MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2026-02-25 18:48:52+00:00
> I’ve said similar in another thread[1]

Me too, at [1].

We need fine-grained permissions at online services, especially ones that handle money. It's going to be tough. An agent which can buy stuff has to have some constraints on the buy side, because the agent itself can't be trusted. The human constraints don't work - they're not afraid of being fired and you can't prosecute them for theft.

In the B2B environment, it's a budgeting problem.
People who can spend money have a budget, an approval limit, and a list of approved vendors. That can probably be made to work. In the consumer environment, few people have enough of a detailed budget, with spending categories, to make that work.

Next upcoming business area: marketing to LLMs to get them to buy stuff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47132273
by rsolva | 2026-02-25 18:48:56+00:00
I run my own instance at home. Not everybody can do this, but if more nerds hosted instances for friends and family, it would get us somewhere at least :)

The goal is not instant world domination, but a organically grown network, providing an off-ramp for those that have had enough and are ready to take some action. Facilitating real world meet-ups would help, I think!
by thomastjeffery | 2026-02-25 18:48:58+00:00
The buses in SLC are clean and friendly. The only buses I have experienced hostility with are Greyhound, and that hostility came exclusively from the workers. What's the difference between my city and yours? Budget? Population? Probably a mix of both.

It's incredibly unlikely that there is one coherent cause for low or high ridership. All we can do is improve the utility of the service. That means improving comfort (keeping it clean), reliability (running on time with minimal detours), throughput (carrying enough people), speed (minimizing the number of stops on the route), latency (minimizing the wait until the next bus), availability (more stops that service potential destinations), and coherence (more routes that take you directly from A to B, minimizing transfers).

Personally, I feel most undeserved by latency: the routes that are convenient to me run every 30min, and the routes that run most often run every 15min. I would ride the bus way more often if routes ran every 10min. I would ride them all the time if they ran more often than that. This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity that will never happen so long as prospective budget is determined by current ridership.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-25 18:49:03+00:00
At risk of sounding like a mindless futurist, I will say that the Transit App has considerably improved my experience of public transit in the US, because it doesn't tell me when the next scheduled ride is, but instead when the next actual bus is.

The only time in recent memory that this screwed me was in SF trying to get a Muni that I thought was a surface route and was in fact underground. So I was standing at a trollybus stop directly over top of the station where I was missing my train.

The one major gap I still feel a lot as a visitor is wanting a transit-aware business search. In Google Maps the "search for X in this area" is a completely distinct workflow from "how to get to X by <mode>", and implicit in the first workflow is that you can infer how long it will take based on the crow-flies distance. And that assumption is very much not true if you are using transit. For example, I would love to be able to be like "show me three-star hotels ordered by transit convenience to X airport and Y event venue" and have it figure out both rides, and call out which ones will have what service level in the evening, overnight, etc.
by enragedcacti | 2026-02-25 18:49:07+00:00
Sections of lines that already have meaningful congestion at adjacent stops wouldn't be a good target for balancing. WMATA in D.C. recently eliminated about 5% of bus stops as part of their overhauled bus network, this is how they described their strategy[1]: "We focused on stops that were about 660 feet apart or less and then assessed ridership at the stop and the availability of safe access for customers. Stops that were close together with low ridership or without safe pedestrian access were considered for consolidation."

Additionally, many stops with a lot of people loading and unloading are hubs which would never be balanced away, and often are designated timing points where the bus will wait to get back on schedule, so loading/unloading time is often irrelevant because predictability is being prioritized over speed. Improving speed and consistency with techniques like removing unnecessary stops increases predictability and allows for tightening up timetables and minimizing average hold times.

[1] https://wmata.com/initiatives/plans/Better-Bus/upload/Bus-St...
by throwaway13337 | 2026-02-25 18:49:13+00:00
I'd push back on the framing but I think we're after the same goal.

Regulation enforcement against the anti-market behaviors would bring a lot of good.

Putting too much power in any centralized authority - company or government - seems to lead to oppression and unhealthy culture.

Fair markets are the neatest trick we have. They put the freedom of choice in the hands of the individual and allow organic collaboration.

The framing should not be government vs company. But distributed power vs centralized.

The entire world right now suffers from too much centralized power. That comes in the form of both corporate and government. Power tends to consolidate until the bureaucracy of the approach becomes too inefficient and collapses under its own weight. That process is painful, and it's not something I enjoy living through.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-25 18:49:21+00:00
> Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?

As someone who did a stint in this kind of construction: not possible, you'd still need to re-pave about 30-50cm worth of road, because curbstones are (usually) suspended in a bunch of concrete to avoid them getting dislocated by cars hitting or driving over them. The result will be a faultline from which you will get potholes in freeze cycles.

The proper way is to do everything at once, leaving one slab of contiguous asphalt without faultlines.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-25 18:49:24+00:00
Currently there's nothing in my headers, but the footer is straightforward. There's the schema, row group metadata, some statistics, byte offsets for each column in a group, page index, etc. It's everything you'd want if you wanted to reject a query outright or, if necessary, query extremely efficiently.

min/max stats for a column are huge because I pre-encode any low-cardinality strings into integers. This means I can skip entire row groups without every touching S3, just with that footer information, and if I don't have it cached I can read it and skip decoding anything that doesn't have my data.

Footers can get quite large in one sense - 10s-100s of KB for a very large file. But that's obviously tiny compared to a multi-GB Parquet file, and the data can compress extremely well for a second/ third tier cache. You can store 1000s of these pre-parsed in memory no problem, and store 10s of thousands more on disk.

I've spent 0 time optimizing my footers currently. They can get smaller than they are, I assume, but I've not put much thought. In fact, I don't have to assume, I know that my own custom metadata overlaps with the existing parquet stats and I just haven't bothered to deal with it. TBH there are a bunch of layout optimizations I've yet to explore, like using headers would obviously have some benefits (streaming) whereas right now I do a sort of "attempt to grab the footer from the end in chunks until we find it lol". But it doesn't come up because... caching. And there are worse things than a few spurious RANGE requests.
by kjkjadksj | 2026-02-25 18:49:33+00:00
Stop frequency is too high on most of my trips. I might have 60 stops in front of me for certain trips I make on bus. It contributes to a ton of time all that dwell time adding up. Where there are express routings offered on top of local routes with maybe 1/4 the stop frequency, time savings are like 1.5x by my estimate.
IMockupper: I built an AI tool to automate App Store asset generation
by damdafayton | 2026-02-25 18:49:58+00:00
Instead of browsing rigid templates, you just describe the environment you want (e.g., "dark mode, neon purple accents, floating 3D perspective") and the AI builds a professional scene around your screenshot globally
You design the layout once, input your translations, and it instantly generates specialized, localized screenshots for every target market and language you need.

https://imockup.fun/
by habinero | 2026-02-25 18:50:03+00:00
Nope. Not correct. Companies have the same 1A rights, too.

In the US, it really doesn't matter who says it, the only thing that matters is who it's being said about.

If you are a "public figure" -- which is a much broader category in 1A law than you think -- then in order to prove defamation, you have to prove the thing was false _and_ that the person saying it knew it was false at the time. Not that they were mistaken, not that they were careless, not that they knew later, they deliberately lied and knew they lied as they said it.

If your next question is "how do you prove what someone was thinking", then yes. That is the reason it's nearly impossible.
by VLM | 2026-02-25 18:50:31+00:00
In 2022 according to the transit system annual report, the suburban quarter million person city I live in has ten routes and operates about 12 hours per day and per the annual report average weekday service consumed is 1556 UPT, so 1556 people step aboard the system and toss coins in the fare jar or pay with the app. UPT means they're not tracking transfers and essentially 100% of trips require a transfer so the real number of people served daily is closer to 775 than to 1550, but we'll run the optimistic numbers. Each of the ten hourly routes is about 4 miles long. So the overall system drives 12 hours * 10 routes * 4 miles * 5280 feet/mile = 2.5 million feet per day and divide that by 1556 passengers per day that's a pax every 1628 feet driven on an average day.

So if we had a bus stop every 800 feet, on average half the stops would be empty and passed by. If that high level of use is causing too much congestion and slow down at stops, if we had two buses running out of phase, pax arrive at the same rate, so we'd pick up a pax every 3000+ feet driven. So if we had bus stops every 500 feet to keep people happy, on average the bus would drive right by about 5 out of 6 empty stops, which seems reasonable and would not result in unusual delays or congestion. Also the bus would pass by every half hour not every hour, which would probably increase ridership a lot.

So if the only labor expense were the $23/hr driver, and we pay 10 drivers on 10 routes, to drive twelve times, thats $23/hr * 10 routes * 12 hours if everything except driver labor were free that means we spend $2760 per day to transport 1556 people, or about $1.77 per trip (assuming diesel is free, buses never wear out, etc). If we doubled the number of bus that would be $5520 of driver labor to move 1556 people per day or $3.55 cost per pax trip. On one hand the actual annual total "OE per UPT" counting weekends and maint and office people and dispatchers etc, according to the annual report is $13.94, so an extra $1.77 would seem cheap, but the bus does not run for free and the total expense of doubling the runs might cost as much as an extra $14 per pax trip.

The costs don't really matter, if the taxpayers want it as a luxury bragging feature of the city. Everyone wants everyone else to use it even though no one would be caught dead actually using it. My point being that adult fare is $2 but adults don't ride its mostly elderly and disabled at the $1 fare, so a profit (loss) ratio of (28 - 1)/28 with two buses per route isn't much worse than (14 - 1)/14 with one bus per route.

Maybe another way to look at the analysis is in my city if the stops are more than 1600 feet apart there will be multiple people per stop and that would "slow things down" whereas a small fraction like 400 feet would mean the bus mostly just speeds by.

No one can seem to explain why we can't have infinite bus stops. How about every stop sign is a bus stop? The bus has to stop anyway. Artificial scarcity to drive down ridership, I suppose.
by Retric | 2026-02-25 18:50:53+00:00
> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further

“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people.

Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation.

As such latency isn’t necessarily as critical vs coverage here.
by ramoz | 2026-02-25 18:50:59+00:00
I'm not too sure what you're asking, but that last part, I think, is very key to the eventual delegation.

Where we can verify the lineage of the user's intent originally captured and validated throughout the execution process - eventually used as an authorization mechanism.

Google has a good thought model around this for payments (see verifiable mandates):
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...
by georgeecollins | 2026-02-25 18:51:07+00:00
I know you are making a joke, but for people who may not understand: The point is that well regarded Universities in the USA are generally old relative to other institutions in the USA. So Stanford has a pretty campus on land that was purchased when hardly anyone lived in Palo Alto. Now that land is absurdly valuable.

As in the article, it changes how you might use the land. A grove is a beautiful place to go and read or relax. But if you could replace that grove with a structure worth of hundreds of millions of dollars it changes things.
by SyneRyder | 2026-02-25 18:51:20+00:00
That was my experience when I tried Moonshine against Parakeet v3 via Handy. Moonshine was noticeably slower on my 2018-era Intel i7 PC, and didn't seem as accurate either. I'm glad it exists, and I like the smaller size on disk (and presumably RAM too). But for my purposes with Handy I think I need the extra speed and accuracy Parakeet v3 is giving me.
by randusername | 2026-02-25 18:51:38+00:00
It exists to indicate how a word is pronounced. Naïve is a better example IMO, cooperation feels too familiar.

Non-native speakers might see something like "nave" instead of "nigh-eve" unless it is clear that there is a stress that breaks out of the diphthong.

I don't think style guides are (usually) about absolute correctness, but relative correctness. A question is asked, a decision needs making, someone makes it, and now a team of individuals can speak with a consistent voice because there's a guideline to minimize variation.
by brandall10 | 2026-02-25 18:51:46+00:00
- Whenever I have a change to suggest, I ask Gemini to review my docs/specs folder. I then describe the change I'm thinking of and ask it to modify the specs as it sees fit. I review those changes, ask questions or make suggestions/corrections, rinse/repeat until I'm satisfied. This tends to take about 5-6 iterations, esp. if the agent is adding or suggesting things I hadn't considered and want to dig in deeper on.

- I don't update plans in the past - any work that superseeds work from an earlier plan is simply a new plan. If during creation of a new plan I review the plan and decide I want to something else that requires a spec update, I trash the plan, do the spec update, and rerun plan generation. Past plans of course can point to divergent specs but that's not something I care about much, as plans are a self-contained enough story of the work that was done.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-25 18:51:52+00:00
I think you’re misreading this. OP has an email account. Someone else signed up for some website that doesn’t verify that you own the address before allowing you to log in and use the service. If the site did verify it, the user wouldn’t have been able to log in because OP would have been getting the verification emails, and not the user.

Later, after OP told the user and they failed to change their address, OP logged into the site and changed their password, putting an end to the spam they were receiving from the user’s actions.

I don’t have an ethical qualm with this. He didn’t want to sign up for the service. Someone else signed his email address up for it. Legally, I can’t imagine that being prosecutable.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 18:52:05+00:00
- The U.S. NSA ran fake LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to phish foreign targets, as revealed in Snowden leaks, posing as recruiters to install malware.

- UK's GCHQ conducted "Operation Socialist," using false personas on social media for spear-phishing against telecom firms worldwide.

- In 2016, Russian GRU operatives (targeting Western elections) used spear-phishing on Democratic Party emails, but U.S. agencies mirrored similar tactics in counter-ops per declassified reports.

- "A Diamond is Forever".

Emotional manipulation linking diamonds to eternal love; planted stories, lobbied celebrities; created artificial scarcity myth despite stockpile.

- Amazon, Walmart, etc.

Scarcity/urgency prompts ("only 2 left!"); personalized "recommended for you" via data exploits.

- Fake reviews.

Paid influencers posed as riders praising service; hidden surge pricing mind games.

- "Torches of freedom".

Women-only events handing cigarettes as "freedom symbols" to subvert norms.

Feel free to ask for more:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-someone-on-hackernews-c...
Show HN: Draw on Screen – a modern screen annotation tool with webcam
by markjivko | 2026-02-25 18:52:10+00:00
I built this tool because I needed to make YouTube Devlogs faster and annotating in DaVinci Resolve took hours.

It allows you to annotate your screen (draw over other apps) and interact with your webcam in real-time (it supports up to 4 webcam configurations).

The app was built from the ground up to reduce cognitive load to a minimum. All tools are spring-loaded and intuitive. Want to draw something? Just swipe. Want to write some text? Double-click. Want to zoom in on something? Scroll up.

It's available for all 3 OS-es, and it's a one-time purchase that you can install on up to 5 computers. Free to try without a credit card.

If you're a content creator or a story teller, I think you'll really like this tool.
by ajsnigrutin | 2026-02-25 18:52:16+00:00
I would prefer that over here in slovenia.... instead, we can't repave a street without digging a few meters deep, finding ancient roman remains, and delaying the repair for many months... heck, even without finding roman stuff, we had an 800m long road closed for 2 years...

So yeah, it's either potholes or road closure for a year++.
by legitster | 2026-02-25 18:52:17+00:00
Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.

Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:

> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.

Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:

> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2026-02-25 18:52:35+00:00
I understand that Anthropic has one of the most popular products in the market.

But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when their leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover moat, to effectively create an AI cartel [1]

I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthro...
by vincentalbouy | 2026-02-25 18:52:35+00:00
Hello, the visa question is quite recurring especially for larger team that have distributed teams.

The algorithm is quite smart about that because it has legacy data from ~1500 events. IT has been shown a lot of example of" When a team is located there, they have VISA issues --> they should actually go there because it worked in the past for XYZ client"

For example the algorithm will know that Dominican Republic is usually VISA frienly and can send larger groups there etc.

For the second part: Finding a venue with the requirements is hard, our clients really have a pain point, but what it is even harder tis to agree on terms, prices, food, meeting space, transportation coordination etc, it is a logistical nigthhmare
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-25 18:53:12+00:00
;)

I defer to Merriam-Webster and/or Harbrace (rather than TCMoS) on punctuation usage.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...

Magical signal panacea searching is ultimately fruitless. Other ways to make bot interactions more difficult, there are policy and technological obstacles that could be introduced. For example, require an official desktop or mobile app for interaction. And then for any text copy-pasted, demarcate it. And throw an error message for any input typed inhumanly-fast. Require a micropayment of like $0.10 to comment. While these things would break the interaction style and flexibility for a lot of innocent human users, these would throw big wrenches into some but not all vulnerabilities of bot interactions.
by 3rodents | 2026-02-25 18:53:14+00:00
The reason we look harshly on past word usage is because of what it represents. The use of slurs 30 years ago isn’t a problem because of the word but because it suggests an association with a specific behavior.

If you look back to the 90s and see someone using a racist slur, you fill in the gaps and assume they were using it because they were racist.

Will people in 30 years look back to today and judge those who showed disdain for people who rely on AI to write for them?

Even if clanker becomes a no-no word 30 years from now, it seems beyond the realm of possibility that people who hated clankers in 2026 will be looked upon harshly. Clankers aren’t a marginalized group today, they aren’t a class that needs protection.

What words are you thinking of when you say that there is precedent?