MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hansvm | 2025-04-29 16:18:32+00:00
> too many cases to analyze

One of my early-career successes was just creating a framework for generating every permutation of perf optimizations for every (log-scaled -- clz is very fast) input size and checking which was best, dropping the results into a lookup table of function pointers to branch on. The university had a large supply of heterogeneous computers, replete with all the normal problems like being able to double floating-point addition throughput on Haswell CPUs by abusing the fmadd instruction, so I made a framework (probably closer to a DSL) for encoding your algorithms in a way that you could analyze perf tradeoffs at compile time and tune your result for the given computer. It's kind of like what ATLAS does for some linear algebra tasks.

Such practices are almost never optimal, but they're pretty easy to implement, and the results are near-optimal for almost all inputs. In the tradeoff between human and computer performance, I think it's a nice option.
by toast0 | 2025-04-29 16:18:50+00:00
> If the lines were buried, there'd be less maintenance caused by weather events, less transmission losses, and overall more efficient and resilient operation.

It's a tradeoff. When there is an issue with underground lines, it's much more expensive to locate and diagnose the fault and repair it; in both dollars and time.

In that area of the country, the ground freezes in winter, and digging becomes very difficult, which would make repairs that much more delayed and expensive.

Also, depending on requirements, it may be possible to augment capacity ny adding a second transmission line to the existing towers at a later time; that would be much less expensive than setting up the first line; but for undergrounding, such a project would most likely be as expensive as the first time, if not more. Similar with replacing the line at the end of its service life (although if the line and the towers have a similar service life, replacing them both brings costs back up similar to the initial project)
by lostmsu | 2025-04-29 16:18:53+00:00
I started reconsidering Edge literally last week because Panorama View managed to lose my groups again, and Edge has excellent workspaces (envy).

Haven't tried the new groups yet, but from the video it is unclear what to do if I don't want them to constantly stay visible in the tab bar. The whole point for me is decluttering it from something I don't need at the moment.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-29 16:19:01+00:00
What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?

> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?

I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
by nemith | 2025-04-29 16:19:08+00:00
Also Facebook has a history of releasing the source code for something. Making a huge splash and then essentially doing nothing after 3 months (aka after someone gets their review).

They use the code internally but fail at making sure it has use externally. This is doubly the case for anything infrastructure

Buck2: Was released. Never could be built correctly without the latest nightly of Rust and even then it was fragile outside of Meta's build architecture

Sapling: Has a whole bunch of excitement and backing when it was announced. Has been essentially dead 3 mos after release.

I used to work for Meta infra. I know the MO. Have a hard time trusting.

Astral use-case is external and has a better chance of actually being supported.
by reginald78 | 2025-04-29 16:19:54+00:00
Sadly, this seems to be the general purpose of telemetry. If the gathered statistics can be contorted to justify doing something you wanted to do anyway, then telemetry will be used for just that. If it says something else, just ignore it and say you don't have enough resources or something.

Proponents suggest it is necessary to improve software. Microsoft has extensively used telemetry for at least 10 years in Windows, does that feel improved to anyone during that time? I'm of the opinion they largely used it to identify what existing features users were still being productive with so they could be enshitified next.
by ljm | 2025-04-29 16:20:02+00:00
$8000 for 2 petabytes of traffic is pretty cheap for them also.

There are plenty of shitty ISPs out there who would charge $$ per gigabyte after you hit a relatively small monthly cap. Even worse if you're using a mobile hotspot.

I would be mortified if my bug cost someone a few hundred bucks in overages overnight.
by nickd2001 | 2025-04-29 16:20:24+00:00
In the UK there's this :) https://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/qualifications/f66. No entry reqs at all. I've a friend who for various reasons back in the day got no secondary school (high school) qualifications i:e no GCSEs or A levels, no undergrad either, but did an apprenticeship and ended up as a software dev , did an Open University MSc and ended up with a Comp Sci Phd ! Open University always seems fantastic to me but maybe US employers would expect Americans to have an American qualification? Regarding your original Q to do the degree at all, absolutely, worth it for the mental development, also there are some great jobs out there that do require a degree and a shame to miss out. Having taken part in a sift for junior developer positions, the applications we get have a lot of cr*p, many people with bootcamps plus half-arsed / plagiarised GitHub. Those with a Real comp Sci degree plus some experience really do stand out.
by overfeed | 2025-04-29 16:20:30+00:00
> I’ve gotten 0 production usable python out of any LLM

Fascinating, I wonder how you use it because once I decompose code to modules and function signatures, Claude[0] is pretty good at implementing Python functions. I'd say it one-shots 60% of the times, I have to tweak the prompt or adjust the proposed diffs 30%, and the remaining 10% is unusable code that I end up writing by hand. Other things Claude is even better at: writing tests, simple refactors within a module, authoring first-draft docstrings, adding context-appropriate type hints.

0. Local LLMs like Gemma3, Qwen-coder seem to be in the same ballpark in terms of capabilities, it's just that they are much slower on my hardware. Except for the 30b Qwen3 MoE that was released a day ago, that one is freakin' fast.
by ang_cire | 2025-04-29 16:20:34+00:00
There is a difference between design that tries to prevent someone from shooting themselves in the foot (designing around how users interact), and design that seeks to influence or limit their behavior. The former is safety, the latter is manipulation or restriction.

Giving system owners RBAC controls so they can choose who is an admin, versus not giving system owners admin privileges at all.

But more importantly, the point of my comment is that the axiom that everyone thinks themselves competent enough, is true at every level of risk. No matter how low risk something is, someone can and will still overestimate their capabilities and muck it up. If we're using that as justification to impose restrictions, there would be no actions that someone could not justify restricting.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-29 16:20:35+00:00
For us the meaning was market specific. We provide application hosting and consulting. Many of our customers came to us from other firms that clearly were run by people who did not understand the basics that an enterprise would expect. An example of this would be backups.

We had several customers jump to us from another local firm. When we got in, we noted that the prior firm had “implemented backups”. This was a script that just made a zip file of their data and stored it right alongside the running application. Sometimes even in a web/network accessible directory. But hey, most of our customers didn’t have backups before they came to us at all.

We’re also talking no MFA, guessable passwords, customer domain names owned by accounts associated with email addresses that no longer existed, etc.

So, stuff like that. I guess to sum it up you could say “we pay attention like an enterprise should,” and that many SMBs in the space don’t, for clients that don’t know what to pay attention to at all.

> The old saying that "small companies make it possible, large companies make it inexpensive" holds as true as always.

I hadn’t heard that. Love it. We don’t come cheap, but our clients don’t have to manage S3 buckets, and we don’t have to run geographically redundant SANs.
by addoo | 2025-04-29 16:20:43+00:00
I guess it’s all relative. One of my code bases still has pylint running with only a couple custom lint rules, that one is slow as hell.

As for version bumping, maybe it’s just a me thing, but I hard fix a version and only update occasionally. Sure each update brings new warnings, but most of them are valid and if you only do it a couple times a year… not that big a deal.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-29 16:20:48+00:00
I use the heck out of the admin. I wouldn't say I'm super experienced with Django, but my solution to users being overwhelmed by doing things there is to build a bit of extra UI just for the stuff they need to do, more Rails style. Meaning: I don't go into fighting too much with the admin when what it can do out of the box is not feasible for some. But even if the admin ends up being used only by devs and some trained folks, I think it has amazing utility.
by 9rx | 2025-04-29 16:22:17+00:00
> The problem the Democrats face is that wage prospects and social issues are segmented by level of education more than in the past.

But that's just because more people typically seek higher levels of educational attainment than in the past, so the more capable people filter upward.

In my grandfather's day, even going to high school was relatively unusual. Back then, the "less than high school" cohort was a healthy mix ranging from those with extreme disabilities to high performing people. Nowadays, there are often even legal mandates that require anyone who is capable to graduate from high school. So, the "less than high school" cohort is now effectively only those with extreme disabilities, with all the life challenges that go along with that. As such, if you only glance at the data you might think that lower levels of education have fallen behind, but in reality they've just lost the people that helped make it look better than it really was for those who struggle.

That doesn't seem like it should be a problem. Only the counting has changed, which isn't materially significant.

I suppose what you are trying to say is that said shift has revealed how bad things have always been for the disabled, and Democrats are called upon to fix the issue making it their problem, whereas it is understood that the Republicans are always of the "fuck the disabled" mind so nobody expects them to deal with it?
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-29 16:22:19+00:00
>Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?

Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).

Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.

>Not judging or anything,

It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.

PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-29 16:22:35+00:00
Obama's administration passed regulations on the most well-known endocrine disrupters in 2016. They wanted to include more on the list of regulated chemicals, but the chemical industry's GOP buddies blocked that.

So basically you're blaming Obama for not managing to do something perfectly. Are you part of the "all or nothing" camp of policymaking?
by atoav | 2025-04-29 16:22:39+00:00
"Not well thought out"? This was the equivalent of putting on a blindfold and throwing random darts at a world map.

On top of that the reasons they gave are contradictory, because in the end the truth is the tariffs were based on the vibes one specific man had held since the 80s. However the world is very different since then.

Not even the numbers make sense. If the goal was to punish people with whom the US has a high trade deficit, why slap a 10% fee on those who don't have a trade deficit at all? This tells countries: "No matter what you do, we will abuse our position of power anyways" instead of telling them "If you behave we both will benefit".

But maybe that wasn't the reason, instead it was manufacturing? Then why on earth not pair tariffs with incentives and help for corporations who want to move their production lines to the US? With the current volatile climate in the US nobody is going to move anything, except maybe away from the US.
by dguest | 2025-04-29 16:22:41+00:00
I discovered the feature accidentally a few days ago while I was trying to simultaneously write a presentation, book accommodations, submit travel paperwork, and brief my colleagues on what they should do while I'm away. And for the last day or so it was very useful.

Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful but it was useful.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-29 16:22:58+00:00
> Gavin Newsom suddenly talking to the enemy.

Gavin Newsom did that when he realized he was done with electoral politics and was ready to turn to a money making post-politics career. Even as an attack dog (which he was very effective at when he was trying) he has almost zero support from Democrats outside of CA, and he’s termed out next year. He didn't realize the (fictious) problem with Democratic politics you are talking about, he started preparing for a career change.

> AOC after she found out that her voters voted for trump

AOC’s district voted 65-33 for Harris while re-electing her 69-30.

And she's now seen in polling as the most significant Democratic leader and is running (with Sen. Sanders) a massive nationwide campaign against the GOP.

> Bill Maher

Bill Maher has never been a Democrat, he’s been a very vocal independent that has jumped on almost every right-wing hate campaign since post-9/11 Islamophobia.
Ask HN: What websites exist that are valuable as social platforms?
by _p2zi | 2025-04-29 16:23:02+00:00
I have been searching for online social media platforms where people can genuinely talk and interact, but so far, I haven't found a good website that fits this need.

This is important to me because I’ve recently lost the ability to interact with people from my own country, which has left me without new ideas or social engagement.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-29 16:23:25+00:00
I was taking simpler to discuss numbers, but if you don't like hypotheticals:

Looking at 2020 numbers

> children

24% of teens or younger

> foreigners

13%

> criminals

23% of the US population has a criminal record

That's at least 50% of the population. That's a lot for a "weak minority".
by kypro | 2025-04-29 16:23:29+00:00
That's interesting. I think there's been some pretty significant improvements in the rate of hallucinations and accuracy of the models, especially when it comes to rule following. Perhaps the biggest improvement though is in the size of context windows which are huge compared to this time last year.

Maybe progress over the last 2-3 months is hard to see, but progress over the last 6 is very clear.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-29 16:23:43+00:00
This is probably brought up whenever an article mentions “wasted time”, but I wonder what percentage of side and “main” software projects “fail”- so we have to define side vs main and what it means to fail (I would imagine failure looks different for each), but anecdotally, none of my side projects have made money, but at least one I would call “done”, so… success?

A fear I have with larger side projects is the notion that it could all be for nought, though I suppose that’s easily-mitigated by simply keeping side projects small, iterative if necessary. Start with an appropriate-sized MVP, et al.
by catapart | 2025-04-29 16:23:54+00:00
I do project work, which generally requires dozens of tabs, sometimes across multiple browsers, depending up on the project (usually a browser-based software project).

In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked, because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open, and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the tabs.

In my head, it's understood as: this is my garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work, and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound down.

Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email, note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.

I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug

ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome, Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.
by bArray | 2025-04-29 16:23:58+00:00
From an AI perspective, I have a rough idea of what intrinsic motivation means to me:

To allow an embodied agent to perform actions within an environment that would generally be considered positive, without the definition of an objective function.

To break that down, to be embodied in this case is to act, sense and have some internal model that can be adapted, all operating within an environment that can be considered external to the agent.

An objective function is where there is some external push towards optimality that requires knowledge of the sensors, actuators, environment, etc. A good test for whether you accidentally baked in system knowledge is if you change the rules considerably and the agent will not operate.

Whether or not an agent acts positively can itself be measured by an environment specific objective function. A properly operating intrinsically motivated agent may perform well on some metrics, i.e. long time lived, reduced search time, etc.

Why do you want an intrinsically motivated agent? Almost all reward/objective functions are somewhat flawed, even if the problem is simple. I am reminded of a group training a robot to walk fast, measured by speed over time with a cut off. Simple enough? Well, they reviewed the trained agent and they immediately feel to the ground to be reset far away. In another test, the agents would purposely break the simulation environment, causing the agents to glitch and be launched far. One thing to note is that in each of those scenarios, the agent optimised for the reward, but made themselves "useless" after doing so.

For AI I have found Empowerment an interesting solution to intrinsic motivation [1]. Essentially agents choose actions to "keep their options open", and try to avoid actions that would reduce the action state space. The actual environment itself is not encoded into the algorithm and the state spaces are arbitrary and could be replaced with any symbol. As a result, you can make large changes to the environment and use the same motivation algorithm.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863
by legitster | 2025-04-29 16:23:59+00:00
The plan was only apparently proposed for Haul, which is Amazon's direct-to-consumer discount brand (a TEMU competitor, essentially).

Which makes sense - Amazon has made their fortune off of hiding shipping costs and baking it into the price. They also mostly concern themselves with logistics and don't directly deal with import costs when they can have independent sellers do that for them.

Still, the reaction from the White House this morning is insane. How quickly they went into victim mode over this shows how sensitive of a topic it is for them.
by killme2008 | 2025-04-29 16:24:32+00:00
In fact, we have an open-source query language, but it's still in experimental, so we don't present it on the website. The description of the enterprise feature is not precise. Sorry for the inconvenience.

GreptimeDB also open-sources the log view UI if you read the article.

I agree with you that ETL is so powerful, and GreptimeDB is so young, we still have lots of work to do. Thank you.