MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yogsototh | 2025-04-11 17:31:15+00:00
"Purely Functional Programming", I guess mostly Haskell/Purescript.

So this only really mean:

Purely Functional Programming by default.

In most programming languages you can write

"hello " + readLine()

And this would intermix pure function (string concatenation) and impure effect (asking the user to write some text). And this would work perfectly.

By doing so, the order of evaluation becomes essential.

With a pure functional programming (by default).

you must explicitely separate the part of your program doing I/O and the part of your program doing only pure computation. And this is enforced using a type system focusing on I/O. Thus the difference between Haskell default `IO` and OCamL that does not need it for example.

in Haskell you are forced by the type system to write something like:

do name <- getLine let s = "Hello " <> name <> "!" putStrLn s

you cannot mix the `getLine` directly in the middle of the concatenation operation.

But while this is a very different style of programming, I/O are just more explicit, and they "cost" more, because writing code with I/O is not as elegant, and easy to manipulate than pure code. Thus it naturally induce a way of coding that try to really makes you conscious about the part of your program that need IO and the part that you could do with only pure function.

In practice, ... yep, you endup working in a "Specific to your application domain" Monad that looks a lot like the IO Monad, but will most often contains IO.

Another option is to use a free monad for your entire program that makes you able to write in your own domain language and control its evaluation (either using IO or another system that simulates IO but is not really IO, typically for testing purpose).
by rtkwe | 2025-04-11 17:31:17+00:00
So what is your actual meaning when you say burn it down? Fire some university president heads who've been caught or what? You're language is vague but grandiose.

The whole academic pipeline is actually quite delicate if we're talking massive disruptions, the current funding shake up is threatening to screw a whole class of graduates because PIs and Universities don't know if they'll be able to pay new graduate students so many are massively cutting back the number of admissions they're taking or skipping a year entirely. That has a knock on effect of screwing up new professors who're still setting up their labs because they can't get research started quickly to get new grants which can screw up their entire careers too. All that to find replace the word diversity or because a few high placed people faked some data?
by fzwang | 2025-04-11 17:31:43+00:00
I used to work in VC and have seen a few examples of this. Every case is a little different, but from what you've described I'd focus on salvaging the co-founder relationship. Conflict like this is totally normal. IMO, a pivot is when you change directions based on new information. It sounds like you're not pivoting, but lost. If you haven't already, addressing this head-on and having a candid conversation about being lost would be beneficial. Think of it as an exercise to possibly strengthen your relationship via conflict. Few other thoughts:

1. At this early stage of the business, the core asset is really the co-founding team and their relationship. Conflict is very much normal, but how you resolve it is important. You should be able to articulate your co-founder's concerns. For ex. she might feel the pressure to show "progress" to your investors.

2. It takes a lot of time and energy to build a good working relationship. Moving onto something else might seem like a good idea at the moment, but you could be right back with the same issue with another co-founder.

3. If you do decide to move on, end the relationship as amicably as you can. Note that this is not necessarily the "quickest" route, but it'll help keep your reputation intact.

Edit: spelling.
by Nckpz | 2025-04-11 17:32:07+00:00
I signed up out of curiosity and it looks like it's supposed to complement the manual editing UI so you can get things done without digging through menus. After the initial prompt and wizard, it's a chat box that sits in the corner of a typical WP admin page.

But in its current state, it seemed pretty broken to me. I just wanted it to add text to the top of the front page, and it kept saying "I couldn’t find the block you mentioned. Describe where it is on the page or select it and try again." no matter how many different ways I attempted to describe it.
by wormlord | 2025-04-11 17:33:27+00:00
> Wasting money in pursuit of public health

How do you define waste? If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results, is that waste? Are inconclusive results wasteful? What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider non-wasteful spending? What about the benefits of effectively subsidizing your biotech sector by keeping biologists in-demand?

There is more upside (globally) to public health spending than maintaining a global empire that deals death and destruction. Trying to nitpick is missing the point entirely.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-11 17:33:33+00:00
"The ultimate test" will be when AI is capable of completely running a startup business. Making itself a website, writing, testing, and iterating its own code, filling out legal forms, marketing its value to consumers, closing sales, and managing its budget. That is the ultimate test that we all fear. If it can do all that, I'll then trust it with making those massive life-death decisions within the government.
by Danielopol | 2025-04-11 17:34:09+00:00
With the explosion of non coding tools and the tide turning towards vibe coding, everybody wants to be a developer now (me included). It's all good and nice to quickly create an website or an app, but you also need to deploy it somewhere. Vercel seems to be one of the most proeminent go to platfforms for this purpose. But Vercel is not perfect and has many issues. People are complaining about high pricing, difficulty to integrate into more complex microservices, bad speed and performance, and making it very hard to transition away from the platform.

Users are frantically searching for alternatives to Vercel, and there are a lot out of there. I tried to aggregate them all here : https://www.vercel-alternatives.com. It's a curated list of websites that offer similar and complementary services to Vercel.
by 9rx | 2025-04-11 17:34:20+00:00
> Why even allow for a runtime error here?

Why not? It doesn't make any difference in practice. Without a complete type system you must write tests to ensure that error conditions (to stay with your example, although this also applies broadly) do what you need of them. If you somehow introduced a runtime error there, your tests would be unable to not notice. Whether your compiler cries or your test suite cries when you screw up is not a meaningful difference.

> You don't even have to make the language complex to support this.

A complete type system is insanely complex to implement and even harder to write against.

Without a complete type system, all you can have is silly half-measures. Maybe the error becomes an optional/result type with forced unwrapping, for example, but you still haven't asserted in the types what needs to happen with the error. So you still need to write the same tests that you had to write anyway. So, other than moving where you discover the problem – from your tests to the compiler – nothing has changed.

The half-measures are a cute party trick, I'll give you that, but makes no real difference when actual engineering is taking place. They might, however, give a false sense of security. They might even convince you that you don't need to write tests (you do). Maybe those make for desirable traits?
by tim333 | 2025-04-11 17:34:59+00:00
Seems to be: "TfL’s efforts to deal with the cyber attack have resulted in a growing shutdown of its own systems, meaning that new zip cards used by children and teenagers cannot be obtained" "17-year-old male has been arrested on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences in relation to the attack. The teenager, who was arrested in Walsall ..." https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tfl-cyber-attack-pers...
by bangaladore | 2025-04-11 17:35:21+00:00
> It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.

This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap labor and deregulation issue.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-11 17:35:27+00:00
With this administration is about destruction of all government spending in order to maximize tax cuts for the top 1% who pay for access to The Hill, it really is about that, and not about efficiency. Also please point me at all the "fraud" they've found and yet for some reason the DOJ isn't charging anyone with "fraud". It's all BS. There are well thought out cuts, and there is what DOGE and Dump are doing.
by asa400 | 2025-04-11 17:35:35+00:00
To follow on from your excellent post, I think a reasonable next question is, "why have these kinds of approaches and ideas in other languages and systems succeeded in gaining market adoption, but Erlang/Elixir has not?"

This to me is the most interesting question about Erlang, and I say this as someone who works professionally in Elixir.

It's _clear_ that there is incredible appetite for tools that help us design reliable concurrent systems given the wild success of things like k8s, Kafka, AWS's distributed systems products, etc., but why hasn't Erlang/Elixir been able to capture that share?

My friends and I debate this all the time, but I don't know the answer.
by hackeraccount | 2025-04-11 17:35:43+00:00
Write your representatives, the Speaker Of The House and the Senate Majority Leader. You could call and/or email them too. If you're super gung-ho call their office and see if you can make an appointment to talk to someone on their staff.

If you're really gung-ho get some friends together who agree with you and find an opposition candidate to either primary or run against your current representative. Ask that person to change their views to agree with yours if they don't already. Consider making donations if they either agree or will change their mind.

Still more gung-ho? Get a large number of friends together and run for office. Once in office make friends of other office holders and through a series of back room deals bring forward legislation that will accomplish your goals.
by zzzeek | 2025-04-11 17:36:28+00:00
this is the lamest headline possible for what the news is:

BERLIN, April 10 (Reuters) - The European Union and China have agreed to look into setting minimum prices of Chinese-made electric vehicles *instead of tariffs* imposed by the EU last year, a European Commission spokesperson said on Thursday.

The EU is seeking to *abolish tariffs on Chinese made EVs*.

This is a major blow to US interests
by jll29 | 2025-04-11 17:36:42+00:00
As much as I sympathize with this post and similar ones, and as much I personally like functional thinking, LISP environments are not nearly as advanced anymore as they used to be.

Which Common LISP or Scheme environment (that runs on, say Ubuntu Linux on a typical machine from today) gets even close to the past's LISP machines, for example? And which could compete with IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm or Microsoft Code?

https://ssw.jku.at/General/Staff/PF/genera-screenshots.html
by throw310822 | 2025-04-11 17:36:50+00:00
> Many US companies and US oligarchs benefit from the actions listed here

US companies benefit from punishing boycotts of Israel? Benefit from sending it (and not to a different country) billions in aid? Benefit from illegally detaining students that oppose it? Benefit from condemning the ICC? Can you explain a) how; b) who these companies and oligarchs are; c) why always Israel and not any other country or mix of countries?
by grandempire | 2025-04-11 17:37:04+00:00
> If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results, is that waste?

It’s certainly worse that research that does produce results. We should try to optimize for research that works.

And yes, in the extreme example of spending a lot of money and never getting anything of public utility, that would be a waste.

> What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider non-wasteful spending?

I wouldn’t use abstractions like “public health” and “public utility”. Which specific projects are funding or losing funding and what’s the impact?

> There is more upside (globally) to public health spending

Look inside the abstraction.
by Natfan | 2025-04-11 17:37:05+00:00
Pretty easily, as it happens[0]. Just implement the RESTful methods as appropriate. Ollama supports the OpenAI API spec

[0]: https://github.com/clidey/whodb/blob/main/core/src/llm/llm_c...

[1]: https://github.com/openai/openai-openapi
by t-writescode | 2025-04-11 17:37:10+00:00
Breaking critical systems like SNAP, Medicare/Medicaid, weather forecasting and many many many other systems that people literally depend on for their being alive *kills* people.

Programmers that work on critical systems are actively trained to take into consideration every contingency to not increase the death rate of their systems, to the best of their abilities.

Aggressive, comprehensive and non-robust axing of systems when literal lives are on the line - especially when it's government systems and those lines maintain any semblance of some people's ability to literally be alive - touch and impact more lives than any single Boeing plane or NASA space shuttle's crash. They are even more critical than those systems - though not as flashy when they fail.
by derefr | 2025-04-11 17:37:17+00:00
In a limited sense, yes.

But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no.

Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using the app before uninstalling it. And no such site/app exists. (Although it could — as this is basically the business model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large lump sum up-front and then they're beholden to do unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)
by kashunstva | 2025-04-11 17:37:28+00:00
Also contributing is the utter lack of opposition leadership. The current president can marshal his goons to invade and defile the Capitol. What leadership is in opposition? The guy that stands up and gives a 25 hour speech? Props for the feat of endurance; but then what? Or Obama, giving a hyper-intellectual abstract, detached talk? It’s a complete vacuum. For the opposition party it’s business-as-usual, as if you can do your regular Senate stuff and get something done.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-11 17:37:36+00:00
I'll join you in getting downvoted for absolutely no reason. It's a shitty thing they're doing, but your observation is correct. My job working on NIH-funded research projects is directly in their path, so I wish they weren't stomping a mudhole across science and technology. But they are, and, as you note, they're doing it very effectively and with incredible speed.

If it's outside our capability as a community to even acknowledge that they're moving fast, how can we note that they're moving way too fast to be doing it right?
by porphyra | 2025-04-11 17:38:21+00:00
Very cool to see this project get rebooted. I'm hoping it will have the critical mass needed to actually take off. Writing CUDA kernels in C++ is a pain.

In theory, since the NVVM IR is based on LLVM IR, rust in CUDA should be quite doable. In practice, though, of course it is an extreme amount of work.
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-11 17:38:36+00:00
Summary, from someone who uses CUDA on rust in several projects (Computational chemistry and cosmology simulations):

- This lib has been in an unusable and unmaintained state for years. I.e., to get it working, you need to use specific, several-years-old variants of both rustc, and CUDA. - It was recently rebooted. I haven't tried the Github branch, but there isn't a release yet. Has anyone verified if this is working on current Rustc and CUDA yet? - The Cudarc library (https://github.com/coreylowman/cudarc) is actively maintained, and works well. It does not, however, let you share host and device data structures; you will [de]serialize as a byte stream, using functions the lib provides. Works on any (within past few years at least) CUDA version and GPU.

I highlight this as a trend I see in software libs, in Rust more than others: The projects that are promoted the most are often not the most practical or well-managed ones. It's not clear from the description, but maybe rust-CUDA intends to allow shared data structures between host and device? That would be nice.
by kyeb | 2025-04-11 17:38:36+00:00
Falconer | Founding team (AI, infrastructure, full-stack, designer) | Bay area | Hybrid/onsite

Falconer is building AI-powered knowledge tools for engineers. Knowledge management is a $30b industry, and we intend to build the tools that leverage AI to power the next generation of engineering knowledge. Our vision is to empower every engineer to write as well as the best technical writers, and enable every organization to have internal docs as great as the best external docs are.

We're currently a team of 3 from Stripe and Meta, prototyping the product with design partners, and hiring a few more engineers to round out the founding team. We've raised a $5m seed round and have several customers lined up, we just need to build it!

Apply at https://falconer.ai/careers, or drop your resume and a sentence or two about what AI knowledge workflows you would be excited to build to jobs@falconer.ai!
by skydhash | 2025-04-11 17:38:39+00:00
Most users only have an handful of applications installed. They may not be the same one, but flatpak is easy to setup if you want the latest version. And you're not tied to the system package manager if you want the latest for CLI software (nix, brew, toolbox,...)

The nice thing about Debian is that you can have 2 full years of routine maintenance while getting reading for the next big updates. The main issue is upstream developer having bug fixes and features update on the same patch.
by mint2 | 2025-04-11 17:38:48+00:00
> Similar to what Elon did with twitter

Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success?

While it hasn’t fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or business terms. It’s been a success only in terms of providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors, not a typical metric of corporate success.

In that regards, yes what is happening at the federal government mimics Twitter - making the government worse in terms of any usual metric of government performance but making it better in terms of carrying out arbitrary whims of a leader.
by evilsetg | 2025-04-11 17:38:52+00:00
The way I see it, joining social media requires your account to be bound by a chain to either a corporation or some rando. I'd much rather bind myself to some random person on the internet because at least there is a chance that they will treat me like a human. A corporation just does not care. The fediverse is run by humans. Good humans, bad humans, but humans at least. This you will never get from a company, at least not in the long run.
Ask HN: Best way to share a portrait-mode screen?
by vogtb | 2025-04-11 17:38:56+00:00
I like to work with my monitor in portrait orientation. The problem is, I'm often sharing my screen or recording Loom videos, and it's exceedingly difficult for others to read my screen or see whats going on.

Are there any solutions here, like sharing a region of my screen only, and dragging windows into it? I can always just share a single window, but when I switch apps I have to share the new window.

How are my fellow portrait-mode people solving this?
by prideout | 2025-04-11 17:38:59+00:00
The fact that triangles have proliferated is not due to half-assery. Hardware can rasterize them very quickly, and a triangle can have only one normal vector. Quads can be non-planar. It's true that quads are nice for humans and artists though!

As an aside, Catmull-Clark subdivision has been around since 1978, which, as a first step, breaks an arbitrary polyhedron into a mesh of quadrilaterals.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-11 17:39:18+00:00
Underfunding and breaking of, for example, unemployment benefits systems causes real harm, real loss of medication, real loss of house, etc.

But that won't make the news in any meaningful way, and the destitute will often be too busy to make loud noises. And the populous at large will sigh and shake their head and say "what a shame", but the loss can be *enormous*.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-04-11 17:39:33+00:00
In some departments (say Social Security) they want to switch from in-house staff to contractors, and in others they want to switch from contractors to in-house staff?

The US government has been moving to privatized contractors in most of it's work for some time, across many administrations and both parties.

Based on what I know of Trump, I'd have expected that to continue. Maybe it is everywhere except for special treatment for DoD? Or maybe this is just a fake and it won't be this way for DoD either. I don't have much idea what is going on.
by billy99k | 2025-04-11 17:39:58+00:00
Mine had just the right balance of tech knowledge, business knowledge, and could play politics. He never threw me under the bus and defended my role to all upper management. He would also push back on ridiculous ideas and dead lines.

You could also pick up the phone and call him night/day and he would try to help you in any way that he could.

When we were acquired, he advocated on my behalf and made it known that the new company would still need me to maintain our existing systems. I'm still here 4 years later and he has since been fired.

He has FU money (he never has to work again at 59) and couldn't keep his mouth shut when a new director was leading us on a path of destruction, so the only logical conclusion was to get rid of him.

We are now friends and talk at least once/month.
by tristor | 2025-04-11 17:40:02+00:00
> Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?

When it came out the LFA was widely lampooned by the car media for being too "soft", not fast enough, and generally lacking spirit and individuality. It's not pretty much recognized in hindsight that it's one of the single greatest cars ever made, and everybody who regularly buys/drives supercars regrets not buying one when they were still being produced.

Weirdly, many people realized this when it was new, that the LFA was actually excellent, but like anything else cars go through different hype cycles where media organizations and insiders focus on different parameters for what they think makes something good, and the LFA came out during a hype cycle that was focused on raw speed, as it was released around the time that "hypercars" were gaining steam as a concept.

Personally, having driven an LFA one time, I quite literally have regular dreams about the memory, and I wish that I owned one. It's on my bucket list.