MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by collinmanderson | 2026-03-08 02:02:50+00:00
I agree using the preferred city name works just fine for USPS, though maybe not for UPS/Fedex.

What I want to know is: Why isn't this preferred city+state mapping dataset for zip codes publicly available from USPS? It would be like 40kb of data for the entire thing. Why is this not public domain from the US Government?

Edit: or is this what I'm looking for (the "Physical City", "Physical State" columns? https://postalpro.usps.com/ZIP_Locale_Detail

It's missing 00501 at least (which zippopotam has), and military zip codes (which zippopotam doesn't have). Military zip codes are included in this file: https://postalpro.usps.com/areadist_ZIP5

Also fun fact 88888 is for "Operation Santa" uspsoperationsanta.com, which zippopotam is missing, but appears in the areadist_ZIP5 file.
by arcticfox | 2026-03-08 02:03:11+00:00
I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
by hluska | 2026-03-08 02:04:30+00:00
I would prefer some kind of privacy statement or even some kind of explanation about what is going on before I just randomly turn my webcam on. This might be great and I’m proud of you for launching but I don’t do things like that. Heck, videos can make a person’s heart race - I had my first attack at 39 and that’s a hell of a lot of risk.
Ask HN: How to serve inference as we do with containes with cached token
by elesbao | 2026-03-08 02:04:31+00:00
I've been reading and experimenting with vLLM but it seems that each day there are more and more articles and AI generated long form about each part of the stack. I have a few GPUs and work for a private education group. I want to run models internally and distribute access to a research team. I don't want to have one (or more) GPU per user neither train models. CUrrently I am doing well with a local Qwen on my own single server but I can't wrap my head around on which part to tackle - right now I am looking to KV caches and building over vLLM but I wanted something simple and secure to not leak data from one session to another.
by dataflow | 2026-03-08 02:04:39+00:00
> Technically speaking ZIP codes are not "supposed" to span states but, in exceptional cases, some do. In this case USPS handles it the same way: the state of the preferred city is the preferred state for the ZIP code.

I've heard this before but it raises a million questions for me and I don't understand how this doesn't cause massive systematic problems and headaches in practice. Are residents even usually well-aware what city they live in, versus what's on their postal address? I sure as heck have always assumed whatever my mailing address says is the city I live in; I can't imagine a ton of people questioning it.

Doesn't this mean a ton of citizens would be registering for the wrong state's elections? Do the election officials always catch these? What about businesses - don't they constantly pay taxes incorrectly if the address is written incorrectly? What about laws (say privacy, wiretapping/call recording, etc.) where people make assumptions based on the city and state - what if they're wrong because the written city isn't the actual city? Who's criminally liable then?? Does every business have to perform a jurisdiction lookup to make sure an address isn't misleading?
by dkechag | 2026-03-08 02:04:44+00:00
Going to the cloud can't possibly be as cheap as owning your own hardware for obvious reasons - they have to make money somehow. Well, unless you use spot instances, which uses spare nodes.
In any case, you move to the cloud despite the cost if you need the multi-region redundancy, the management/features etc. More commonly it's because the higher ups heard everybody's doing it, but oh well :D
by serious_angel | 2026-03-08 02:05:21+00:00
In the minified source code, we may see, it uses:

```
try {
const l=await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({audio:!1,video:{facingMode:"user"}}); /* ... */ } catch { this.showError("Could not access webcam. Please check permissions.") }
```

There are alternatives to verify mediaDevices support as https://addpipe.com/getusermedia-examples/
by Aurornis | 2026-03-08 02:05:32+00:00
> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

> The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later

How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees?

If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 years. You could try to find cheaper colocation but even with free colocation your example doesn’t break even for over a year.
by PaulKeeble | 2026-03-08 02:05:55+00:00
The main thrust of the economic argument has been on the cost of system adminstrators that maintain the hardware. Electricity and cooling being big ongoing costs, but also when AWS released it wasn't uncommon to order a server and have it take 3 months to arrive.

I think in practice the system administrators are still in the company now as AWS engineers, they still keep all that platform stuff running and your paying AWS for their engineers too as well as electricity. It has the advantage of being very quick to spin up another box, but also machines these days can come with 288 cores, its not a big stretch to maintain sufficient surplass and the tools to allow teams to self service.

Things are in a different place to when AWS first released, AWS ought to be charging a lot less for the compute, memory and storage, their business is wildly profitable at current rates because per core machines got cheaper.
by rznicolet | 2026-03-08 02:05:58+00:00
As somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a handful of shots at the Big Five publishers with your manuscript. If they don't want it? It's small press or self-pub, and good luck getting your book above the sea of mediocrity.

The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers.

(And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)
by idopmstuff | 2026-03-08 02:06:14+00:00
> And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at?

I was a product manager for 15 years. I helped sell products to customers who paid thousands or millions of dollars for them. I never looked at the code. Customers never looked at the code. The overwhelming majority of people in the world are constantly relying on code they've never looked at. It's mostly fine.

> How do you verify the end result?

That's the better question, and the answer is a few things. First, when it makes changes to my ad accounts, I spot check them in the UI. Second, I look at ad reporting pretty often, since it's a core part of running my business. If there were suddenly some enormous spike in spend, it wouldn't take me long to catch it.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-03-08 02:06:16+00:00
I think you get more bang for your buck focusing on build security than on audited sources. If the build is solid then it forces attackers to work in the open where all auditors can work together towards spoiling their efforts.

But if you flip it around and have magically audited source but a shaky build, then perhaps a diligent users can protect themselves, but the attacker can just keep trying until they compromise somebody who is less diligent. Sure, scanners exist, but if you have access to the scanner you can likely re-hide the payload without much additional effort. You could even hide it differently for each user you attack.
by api | 2026-03-08 02:07:03+00:00
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.

I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.

I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.

The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
by zackify | 2026-03-08 02:07:15+00:00
the 140/mo is for 3x less vcpu, so $420/mo savings if you use all those same cores. sorry for the poor comparison wording there. in a few months already up to $1300+ by 6 months already paid the machine.

colo fees are cheap if you need more than just 1u. even with a 50-100 fee you easily get way more performance and come ahead within a year
by sarchertech | 2026-03-08 02:07:22+00:00
At some point verbosity becomes complexity. If you’re talking all observable behavior the input and output pairs are likely to be quite verbose/complex.

Imagine testing a game where the inputs are the possible states of game, and the possible control inputs, and the outputs are the states that could result.

Of course very few human written programs require this level of testing, but if you are trying to prevent an a swarm of agents from changing observable behavior without human review, that’s what you’d need.

Even with simpler input output pairs, an AI tells you it added a feature and had to change 2,000 input/output pairs to do so. How do you verify that those were necessary to change, and how do you verify that you actually have enough cases to prevent the AI from doing something dumb?

Oops you didn’t have a test that said that items shouldn’t turn completely transparent when you drag them.
by skydhash | 2026-03-08 02:07:53+00:00
Code is like f(x)=ax+b. You test would be a list of (x,y) tuple. You don’t verify the correctness of your points because they come from some source that you hold as true. What you want is the generic solution (the theory) proposed by the formula. And your test would be just a small set of points, mostly to ensure that no one has changed the a and b parameters. But if you have a finite number of points, The AI is more likely to give you a complicated spline formula than the simple formula above. Unless the tokens in the prompts push it to the right domain space. (Usually meaning that the problem is solved already)

Real code has more dimensionality than the above example. Experts have the right keywords, but even then that’s a whole of dice. And coming up with enough sample test cases is more arduous than writing the implementation.

Unless there’s no real solution (dimensionality is high), but we have a lot of tests data with a lower dimensionality than the problem. This used to be called machine learning and we have metrics like accuracy for it.
by DHPersonal | 2026-03-08 02:07:56+00:00
Address entries are the weirdest places of frustration. Business clients want Google Places to make address input easier. This user wants a single ZIP code entry to begin the process. Why is adding one’s own address manually that huge of a hurdle that we have to separate the user from the inputs? If there is one person in the world who should know my address, it’s me: why then put such an effort into building a site that takes away my ability to enter my address?
by DrewADesign | 2026-03-08 02:07:59+00:00
> I'm 8x more productive than I was in 2022... And I jokingly say "I'm probably not going to have a job in 1 or 2 years"...

> We are going to create incredible value to humanity. 8x rate. I don't know what our hourly will be.

Do we have 8x more demand for software than current developers can currently supply? No, we don’t. Many developers will soon have a very bitter pill to swallow once they realize that developers are the beneficiaries of good market dynamics rather than some precious intellectual elite whose skills are monetizable in any other context.

Their hourly will be whatever DoorDash pays them to deliver pizza and egg rolls. Grad school isn’t any safer, and frankly, many of the soft, arrogant and maladroit people I’ve seen try to enter blue collar trades fail very quickly once they realize how hard the road is to get to those high salaries they always hear about.
by cortesoft | 2026-03-08 02:09:20+00:00
I am not just making this up, this a very well studied thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting

> Your argument is basically well voting doesn't matter so we should have a dictatorship instead of democracy

I am actually not saying that at all, which is what makes this a paradox. I think democracy is important and that getting an accurate determination of the will of the people is important... but it still doesn't make sense, from a pure game theory perspective, to vote in an election.

It isn't REALLY a paradox, because both things are true - voting is a good way to get a representative sample, and a single vote isn't going to change that sample very much.

In many ways, this is just basic statistics, and we experience this every single election night - elections are called WELL in advance of every single vote being counted, because we already know with statistics what the result will be. Now, there are a few examples of this going wrong, but those are mostly times where the rush to call an election makes people call it when the statistics say there is still a reasonable chance for a comeback.

Honestly, it if was up to me, elections should be determined by a random sample. Randomly select N citizens from the country to be the voters that year, and use that result. If N is sized correctly, you will get the same result you would with an actual election, and we don't have to have everyone waste their time voting.

This would never happen, of course, and I honestly can kind of understand why; the results aren't the only thing that is important, feeling connected to the process and that your voice matters also is important. It is a bit of a agreed upon delusion, though.
by mosura | 2026-03-08 02:09:35+00:00
The fact this reflects the subject matter in question is an irony surely lost on the author as well.

Political tedium aside a major factor in the decline of scifi is we live in the future, only it is not the future people were being excited about. As many creatives put it they wanted machines to do the chores and them to do the art, not the other way around.
by JoeAltmaier | 2026-03-08 02:10:34+00:00
UUIDs are necessary. It's possible for file contents to be identical (e.g. short configuration files may coincidentally coincide over time and space). Would the hash then be unique?

Consider: you want a certain data object, with a given UUID. You can find it anywhere, even from a malicious server. Then look up the hash in a trusted database, verify it. Impossible then for the MITM to fool you. No more virus scanning executables.
by api | 2026-03-08 02:10:56+00:00
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.

It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.

As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
by Finnucane | 2026-03-08 02:12:04+00:00
I worked in NY publishing in the 1990s and also did some small press stuff, and even then the 'death of the midlist' was already an old topic. And yeah, consolidation had someting to do with it: publishers were owned by bigger businesses that saw them as black boxes to extract value from. Distribution was changing: the big 'superstores' and Amazon/online sales starting to be a thing. Mass-market was getting crushed. Obviously, not everything that got published was a bestseller, or even expected to be, but authors couldn't get the same space to grow a career. If it didn't work, they'd be cut.

Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.
by groby_b | 2026-03-08 02:12:04+00:00
If they are "indistinguishable" from those book covers, I strongly suggest visiting an optometrist.

You may not enjoy modern art, and that's fine - but most of it runs circles around modern book covers. The latter are optimized to grab attention, without any artistic merit. They're the equivalent of shouting loudly.

Modern art may be the equivalent of speaking in esperanto or lojban to you, but at least it's still trying to say something.
by hluska | 2026-03-08 02:12:06+00:00
In a similar tone, it’s 2026. Why are we still messing with form ordering instead of leaning into autofill? So somehow it makes more sense to change every single address form in existence to a non standard order because…why exactly? There’s a whole world outside of the United States with many formats for postal codes. It’s more efficient to just use autofill…
by twodave | 2026-03-08 02:12:14+00:00
Yeah, anyone who has had to work with USPS bar codes should know that internally these are called routing codes, and they come in 5, 9 and even 11 digit variants. The 11-digit one narrows down to a specific delivery point, but even that isn’t enough to derive an address (just enough to know whether you’re looking at the right one or not). Zip+4 codes also change frequently because they aren’t based on locations but on delivery routes and sequencing.
by droidjj | 2026-03-08 02:12:28+00:00
> "Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just [a] few hundred copies."

For anyone else who was intrigued by this statement: The essay links to another Medium essay[0] which links to a book critic's blog[1] which links to a 2014 article from Publisher's Weekly[2]. That article reports, e.g., that in the week after winning the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, "Tom's River by Dan Fagin, went from 10 copies to 162 copies sold (6,266 copies sold to date) on BookScan." The poetry winner that year had sold 353 copies at the time the article was published. It came out about six months earlier.

So perhaps for some poetry books, an author could win a Pulitzer and "sell just a few hundred copies." But that seems like it would be rare.

Anyway, these aren't great numbers, but maybe not as abysmal as the author makes it sound.

[0] https://aaronschnoor.medium.com/does-winning-a-pulitzer-priz...

[1] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-w...

[2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a...
Show setup modal with confetti on coverage page when no CI data exists
by nishiohiroshi | 2026-03-08 02:12:30+00:00
Coverage dashboard used to show a tiny setup link when no CI data existed. Most users missed it. Now a modal pops up on page visit with a "Set Up" button that creates the CI workflow PR in one click. Archived and empty repos get a different message instead of a broken setup flow.
by Stromanker | 2026-03-08 02:13:25+00:00
It sounds like your address isn't listed correctly in the UK Postcode Address File (PAF).[0] There's a form you can fill in requesting a correction.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcode_Address_File
[1] https://www.royalmail.com/personal/receiving-mail/update-you...
by DrewADesign | 2026-03-08 02:13:27+00:00
Sorry, I wasn’t giving a serious answer. It’s just not as amusingly worded as in thought.

Seriously, though, your question is one of those “how long is a piece of string” sort of questions. Just like any other software quality question, it depends on context, competence, goals, market dynamics, organizational culture, project timelines, team expertise, etc.

Do people pay their bills on time? Do people wear seatbelts? Do people brush their teeth for the full two recommended minutes? Depends, depends, depends.
by operatingthetan | 2026-03-08 02:13:30+00:00
>Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.

In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
by Aerroon | 2026-03-08 02:13:38+00:00
Didn't Anthropic's case already set the precedent that training itself is fine? It's not like copyrighted novels are a large portion of human-generated text data. It's just the stuff that's easier to get because it's preserved in bulk.

Video transcription has more or less been solved. Imagine how much data Google has in YouTube transcripts. And the longer these AI chat bots operate the more data they manage to collect for training as well (I think Google making it so you can easily upvote or downvote a response by the bot is a good idea).
by serious_angel | 2026-03-08 02:13:51+00:00
I haven't dug deeper due to time availability, but for the same sake of privacy, I've found:

1. `/api/event` endpoint mentioned in the `/stats/script.js` file;

2. There's `/parties/lobby/main/telemetry` in a minified JavaScript chunk asset;

3. There's VitalLens mentioned, and there's an error string in the same asset: "A valid API key or proxy URL is required to use VitalLens. If you signed up recently, please try again in a minute to allow your API key to become active. Otherwise, head to https://www.rouast.com/api to get a free API key."
Show HN: Too many AI SaaS launching every day so we built Arena where they fight
by GiornoJojo | 2026-03-08 02:13:57+00:00
Every day a new “AI tool” launches.
Most are vibecoded clones.

So we built Glad-ia-tor : an arena where AI SaaS fight for survival.

The crowd roasts them.
The crowd votes.
Only the strongest survive.
by dkechag | 2026-03-08 02:14:11+00:00
A 16-core 4565p is of course faster in max single thread speed than a 96-core that GCP is running at an economically optimal base clock.

A year ago I gave a talk about optimizing Cloud cost efficiency and I did a comparison of colocation vs cloud over time. You might find it interesting here, linking to the relative part: https://youtu.be/UEjMr5aUbbM?si=4QFSXKTBFJa2WrRm&t=1236

TLDR, colocation broke even in 6 to 18 months for on-demand and 3y reserve cloud respectively. But spot instances can actually be quite cheaper than colocation.

You generally don't go to the cloud for the price (except if we are talking hetzner etc).
by esperent | 2026-03-08 02:14:19+00:00
Nobody here is still using ChatGPT, hopefully. They are the company of using automated drone warframe that results in schools getting bombed.

I'm sure that other companies are guilty of this too but OpenAI is the one that's loudly and dramatically stepping forward and saying "we support this" and if you continue using them after learning that, you are also saying that you support this.