MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshstrange | 2025-04-11 13:14:24+00:00
Apple, so far, has completely missed AI. Their writing tools are joke, image playground is joke, Siri still sucks. Notification summaries are humorous at least and I think they are "fine" overall.

I think it's, in part, due to Apple wanting things to be "perfect" (a goal they miss often, I know) and LLMs are just not that. Additionally, their locked-down OS means no one else can compete and show them the path forward. At least in the Cydia days they could steal from the jailbreak community.

I'm hesitant on the EU/DMA but Apple is shooting themselves in the foot by how locked down their products are. The Apple Vision Pro sucked due to software in large part. It was/is just an iPad strapped to your face and iPadOS sucks (good for you if you can get real work done on it).
by 4ndrewl | 2025-04-11 13:14:38+00:00
I've made a self-bow (ie a longbow from a single piece of wood) - under instruction it took a couple of days with some simple, but very sharp, tools.

If you're going the laminate route do yourself a favour and buy some pre-laminated wood designed for the pressures a bow needs to take. The results of laminate cracking and splintering near your eye don't really bear thinking about.
by troupo | 2025-04-11 13:14:40+00:00
> I don't want functional-flavoured programming, I want functional programming.

> you gotta stop using those for-loops and [i]ndexes, and start using maps, folds, filters etc.

You mean what C# literally does everywhere because Enumerable is the premier weapon of choice in the language, and has a huge amount of exactly what you want: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.linq.enu...

(well, with the only exception of foreach which is for some odd reason is still a loop).

> But 5 years after that

Since .net 3.5 18 years ago: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.linq.enu...

> So we paid the price, but didn't get the reward.

Who is "we", what was the price, and what was the imagined reward?
by larve | 2025-04-11 13:14:51+00:00
Even putting the common lisp aside, PAIP is my favourite book about programming in general, by FAR. Norvig's programming style is so clear and expressive, the book touches on more "pedestrian" parts of programming: building tools / performance / debugging, but also walks you through a serious set of algorithms that are actually practical and that I use regularly (and they shape your thinking): search, pattern matching, to some extent unification, building interpreters and compilers, manipulating code as data.

It's also extremely fun, you go from building Eliza to a full pattern matcher to a planning agent to a prolog compiler.
by broabprobe | 2025-04-11 13:15:36+00:00
huh, I wonder if he has relayed this story multiple times, I’m only familiar with this version, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12020560-talking-about-when...

“(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

― Kurt Vonnegut
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-11 13:17:05+00:00
And <hgroup>, and <em>, and <strong>...

I'm not going to lie, I don't have a lot of faith in the people making markup decisions for HTML these days. It was obvious that none of these tags made any sense and anyone who knows what semantics mean knows they would get semantically bleached the instant they hit end users. Wordpress still uses B and I buttons for <em> and <strong>. That's never going to change because emphasis and strong are just not a thing that users understand so it can't be on the UI. In fact, I don't even understand the difference between the documentation fails to explicitly assert it. Screen readers and web browsers render them the same way as <b> and <i>. At this point I have to wonder for whom exactly what this markup created, and what problem did it seek to solve. I have no idea what was going on with the committee to take years of <h1> and <h2> meaning completely different things and think "what if <h1> meant the same thing as <h2> sometimes if it's in a <section>?" or "what if we <h3> didn't mean <h3> when it's in a <hgroup>?" This was a great place to introduce an <h> tag. Did they just want to avoid breaking backwards compatibility while at the same time not caring about it? I just don't understand...

Meanwhile everybody from users, to search engines, to social media platforms, to forums, to article writers are still waiting for a <spoiler>.
by skydhash | 2025-04-11 13:17:41+00:00
I thinks it the imperative shell, functional core. The shell provide the world, the core act on it, the the shell commit it at various intervals.

Functional React follows this pattern. The issue is when the programmer thinks the world is some kind of stable state that you can store results in. It’s not, the whole point is to be created anew and restart the whole computation flow. The escape hatches are the hooks. And each have a specific usage and pattern to follow to survive world recreation. Which why you should be careful with them as they are effectively world for subcomponents. So when you add to the world with hooks, interactions with the addition should stay at the same level
by nottorp | 2025-04-11 13:18:30+00:00
> Didn't you ever grep a text document written in a language other than English?

Yes but it was for humans originally? Not for machine processing.

> Not to mention the folks who deliberately set LANG so that their compiler and everything else will give them localized error messages.

The horror! Who even works on translations for compiler error messages ?!? It makes absolutely no sense!

Next they'll want to localize programming language keywords. I wonder how well that will work at this current project of mine that has people native to 3 countries, none english speaking ...
by ddawson | 2025-04-11 13:18:36+00:00
I'm so happy i work on a team. Early in my career I substituted my speed for what I saw as deep experience of others around me. I was the one willing to move fast and break things and I'm still doing that. Fortunately, I've learned to temper my eagerness by teaming up with others willing to probe my approach. I'm still impatience and eager but I'm much, much stronger in a team than as a lone cowboy.
by NickC25 | 2025-04-11 13:19:04+00:00
All fine and dandy until one realizes that the pentagon's budget is measured in the trillions, and this sort of deal probably doesn't even deal with mission critical stuff.

That said, we do waste a ton of money on consultants, and the pentagon needs to trim its budget. Should also be noted that Pete Hegseth is a fucking moron, and some of these cuts probably hurt our national security readiness.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-11 13:19:14+00:00
That's just one dimension of "good" though, every language has its own pitfalls, some more than others. Go has pitfalls, sure, but the language it was designed to replace (C/C++) has more of them.

And languages with no room for mistakes have their own issues, like readability or productivity, but I don't have any experience with those; what language(s) are you thinking of? I don't know it myself but Rust seems more "bolted down" when it comes to that aspect.
by apercu | 2025-04-11 13:20:00+00:00
> being a middle man between backend and analyst (I work as a data engineer in between) because none has the time and interest to communicate with each other -- so I usually took up the initiative and clear up things. I also work in small companies where people are expected to wear multiple hats, so no one gets their toes stepped on.

Just curious if you have ever felt that it's hard to demonstrate your value to the organization if you're a "glue" guy like that. (I have also worked in several small companies, but only as a partner or an executive.)

I've found that the older and more experienced I get, the more specificity I want in how the value I provide will be measured.
by yapyap | 2025-04-11 13:20:10+00:00
eh, I feel like this is a nicely typed out comment but it hits some wrong notes.

1. I wouldn’t say the car veands you mentioned are popular because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course due to weight distribution and other details I assume they’re not all equally safe but that aside).

Personally when I look at those brands I think they’re sleek and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it’s because they’re expensive cars, driven by the rich. They’re not chosen only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they’re chosen by the rich because they are the only ones to have the financial means to afford one.

Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible, whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.
by icegreentea2 | 2025-04-11 13:20:13+00:00
I mean, there's certainly some of that happening right now (and has probably always happened to some degree even in America).

That being said, I think these specific cuts have a real possibility of being genuine. I believe this because:

* They actually do align with long-term thinking. In general, the DoD (and the federal government... and really all North American government as a whole) has been on a multi-decade slide of out sourcing more and more capabilities to consultancies. This HAS made us all worse at governing. Hegseth (for better and worse) has the cover to make this type of cut while riding out whatever bumps might come out of this.

* Hegseth also needs to create cover. He's probably about to get a giant budget increase (~900billion to an even trillion). Actions like this allow him to backup his claim that yes - America is spending more on defense, but we're doing so better.

That said, who knows how this specific case will end up.
by ralferoo | 2025-04-11 13:20:25+00:00
My understanding of "cost of goods sold", which is quite likely to be wrong, is yes for the first and no for the second. Or at least, it'd include the pro-rated salaries of the staff for the time spent producing the goods.

I think it's essentially if you had all the designs for a product and asked someone else to manufacture it for you, everything they would spend and charge you for producing the product and delivering it to your ship (or whatever), at which point you take over all the rest of the costs including the shipping.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-11 13:20:26+00:00
Cool article! The stack (and results) are impressive, but I also appreciate the article in itself, starting from basics and getting to the point in a clear and slowly expanding way. Easy to follow and appreciate.

On a bit of a tangent rant, this kind of writing is slowly going away, taken over by LLM slop (and I'm a huge fan of LLMs, just not the people who write those kinds of articles). I was recently looking for real world benchmarks for vllm/sglang deployments of DeepSeek3 on a 8x 96GB pod, to see if the model fits into the amount of RAM, with kv cache and context length, what numbers to people get, etc.

Of the ~20 articles that google surfaced on various attempts of keywords, none were what I was looking for. The excerpts seemed promising, some even offered tables & stuff related to ds3 and RAM usage, but all were LLM crap. All were written in that simple style - intro - bla bla - conclusion, some even had RAM requirements that made no sense (running a model trained in FP8 in 16bit, something noone would do, etc.)
by tpoacher | 2025-04-11 13:20:52+00:00
I've said something similar for a while. That dual interview question "what is your greatest strength? what is your greatest weakness" is a very bad question.

Your strengths and weaknesses are joined at the hip, and they are the two sides of the same coin which is your personality.

In some contexts, your personality becomes a strength. In other contexts it becomes a weakness.

The trick is whether you are able to recognise under what circumstances your personality becomes a strength, and what you then do to allow you to play to your strengths, and maximize its effect, or obversely, whether you are able to recognise under what circumstances your personality becomes a weakness, and what kind of external mitigations do you or have you then put in place, to minimize the effect of that weakness.

So in that sense, the typical "I work too hard" passive-aggressive response is a bad response. A good response would be that you tend to be a hard worker, which is good when you need to be relied upon, but bad in terms of having work-life balance and getting easily burnt out. Hence the external mitigations should be a clearly negotiated work package which insists on sticking to work hours and allocated holidays.

Or, another example, adaptability. Adaptability is great if the role requires it. But it's a curse if you find yourself becoming the "go to" man for all bunch of unrelated things, which then distract you from your number 1 task and opportunities for growth. So the mitigation strategy is a clearly defined role and responsibilities.
by FalseNutrition | 2025-04-11 13:21:05+00:00
Not only that. Life accumulated those over the eons, as the rocks eroded, the useful metals got saved by life, and the rest was washed down. So the natural levels are way higher. Life is good at hoarding these "heavy metals".

People in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631251 have been arguing that these people must have been some top class elite, and I totally get it. They are too good looking. But, that's how it was. The typical of the past would be above celebrity looks today. A lot of curent idols look stunted in comparison.
by HelloNurse | 2025-04-11 13:21:06+00:00
Why? Just use different h1...h6 family tags depending on your structure.

The example in the article

<body> <h1>Level 1</h1> <section> <h1>Level 2</h1> <section> <h1>Level 3</h1> <section> <h1>Level 4</h1> </section> </section> </section> </body>

can become

<body> <h1>Level 1</h1> <section> <h2>Level 2</h1> <section> <h3>Level 3</h1> <section> <h4>Level 4</h1> </section> </section> </section> </body>
by jsfez | 2025-04-11 13:21:34+00:00
Playwright’s built-in visual testing (toHaveScreenshot) works well in small projects: it’s fast, simple, and local.

But once you start using it in a team with multiple contributors, it quickly becomes fragile:

- Snapshots live in Git and often conflict - You compare against your last push, not production - Test runs must be triggered manually to update screenshots - Results are hard to review and trust without a proper UI - Flaky diffs creep in due to platform and rendering inconsistencies

I wrote an article that breaks down the strengths and limits of Playwright’s model, and why it starts to fail at scale. It also explains how shifting to a CI-based approach (like Argos) changes the baseline, stabilizes results, and adds a real review layer.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-11 13:21:55+00:00
The idea of pure functional programming is that you can really go quite far if you think of your program as a pure function f(input) -> outputs with a messy impure thing that calls f and does the necessary I/O before/after that.

Batch programs are easy to fit in this model generally. A compiler is pretty clearly a pure function f(program source code) -> list of instructions, with just a very thin layer to read/write the input/output to files.

Web servers can often fit this model well too: a web server is an f(request, database snapshot) -> (response, database update). Making that work well is going to be gnarly in the impure side of things, but it's going to be quite doable for a lot of basic CRUD servers--probably every web server I've ever written (which is a lot of tiny stuff, to be fair) could be done purely functional without much issue.

Display also can be made work: it's f(input event, state) -> (display frame, new state). Building the display frame here is something like an immediate mode GUI, where instead of mutating the state of widgets, you're building the entire widget tree from scratch each time.

In many cases, the limitations of purely functional isn't that somebody somewhere has to do I/O, but rather the impracticality of faking immutability if the state is too complicated.
by Smeevy | 2025-04-11 13:22:12+00:00
I don't disagree, but I think implementing this sort of review with software is dangerous in a different way than making bad behavior more efficient.

A parole board can have dissent and differing personal experience in its ranks. There can be disagreement, but that discussion might lead to a more right or more wrong outcome.

When you have the number spit out from some case management, there's no arguing with it. We just turned the programmers that wrote that bit of code into unassailable gods of the process, with whom we can only communicate with through Jira tickets. It isn't more right or more wrong, but it is consistent with the variables provided. That mindless consistency applied to human situations like this quickly becomes horrific.
by encom | 2025-04-11 13:22:35+00:00
Apple is not a UNIX vendor. They checked off enough of a compliance list to pass in the legal and marketing sense, but in any real practical sense it's not usable as a UNIX system. It's not designed to serve anything. Most of it is locked down and proprietary. No headless operation, no native package manager, root is neutered... and so on. It's not UNIX.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-11 13:23:01+00:00
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.... It just feels ham-fisted."

So like exactly what is happening with driverless car technology.

A technology that was in its infancy in lab settings; taken out of that context and thrust upon our public roads by capricious impulsive billionaires in "beta" form, which has predictably killed people; but instead of pulling back and having a discussion about the possible downsides, this technology is allowed to plague us; because thought or discussion about possible downsides are short circuited by platitudes about how you have to crack eggs to make an omelet.

Can't get a driverless car future free of car deaths without first killing some people with driverless cars, ya know?
by Tarq0n | 2025-04-11 13:23:17+00:00
The problem in your example is threefold:

1) what are my rights, I.e. Against what constraints was the algorithm implemented?

2) "we have decided": who is "we", it's actually good that a particular entity is responsible for the output of the algorithm, computers can't be responsible for things.

3) is there appeal or human review?

If a bad algorithm is part of some process that affects me I'm going to ask what my rights are, who's responsible and where I can appeal, not the specifics of the algorithm.
by svachalek | 2025-04-11 13:23:23+00:00
It's amazing how fast we can eat up new hardware capabilities. The old 6502 1-MHz CPUs were capable of running much more sophisticated software than most people today imagine, with 1/1000 or 1/millionth the hardware. And now we're asking LLMs to answer math questions, using billions of operations to perform something a single CPU instruction can handle.
by matwood | 2025-04-11 13:23:57+00:00
No one really answered your question. We talk about endowments as a single pot of money the school can do anything with, but that's not really the case. Much of the time the money has to be used for specific purposes, and it's setup in a way that it can be used for that specific purpose in perpetuity.

Need is also an interesting question. A lot of the money that has been cut off across the federal government was already allocated, but just not paid out yet. So people won a grant, built out a service around the grant, and then they are getting stiffed by the government. Suddenly having to find another source for those funds is not tenable even if the school has an endowment, and thus you see everything shutting down. The worst part of the whole thing is this will eventually cost the US more money because the government will likely lose most of these lawsuits but then it costs more to stand the machinery back up once the grants are paid.
by selfhoster | 2025-04-11 13:24:10+00:00
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/pentagon-cuts-5...

"This latest announcement follows a March 20 declaration from Hegseth, where he detailed $580 million in cuts to various programmes, contracts, and grants. The overall reduction now amounts to nearly $6 billion as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, which aims to streamline Pentagon expenditures and focus resources on warfighting capabilities."
by pelagicAustral | 2025-04-11 13:24:41+00:00
Doesn't mean to say it's not related:

>> The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies. [0]

[0] https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/hegseth-memo-dod-it-serv...

or: > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/15/doge-p...
by hliyan | 2025-04-11 13:25:12+00:00
Better formulated as: some weaknesses may be unintended consequences of your strengths under certain conditions. Rules of thumb like this are useful approximations of reality, but I wouldn't elevate them to the level of a principle that I would use in 1:1s. All the little phenomena that people like the author (myself included) in the tech/management world have observed and written about, would probably add up to several thousand. Human behaviour is complex. Sometimes you have no choice but to handle it on a case by case basis.