MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-11 16:44:19+00:00
I'm not paying close attention to all the noise, so forgive me if I am way off base. But aren't they effectively doing a values purge/refinement/reset? Similar to what Elon did with twitter and what few companies have managed to do to transform themselves?

My point is (in an effort to maintain a most respectful interpretation) that I imagine the environment is becoming more hostile to people with certain values while becoming less hostile to people with other values. And while there's a good chance I'm wrong, my generous assumption would be they are making a hostile environment for people who value process over outcome and making it less hostile to people who value outcome over process. (Replacing bureaucrats and risk-averse money wasters with problem solvers, innovators and cowboys)
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-11 16:44:20+00:00
Sometimes, when people say one language can't do what another does, they aren't talking about outputs. Nobody is arguing that lisp programs can do arithmetic and others can't, they're arguing that there are ergonomics to lisp you can't approach in other languages.

But even so

> it's all going to break down eventually to the ops above.

That's not true either. Different runtimes will break down into a completely different version of the above. C is going to boil down to a different set of instructions than Ruby. That would make Ruby incapable of doing some tasks, even with a JIT. And writing performance sensitive parts in C only proves the point.

"Any language can do anything" is something we tell juniors who have decision paralysis on what to learn. That's good for them, but it's not true. I'm not going to tell a client we're going to target a microcontroller with PHP, even if someone has technically done it.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-11 16:44:21+00:00
Yes and no.

Nowadays, there's a lot of violence that is predicated upon misinformation in social media platforms.

e.g. The Southport riots (UK) were fuelled by entirely fabricated and false information: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zshjs82

40 police officers were injured and 27 taken to hospital, so I would certainly classify that as violence. I don't think we should tolerate that level of misinformation designed to stir up racist hatred.
by yibg | 2025-04-11 16:44:44+00:00
It also breaks a lot of the way businesses make and sell stuff today.

For example, several car makers makes cars in Canada, Mexico and the US but sells them across the borders (and globally). Honda makes Civics and CRVs in Canada but sells them in the US, but the Accord is made in the US and sold in Canada. So now if there are tariffs on car imports and especially if there is also a reciprocal tariff, Honda gets hit both ways. What would they do? Make some civics in the US and some in Canada? Seems very inefficient.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-11 16:44:46+00:00
Regarding your 1) Easy peasy! Imagine accelerating out-of-saddle (Wiegetritt) from around 45kph to intended 55 to 60, to get through an underpass fast, to get ahead of traffic, because wanting to cut the sharp curve at the end and have enough speed for effortless uphilling.

Crunch-Bang! Got my handlebar including the stem painfully into my chin. Guess what? Astonishingly (to myself) I did NOT fall, but managed to wobbly and swayingly brake to standstill, by the still attached brake wires, evacuating to the small sidewalk, and pushing it out of the underpass.

There https://maps.app.goo.gl/D26VGpXXZ3TJmbGTA from left to right.

I think it was a good thing to be ahead of traffic, and not between/beside it in that moment.

Even more funny, at that time there was a large bicycle store only a few 100m away, so I got a new stem in about half an hour, while calming down a little ;>

2) Yah, thats ugly. Almost tore up my ankle that way, but luckily it was only a deep cut, which took 2 to 3 weeks to heal.

Otherwise? Torn chains, mostly.
by wolpoli | 2025-04-11 16:44:50+00:00
In the 90s, Windows was simple enough that I was able to read tech articles and understand a lot of what is going on inside, up to the point of Windows 2000, and to a certain extend, Windows XP. That completely changed with Vista/7 where I can no longer recognize the name of many processes that are running or understand what actions/situations make my computer lag.

Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.
by pxc | 2025-04-11 16:45:18+00:00
I should add that upon reflection, I did have some really good "flipped classroom" experiences in college, especially in highly technical math and philosophy courses. But in those cases (a) homework was really vital, (b) significant work was never done in class, and (c) we never watched lectures at home. Instead, the activity at home (which did replace lectures) was reading textbooks (or papers) and doing homework. Then class time was like collective office hours.

Failure to do the homework made class time useless, the material was difficult, and the instructors were willing to give out failing grades. So doing the homework was vital even when it wasn't graded. Perhaps that can also work well here in the context of AI, at least for some subjects.
by cpmsmith | 2025-04-11 16:45:46+00:00
Apple Music's library features much more closely mirror the iTunes style, i.e. you have a library you can browse outside of just the "liked songs" pseudo-playlist. For instance, in Spotify (AFAICT) there's no way to browse all the songs in your library by artist; you can only list the artists you've followed, which is unrelated to whose songs you've liked, and go to their general artist page.

Personally, this is the top contender for a reason for me to switch away from Spotify.
by jpsouth | 2025-04-11 16:45:46+00:00
Always had time to support and mentor people with his incredible skills, would be online at 4am doing out of hours deployments with us, and inevitably get us out of the shit when something went wrong. I was frequently in awe of his technical capability and ability to come up with a solution for… anything!

On the human side, he was compassionate, deeply cared for his employees (and let us put our lives before work), and a genuinely fun, cool guy you wanted to know, wanted to get on a call with or play some games after work - I’m sat in the sun typing this while wearing a t-shirt he custom made for me.

Will, you are and always will be a legend mate!
by DontchaKnowit | 2025-04-11 16:46:34+00:00
He knew virtually nothing about how to do my job, was technically incompetant to the point of struggling to move files between folders on his computer, but was very effective at insulating me from any bullshit wastes of time - meetings were kept to a minimum, any user complaints were filtered through him. Never requested progress reports on any of my work, trusted me to work autonomously, and if I ever needed help, he had a large rolodex of people he could get me in contact with.

He was the shit.
by glitchc | 2025-04-11 16:46:38+00:00
It's interesting reading conversations in this thread. Everyone wants government to hire competent individuals. Yet, when it comes to a personal choice, the very same individuals decline the lower compensation.

Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's needed to pay for those higher salaries.

It's classic cognitive dissonance in full effect leading to a tragedy of the commons. It goes to show that tech folks are no different from regular (DEI, MAGA, other) people.
by sync13298 | 2025-04-11 16:47:09+00:00
When deeply nested libraries generate PRNGs, all that layering becomes impure and must be treated like any other stateful or IO code. In Haskell, that typically means living with a monad transformer or effect system managing the whole stack, and relatively little pure code remains.

The messiness gets worse when libraries use different conventions to manage their PRNG statefulness. This is a non-issue in most languages but a mess in a 100% pure setting.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-11 16:48:18+00:00
This comment is distinctly incurious. Sure, it doesn't have to be a clinical diagnosis but that's also kinda the point of talking about it so casually: it doesn't always have to rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis. Some people will not be satisfied with the "we're just nerds" explanation and that's okay too. (Indeed, obsessive weirdos, eh?)
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-11 16:48:51+00:00
I'm going to push back a bit here: things are improving, and China is already as rich as Mexico...now I get that American's have a unjustly bad impression of Mexico because of poverty at the not very populated border, but Mexico isn't a poor country, nor is Thailand, etc...these are all middle income countries that are quickly approaching high income countries.

Having lived in China for 9 years, and left 9 years ago, I can't really justify calling China poor anymore. Ya, they have a huge rural area and they still have lots of poor people, but they have a huge middle class (even if it isn't a majority of the country) that can afford a lot of things.
by RobKohr | 2025-04-11 16:48:54+00:00
Yep, I got the same exact dishwasher because it was highly rated, and noped out of connecting it to the cloud.

The only buttons I press though are power and start. Just make my dishes clean oh magic cleaning box.

I also hate the touch buttons too. My favorites were the old washers with the big clicking square block buttons. I also like for the modes when you pushed one down, the others would pop up.

Of course this was about 40 years ago, and such things are ancient history.
by al_borland | 2025-04-11 16:48:56+00:00
Does Spotify have a library option? I haven’t been a heavy Spotify user, but last time I tried it, it seemed like I could “follow” artists as a proxy to adding something to a library, but I found it all pretty confusing.

I know they have playlists, but I was looking more of the feature like, “these are all the songs I’m interested in, that I will use to build my playlists or shuffle… because I don’t want to try and remember everything as I wade through a 60m track library of all the songs available on Spotify.”
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-11 16:49:04+00:00
It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion.

Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the world. You turn your community into a meta organism: rather than continuous appendages and nerve endings you might have a meerkat a couple hundred yards observing for predators for you sharing their own senses on their own body with you through their long distance communication abilities in the form of their vocalizations or body language. Now you can solely be a meerkat and get all this information about the area without having to evolve into some lovecraftian horror with a set of eyes and ears every 100 yards.
by matt_s | 2025-04-11 16:49:18+00:00
> Why are we reinventing the wheel so often instead of improving a common SDK or open framework?

Welcome to the world of software technology, can I interest you in one of the 87 JavaScript frameworks out there that all manipulate an HTML DOM in one way or another?

Setting the sarcasm aside, I think there are "AI" companies popping up which do these types of things - orchestration, agent libraries, etc. so it makes some sense for each AI company to have their own flavor of those available.

Edit to add: I put "AI" company in quotes because at a technical level these companies/apps aren't creating AI themselves, they are wrapping AI HTTP APIs.
by next_xibalba | 2025-04-11 16:50:42+00:00
> cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution

... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation" as an answer is why nothing gets built in California. "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation" is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.

More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.

Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal, Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg, John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again clean.

People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing incredible progress and all that would be lost. We aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant, sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-11 16:50:49+00:00
I'm hoping that wasn't a racist comment (that those other countries aren't worth it for some reason), I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. There is a lot of potential in emerging markets, potential that the Americans have ignored to their detriment (as we are experiencing now, we basically have no leverage over China because they expanded their markets enough over the course of a decade).
by sambeau | 2025-04-11 16:51:29+00:00
I think that's a very myopic view of what Jobs did. I am of the opinion he was one of the greatest designers of all time.

Just because he didn't move pixels across the screen doesn't mean he wasn't setting the design language, defining taste, sweating detail and holding the vision. No-one would suggest that a show-runner didn't make TV, or that a director wasn't a filmmaker. Jony Ive's design changed (and improved) immensely one he was working closely with Jobs. Once Jobs was gone things drifted. Similarly Pixar was hyper-focused under Jobs then began to drift as soon as he was no longer involved.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-11 16:51:33+00:00
That's a pretty good description of what happens at most airports I've been through.

> So none of this sounds too unusual to me, except for the final step: being shipped off to a detention center.

It's because her J-1 visa was cancelled. I am not sure if that was warranted or how threatening frog embryos are, so can't judge there. But if the J-1 visa is cancelled, the person usually has to exit the US and re-apply. She didn't necessarily lose her status as a J-1 student, but she may need a new visa. So the procedure here would have been to put her on a plane to Russia. However they asked her if it would be dangerous for her to be there, and it is, so she got sent to a detention center instead.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-11 16:51:45+00:00
> They say they do: “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”

I'd note that these are the same folks asserting people with no criminal records are convicted criminals.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5282379/trumps-mass-dep...

"In a press briefing last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked how many people arrested had a criminal record. She said, 'All of them, because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.' But Carlos came to the U.S. through a legal pathway, although the CBP One app he used was shut down by Trump as soon as he took office."
by somerandomqaguy | 2025-04-11 16:52:00+00:00
No it's not. I'm not talking about eligibility, that has nothing to do with how the cash flows, because the implication that you were making right at the front was that money goes straight from the government to the buyer. Which is absolutely not the case, Tesla has to file the paperwork and Transport Canadas pays out to Tesla. After that, TC doesn't have any say in where the money goes (also why TC can do this investigation now; they haven't released the money yet to Tesla).

Plus right now that's what Tesla's is one of the more believable scenarios I mentioned: : https://electrek.co/2025/04/09/tesla-canada-says-its-shady-4...

That they were rushing to fill out a backlog from sales from previous months. Not a massive rush of sales.
by miltonlost | 2025-04-11 16:52:15+00:00
Cool. Go back to thinking we can only raise taxes on the middle class to pay for medicare and ignoring any taxes on the wealthy like you said in your first post. ( we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation )

Your current fiscal situation is only right-wing talking points.
by f33d5173 | 2025-04-11 16:52:21+00:00
Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant, because they see that as a market opportunity. Otoh, artists complain about legal compliance of AIs not because that is what they care about, but because they see that as their only possible redress against a phenomenon they find distasteful. A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
by beautron | 2025-04-11 16:52:25+00:00
> Going from a project with 1,000 to 1,000,000 lines of code is a tiny leap compared to going from 0 to 1000.

Are you sure the leap is tiny? It's a much easier problem to get only 1,000 lines of code to be correct, because the lines only have to be consistent with each other.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-11 16:52:33+00:00
>the question here is why everybody traded security for convenience

I don't think security was traded away for convenience. Everything started with convenience, and security has been trying to gain ground ever since.

>happen for people to start taking security seriously

Law with enforced and non-trivial consequences are the only thing that will force people to take security seriously. And even then, most probably still wont.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-11 16:53:02+00:00
> allowing an endrun of the the spirit of the GPL in gcc was never going to happen.

You're right:

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

> If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-11 16:53:25+00:00
Even if this is the case, “process” is immensely more important in government and military than in companies because government has the authority, the prerogative even, to use violence, ruin lives, and kill people. The onerous processes are in place to protect civilians.

When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose their jobs. When the federal government shoots from the hip, trust in the institution erodes and people die.

Not that there is no room for streamlining and reducing bureaucratic and IT bloat, but it is very important to remember that the government is not a business, and in many ways should be run very differently from a business.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-11 16:53:27+00:00
> It is that it is means to end, not the end itself.

So is giving billions in aids to Israel every year, despite Israel being a rich country (and tens of billions in the last two years alone, and to bomb civilians, no less).

So is providing diplomatic cover to Israel in the UN and against institutions such as the International Criminal Court, at the cost of your own moral standing in the world.

So is passing laws punishing boycotts of Israel- which the US has done for many years, before Trump.

So is absorbing the cost of the instability caused by Israel in the Middle East and intervening in its defence every time they need it.

At what point will you start connecting the dots and realise that all these means to some different end always end up benefitting Israel, and no one else?
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-11 16:53:30+00:00
Sections are a very good idea for a tag that embedded a document in a lower hierarchy inside your document. The way that it should be from the beginning instead of having the global h1, h2... and hacking a structure out of them.

But then screen readers universally decided that no, instead of using sections to navigate a page, they will just ignore the spec and flatten everything into the top of the hierarchy. So nobody uses them.

(And yes, it shouldn't be a warning to use an h1 in a section with the default style either. They are just making a non-backwards-compatible change to the default style, fucking own it and have the old pages change.)
by kiwicopple | 2025-04-11 16:53:32+00:00
A couple of years ago we shared[0] an experimental extension for CRDTs in Postgres. This was a good start, but it had a major limitation: CRDTs can be very chatty and so they quickly fill up the WAL.

We just released a new version which solves this problem: https://github.com/supabase/pg_crdt

The new approach uses UNLOGGED tables for documents and logged tables for changes. This enables us to merge changes efficiently in-memory, then persists just the changes directly to the WAL (previously it was sending the entire CRDT).

The new version also takes advantage an advanced in-memory object persistence feature in Postgres called "expanded datum"[1] and some optimizations to this feature that are coming in Postgres 18[2]. This allows for more complex operations without serializing and deserializing the documents between every operation, which gets progressively slower as documents grow.

What is a CRDT? A CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) is a data structure that syncs across multiple devices or users. They are used in multi-player applications like Figma and Notion. For example: A shared text editor where multiple people type at once, and everyone sees the same final result without manual conflict resolution.

The end goal here is that you will be able to store CRDTs as a data type in your database, and treat Postgres simply as a "peer". A good example would be storing text for a blog post:

create table posts ( id serial primary key, title text not null content autodoc not null default '{}' );

Repo: https://github.com/supabase/pg_crdt

Docs: https://supabase.github.io/pg_crdt/automerge/

----

[0] initial release/discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931971

[1] expanded datum: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-toast.html#S...

[2] PG18 optimizations: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3363452.1737483125%40s...
by pxc | 2025-04-11 16:53:50+00:00
That's such a weird characterization of this article, which (in contrast to other writing on this subject) clearly concludes (a) that Nix achieves a very high degree of reproducibility and is continuously improving in this respect, and (b) Nix is moreover reproducible in a way that most other distros (even distros that do well in some measures of bitwise reproducibility) are not (namely, time traveling— being able to reproduce builds in different environments, even months or years later, because the build environment itself is more reproducible).

The article you linked is very clear that both qualitatively and quantitatively, NixOS has made achieved high degrees of reproducibility, and even explicitly rejects the possibility of assessing absolute reproducibility.

NixOS may not be the absolute leader here (that's probably stagex, or GuixSD if you limit yourself to more practical distros with large package collections), but it is indeed very good.

Did you mean to link to a different article?