MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sofixa | 2025-04-24 11:06:45+00:00
> Name a thing that the USA will not be able to produce themselves

Smartphones. Computers. Servers, switches. Anything that relies on an advanced chip. Anything that needs cobalt or lithium or coffee or cocoa or any other material not found in sufficient numbers or quality in the US. Ships. Hell, planes while we're at it (Boeing suck ass). Anything that needs to be affordable (like clothing).
by Sol- | 2025-04-24 11:07:33+00:00
Maybe a naive question, because presumably more money is always better, but I do wonder what the endgame with this Wealth Fund is. Obviously a country is not like an individual, so it's not like the whole country of Norway can "retire" once its wealth fund has reached a certain size, because people within the country still have to perform services for each other and therefore work.

So there seems to be a limit in how much these trillions in assets abroad can benefit the welfare of the Norwegian people. This has always confused me a bit, but I'm not well-versed enough in economics to articulate it correctly.

Probably the same must be true for most export-oriented economies, just that there the assets abroad are held by companies and individuals instead of a government fund.
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-24 11:07:34+00:00
I think it is part nature, part nurture.

To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.

As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.

So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.

Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-24 11:07:43+00:00
> Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?)

Yes. But in these early stages, that will only prove the LLM's can't do much more than be a fancy autocomplete, as opposed to a way to accelerate the workflow navigating anything with real-world value.

Maybe in a few years for the most common domains this will truly shine.
by Jach | 2025-04-24 11:08:12+00:00
It's funny but I think your exact comment could have been written 10 years ago, substituting 2025 with 2015. Some things might be ±2 years. This observation could be seen as both a positive and a negative about both the language and people writing about it.

Things have changed since 2015, though, and in 2015 looking back at 2005 things had changed too. (Quicklisp was only on the scene in 2010, which is somewhat late compared to its equivalents in other languages.) Popularity-wise, I continue to be positive about CL's global future, even if nothing is done about your bullet points. Over the years I keep noticing new software, new implementation features, the occasional new book, new papers, new jobs, and new people writing stuff, I expect that to continue. Some long-standing companies and systems are still going, avoiding the death of a total rewrite or just better competition, some of them like managing train schedules are older than me. It looks like a living and (slowly) growing ecosystem. It won't ever again enjoy a top-10 language status by making technical changes, but I don't think many people care. (There's a similar level of not caring when it comes to non-GC languages and how their overall job market share is probably not going to shift from ~10% any time soon (barring the potential of forced mass early retirement due to AI).)

I was considering a more argumentative reply to your bullet points because I think they're not quite correct... There's a lot of nitpicking that could be done, and further elaborating the nuances might lead to a conclusion that, to the extent the points are true, they don't really matter -- in other words, my reaction to the list even in its strongest form (by my views anyway) is still kind of just a big shrug, so why bother trying to argue with it? I'll keep using Common Lisp. (Even despite my own pet complaints not on your list.) And given your final statement about sticking with it, I wonder if you also kind of shrug at the importance of those things.
by seszett | 2025-04-24 11:08:12+00:00
> Name a thing that the USA will not be able to produce themselves

Coffee and planes that stay in the air.

But to be more serious, the US (and Europe maybe to a slightly lesser extent) wealth is propped up on cheap labour overseas like the Roman empire was on slaves. It is absolutely possible to change that, but it's not as painless as you seem to think.
Ask HN: Could a passive underwater device shift naval strategy?
by Hi-Alex | 2025-04-24 11:09:16+00:00
I'm working on a concept for a passive underwater device. The probe stays dormant underwater, equipped with sensors and a basic AI module. When triggered (by a timer or environmental input), it surfaces and emits short coded optical signals (LED/IR/laser). Optional support for GPS and Iridium satellite uplink.

Potential use-cases I'm exploring: – Acts as a decoy to provoke sonar activity – Mass deployment for presence simulation – Environmental and educational applications

I call this concept NUTRA: Naval Underwater Triggered Response Architecture.

My question to HN: Could a low-cost, passive, behavior-based platform like this realistically shift assumptions in modern naval defense or reconnaissance?

Where are the blind spots in this logic? What weaknesses am I overlooking?
by krishiv_piduri | 2025-04-24 11:09:27+00:00
Hey HN, I’ve always struggled with linear note-taking, especially when trying to understand big topics like “machine learning” or “stoicism.” So, I built a little tool that lets you type a word and watch it grow into a visual learning map.

Here's how it works:

You start with one word, idea, or question.

The app uses AI to generate a branching mind map in real time.

You can click on any node to expand it, get a short summary, or go deeper.

It’s designed for visual thinkers, ADHD learners, and anyone who feels overwhelmed by walls of text.

I’d love feedback, especially on:

How to make it more useful for actual learning?

Does the UI feel smooth or confusing?

What use cases do you want this for?

It’s free, open source, and I’m still actively building. Appreciate any thoughts or ideas
by baritone | 2025-04-24 11:09:43+00:00
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.

Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.

This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.

Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.

Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.

Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
by metalman | 2025-04-24 11:10:14+00:00
Awsome! And a real incentive to close the loop on my off grid house and shop, and add transportation. I am thinking about getting a car to go with the truck I will keep, but realise is just more vehicle than I need 50% of the time, so upgrading my solar array, and adding charging equipment for a car is looking good. I can attest to the simple facts of how reliable solar pv is, and that the ROI is amazing. The intangible part is that I just dont consider costs around electricity or home (wood) heating, which I realise has given me that bit of margin when I am running close to the edge.....ie: certain bills and stresses, just never add to the pile. I have also built and run a whole bio diesel truck and plant.There are local farmers who have gone all in, and are raising crops that are pressed for oil, which is then used in diesel powered equipment, the left over "cake" fed to livestock, some have gone even further and built methan digesters that convert manure, into well, methane, which fuels generator motors. Little islands that are operating successfully, providing employment, and selling goods and services, off the grid. Technicaly challenging, but profitable and insulated from other bumps in the economy.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-24 11:10:51+00:00
> Sure a contract was signed, but as has been pointed out many times about Google's heavy-handed control over Android, it doesn't mean it was fair to all parties:

The article is basically saying "if you don't use Play store and Google apps you'll have to build them yourself". I don't really understand - yes? You would have to. But you still got a load of stuff free. You only have to build apps on top. You get a working OS for free still, which is incredibly valuable.
by cynusx | 2025-04-24 11:11:50+00:00
I love your enthusiasm so let me share some hard-won learnings with you.

In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).

The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.

That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.

People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.

Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.

You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.

And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-24 11:11:52+00:00
It provides leverage for a country that otherwise only has wealth stored mostly in tradeable natural resources (natural gas, wood, and fish) and real estate. The sovereign wealth fund exists to maintain the wealth of the country in the case that they are no longer able to trade natural resources or their housing market crashes and people are unable to sell their real estate for a profit anymore. It allows for them to have time to reorient their economy towards something new instead of everyone going into poverty and getting stuck there.
by franga2000 | 2025-04-24 11:12:30+00:00
Calling the Google Apps agreement something phone vendors voluntarily agreed to is pedantic, reductive and useless. Yes, technically they didn't get physically forced into it, but that's not the whole story.

Google used their unimaginably deep pockets and several monopolies to make sure that no phone without Google Apps will sell. Look at what happened to Huawei after Trump's ban - there were articles in even mainstream media about how people are buying the P10 (was it?), starting it up, realizing nothing works and trying to return it. And literally the only reason that "nothing worked" was that it didn't have Google Play services.
by diggan | 2025-04-24 11:13:11+00:00
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.

Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.

Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
by CPLX | 2025-04-24 11:14:13+00:00
The relevant fact here is contained in this article's subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial..."

He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his company, which dominates social media, does not have market power and thus is not a monopolist.

The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the government.
by iamcalledrob | 2025-04-24 11:15:09+00:00
I'd bet that this is ultimately about people's preferences for consuming content, unfortunately.

People will say they only want content from friends, just as they say they want to eat healthily. But the desire and the reality end up looking very different.

People at large will spend time in whatever surfaces are the most engaging (~addictive), and if a platform like Facebook removed those "other posts", it's likely that people would just spend time on another platform instead -- TikTok, Reddit, YouTube Shorts, etc...

It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's a very tricky problem to tackle at scale.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-24 11:15:10+00:00
You do you, but I'd be curious to hear what you think you can do in VS Code that you can't do in vim - what these "more features" are. Vim, and Neovim, have an expansive plugin culture. They are designed to be very configurable and customisable, so that the software fits around you and what you need to do. What features do you find missing?

Also, I get that you feel vim users are being a bit evangelical - "trying to teach", as you put it - but I can assure you that I, for one, have used VS Code plenty (including using vim keybindings), and it's just not very good for me. It doesn't fit me.

It's slow, it's not as configurable to my needs. I sometimes have nothing more than my iPad Pro (and magic keyboard), with me - I can mosh/ssh into a dev box, tmux up a session get to work easily, I never found a nice way to make VS Code work in this pattern.

What's the point in being a software engineer if you can't have software that fits you? Yes, vim has a learning curve, but then I get to make it my own and make it fit what I need. Same with tmux, my shell, and so on. In my experience, VS Code forced me a little more to fit to it rather than the other way around.

Like I say, you do you, but don't think all vim fans are talking from a place of ignorance.
by netsharc | 2025-04-24 11:15:11+00:00
I read this yesterday about Zuck. God, Zuck, what a cunt. It's a review of Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, which Meta tried to kill.

It also mentions Zuck's motivation for learning Mandarin.

Yes it's off-topic, but I think it's important to know when discussing Zuck/Meta:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).

> At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.

[...]

> Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.

> After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more.

[...]

> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.

[...]

> Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
by belter | 2025-04-24 11:16:15+00:00
Looking at it from execution perspective, you might be able to get a faster signal if you manage to narrow the offer to a more specialized product.

It might seem counter-intuitive as it would narrow the market, but at the same time will provide more value for the potential audience. It will help focus marketing budget also. Like maybe target professional athletes or Pilates fans as an example.

Good luck!
by sofixa | 2025-04-24 11:16:16+00:00
Again with people of limited knowledge and intellectual assuming GDP means anything relevant to the point they're making, but it doesn't.

Exhibit A, almost 9% of GDP is tourism. Not only is that not productive in any sense of the word, that will crater thanks to Trump and ICE Gestapo wannabes arresting random people for minor administrative errors. Nobody sane wants to visit the US now.

Exhibit B, you assume higher GDP means something good. In the US, a good coffee, with tip and tax, can cost you $10. In France, it's 1.50-2€. GDP numbers would make you believe the US is 5-10 betters, but in reality, there's no difference other than Americans being scammed out of their money with very high prices.

Exhibit C, anything that happens in any of the US health insurance companies. Record profits, high market caps, etc. but you'd struggle to find anything of any value happening there.
by palata | 2025-04-24 11:16:23+00:00
I have been using vim for 15 years. I disagree with the idea that it makes me more efficient than someone else. First, because I have friends who don't use vim and are very fast. Second because most of my time as a developer is not spent writing/editing text.

No, I love vim because of its ergonomics. If I use a mouse for too long, my arm/shoulder starts hurting. Maybe I could improve the ergonomics of my mouse (having a vertical mouse already helped), but using vim and a tiling window manager allow me to drastically reduce my use of the mouse. It makes me more efficient than me when I use a less ergonomic setup, sure. But that's me.

It's all about ergonomics, and everyone is different. It's okay to be faster with a mouse or on an iPad.
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 11:16:35+00:00
The question of increasing productivity and what that means for us as laborers is another entire can of worms, but that aside, I have never yet found LLM-gen'd code that met my personal standards, and sped up my total code output.

If I want to spend my time refactoring and bugfixing and rewriting and integrating, rather than writing from scratch and bugfixing, I can definitely achieve that by using LLM code, but the overall time has never felt different to me, and in many cases I've thrown out the LLM code after several hours due to either sheer frustration with how it's written, or due to discovering that the structure it's using doesn't work with the rest of the program (see: anything related to threading).
by jappgar | 2025-04-24 11:16:54+00:00
To me THIS is the most stressful part of the whole thing.

I like programming but I have other hobbies I find fulfilling, and nothing stops me from programming with a pen and paper.

The bad vibes are not caused by lack of programming, they're caused by headsman sharpening his axe behind me.

A few lucky programmers will be elevated to God status and we're all fighting for those spots now.
by canucker2016 | 2025-04-24 11:17:16+00:00
Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler has the /Ge compiler option ( see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/ge-ena... ) Deprecated since VC2005.

This compiler option causes the compiler to emit a call to a stack probe function to ensure that a sufficient amount of stack space is available.

Rather than just probe once for each stack page used, you can substitute a function that *FILLS* the stack frame with a particular value - something like 0xBAADF00D - one could set the value to anything you wanted at runtime.

This would get you similar behaviour to gcc/clang's -ftrivial-auto-var-init

Windows has started to auto-initialize most stack variables in the Windows kernel and several other areas.

The following types are automatically initialized: Scalars (arrays, pointers, floats) Arrays of pointers Structures (plain-old-data structures) The following are not automatically initialized: Volatile variables Arrays of anything other than pointers (i.e. array of int, array of structures, etc.) Classes that are not plain-old-data During initial testing where we forcibly initialized all types of data on the stack we saw performance regressions of over 10% in several key scenarios. With POD structures only, performance was more reasonable. Compiler optimizations to eliminate redundant stores (both inside basic blocks and between basic blocks) were able to further drop the regression caused by POD structures from observable to noise-level for most tests. We plan on revisiting zero initializing all types (especially now that our optimizer has more powerful optimizations), we just haven’t gotten to it yet.

see https://web.archive.org/web/20200518153645/https://msrc-blog...
by einpoklum | 2025-04-24 11:17:26+00:00
I cannot believe how, after all these years, we don't even have `restrict` in the language, nor uniform function call syntax (i.e. x.foo(y) being interchangeable with foo(x, y) ); but we do get the ultimate bells-and-whistles in the form of reflection and reflection-based code generation; and the half-baked coroutines mechanism.

uniform function call syntax and a `restrict` mechanism have not made it in to the standard after so many years
by aredox | 2025-04-24 11:18:23+00:00
>Saying "just text prediction" understates how big a deal that is.

Here on HN we often see posts insisting on the importance of "first principles".

Your embrace of "magic" - an unknown black box who does seemingly wonderful things that usually blow up to one's face and have a hidden cost - is the opposite of that.

LLMs are just text prediction. That's what they are.

>Why can LLMs generally write code that even compiles?

Why can I copy-paste code and it compiles?

Try to use LLM on code there is little training material about - for example PowerQuery or Excel - and you will see it bullshit and fail - even Microsoft's own LLM.