MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kgeist | 2025-04-28 10:36:06+00:00
For me personally, there's no dilemma. I was landed a pretty good, high-paying job after showing my pretty sophisticated pet projects I made for the fun of it. In my free time, I keep making pet projects out of "curiosity, enlightenment, and purity", and if some have potential, I showcase them to the employer and they're integrated into the product, or as a dev tool. Builds a good resume, too. Maybe I'm lucky that my employer is open to new ideas/projects. So, both the angel and the devil are satisfied :)
by microtonal | 2025-04-28 10:36:16+00:00
I mean, he and his cronies have even said they would do most of these things. One thing we have learned is that they mean what they say. If they say we would like to put US citizens in a prison in El Salvador or Tesla protestors are domestic terrorists they also mean it. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that they are slowly boiling the frog of ignoring court orders, etc.
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-28 10:36:17+00:00
I think someone can drive 80km/h on this one. Plus they should be super-slippery in rain, right?

I remember crossing Poland towards Lithuania some years back, and in some village 1h from the border had a 500m part with stones, and those stones used would force me to do 25-30km/h and not more, I feared that my tires would burst, also the noise was unbearable.
by smeej | 2025-04-28 10:36:18+00:00
Why are typical passenger vehicles even sold with the ability to go so fast? Or perhaps more pertinently, why aren't any typical passenger vehicles I've ever heard of sold without the ability to go so fast?

I think the overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of people would happily buy a car that couldn't go more than 100mph. Many who only rarely leave their cities and would be happy to use alternate transportation if they did would probably buy a car that couldn't go more than 50mph.

Going that fast seems like a feature most people don't care enough about that they'd be willing to pay for it, so why does the market appear to include it by default?
by latexr | 2025-04-28 10:36:36+00:00
Full title is:

> Go read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and then come back and tell me that LLMs can replace human programmers

Which to me gives a very different understanding of what the article is going to be about than the current HN title. This is not a criticism of the submitter, I know HN has a character limit and sometimes it’s hard to condense titles without unintentionally losing meaning.
by bawolff | 2025-04-28 10:37:08+00:00
> Suggestions are appreciated. C Doctorow and U Le Guin comes to mind.

Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things.

Fundamentally i think the issue is that novels usually have to be about conflict. If everything is peachy you dont have a novel. I think it takes much more skill to write an interesting optimistic near future sci fi novel that is actually about the technical change instead of just using it as a setting.

Most of the optimistic technology novels i can think of that i liked were far future - Iain banks. Maybe greg egan although optimistic isnt exactly the right word. They show an interesting world, but its clearly not our world. Is it really an optimistic take on the future of technology if the technology in question is hundreds of years in the future?

Perhaps you'd like something like "Song for a new day" by Sarah Pinsker.

I dont really know if it fits as "optimism", but i'd like to mention "The Fortunate Fall" as a really interesting novel about technology.
by buran77 | 2025-04-28 10:37:56+00:00
With the very big difference that in my case it never needs to (or can, really) be connected to a network and someone else's service [0]. Only to the "parents' service", which was a more convoluted experience for them. They had to manually transfer the file to the internal memory, link it to the NFC label, and print an appropriate cover art label.

It was also interesting to see that when all the kids were gathering around with their toys they were all gravitating towards the one none of them had. But that was an unintended side effect.

[0] When I first heard of Tonies my mind jumped at the idea that the content is stored on the figurine and somehow wirelessly transmitted to the box. The child, parent, and engineer inside me were all thoroughly disappointed this is not the case, and even more so at the perspective of the service being stopped one day or who knows, monetized more aggressively.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-28 10:38:08+00:00
Sure. I used to enjoy playing the Sims until I had that gut realisation that I was trying to get them to grind out better lives, when I should just spend that time doing it for myself.

I also bought Shenzhen I/O, because the idea of being able to program in a game seems fun. But after reading more, I didn't end up playing it because it would involve too much study of how the in-game computers work, and I'd get much more long-term satisfaction from studying real assembly languages etc.
by icoder | 2025-04-28 10:38:17+00:00
Cool! I'm working on something comparable, but with the audio stored on a single SD and playback triggered using an RFID tag that we can than stick on wooden figures made by my GF (or anything 3D printed).

I'm still iterating over hardware, realising Pi Zero is a bit of overkill, using too many NiMH batteries in series may actually break those batteries, that ESP8266 has much less GPIO's available than the module design suggests, among other lessons learned.

My current approach is Pi Pico (ESP32 was the alternative) with a DfPlayer Mini and a 32GB SD card.

The DfPlayer isn't too keen on running on 3v3 from cheaper LDO's (which are on the modules I'm using) so my current approach uses a small power bank. That just offloads the hard part (for me) of battery management to the professionals. This weekend I added a few resistors and a transistor to draw extra power (0.5secs every 20 seconds) to keep the power bank awake.

But I have different LDO's and an ESP32 coming in, so it's not fully decided yet. Will for sure scan this thread and OP's article for more ideas!
by frenchmajesty | 2025-04-28 10:38:20+00:00
Hey, OP here. I agree.

If you get a list of all the startups that got acquired or IPO in the last 10 years, you will find it's extremely rare the technical co-founder is still around. The staying rate for CEO is like 99% while the staying rate for CTO is more like 50% (making up numbers here but this is directionally right).

With enough scale, a great CTO can be hired for the right salary. The way I answer this for myself is two-fold:

1. I've vowed I will never be the second chair guy because I don't wanna get pushed out.

2. It's important to up-skill yourself so you can contribute more value than a glorified engineering manager by driving vision, being a headhunter of superstar engineers, among others high-value skills
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-28 10:38:34+00:00
UB issues in C is way overblown. Just don't do dumb shit with null pointers and use const where appropriate that eliminates most of it.

As for other stuff, I was working on a LLVM extension a while back to put a lot of Python-isms into C, like the array slicing, print statement, f strings, and decorators.

Generally though, I found that writing your own macros is actually easy, and you just have to type stuff out a bit more. Last project I worked on in C I had an include file that had all the macros and the defined functions to go with the macros. The print statement honestly takes up most of the file, cause its a combination of vararg in the macro with _Generic selector with functions defined on how to print each type of variable. But the rest of the stuff like array slicing is just a macro that calls a function that takes the slice arguments as a string. Doesn't look as nice as actual array slicing, but it works and easy to write.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-04-28 10:38:37+00:00
Well, I have some experience with the Danish National Archives, but may be out of date.

First, the rule used to be that they could crawl all Danish sites or having interest to Danish government (so I guess also news reports of Denmark or discussion in other nations) ignoring robots.txt, which yes I found that to be a very wrong headed rule but that's what it was. So obviously they need to put in a good deal of effort to get content into the archives that would be getting blocked otherwise.

At the same time governmental records, including the records and cases in communities around the country get added to archives (but of course are only available to scholars at some future date)

So theoretically this is a lot of data. I suppose other national archives probably have similar rules and situations.

It would seem unlikely that one could rewrite history easily with so much data, without alerting people to what you were doing. But I guess that is actually the lesson of Fascism, they don't care if you see what they're doing.

They will do it and then hope you forget how it got to be like it is.
by Snild | 2025-04-28 10:38:46+00:00
Swedish and English subtitles for Eurovision sensation KAJ's 2018 musical Gambämark: https://github.com/dolkow/gambamark-subtitles

My wife and I are fans, but their Finland-Swedish Vörå dialect is not easy to understand, especially for us in the very south of Sweden. I have watched the recording too many times to count, and made these so she could enjoy it more.
by nickwatson | 2025-04-28 10:39:12+00:00
I updated the Readme now, to describe as "CleverBee: AI-Powered Online Data Information Synthesis Assistant" and put emphasis on the synthesis.

Also, put a new section in place:

What cleverb.ee is not Cleverb.ee is not a replacement for deep domain expertise. Despite explicit instructions and low temperature settings, AI can still hallucinate. Always check the sources.
by socalgal2 | 2025-04-28 10:39:27+00:00
This is the most annoying thing, they risk the lives of themselves and everyone around them and gain at most 1-2 minutes on 30 minute drive.

It ridiculous how often someone speeds by, breaking the speed limit and often various other traffic laws and 30 seconds later we're side by side in traffic because their wreckless driving didn't actually but them any time.
by IanCal | 2025-04-28 10:40:22+00:00
What's the purpose of this?

> In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.

Is any part of this intended to be valid? It's a very weak argument - is that the purpose?
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-28 10:40:28+00:00
> The use of Unsafe in Java is demarcated, and besides, it is now being removed altogether, but we have more interesting things to talk about.

If you call importing a package and using it demarcated, I have a bridge and some fog underneath to sell you.

> This is done by finding an inductive invariant -- one that is preserved by all program operations -- that implies the property.

This is a strawman fallacy, we're not talking purely theoreticals. Just because you can build a model of Empire state building from Legos doesn't mean that it will work for the real thing. Your Even Theorem Prover can't write 100 beers on the wall. Or even output Hello <name> for arbitrary name.

Rust, however, can maintain invariants and be expressive enough because it relies on outside the computer assistance (aka unsafe blocks).

> As someone who wrote safety-critical avionics software in Ada in the nineties, I can tell you that we had good reasons to largely abandon Ada.

As an outsider looking at commercial and military avionics failures (I can't be certain, but my guess is it seems cost-cutting on both hardware and software didn't quite pan out), I'm not sure that the right call was made.

> But it isn't because you assume that a language that makes more guarantees will always produce more correct programs per unit of effort, but we know that to be false.

Again, [citations needed]. Google mentioned they had little problem getting people to work with Rust. The onboarding time was around 3 months.

And statements that borrow checker is hard is no different, than saying, well, types are hard, generics are hard, covariance & contravariance are hard, indexes starting at 0 are hard, ones and zeroes are hard. To me, these are complaints of people that didn't run the gauntlet, and didn't build their "muscle memory" in programming.

> But it isn't because

The nirvana fallacy is the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives.[1] It can also refer to the tendency to assume there is a perfect solution to a particular problem. A closely related concept is the "perfect solution fallacy".

You are using ATS and Idris as examples, and I agree, we should use them more. In fact, Rust extensions to generate proofs are amazing in my opinion, and both of those languages are remarkable. What they lack however is an ecosystem. Rust has that.

What does Zig give you? No ecosystem, no stability guarantees, and worse memory safety.
by alok-g | 2025-04-28 10:42:33+00:00
>> but it can't go "in" any further because its own wave function is already there, blocking it.

This is good food for thought for me. Though I am still not fully clear. If the above were the setup with classical mechanics and electrostatics, with nuclear charge at the center and electronic charge smeared out, I would use Gauss theorem to find electric field and still find that the smeared charge would feel a net force towards the center and want to move that way.
by piker | 2025-04-28 10:42:49+00:00
I'm working on an IDE for lawyers: https://tritium.legal

It's inspired by VS Code and hopefully positioned to eventually be a Cursor-like experience for transactional lawyers. The LLM integration isn't baked in yet to keep the in-house onboarding frictionless.

It's a desktop application written in Rust. It uses egui (an immediate mode UI library) for speed.

I'd greatly appreciate any comments.
by Sammi | 2025-04-28 10:43:43+00:00
That sounds hard. I got my bsc and msc in cs in 2015 exactly because I was afraid of this.

I know maybe a couple of guys who've had successful careers in cs despite having no degree. Those guys are especially talented and industrious. Real rock stars. I'm an average slob in comparison and I feel lucky to have my papers, as I have a decent track record of getting interviews. Small local companies seem to respond the best to my resume. Big places and remote jobs seem to have a much higher bar to clear.
by worldsayshi | 2025-04-28 10:44:06+00:00
Yeah I've only read The Dispossessed and a few short stories so I might have a tilted view of her bibliography.

I've tried to get into Ian Banks. One feeling I get is that there's two kinds of optimist sci fi. Technology magically solves our problems - or technology can be both force for good and bad, let's use it for good. I have a feeling that Ian M Banks writes the former but I'm probably wrong here?

There can still be interesting conflict even if the bigger problems have been solved. Dispossessed is one good example I think. The conflict is partially about flaws inherent in the "better" society that they created.

And in Star Trek and to some degree in "The long way to a small angry planet" the conflict is between the larger society and the hold outs.
by timeon | 2025-04-28 10:44:36+00:00
I lived mostly in rural areas but this still sounds too wild. Are US rural areas so dangerous? Especially aggressive humans? I've newer felt that I need the gun to protect myself, but than again I do not live in a place where 'aggressive humans' could easily[0] have a gun.

[0] As it is harder to obtain gun on illegal market when it is harder to obtain one on legal market.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-28 10:45:13+00:00
Obviously some things moved, mostly because of regulatory requirements. But this was overall kept to a minimum and London is as strong as ever as financial centre, stronger even [1] [2].

Similarly, my guess is that in 4 years Europe will still be a distant 3rd and not much will have changed, not least because whatever is happening now in the US has much less long term impact than Brexit (everything can change in 4 years) and I don't see Europe suddenly changing drastically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index

[2] https://dealroom.co/guides/europe
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-04-28 10:45:18+00:00
> If you really believe that your fellow citizens can be easily influenced to undertake extreme actions by a twitter post

so words have no capability of influencing people? Why speak at all if it can never change anyones opinion?

See what happens when you do reduction to absurdity of any argument?

But seriously, ask yourself: Is the entire ad industry a sham? Are state actors like the kremlin troll farms, the chinese fake newspapers and the cia meme department all wrong and no one can ever be influenced because they are adults and rational actors all the time? Are objectively effective misinformation campaigns like Brexit not proof of succesful compelling speech through channels like cambridge Analytica?

> why not end democracy altogether?

democracy is about empowering people. Leaving people to construct an identity through heaps of misinformation is not democracy, its insane and it cannot work.

> Since citizens are seemingly perpetual minors who lack agency over their actions.

Someone spending billions of dollars in anti intellectualism propaganda, political smear campaigns and capturing media networks is not the fault of the individual citizens, they are not minors they are victims of targetted hostile information hazards.

> This is why all authoritarian regimes absolutely love hate speech laws.

Authoritarian regimes tend to brag about how free their speech is. America spent the 50s chest bumping while sending people to jail over "communist ties" under mccarthyism, they spent the 60s bragging about free speech while sending students to jail for complaining about vietnam, they spent the early 2000s talking about free speech while punishing allies who did not agree with Irak (like France) and sending people to black sites like Guantanamo. And now they brag about free speech while the sitting president Elon decides which individual words get flagged in his social network and the vice president Trump jails 3 different judges over their rulings

you know all that free speech
by BlueTemplar | 2025-04-28 10:46:43+00:00
This article was a lot of work, which, while commendable, looks like it could be easily avoided by the following rule of thumb :

If your numbers/data/chart/speech does not feature uncertainty, then (in a professional setting) you should be dismissed as a bullshitter or incompetent.

(The importance of thinking about how and how much you might be wrong is drilled out into the minds of students from the start of university for a good reason.)
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-28 10:46:44+00:00
One easy way to tell the difference: if you do the full upload non-destructively, such that there's a full uploaded copy that thinks it's you, and your full original biological self, would the latter then happily get disintegrated? (There are people who say yes to that question, which genuinely baffles me.)

The thing I'm talking about, of attempting to build a "move" operation that isn't "copy then delete", is exactly what I meant when I said it seems harder but possible to solve.
by vanderZwan | 2025-04-28 10:46:48+00:00
Here's my neo-Luddite take on this. Slides with support for notes in a synchronized second window in just 371 bytes of minified javascript, some HTML and some CSS:

let a=[...document.getElementsByClassName("slide")] .map((a,b)=>[a,"slidenote"==(b=a.nextElementSibling) ?.className?b:a]),b=0,c=0,d=()=>a[b][c] .scrollIntoView(),e=new BroadcastChannel("s"), l=a.length-1;d();e.onmessage=({data:a})=>{c^=a.c, b=a.b,d()};document.addEventListener("keypress", ({key:f})=>{b+=(f=="j")-(f=="k");b=b<0?0:b>l?l:b; c^=f=="n";e.postMessage({c,b});d()}); div.slide, div.slidenote { height: 100vh; width: 100vw; /* Other slide styling options below */ ... ... } <div class="slide"> Anything in here is one slide </div> <div class="slidenote"> (optional) Anything in here is a note for the slide above </div>

You can trivially use the HTML and CSS inside markdown, so any markdown parser that generates HTML is now an ultra-lightweight slides generator.

For a deeper explanation, see Dave Gaur's original minslides[0] and my own presentation on how I added note-support to it and golfed the JS code[1].

[0] https://ratfactor.com/minslides/

[1] https://nbd.neocities.org/slidepresentation/Slide%20presenta...
by carlos-menezes | 2025-04-28 10:48:06+00:00
> LinkedIn is a cesspit!

> In the vast landscape of professional networking, LinkedIn provides us with a unique opportunity to connect, collaborate, and thrive. Let's harness the power of this platform to cultivate meaningful relationships and unlock endless possibilities. Together, we can navigate through the challenges and reach new heights of success! #LinkedInEcosystem #Collaboration #ProfessionalNetworking
by __mharrison__ | 2025-04-28 10:48:11+00:00
I'm using Jupyter and typst for my slides these days. (Which depends on the audience.)

I was going to write tooling to convert markdown to typst, but typst is so easy that I haven't bothered. Of course Jupyter has markdown support, but I'm normally running code when presenting with it (did 20 hours last week).
by enos_feedler | 2025-04-28 10:48:45+00:00
Chrome extension to organize web-based learning into journeys. Uses the tab group API and sidebar to bundle a set of websites into a "container". Sidebar tracks progress through visiting the pages. Requires an LLM token for generating "packets" from a prompt. Requires s3 bucket token because it generates web sites just in time.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unpack/mcgdbnjjnnfm...
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-04-28 10:49:32+00:00
> wanted to silence their political opponents in the past administration

Literally when? Bezos bought a newspaper, Elon bought Twitter, Trump was on TV daily (and not being prosecuted by the DOJ), Ben Shapiro was again the most promoted video network in facebook, RFK was spreading misinformation left and right and is now telling the worls that autistic people can never pay taxes while Elon pays his salary.

Like name 1 person who was silenced? it is literally impossible to not hear the constant, incessant, child like whinning. you can have the senate, congress, the supreme court and the presidency and still act like victims. Crash the economy and its always someone elses fault.

Accountability is perhaps a value you should cherish more than silence, cant have that can we
by westoque | 2025-04-28 10:49:40+00:00
> This weekend I’m working on mobile app that allows you to upload photos and it turns everything into a stitched anime (ghibli or not) with movements and eventually sound and script. Great to make mini animes from your day or travels or anything.

I vibe coded the above including everything: code, design, logos. Just did it solo. It has all error handling, video generation notifications (it takes a while) and credit system. I myself can't believe it's been done in a month with AI. It's already in closed beta in iOS and android app stores. Let me know if you want to try it out before public release.

My quoted comment above was 28 days ago. This is working on this part time and with a family.

EDIT: Added context.