MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diego898 | 2025-04-25 13:34:13+00:00
Just to clarify - I am not presuming to shift blame - I am asking about a failure mode here- absolutely hold hegseth accountable (he should have never been in this position and is completely unqualified in my opinion).

I am also not suggesting we hold an IT person accountable-

I am only saying there should be rules/systems in place so that if someone else asks for something obviously wrong like this again, there’s a clear stop gap to say “that’s not possible”

Maybe there already is one(several) - if so, then of course the chain of accountability continues to ensnare…
by veidr | 2025-04-25 13:34:17+00:00
Yeah, I know all about that stuff. But nevertheless, you _can_ fork it.

Is it the most awesome, selfless, altruistic version of open source? Clearly not.

But is it better than being proprietary closed-source software? Well, that's a value judgement, so we can each decide that for ourselves. Personally, I think so, but maybe it depends. Regardless, though, it's open source, and if it weren't the software landscape would look very different.

Cursor, Windsurf, etc. would presumably not be as far along as they are, because they'd have to invest in basic editor functionality. Among many other projects, both open-source and otherwise.
Ask HN: Can someone with Shopify experience explain what it's used for?
by JeduDev | 2025-04-25 13:34:28+00:00
I’ve never used it myself, but from the outside it seems a bit like WordPress. I’ve been thinking about building an app that somehow combines the two — though I don’t have hands-on experience with Shopify.

My idea is to create an AI-powered platform for e-commerce and content management, also focused on personalizing websites.
by immibis | 2025-04-25 13:34:48+00:00
You know what's better at getting the cost down better? Not adding extra parts for aesthetics. Gluing on extra panels costs more than not gluing on extra panels. Also, making them smaller makes them cheaper. They're actually too big to fit in standard European parking spaces, so clearly they have no need to be as big as they are.

Their design is all about aesthetics, but a type of aesthetics that is non-conventional in the car industry.
by diggan | 2025-04-25 13:35:08+00:00
That particular quote is from the "Epigrams on Programming" article by Alan J. Perlis, from 1982. Lots of ideas/"Epigrams" from that list are useful, and many languages have implemented lots of them. But some of them aren't so obvious until you've actually put it into practice. Full list can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117034445/http://www-pu.inf... (the quote in question is item #9)

I think most people haven't experienced the whole "100 functions on 1 data structures instead of 10 on 10" thing themselves, so there is no attempts to bring this to other languages, as you're not aware of it to begin with.

Then the whole static typing hype (that is the current cycle) makes it kind of difficult because static typing kind of tries to force you into the opposite of "1 function you can only use for whatever type you specify in the parameters", although of course traits/interfaces/whatever-your-language-calls-it helps with this somewhat, even if it's still pretty static.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-25 13:35:29+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787992

> of paying $2 to $3 more on a $100 item, not paying $110 more on a $100 item

$110 more on a $100 item would be $210. I have no idea where pwg got the “$110 more”, though. Seems the in-context comparison would be “$85 more”.
by TheChaplain | 2025-04-25 13:36:06+00:00
Wikipedia definesit as; "Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks."

Certainly TikTok and Twitter are the primary targets here, but this could also hit smaller communities like Mastodon and Diaspora.

And even if the laws would apply only to larger communities, wouldn't this inhibit growth of smaller communities? If they grow too big, they'd be forced to abandon volunteering for more organized and salaried moderation.
by bluGill | 2025-04-25 13:36:11+00:00
Cybertruck looks that way because of compromises. They didn't think the shape would sell, they thought stainless steel would sell. The shape is a function of how hard it is to shape stainless steel. Likewise gluing panels on is required because stainless steel can't be welded. Because they refused to compromise on stainless steel they were forced to compromise elsewhere.
by diego898 | 2025-04-25 13:36:19+00:00
I 100% agree - I’m only saying hegseth didn’t run an unsecured line into his office himself no?

Why didn’t some automated system say “installation of unsecured lines in this building is not possible” or similar

To be course : I didn’t think something so obviously wrong would have been allowed and enabled by several people who made this possible - removing absolutely no accountability from the person who asked for this to happen
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-04-25 13:36:58+00:00
Adding additional columns has always been trivial. What is not is the 98% of other things migrations do. Managing the version of the schema, applying ups in order, executing downs correctly, handling fk references. It’s not necessarily the fault of the migrations frameworks themselves, of which many exist in varying degrees of quality, but rather that the underlying problem of trying to morph a schema that is dependent on the underlying shape of the data is often a difficult problem armed with many footguns.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-25 13:36:59+00:00
Pretty sure it effectively has. Doesn't the state have different regulations have an effect on the rest of the country?

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/09/1121952184/the-impact-of-cali...

> VOGEL: It's such a large market so that anything which California acquires for its own product sold in its state is going to resonate among national and global companies. If you don't want to have to make separate products for California and the rest of the country, you might as well just make them according to California's standards.
by floatrock | 2025-04-25 13:37:18+00:00
How good is a tax law if it becomes tricky to define the thing being taxed. Is the "social media" of today really the same Facebook of a decade ago?

This California tax momentum gives additional context for recent Zuck's arguments in the Meta antitrust hearing that Facebook isn't really "social media" anymore: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke...
by immibis | 2025-04-25 13:37:27+00:00
This relies on a court's interpretation. GPLv3 made it explicit that the user has to be provided with everything they need to install modified software. GPLv2 just says "scripts used to control installation" which can be easily interpreted to exclude private signing keys. And the LGPLv2 says when an executable statically links to the library the user must be able to produce a modified executable - nothing at all about being able to install that executable.
by haswell | 2025-04-25 13:37:41+00:00
> I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?

No, and I said as much in my comment. My point was not that my experience is universal, but that I have direct experience with the failure mode of such an arrangement. Am I 50% of the population? 75? 5? I don’t know. But as I went though it, I met more people who’d gone through something similar, and I learned a lot about myself that made me realize my previous imagination about a life without work were mostly fantasies. Again, this isn’t to say there aren’t productive ways to navigate it. Just that the ways I imagined this working were very different from reality.

The bottom line is that we don’t know what such an arrangement would bring about at mass scale, and if people are more likely to have an experience like yours or like mine. There’s probably a spectrum of experiences between them. I just think we should approach such a future thoughtfully and carefully.

Diving in head first with a “let’s see what happens” attitude seems dangerous and ill advised.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-25 13:37:45+00:00
> I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel

Can you elaborate on this? I manage a Mattermost instance and there are some features missing from the OSS self-hostable community edition, but notifications seem to mostly work, even on mobile where notification delivery does rely on their gateway
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-25 13:37:53+00:00
Two things here:

I have no data either way but I can imagine that there are many more people who are wealthy and quietly having a great time with it. Most of the retired people I've known, early or not, also enjoyed it. Some have definitely taken up work-like pursuits on their own terms.

Secondly the wealth being the means to achieve this is itself a confounding variable. I don't think it's good for your mind or soul to "have everything," no. Life isn't and shouldn't be merely a series of your own preferences. That doesn't indicate to me that lacking confidence in your mere survival is necessary for human thriving. As far as I know research indicates the opposite.
by another-dave | 2025-04-25 13:37:58+00:00
> The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.

If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.
by m0llusk | 2025-04-25 13:38:14+00:00
Taxes tend to discourage things, so that kind of makes sense. However, the California Legislative Analysts Office has produced a detailed report showing that this practice of dedicating taxed funds to specific spending has already gone badly wrong with many of these funds being forced into the general fund particularly during budget crunches such as what is going on now. The most reasonable practice is to put all tax revenue into a general fund that is allocated as necessary by representatives. This allows budgets to be balanced without breaking laws while also responding to the priorities of the day which always change.
by CivBase | 2025-04-25 13:38:50+00:00
Healthy in what sense? I wouldn't describe my job as "healthy activity". But I also wouldn't describe it as "unhealthy" and it enables me to enjoy a higher quality of life.

Nobody's forcing me to work. I could quit today if I wanted. But I doubt that would be beneficial to my overall health, given I do not have the wealth required to support myself and my family for very long.
by Someone | 2025-04-25 13:39:06+00:00
> Since the register size is fixed there is no way to scale the ISA to new levels of hardware parallelism without adding new instructions and registers.

I think there is a way: vary register size per CPU, but also add an instruction to retrieve register size. Then, code using the vector unit will sometimes have to dynamically allocate a buffer for intermediate values, but it would allow for software to run across CPUs with different vector lengths. Does anybody know whether any architecture does this?
by ckemere | 2025-04-25 13:39:28+00:00
(No access so haven't read yet.)

I think that the current systems being tested by Neuralink are (1) a connection to motor cortex allowing quadriplegic/locked-in to type/control a mouse; (2) a connection to visual cortex to provide vision for patients with bilateral complete vision loss.

(1) has been documented fairly well; provides some benefit (let's say 10x) for patients beyond eye trackers / sip-puff interfaces but at a cost that is easily 10000x greater. Unclear whether insurance would cover this. Even if they did, total patient population increase per year is probably ~1000, so asymptotic market is tiny.

(2) has not been documented. Historically, there are lot of challenges with cortical stimulation for vision, and the company's distaste for doing science / acknowledging scientific uncertainty makes me skeptical. Same issues as (1) apply if it does work.

I think that people who worry about black-mirror style issues have been overwhelmed by the hype machine. These things are infinitely worse than natural senses and motor control. They are using bluetooth connections and they have no R&D path to increasing bandwidth to neurons in a way that would grow exponentially.

What is possible in this space is something that has real but marginal benefit to a small number of patients. I had hoped that somehow Musk was motivated to solve the insurance and regulatory challenges towards deploying things to these patients, but I think unfortunately that the more their valuation rises, the greater the likelihood that they will close up shop sooner.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-04-25 13:39:32+00:00
I just spoke up because something we're seeing a lot as Europeans is these subtle twists and turns in the narrative. When you live here a lot of this stuff is up close and personal - we don't need to infer anything from internet comments or past news articles. We've been paying attention - I have personally watched the military convoys running east-west. We have Ukrainians integrated into our communities.

We expended much energy internally consumed by internal debates and arguments about who is supplying what, how much, through which channel. As EU member states we're not always aligned and we are different cultures speaking different languages. This has been used against us in the information warfare layer.

I really don't believe you can simplify the entire EU and say we're begging. There are certain capacities that we can't replace, and for decades member states prioritized dismantling our military industrial complex (in perfectly good faith!). Winding up heavy military industrial supply chains can't be an over-night process. And yeah, I believe you're absolutely correct - a lot of this is political theater.

My own personal view: the war won't be over anytime soon. The other side has gone all in on it. Even if they were to slam the brakes it would take years to reduce that momentum. They've had their own internal wars and purges fueling this thing and whatever they do, they would need to have a solid explanation. It's basically a sacred crusade to them.

Now, this might be controversial, but my personal belief is that on some level, we too prefer that the war grinds on. Only as long as it does not escalate into nuclear. It might be a cynical belief, but at this point it's the Ukrainians who are going to have years of real-life warfare experience and the EU wants access to this to learn from.

Anyways, there's a fucking TV host running the US DoD. These aren't serious people. Trump doesn't have nuanced ideas to read into on any of this - he wants to end the war as much as he wants to eat cheeseburgers and have crowds cheer for him. Maybe he'll get that headline, maybe he won't.

That's my two euro-cents ;)
by sameasiteverwas | 2025-04-25 13:39:45+00:00
I hope they make it to market. Looks like a great replacement for my 2000s Ford Ranger.

I'm also eyeing Edison Motors. They're working on an electric retrofit kit for pickups. https://edisonmotors.ca/trucks/edison-pickup-kit/

I wish someone would do a cheap Telsa roadster with modern tech. A street legal electric gocart.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-25 13:39:57+00:00
As Carl Sagan said, we’re a species that needs a frontier. We need to explore. That’s how hunter-gatherers actually survived, by following the animal migration and pushing outwards when population pressure or ecological change demanded it.

I don’t see how our modern incarnation of plantation jobs is in anyway equivalent to that natural instinct. I don’t think that the vast majority of people would have as much trouble as you finding meaning in their lives without work - especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-25 13:40:31+00:00
Good read!

Over the last week or so, got curious about how India's home-grown cpu effort was doing. Just yesterday I linked an article where somebody reviewed the single (1!) IC that came out of that effort. Bottom line: unimpressive, and flawed in many ways. And I agree. A ehm... pathetic showing. Especially given the timespan (~2021...today, no updates, no new products, no community around that 1 part, no open source cpu/SoC designs making it into mass-produced silicon, nothing).

So... the tech talent is there. IC manufacturing plants exist (and more coming online). Designs up for grabs. Political will has been shown. Venture capital available.

And yet... nothing much of substance.

Is this a cultural thing? Too much focus on applications or services, but not on the tools themselves? Disinterest in R&D? Poor infrastructure? Bureaucracy? All of above? Other factors?

FYI: not out to bash India here. Just curious about the why & how.
by sampullman | 2025-04-25 13:40:43+00:00
Mistaking Swift for XCode isn't the issue here. Swift is great, I'm just pointing out the issues I've had with it in large projects.

> ...give it some room to breathe by adding a clarifying type definition

Right, but that's the problem - it's the only language I've used where this is something you have to worry about, and it's not like the type system is more powerful. And often, the issues stem from external libraries outside my control. Better compiler errors would help mitigate the issue.

There's a lot to like about Swift, but I also think it's productive to identify the parts that compare unfavorably to other languages.
by bell-cot | 2025-04-25 13:40:44+00:00
> [...] there was a time when people in Washington were positively giddy about Jeff Bezos’ new mansion on S Street. [...]

> “What he’s going to do is revive the legacy of Kay Graham and her great socializing — bringing smart, interesting people together in a social context,” Jean Case, who with her husband Steve was an old friend of Bezos and his then wife, said at the time.

> It was a prediction that a certain stratum of D.C. very much wanted to believe. The idea of a world-transforming industrialist running the political city’s salon flattered establishment Washington’s perennial hunger for social validation: See, we’re not just a bunch of ill-dressed policy wonks!

> The validation never arrived.

The real story isn't about Trump. The real story isn't about Bezos.

The real story is about thousands of supposedly educated & sophisticated people, who deluded themselves with baseless beliefs, because those beliefs felt SO good to them.
by udit99 | 2025-04-25 13:41:09+00:00
> argue that memorisation isn't really learning and that learning experiences should be about developing deeper understanding, Agreed, but if you ask anyone who's SR for any amount of time will tell you: It's realllly hard to be effective with it if you don't understand the underlying concept. The order of operations is "first understand, then drill". Of course, this comes with nuance. There are things that just have to be drilled and others that don't even need any drilling if you understand the concept. And I'd expect those educators to know the difference.

> There is no measure of 'best practice'; a lot of these shifts are driven by personal preference.

Again, you're probably right but using the example of SR threw me off because it's the one thing where I think the data is so clear that it's easily justifiable.
by galeaspablo | 2025-04-25 13:42:09+00:00
Agreed. The head of line problem is worth solving for certain use cases.

But today, all streaming systems (or workarounds) with per message key acknowledgements incur O(n^2) costs in either computation, bandwidth, or storage per n messages. This applies to Pulsar for example, which is often used for this feature.

Now, now, this degenerate time/space complexity might not show up every day, but when it does, you’re toast, and you have to wait it out.

My colleagues and I have studied this problem in depth for years, and our conclusion is that a fundamental architectural change is needed to support scalable per message key acknowledgements. Furthermore, the architecture will fundamentally require a sorted index, meaning that any such a queuing / streaming system will process n messages in O (n log n).

We’ve wanted to blog about this for a while, but never found the time. I hope this comment helps out if you’re thinking of relying on per message key acknowledgments; you should expect sporadic outages / delays.
by mapt | 2025-04-25 13:42:24+00:00
We make corn-derived fuel in order to power the Iowa caucus.

Corn farmers could be doing literally anything else, including a whole variety of things that rebuild soil or capture carbon or generate electricity, and it would be equally effective at powering the Iowa caucus, as long as we pay them to do it. They could even be producing crops organically, producing free-range livestock, or producing different lower-return higher-nutrition types of food, should we ever be interested in changing our diet a little. Deciding to produce the world's largest excess food supply in an industrialized fashion and then literally burning it was maybe a poor use of resources.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-25 13:42:40+00:00
> A consistent mistake by the Democrats is thinking foreign policy will win votes.

Trump won votes in 2024 based on how he said he would handle several foreign policy issues: NATO, Ukraine, Palestine, tariffs, China, and Iran, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

> You can’t win a national election based on war crimes.

This clearly is the case, so do the prosecutions after winning the election and running on domestic issues. To do anything less is to both give up the moral high ground and endorse the war crimes by not vigorously investigating them.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-04-25 13:43:15+00:00
Well, yes, I find it incredibly worrying. Especially as someone who finds the ideology that appears to run the US abhorrent.

I am not shocked, however- it seemed blatantly wrong for them to rendition people before now. If they can do it to one group, they will likely do it to others, including you and me.

Other than the (predictable) change in scope it's not a new thing, though.

The US public famously doesn't notice when its government commits crimes- the invasion of Iraq being the first large and obvious one in my life. I was shocked then, but at this point I am more surprised that full blown fascism is taking so long to form up. Hopefully I am just being hyperbolic in my reasoning.
by bastawhiz | 2025-04-25 13:43:22+00:00
Torvalds is exactly the sort of person I'd leave a company to be as far away from as possible. He's brilliant but absolutely insufferable whether it's deserved or not. Anyone with admin access who leans into a pissing contest after breaking the build because they upgraded their operating system just before a release rather than taking the hour to fix the mess they made is going to make you hate your job. God bless the well-mannered kernel maintainers who grind past it.