MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cwillu | 2025-04-13 12:24:36+00:00
> It tainted civilization, at the very least America!

I regret to inform you that america is not and has never been a unique snowflake. An important player in the world, sure, but one that has long been obsessed with the notion that it is special in some way, and it's just not true.

Every country is at risk of going batshit crazy, and it's always been disturbing how americans seem the truly believe they are immune, because when that belief gets challenged…
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-13 12:24:37+00:00
> Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion?

As long as they got a timer, so the bots react "between 10 and 30 mins later" and they got a limit to "5 interactions per day", otherwise, if some-five coders forget those limits, and we end up having 5 bots interacting within a 1ms of the 'previous post', Reddit will run out of storage space :)
by Lerc | 2025-04-13 12:25:08+00:00
The same same for the human professions, a set of agreed upon guidelines on acting in service of the client, and enforcement of penalties against identifiable instances of prioritizing the interests of another party over the client.

There will always be grey areas, these exist when human responsibilities are set also, and there will be those who skirt the edges. The matters of most concern are quite easily identifiable.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-13 12:25:24+00:00
There was a time when it was all about .com and there was no omnibar. Now there are almost 1600 tlds! Even though a 1 word domain may be hard to find, if you are creative you can always find something.

A special domain is a nice to have, not a “have to have” for marketing. Usually people who hold domains want 10x or more than most web developers (think real estate developer not software developer) want to pay.
by gtirloni | 2025-04-13 12:25:24+00:00
Sure, we can throw code over the wall faster. Is that all that matters though? Just like in poetry, prose, images, etc, AI generates average or worse code. Sure, it may do the job and if your goal is to be average, fine, you should be worried. But has anyone with deep knowledge in programming and a desire to excel actually looked at AI-generated code and thought "omg, this is a work of art. it's so perfect and maintenance will be much easier than anything I could have done! plus, it matches all the requirements from the stakeholders"?

Don't get me wrong, it lets me be more productive sometimes but people that think the days of humans programming computers are numbered have a very rosy (and naive) view of the software engineering world, in my opinion.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-13 12:26:13+00:00
It's entirely up to you. You can just write Haskell with IO everywhere, and you'll basically be working in a typical modern language but with a better type system. Main is IO, after all.

> if the program were running and the system crashed half way through, we'd still have logs for everything that was processed up to the point it crashed

Design choice. This one is all IO and would export logs after every step:

forM_ entries $ \entry -> do (result, logs) <- process entry export logs handle result

Remember, if you can do things, you can log things. So you're not going to encounter a situation where you were able to fire off an action, but could not log it 'because purity'.
by oliviergg | 2025-04-13 12:27:17+00:00
For me, it’s the opposite, I had somewhat lost my love for my job as a developer between two JavaScript framework wars or wars between craftsmanship and agile. I think we now have the opportunity to return to addressing actual needs. For me, that has always been the driving force, an idea becomes a product. These agents have rekindled my desire to create things.
by sapiogram | 2025-04-13 12:27:19+00:00
Absolutely nothing has changed at the language level, and for using channels and the `go` keyword directly, there isn't really tooling to help either.

Most experienced Golang practitioners have reached the same conclusions as this blog post: Just don't use channels, even for problems that look simple. I used Go professionally for two years, and it's by far the worst thing about the language. The number of footguns is astounding.
by indigoabstract | 2025-04-13 12:28:57+00:00
Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today.

What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.

On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 12:29:07+00:00
No need to be snarky. The choice to default to FP32 is inspired by the fact that most typical use cases don't need double-precision (GPU shader languages and game engines do this all the time). This in turn allows us to vectorize code for 2x throughput compared to using FP64. We're gonna add a flag to change the default floating-point precision for devs who need extra precision.

See docs: https://docs.fxn.ai/predictors/requirements#floating-point-v...
by sureglymop | 2025-04-13 12:29:49+00:00
Online banking (anecdotally) works great, though may use the sandboxed google play services. At least here in Switzerland with Swiss banking apps I've never had issues with it.

I would recommend people to install the play services and play store in the main profile. Then, install apps in the main profile too but remove all permissions and abilities, restrict and disable them. After that, enable them in a "banking" profile. One can then selectively enable and disable the play store to update these apps which propagate to the other profiles. The disabled apps are still updated normally by the play store.

I do believe that they are working on a feature to limit app intercommunication in a similar vein as the other scopes. This would be cool because it would allow one to allow "point to point" communication of certain apps with the play services but otherwise restrict them. Though I don't know the state of development for this feature.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-13 12:31:28+00:00
What it really should be about --- education.

A better educated citizenry would never have fallen for the con that huge new tariffs are anything but a huge new tax increase on themselves.

A better educated citizenry would realize that no country has ever taxed it way to prosperity and "greatness".

The natural enemy of democracy is ignorance --- and Trump is the proof.
by gtani | 2025-04-13 12:31:52+00:00
guide to participating from home, watch:

- vix futures, front month has only hit 40 3x in 20 years, tho for sustained period starting late 2007 when the contracts were a lot lower volume

- /zb /zn futures contracts, BBB OAS spread on St. Louis fed website,

- credit default swaps, i can't find free public website

- some people say you can get insight from polymarket, other betting sites

- GDP now on Atlanta Fed website, note gold haircut

- other sites monitor options' large buys, skews and dex/gex (gamma exposure) on indexes, futures and single stocks but those sites are $ subscription
by cwillu | 2025-04-13 12:32:17+00:00
The notion that JT had complete control is just utter nonsense. Federal jurisdiction is sharply limited, the opposition party is expected to be able to introduce and pass legislation during a minority government (the ppc has just been acting incompetent; the NDP managed to pass national dental care despite only hold 16% of the seats), and provincial governments have been largely doing their own thing despite federal funding initiatives.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 12:32:20+00:00
Yup but you're skilled enough to write--and more importantly, maintain--the required C/C++ code. Most devs and companies we talk to just want to make something people want; they don't care for the added complexity of writing and maintaining native code.

The way I like to think about this is how much more code got written when "high level" languages like C came onto the scene, at a time when Assembly was the default. Writing Python is way (way way) easier and faster than any of the lower-level languages--no pointers, no borrow checker!
by kyrra | 2025-04-13 12:32:22+00:00
This still exists today. For example, I am on the payments team but I have a 20% project working on protobuf. I had to get formal approval from my management chain and someone on the protobuf team. And it is tracked as part of my performance reviews. They just want to make sure I'm not building something useless that nobody wants and that I'm not just wasting the company's time.
by vertnerd | 2025-04-13 12:32:34+00:00
I'm a little older now, over 60. I'm writing a spaceflight simulator for fun and (possible) profit. From game assets to coding, it seems like AI could help. But every time I try it out, I just end up feeling drained by the process of guiding it to good outcomes. It's like I have an assistant to work for me, who gets to have all the fun, but needs constant hand holding and guidance. It isn't fun at all, and for me, coding and designing a system architecture is tremendously satisfying.

I also have a large collection of handwritten family letters going back over 100 years. I've scanned many of them, but I want to transcribe them to text. The job is daunting, so I ran them through some GPT apps for handwriting recognition. GPT did an astonishing job and at first blush, I thought the problem was solved. But on deeper inspection I found that while the transcriptions sounded reasonable and accurate, significant portions were hallucinated or missing. Ok, I said, I just have to review each transcription for accuracy. Well, reading two documents side by side while looking for errors is much more draining than just reading the original letter and typing it in. I'm a very fast typist and the process doesn't take long. Plus, I get to read every letter from beginning to end while I'm working. It's fun.

So after several years of periodically experimenting with the latest LLM tools, I still haven't found a use for them in my personal life and hobbies. I'm not sure what the future world of engineering and art will look like, but I suspect it will be very different.

My wife spins wool to make yarn, then knits it into clothing. She doesn't worry much about how the clothing is styled because it's the physical process of working intimately with her hands and the raw materials that she finds satisfying. She is staying close to the fundamental process of building clothing. Now that there are machines for manufacturing fibers, fabrics and garments, her skill isn't required, but our society has grown dependent on the machines and the infrastructure needed to keep them operating. We would be helpless and naked if those were lost.

Likewise, with LLM coding, developers will no longer develop the skills needed to design or "architect" complex information processing systems, just as no one bothers to learn assembly language anymore. But those are things that someone or something must still know about. Relegating that essential role to a LLM seems like a risky move for the future of our technological civilization.
by sureglymop | 2025-04-13 12:33:45+00:00
One cool thing about GrapheneOS when I recently got a new Pixel 9 was how easy it was to install it with just my older Pixel phone. Because the installer is WebUSB based it works in the Vanadium browser. I just connected the two phones together with a USB cable and could install the OS on my new phone from the browser.

One currently missing thing is a "transfer" or backup functionality otherwise. There's really no good solution other than to manually port over applications and use their built-in import/export features if available.
by AngryData | 2025-04-13 12:33:45+00:00
I don't think this is a problem with the constitution as it was actually written, this is just the cumulative effect of states, congress, and the judicial branch ceding power to the executive for decade after decade, with a decent dose of political corruption, because both parties thought it was convenient for when they are in power. People had been warning about it the whole time and every time it happened they were either ignored as paranoid or grouped up as conspiracy theorists.
by Tenoke | 2025-04-13 12:33:52+00:00
I get it but for what is worth, the accepted behavior here is that you can repost eventually but you should wait significantly longer than a day before doing so.

> Are reposts ok?

>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
by Aachen | 2025-04-13 12:34:32+00:00
It shouldn't work like a petition, but these organisations do treat it as such unless something is very obviously a major violation. Even with numbers of Graphene users, what part of that is Dutch? What part of that wants to use Google Pay? What part makes use of a workaround? Multiple reports of problems does give some information/signal that this is worth their time

But yes, as said I'd not use the same wording because it shouldn't just be a copy-paste, that's also wasting their time. I could refer to what was already submitted so they can more easily bundle them, but I understand you don't have it anymore so np. Thanks for mentioning you've submitted this in the first place and the additional info, that does motivate me to continue also submitting things and to know better what makes sense to submit :)
by rollcat | 2025-04-13 12:34:49+00:00
Interesting project, but you still need to hook it up to a backend to create a window to draw pixels on. SDL is likely the most portable library to do that; you could substitute fbdev, DirectX, wgpu, glfw, win32, metal, and so on.

The point is, once you have a window and a putpixel (or even better, surfaces and blitting), the rest is easy to handcraft. A standardised library would of course help.
by ninkendo | 2025-04-13 12:35:00+00:00
Same. It’s a pattern I’m reaching for a lot, whenever I have multiple logical things that need to run concurrently. Generally:

- A struct that represents the mutable state I’m wrapping

- A start(self) method which moves self to a tokio task running a loop reading from an mpsc::Receiver<Command> channel, and returns a Handle object which is cloneable and contains the mpsc::Sender end

- The handle can be used to send commands/requests (including one shot channels for replies)

- When the last handle is dropped, the mpsc channel is dropped and the loop ends

It basically lets me think of each logical concurrent service as being like a tcp server that accepts requests. They can call each other by holding instances of the Handle type and awaiting calls (this can still deadlock if there’s a call cycle and the handling code isn’t put on a background task… in practice I’ve never made this mistake though)

Some day I’ll maybe start using an actor framework (like Axum/etc) which formalizes this a bit more, but for now just making these types manually is simple enough.
by gjm11 | 2025-04-13 12:35:15+00:00
Who wants clock noon to be the midpoint of the workday? The canonical working hours are 9am to 5pm [Parton 1980] whose midpoint is at 1pm. Many people work earlier and/or later, but my impression is that it's pretty unusual to have the midpoint at noon.

(Schools tend to have earlier times. It's not so unusual for a school's workday to have its midpoint at about noon, I think.)
by Frieren | 2025-04-13 12:35:53+00:00
> but employees pay about 50% of the taxes for any of their workers' income

That is wrong. Employers pay a small fraction of taxes per each one of their employees.

I think that there is a big problem with education and the tax system. When people thinks that the "employer part of the salary tax" is 50% of the employee tax we are failing to provide education to our own citizens. And I think that HN readers are more informed that the average person.

But this is by design. Misinformed citizens have a more difficult time realizing how much money big corporations and the rich are stealing.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 12:36:07+00:00
We're focused specifically on on-device AI inference (and related compute-bound algorithms, like computer vision or scientific computing).

We want devs to find or develop inference code (always in Python); decorate it with Function's `@compile`; compile it; and run natively in their Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, WebAssembly, or Windows applications.

We won't be supporting other use cases like web servers (no Django or FastAPI).
by fpoling | 2025-04-13 12:36:36+00:00
I once read a book from 1982 that was arguing about CSP implementation in Ada that it lead to proliferation of threads (called tasks in Ada) and code complexity when mutex -based solutions were simpler.

Go implementations of CSP somewhat mitigated the problems raised in the book by supporting buffered channels, but even with that with CSP one end up with unnecessary tasks which also brings the problem of their lifetime management as the article mentioned.
by h4ny | 2025-04-13 12:37:11+00:00
That's a fundamentally biased attitude though. It's not very different from saying: "oh, that guy's got tattoos, I'm not going to engage because he's probably a gangster."

Unless someone has proven to you that they are not trustworthy, you choosing not to listen is a... personal choice at best. So don't try to chalk it up like if it's not presented in a certain way that's to your taste it's not real science and/or it's fake news.
by Lerc | 2025-04-13 12:37:19+00:00
I am not a fan of fatalism. Instead of saying it won't ever happen, we need to be asking to have rights.

At the very least you will force people to make the case for the opposing opinion, and we learn who they are and why they think that.

Lawyers cannot act against their clients, do you think we have irreparably lost the ability as a society to create similar protections in the future.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-04-13 12:37:23+00:00
The old 'monopolize and screw' gambit of private equity. I've heard of the firms that specialize in identifying essential parts of military systems that have one or only a few possible manufacturers, then buying them up and increasing the price by several thousand percent (the DoD will buy them anyway). But this is the first I heard of the approach being applied for required municipal purchases. I guess nothing is safe.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-13 12:37:27+00:00
This is true for sure. But even if you look outside SpaceX, it's all American firms (sort of). Blue Origin, Rocket Lab (NZ origin but by now American). So maybe they aren't making money or getting much "market traction" but at least are in the race.

Europe has some such startups, Isar is one that comes to mind, but only going by media buzz, seemingly much less. I have zero insight into this industry so I can't tell if it's just my biased reading of biased reporting, or reality.
by marcusb | 2025-04-13 12:37:35+00:00
I can understand what the bots posting this stuff on reddit are after, but what puzzles me a bit are the posters here who clearly are LLM-backed bots that post once or twice without any affiliate links or other visible scams, then disappear. Maybe they are getting banned but it isn't obvious? (If so, good job dang and team!)

For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly obvious LLM take:

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774:

If your content got ingested by scrapers that don't respect the robots.txt, but that it was copied to another domain with a more lenient robots.txt, you could poison legitimate datasets. It seems wasteful to actively try to sabotage humankind's technological progress.
by geysersam | 2025-04-13 12:38:16+00:00
Absolutely agree. It's ridiculous that low wage labor is considered a "comparative advantage". It's an advantage to capital owners perhaps, but certainly not to workers. And like you said, advantages are not static.

In my opinion it's intrinsically valuable to have a diverse regional economy. Culture and economy are fundamentally inseparable, imagine a society where everyone is doing the same thing because of "comparative advantage" making them 10% more efficient than the other country... What poverty!
by Oras | 2025-04-13 12:38:46+00:00
The web we know is dead. I almost stopped reading anything outside HN, and even in HN, I've been noticing a rise of bots, especially with ShowHN where suddenly a bot will start upvoting and commenting random crap to move it to the top.

I read a report that 49% of internet traffic in 2024 was bots. I believe this will increase significantly this year.

We (humans) are a minority now.
by ndegruchy | 2025-04-13 12:40:38+00:00
I use the `~/.local/bin` methodology for single binaries, too. Linux, macOS, doesn't matter. I try hard to not make my home directory look like a phonebook when I `ls -alh` it. Sometimes that's easier said than done. I also use `~/.local/opt` as a container for larger applications (like Emacs). While I don't have architecture distinctions, I also don't use multiple versions or platforms regularly.
by elpocko | 2025-04-13 12:40:46+00:00
Fun fact: They have a device that

"...cancels an android into catalepsy," Rachael said, her eyes shut. "For a few seconds."

It is mentioned once, then never again AFAIR. They could use that device to detect andys with the press of a button, but why do that when you have something straightforward like the Voigt-Kampff test?
by davidanekstein | 2025-04-13 12:40:56+00:00
I think AI is posing a challenge to people like the person in TFA because programming is their hobby and one that they’re good at. They aren’t used to knowing someone or something can do it better and knowing that now makes them wonder what the point is. I argue that amateur artists and musicians have dealt with this feeling of “someone can always do it better” for a very long time. You can have fun while knowing someone else can make it better than you, faster, without as much struggle. Programmers aren’t as used to this feeling because, even though we know people like John Carmack exist, it doesn’t fly in your face quite like a beautiful live performace or painted masterpiece does. Learning to enjoy your own process is what I think is key to continuing what you love. Or, use it as an opportunity to try something else — but you’ll eventually discover the same thing no matter what you do. It’s very rare to be the best at something.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 12:41:12+00:00
There's actually no overhead of "still using Python" because we don't use Python. The overhead in Function exists solely because we have a bunch of sugar added to create a unified interface for calling different kinds of functions (i.e. generator functions, etc).

You don't have to take my word for it: you can pull the C++ source code that we generate from a given Python function and inspect it yourself: https://docs.fxn.ai/predictors/compiler#compiling-binaries
by jajko | 2025-04-13 12:41:22+00:00
Lol there was no 'cohesive strategy' 8 years ago, what the heck you wtite about. You suffer some memory loss?

He was chaotic, he was doing ego polishing reality show from day 1. The only difference was a 'barrier of sanity' that people around him formed, dampening his bipolar outbursts into more reasonable actions (or lack of thereof, often without his knowledge). He eventually fired all of them, forgot that part?

Now he has just pure yes men around him, licking his ass and patiently waiting for him to die or get killed (vance has a look and behavior of patient calculating sociopath for example, he may be much worse if given chance)