MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-12-16 20:00:12+00:00
No. The police chief was unhappy with the outcome.

I also didn't personally get the contract cancelled --- in fact, I (for complicated reasons) opposed cancelling the contract. But I can tell you the sequence of things that led to the cancellation:

1. OPPD made the mistake of trying to deploy the cameras as an ordinary appropriation, without direct oversight, which pissed the board off.

2. We deployed the cameras in a pilot program with a bunch of restrictions (use only for violent crimes, security controls, stuff like that) that included monthly transparency reports to our CPOC commission.

3. Over the pilot period, the results from the cameras weren't good. That wasn't directly the fault of the cameras (the problem is the Illinois LEADS database), but it allowed opponents of the cameras to tell a (true) story.

4. At the first renewal session, an effort was made to shut off the cameras entirely (I was in favor then!), but the police chief made an impassioned case for keeping them as investigative tools. We renewed the contract with two provisos: we essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts, and we cut off all out-of-state sharing.

5. Transparency reports about the cameras to CPOC continued to tell a dismal story about their utility, complicated now by the fact that we (reasonably) were not using them for alerting in the first place; we had something like 5 total stories over a year post renewal, and 4 of them were really flimsy. The cameras did not work.

6. Trump got elected.

7. A push to kill the cameras off once and for all came from the progressive faction of the board; Trump and the poor performance of the cameras made them impossible to defend.

8. OPPD turned off all sharing of camera data.

9. The board voted to cancel the contract anyways.
by Vegenoid | 2025-12-16 20:00:17+00:00
The idea is that they let you stay locked in for free. They dissuade people from making their CI pipeline forge-agnostic by charging you if you if you take steps to not be dependent on them. This means they can keep charging in other areas, and keep people in GitHub so that it stays dominant. Dominance is something that can be used to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, keep GitHub as the place where code goes so they have training data for LLMs, and dominance can simply be cashed in down the line.

I don’t know if that’s actually why they’re doing this, but it sounds plausible.
by scuff3d | 2025-12-16 20:00:33+00:00
In addition the industry has been going through a massive correction post Covid, and all the free money drying up. Any impact AI is having is all mixed up with that.

The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.

Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.
by dpc_01234 | 2025-12-16 20:00:33+00:00
Right buffer is a relative obvious and simple idea. For some reason the Java-OOP crowd keeps thinking that LMAX deserves a nobel price for being neither first nor last to use it.

> have to go out of my way

Yeah, that's exactly the annoying part. Can't mention ring buffer ever without someone bring up LMAX. "But do you know, that some Java developers somewhere once wrote something that didn't completely ruin the hardware performance?! It's stunning and amazing."
by hopelite | 2025-12-16 20:00:43+00:00
I find all this very interesting from a historical perspective because we are ramming into the control matrix that has been constructed around America for around 150 years now at minimum, the notion of universal equality; and it is causing the inevitable and predictable collapses that are caused by its inherent contradictions.

We wanted diversity and equality because it served a narcissistic ethnic group, and now that they’ve started realizing that their whole short sighted, self-serving system is turning on them, they’re blowing huge holes in it and getting ever more draconian… as is typical of narcissists, especially malicious and grandiose types of extreme narcissists.

You will not be able to convince these toes of people with things like facts, because what they promote or support is an emotional level conviction similar to a religious one. The whole China ruse itself is just a lie and the ones who used and deployed that lie for strategic ends know this. All those who promote it are just the worthless foot soldiers on a battlefield of and over the mind.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-16 20:00:58+00:00
The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night.

In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities.

Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view.

And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.
by elil17 | 2025-12-16 20:01:21+00:00
Ah, I understand now. Before I defined my values, I don't think I thought all too much about the "value of values" - I definitely was convinced by what Ralph Keeney said on the podcast I linked. I also started working on defining my values at a time when I had a lot of impactful decisions to make (whether to switch jobs, where to move as I was leaving my parents house for the first time, etc.). This made reflecting on my values quite a natural thing to do.

For me, writing down my values was an involved process that included reading multiple books about decision making (including Keeney's), journaling over the course of several months, and interviewing friends and family to incorporate their perspectives.

Since I defined my values I have found them quite helpful in a variety of circumstances. Some examples:

- I reflected on my values when deciding whether to accept a job in a different country. They didn't change what I chose but they gave me confidence in my decision.

- I used them as part of Keeney's value focused decision making process to choose an apartment to live in. Knowing my values led me to choose a different apartment than I would have if I had made the decision intuitively.

- In the last couple of weeks I have been feeling a bit lost and I have reflected on some ways I have not been living up to my values. Knowing what my values are shows me what I need to do to get myself back where I want to be.

Overall I can't recommend defining/writing out your values enough. It has had a significant positive impact on my life. Loved ones have since commented that I seem more self-actualized and intentional.
by p_ing | 2025-12-16 20:01:23+00:00
> Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera.

Not the camera, no, just the eyes behind it -- namely police officers who have been caught stalking exes via Flock.

> Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).

In many jurisdictions in the US, police must personally witness the events to intervene. /Traffic/ cameras are one thing -- they only record those who violate the laws (red light, speeding). But continual monitoring of all persons passing falls into another bucket, like a Stringray device would.

> The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.

The abuse of this data is already happening. It's not a hypothetical.
by nosianu | 2025-12-16 20:01:34+00:00
> What makes a code worthy of trust is passing tests

(Sorry, but you set yourself up for this one, my apologies.)

Oh, so this post describes "worthy code", okay then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Tests are not a panacea. They don't care about anything other than what you test. If you don't have code testing maintainability and readability, only that it "works", you end up like the product in that post.

Ultimate example: Biology (and everything related, like physiology, anatomy), where the test is similarly limited to "does it produce children that can survive". It is a huuuuuge mess, and trying to change any one thing always messes up things elsewhere in unexpected and hard or impossible to solve ways. It's genius, it works, it sells - and trying to deliberately change anything is a huge PITA because everything is interconnected and there is no clean design anywhere. You manage to change some single gene to change some very minor behavior, suddenly the ear shape changes and fur color and eye sight and digestion and disease resistance, stuff like that.
by dkobia | 2025-12-16 20:01:40+00:00
I had the privilege of working with a great SWE intern this year. Their fresh ideas and strong work ethic made a real impact. Experienced engineers need this kind of energy.

Yes many over-rely on LLMs, but new engineers see possibilities we've stopped noticing and ask the questions we've stopped asking. Experience is invaluable, but it can quietly calcify into 'this is just how things are done.'
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-16 20:02:38+00:00
It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS.

It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
Top Startup Ideas Guaranteed to Get $1M Seed Funding
by suhaspatil101 | 2025-12-16 20:03:01+00:00
If you’ve spent any time around investors, you already know the uncomfortable truth.

Funding rarely comes from “brilliant ideas.” It comes from ideas that feel inevitable to the person writing the check.

The startups that raise $1M+ at seed usually aren’t doing something magical.

They’re doing something obvious, but in a way that’s hard to ignore. Clear pain. Clear buyer. Clear reason now is the right time.

That’s why chasing clever ideas often backfires. Investors don’t want novelty. They want conviction.

And conviction comes from problems that already cost real money, time, or headcount.

What I kept noticing while studying seed-stage companies was a pattern:

the ideas that get funded are almost always tied to workflows people complain about constantly, internal ops, reviews, compliance, support, sales admin, coordination.

Boring problems, but painful ones. AI just makes them cheaper and faster to solve.

I started collecting these recurring pain points from public discussions and founder communities. Over time, that turned into startupideasdb-com (you can google it), not a promise of funding, but a way to align ideas with what investors already recognize as real.

No idea is truly “guaranteed.”

But some ideas make investors lean forward instead of asking “why?”

If you’re thinking about raising your first round, I’m curious:

what signal do you think matters most, traction, clarity, or timing?
by spike021 | 2025-12-16 20:03:02+00:00
I find vibe coding similar to visiting a country where I don't know the local language very well.

Usually that requires saying something, seeing if the other person understands what I'm saying, and occasionally repeating myself in a different way.

It can be real tiring when I'm with friends who only speak the other language so we're both using translator tools and basically repeating that loop up to 2-3 hours.

I've found the same situation with vibe coding. Especially when the model misunderstands what I want or starts going off on a tangent. sometimes it's easier to edit the original query or an earlier step in the flow and re-write it for a better result.
by tadfisher | 2025-12-16 20:03:07+00:00
Isn't this all because PCI resizable BAR is not required to run any GPU besides Intel Arc? As in, maybe it's mostly down to Microsoft/Intel mandating reBAR in UEFI so we can start using stuff like bindless textures without thousands of support tickets and negative reviews.

I think this puts a floor on supported hardware though, like Nvidia 30xx and Radeon 5xxx. And of course motherboard support is a crapshoot until 2020 or so.
by 9rx | 2025-12-16 20:03:23+00:00
Finance is a larger sector, but largely exists to support tech. If tech disappeared, as suggested in the earlier comment, the USA's finance sector would soon diminish to near-nothing and might even totally collapse under the weight of that loss.

For a more relatable example, it's kind of like how agriculture manufacturing (machinery, fertilizer, etc) is a larger sector of the economy than agriculture itself. All well and good when everything is functioning, but if agriculture collapsed, it becomes pretty obvious that said manufacturing would go down with it. It is no help that it is a larger sector.

In modern economies supporting sectors will almost always be larger than the "core" industries they support.
by godelski | 2025-12-16 20:03:43+00:00
> Image search? I have a search engine for that.

I'd use it. Why does it need to be another site? I'd trust Mozilla more than I trust Google. Do you really feel different?

Plus, Search by Image[0] is one of the most popular extensions, with 3x as many people using it as tree-style tabs.

I don't use it but a grammar tool is the next most popular[1], so I could see this being quite a useful feature.

But the other stuff, I'm with you. I like translate but I personally don't care for dubbing, summarizing, or anything else.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetool/
by blahbob | 2025-12-16 20:04:01+00:00
In my experience, it depends on the task. As a hobby, I develop personal projects (mostly web apps) where I'm not an expert in the relevant technology. In this case, LLM-assisted coding is empowering - and I don't think it's Dunning-Kruger, as I can understand the generated code, and it "feels" good enough given my 20+ years' experience in software engineering.

However, when it comes to my professional work on a mature, advanced project, I find it much easier to write the code myself than to provide a very precise specification without which the LLM wouldn't generate code of a sufficiently high quality.
by rapind | 2025-12-16 20:04:03+00:00
> No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.

This is part of the appeal of Lustre and Elm to me. Not the main thing, but being able to avoid JS land churn (and nulls) is quite nice.
by xpe | 2025-12-16 20:04:05+00:00
I will preemptively grant the narrow point that if a project demonstrates poor quality in its code or text (i.e. what I mean when I say "slop"), it can dissuade potential users. However, the "Why AIsbom?" section strikes me as clear and informative.

Many people prefer human writing. I get it, and I think I understand most of the underlying reasons and emotional drives. [1]

Nevertheless, my top preference (I think?) is clarity and accuracy. For technical writing, if these two qualities are present, I'm rarely bothered by what people may label "AI writing". OTOH, when I see sloppy, poorly reasoned, out-of-date writing, my left hand readies itself for ⌘W. [2]

A suggestion for the comment above, which makes a stylistic complaint: be more specific about what can be improved.

Finally, a claim: over time, valid identification of some text as being AI-generated will require more computation and be less accurate. [3]

[1]: Food for thought: https://theconversation.com/people-say-they-prefer-stories-w... and the backing report: https://docs.iza.org/dp17646.pdf

[2]: To be open, I might just have a much higher than average bar for precision -- I tend to prefer reading source materials than derivative press coverage, and I prefer reading a carefully worded, dry written documentation file over an informal chat description. To keep digging the hole for myself, I usually don't like the modern practice of putting unrelated full-width pictures in blog posts because they look purdy. Maybe it comes from a "just the facts, please" mentality when reading technical material.

[3]: I realize this isn't the clearest testable prediction, but I think the gist of it is falsifiable.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-16 20:04:09+00:00
There's still something off in the grading, and I suspect they worked around it

(although I get what you mean, not easily since you already trained)

I'm guessing when they get a clean slate we'll have Image 2 instead of 1.5. In LMArena it was immediately apparent it was an OpenAI model based on visuals.
by p_ing | 2025-12-16 20:04:47+00:00
Time to re-read what "urban" is defined as. My town, for instance, is counted as "urban", yet there is a single bus that will take you anywhere near to true urban center that comes twice per day. It's six miles (~15 minutes) from the nearest non-shit grocery store/Starbucks.

My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big.

The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-12-16 20:04:52+00:00
There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can spend a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.

The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.

I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
by taintegral | 2025-12-16 20:05:15+00:00
(I made rkyv) I took a look at lite3/tron because I was interested in seeing how it approached some of the issues I ran into with rkyv. I ended up with some additional information related to points 1 and 2 I figured I'd write down:

1) You're correct, rkyv uses a B-tree with a default branching factor of 6 [1]. I don't think I've ever implemented a binary tree in any version of rkyv - maybe one of the earliest versions used a sorted vec instead of a B-tree? I hate the B-tree map implementation because it is so complicated, even though it actually used to be even worse in 0.7 when it was implemented as a B+ tree. Sorry for making you read any of it!

2) Arbitrary mutations would definitely be an improvement on rkyv, and I was most interested to see what kind of approach lite3/tron took! Unfortunately growing the buffer is not supported [2] and freed memory isn't reclaimed [3]. These are the two actually difficult problems standing in the way of rkyv getting more comprehensive mutation support, so unfortunately I think there's nothing valuable to take away here.

The issue with growing the buffer is that you invalidate any pointers into the buffer and have to manually fix them up (e.g. by re-crawling the buffer). There's not a decent approach I'm aware of which manages these pointer fixups in a way that limits complexity and avoids really nasty API surfaces.

The issue with memory reclamation is that you effectively have to add an allocator to your buffer, and that allocator has to also be persistable. I actually got this part working in rel while that was still a project worth hacking on [4]. I just ran out of steam and willingness to play the type-tac-toe required to get a safe API out of it. The main problem I ran into there was related to value branding, since you shouldn't be allowed to make references to objects which cross between contiguous buffers.

This project is neat, but it does basically just look like an rkyv-converted `BTreeMap<String, JsonValue>`.

[1]: https://github.com/rkyv/rkyv/blob/main/rkyv/src/collections/... [2]: https://github.com/fastserial/lite3/blob/main/src/lite3.c#L5... [3]: https://lite3.io/design_and_limitations.html#autotoc_md29 (see note at end of section) [4]: https://github.com/rkyv/rel/blob/main/rel_example/src/main.r...
by chrisweekly | 2025-12-16 20:05:15+00:00
Personally, I quite liked GitLab CI when I used it circa 2021-23. Just now I did a quick search and found this article^1 suggesting (even before this GH pricing change) Gitlab CI may be a better choice than Github Actions.

1. https://medium.com/@the_atomic_architect/github-vs-gitlab-20...
by no_wizard | 2025-12-16 20:05:17+00:00
The exodus from GitHub has not begun, as far as I can tell.

They seem to care much less about free users than in the past but businesses still flock to it. GitLab is the only other platform I’ve seen in the workplace of anywhere I worked, with the exception of a big tech company I worked at. They had both GitHub enterprise and an internally maintained platform which was being phased out. if I recall correctly it based on Phabricator
by zamadatix | 2025-12-16 20:05:55+00:00
I understand what your claim is, I just disagree it's that blanket. You could e.g. absolutely build the UI for a profile switcher before your implementation of the backend changes are merged without carrying implications of how well that will handle isolation in the same way in security you could implement the null cipher in TLS to test that portion of the code without it forever implying you have bad encryption.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-16 20:05:57+00:00
I run Jenkins (have done so at multiple jobs) and it's totally fine. Jenkins, like other super customizable systems, is as reliable or crappy as you make it. It's decent out of the box, but if you load it down with a billion plugins and whatnot then yeah it's going to be a nightmare to maintain. It all comes down to whether you've done a good job setting it up, IMO.
by vblanco | 2025-12-16 20:06:28+00:00
This is not really directly about resizable BAR. you could do mostly the same api without it. Resizable bar simplifies it a little bit because you skip manual transfer operations, but its not completely required as you can write things to a cpu-writeable buffer and then begin your frame with a transfer command.

Bindless textures never needed any kind of resizable BAR, you have been able to use them since early 2010s on opengl through an extension. Buffer pointers also have never needed it.