MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dandelion9 | 2025-04-14 15:38:27+00:00
Strong types are not orthogonal to dynamic types, but I'll assume you're referring to static typing instead. My opinion on this is static type systems are great and provide amazing fit when you can model an entire system (e.g. a compiler). I think they are overrated for typical business software subject to change over time. IMO this is because business data tends to outlive any particular code base, or compiler version.

The way I see it is there's a spectrum of ways of handling this, from type systems, validation code, documentation, integration tests (validating runtime behaviour), and static analysis tooling, but I don't agree that a static type system is the best (and is often only barely adequate) way of integrating modules. The optimal solution is going to vary based on each project's requirements: e.g., is the modular code going to be consumed via networked API or as a library, and is it internally controlled or third-party? How many teams are going to be working on it? How much care has been taken with backwards compatibility? If we break the interface of some random minor function every update, a static type system may help, then again if it's just for our team: who cares? I'm sure we've all seen updates make internal modifications that break runtime behaviour but don't alter data models or function signatures in a way that get's picked up by a compiler.

Even in the most extreme type systems, interfaces are eventually going to need documentation and examples to explain domain/business logic peculiarities. What if a library interface requires a list in sorted order? Is it better to leak a LibrarySortedList type into the caller codebase? The modularity starts to break down. The alternative is use a standard library generic List type, but you can't force the data to be sorted. To encode this type of info we need dependent types or similar. A different example would be a database connection library, every database supports different key/value pairs for connection strings. If the database library released a patch which deprecated support for some arbitrary connection string param, you wouldn't find out until someone tried to run the code. Static analysis tools may catch common things like connection strings, but IME there's always some custom "stringly" typed values in business applications, living in a DB schema written 10+ years ago.

We also have to consider that the majority of our data arrives serialised, from files or over the wire. It's necessarily constrained to generic wire protocols, which have lower fidelity than data parsed into a more featured type system. Given that this type of data is getting validated or rejected directly after deserialisation, how much extra value is derived from having the compiler reiterate your validation code? Non-zero for sure, but probably not as much as we like to think.
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-14 15:38:56+00:00
> Does your average consumer actually care?

Yes. This is an anecdote but I personally know people who are boycotting Target and a lot of other companies that backtracked on DEI and LGBTQ rights. I think these companies are all posturing and will say what they think will get you in the door but other people I know are taking this personally and changing their spending habits to reflect that.
by ncr100 | 2025-04-14 15:39:03+00:00
Ah. This post counts for one, or 0.000173% of the 1.56 billion customers (annual).

- Demographics https://www.numerator.com/snapshots/target/

- More demographics https://www.contimod.com/target-statistics/

What might be interesting is to sample your persons more broadly (across country) and in more quantity?
by thiagoharry | 2025-04-14 15:39:11+00:00
> Dubious” charges against Lula? — He was convicted of accepting a seaside apartment as a bribe for helping the OAS construction company get lucrative deals with state oil firm Petrobras.

Yes, since nobody yet proved that the apartment was Lula's apartment. And tt was discovered several problems with Lula's charges, which was judged by a person that later was rewarded by Bolsonaro with a job as minister.

> Also Bolsonaro was termed “far right,” but Lula not called “far left?”

Lula is not far left, but center left. He is a social democrat at best, not a communist.
by alex1115alex | 2025-04-14 15:39:15+00:00
One of our app devs built this recently, but for swearing:

https://youtube.com/shorts/FthRCwn1JuM?si=lC3eWAUI7sV-LL-r

A wearable speech coach would be awesome, though. Detect filler words and give you an alert on your HUD when it detects "uh" "uhm" etc.
by lesostep | 2025-04-14 15:39:34+00:00
It's highly specific to the country (and also to the social media where the community was once established), so I doubt it is relevant to you. But think fandom non-english space with historical empathizes on female and lgbt members under antilgbt government. Any social media on this particular language that wants to grow large will swiftly remove half of the discussions we can have there. Keeping separate from opinionated socially-aligned people is also a plus
by derektank | 2025-04-14 15:39:35+00:00
>Bolsanaro was already in power when this happened, so there is little reason to suspect him of wielding power over the courts or anything like that.

Bolsonaro had only made one appointment to the Supreme Federal Court at the time of the judgement in favor of Lula in 2021, while 7 of the 11 had been appointed by Lula or Dilma Rousseff. Yes, Lula was not in a position to pressure the supreme court as president but I don't think one should assume he had zero influence either. I'm not intimately familiar with Brazilian politics though and wouldn't want to unfairly imply any of the judges were in any way corrupt so I'll just leave it at that.
by simonw | 2025-04-14 15:39:49+00:00
The daily briefing prompt is here: https://www.val.town/x/geoffreylitt/stevensDemo/code/dailyBr...

It's about 652 tokens according to https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-token-counter - maybe double that once you add all of the context from the database table.

1200 input tokens and 200 output tokens for Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs 0.66 cents - that's around 2/3rd of a cent.

LLM APIs are so cheap these days.
by tomjen3 | 2025-04-14 15:40:17+00:00
This seems a case of extracting a lot of information from very little data.

The economy is in a weird situation. The situation is extremely fluid. And people who can afford to buy groceries, partially with a subscription service, are also the kind of people who are less likely to be affected by the economy.

There you have it. There is an alternative explanation that fits the same data. In fact I'll argue it fits a little bit better since the other chain's foot traffic was up only 0.3 percent. If people had fled from Target, you'd expect this one to go up quite a bit more.
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-14 15:40:19+00:00
OMG, the difference between tabs and spaces is so tiny that it's generally inconsequential in modern IDEs.

In our case, where we use .editorconfig and a reformatter, if someone makes a case that we should change, it's trivial to do so.

> Oh, being stuck with incumbent decisions.

I think if you feel that way about tabs vs spaces, the problem isn't "incumbent decisions," the problem is your attitude.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-04-14 15:40:53+00:00
What will the LLM use to call out to an OpenAPI system? Will it use a shell command like curl? How will it bind to the shell? How will the LLM’s host orchestrate that on the LLM’s behalf?

And who will define the credentials? And what is the URL? Oh, those are in the environment variables? How will the LLM get that info? Do I need to prompt the LLM all that info, wasting context window on minutia that has nothing to do with my task?

…if only there was a standard for that… I know! Maybe it can provide a structured way for the LLM to call curl and handle all the messy auth stuff and smooth over the edges between operating systems and stuff. Perhaps it can even think ahead and load the OpenAPI schema and provide a structured way to navigate such a large “context blowing” document so the LLM doesn’t have to use precious context window figuring it out? But at that point why not just provide the LLM with pre-built wrappers on top specifically for whatever problem domain the rest api is dealing with?

Maybe we can call this protocol MCP?

Because think about it. OpenAPI doesn’t help the LLM actually reach out and talk to the API. It still needs a way to do that. Which is precisely what MCP does.
by NathanFlurry | 2025-04-14 15:41:09+00:00
Appreciate the kind words!

I see ActorCore as picking up on PartyKits vision where they left off after acquisition by Cloudflare. Here's a few of the few things we've added to ActorCore:

- Full TypeScript type safety for calling actions on actors – PartyKit provides raw WebSocket messages instead

- Streamlined state persistence – PartyKit requires using low-level storage calls for persistence

- Flexible scheduling API – PartyKit exposes the single alarm from Cloudflare instead

- Simpler "functional" API – you might prefer PartyKit if you prefer using ES6 classes

- Upcoming SQLite features & deep integrations for features like auth & local-first sync will make it easier to ship quickly

- Not vendor-locked to Cloudflare

PartyKit already has a few integrations that is on our roadmap, such as Yjs

Curious to hear your experience using both.
by syspec | 2025-04-14 15:41:26+00:00
The beauty of kotlin is they don't need to. I use kotlin on the backend (never did android development). It's amazing. Better version of java than java. Use any and all java libraries transparently (there's nothing to change or do), heck you can even have the java and kotlin in the same codebase (something I haven't really done, but tried it for fun)

Java and Kotlin both compile down to .class Java bytecode.

To the JVM, there is no difference
by josefresco | 2025-04-14 15:42:08+00:00
While all the major retailers are down (due to economic "uncertainty"), Target is certainly hurting the most.

Costco, who pushed back against the calls to end DEI is doing the best.

> Target lost 9% of its foot traffic year over year in February and 6.5% in March, according to Placer.ai research. It even lost traffic during Target Circle Week. That’s more than Walmart, which lost 5.7% of traffic February and another 3.8% in March. In contrast, Costco gained 2.2% in traffic in February and 7.5% in March.

https://www.startribune.com/target-walmart-foot-traffic-decl...
by inertiatic | 2025-04-14 15:42:31+00:00
>I'm still looking for a systematic approach to make a hybrid search (combined full-text with embedding vectors).

Start off with ES or Vespa, probably. ES is not hard at all to get started with, IMO.

Try RRF - see how far that gets you for your use case. If it's not where you want to be, time to get thinking about what you're trying to do. Maybe a score multiplication gets you where you want to be - you can do it in Vespa I think, but you have to hack around the inability to express exactly that in ES.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-14 15:42:43+00:00
Ages ago, I proposed that the best CMS for a company would be one which used e-mail as the front-end:

- all attachments are stripped out and stored on a server in an hierarchical structure based on sender/recipient/subject line

- all discussions are archived based on similar criteria, and can be reviewed EDIT: and edited like to a wiki
by cess11 | 2025-04-14 15:43:26+00:00
"It’s very useful for personal AI tools to have access to broader context from other information sources."

How? This post shows nothing of the sort.

"I’ve written before about how the endgame for AI-driven personal software isn’t more app silos, it’s small tools operating on a shared pool of context about our lives."

Yes, probably, so now is the time to resist and refuse to open ourselves up to unprecedented degrees of vulnerability towards the state and corporations. Doing it voluntarily while it is still rather cheap is a bad idea.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-14 15:43:28+00:00
It is the same level of fragility compared to HTTP because most HTTP connections now are stateless keep-alive connections. The solution to this fragility is to open a new connection after the prior connection breaks. You will know when the WebSocket connection breaks in both the browser and Node because there is an event exactly for that. That new connection request can occur via timed intervals or as needed at next message, depending upon concerns of directionality and urgency.

Transmission is not a function of state. Your application gains greater durability when those two qualities become fully independent of each other.

Transmission jank is a concern for web servers that come down and then back up with restoration of many concurrent connections. The solution to that is stagger connection establishment in batches and intervals. This is not a normal operating concern though, because how often does your web server crash on you in production if you have 10,000 or more active connections.

As for CDNs leave static asset requests to HTTP. For performance these files should be consolidated to the fewest number of requests balanced against initial rendering concerns in the browser. This should also typically be limited to initial page request.
by noosphr | 2025-04-14 15:43:39+00:00
I've build adaptive agent swarms using email, mailing lists and ftp servers.

If you don't need to have the lowest possible latency for your work and you're happy to have threads die then it's better than any bespoke solution you can build without an army of engineers to keep it chugging along.

What's even better is that you can see all the context, and use the same command plane as the agents to tell them what they are doing wrong.
by sour-taste | 2025-04-14 15:43:49+00:00
Congrats! It was super interesting to read about the western express, when I did this a few years ago I did the astoria route: https://blaise.bike/

Did you look into different tires? 8 flats seems like a lot. I got exactly one running schwalbe marathon plus tires.

Overall what was your favorite part of the trip?
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-14 15:43:54+00:00
> The doctor's practice or hospital gets the extra $1656, from the insurer.

No, they don't.

Insurance pays out their negotiated rate of like $100 for that 15 minute appointment. (Which likely has some pre- and post-appointment work involved. My doc has clearly at least skimmed my chart prior, and I get a written note later. I'm also seen by a nurse initially.)

The rates have to be obscenely high on paper so the insurer gets their big win negotiating.

The rest just... evaporates. https://imgur.com/a/X5oLXgr
by dangus | 2025-04-14 15:43:57+00:00
I am much less negative on Tim Cook and I’ll tell you why:

Steve Jobs was a great vision leader but something of a bad manager in other ways. Being an asshole doesn’t magically make his track record perfect, especially if we include his first stint at Apple.

He was a great leader of a growth company. He motivated and sourced talent very well in his own strange way.

Tim Cook is extremely good at the logistics of a large and mature company, and Apple doesn’t need a Steve Jobs because it doesn’t need to grow.

Apple doesn’t need to do any of the shit that you’ve criticized them for doing badly. It doesn’t need the Vision Pro or an AI product at all. It doesn’t even need to innovate anymore, ever.

Apple is now entrenched in a duopoly. It literally can’t fail. They are basically like AT&T now.

They’ll make more money reselling cloud storage and bundling a glorified cable subscription with it. They probably make more money on their stupid credit card than OpenAI will ever make.

Hell, their services division makes more revenue than Macs and iPads combined IIRC.

Perhaps Tim Cook’s only failure is not canceling the Vision Pro product and not delaying Apple Intelligence. But the consequences of those actions are minimal if any. They probably sold the iPhone 16 Pro to millions of morons who don’t even care about the AI rug pull.

With a company so large, Tim Cook’s most important job is keeping the machine running, staying on the good side of all the countries involved politically, things of that nature. And in that sense he’s done a great job.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-14 15:44:08+00:00
> This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.

Maybe this is true, I don't actually know. But I'm quite skeptical that someone who worked at Google for a long time, and has work with their name on it they can point to, who can work remotely, will have a harder time finding gainful employment than a physical laborer.

I'm not trying to pile on the "screw this guy for whining" train, but I think it is important to recognize the privilege of working in tech.
by everdrive | 2025-04-14 15:44:09+00:00
On the "very-online right," there's a lot of "go woke, go broke," but there is generally not a lot of precision when it comes to actually measuring whether this is true. Certainly this has been true in some cases, but often overtly "woke" things are quite successful and popular.

The Bud Light controversy was interesting since the market for Bud Light seemed to be fairly cornered by the very people who were likely to dislike modern progressive and "woke" signaling. (ie, lower class and lower-to-middle class working class)

To the extent that the analysis from the article is correct, I wonder whether Target's market significantly skewed liberal and progressive, and potentially they have offended their constituency.

As I noted above, I am a bit skeptical that the causation is so solid as people make out. In the past few years on the right, the analysis has often been very sloppy an ideological, even if some companies have seen legitimate pushback for political signaling.
by mont_tag | 2025-04-14 15:44:26+00:00
ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.

Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.

I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).
by owebmaster | 2025-04-14 15:44:26+00:00
> "Dubious” charges against Lula? — He was convicted of accepting a seaside apartment as a bribe for helping the OAS construction company get lucrative deals with state oil firm Petrobras

is it also called a bribe when someone pay for it? I think it is called lawfare

> Also Bolsonaro was termed “far right,” but Lula not called “far left?”

Is lula exalting Stalin and trying to install a proletariat dictatorship?
by meepmorp | 2025-04-14 15:44:39+00:00
> The camera shows night in the Wild West.

> A masked man creeps through the shadows of a sleeping town.

> He looks both ways, then

... walks into a casino, realizes there's a flaw in how they shuffle and deal cards, and then makes a shit ton of money exploiting this weakness.

After losing a shit ton of money because they didn't plan for someone to play the game in an unexpected way, the owners of the casino demanded the money back.

"Did you steal our money?", they ask?

"ABSOLUTELY NOT," he replies, "I didn't get any non-public information, I didn't manipulate the deck, and you have yet to point to a single hand that was not played entirely within the stated rules of the game. You're just mad because I noticed that you fucked up and bet accordingly."
by bsimpson | 2025-04-14 15:45:18+00:00
His post isn't for you.

It was written on his personal blog, announcing to the community of people who look up to him (and yes, there's a community) why he won't be in the places they expect.

Adam was a UX Engineer who saw a job that needed doing, but didn't exist, so he willed it into existence. He found a way to use his talents to literally make the world a better place. (I don't care if you think there are more important jobs - the truth is that the internet mediates most of our societal interactions, and he was making it better for everyone.)

He was doing a kickass job at it too. He should be hurt and angry to have that rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him.

He doesn't need to pay lip service to starving kids in $REMOTE_AND_DESTITUTE_PLACE or self-flagellatingly privilege check. His blog isn't here for your entertainment, and he doesn't need your approval.

There aren't many companies that have such a symbiotic relationship with the web platform to be willing to fund people to make the web a better place. For a while, Google was the foremost place that did.

Adam is immensely talented and a wonderful person on top of it. Hopefully a great opportunity will snatch him up quickly. But there aren't many places to do the work he was doing. He deserves to be mad to see the job he worked so hard to build swept away by some antisocial business school bullshit. And as the people who will miss out when he's not there to make the web a better place, we do too.
by ghaff | 2025-04-14 15:45:36+00:00
People here get u on their high horse about investment minimums and the like. Sure, they get real excited about some startup and they may turn out to even be right. I also know people who do angel and seed investing who are beating the bushes for capital or are just holding tight. Startup investing isn’t some magic money tree reserved for the well off. Heck, I’m pretty selective about even purchases of even individual public companies.
by aredox | 2025-04-14 15:45:43+00:00
I don't think you can reduce tearing with fine muscular control. The physics of cutting are weird; cutting at an angle is different, the chipbreaker plays a huge role, vibration ("chatter") has to be kept under control, and the best way to avoid tearing is usually scraping - where the cutting edge has a completely different geometry from a plane iron.

The trend in western planes has been to use speed, the weight and rigidity of iron to cut through wood before it has time to flex, whereas you see those Japanese planes cutting slowly - but again, traditional Japanese wood is softer and less knotty or wavy than the oak or walnut or exotics that are a staple of traditional western woodworking. Look at the Australian woodworking scene for ex., their native wood species are challenging.