MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattbee | 2025-04-09 09:59:22+00:00
Assuming you're working on regular software where you can run it in isolation, without cost, I disagree with "don't guess".

A guess might be your best opportunity to test a theory about a bug you don't understand. That's particularly true where you're a newcomer to an area and the documentation is written for someone with different experience.

A series of guesses and tests can narrow down the problem, and ultimately help you fix a bug on your own terms, a bit like tracer fire.

I much _prefer_ to build a mental model, and to spot the bug as a deviation from that model. And unguided guesswork can be a sign that you're flailing. But guessing can be a strategy to build that model.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-04-09 10:02:26+00:00
> The problem with this is if you have a team working on a C++ product you will need some people who can catch memory bugs to review every code before merging. Even with this approach it still possible to missed some memory bugs since the reviewer need to fully understand each object lifetime, which is time consuming during code review.

Nah, if you're trying to match every "new" with a "delete" during the code review, you've already lost the battle. You can probably succeed when the code is added, but then the edits start to flow and sooner or later it's gone. Reviews are mostly good to catch design problems, not bugs.

The only reliable approach I know is to have a strict rule of never mixing memory management with business logic. Nothing else works well enough but this one however works remarkably well.

Business logic should rely on containers, starting with simple unique_ptrs and vectors and going deeper and deeper into the custom land when appropriate. If you can't find a suitable standard container, you build a custom one. The principal difference of "writing a custom container when you need it" compared to "integrate custom memory-management into the business logic when you need it" is that containers are:

* well understood

* well tested

* relatively small code-wise

* almost never change once implemented

None of the above applies to the business logic, it's the complete opposite.

Think of it kind of like programming in Java: someone has to write the memory management and it's a hell of job. However once this is done, programming the ever-changing business logic is easy and safe.

You can live the same life in C++ AND also have the ability to put on the "Doomguy of the memory management" shoes whenever you feel like it. Just don't forget to take of the shoes of the "business logic guy" when you do it, you can't wear both at the time.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-09 10:03:28+00:00
I first used pg full text in around 2008. I've also used SOLR and ElasticSearch to power search and recommendation in substantial products.

The issue I have had with postgres full text search isn't that it's too slow, it's that it's too inflexible. It's a nice way to add simple search to fields but poor if you want to tune the search at all. Even allowing for general substrings is too much to ask, even allowing for custom tokenization is too much to ask. There's no tokenization pipeline to speak of unless you want to write c extensions (which of course you can't do for hosted databases anyway). Solr and Elasticsearch let you set up very complex indexes and search processing via configuration. There's absolutely nothing that would prevent postgres from adopting a lot of this capability, but instead postgres offers literally NOTHING. I get the impression that most of the developers for postgres full text haven't spent much time with other solutions as from previous discussions they don't really understand what I mean when I talk about tokenization and filter setup, and they don't really understand why this is a deal-breaker even for very simple applications. Postgres just splits on whitespace (and lets you basically manually use stopwords and stemming, which is crap). There is really no way to concatenate fields in a clean way into a single index, which again makes it extremely annoying to work with. There's no way to score searches based on field weighting or really any other kind of weighting beyond BM. Compared to the alternatives it's a toy system.
by thanhnguyen2187 | 2025-04-09 10:03:59+00:00
I’m going to cover what happened and the technical details of a crypto job scam that I’ve avoided. Let’s hope that it can be both entertaining and informative.

It’s my second time encoutering this kind of scam. In the first time, I just ignored it as the sign is too obvious: a non-fitting job (frontend heavy job for a backend guy) where the recruiter is “impressed with my technical skills” and think that I’m “an exellent fit”. For this second time, I got fooled at first as it is too good, and after I realized it’s too good to be true and likely a scam, instead of stopping early, I just got… more patient and curious about what’s behind.
by joegibbs | 2025-04-09 10:05:20+00:00
I think Trump is kind of like a semi-fictional character: there’s the real guy and then there’s the character he played on shows The Apprentice which are all a bit scripted, in interviews etc as the larger-than-life successful businessman. People voted for the character. But when you play a character like that for your whole life then it becomes who you are, which is why he’d play the storyline.
by kypro | 2025-04-09 10:05:32+00:00
> that might just be wishful thinking in a social/AI age where real truth in any particular domain is too complex for individuals to digest

It's not necessarily that you're smarter, but you have different preferences and concerns given your circumstances.

If you're a low-paid worker you're likely very vulnerable and exposed globalisation. Globalisation is great because it means all the bad jobs low-paid workers used to do can be done even cheaper abroad, but if you're one of those workers you have to watch your opportunities drying up. Not sure it's going to happen now, but there was a hope that with places like India coming online even some of the more expensive digital jobs can now more easily be outsourced would be a huge boom for the IT sector which has historically had to pay very high salaries to employ skilled workers in the West. But again, whether this is good or not really depends on if you're one of the workers in these sectors – if you are you might think that we should protect jobs even if it is bad for GDP.

Plus if you're poor already you're not going to care much about an economic crash because you have no real stake in the economy. Even if this is a bad way to look at it because things can always get worse, the immediate impact of the DOW dropping isn't going to bother you if you have no assets.

Not all, but many people who voted Trump don't want a stable thoughtful character who will continue with the status-quo with a few minor adjustments. They actually want a mad man who will disrupt everything. Many even want the DOW to tank – we're seeing this sentiment all over places like X right now.

I live in the UK, but I saw the same kind of thing with Brexit too. Middle-class people understood immigration and the EU was good because immigration increased GDP and it meant those who went to university could study and work abroad. But these types of arguments are not very convincing for someone who is poor and on welfare (which would be over 50%+ of UK households). Politics needs to be discussed from a different perspective. Arguing something is bad for investors or GDP isn't going to convince people who are poor when the people on the other side of the argument are saying it's going to be good for jobs and the average American. Of course whether that's actually true or not is another conversation, but that's the way arguments need to be framed.
by felixheikka | 2025-04-09 10:06:09+00:00
We're co-founders of https://buildpad.io

We're hoping to help founders with the problems they experience on their journey of building products.

I've been there myself in the beginning and I've made the mistakes. Sharing what I've learned from my experience is the least I can do to help those who are starting out.

And if the people who read the posts need more practical help, then they can get that by finding out about our platform.

So, I'm hoping to help people with a bonus of having some check out our platform.

A fair exchange in my opinion, but maybe I'm wrong.
by cassepipe | 2025-04-09 10:07:07+00:00
I think it depends on your use cases :

1. *Browsing*

This can be completely avoided. Here is a thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks in order to achieve no-search browsing

- Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search)

- Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove searches from your History. This will avoid searches from your history to pollute the results

- Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false`

Now when you Ctrl + L into the tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard.

If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine. A cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs/ You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^

P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends.

P.P.S: Now you can also learn more about custom search engines : https://askubuntu.com/a/1534489

2. *Quick answer* on a topic. This is the second most common use case and what Google has been trying to optimize for for a long time. Say you want to know how many people are there in Nepal or what is the actual percentage blue-eyed people in Germany. This is where llm shine I think but to be fair Google is just as good for this job.

3. *Finding resources* to work with. This one is a bit on the way out because, it's what people who want to understand want but we probably are few. This is valuable because those resources do not just give an answer but also provide the rationale/context/sources for the answer. But.

On the one hand, most people just want the answer, and most people can be you if, even though you deem yourself a curious person, you don't have the time right now to actually make the effort to understand. On the other hand, llms can craft tutorials and break down subjects for you which turn those resources much less valuable. I kind of feel like the writing is on the wall and the future for this use case is for "curating" search engines that will give you the best resources and won't be afraid to tell you "Nothing of value turned up" instead of giving you trash. Curious to hear your thougts about that.
by shebnik | 2025-04-09 10:07:29+00:00
just started trying asking question DeepSeek. Search engines return too many marketing materials, bloggers copy&paste nonsense and, recently, completely stupid AI autogenerated sites.

It is easy to filter them when you working with familiar domain, but trying to learn something completely new - it is better to ask DeepSeek for a summary, and then decide what to explore.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-09 10:07:35+00:00
Precisely. So when you say they used the images without permission, you are knowingly making a false implication - that it was known to them that they needed permission and that they intentionally disregarded that fact. In reality that has yet to be legally established.

Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.

I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.

Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-09 10:08:07+00:00
I've read (or not read as it is in some cases) some really bad and/or really convoluted documentation.

Some industry standard tools, like Jackson, don't even have documentation but instead point you to various tutorials that are written by others on how to use it: https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-docs

One of the nice things that LLMs have done is taken some of that mess of missing/poor/convoluted/scattered-to-the-winds documentation and distilled it into something accessible enough that you either get a useful answer or get a useful direction on how to narrow your search for the answer.

I think "read the docs" is good advice; but even the article itself doesn't go so far as to say *all* documentation is good.
by angelofpc | 2025-04-09 10:09:08+00:00
Frontend Engineer | React, Nextjs, React Native, Node.js | Scalable Web & Mobile Solutions Location: Lagos, Nigeria

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Open to opportunities worldwide

Technologies: React, React Native, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS, Docker

Portfolio: angelofpc.com

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16xRGYfmkKf0_D4iGeq028ZKt...

Email: dagrandmaster01@gmail.com or ace@angelofpc.com

I'm a frontend heavy Full-Stack Engineer with 6+ years of experience building scalable web and mobile applications either as a frontend, mobile or backend developer. As the Head of Engineering at Rumi Africa, I've led the development of high-impact products, solving real-world problems with React, React Native, Next.js, TypeScript, and a strong backend foundation.

Open to opportunities that challenge me—whether full-time or contract—where I can contribute to high-growth products and teams. Let's build something great!
by jainshreyans | 2025-04-09 10:10:35+00:00
Location: Bangalore, India Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Negotiable (depends on the role, remote or bangalore is my first priority)

Technologies: Python, Pytorch, Pyspark, SQL, ElasticSearch, Docker, FastAPI, Flask, Azure, Airflow, GCP, Machine learning, Deep Learning, NLP, RecSys, Reinforcement Learning, LLMs, AI Interpretability.

Résumé/CV:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q0DZX5LjM6Ty36EPSn4wbvmFDQ5...

Email: jshrey8@gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/shreyansjainn

Portfolio: https://shreyansjainn.github.io/

Independent ML Interpretability Researcher with 8+ years of experience as a Data Scientist, specialising in developing and deploying OCR systems, search engines, recommender systems, NLP and time series forecasting models.

Also, I’m an independent contributor to an ML Interpretability research project working along with a team from NYU (recently got accepted in ICLR 2025 Blogpost Track) and a contributor to the Open-Source library Minari - Farama Foundation.
by subsection1h | 2025-04-09 10:10:36+00:00
Shitting on less developed areas of the world is one of Hacker News's favorite guilty pleasures. Let me try to assist.

Maternal mortality rate in Iran in 2020: 22/100,000 live births [1]

Maternal mortality rate in Mississippi in 2018-2022: 39.1/100,000 live births [2]

Infant mortality rate in Iran in 2022: 10.35/1,000 live births [3]

Infant mortality rate in Mississippi in 2022: 9.11/1,000 live births [4]

[1] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240068759

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/maternal-mortality/data.htm

[3] https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/maternal-infant-health/infant-mortality/
by AngryData | 2025-04-09 10:11:01+00:00
The thing is you don't need to run a grueling factory that runs you ragged in the modern day unless you are trying to undercut the poorest economies in the world. People don't want manufacturing back here to try and dominate the world in manufacturing capabilities, they just want some minimal amount of local capacity for it, and for the people that do it to make a decent wage and have basic safety standards. Its not like the US is struggling to barely survive and couldn't afford the cost. But in order to do that and not have it become some grift by the owners from the government there would need to be hard limits on how much owners and investors can extract from it, which is straight up anti-capitalist and of course capitalists are vehemently opposed to any industry or business not operating under capitalist principles, doubly so if it is a state-owned business.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-09 10:11:22+00:00
I haven't used Haskell in years, but I still find myself wishing for Hoogle no matter the tool I'm using. Being able to just go "I know I want a value of type X, what functions return type X?" is so useful. I think Scala may be the only other language I have used whose docs let you search by type signature like that.

I have been playing around with Zig a lot lately, and their doc system is quite nice too. I particularly like how they will embed the source of how what you are looking at is implemented, and often an example of how it is expected to be used. Being able to see the language in action all over the docs has helped with making it super easy to pick up. Being able to search based on type signature a la Hoogle would really be killer though.
by antonkar | 2025-04-09 10:12:27+00:00
With more than 50% probability. Instagram has a clause that they can use your photos for ads and endorsements, basically for profit.

Many sites repost those photos, I doubt Meta will care to meticulously remove them. If the model can generate photo-like content of people - it had photos of people put inside.

I doubt they only trained on public domain photos of people.

If they started doing shady stuff, why would they ever stop?
by actionfromafar | 2025-04-09 10:12:29+00:00
I also find that my "context windows" can only hold so much. I can't understand everything all at once. So if I do very deep dives, I tend to forget (temporarily) other parts of the problem/stack/task/whatever. The solution for me is to create as much as possible as self-contained testable units. Not always possible, but something to strive for.

And I find that this skill of organising is the limit for how large/complex systems I can build before they become unmaintable. This limit has increased over time, thankfully.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-09 10:13:14+00:00
It's hilarious seeing HN and similar discussion groups get up in arms about the involvement of the tech industry in governance after spending the last decade endlessly praising the merger of the two. It's not like they weren't warned over and over again that this would eventually come back to bite them. That big tech wouldn't obey them as their master forever. But all too many were convinced big tech had the same values as they have so it was ok to let these companies run amuck and drive all over everyone's rights.

This isn't a case of big tech flipping from Democrats to Republicans (or libertarians). It's that they never were on anyone's side but their own. For a decade they were enabled and allowed to grow their power unchecked. Now they don't need to obey anymore. They haven't flipped to the Republicans. They've flipped to themselves.
by kevincox | 2025-04-09 10:13:21+00:00
Yeah, my jaw was dropping as I realized how far they went with this from checking their mount options to reading ext4 source code. Directly order is almost always an implementation detail (I'm pretty sure it is on ext4) and even if it isn't you still shouldn't rely on it (for when someone decides to migrate your production machines to BTRFS because they want snapshots and now your app has some weird breakage). The problem is that the app depends on directory order, and you need to fix that, not figure out how you can predict the directoy order.

Maybe there should be a mount options to randomize directory order that people can use in their staging environments.
by te0006 | 2025-04-09 10:14:14+00:00
This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the feasabilty of this idea: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/ee/d0ee0...

"Due to the emergence of low cost renewable electricity from solar and wind, there is renewed interest in decentralized opportunities for electricity-driven nitrogen fixation."

"This analysis shows that the energy consumption for NOX synthesis with plasma technology is almost competitive with the commercial process with its current best value of 2.4 MJ mol N−1, which is required to decrease further to about 0.7 MJ mol N−1 in order to become fully competitive"

Note that this measure of competitivity is based on energy, not cost. So the (intermittently) ultra-low cost of electrical energy generated by modern PV installations (where substantial overprovisioning is becoming normal) has not been taken into account.

An Agri-PV installation that produces all the fertilizer it needs from its own surplus electricity would be cool indeed.
by smcin | 2025-04-09 10:15:13+00:00
Yes AFAIK the Fed data includes people's retirement plans. People's retirement plans issue them a statement; I don't see why we need to divvy up the estimated beneficial ownership.

(Defined Benefit pensions are pretty rare in the US; in March 2023, only 15% of private industry workers had access to a defined benefit pension plan, and only 11% participated in such plans; mostly govt and local workers. Hence, the Fed data averages are deceptive; ~85% of people have no DB, 15% or fewer. So if they graphed those two separate subpopulations, we'd see more representative numbers for people who spent most of their working lives working for govt + everyone else.)

(Why would you expect US Fed data on US residents to have anything to do with Norway’s sovereign fund? There are comparatively few Norwegians in the US and even fewer retirees living in the US who spent most of their life working in Norway; approximate as zero.)

Yes, obviously older people have more savings, things compound. Also their retirement plans may have historically had more generous provisions/matches. And they got to invest in previous boom cycles. And historically real-estate tended to go up not down, most of the time.
by graycat | 2025-04-09 10:16:11+00:00
> the entire world circa 1970.

About then was the IBM 360/91 with a 60 nanosecond cycle time. So, that would be a clock speed of

1/ ( (60)/(10^9) ) = (10^9) / 60 = 10^7 (100 / 60 ) = 10^7 (10 / 6 ) = 10^7 (1.66) 1.66 (10,000,000) 16.66 (1,000,000) = 17 Mhz

Now we can have clock frequencies of 4 GHz, that is

4000/17 = 235

times faster. And we can have 16 cores instead of 1 for

(16)(4000) / 17 = ~4000

times faster. "entire world"?
by nickjj | 2025-04-09 10:17:54+00:00
I think this also ties into using tools that help faciliate this workflow.

Being able to jump to a definition of library code lets you really quickly move from your code to some function you're trying to figure out. With code editor support this is a seamless experience that can happen without a real context switch.

Without this, you might leave your code editor, Google for the project it's related to, find it on GitHub, open up the "dev" version of GitHub (hitting . when logged in on a repo's home page) so you can explore the project, then do a project search for that function and wade through a bunch of results until you find it.

That or find the code locally where your package manager might have saved it but if your app is in Docker that could be a problem because it might not be volume mounted so you won't be able to explore it from the comfort of your local code editor.