MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by achierius | 2025-04-09 00:14:52+00:00
You speak like they would have to do something 'aggressive'. If you can achieve a circular economy, where robots produce products for the benefit of a lucky few who can live off of their investments (in the robots), then the rest of the population will 'naturally' go away.

You might say "but why not use just 1% of that GDP on making sure the rest of humanity lives in at least minimal comfort"? But clearly -- we already choose not to do that today. 1% of the GDP of the developed world would be more than enough to solve many horrifying problems in the developing world -- what we actually give is a far smaller fraction, and ultimately not enough.
by photonthug | 2025-04-09 00:15:58+00:00
I'd say that being a believer doesn't necessarily conflict with being a grifter. In fact the true believer is practically obligated to engage in tricks, because the ends justify the means. For example taking government contracts for anti terrorism because the problem isn't well defined, your results are hard to check, and the money is going to be good if temporary. Anything where you don't really expect to provide promised value is always worth it because you're going to "pay it back" with big results later. For more recent stuff along the same lines, colonizing mars and getting away from oil are like that too, because for the true believer stuff like this is worth a little stock manipulation or whatever else is required.
by neilv | 2025-04-09 00:16:40+00:00
> Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. [...] For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.

You're taking a swipe at factory workers, and elevating Software Engineers to the intellectual strata of doctors?

Most working-age adults can be a contemporary Software Engineer (even without LLM cheating).

For that matter, I could teach bright 12 year-olds to apply the technical skills that your average Software Engineer does (though that would be mean, and stunt their development).

You'd better pray that your doctor is much more capable and professional than your typical Software Engineer.
by achierius | 2025-04-09 00:17:28+00:00
"Tech nerds" like Dorsey and Zuckerberg have almost nothing in common (on a day-to-day basis, with how they live their lives, their material incentives, etc.) with "tech nerds" like "Intel Employee #783,529". Those are not a single class of people, and it was predominantly the first group that pushed this sort of rhetoric, not the latter.
by jchw | 2025-04-09 00:18:25+00:00
The point is that if you run -x you will definitely see plenty of output leading up to the failure. It is true that if the command that fails outputs nothing to stderr, then this may still lead to confusing outcomes, but you will not be staring at empty output, you'll be staring at the commands leading up to the failure.

This is of course no different than if you had set -e and then a command with no pipes failed silently without outputting anything to stderr.

I don't personally see why this is notable in relation to pipefail.
by josephg | 2025-04-09 00:18:33+00:00
I used Plot for an academic paper I wrote recently. It was the only charting library that I found that let me generate the charts I wanted to draw - which in my case was a grouped bar chart with a logarithmic scale. Ie:

https://github.com/josephg/egwalker-paper/blob/master/diagra...

I didn't try echarts though. I might have to give it a go if its good.
by xenadu02 | 2025-04-09 00:18:56+00:00
I just bought a lathe to lock in prices before tariffs cause them to rise. Its a hobby I've wanted to get into for a long time.

There are no manufacturers of screw cutting lathes (a variant of engine lathes and what most people think of as a manual lathe) left in the USA. If you look at old 60s/70s catalogs of lathes the basic models would cost around $15,000 in adjusted money. The Chinese imports are $3000.

Could someone make a competitive lathe for around $3000 in the USA? Perhaps. But it will take significant investment to make that happen. I'm not sure where that investment will come from as Wall Street has no interest in such things.
Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)
by 1ilit | 2025-04-09 00:20:18+00:00
One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs.

In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take this project in.

All of this was an accident. But now I feel like I'm missing out on not using this success. I have been thinking of monetization options, but not sure if I wanna go down that route. I like the idea of it being free and available for everyone but also can't help but think of everything that could be done if committed full-time or even had a small team. I keep telling myself(and others) i'll do something if i meet a co-founder, but doubt and fear of blowing this up keeps back.

How would you proceed?
by tofof | 2025-04-09 00:20:24+00:00
While I do like LLMs for these tasks, unfortunately this one failed you but was a near enough miss that you couldn't see it. What you were really looking for is the Red Queen problem/hypothesis/race, named after a quote from Through the Looking Glass, with the Queen explaining to Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." In particular, the Red Queen term is specifically the equilibrium you inquired about, where relative fitness is unchanging, rather than the more general concept of an evolutionary arms race in which there can be winners and losers. The terms 'evolutionary equilibrium' and 'evolutionary steady state' are also used to capture the idea of the equilibrium, rather than just of competition.

Evolutionary arms race is somewhat tautological; an arms race is the description of the selective pressure applied by other species on evolution of the species in question. (There are other, abiotic sources of selective pressures, e.g. climate change on evolutionary timescales, so while 'evolution' at least carries a broader meaning, 'arms race' adds nothing that wasn't already there.)

That said, using your exact query on deepseek r1 and claude sonnet 3.7 both did include red queen in their answers, along with other related concepts like tit for tat escalation.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-09 00:20:44+00:00
Python is a great language for the non-professional programmer who wants to put their other skills on wheels. Even if other languages have more pedagogical value, Python is easy to learn and not a waste of time of time for anybody. (At work I code Java/Javascript but wrote a “maintainance droid” in Python that merges changes from git, installs database migrations, runs tests and all that so I don’t have to.)
by 0x0203 | 2025-04-09 00:20:49+00:00
I'll have to dig it up (maybe if I get time tomorrow I'll try), but I've seen a couple research papers where they wrote software that got was pretty effective at decoding peoples passwords by listening to them type. Between different keys sounding slightly different, the timing between keystrokes, and an individual's personal typing patterns, it's not even all that difficult. So yes, that sort of thing has definitely been done.
by dgfitz | 2025-04-09 00:21:26+00:00
I have never understood this.

If everyone is educated, who is going to collect your garbage, fix your car, replace your broken pipe in the wall, cut down the rest of the tree that fell across the street, stock your groceries, sell you fast food, drive trucks across the country, build houses and buildings, pump septic tanks… I can keep going.

I don’t get it, never have. Education is not some magical bullet. In fact, having attended college and graduated with a now-lucrative job as an sw engineer, I can say I learned almost nothing at all in college because of the institution itself. At best it made me teach myself whatever was in the class textbooks. The professors mostly spoke English as a second or 3rd language and the TAs were even worse.

“Oh the culture, the diversity!” Meant absolutely nothing to me, I’ve had diverse family and friends since I was a child.
by flanbiscuit | 2025-04-09 00:21:29+00:00
I'm more of a visual person when it comes to puzzles like these so here's my take:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Mary B B A B A B B A B B 7 Dan B A A A B A B A A A 5 Lisa B A A A B B B A B A 3 Colin B B A A A B B A A A ?

First I remove the answers that everyone agreed on. We know that one of these 4 answers is wrong because of Lisa.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Mary _ B _ B A B _ _ B B 7 Dan _ A _ A B A _ _ A A 5 Lisa _ A _ A B B _ _ B A 3 Colin _ B _ A A B _ _ A A ?

Next we can assume anything matching Lisa's remaining answers are wrong, so I will put an x for those. These we 100% know are wrong answers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Mary _ B _ B A x _ _ x B 7 Dan _ x _ x x A _ _ A x 5 Lisa _ x _ x x x _ _ x x 3 Colin _ B _ x A x _ _ A x ?

If you count both the remaining answers and the blanks, you'll see they equal to their score + 1. That 1 being that unknown of the 4 original blank columns where everyone agreed.

So the answer for Colin would by 6 because he has 7 remaining answers.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-09 00:21:50+00:00
Besides, all the "I'm tariffing! Maybe not. I'm tariffing! I'm super serious this time! Maybe not" leading up to this destroyed confidence that these'll even be fully implemented—the tariffs are still rolling out, and will be until early next month. And if implemented, will he keep them going? Month after month? I don't think most people with capital believe it.

Proof of the uncertainty is that Wall Street clearly thinks there's a good chance he'll back off. That's why the market still has room to keep falling, rather than having already fallen as far as it will for a while. It's got a lot of room left. All that room is people betting he's not going to keep this up.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-09 00:22:27+00:00
China has ~1.4B people and will. They lead in 37 of 44 of advanced technologies. They are already a manufacturer to the world not only for low value goods, but also high tech goods. They are the largest buyer of industrial robotics, they have ~540GW of annual solar PV manufacturing capacity (through the entire vertical), and they account for almost 60% of global EV production. They are erecting twice as much wind and solar capacity as every other country combined. The US has ~340M people and offshored anything that isn't financial services, tech, etc. The US has lost the will to build, and only started to recover it under enormous effort (Inflation Reduction Act). There will be blood. I'm not underplaying the damage the US could do to China via trade restrictions, but rather saying whatever the US does, China will not only survive it, they will lean even harder into whatever they believe will lead to their definition of success.

As Xi would say, "Eat bitterness" (a Chinese idiom signifying enduring hardship and suffering without complaint, often seen as a virtue of perseverance and resilience). Can Americans endure hardship incurred by a brutal global trade war? If so, for how long? Such a natural experiment is about to occur, which is interesting, exciting, and terrifying simultaneously.

Xi Jinping calls on young Chinese to embrace hardship - https://www.thinkchina.sg/society/xi-jinping-calls-young-chi... - June 16th, 2023
by doctoboggan | 2025-04-09 00:22:49+00:00
> In our testing, raters preferred the reports generated by Gemini Deep Research powered by 2.5 Pro over other leading deep research providers by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Are these raters experts in the field the report was written on? Did they rate the reports on factuality, broadness, and insights?

These sort of tests (and RLHF in general) are the reason that LLMs often respond with "Great question, you are exactly right to wonder..." or "Interesting insight, I agree that...". I do not want this obsequious behavior, I want "correct answers"[0]. We need some better benchmarks when it comes to human preference.

[0]: I know there is no objective correct answer for some questions.
by peterlk | 2025-04-09 00:23:35+00:00
I think we are saying slightly different things. COGS are composed of many smaller capital allocations. According to this untested, pet thesis, putting on a report that $250M was spent on capex is just fine; but if you go to a single vendor and sign a $250M contract, you have wasted money by not being more careful about how that capital is allocated. $100M is _a lot_ of capital, and I think it’s easy to lose sight of how much stuff you can do with that much money when applied to industries that don’t pay tech salaries for speculative growth. As examples: how many pounds of food could you grow for 100M? How many doctors could we train for 100M?

I think the thesis is thought provoking. Not sure yet if it’s worth anything, but it also doesn’t preclude businesses from having massive cashflow.
by xipho | 2025-04-09 00:24:02+00:00
I find this very amusing. In philosophy of science some 20+ years ago I had a wonderful prof who went through 3(?) periods of thought. He laid out this argument, followed by the arguments seen below in this thread in various ways, in a systematic way where he convinced you that one way of thinking was correct, you took the midterm, then the next day he would lead with "everything you know is wrong, here's why.". It was beautiful.

He noted that this evolution of thought continued on until people generally argued that concepts/definitions that let you do meaningful things (your definition of meaningful, doesn't really matter what it is), are the way to go. The punchline at the very end, which happened to be the last thing I regurgitated on my last undergraduate exam, was him saying something along the lines of "Science, it beats hanging out in malls."

All this to say that if we read a little philosophy of science, that was done a long time ago (way before the class I took), things would make more sense.
by Arch-TK | 2025-04-09 00:24:05+00:00
I disagree completely.

It's not just a technicality, traits are not the same as multiple inheritance. They allow you to solve the same kinds of problems but traits don't introduce the mountain-loads of confusion, complexity and headache that multiple inheritance does.

Moreover, nothing forces you to use traits. You're just strictly better off using them in many cases. But you can always defer to writing overtly repetitive C style code if you want.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-09 00:24:20+00:00
> They aren't nitpicking your language

They absolutely are. "Htmx is “frontend tech”." is a nitpick (and an incorrect one at that). "What defines normal?" is a nitpick - if you ask an ensemble of frontend web developers what normal web frameworks are, they'll convert on the set that I specified without bringing up absolutely ridiculous answers like ColdFusion, and all of their answers have enough commonalities that you can answer the question I posed. "Your idea of normal is presumably whatever you’ve been using for the past few years." isn't "asking for clarity" - it's a dunk with no substance. "Ok, so your list of “normal” frontend doesn’t support your original point... React and Next have been moving in the opposite direction with SSR." is absolutely a nitpick - it's very very clear from the line that that poster quoted that I was referring to client-side rendering.

Let me reiterate that: pavlov read the line of my comment that answered his hypothetical question about SSR vs client-side rendering, then used it to try to gotcha me by saying "actually, React isn't just client-side".

And claiming that they were just "disagreeing" with me and "characterising their disagreement as language nitpicking isn't disagreeing it's just wrong" is factually incorrect. Aside from ”you want to push as much logic to the client” (which they didn't disagree with), I didn't make any statements to agree or disagree with - I asked a question that they tried to dunk on without actually engaging with.

People do not talk like this in real life. Let's not normalize or defend this, or manipulate language to try to justify it, shall we?
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-09 00:24:39+00:00
> But once uttered, we can't control how other people interpret our words.

Sure I could. If the HN had an edit button.

Death of the author, eh? I don't prescribe to that notion. It makes every interpretation valid. Even if the one interpreting them is tripping balls.

> All I'm saying I that I hope we're not spending time trying to terraform mars while our own planet dies.

If we are waiting until every human being is content and happy, and environment is perfectly stable, we'll be waiting past heat death of the universe.
by ndriscoll | 2025-04-09 00:25:42+00:00
Not that this detracts from the wider point, but I'd expect unpause to just work unless you go out of your way to make it not work. Even if you drop the connection at some point, afaik they use ~15 Mb/s as their "premium" bitrate, so e.g. a 30 s buffer takes less than 64 MB. That gives plenty of time to re-establish streaming after an unpause. It's not like the computer forgets what it was doing if you leave it alone.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-09 00:26:02+00:00
> Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.

We already have some content where this has been attempted. That content is on the piracy sites. And that's when breaking the DRM and piracy sites are both illegal.

They simply wouldn't use a business model where they first make something and then try to charge people for it after. Instead you might have a subscription service, but the subscription is patronage, i.e. you want them to keep producing content and if enough people feel the same way, they make enough to keep doing it. But the content they release is available to everyone.

> every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.

The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?

> Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.

The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior. The real question is, would we be better off without it, if some things wouldn't be created?

Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms, i.e. you get 14 years and there is none of this anti-circumvention nonsense which in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents. But the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.
by nico | 2025-04-09 00:26:10+00:00
Just did a test last week and OpenAIs research was way better. Found 10x more sources and did an overall pretty great job

The task was to lookup information about a late distant family member who had been a prominent employee in a certain foreign government about 100 years ago

Gemini barely scratched the surface and pretty much gave up

ChatGPT on the other hand, kept building up on its research, connecting the dots and leveraging each bit of acquired information to try to find more
by davesque | 2025-04-09 00:26:18+00:00
I've been getting the same thing at my company. Honestly no idea what is driving it other than hype. But it somehow feels different than the usual hype; so prescribed, as though coordinated by some unseen party. Almost like every out of touch business person had a meeting where they agreed they would all push AI for no reason. Can't put my finger on it.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-09 00:26:22+00:00
Unless of course you try to transmit it to someplace your bank or the government doesn't like, or the bank has dumb AML controls. In which case the transaction will likely get held up if it can be sent at all. If you try to transfer from somewhere boring like from the USA to Canada of course you can send $25k no problem (most of the time anyway, my bank has interrogated me and locked up my account before for attempting to send $1500 to my wife until I gave up and just used cash).

Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai and walk away with it in cash at an OTC desk in an hour via a wallet to wallet.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-09 00:27:03+00:00
More incorrect statements.

> your backend has rich domain logic you can leverage to provide users with as much data as possible ... Pushing as much logic (i.e., state) while you're developing results in a pale imitation of that domain logic on the front end

False. There's very little that you can do on the frontend that you can't do on the backend - you can implement almost all of your logic on the frontend and just use the backend for a very few things.

> leading to a greatly diminished user experience.

False. There's just no evidence for this whatsoever, and as counterevidence some of the best tools I've ever used have been extremely rich frontend-logic-heavy apps.
by mrexroad | 2025-04-09 00:27:31+00:00
> my life feels like I am a drone > Not being female is a huge disadvantage these days. > All things males can only dream of. Are you saying that the same dynamic do not occur when gender roles are reversed (pops stayed home while mom worked; mom does, pops gets house and pension)? No disrespect intended, but you might want to find someone to help you unpack and process these things you’re saying; no good will come of projecting on to gender dynamics and letting resentment fester.
by mancerayder | 2025-04-09 00:27:51+00:00
I've become very very bad at Google searches. Nothing seems accurate anymore, I should say precise, I'm hitting vendor/official/party-line stuff, or wordy blogs that say nothing.

I use ChatGPT at home constantly, for history questions, symptoms of an illness, identification of a plant hiking, remembering a complex term or idea I can't articulate, tips for games, and this list goes on.

At work it's Copilot.

I've come to loathe and mock Google search and I can't be the only one.
by squigz | 2025-04-09 00:28:19+00:00
> Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing.

When you scale up the thinking past rudimentaries like 'hanging drywall', it still applies to nations - instead of "do we have enough people who know how to mine ore" it's "do we have the capability of mining enough ore to meet our needs" and the various intricacies that come with those massive-scale problems - problems that are much more easily solved when backed by a global economy.