wait for as much as two hours before they got the materials needed to run the tests.

My solution was to use peer-to-peer BitTorrent (no Trackers involved), with HTTP seeding. So the BitTorrent files had no trackers listed, but the three servers listed as HTTP seeds, and the clients were all started with local peer discovery. So the first couple of computers to get the job would pull most/all of the file contents from our servers, and then the rest of the computers would wind up getting the file chunks mostly from their peers.

I did need to do some work so that the clients would first try a URL on the servers that would check for the .torrent file, and if it did not exist, build it (sending the clients a 503 code, causing them to wait a minute or two before retrying).

There are lots of things I would do differently if I rebuilt the system (write my own peer-to-peer code), but the result meant that we rarely had systems waiting more than a few minutes to get full files. It took the thundering heard and made it its own solution.
by rimunroe | 2025-09-23 19:45:14+00:00
Others have already pointed out some of the obvious issues with your reasoning, but I'd like to add that improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure can actually make it easier for motorists by reducing the number of vehicles on the road and by easing congestion through traffic calming. You can actually end up with more parking spaces because while some parking spaces may be lost by adding bike paths (which is not a given!) it's entirely possible this is offset by a reduced number of cars on the road.

Also, in places with good bike infrastructure it's normal to see food delivery drivers riding bikes instead of driving cars.
by TheRealBrianF | 2025-09-23 19:45:26+00:00
I think you're obliquely referring to me there.

I covered some of this in one of my previous blogs where i talked about the systemic challenges here that I've uncovered. The heavy users that I spoke to, 100% of them had a repository manager, some Nexus, others Artifactory. And yet the high levels of consumption still persisted. I discussed some of the reasons for this in the blog link below... but I think this refutes the theory that simply having yet another caching proxy solves the problem. It really doesn't. Additionally as Mike discussed, bandwidth is only part of the challenge. Without the people behind the repositories doing the malware response, the curation of namespaces etc, there wouldn't be anything to proxy anyway.

https://www.sonatype.com/blog/free-isnt-free-the-hidden-cost...
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-23 19:46:10+00:00
it's called an HOA or a master planned community and its a voluntary agreement between homeowners, not something any one homeowner is entitled to over the protestations of others. People who want to join an HOA are entitled to do that, and people who don't are entitled to not, but that's different from the law because the law is not optional or voluntary. It is, by its very nature, a restriction on the liberties of people without their express consent. What you're talking about is very, very different and deserves to be discussed independently of this.
by wrs | 2025-09-23 19:46:37+00:00
1. Research -> Plan -> Implement

2. Write down the principles and assumptions behind the design and keep them current

In other words, the same thing successful human teams on complex projects do! Have we become so addicted to “attention-deficit agile” that this seems like a new technique?

Imagine, detailed specs, design documents, and RFC reviews are becoming the new hotness. Who would have thought??
by xgbi | 2025-09-23 19:46:58+00:00
Cause the codebase wasn't in my scope originally and I had to review in emergency due to a regression in production. I took the time to understand the issue at hand and why the code had to change.

To be clear, the guy moved back a Docker image from being non-root (user 1000), to reusing a root user and `exec su` into the user after doing some root things in the entrypoint. The only issue is that when looking at the previous commit, you could see that the K8S deployment using this image wrongly changed the userId to be 1000 instead of 1001.

But since the coding guy didn't take the time to take a cursory look at why working things started to not work, he asked the LLM "I need to change the owner of some files so that they are 1001" and the LLM happily obliged by using the most convoluted way (about 100 lines of code change).

The actual fix I suggested was:

securityContext: - runAsUser: 1000 + runAsUser: 1001
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-23 19:47:02+00:00
I mean... I ordered dinner last night after getting into SF around 2am. Not only did I meet the Dasher in my hotel's lobby, when I saw the direction he was coming from on the app, I went outside, across the street, and over to the alley he was coming down then held my phone up so he could see me.

I don't live here, but I can see parking is a huge hassle. Why make the poor guy circle the block until the hotel's portico had an opening for him to park when I could just walk like 50', get my food faster, and save him 5-10 minutes?
by vessenes | 2025-09-23 19:47:08+00:00
I think you’re wrong. Consider the following. It’s 1995. You and your next door neighbour Jeff Bezos have both just raised $10mm from competing VCs to build amazon.com.

You can choose to have a Claude API portal to the future where you pay 2025 prices for token inference, or you can skip it, and use 1995 devs to build your competitor.

Which do you do?
by jawns | 2025-09-23 19:47:31+00:00
One of the reasons why I think Google Photos is pushing out this functionality is that these new AI-generated variations count toward your overall storage.

So hey, you take a selfie, 3 MB. And now you want your selfie to show yourself posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, and the Grand Canyon. OK, now you've added an additional 12 MB.

Do that often enough, and you'll have to buy another block of Google One storage, which is MRR for Google.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-09-23 19:47:35+00:00
The law has been widely communicated.

You could argue that people cannot be expected to carry tape measures with them, because their glove compartments are too small.

But the difficulty of judging the distance from the intersection is a factor in a minority of cases.

SFMTA could have chosen to enforce the law but allow a tolerance of 5 feet. That would start providing safety benefits earlier without surprising any driver who made an honest mistake in their estimate of the distance.