MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-25 13:43:44+00:00
Zero-termination is not lower level than having a separate size, or an end pointer.

What is low level is deciding on an memory representation and working with it directly. A high level language will just have a "string" object, its internal representation is hidden to the programmer and could potentially be changed between versions.

In C, "string" has a precise meaning, it is a pointer to a statically allocated array of bytes with the characters 's', 't', 'r', 'i', 'n', 'g' followed by a zero. That is the low level part, C programmers manipulate the memory directly and need such guarantees. Had it been defined as the number of characters in 4 bytes followed by each character of 2 bytes each in native endian would be just as low level. Defining it as "it is a character string, use the standard library and don't look too closely", as it is the case in Java is high level.

The "feature" is that the memory representation of strings is well defined. The choice of zero-termination has some pros and cons.

Note that in many cases, you can use size+data instead, using mem* functions instead of the str* ones. And though it is not ideal, you can also use "%.*s" in printf(). Not ideal, but workable.
by jweather | 2025-04-25 13:43:51+00:00
I feel like there might be a green/yellow/red situation here, where red indicates inconsistency with marked information, while yellow indicates "not satisfied YET, but could be with marked information"

If Q1 is "the answer to Q2" and I mark A:A, Q1 should be red if A is crossed off for Q2, yellow if A is still an option for Q2, and green if A is the chosen option for Q2.
by wrasee | 2025-04-25 13:44:15+00:00
One problem is that one person’s hammock time is another’s overthinking time and needs the opposite advice. Of course it’s about finding that balance and that’s hard to pin down with words.

But I take your point and the trend definitely seems to be towards quicker action with feedback rather than thinking things through in the first place.

In that sense LLM’s present this interesting middle ground in that it’s a faster cycle than actually writing the code, but still more active and externalising than getting lost in your own thoughts (not withstanding how productive that can still be).
by eth0up | 2025-04-25 13:44:16+00:00
There's a trove of truth in this <lottery / denial> perspective. It happens on all levels of success. But what a profoundly different world it would be if wholesome humility was the default tendency. I'm not saying it would be a panacea, but understanding the dynamics, even intuitively, of the myriad interdependencies that allow our every action would be a humble leap in a better direction.

For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.
by frankc | 2025-04-25 13:44:17+00:00
I think category A is too broad. I enjoy building systems, not typing code. You can still get that joy having an LLM do the coding. You don't need to let it do the systems design. Also, some of the building process is the system I care about it, and some of it is tooling for the system I care about. Those tools are means to an end and I am happy to defer the entire process to the LLM, and those are stand-alone usually which is right in it's wheelhouse.
by davidmdm91 | 2025-04-25 13:44:21+00:00
Managing Kubernetes resources with YAML templates can quickly turn into an unreadable mess. I got tired of fighting it, so I built Yoke.

Yoke is a client-side CLI (like Helm) but instead of YAML charts, it allows you to describe your charts (“flights” in Yoke terminology) as code.

Your Kubernetes “packages” are actual programs, not templated text, which means you can use actual programming languages to define your packages; Allowing you to fully leverage your development environment.

At its core a flight is a program that reads inputs from stdin and writes resources to stdout. It is packaged as a WebAssembly Module for portability and security. This allows you to leverage any programming language that supports WebAssembly like Go or Rust to build your "chart" logic.

With yoke your packages get: control flow, static typing and intilisense, type checking, test frameworks, package ecosystem (go modules, rust cargo, npm, and so on), and so on!

What's more Yoke doesn't stop at client-side package management. You can integrate your packages directly into the Kubernetes API with Yoke's Air-Traffic-Controller, enabling you to manage your packages as first-class Kubernetes resources.

This is still an early project, and I’d love feedback. Here is the Github Repository and the documentation.

Repo: https://github.com/yokecd/yoke Docs: https://yokecd.github.io/docs

Would love to hear thoughts—good, bad, or otherwise.
by rvz | 2025-04-25 13:44:32+00:00
Every time another startup falls for the Java + Kafka arguments, it keeps the AWS consultants happier.

Fast forward into 2025, there are many performant, efficient and less complex alternatives to Kafka that save you money, instead of burning millions in operational costs "to scale".

Unless you are at a hundred million dollar revenue company, choosing Kafka in 2025 is doesn't make sense anymore.
by duxup | 2025-04-25 13:44:47+00:00
A stable / consistent source of funding not connected to one industry.

Nobody is going to be better off if the funding for their mental health services is cut off because X industry is having a bad time or gets reclassified or something else.

I see this happen with sin taxes and other funding sources with education programs all the time. Programs cut, people fired because their funding is some sin tax or very specific source that dried up. Important services like mental health and etc should be funded consistently.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-25 13:45:16+00:00
I think that the tech exists for more interactive AI generation, it's just gonna take time to implement.

I foresee something like your standard production software with heavy AI integration, where you prompt it to make the song you want, but it is made fully step by step in the production environment. You can then manually tweak it or ask the AI to fine tune whatever parameter or slice you want.

Kinda like sitting over the shoulder of someone who knows what they are doing, and working collaboratively with them to accomplish the idea you have in your head. Meanwhile you have practically no idea what all those buttons/lines/glowly bits/sliders do.
by hodder | 2025-04-25 13:45:43+00:00
I buy ~200,000 physical barrels of oil for 2 refineries every single day. The quantity is mind blowing and Im not even a particularly large oil trader in the grand scheme of things. The world drinks ~104 million barrels per day or around 1200 barrels a second. An olympic swimming pool holds ~15000 barrels of volume. In Canada, we trade in "cubes" which are M3. Each M3 is ~6.29287 barrels of oil. I do my monthly planning in km3.

I'm happy to answer any industry questions in case anyone has any. It is a fascinating job.
by once_inc | 2025-04-25 13:45:49+00:00
As always: there is nothing inherently wrong about either plastics or carbon fuels. The problem is in using it in incorrect situations. Plastics are perfect for transporting an preserving foodstuffs in. Cheeses, meats, etc all have significantly longer shelf-lives because they are placed in plastics in a protective atmosphere. It is things like plastic bottle-caps, plastic straws, and other (generally small) disposable plastic tools that find their way into nature and wreak havoc.

Similarly for carbon fuels: these can have extremely high energy density coefficients, and are usable on a global scale. I would still prefer a move away from them and into Nuclear, but for some situations, having a small canister of fuel and a tool to convert that into mechanical action is extremely useful. Chainsaws for instance.

Also: I don't know what the tolerances for this material are, but they might be interesting for use in space?
by rami-dev | 2025-04-25 13:46:36+00:00
Email eXtract is a simple and powerful tool that helps you find and collect email addresses quickly from websites, LinkedIn, and other online platforms. It’s designed for marketers, sales professionals, recruiters, and anyone who needs to build an email list fast.

Key features include: - Extract emails from websites and LinkedIn profiles - One-click email capture with a Chrome extension - Export emails to CSV or Excel files - Automatically remove duplicates and invalid emails - Smart filters to help you target the right contacts

Email eXtract is ideal for cold email campaigns, lead generation, client outreach, and recruiting. Instead of spending hours manually searching for emails, you can save time and focus on growing your business.

Whether you're a freelancer, startup founder, or part of a larger team, Email eXtract gives you the data you need with speed and accuracy.
by galeaspablo | 2025-04-25 13:47:52+00:00
It is useful, but it is not generally applicable.

Given an arbitrary causality graph between n messages, it would be ideal if you could consume your messages in topological order. And that you could do so in O(n log n).

No queuing system in the world does arbitrary causality graphs without O(n^2) costs. I dream of the day where this changes.

And because of this, we’ve adapted our message causality topologies to cope with the consuming mechanisms of Kafka et al

To make this less abstract, imagine you have two bank accounts, each with a stream. MoneyOut in Bob’s account should come BEFORE MoneyIn when he transfers to Alice’s account, despite each bank account having different partition keys.
by heironimus | 2025-04-25 13:49:11+00:00
This implies that Space X is overcharging compared to launches from 25 years ago, but is cheaper relative to ULA launches from 10 years ago.

But how does, for example, "1998: Deep Space 1 — Delta II rocket — $86 million" compare to "2025: SPHEREx astronomy mission — Falcon 9 rocket — $99 million"? Are they similar payloads? Are the reliability requirements the same? Could there be a reason the Falcon 9 launch costs more instead of less, as we would expect?

The article does mention interesting reasons why some cost more than others such as scheduling, hazardous payload, weight, non-combined payloads, etc., but without addressing each launch individually there is no way to address the headline, "Why is NASA paying more?"

Incidentally, from the data, I don't see any case of them paying significantly more. It's actually about the same, so even that is misleading.
by skydhash | 2025-04-25 13:49:19+00:00
> I don't how to care for livestock or what to do to prepare and can a pig or a cow. I could learn it. But I'll keep using the way of least resistance and get it from my butcher

You'd sing a different tune if there was a good chance from being poisoned by your butcher.

The two examples you chose are obvious choices because the dependencies you have are reliable. You trust their output and methodologies. Now think about current LLMs-based agents running your bank account, deciding on loans,...
by ladeez | 2025-04-25 13:50:30+00:00
Temporarily. Then your brain normalizes to the novelty and you’re just a junkie looking for a novel fix again.

Not really sure where you all think the study of language driven thought gonna get you since you still gonna be waking up tomorrow on Earth being a normal human with the same external demands of society regardless what of the bird song. Physics is pretty normalized and routine. Sounds like some sad addiction driven disassociation.
by lolinder | 2025-04-25 13:51:15+00:00
I don't think you need to distinguish individuals from corporations in order to advance human freedom. You can make the licenses such that any corporation that uses them to provide services to users must provide the users with required freedoms. If businesses can make money while respecting those terms, all the better!

The same goes for the internal use loophole: the corporation should be required to provide its internal users with certain freedoms, and if they do that then mission accomplished.
by raoulscalise | 2025-04-25 13:51:44+00:00
Hey, thanks for the reply!

Can you give an example of the latest library or framework that changed?

The part where you mentioned editing code like you edit Clojure/Lisp, moving/ modifying forms rather than text — I don't fully understand, but it sounds super interesting.

Can you point to some specific examples of design patterns and data structures? And regarding the tests — are you talking about unit tests, integration tests, or E2E tests? Also, don't you think setting up tests takes a lot of time? Do you feel it provides a net gain in productivity?

Thanks a lot
by haswell | 2025-04-25 13:51:48+00:00
I’ve asked myself the same question, because before taking the break I also had visions of working on important/meaningful/undervalued things on my own terms.

I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.

But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.

I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.

I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.
by dlisboa | 2025-04-25 13:51:53+00:00
> There is a good chance that there will be a generational skill atrophy in the future

We already see this today: a lot of young people do not know how to type in keyboards, how to write in word processors, how to save files, etc. A significant part of a new generation is having to be trained on basic computer things same as our grandparents did.

It's very intersting how "tech savvy" and "tech compentent" are two different things.
by bell-cot | 2025-04-25 13:52:04+00:00
Happily, it sounds like WY's State Treasurer is mindful of manufacturing realities - especially markets, skilled workers, and supply chains.

I'm none of a Wyomingite, a Republican, or a Trump fan. (There's a heavy "following Trump's vision" spin to the announcement.)

But still, I hope that Mr. Meier's plan is quickly and obviously successful.
by patcon | 2025-04-25 13:52:25+00:00
I love your comment! I can tell that you're a tangential referential thinker, and I assume the downvotes are more from people frustrated that the bounds of the thought-space are being fuzzed in ways frustrating to their minds.

Metaphor and analogy are in a similar spirit to what you are speaking of. The thinking they ground offer a frustrating inability to contain. Some people love to travel through language into other thoughts, and some are paralysed by that prospect.

As always, success is in the balance and bothness :)

Anything, thanks for sharing!
by ai-christianson | 2025-04-25 13:52:31+00:00
Very cool. We're using helm currently for our startup. It works, but I'm not super excited about it. We've also played with deploying k8s resources with ansible. It works better than expected, but is a bit clunky.

We've also written operators and controllers for some things, but that's a lot of work and not always worth it.

Your project looks like a very interesting alternative, will check it out!
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-25 13:52:44+00:00
Your HR department doesn’t control the budget. They carry out directives from their management. This is endemic across the industry from small companies to in my experience of n=1 at BigTech.

Even there people get better offers coming in externally than they do an internal promotion.

On a related note, it was also easier coming in as an L6 (senior) than it was to get promoted from an L5 to an L6.
by onionisafruit | 2025-04-25 13:53:24+00:00
My mother told me I would end up in massive unrecoverable debt if I didn’t keep my check book balanced, and if I kept it up for too long I would be arrested for fraud. She was from MS, so that tracks.

My prev comment was just quoting Johnny Cash. Had I thought about it, I probably would have assumed that “writing hot checks” was in the song because it’s sort of an amateur crime that landed him in the prison where he learned his lessons. Of course it has to be Mississippi for the chain gang reference.
by jajko | 2025-04-25 13:53:45+00:00
Patriotism is as we know a loyalty to real estate. Borders do change all the time if history is viewed from few steps back. In fact, everything changes - languages, culture, traditions and so on.

Where I come from in Europe - they say we have proud history going back some 1500 years. Well before that, there were other tribes, we are same type of immigrants as current waves. We either mingled with them, killed them or drove them away. I am pretty sure genetic tracing would favor the mingling for the most part.

What makes more sense is really what all others say - pick up a specific set of people, philosophy, moral imperative etc. and be loyal to them. Higher concepts muddy the waters with slippery slopes and are unnecessary, just opening surfaces to manipulation.
by pranitbauva1997 | 2025-04-25 13:53:56+00:00
After hitting workflow friction and editing inertia with my Zola/Rust static site, I migrated back to a CMS. Wagtail won out due to Python/Django familiarity and needing backend features beyond static generation—a pragmatic shift. This post details the rationale, the Hetzner/Cloudflare/Tailscale stack, and why SSG limitations became too costly.
by immibis | 2025-04-25 13:53:57+00:00
As bushbaba points out, the same things may happen with Kafka.

The standard regex joke really works for all values of X. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know - I'll use a queue!" Now they have two problems.

Adding a queue to the system does not make it faster or more reliable. It makes it more asynchronous (because of the queue), slower (because the computer has to do more stuff) and less reliable (because there are more "moving parts"). It's possible that a queue is a required component of a design which is more reliable and faster, but this can only be known about the specific design, not the general case.

I'd start by asking why your data store is randomly failing to write data. I've never encountered Postgres randomly failing to write data. There are certainly conditions that can cause Postgres to fail to write data, but they aren't random and most of them are bad enough to require an on-call engineer to come and fix the system anyway - if the problem could be resolved automatically, it would have been.

If you want to be resilient to events like the database disk being full (maybe it's a separate analytics database that's less important from the main transactional database) then adding a queue (on a separate disk) can make sense, so you can continue having accurate analytics after upgrading the analytics database storage. In this case you're using the queue to create a fault isolation boundary. It just kicks the can down the road though, since if the analytics queue storage fills up, you still have to either drop the analytics or fail the client's request. You have the same problem but now for the queue. Again, it could be a reasonable design, but not by default and you'd have to evaluate the whole design to see whether it's reasonable.
by ladeez | 2025-04-25 13:54:19+00:00
Yeah doesn’t matter what you prefer. New hardware will boot strap models and eliminate the layers of syntax sugar devs use to write and ship software.

Hardware makers aren’t living some honorific quest to provide for SWEs. They see a path to claim more of the tech economy by eliminating as many SWE jobs as possible. They’re gonna try to capitalize on it.
by noduerme | 2025-04-25 13:54:41+00:00
On the other hand, threading makes it possible for one group of people to spin off into a subtopic like discussing the relative merits of threaded vs linear boards, in the same general post about what Zuck said, without annoyingly hijacking the main topic. On HN I often find it useful to collapase the child responses and just read the top level, until something like this pulls me into a rabbit hole.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-25 13:54:44+00:00
They think their wealth, position, etc. is a result of merit. However, they know their wealth was not earned, but given. At best, they were born into a position of privilege and simply used their existing, unearned, wealth to build more.

Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
by buescher | 2025-04-25 13:54:53+00:00
You left out that exampleMethod will of course belong to a Conway's law CustomerConceptManager object. I think this is one of the reasons that software as a field has taken off so well in recent decades while more conventional physical-stuff engineering has stagnated (outside of lithography to support... software) - you can map bureaucracy onto software and the bureaucratic mindset of "if I think I should be able to do something, I should just be able to tell people to figure out how" has fewer hard limits in software.
Show HN: Simulating Singapore's General Election Using LLM
by zp_uca | 2025-04-25 13:55:38+00:00
Hi HN, This is ZP from Nucleus AI.

I've built a webapp to analyse and simulate the upcoming election in Singapore.

Every run simulates all Singaporean voters using a LLM. It's also possible to chat with voters after they have voted to understand how they voted.

Love for you to play around with this and let me know what you think!
by wat10000 | 2025-04-25 13:56:23+00:00
They have one advantage, which is saving 3 bytes of memory (depending on what you decide your max supported string length should be) per string. It's hard to imagine an environment where that's a worthwhile tradeoff, even in the most constrained embedded systems (where you can probably get away with a 16-bit length field and thus only save one byte), but they're not completely without merit.
by 0atman | 2025-04-25 13:56:49+00:00
My go-to is "Alice has 3 brothers and also has 6 sisters. How many sisters does her brother have?". They all say 6!

This test is nice because, as it's numeric, you can vary it slightly and test it easily across multiple APIs.

I believe I first saw this prompt in that paper two years ago that tested many AI models and found them all wanting.
by snarf21 | 2025-04-25 13:56:56+00:00
We need to recognize the reason. It is about scale and cost. Pseudo-art and pseudo-writing can be done completely in the cloud and scale easily. Having a robot to fold even a single towel requires millions of physical robots instead of dozens of servers. Physical products are hard to scale and they break more easily plus they have to live in an uncontrolled invironment.
by haswell | 2025-04-25 13:57:02+00:00
> especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.

I didn’t have “fuck you money”. Just enough to live a moderately frugal life on the equivalent of median income as long as the market didn’t tank.

The thing about your point that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’re describing a scenario in which 99% of people suddenly are in the same situation I was.