MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by degrees57 | 2025-04-08 19:34:07+00:00
I switched my default search engine in my browser to perplexity.ai a few months ago and am super happy with it. The only time I use Google anymore is to specifically visit www.google.com and put site:example.com in the search field, when I know the results I am looking for are only found within that site. I've only had to do that five or six times in the last few months.

And yes, just plain old Google search is completely lackluster in comparison to the perplexity.ai search I get to do today.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-08 19:34:23+00:00
> criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of criticizing AI itself

I think you misunderstand OP's point. An employer saying "we only hire experienced developers [therefore worries about inexperienced developers being misled by AI are unlikely to manifest]" doesn't seem to realize that the AI is what makes inexperienced developers. In particular, using the AI to learn the craft will not allow prospective developers to learn the fundamentals that will help them understand when the AI is being unhelpful.

It's not so much to do with roles currently being performed by humans instead being performed by AI. It's that the experienced humans (engineers, doctors, lawyers, researchers, etc.) who can benefit the most from AI will eventually retire and the inexperienced humans who don't benefit much from AI will be shit outta luck because the adults in the room didn't think they'd need an actual education.
by jlaporte | 2025-04-08 19:34:33+00:00
No opinion on this particular package. But on the naming, "Apache" ECharts...

It's long since time that Apache foundation projects stop using the Apache name. Apache is a license, a foundation, a webserver. Apache supported projects have little to do with that - not the same people, not the same product area. Just some help with money and logistics.

And for those that argue the tie to the Apache org:

They're not CNCF Kubernetes, CNCF Helm, CNCF Jaeger. They're Kubernetes, Helm, Jaeger.
by sshine | 2025-04-08 19:35:46+00:00
Probably 70% of my searches are FastGPT searches, meaning I end my search query with a ‘?’ and Kagi summarises the results, so I don’t need to click.

And the ratio between using search engine and Kagi’s LLM agent with search is still 70% search. Sometimes, searching is faster, sometimes asking AI is faster.
by birdflyinghigh | 2025-04-08 19:35:54+00:00
Before PIX there was TED which worked normal but you usually had to wait up to 3 hours to clear the transfer. Now because of the offload caused by PIX every single transfer you make through TED takes up to 10 minutes, usually 2, but noone cares. The look of happiness people have when they scan qr-code is the same of that kid that just got an ice cream. The reason why Pix was adopted so rapidly, and is so omnipresent, is because of ease of use. You scan the QR-code and that's it, transaction completed. Nobody mentioned that half of users is unable to figure out how to get started with pix, that is register keys, so they ask some techie parents, friends or go to the financial institution to get them started. Before most people that were inept to type in few necessary numbers to complete a transfer from one bank to the other, now switched to Pix and all they have to do is give the phone number or tax ID and are ready to receive money or scan qr-code to sent it out.

Because of that there is a total inclusion and also utter surveillance. So now in Brazil there are 2 problems, 60-80% of financial transactions are processed by the government and to add to the damage the entire economy is run on one point of failure which is WhatsApp. If at the same time, 2 of them would stopped, let's say for 3 weeks or maybe less, entire COUNTRY would do down the drain.

All the alternatives are fading away, lots of people don't even know how to change a ringtone on the phone but know how to do everything through WhatsApp. Try to ask, not even demand, in random business to provide you with alternatives for contact, you'd get that look saying GTFOOH. If pix would stopped, people would not go to atm to withdraw money, they'd wait until it'd come back online. When WhatsApp stops for few hours it feels like Sunday morning before the picnic.

Government+meta=success story of Brazil
by taeric | 2025-04-08 19:36:01+00:00
Very fun post! If folks haven't seen it, Knuth's latest release looks at constraint satisfaction. Really fun discussion on the relations between different ways to model this sort of problem. Happy to add this book to my list!

I would also challenge the author to consider puzzles a bit more. Sprinkling fun into the topics goes a long way. Specifically, do both! Talk about how you can reframe a "real world" problem in terms of some puzzles we may have played as kids. Invite us to play more as adults.
by billy99k | 2025-04-08 19:36:01+00:00
It won't happen in the short-term, because it takes time for manufacturers to move their entire base of operation to another country and disrupt the supply chain.

In the longer term (3+ years), it's possible. Companies are too greedy though. Once the incentives are gone, they will be back to slave labor in China and Vietnam and people in the US will still wonder where all the jobs went.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-08 19:36:16+00:00
Visa and Mastercard are agents for the customer, who benefits greatly from instant and convenient transactions, fraud protection, currency conversion, and credit lines. The merchant pays them for access to these customers, and I have to say that the fees are small for what an amazing service these networks provide. I don't think neither their fees nor their profits are outrageous.

While Pix is a very impressive system, they offer no benefit to the customer over credit/debit cards. Only benefits to the merchants. For inter-personal transactions it is great, and for micro businesses. But as soon as your business grows beyond that, you will want to accept card payments.

If Visa and Mastercard sell transaction data, can you point me to where I can purchase this data? Everybody is saying this is the case, but forgive me for having doubts. Is this what you are talking about? https://usa.visa.com/solutions/visa-commercial-data-solution...

From what I understand, they are selling data in the aggregate, not individual transactions.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-08 19:38:22+00:00
Considerations:

Will people seeing ex-DOGE employees on your staff (such as through LinkedIn) impact your company? For future recruiting? For business to business in your company's domain? For clients? I personally wouldn't work with people that operate in the manner DOGE has (push the limits and move as fast as possible so you can't get stopped, assume part of what you are doing is unacceptable/illegal and will be pulled back instead of making sure what you do is acceptable/legal) and I would be hesitant to trust a company that does unless I was looking to break things in an established space or something. Seperate from that the majority of devs I know wouldn't work with them for political reasons adding up to a whole lot of unfavorable to overlook if you have other candidates.

Do you recruit through current employees? Will tilting your recruitment pool to be more ex-DOGE centric impact your company culture and/or again recruiting other talent? I'm not calling them members of nationalist parties, but there's the whole 'let one into your bar and soon you have a bar full of them' analogy for a reason. Are you OK if you company is labeled an exDOGE shop or other political pejorative shop in the industry you are in?

There's enough other talent out their I'd just pass and less someone else juggle the factors.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-08 19:39:11+00:00
This is fantastic. I'm not surprised they focus on short last lines and on rag, since it's easy to imagine defining metrics for them to then minimize.

But they say:

> We are not yet making adjustments to prevent rivers, although we’d love to in the future.

And indeed, I couldn't even begin to guess how to define a metric for rivers, that can occur at different angles, with different variation, being interrupted by various degrees... I'm curious if there's a clever metric anybody has invented that actually works? Or does it basically require some level of neural-network pattern recognition that is way too expensive to calculate 1,000 variations of for each paragraph?
by metalman | 2025-04-08 19:39:11+00:00
ok lets lay this out, somebody claims that some big complicated numbers that they had and claimed to be valuable, got removed by somebody else, useing a lot more smaller less complicated numbers worth essentialy nothing, and now are seeking the help of someone else with presumably, slightly more, uncomplcated numbers to retrieve the big complicated numbers,from the whoever it is that has them now, in return for a smaller share of said large and complicated numbers.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-08 19:39:45+00:00
Which makes it so strange that some birds seem to have very sophisticated vocalizations. Why? How does it serve them, and why did they diverge so much?

Take ravens for example. There's one that hangs out in trees directly outside of my house now and then. It makes new sounds I haven't heard before quite often. I don't hear other ravens, so I'm not even sure it's trying to communicate. Does it have a social purpose? Is it bored? Do the variations express anything at all?

Yet being in a forest with them around, you hear all kinds of noises too, and they do it all together. They interact a lot. Though my experience is that they use fewer variations when they're together compared to the weird one outside of my house.

They seem very intelligent regardless. They're such cool birds.

Meanwhile most of the other birds around my house, as far as my ears can tell, just make the same sounds over and over. What does any of it mean?
by infecto | 2025-04-08 19:40:28+00:00
Look, it’s not “bizarre” to point out that Observable has deeply shaped the modern D3 ecosystem. The issue isn’t that the D3 API has changed, it’s that a huge number of learning resources, examples, and docs have been rebaked into Observable’s reactive notebook style, which, for people not using Observable, adds a ton of indirection and mental overhead.

You might not notice it if you already know D3 inside and out, but for newcomers, it’s a bit of a turnoff. It’s ok if you like it though!

And no, this isn’t about “blindly copying and pasting.” It’s about people wanting to use D3 without having to learn an entirely different execution environment. That’s a reasonable boundary to set, especially when time and focus are finite.

You can use as many italics as you want but I don’t think it’s a wildly bold claim and your counter example is simply silly.
by latchkey | 2025-04-08 19:41:04+00:00
My problem with monk fruit extracts is that they tend to be full of erythritol (even listing them as the first ingredient [0]), which tends to wreck my stomach. I was in a super market once and not a single product on the shelf was pure monk fruit.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/RAW-Natural-Sweetener-Erythritol-Suga...
by bcrl | 2025-04-08 19:41:38+00:00
Back in the early 1990s I recall working on a system that downloaded Usenet news feeds over satellite. I worked for a local sysop at the time, and due to high long distance costs in Canada it was tremendously more cost effective than transporting a similar amount of bandwidth over leased lines. The rural area I lived in was only fed with copper T1 lines until ~1999 when a local group finally convinced the incumbent to install fiber with the promise of over $1 million in business from the local municipalities, schools and hospitals. Residential and business ADSL was purely a side effect of that effort. We didn't get new DSLAMs with limited VDSL2 service until summer of 2014, and it still took them a couple of years to fix issues with the copper and qualify more than a handful of lines.
by taylodl | 2025-04-08 19:42:06+00:00
I understand and to a large degree agree with what you are saying, but those "idiot sycophants" don't have a bottomless wallet and the resulting inflation is going to hit them hard. My father-in-law had a saying "I may be dumb, but I ain't plumb dumb" that I think applies here: I suspect the majority of these folks aren't plumb dumb.
by jader201 | 2025-04-08 19:42:26+00:00
These days, about the only liquid you can consume without controversy is water.

Some say coffee is good for you (in moderation), some say it's bad for you.

Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.

Some say some artificial sweeteners have benefits, some say all of them are toxic.

Some think fruit juices are good for you, because fruit. Some (most) say they're bad for you.

Some say fruit smoothies are good for you, because the fiber content outweighs the downside of fructose/natural sugars. But some say all fruit sugar is bad for you.

The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you. But maybe I missed some thread where sucrose in moderation actually has health benefits.

I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
by star-glider | 2025-04-08 19:43:01+00:00
This is my favorite thing about Kagi; you can do both. If you just append a question mark, it'll run the search through a simple LLM and give you those results (with citations) right before standard search. From there, you can proceed into a more sophisticated frontier model if that's more effective.

"Search" can mean a lot of things. Sometimes I just want a website but can't remember the URL (traditional); other times I want an answer (LLMs); and other times, I want a bunch of resources to learn more (search+LLMs).
by ben_w | 2025-04-08 19:43:02+00:00
Given how many different and compounding bad decisions seem to be happening here, if they actually push the social security rewrite live after just a few months like Musk said it would take, I currently — genuinely, literally — expect this will be somewhat like saying "Worked under Henry Labouchere during his time as Chief Secretary for Ireland" on a CV handed out in Dublin in 1860.

I really hope they delay that rewrite and actually test it. They might, but if they don't…
by infecto | 2025-04-08 19:43:24+00:00
Ah, there it is, “Western chauvinism,” the all-purpose dismissal when you’ve got no real counterargument. You’re not engaging with what I said, you’re just performing indignation.

Yes, I’ve seen videos, read books, listened to defectors, and followed reports from Amnesty, the UN, and others. You? You’re just here to sneer at the idea that anyone outside North Korea could possibly know anything. That’s not humility, it’s nihilism in a moral disguise.

You say I “know nothing” about North Korea. Maybe not everything. But I know enough to not reflexively defend a regime that starves its people while building monuments to a cult of personality. If that makes you uncomfortable, good.
by froh | 2025-04-08 19:43:29+00:00
well, IBM very publicly invested 1Bn USD into supporting Linux on all their hardware with all their software. so db/2 on s390 on Linux, likewise websphere, etc. it gave the customers the promise of one run time environment on anything. and SUSE and shortly later Red Hat provided truly source compatible environments for software vendors. "code once run anywhere", for real. and then IBM and Oracle and Co forced suse and red hat to become binary compatible at the kernel/libc and basic system libs level, so Oracle and all could provide one binary under /opt on any Linux...

and that pulled all other vendors along, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, likewise for software...

and it all started with IBM officially supporting and pushing the hobbyist student project Linux on the holy Grail of enterprise compute, (of 1999/2000): s390
by mantas | 2025-04-08 19:43:41+00:00
I'm euro and runner/cyclist so I doubt that was a factor. I also had my bicycle with me for some rides on off days, but it wasn't beyond my usual mileage. Maybe even less, because riding road bike in Tokyo was an experience that made me realise how good I've it back home. Surroundings hills are nice, but getting out of the city sucks big time.
by Conasg | 2025-04-08 19:44:00+00:00
I took a cursory look and I like what I see – the service maps are really good, I love the level of detail. I will say, one thing I'm looking for with this kind of software, to maximise value, is structured logging support, and from what I could see, each log line just has the raw payload currently. Is that something you have on your roadmap?
by vannevar | 2025-04-08 19:44:13+00:00
I would argue that Lenat was at least directionally correct in understanding that sheer volume of data (in Cyc's case, rules and facts) was the key in eventually achieving useful intelligence. I have to confess that I once criticized the Cyc project for creating an ever-larger pile of sh*t and expecting a pony to emerge, but that's sort of what has happened with LLMs.
by sshine | 2025-04-08 19:44:17+00:00
In one job, I found three exploits. I did the analysis / writeup, and a pull request, and they collected dust for 4 months.

I don’t know why. Maybe it was political (acquisition and certification). Maybe they didn’t understand or recognise the statistics that I used. Maybe they didn’t think it was a problem, since they assumed that no incidents had happened.

My impression is that the buggier the code, the less they care about security if it hit them in the face.
by captn3m0 | 2025-04-08 19:44:28+00:00
I found some reasonable sources:

https://ember-energy.org/data/chinas-solar-pv-export-explore... has charts for countries (and regions) that go to middle of 2024.

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-solar-exports-data/ has the raw data, which shows 2194.236922MW of installation in pakistan in _just Jan 2025_.

This is just China export data, based on the assumptions that: the country importing is actually installing this, and that .cn is 80% of the market, so it is a good proxy.

Good job to whoever is importing this!
by neogodless | 2025-04-08 19:44:51+00:00
I mean, I haven't been a subscriber for a couple years but are they losing a lot of subscribers?

https://backlinko.com/netflix-users

I see some slowing growth particularly across 2021/2022 but as of this report (April 2024) they were still growing through 2023.

260M subscribers. They aren't exactly hurting.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-04-08 19:45:40+00:00
Actually, you hit the nail on the head, they are _not_ like humans because they only know what you say, not what you mean. A human would understand that when you ask a broad question, you want a broad answer. Broadly speaking, Jeeps are bad.

Our current LLM are kneecapped because they are very reluctant to be negative.
by Veliladon | 2025-04-08 19:46:21+00:00
There's two main things. First of all, when you load data into a register from an address in memory the CPU loads 64-byte cache lines, not words or bytes. AActor for instance is 1016 bytes. 16 cache lines. It's freaking huge.

So let's say you're going through all the actors and updating one thing. If those actors are in an array it's easy. Just a for loop, update the member variable, done. Easy, fast, should be performant right? But each time you're updating one of those the prefetcher is also bringing in extra lines, more data in the object, thinking you might need them next. So if you're only updating a single thing or a couple of things in the object on different cache lines you might really bring in 3-8x the data you actually need.

CPU prefetchers have something called stride detectors which can detect access patterns of N number of steps and stop the prefetcher from grabbing additional lines but at 16 cache lines the AActor object is way too big for the stride detector to keep up with. So you stride in gaps of 16 cache lines at a time through memory and you still get 2-3 extra cache lines after the initial access.

Secondly, a 1016 byte object just doesn't fit. It's word aligned but it's not cache line aligned and it's sure as hell not page aligned.

Best case scenario if you're updating two variables next to each other in memory the prefetcher gets both on the same cache line. Medium case scenario, the prefetcher has to grab the next line every so often. You'll get best most often and medium rarely.

Bad case scenario, the prefetcher has to grab the next cache line on the NEXT PAGE. Which only just became a thing on recent CPUs but also involves translating the virtual address of the next page to its physical page address which takes forever in data access terms. Bunch of pointer chasing, basically a few thousand clock of waiting.

The absolute worst case scenario is that the prefetcher thinks you need the next cache line, it's on the next page, it does the rigamarole of translating the next page's virtual address and you don't actually need it. You've done two orders of magnitude more work than reading a single variable for literally nothing.

So yeah. The prefetcher can do some weird ass shit when you throw weird and massive data structs at it. Slashing and burning the size down helps because the stride detector can start functioning again when the object is small enough. If it can be kept to a multiple of 64 bytes you even get page aligned again.
by plsbenice34 | 2025-04-08 19:46:30+00:00
I use a search engine 99% of the time. Occasionally i use an LLM, but even for checking the most simple information I am not able to have any confidence that the answer it gives is correct. It seems to lie to me every time i use it and contradicts itself when i tell it that it made an error. It provides no citation to where it got its information and that seems completely essential. I very rarely see any use for it. Even if a search engine is much slower i will not compromise on knowing where the information is sourced from so I can judge its accuracy, bias, etc. I feel disturbed by all the people that have lower information standards
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 19:47:02+00:00
Interesting questions!

Glamorous Toolkit is indeed built by the team at feenk, which is a company. However, we created the company to fund the research, not the other way around. Everything we do is free and open-source.

Our goal is not to build Glamorous Toolkit, but to validate the idea that what we call Moldable Development (programming through contextual tools) leads to explainable systems.

We start from legacy systems because that's a hard problem that is not yet solved. If we are to find a new way of working, it should work in the least favorable conditions. With legacy systems, we have extreme combinations of technologies and inter-twinned domain knowledge that we have to make sense of.

At first the approach was called humane assessment, but along the way we found that it actually does change forward engineering as well. For example, we've seen cases in which startups produce pitches for investors right from the development environment. Or teams that put a face on domain-driven design by showing the domain to business people from the development environment leading to co-development. Glamorous Toolkit itself is an extensive case study of Moldable Development, too.

More recently, we also apply the same ideas to creating editing experiences as well. Imagine editors of generic languages that understand the framework or the domain and that offer inline activities.

Yet another application area is that of code transformation. It turns out that we can describe large scale code transformations through contextual transformations as well. This then allows us to evolve large code bases seamlessly.

This can work if creating a new experience is inexpensive. And this can be achieved if we can compose the overall experience out of tiny pieces. Micro tools like views in the inspector, custom debuggers, dedicated editors or even transformations.

There are a few more details at moldabledevelopment.com including the beginning of an open book I am writing with Simon Wardley.

Does this address your questions?