MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inetknght | 2025-04-08 14:24:40+00:00
Perhaps if you're driving, the things around you need to give you time to react to other things around you. Fewer things are more frustrating than getting honked at because you pressed a button, then got distracted by a car pulling up which you needed to look at to be aware of, then missed the printer asking if you want a receipt, and then having to press another button to talk to someone to ask for a reprint which, of course, holds up the line of cars growing behind you while someone gets paged to come to the kiosk.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-08 14:24:47+00:00
My daughter heard a little bit about string theory in physics class, and got freaked out. "11 dimensions? How am I supposed to understand that?" I told her that all the experimental evidence that supports string theory could fit on one sheet of paper, without using ink.

So, string theorists say this. OK, and? That's kind of interesting, I suppose, but... make a testable prediction.
by svilen_dobrev | 2025-04-08 14:25:28+00:00
i have also found these to be interesting, kind of selection/ analysis/ visualisation over memoirs of Lou Gerstner (part 2 is around s/360):

https://juliusgamanyi.com/2018/12/28/wardley-maps-an-illustr...

https://juliusgamanyi.com/2019/06/18/wardley-maps-an-illustr...

https://juliusgamanyi.com/2020/06/25/wardley-maps-illustrate...

Now, reading the article, this "[rivalry].. So intense was it that sometimes it seemed to exceed the rivalry with external competitors.” reminded me of something old about Motorola.. where rivalry went to the need to reverse-engineering other depts' chips via 3rd party acquiring them..

www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/September-2014/What-Happened-to-Motorola/
by sReinwald | 2025-04-08 14:25:30+00:00
It depends on what I'm after. I still use regular searches quite a bit.

But a lot of my classic ADHD "let's dive into this rabbit hole" google sessions have definitely been replaced by AI deep searches like Perplexity. Instead of me going down a rabbit hole personally for all the random stuff that comes across my mind, I'll just let perplexity handle it and I come back a few minutes later and read whatever it came up with.

And sometimes, I don't even read that, and that's also fine. Just being able to hand that "task" off to an AI to handle it for me is very liberating in a way. I still get derailed a bit of course, but instead of losing half an hour, it's just a few seconds of typing out my question, and then getting back to what I've been doing.
by iLemming | 2025-04-08 14:25:34+00:00
Thank you captain obvious, but that's not what I'm saying. If your vocation involves sitting long hours you already "not taking care of your body" - humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, engaging in regular physical activity - walking, running, and foraging, not sitting all day long. Think about it - we are among a few species with horses, wolves, ostriches and dogs that can run for many miles in a single event - because we evolved to do that. Yet our ability to sit for extremely long durations is very unusual and not evolutionary advantageous. Imagine forcing a wolf to stay motionless and keep the eyes on the artificially lit up screen? The wolf will likely gets depression and dies within a year or two, if not sooner.

The human body is designed for movement, and sedentary behavior disrupts metabolic processes, affects posture, and almost unavoidably results in weakened muscles and bones.

Staring at screens for extended periods leads to digital eye strain - dryness, irritation, blurred vision, headaches. Prolonged screen time can also disrupt sleep patterns which affects melatonin production. Additionally, it too, contributes to poor posture and musculoskeletal issues, particularly in the neck and shoulders.

Typing for long hours leads to repetitive strain injuries - carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, and muscle fatigue in the hands, wrists, and arms.

If you think you can undo decades of harm to your body by occasional exercise, well, I have bad news for you. If you think you can just hop around like a butterfly when you need to do something like setting up a Kafka cluster from scratch, which requires you to have a combination of technical skills and extended periods of sedentary work, screen time, and typing - something that can't be done "very quickly and only once," you're thinking of some other profession, not this. Extend that to five days a week, for many years - that's what's required - you'll find yourself primarily sitting, staring at the screen, and typing during most of your waking hours. This is a typical facet of a programmer's life.

Software development career WILL harm your body, and there are only limited things you can do about it, and only to the effect of mitigation - there's no magical cure, remedy, or escape.
by blackhawkC17 | 2025-04-08 14:25:44+00:00
> I think the bigger question here is what role Chinese policy is playing in this story. Is their involvement strictly commercial?

There's little government policy behind it. It's basically:

Chinese companies invest in massive production of solar panels and drive prices down to unprecedented levels.

Pakistani individuals and businesses, facing energy shortages and very expensive grid power, decide to invest in solar panels to get cheap energy.

> Have Chinese politicians decided on some sort of Marshall Plan-style approach to the Middle East?

Not even close, and there's no reason for them to do this.
by rafterydj | 2025-04-08 14:25:49+00:00
Firstly, what we call a suit is a highly varied outfit of clothes that are designed to look good on a male silhouette. Deriving from that, yes, the suit is aesthetically better- to disagree is to discount both the entire field of custom tailoring and also the rest of wider society surrounding tech.

Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.

To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.

You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-08 14:26:15+00:00
I was involved in a discussion about this here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427996

It's frustrating that we're beholden to Github to add support for something like this to their platform, especially when the incentives are in the wrong direction— anything that's more generic and more portable reduces lock-in to Actions.
by lucasyvas | 2025-04-08 14:27:32+00:00
I may be targeted for calling this the “correct” way, but it is - it’s the only correct way.

Otherwise you need complicated setups to test any of the stuff you put up there since none of it can be run locally / normally.

GitHub Actions, like any CI/CD product, is for automating in ways you cannot with scripting - like parallelizing and joining pipelines across multiple machines, modelling the workflow. That’s it.

I would really appreciate an agnostic templating language for this so these workflows can be modelled generically and have different executors, so you could port them to run them locally or across different products. Maybe there is an answer to this that I’ve just not bothered to look for yet.
by goku12 | 2025-04-08 14:27:59+00:00
Those arguments are so vague, subjective and often just irrelevant that it doesn't merit any place in a decision that inflicts such serious damage on people who don't share those beliefs. All it tells me is how some people justify such moral ineptitude. They seem to think that their personal beliefs are divine and unquestionable enough to be imposed on everyone else. Definitely not what one would call freedom.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-08 14:28:24+00:00
Talking about birds, I'm aware that certain species of parrots are considered to have comparative intelligence to a young child -- and they usually live a long life.

I wonder whether it is possible to increase their intelligence further -- e.g. what if they are really as smart as 4-5 years old in one generation and a bit more in the next? Is there a way to "eugenics" (I know it's a bad word) birds on intelligence?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-08 14:29:20+00:00
> We don't really know what's inside the event horizon or how the mass if actually distributed.

Is that entirely true? We can tell if the black hole is rotating because of the frame dragging that happens outside the event horizon. Could we tell anything about the radial distribution of mass from the shape of space outside the event horizon? (I'm asking; I don't know enough GR to know.)
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-08 14:29:22+00:00
Kind of. There was no evolutionary advantage to removing the blind spot because brains adapted to compensate for it on a much shorter timescale than evolution. So most mammals still have the blind spot.

Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary advantage in making their brains as small and light as possible.

To me, this implies bird brains are likely to be much more efficient, both volumetrically and energetically. That's the more fascinating angle, IMO
by andelink | 2025-04-08 14:29:33+00:00
A harrowing story indeed.

It is nothing short of a miracle that we have not yet fallen to a nuclear catastrophe. The Cuban Missile Crisis was of course very close, with military advisors on both sides pushing for strikes. A more disturbing (IMO) tempting of fate was the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident [1], where soviet defense systems detected incoming ICBMs from the US. Protocol dictates launching retaliatory nuclear strikes, but the Soviet colonel at the early warning system, Stanislav Petrov, deemed it to be a false alarm, which it ultimately was. Had he followed orders, we would have experienced a full scale nuclear war.

Perhaps more upsetting is the number of nuclear catastrophes the US nearly inflicted on itself. The incident in the TFA is just one of several such incidents arising from a single Cold War Air Force program: Operation Chrome Dome [2]. The US would fly multiple bombers carrying up to four thermonuclear bombs in a loop from Texas eastward over the Atlantic up to Greenland then west and south over Canada back to the PNW US. Everyday we had bombers above us, and some of those days they accidentally dropped nukes on us. Two on North Carolina, two on California, two on Maryland, etc. By dumb luck alone, none of them detonated. It was only after a crash of four thermonuclear bombs on Greenland that the program was killed, two years after Spain.

Despite our gross mishandling of the risks, we have somehow come out alive. A world with nuclear weapons is not a world we can sustain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome

[3] https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht...

[4] https://archive.org/details/DODNarrativeSummariesofAccidents...
by lproven | 2025-04-08 14:30:15+00:00
Basically anything plastic.

Plastics recycling is a scam.

Glass recycles well, if colours are kept separated.

Aluminium and iron and most pure or semi-pure metals too.

Far better to wash and reuse, of course, as was still the rule when I was a child, and in some of Scandinavia even 25Y ago.
by anonfordays | 2025-04-08 14:30:51+00:00
Your comment isn't clear as to why. If you assign two vCPUs to a KVM VM, why would limiting the VM's kernel to only scheduling on one vCPU increase the speed? The vCPUs are typically all on one physical CPU anyway, unlike a mainframe. You can also set affinity/processor pinning in KVM if you have more than one physical CPU/core, with the VM being none the wiser.
by cyberclimb | 2025-04-08 14:31:14+00:00
As a foreigner that visited Brazil for some weeks, I found the ubiquity of the PIX payment system to be a handicap for tourists visiting the country.

PIX is only for locals as you need to register with a CPF (Brazil ID number which is hard and tedious to get as a tourist). I ran into many scenarios where the only option was to pay with PIX and the staff aren't used to tourists and look at you funny when you explain you can't use PIX.

Also beyond PIX, if you try to book buses, planes, or take out a gym membership, while you're within the country, 99% of the time it's shockingly impossible to pay without a CPF, even by credit and debit card. I've even seen this for paying the laundry machine.

I'm sure the PIX system is great for Brazilians, and it was helpful having a local friend to make payments on my behalf, but Brazil really lives in a bubble where it seems a side-effect of their system is making things actively very hard for visitors to operate within the country.
by rqtwteye | 2025-04-08 14:31:29+00:00
You have to go lower down the stack. Don't use AI but write the AI. For the foreseeable future there is a lot of opportunity to make the AI faster.

I am sure assembly programmers were horrified at the code the first C compilers produced. And I personally am horrified by the inefficiency of python compared to the C++ code I used to write. We always have traded faster development for inefficiency.
by borroka | 2025-04-08 14:31:41+00:00
Which is funny, because weren't we in tech the people who aspired to “think different”? But then it didn't become think-different for the individual but for the tech in-group against the "square", boring, formality-driven out-group. And since the world is becoming increasingly informal and any group worth its salt needs to differentiate itself, tech people might be the first to return to wearing suits and ties (or dresses) to work. I'd love that.
by bpshaver | 2025-04-08 14:33:18+00:00
But the ranking is not reflective of actual skills. That's the critique. Aside from very frequent open source contributors (and I think these people are the minority of devs), devs will tend to be "profiled" by this tool according to the dot scripts, university projects, Advent of Code, or other half-hearted projects they happen to have put on their Github. (Maybe I'm just projecting...)

The issue isn't that not everyone has a Github presence, the issue is that for most people their Github presence is somewhat unrepresentative of their actual job skills.
by esafak | 2025-04-08 14:33:28+00:00
Companies need to be aware of the long-term affects of relying on AI. It causes atrophy and, when it introduces a bug, it takes more time to understand and fix than if you had written it yourself.

I just spent a week fixing a concurrency bug in generated code. Yes, there were tests; I uncovered the bug when I realized the test was incorrect...

My strong advice, is to digest every line of generated code; don't let it run ahead of you.
Show HN: Gepetto – A Minimalistic CLI-Based Browser Operator
by eschnou | 2025-04-08 14:33:42+00:00
Hi all, I've built Gepetto to automate the QA/DevOps of my 'vibe coded' projects. I wanted a minimalistic CLI-based headless browser operator that I can run on cli and CI/CD.

Key features: - Execute tasks described in natural language - Sequential step processing (only proceeding when previous steps succeed) - Reporting in JUnit XML - Support for various LLM backends (GPT, Claude, Ollama, etc.) - MCP protocol support for connecting to third-party actions - Headless operation for server environments (tested on Ubuntu)

Use cases I'm exploring: - QA Automation for webapps - Liveness checks that simulate real user behavior - Data scraping from web-only dashboards - Processing unstructured logs - Generating reports from various sources

Gepetto is built with OpenGPA (an open-source agentic orchestration framework in Java) and leverages Playwright for browser control over MCP. You can easily add other MCP tools to use email, slack, etc.

It's open source (MIT license) and I'd love your feedback!

GitHub: https://github.com/eschnou/gepetto

I'm happy to answer any questions and hear your thoughts on how this might be useful for your workflows.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-08 14:34:18+00:00
I wonder if there is any kind of bias of perception. If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe thousands of clients throughout their career life, while engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast gap between the two.

Maybe there are two types of intelligence -- versus humans and versus nature.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-08 14:34:18+00:00
> Humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small car? That's complete science fiction.

Goldman Sachs doesn't think so.

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/humanoid-robots-mark...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/humanoid-robot-market-researc...

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/robotics...

They don't even need to be humanoid is the thing.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-08 14:34:19+00:00
America via FATCA requires foreign banks to snitch out all US persons, without any warrant or accusation of crime, to the American IRS, either directly or through exchange agreement for same information through their reporting to the foreign government.

The requirements are fairly simple, but the liability is extreme so that most banks across the world generally are loathe to do this unless you have some kind of resident visa and professional+ income or a large net worth.

If the foreign (Brazilian) bank fails to do so then US cuts off their access to USD.

As a practical matter casual offshore banking for middle class or lower Americans is closed off, the message broadcast loud and clear from the government is they would prefer you to use crypto as a substitute.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-08 14:34:22+00:00
Linux namespaces and Nix closures solve different problems at different stages of the software lifecycle. Namespaces isolate running processes; Nix closures guarantee build-time determinism and reproducibility across systems.

Namespaces don’t track transitive dependencies, guarantee reproducible builds, enable rollback, or let you deploy an exact closure elsewhere. They’re sandboxing tools—not package management or infra-as-code.

If anything, the two are complementary. You can use Nix to build a system with a precise closure, and namespaces to sandbox it further. But calling namespaces a "more complete solution" is like calling syscall filtering a replacement for source control.

Also, minor historical nit: most namespaces existed by the late 2000s; Nix’s whitepaper was written after that. So the premise isn’t even chronologically correct.
by hmmm-i-wonder | 2025-04-08 14:34:47+00:00
Have you actually looked at the numbers or are you just bound and determined to stick to your opinion regardless of facts or reality?

As shown, the US isn't the top or the majority of deaths in war over your chosen time period. Your have provided no actual basis for your claims the US is the worst, let alone the worst "by far".

Either put up facts to attempt to prove your argument or be dismissed as an ignorant troll I'm ok with either outcome.
by Fraterkes | 2025-04-08 14:35:18+00:00
If ai exacerbates culture issues and management incompetence then that is an inherent downside of ai.

There is a bunch of programmers who like ai, but as the article shows, programmers are not the only people subjected to ai in the workplace. If you're an artist, you've taken a job that has crap pay and stability for the amount of training you put in, and the only reason you do it is because you like the actual content of the job (physically making art). There is obviously no upside to ai for those people, and this focus on the managers' or developers' perspective is myopic.
by theonlyt3 | 2025-04-08 14:35:32+00:00
No formal benchmarks yet—but just from our own tests, OpenAI's computer use model has generally done a better job than Anthropic's, especially at locating the right click targets and coordinates. We're definitely planning a more thorough comparison soon, though! Curious if anyone else has noticed differences in these computer use models? Would love to swap notes! :)
by Lutger | 2025-04-08 14:35:52+00:00
That's interesting. Aren't there examples in nature where a species essentially destroys itself? There are many on the population level. Plants often do this, its called succession.

There's a layer to this, where natural also implies good and unnatural implies bad. For example, plastic is bad because it is unnatural, but arguing it is natural after all somehow makes it good (that is the rhetoric I believe). This depends on the notion of a 'natural order', whether that is some vague concept of 'the universe' or of God himself. Anything against that order is bad and unnatural. Humans are part of that order.

Of course, that is very pre-modern idea. I believe what comes close to a useful definition of natural would be something like 'emergent' or 'spontaneous', as opposed to deliberately designed. Its a quality you could also ascribe to, for example, cities or software systems. You don't need the human/nature split for it to be useful. It is not exactly capturing what people think of as natural, but then again we also do not believe in God anymore - by and large. At least not in the way we used to.
by jackyinger | 2025-04-08 14:36:03+00:00
How’s basing the US economy on services looking now?

My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full of lazy knuckleheads (and believe me I’ve got the stories to back this assertion).
by immibis | 2025-04-08 14:36:24+00:00
Someone told me about Tailwind last week on IRC, and I literally do not see the point of writing class="font-bold" versus style="font-weight:bold;" especially if the former means you have to add a whole bunch more complexity to your build process (and to have a build process at all).

I wrote my website in C, so I don't know about this modern web process stuff.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-08 14:36:25+00:00
True, but that doesn't mitigate the problem I have with using LLMs as a search engine replacement. The issue I have is that LLMs "predigest" things and present you with the sources that are relevant to its response.

However, it still blinds you to the larger picture. Providing supporting sources is all well and good, but doesn't help you with the larger view. I want the larger view.
by haswell | 2025-04-08 14:37:00+00:00
I think this is somewhat beside the point.

Going back to where this started, many people feel uncomfortable consuming products that contain chemicals added by humans/corporations.

Whether or not this concern is fully justified is a fair point to debate. If we could perfectly replicate the ideal strawberry down to the molecular level, said strawberry shouldn’t be a concern, even for people who go out of their way to avoid food additives.

People value diamonds for an entirely different reason. What they value is the narrative behind the diamond. Its (supposed) rareness, and the fact that natural forces produced something beautiful. There are also still echoes of hundreds/thousands of years of culture that placed a high value on them before science could replicate them.

But ultimately I think this is all orthogonal to the strawberry situation. The reasons someone does or does not want to eat a truly perfect strawberry replica will be very different from the reasons someone values a diamond.