MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by macNchz | 2025-12-20 18:13:51+00:00
It’s a very widespread problem, I think, and probably has a complex mix of causes, but my perception as a NYC runner, cyclist, and driver is that there’s a fairly small percentage of extremely antisocial drivers who we allow to behave badly with relative impunity, which itself moves the Overton window of driving behavior towards aggression/chaos, so to speak.

Very frequently when there is a newsmaking incident in which a driver runs people over in some egregious fashion, it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year. We know who these people are, we just don’t seem to have any motivation to actually do anything about it.

The city has published research on this, showing drivers who get 30+ speed camera tickets in a year are 50x as likely to be involved in crashes with serious injuries or death, but efforts to actually do something about their behavior are consistently stalled or watered down. Other research points to various causes, including backed up courts and decreased enforcement generally.

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-advocate-fo...

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc-driver-behavi...
by spiralpolitik | 2025-12-20 18:14:04+00:00
In-house vs Cloud Provider is largely a wash in terms of cost. Regardless of the approach, you are going need people to maintain stuff and people cost money. Similarly compute and storage cost money so what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.

In my experience you typically need less people if using a Cloud Provider than in-house (or the same number of people can handle more instances) due to increased leverage. Whether you can maximize what you get via leverage depends on how good your team is.

US companies typically like to minimize headcount (either through accounting tricks or outsourcing) so usually using a Cloud Provider wins out for this reason alone. It's not how much money you spend, it's how it looks on the balance sheet ;)
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-20 18:15:13+00:00
I suspect if data from eye-tracking tests were available, there would be an extremely clear revealed preference from users. I read image galleries the exact same way I skim text, in an ordered fashion that allows me to "read" every image without reading an image twice, stopping if my attention is caught by something in particular. Splotting garbage over the screen haphazardly makes it blend together annoyingly and results in my eyes traversing the same areas multiple times both to try to pick out details and to try to keep my place in what I have/haven't skimmed yet. It is a layout that itself demands my attention, rather than letting my attention be absorbed naturally by the actual images.
by elif | 2025-12-20 18:16:39+00:00
It is crucial to consider correlated variables in their correct context. This finding does not even imply impairment.

A low emotional intelligence driver, one with depression or low self worth, perhaps a psychological pathology like narcissism or nihilism. This is the type of person to initiate vehicular homicide. Intoxicant intake is a SUBSET of this group of variables.

The archetypical homicidal driver would of course have exceptionally high representation in cannabis use, and also likely cigarette use, and probably nitrous oxide but they don't measure that.

EDIT: what I will say is that dab culture is something beyond traditional cannabis use, and I could absolutely theorize that dab use in a vehicle is the new drunk driving.
by sflanker | 2025-12-20 18:16:51+00:00
This is a totally different class of software than what that post is ranting about. Charles is a local developer tool intended for temporary use when debugging. It only inspects TLS connections if 1) you enable that feature and 2) you add the domain being connected to the list to be inspected.

That being said, the mechanism is the same. Charles generates a root certificate that it uses to issue certificates for each domain in intercepts a TLS connection for and you need to install that root certificate in your OS such that your clients will trust that certificate. If you have a client that doesn’t use the Mac OS certificate store you may have to do some extra per client configuration.

I also despise “security” tools that intercept and inspect TLS traffic (such as ZAcaler for example), but I find a Charles to be very useful for what it does and the TLS inspection support is easy to use and really helpful/necessary in some cases.
by toast0 | 2025-12-20 18:17:06+00:00
> There's a lot of focus in this thread on the atomic clocks but in most datacenters, they're not actually that important and I'm dubious that the hyperscalers actually maintain a "fleet" of them, in the sense that there are hundreds or thousands of these clocks in their datacenters.

I mean, fleets come in all sizes; but if you put one atomic reference in each AZ of each datacenter, there's a fleet. Maybe the references aren't great at distributing time, so you add a few NTP distributors per datacenter too and your fleet is a little bigger. Google's got 42 regions in GCP, so they've got a case for hundreds of machines for time (plus they've invested in spanner which has some pretty strict needs); other clouds are likely similar.
by slroger | 2025-12-20 18:17:08+00:00
Great read. I moved my video sharing app from GCP to self hosted on a beefy home server+ cloudflare for object storage and video streaming. Had been using Cloud SQL as my managed db and now running Postgres on my own dedicated hardware. I was forced to move away from the cloud primarily because of the high cost of running video processing(not because Cloud SQL was bad) but instead have discovered self hosting the db isnt as difficult as its made out to be. And there was a daily charge of keeping the DB hot which I dont have now. Will be moving to a rackmount server at a datacolo in about a month so this was great to read and confirms my experience.
by flomo | 2025-12-20 18:17:48+00:00
Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working.

Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-20 18:18:33+00:00
It depends on the level of your habitual use. A 5mg gummy every evening is probably fine.

I’ve seen plenty of people who are essentially using THC vapes like nicotine vapes, in that they use them every few hours and start to get anxious if they don’t. Stoned driving has become normalized - between seeing people lighting up behind the wheel on snap map, seeing it on TV (this happened in The Rehearsal season 1), and seeing it in person, it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.

If you’re high all day every day, that may be your normal, but it doesn’t mean you’re competent to drive.

In my personal experience, it took a very long time to fully get through a high dose of THC - usually at least a full night sleep, but sometimes more like two, before my reaction times came back. Notably, it takes much longer for the impairment of THC to wear off than the subjectively enjoyable experience of being high, so you can “sober up” but still be impaired.

If you’ve been getting high every day for 10 years, it is hard to take seriously that you would know if you’re impaired. Kind of like vegans who haven’t tasted dairy for 10 years tend not to be reliable judges of the quality of vegan mayo - how could they possibly know?
by jcelerier | 2025-12-20 18:19:40+00:00
> How are LLMs not statistical models that predict tokens?

there's LLMs as in "the blob of coefficients and graph operations that runs on a gpu whenever there's an inference" which is absolutely "a statistical model that predict tokens" and LLMs as in "the online apps that iterates and have access to an entire automated linux environment that can run $LANGUAGE scripts and do web queries when an intermediary statistical output contains too much maybes and use the result to drive further inference.".
by palmotea | 2025-12-20 18:19:55+00:00
> To use them well you still need to know everything - whenever you prompt lazily you're opening yourself up to a fuckton of technical debt.

> That might be acceptable to some, but is generally a bad idea

That's my point: to use them effectively you need to know everything, but to use them heavily puts you in a situation where that knowledge atrophies (e.g. the OP's statement "every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber"). The bosses want the results now, and don't mind if in a few years you're much less capable (and maybe not capable of getting effective results anymore).

If AGI comes soon enough, their bet will have paid off.
by roywiggins | 2025-12-20 18:20:42+00:00
The Readme is substantially LLM generated, yeah? Something about LLM readmes leave me cold. Including stuff like this feels like the sort of typical LLM time-wasting stuff that they output these days:

Add 3D Model: Click "3D Model" → "Add 3D model (.glb)" → Select your file Add Image: Click "Image" → "Add image" → Select your file Add Text: Click "Text" or press T to add 3D text

To add a 3d model I click "3d Model" and then "add 3D model" and then add my 3d model. Very clear, but not usually what I look for in a readme. LLMs love this sort of stuff though.

To compare, the initial Readme (I guess this is a default re-frame readme?) doesn't have this same LLM vibe at all: https://github.com/ertugrulcetin/immersa/blob/7f585f5f544e2f...
by zbentley | 2025-12-20 18:21:20+00:00
Netflix is not a good counter argument, since lots of that content is not (legally/easily for casual users) available anywhere else even with ads.

YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are buying it just for ad removal versus buying it to get access to additional games/movies/content. Is that data available? I’d be interested in checking it out if so!
by toast0 | 2025-12-20 18:21:44+00:00
If you use a general purpose hostname like time.nist.gov: that should resolve to an operational server and it makes sense to adjust during an incident. If you use a specific server hostname like time-a-b.nist.gov: that should resolve to the specific server and you're expected to have multiple hosts specified; it doesn't make sense to adjust during an incident, IMHO. You wanted boulder, you're getting boulder, faults and all.
by Sesse__ | 2025-12-20 18:22:14+00:00
I know how checkpointing works in Postgres (which isn't very different from how it works in most other redo-log implementations). It still does not change that you need to actually update the heap at some point.

Postgres allows a group commit to try to combine multiple transactions to avoid the multiple fsyncs, but it adds delay and is off by default. And even so, it reduces fsyncs, not writes.
by mrj | 2025-12-20 18:22:32+00:00
Well, it would be good for the rest of us on the road if people driving two tons of murder box are 0% impaired.

I'm no angel but I have gotten more diligent... I'm just reacting to "the degree". The goal has to be zero degrees of impairment when a moment of inattention can kill.

Also, my son was just hit by a driver while he was on a bike and in the bike lane. They claimed not to see him. He's fine thankfully but it's really scary to watch him ride off.
by roughly | 2025-12-20 18:23:21+00:00
I think it’s underappreciated the degree to which police and LEO have started behaving like political actors. NYC cops decided to “strike on the job” when the city started changing its stance in the mid-2010s, and in the Bay the cops responded similarly to Prop 47 by effectively not prosecuting shoplifting and other minor crimes anymore. Similarly, the recall of Pamela Price started almost the moment she took office and was accompanied by a work slowdown by the OPD in the interest of making the crime situation look worse. There’s other examples, but effectively the police have turned lax enforcement into a tool to preclude any shifts in policing policies. I’ve got my own feelings about those policies, but when you’ve got the cops acting like a political block that gets to set policies instead of a group of city employees tasked with enforcing them, I think that should concern the rest of us.
by squigz | 2025-12-20 18:24:32+00:00
That link doesn't appear to say that blood tests are reliable

Literally in the summary

> While blood alcohol content (BAC) level represents an accurate measurement of alcohol impairment, the presence of THC in a driver’s body has not been shown to be a predictable measure of cannabis impairment.

But further on

> Because THC in the blood can result from both recent as well as past use, impairment cannot be inferred from blood levels.
by jared_lewisparc | 2025-12-20 18:25:51+00:00
That’s accurate — Ada is designed to support human judgment and prevent incorrect or unauditable decisions, not to replace thinking.

I'm 27, but heavily inspired by the likes of Bill Atkinson and Alan Kay (Dynabook -- iPad). I built all of this (and much more) on "accident" because I suppose the best work comes when you least expect it.

Every morning I wake up and make something new, pretty sure I have several kernels, I ended up on the Darwin website (something about a platypus) I built a game engine that can make GTA in 5-10 mins (you don't need better compute just better math, see: the Moon landing). So yeah it's pretty cool :-) Not sure what to do with it. But having fun! I'm a teacher, so it tracks. If you can teach kid, you can teach a computer.

Also came up with a UniCalc (unified calculus) bc I don't accept calc as valid per se, but not trying to get into the math wars bc it really doesn't matter that much tbh. Thanks for the comment. Happy Holidays.
by c0nsumer | 2025-12-20 18:26:18+00:00
The last release was 2021.01 but the GitHub repo seems to be recently updated. So I'd say... Maybe?

That said, there are often times software gets so stable that not having a new release for years is fine. Maybe this is one of them?

(I'm very new to OpenSCAD so I haven't run into bugs yet... But maybe it's pretty solid?)
by like_any_other | 2025-12-20 18:26:24+00:00
Neither party has done much trust-busting recently [1], and farmers specifically call out the monopolies squeezing them in the video. It seems you're basing you assertion, that they don't know who their economic enemies are, on mistaken stereotypes.

[1] But one party is big on rhetoric, and has delivered some concrete followup, on promises to disadvantage the farmers whose ignorance you're asserting: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/05/how-bidens-sba-is-doing-on-g...

And, more broadly speaking, the ideology that party promotes has disadvantaged them in many other areas as well: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
by Youden | 2025-12-20 18:26:27+00:00
There was a larger discussion in a previous thread on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730

Since then, [0] has been published and I think it's worth at least a skim. Since it's quite recent the introduction summarizes some of the most recent research.

The things that jump out at me are:

- [0]: Habitual users with baseline concentrations above legal limits perform just as well as habitual users with baseline concentrations below the legal limit, indicating that for habitual users, the legal limit doesn't have any relation to impairement.

- [1]: A study in Canada analyzed crash reports and blood tests to look at the state of drivers responsible for accidents. While alcohol had a very clear and statistically-significant influence on the risk of a driver causing an accident, THC did not.

To steelman the idea that THC causes accidents, [0] only looks at habitual users with baseline levels of THC and [1] only looks at non-fatal injuries.

My conclusion right now is that the number of drivers in accidents with THC in their blood is going up because the number of people with THC in their blood is going up, not because drivers who use THC cause accidents.

The law's assumption that this level of THC is evidence of impairment seems to be invalid.

The law would be better off measuring impairment in some way and perhaps intensifying penalties when an impairment test fails and the user has THC concentration above some threshold.

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/71/12/1225/8299832...

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31106494/
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-20 18:27:44+00:00
RLHF really has a different goal - it's not about rewarding/encouraging reasoning, but rather rewarding outputs that match human preferences for whatever reason (responses that are more on-point, or politer, or longer form, etc, etc).

The way RLHF works is that a smallish amount of feedback data of A/B preferences from actual humans is used to train a preference model, and this preference model is then used to generate RL rewards for the actual RLHF training.

RLHF has been around for a while and is what tamed base models like GPT 3 into GPT 3.5 that was used for the initial ChatGPT, making it behave in more of an acceptable way!

RLVR is much more recent, the basis of the models that do great at math and programming. If you talk about reasoning models being RL trained then it's normally going to imply RLVR, but it seems there's a recent trend of people calling it RLVR to be more explcit.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-20 18:28:03+00:00
> Each of the last productivity multipliers coincided with greatly expanded markets

They didn't. But it may be a relevant point that all of that was slow enough to spread that we can't clearly separate them.

Anyway, the idea that any one of those large markets is at saturation point requires some data. AFAIK, anything from mainframe software to phones has (relatively) exploded in popularity every time somebody made them cheaper, so that is a claim that all of those just changed (too recently to measure), without any large thing to correlate them.

> That's quite unlike previous revolutions where we had to build all the software from scratch

We have rewritten everything from scratch exactly once since high-level languages were created in the 70s.
by layer8 | 2025-12-20 18:28:07+00:00
> When implementing logging, it's important to distinguish between an error from the perspective of an individual operation and an error from the perspective of the overall program or system. Individual operations may well experience errors that are not error level log events for the overall program. You could say that an operation error is anything that prevents an operation from completing successfully, while a program level error is something that prevents the program as a whole from working right.

This is a nontrivial problem when using properly modularized code and libraries that perform logging. They can’t tell whether their operational error is also a program-level error, which can depend on usage context, but they still want to log the operational error themselves, in order to provide the details that aren’t accessible to higher-level code. This lower-level logging has to choose some status.

Should only “top-level” code ever log an error? That can make it difficult to identify the low-level root causes of a top-level failure. It also can hamper modularization, because it means you can’t repackage one program’s high-level code as a library for use by other programs, without somehow factoring out the logging code again.
by elif | 2025-12-20 18:28:56+00:00
I would imagine that prompting anything like this will have an excessively ironic effect like convincing it to suppress patterns which it would consider to be pre-knowledge.

If you looked inside they would be spinning on something like "oh I know this is the tile to walk on, but I have to only rely on what I observe! I will do another task instead to satisfy my conditions and not reveal that I have pre-knowledge.

LLMs are literal douche genies. The less you say, generally, the better
by convolvatron | 2025-12-20 18:29:13+00:00
I love the model, it's nice to be able to generate things parametrically instead of grabbing knots with the mouse. so I use scad pretty often.

but it has real problems - the language is weird and unfortunate. not anything super fatal, just the obvious product of evolution that would be more cohesive if it were architected wholesale

epsilons are really unfortunate. you have to expect that after getting what you want in the whole, you're going to have to scan over the whole thing and look for cracks or collision where there shouldn't be performance is quite sad. here you are happy going back and forth between the view and text windows, but as you go on, it starts taking .. minutes.. to update the view once you have a reasonably complicated geometry high-level operators would also be nice. I made the mistake of using a thread library once, not only did that make my model unrenderable, there was so much noise in the model and the manufacturing process I had to make 3 expensive test prints in sintered nylon to get the fit right. (I'm thinking an annotation on a cylinder that says 'standard 1mm thread')
by xphos | 2025-12-20 18:29:23+00:00
Well that was a failed response opps. I am just cautious because while transformers get the random guessing right you can get the right answer statistically but fail on accuracy improvement long term. Clearly this model does better than the current model but extending it to be even better seems basically intractable besides throw more data at it but what if it derived the wrong model you simply cannot actually know
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-20 18:29:32+00:00
I sense a branding opportunity here... We already have "elevator music" to designate generic production-music-slop, so what will the next step be?

"OpenAI anything" seems a bit too much, yet "Claude somesuch" or "Grok horrifying" don't work either.

HN Branding Experts, what do you say?
by bradfitz | 2025-12-20 18:29:45+00:00
I find myself using OpenSCAD regularly to 3D print little things for the house. (Most recently: hooks to attach Christmas lights to our roof deck's glass walls)

And when something gets too trick, ChatGPT is amazing at writing in it. Often it nails the whole design in the first try, like https://bsky.app/profile/bradfitz.com/post/3maelwomyw22n to mask off certain Raspberry Pi pins to make reassembly of projects easier later.
by didibus | 2025-12-20 18:30:48+00:00
None of them matter that much. They're all just ways to bring in context. Think of them as conveniences.

Tools are useful so the AI can execute commands, but beyond that it's just ways to help you build the context for your prompt. Either pulling in premade prompts that provides certain instructions or documentation, or providing more specialized tools for the model to use along with instructions on using those tools.
by epistasis | 2025-12-20 18:31:25+00:00
It's not entirely new! In 1975 during labor negotiations the police detonated a bomb on the mayor's yard, partially damaging the front door, and left a note saying "Don't threaten us":

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19750820.2.20

Since then, the SFPF have always had a culture of being above the law. The monopoly on legal violence thing can be taken a bit too far.
by rwmj | 2025-12-20 18:32:07+00:00
Here's an example of a bug that I filed about non-actionable error messages: https://github.com/karmab/kcli/issues/456

The first error message was "No usable public key found, which is required for the deployment" which doesn't tell me what I have to do to correct the problem. Nothing about even where it's looking for keys, what is supposed to create the key or how I am supposed to create the key.

There are other examples and discussion of what they should say in the link.

Edit: Here's another one that I filed: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/20775