MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RandomBacon | 2025-11-17 18:24:28+00:00
I take down scam bandit signs [0]. Since I noticed the Flock signs in one neighborhood, I no longer enter that neighborhood to take down the scam bandit signs.

[0] "Text us to see if you qaulify for (some non-existent) government program to get free (things)"

I hope that neighborhood enjoys the flock cameras more than the visual blight and their neighbors getting scammed.
by kube-system | 2025-11-17 18:25:00+00:00
Are you talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955996 ?

They were not confused, they were specifically talking about the distinction of 'certified' and how it applies to this article.

Colloquially, people commonly understand that "pre-owned" means "used".

This is different than people shortening their language while concurrently understanding the distinction.

How would anyone presume a warranty based off of the terms used or pre-owned? There's not an industry standard warranty that correlates to these terms. Anyone who's curious about a warranty would be told the terms of the warranty are anyway regardless of whether it was called it pre-owned or used.
by biophysboy | 2025-11-17 18:25:06+00:00
>If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.

Is it cheaper than buying a TV, and then having someone come install it on your wall? More meaningless drivel from Marc Andreesen.
by tptacek | 2025-11-17 18:25:19+00:00
Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches.

There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though). A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally only allows you to demand production of (1) actual documents that (2) the public body has (3) on hand (or are generally deemed to have on hand, such as email records).

So it's pretty legally dubious that you can use FOIA to compel production from Flock (you can probably compel, from the public body, any number of reports Flock can generate --- we've done that here for our Flock network and sharing configurations, for instance).

Here it sounds like a WA judge might be saying that some corpus of data Flock maintains is effectively public data. If that's the case, that's a novel interpretation.
by super256 | 2025-11-17 18:25:36+00:00
I just read the MDN article of WS and you are right: WT is indeed treated as the successor of WS (in many use cases), which I did not expect at all: 'Additionally, the WebTransport API is expected to replace the WebSocket API for many applications. WebTransport is a versatile, low-level API that provides backpressure and many other features not supported by either WebSocket or WebSocketStream, such as unidirectional streams, out-of-order delivery, and unreliable data transmission via datagrams.'

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_...
by weepinbell | 2025-11-17 18:25:50+00:00
Certainly charities exist that are ineffective, but there is very strong evidence that there exist charities that do enormous amounts of direct, targeted good.

givewell.org is probably the most prominent org recommended by many EAs that does and aggregates research on charitable interventions and shows with strong RCT evidence that a marginal charitable donation can save a life for between $3,000 and $5,500. This estimate has uncertainty, but there's extremely strong evidence that money to good charities like the ones GiveWell recommends massively improves people's lives.

GiveDirectly is another org that's much more straightforward - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty, with very low overheads. The evidence that that improves people's lives is very very strong (https://www.givedirectly.org/gdresearch/).

It absolutely makes sense to be concerned about "is my hypothetical charitable donation actually doing good", which is more or less a premise of the EA movement. But the answer seems to be "emphatically, yes, there are ways to donate money that do an enormous amount of good".
by mattvr | 2025-11-17 18:25:52+00:00
While WebTransport is promising, it's limited to client-server communication unlike WebRTC.

WebRTC supports peer-to-peer UDP connections as well. Thus it's better for use cases like low-latency games, video calling, and secure direct communication between devices.

A better push might be to make WebRTC more simple and modern, but I'm not sure if any standards committees are working on this yet.
by RationPhantoms | 2025-11-17 18:26:35+00:00
I've personally used the Lidar sensors on my iPhone with an app like Polycam to some degree of success. I was doing a scan of a massive oak tree in my backyard to plan out the treehouse tab location and associated treehouse for my kids but fell flat after the model was created (Sketchup is truly enshittified). I'd imagine a similar process for creating the "fill" for the void in the wall.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-17 18:26:35+00:00
Completely agree. You see this all the time in online discourse. I call it the "two things can be true at the same time" problem, where a lot of people seem unable to believe that 2 things can simultaneously be true, in this case:

1. Google has engaged in a lot of anticompetitive behavior to maintain and extend their web monopoly.

2. Removing XSLT support from browsers is a good idea that is widely supported by all major browser vendors.
by tombert | 2025-11-17 18:26:41+00:00
As I have gotten older, I have grown immense respect for older people who can geek out over stuff.

It’s so easy to be cynical and not care about anything, I am certainly guilty of that. Older people who have found things that they can truly geek out about for hours are relatively rare and some of my favorite people as a result (and part of the reason that I like going to conferences).

I like my coworkers and they’re certainly not anti-intellectual or anything, but there’s only so long I can ramble on about TLA+ or Isabelle or Alloy before they lose interest. It’s not a fault on them at all, there are plenty of topics I am not interested in.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-17 18:26:50+00:00
The sites that will be broken are disproportionately important though. Congress.gov/govinfo.gov, weather.gov, europa.gov, plus dozens of sites for libraries, and universities.

Looking only at how many sites use a feature gives you an incomplete view. If a feature were only used by Wikipedia, it'd still be inappropriate to deprecate it with a breaking change and a short (1yr) migration window. You work with the important users to retire it and then start pulling the plug publicly to notify everyone you might have missed.
by jmount | 2025-11-17 18:26:53+00:00
Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism are just a couple of the presentations authoritarians sometimes make for convenience. To me the code simply as "if I had everything now, that would eventually be good for everybody."

The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.
by parpfish | 2025-11-17 18:26:54+00:00
that example of the radiologist review cases touches on one worry i have about automation with human-in-the-loop for safety. specifically that a human in the loop wont work as a safeguard unless they are meaningfully engaged beyond being a simple reviewer.

how do you sustain attention and thoughtfully review radiological scans when 99% of the time you agree with the automated assessment? i'm pretty sure that no matter how well trained the doctor is they will end up just spamming "LGTM" after a while.
by tylervigen | 2025-11-17 18:27:19+00:00
For lay-users they could have explained that better. I think they may not have completely uninformed users in mind for this page though.

Developing an ensemble of possible scenarios has been the central insight of weather forecasting since the 1960s when Edward Lorenz discovered that tiny differences in initial conditions can grow exponentially (the "butterfly effect"). Since they could really do it in the 90s, all competitive forecasts are based on these ensemble models.

When you hear "a 70% chance of rain," it more or less means "there was rain in 70 of the 100 scenarios we ran."[0] There is no "single accurate forecast scenario."

[0] Acknowledging this dramatically oversimplifies the models and the location where the rain could occur.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-17 18:27:35+00:00
You have a good point, but is a phone equal to your private home, or is it similar to a car (where you are required to have transparent glass windows). Is it a right or a privilege?

But to challenge your argument further, if the majority are fine with having cameras in their homes that don't transmit unless a crime is detected, isn't that just democracy?

What's getting lost in this discussion might be the fact that the majority of people don't care that much about privacy, especially when heinous crimes are involved. Furthermore, the equivalent would be house builders installing cameras in homes, not home owners being required to install one. But a reasonable compromise might be scanning content being transmitted instead of stored?
by dh2022 | 2025-11-17 18:27:44+00:00
In my view if the local dealers will go to hell in a hand basket I won’t shed a tear. Michael’s Subaru of Bellevue couldn’t tighten some gasket under the car and my car was leaking oil after the oil change. When I took the car to the dealership they said it was because of my car being too old (older Subarus have indeed a problem with oil leaks). The guy behind the counter looked like he had anger management problems with my request to take another look. So yeah, if Amazon will put these dealerships out of business - good riddance.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-17 18:27:54+00:00
I mean, yeah. What percentage of searches for "Amazon" in today's world do you think is going to not be about acquiring cheap shit very quickly? I would expect the tech company to be a better answer than most when someone searches for Amazon. Searching for "the amazon" gives the expected results as that's how it is more commonly referred. So it does seems like your search query as performed was just a bad search
by _dain_ | 2025-11-17 18:28:54+00:00
idiotic populist move. resellers exist because the listed price is much lower than the price people are willing to pay. banning them doesn't make the demand go away. this will just create a black market in resold tickets, with no legal recourse against fraud etc.

yookay government's crusade to outlaw all useful economic activity continues apace. you can't legislate away scarcity.

EDIT:

>How is scalping a useful economic activity? What new value is created by for example buying up loads of Taylor Swift concert tickets and selling them at a marked up price?

if I don't want to wait in a queue or spam F5 on a website at 4 in the morning so I can be one of the first, I can instead pay somebody to do all that tedious work for me, and they can profit from it. this is a valuable service that I'm willing to pay for, and have in fact paid for with no regrets whatsoever.

SCARCITY IS A FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC FACT. more people want to attend a concert than there are seats available. this scarcity must be rationed in some way. there are many ways: queues, lotteries, clientelism, theft. prices are one of the more efficient mechanisms, because unlike the others, money can be directly traded, stored, accounted for, and is a means by which the value of other goods and services can be compared.

if I wait in a queue, that is a cost I have to pay, but it is simply lost. it goes nowhere. but if I pay someone else to sit in the queue for me, I can do something else useful with the time I would have spent in the queue, and that other person can then use the money to buy something else in the future. that is the value of scalping! moreover, that one other person can sit in the queue on behalf of N other people; we all benefit from this economic specialisation and reduction of redundancy.

scalpers are the unjustly persecuted heroes of our economy. they are apostates from Queueing, our national religion.
by uecker | 2025-11-17 18:28:56+00:00
IMHO and maybe counterintuitively, I do not think the existence of UB makes it harder to do formal verification or have safe C implementations. The reason is that you can treat it as an error if the program encounters UB, so one can either derive local requirements or add run-time checks (such as Fil-C) and then obtains spatial and temporal isolation of memory object.
by retrac | 2025-11-17 18:29:00+00:00
Very cool. I've been sketching out a relay computer myself. Mostly unbuilt but I have tested a variety of circuits implementing gates, latches, oscillators, flip flops, counters, registers all using only SPST reed relays.

I'm fixated on speed. I connected some reed relays in a 3 stage ring oscillator and it ran at 1.8 kHz. That has me thinking that with a pipeline 100 instructions a second might be attainable. Reed relay logic seems to be fast enough for a UART at 50 baud. Teletype interactivity is a stretch goal.

My program counter is also 12 bits! And I've also been using Digital to simulate parts of it. Great tool for that.

The current design is RISC-like with a 12 bit word requiring 4 cycles for most instructions. I have an old version of the design specified in gate level Verilog. I should publish that. Though I'm forever tinkering with the control such that it'll probably never be done. Karnaugh maps are like Sudoku.
by taylodl | 2025-11-17 18:30:00+00:00
They’re referring to the demand shock effect: tariffs raise prices on imports, which suppresses overall demand and reduces aggregate spending. Since inflation measures the general price level, weaker demand can offset cost-push effects, producing lower inflation readings. Technically correct - but highly counterintuitive and easy to spin. The average American struggles with fractions and percentages - especially per capita statistics - so they know they won't understand this.
by traverseda | 2025-11-17 18:30:07+00:00
ImHex will tell you if it's compressed. Do you understand data structures? Floats, all those data types?

I'd suggest looking at a format like msgpack to see what a binary data format could look like: https://msgpack.org/

Then be aware that proprietary formats are going to be a lot more complicated. Or maybe it's just zipped up json data, only way to tell is to start poking around at it.
by xethos | 2025-11-17 18:30:08+00:00
I agree, and that's the exact point I would make. The problem though, is I want a small phone with a headphone jack (and a physical keyboard, but that's orthogonal to the point).

Many OEMs sell their flagship as a shiny glass slab with only BT or USB-C for audio, and ship 3.5mm jacks and other "antiquated niceties" like a uSD card reader, on their lower-end models.

It's difficult to square the circle of "I want these specific features, but on a phone that's not working against me (any more than modern phones already do)"
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-17 18:30:20+00:00
> . . . but also what’s called long-termism, which is worrying about the future of the planet and existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, AI, or being hit by comets. When it made that shift, it began to attract a lot of Silicon Valley types, who may not have been so dedicated to the development part of the effective altruism program.

The rationalists thought they understood time discounting and thought they could correct for it. They were wrong. Then the internal contradictions of long-termism allowed EA to get suckered by the Silicon Valley crew.

Alas.
by tylervigen | 2025-11-17 18:30:59+00:00
> I don't feel as if I get any more accurate data now than I did back when my parents turned to the daily weather channel for the forecast.

The accuracy improvement is provable. A four-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast 30 years ago. And this is supremely impressive, because the difficulty of predicting the weather grows exponentially, not linearly, with time.

You are welcome to your feelings - and to be fair, I'm not sure that our understanding of the weather has improved as much as our computational power to extend predictions has.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-17 18:31:28+00:00
I completely agree with the point, and I've made the same point myself.

However, I think "good will hunting" is a bad example.

> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

There is a scene where they have this conversation without words. Robin Williams is asking him without spelling it out and Matt Damon understands what the question is and dances around it. They both know what they're talking about even if they don't put it into words. In the case of this specific movie the problem isn't communication, it's just that the main character is incapable of dealing with things inside him that he doesn't understand (aka "emotionally immature"). (well, that was my interpretation anyway).
by yawaramin | 2025-11-17 18:31:55+00:00
If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it.

Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure? Huge solar and wind farms spread out over vast areas, essentially destroying the local ecology? NPPs have a relatively tiny footprint.

Every cited source has a bias. You think 'Clean Technica' is unbiased? Come on.
by belorn | 2025-11-17 18:32:00+00:00
Here in Sweden, the use of license plate scanners has become the norm for basically all parking houses, bridge tolls and road tolls. Even if you don't install the app or become a "member" of whatever system they are using, the license plate scanners is still used to detect when you enter or leave, and in some cases they automatically look up your home address to send you the bill with zero interaction with the driver. Even if they offer alternative ways to pay, by for example sms, it still uses the license plate scanner when you leave.

The only political party to even mention this as a problem was the pirate party back 15 years ago, and even then it never became a major issue that got discussed. Like paying with credit cards rather than physical cash, people see it as convenience or just as the way things now work.
by nocoiner | 2025-11-17 18:32:07+00:00
Thanks, appreciate the recommendation! Polycam looks pretty pricy - is the subscription necessary for casual scanning, or does the free version work? I assume I would need at least the basic subscription.

I’m happy to pay for software, but I really don’t care for subscriptions. (Why no, holding back the tide is not going well at all, why do you ask?)
by Sean-Der | 2025-11-17 18:32:19+00:00
What do you think a more simple/modern WebRTC looks like?

* RTP over QUIC is promising https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-avtcore-rtp-over...

Do you want a new PeerConnection API? Are you annoyed with the Offer/Answer model? Do you have beef with the protocols. The possibility are endless :)
by huevosabio | 2025-11-17 18:32:41+00:00
```

Each of these phenomena have a name: there’s Jevons Paradox, which means, “We’ll spend more on what gets more productive”, and there’s the Baumol Effect, which means, “We’ll spend more on what doesn’t get more productive.”

```

I don't think that's exactly right. Jevons says "we consume more on what gets more productive" and Baumol says "the unit cost increases for that which is less productive".

The typical example for Baumol is the orchestra (or live music) which is today much more expensive than in the 1800s. I don't think we spend more in aggregate than we did in the 1800s!

Edit as I continue reading: ```

Other goods and services, where AI has relatively less impact, will become more expensive - and we’ll consume more of them anyway. ```

This definitely NOT the case. Basically the author is saying we will consume more of everything, which is not true! We famously stopped using horses and all the relevant industries.

The unit cost for horses, however, did increase!

What the author should be stating is that the new production bottlenecks will command a higher price and probably play a bigger role in the economy, but not everything gets to be a new bottleneck.
by titzer | 2025-11-17 18:32:53+00:00
I used a Sun Ray for two summers when interning at Sun Labs in 2002 and 2003. They were kind of awesome and kind of sucked at the same time. First, the display wasn't that great for the time, and they were expensive for what you got. Second, we had ours hooked up to (one of) the labs' E10ks. Because it was shared amongst many users, some things could get janky under load. One thing in particular is that certain image formats were heavier than others, and the crappy Firefox at the time could cause jank for multiple users when processing image-heavy webpages.

It was a neat party trick to take your ID card out of your terminal and walk down the hall, put it into someone else's and boom, have your session, but that was more rare than you might think.

All in all I think I would prefer a workstation.

Admins on the other hand, probably preferred these. If the thin clients were more like $100-200, this would have taken over the world. But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers.
by codethief | 2025-11-17 18:33:02+00:00
You're right that it's not always easy to separate pure from effectful code. But you definitely can (model it as a state machine) and I think it's worth it, especially if those steps can take a long time, can fail, might be executed in parallel, etc.

For instance, I once worked on payment-related code at a large online retailer. The steps I and J from your example would have been calls to the payment gateway's API (payment initiation, actual payment request). There was also a step K (polling for payment confirmation) and even a step K' (a payment confirmation callback the gateway might or might not call before or after we get around polling for the payment status ourselves). And often there was even user interaction in between (the 3DS/3DS2 credit card payment scheme that's common here in the EU). Every single one of those steps could fail for a myriad of reasons, e.g. time out, be rejected, … and we had to make sure we always failed gracefully and, most importantly, didn't mess up our payment or order records.

Of course this was an old enterprise Java code base, created by people who had long left the company, and all this had been written just the way you imagine it. It was an absolute mess.

Every single time I worked on this code base I secretly wished one of the original authors had heard of state machines, pure vs. effectful code, and unit tests.