MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwawayb299 | 2025-04-22 17:12:49+00:00
> But I'm really referring to the idea that at some point you should more or less create a solution in a spec, and then code should just be an implementation of the spec

This sentence is a little ambiguous, so I might be reading it wrong. But if you're literally referring to the idea of a spec so detailed it's virtually coded in a natural language, then I find this idea baffling. We have a specialized tool for this job - programming languages, which I enjoy quite a bit, btw. Are these somehow beneath a true software engineer, who's supposed to program in English?

Anyway, let's do a bit of napkin math here.

- So, a real Senior Software Engineer spends 95% of their time producing specs.

- Say, coming up with this particular spec took 16 hours, then the time dedicated to implementation works out to approx. 51 minute.

- Assuming their typing speed is 350 characters per minute (nothing to scoff at, especially considering typing is such a minor part of their job.)

- Now, their style guide sets the cutoff for a line of code at 120 chars (they aren't some 80-char cavemen, are they?)

Putting it all together, banging out code non-stop for 51 minutes, they'd end up with O(150) lines of code to show for 16 hours of planning and speccing... I say someone is coasting as if it were the last day of their life. Curious to hear your take!
by taylodl | 2025-04-22 17:12:49+00:00
This is what I was taught:

There are two types of music: classical and folk.

Classical music involves musicians having a high technical proficiency with their instrument and the ability to translate musical notation on paper into music through their instrument. Such musicians are said to be classically trained.

Folk music also involves musicians having a high technical proficiency with their instrument; however, they rarely translate musical notation on paper into music through their instrument. Instead, they tend to memorize musical structures and are skilled at composing on the fly, i.e., improvisation.

Folk music predates classical music by thousands of years. Both types of music have several genres. Classical has baroque, classical, romantic, modern, and contemporary. Folk has pretty much everything else! In this context, folk music is much more than American folk, bluegrass, and country: it also encompasses rock, blues, jazz, and pop, for example.
by raattgift | 2025-04-22 17:13:05+00:00
How do you propose to measure the ultralocal Riemann curvature? I agree with you that it can be there in an exact solution, but I don't really agree that it's necessarily physical (there are many many exact solutions which aren't, for starters). Even with a broader definition of local, a Synge 5-point like process is not going to find a failure of parallel transport in a sufficiently small region. Would you be satisfied with "effectively flat" (in an EFT sense) or even "FAPP flat"?
by whstl | 2025-04-22 17:13:24+00:00
I’ve been using Hasura and PostgREST for a few years now with real big production apps, in enterprise and in startups, and honestly the only problem with them is that backend engineers feel threatened.

They are great products that cover 95% of what a CRUD API does without hacks. They’re great tools in the hands of engineers too.

To me it’s not about vibe coding or AI. It is that it's pointless to reinvent the wheel on every single CRUD backend once again.
by ryao | 2025-04-22 17:13:38+00:00
This is correct and is roughly what I meant. My only nitpick is that I was thinking that if they forked at the time of the older notice, they would be fine to have used it, rather than a vague notion of appropriateness that probably was intended to mean the same thing, but is less precise.

The hacker news post reached someone high enough up at Microsoft to have things changed. They ended placing a combined copyright notice that is a mixture of both versions into the repository to play it safe.
by Snawoot | 2025-04-22 17:13:40+00:00
I had an attempt to improve performance of memory allocation with the use of arenas in Go and I chose freelist datastructure[1]

It almost doesn't use unsafe except one line to cast pointer types. I measured practical performance boost with "container/list" implementation hooked to my allocator. All in all it performs 2-5 times faster or up to 10 times faster if we can get rid[2] of any and allocations implied by the use of it.

All in all, heap allocations can be not that bad at all if you approach them from another angle.

[1]: https://github.com/Snawoot/freelist

[2]: https://github.com/Snawoot/list
by candiddevmike | 2025-04-22 17:14:17+00:00
So there was originally BuildFlow[0], then LaunchFlow[1], and now infra.new? How many pivots are you folks going to do? What happened to all the customers you had on these products?

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169256

1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063124
by chuckadams | 2025-04-22 17:14:20+00:00
LambdaMOO was ahead of its time in many ways: lists are immutable, but there was a handy splice operator. Verbs could have aliases and wildcards or both, allowing for some interesting namespace-like behavior. Would have been nice if they could have completely decoupled the built in parser before development died off, but it should be a pretty simple task nowadays, and some places like E_MOO managed to soft-code some pretty decent parsers regardless.
by kleiba | 2025-04-22 17:14:29+00:00
A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old kids don't care about the history of computers), that I couldn't blame any of my students not to show much interest in my classes.

As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.
by ianbicking | 2025-04-22 17:14:48+00:00
That seems like a really short lifespan...? Like you can use it for a couple years, but only if you don't actually use it.

There's an obvious aesthetic draw to e-ink, but it seems like passive-matrix monochrome LCD (like the Playdate) would be similarly power-efficient (or better [1]), longer lasting, usable in full daylight, and with better refresh rates.

How good are the best monochrome LCD screens now? Like... most reflective background and feel the flattest? (The vertical offset between the liquid and the background always bugs me.) Playdate (a Sharp Memory LCD [2]) seems pretty good but surprisingly low contrast. I suppose because the liquid crystal still blocks light even when its off? (I'm unclear here)

Looks like the OLPC transflective LCD screens are actually manufactured now [3] (5" display for $50 [4], maybe 10" but I'm skeptical [5]). The overall OLPC design was actually pretty great [6], even if many of the components weren't so great; it would be cool to see that revisited by some hobbyist.

[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/403725

[2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694

[3] https://www.kingtechlcd.com/product-category/transflective-d...

[4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/5-inch-transflective-...

[5] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10-inch-1200-1600-Tra...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-22 17:14:54+00:00
I discovered this with doordash during the pandemic. They would flat-out not bring things, or would make insane substitutions (one that springs to mind is maple syrup for flour, as though if i have enough syrup pancakes will just happen in some sort of drizzle-down economics) and when you talked to support they would refund the cost of the item as account credit but not the delivery fee. Which means that not only did they not unwind the transaction after they failed to deliver their part, the only way for me to get what I ordered in the first place was to order a second time and pay them a second delivery fee.
by BambooBandit | 2025-04-22 17:15:30+00:00
I feel like the bigger problem isn't whether these deep research products work, but rather the raw material, so to speak, that they're working with.

For example, a lot of the "sources" cited in Google's AI Overview (notably not a deep research product) are not official, just sites that probably rank high in SEO. I want the original source, or a reliable source, not joeswebsite dot com (no offense to this website if it indeed exists).
by 3np | 2025-04-22 17:15:31+00:00
> Longtermism should not be confused with “long-term thinking.” It goes way beyond the observation that our society is dangerously myopic, and that we should care about future generations no less than present ones. At the heart of this worldview, as delineated by Bostrom, is the idea that what matters most is for “Earth-originating intelligent life” to fulfill its potential in the cosmos. What exactly is “our potential”? As I have noted elsewhere, it involves subjugating nature, maximizing economic productivity, replacing humanity with a superior “posthuman” species, colonizing the universe, and ultimately creating an unfathomably huge population of conscious beings living what Bostrom describes as “rich and happy lives” inside high-resolution computer simulations.

> This is what “our potential” consists of, and it constitutes the ultimate aim toward which humanity as a whole, and each of us as individuals, are morally obligated to strive.

I do not believe that this is either obvious, an accurate generalization of longtermism or backed by references (did I miss one?)

EDIT: Did miss the "noted elsewhere" link (pdf): https://c8df8822-f112-4676-8332-ad89713358e3.filesusr.com/ug...
by philistine | 2025-04-22 17:16:12+00:00
You're assuming that IO and CPU are equal.

CPU speed is getting faster at a much higher rate than IO. It makes sense, one is infrastructure, the other is the silicon in your pocket.

That's why you're getting downvoted, and why algos always push more and more to the CPU. Statistically, the correct posture is to expect the CPU to consistently get faster. I mean, if you make an image format now, you want it to work with CPUs in 30 years. Will IO speed gains overtake CPU improvements in 30 years? Most certainly not.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-22 17:16:46+00:00
If nothing else it is much _faster_.

It used to be. But in a lot of the places I shop, it's not anymore. Especially the supermarket. And Target!

Enter your store rewards card number. Skip. Do you want to pay with your store card? No. Do you want to donate to our charity of the month? No. Do you want to round up your total to save the dying baby whales? No. Tap, insert or swipe. Wave the phone around the payment pad to find the invisible, not marked sweet spot so it bleeps. Oh, it's a debit card! Enter your PIN. Push. Push. Push. Push. Do you want cash back? No. Confirm the total. Push. Do you want your receipt printed, e-mailed, or not at all? Not at all. Transaction complete.

Versus cash:

Your total is $28.52. Hand over $40.00. Teller puts the bills in the slot, and the machine tells her how many bills of which denominations to give me, while my coins slide down the little chute into the change tray.

And I'm gone.
by robinhouston | 2025-04-22 17:17:20+00:00
I would encourage anyone who's intrigued by this paradox to read Timothy Chow's comprehensive paper on the subject (https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9903160).

In particular, he discusses what he calls the meta-paradox:

> The meta-paradox consists of two seemingly incompatible facts. The first is that the surprise exam paradox seems easy to resolve. Those seeing it for the first time typically have the instinctive reaction that the flaw in the students’ reasoning is obvious. Furthermore, most readers who have tried to think it through have had little difficulty resolving it to their own satisfaction.

> The second (astonishing) fact is that to date nearly a hundred papers on the paradox have been published, and still no consensus on its correct resolution has been reached. The paradox has even been called a “significant problem” for philosophy [30, chapter 7, section VII]. How can this be? Can such a ridiculous argument really be a major unsolved mystery? If not, why does paper after paper begin by brusquely dismissing all previous work and claiming that it alone presents the long-awaited simple solution that lays the paradox to rest once and for all?

> Some other paradoxes suffer from a similar meta-paradox, but the problem is especially acute in the case of the surprise examination paradox. For most other trivial-sounding paradoxes there is broad consensus on the proper resolution, whereas for the surprise exam paradox there is not even agreement on its proper formulation. Since one’s view of the meta-paradox influences the way one views the paradox itself, I must try to clear up the former before discussing the latter.

> In my view, most of the confusion has been caused by authors who have plunged into the process of “resolving” the paradox without first having a clear idea of what it means to “resolve” a paradox. The goal is poorly understood, so controversy over whether the goal has been attained is inevitable. Let me now suggest a way of thinking about the process of “resolving a paradox” that I believe dispels the meta-paradox.
by throwanem | 2025-04-22 17:17:24+00:00
I did not need to read the article to know something about how laboratory animals behave. As a child I regularly had the company of controls whom my mother opted to smuggle home once their experiments had concluded - rather than, as was officially required in the laboratory technician role from which she has long since retired, euthanize them.

I suppose if the method required for same were not precisely enough specified, we might argue that "safely and peacefully lived out their allotted span of days" still qualifies as the eponymous or nominal "good death." Mama will be 71 this year but has not lost her wits. Would you like me to text and ask if she remembers whether she broke that rule or only bent it?

I certainly will read the article properly, of course. I just haven't yet made the time. But I will note, since you bring it up, that the implicit distinction given there between behaviorist and ethologist as two different kinds of bad is indeed just the sort of distinction a philosopher might draw; that is, valid, nuanced, interesting, and not at all guaranteed to be remotely sound. The prototypical modern ethologist is Jane Goodall, and the one whose work I've myself most closely and productively studied is Mary Jane West-Eberhard.
by Ancapistani | 2025-04-22 17:17:24+00:00
I hate to be that person, but neither the article nor the study makes that claim.

All we know is that people who visit the ER or who are hospitalized "for cannabis use" (not defined in the abstract; full text is behind a paywall) end up with dementia at a higher rate.

That does not mean cannabis caused it. They've accounted for many confounding factors, but you can't account for all of them. Off the top of my head, perhaps people who are in the very early stages of dementia do not tolerate THC as well? Maybe their emotional regulatory ability declines before diagnosis, and they're therefore less able to bring themselves down if they experience anxiety.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-22 17:17:26+00:00
LambdaMOO versions from sometime in the mid-90s and up (and offshoots like ToastStunt and also my rewrite, mooR) let you override the builtin parser with $do_command.

And the builtin one I wrote in mooR is built to be pluggable (Rust trait) so should be possible to swap it out.
by norir | 2025-04-22 17:19:04+00:00
There is an argument that western civilization went astray when Plato elevated human reason above all other virtues. The obvious problem is that for all of the wonderful things reasoning has given us, it is just as effectively used for deceit both of the self and others. The arguments behind much of today's so called rationalists are laughable -- especially to someone outside of their bubble. It is precisely for these reasons that they have to cloak their ridiculous arguments in arbitrary quantitative analysis and impenetrable jargon. And then there is the irony of their nearly universal militant atheism that comes along with sneering contempt for traditional religion (which they also generally have at best an extremely superficial knowledge of).

I also am particularly amused by the worship of Bayesian statistics without serious reflection on the fact that it is premised on subjective belief in the prior.
by somebehemoth | 2025-04-22 17:19:58+00:00
What about users who sign up for these insecure apps and have their data and possibly their identity stolen due to the misplaced trust? That this already happens is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to believe they are experts.

I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.
by DavidPP | 2025-04-22 17:21:03+00:00
I'm currently building an internal tool using SurrealDB directly, but I'm curious to use Morphik since it implement features I hadn't the time to figure out yet. (For example, I started with hardcoded schemas and I like how you support both).

Minor nitpick, but the README for your ui-component project under ee says:

"License This project is part of Morphik and is licensed under the MIT License."

However, your ee folder has an "enterprise" license, not the MIT license.
by ryao | 2025-04-22 17:23:42+00:00
It seems that only portions are from the original, so it is possible that they made the fork by copying files as they were needed. In that case, there was no removal of the notice. It just never was copied since they were using the project as an organ donor. That is a problem when using a single LICENSE file. It would have been handled had the original files had headers stating the license and copyright.
by mhitza | 2025-04-22 17:24:30+00:00
Is that 200 a made up number?

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm...

Do you have a better source for your number.

As far as cost, 200/month is nothing, but those are not the numbers we hear about when things spiral out of controll due to a ddos or sudden surge in popularity.
by layer8 | 2025-04-22 17:26:32+00:00
At the level of what he did, physics is “just” math (finding solutions for Einstein’s general-relativity equations).

Also, from Wikipedia: “At age 18 [so around 1924], Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. He had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics [we can assume that’d include an interest in relativity at that time], he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.”
by pansa2 | 2025-04-22 17:26:34+00:00
Looks like there’s a `mixed` type, variables of which can hold values of any type. But at least that’s something you can `grep` for.

A more subtle issue with type hints (as in TypeScript/Python, not sure if this applies to Pike) is that there are ways to work around the type system. You can get, for example, a variable of type `int` that actually holds a `list`:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43508152
by intrasight | 2025-04-22 17:26:35+00:00
My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously rich domain of real neurons which I knew nothing about. I worked as a software engineer for a couple years after graduating but then went back to school to study Neurophysiology. I did not pursue it as my area of work or research, but I am grateful for having had the opportunity to look at the world from the perspective of a biologist.

If you're an engineer and early in your career and feel there's something missing from your intellectual space, I encourage you to go back and get a graduate degree in something totally different. Humans live a very long time so don't feel like you're wasting time.
by senderista | 2025-04-22 17:26:42+00:00
The max-heap algorithm alluded to above is correct. You fill it with the first k values scanned, then peek at the max element for each subsequent value. If the current value is smaller than the max element, you evict the max element and insert the new element. This streaming top-k algorithm is ubiquitous in both leetcode interviews and applications. (The standard quickselect top-k algorithm is not useful in the streaming context because it requires random access and in-place mutation.)
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-22 17:26:43+00:00
> Also, it’s quite boring that these people say the same thing for decades now. It’s quite simple nowadays to predict how these “unlike me” people will “think” on every single topic on social media. Usually, it’s not even their thoughts. Almost all of them are baseless parroting.

You could say this about any forum on the internet, including this one. But the diversity of thought and interest here is quite small in comparison to twitter just by sheer numbers and the necessity of this forum circling the shared interest of VC culture.

Hey, I understand why people left twitter. I just don't see how bluesky improves on the actual culture of the site—the best posters never transitioned.
by vkou | 2025-04-22 17:27:13+00:00
> Going by that theory why doesn't Visa just jack up their prices by 10x?

They (in collusion with MasterCard) could jack up prices and then there's be an antitrust case against them.

Here's the thing, though - as long as they don't abuse their duopoly position, those anti-trust cases are weaker. And a policy of preferring to side with the customer in these disputes is not exactly viewed as abuse of the monopoly position.
by garrickvanburen | 2025-04-22 17:27:54+00:00
I originally read The Cold Start when I was inside a startup studio with an abundance of marketplace ideas.

This book helped clarify for me that no successful marketplace starts out as a marketplace - simply because you need to start out with ready access to one side (likely the supply side as in the Uber & AirBnB examples) and build demand.

The marketplace/network then emerges strategically as more suppliers are onboarded.

This insight helped quickly focus and filter the marketplace ideas we didn't have any business pursuing.
by film42 | 2025-04-22 17:28:04+00:00
Nice! In rails I end up using Rails.cache most of the time because it's always "right there" but I like how you break out the cache to be a per-method to minimize contention. Depending on your workload it might make sense to use a ReadWrite lock instead of a Monitor.

Only suggestion is to not wrap the error of the caller in your memo wrapper.

> raise MemoTTL::Error, "Failed to execute memoized method '#{method_name}': #{e.message}"

It doesn't look like you need to catch this for any operational or state tracking reason so IMO you should not catch and wrap. When errors are wrapped with a string like this (and caught/ re-raised) you lose the original stacktrace which make debugging challenging. Especially when your error is like, "pg condition failed for select" and you can't see where it failed in the driver.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-22 17:28:23+00:00
The first journalist I know outed by Yahoo was Shi Tao (in 2005). He got a 10y hard labor sentence for sharing a doc with a Chinese language site in the US. The doc was what the CCP sent to journalists; it detailed how to self-censor for the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Tao_(journalist)