MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OskarS | 2025-04-25 09:10:22+00:00
Very neat visualizations! Really good way to demonstrate the underlying principles. Great article.

I will add one thing: the author makes much of how problematic CPU-intensive tasks are. That's true, but also: if you need to do a CPU-intensive operation, you need to tie up a CPU to do it, there's no getting around it. What you might want to do is break the computation up in to smaller chunks with `.await`s sprinkled in there or dispatch it to a background thread, but at some point you have to pay the cost in CPU time.

What is much more problematic is blocking I/O operations. That also ties up a CPU and blocks the event loop, but for no good reason. All the CPU is going to be doing is sleeping waiting for the network or hard-drives or whatever it is to do it's work, when it could be doing other useful things, processing other events. That kind of thing leads to huge under-utilization of your resources, and it kills your concurrency.

This means you really can't mix async I/O with blocking I/O: if you go async, ALL your I/O operations need to be async. Or you have to do it off the event loop in a background thread or something, but then you're losing all the benefits of using async in the first place.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-25 09:10:46+00:00
The world is filled with brilliant people.

My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.

Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band name or whatever.

I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters, and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.

So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public information. They're hardly household names.

If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.

And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps the show running.

We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of this blindside.
by LinAGKar | 2025-04-25 09:11:55+00:00
I did give CLion a try when looking for an editor, but last I checked CLion required you to use CMake. Also, JetBrains has it all split up between different IDEs. I need on e that supports C, C++, Python, Cython, Makefile, TypeScript, SCSS, XHTML, Shellscript, JSON and XML in the same program. I also need a program that can do CMake and C, and a program that can do C# (including project management, building, tests etc), Batch script, PowerShell, Shellscript, Cake and YAML, preferably with the same UI. And it needs to work on Linux. VSCode is the only one I've found that can handle that.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-25 09:11:57+00:00
A standard (now) actual chemical drum holds 200L, which would be 200kg plus the weight of the barrel if filled with water. Oil is less dense.

Estimations are much easier with metric units.

There are special hand-powered machines for moving chemical drums: https://www.salesbridges.eu/en/products/drums-lifter/
by frklem | 2025-04-25 09:12:20+00:00
"Faced with such a marked defensive negative attitude on the part of a biased culture, men who have knowledge of technical objects and appreciate their significance try to justify their judgment by giving to the technical object the only status that today has any stability apart from that granted to aesthetic objects, the status of something sacred. This, of course, gives rise to an intemperate technicism that is nothing other than idolatry of the machine and, through such idolatry, by way of identification, it leads to a technocratic yearning for unconditional power. The desire for power confirms the machine as a way to supremacy and makes of it the modern philtre (love-potion)." Gilbert Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects.

This is exactly what I interpret from these kind of articles: engineering just for the cause of engineering. I am not saying we should not investigate on how to improve our engineered artifacts, or that we should not improve them. But I see a generalized lack of reflection on why we should do it, and I think it is related to a detachment from the domains we create software for. The article suggests uses of the technology that come from so different ways of using it, that it looses coherence as a technical item.
by Udo | 2025-04-25 09:13:09+00:00
I had to try this gem, it's my new benchmark! o4-mini-high also fails spectacularly, even after repeated feedback. However, 4.5 (the impractibly large demo model) gets it right:

It’s a nonsense twist on the classic lateral thinking puzzle:

The original puzzle goes: “A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies, and the son is rushed to the ER. The surgeon says, ‘I can’t operate on him—he’s my son.’” The intended answer to that puzzle challenges the listener to recognize the surgeon is the child’s mother, confronting implicit gender biases.

Your version humorously mangles it by swapping roles (“son and his man”) and objectifying the victims as cars, creating a logical absurdity. The sentence “I can’t operate on this car, he’s my surgeon!” doesn’t parse logically, indicating it’s a playful distortion rather than a coherent scenario
by pajamasam | 2025-04-25 09:13:35+00:00
I would imagine OSCP has a high failure rate, but I have zero proof on that.

> In 2025, do coding certifications still hold value for developers, or has practical experience taken the lead?

The best is to do both. I had worked with AWS for years and thought I knew it well until I did a AWS Solutions Architect Professional course.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-04-25 09:15:23+00:00
You are on to the key insight here.. what is emerging is the creative consumer. I.e. I know what I want when I hear it. Or I know what I want when I see it.

This means you can hear something and say.. you know this is nice, but I would like it more if it were different in this way.

With generative tools you can do that. Personally I really like to listen to music, but I generally dislike the lyrics. I want uplifting songs, maybe about what I am doing right now to motivate me. Well with something like Suno.com.. I can just make one. Or I can work with claude or chatgpt to quickly iterate on some lyrics and edit them to create an even higher fidelity song.

The key here is that I can give a rat's ass if anyone in the world likes or cares about my song.. but I can listen to it while I work. It is exactly what I wanted to listen to or close enough.
Ask HN: Why is web auth not a solved issue?
by zwnow | 2025-04-25 09:17:02+00:00
Personally, every project I start, I quit due to not being comfortable with the auth implementation.

I've been into web development for 4 years now. During my research regarding auth in this timeframe, I have found a million reasons on why I should not roll it myself. The reason is always it being to difficult to implement, too much responsibility and basically no matter how I'd do it, it would be unsafe.

The general consensus among web developers seems to be to just let a third party do it. And I understand the reasoning, they are experts and have decades of experience on that specific thing. It makes sense as long as you're fine with third party service dependencies for your application. However, I don't want that. I do not feel comfortable submitting my users data to tech giants for obvious reasons.

I am wondering why it's so difficult to implement secure auth? Why can frameworks like Laravel or Phoenix just generate auth solutions? Why should I trust them, if everyone is saying I shouldn't roll it myself?

After all, if Laravels or Phoenix generated auth isn't safe, I am the one taking responsibility anyway, no?

To my understanding web auth has been an issue for decades now, why aren't there protocols in place to solve it? Or if they are, why aren't they talked about a lot?

Considering how often I read about auth breaches with the big players in the game (Firebase as an example) I am not comfortable trusting third parties with that task either.

So how is one supposed to do it? There are so many JWT tutorials on youtube, but apparently JWTs aren't safe either. Then there are session cookies, which also aren't safe? Why is that?

I am also not talking about authorization. I specifically mean authentication. If I wanted a micro blog platform where users can log into their accounts and write about stuff, how would I make sure it's secure without having to trust third parties, especially big tech companies who repeatedly prove they cant be trusted over and over again?
by jitl | 2025-04-25 09:18:03+00:00
Agree this isn’t Apple exclusive. Mostly what I mean to say is that media tends to portray things as DOOMED if they aren’t amazingly successful right out of the gate. The Vision Pro v1 is not a great product but it’s also a super niche product given the price so expectations of 20M units are far fetched to begin with. It’s more of a Mac Pro tier product than a MacBook Pro 16 or a MacBook Air product, much less an iPad or iPhone type product in terms of addressed market. But I don’t think this means the product is an abject failure that should be cancelled and written off as a sunk cost / dead end.
by Aldipower | 2025-04-25 09:20:11+00:00
Art is always some form of human interaction. When we talk about AI music, I think we do not talk about art anymore, so this isn't human interaction as this isn't art too. The creation of the AI itself, could be considered as art, but not the outcome of the AI. We have to be careful in our discussions not to mix the things up. A lot of confusion happens in recent discussion.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-25 09:23:20+00:00
A proficient coder can write a program to accomplish a task in the singular.

In the plural, accomplishing that task in a performant way at enterprise scale seems to involve turning every function call into an asynchronous, queued service of some sort.

Which then begets additional deployment and monitoring services.

A queued problem requires a cute solution, bringing acute pain.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-25 09:25:20+00:00
Exactly. As quoted in the article:

> you didn't coordinate with anyone. You didn't search lore for the warning strings, you didn't even check -next where you've now created merge conflicts. You put insufficiently tested patches into the tree at the last minute and cut an rc release that broke for everyone using GCC <15. You mercilessly flame maintainers for much much less.

Hypocrisy is an even worse trait than flaming people.
by lud_lite | 2025-04-25 09:25:38+00:00
This sounds like sage advice! Instead of paying for ads, pay for yourself to cold call. The investors still get value.

Also don't travel anymore and the workshops are not mandatory unless it is in some kind of contract. Even then negotiate to get that changed as it increases runway. They can record the workshop for you too if needed.

If you do everything remotely you could move to lower COL area.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-25 09:25:52+00:00
>If I am willing to pay 10% more for a locally made product, then a 10% tariff has no effect on me assuming that the local company has non colluding local competitors,

That's the unfortunate, greedy part of it all. Even in the purest form, if tarriffs raise prices 10%, the domestic companies will still proceed to do a price hike instead of compete in the newly level playing field. They use the opportunity and raise prices more for hopes of a larger margin. Especially in such an inflationary economy.

The customer loses out in the end because domestic companies (in this pure scenario) can't help themselves.

The impure points are more common and simply show how stupid the policies are. If you have blanket tarriffs and don't have silicon mines to take advantage of, domestic companies don't have much choice in where to get silicon. We simply don't have that resource domestically to begin with. Coffee is another common example.
by genewitch | 2025-04-25 09:26:07+00:00
Probably not, but even if so, how much will that cost? There's AI that will take a pronpt like "what's the best weed whacker in 2025" and build a whole web page to publish the review. It's great, awesome. $10 in tokens to do that.

And that's probably still a subsidized cost!

Bfw "what is the best weed whacker" is John C. Dvorak's "AI test"
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-25 09:27:00+00:00
Since this is the first time I hear of this I think's false.

But if you have real evidence of csam on xitter any journalist not owned by alt right will jump on it. One good news story by a reputable outlet and Visa/MasterCard is out of xitter 100%. If you're lucky they'll also stop processing ad money and the platform is toast. Do it, leak it.

Remember, payment providers ditched pornhub the same month the story about csam and other abuse went public. That's all it takes.

But anyway. Payment processors do not like porn. See my other comments. Maybe they are scared to ditch xitter because of current politics but I think it's the matter of time and good reporting. Let NYT write about it
by arrowsmith | 2025-04-25 09:28:51+00:00
> if Laravels or Phoenix generated auth isn't safe

What makes you think they're not safe? Zillions of successful apps have been built using Laravel and Phoenix and (afaik) no-one has hacked their auth code yet. The code is open-source for anyone to inspect for vulnerabilities. I wouldn't feel unsafe using them.

You seem to misunderstand what it means to "roll your own auth".

"Don't roll your own auth" doesn't mean "use a third-party auth provider". It means "use an existing, expert-made auth solution and don't try to write it yourself."

That can be a third-party provider like Firebase, it can be a code dependency like Rails's Devise, it can be generated by `phx.gen.auth` in Phoenix, it doesn't matter - the point is that you're using a tried-and-tested auth solution written by someone who knows what they're doing.

Writing your own auth code is generally a bad idea because it's complicated, time-consuming and easy to get wrong. But there are zillions of off-the-shelf solutions you can use that have been created by security experts and battle-tested in thousands of production apps. As far as I'm concerned, web auth is a solved problem.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-04-25 09:30:19+00:00
I love your perspective here. I don't agree with all of it, but it really made me think.

I do a lot of photography as a semi-amateur hobby (semi because I occasionally get paid but my goal is not to be a professional.) Often when I'm going out shooting in a city, thousands, maybe even millions have observed the same sight I'm seeing. I'm not snapping the first picture of the Hindenburg or the unveiling of the Empire State Building. But it's my unique perspective that makes my art. People like and recognize my pictures because of my personal composition. In general I think most portrait and street photographers have come to terms with this, and an increasing number of landscape and event photographers in the age of smartphones.

With art there's no "right answer", it's the soul found within the work.
by esperent | 2025-04-25 09:30:33+00:00
> at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else

You're massively misunderstanding the goals of these large companies who provide open source projects, whether it's VSCode, Android, Chrome, or whatever. The goal is always control. Companies at this scale never do free work for the common good.

I don't say this to deride them, I say it as a statement of fact that we all need to be aware of when we choose to use these products.
by munksbeer | 2025-04-25 09:30:58+00:00
I'm not a fan or an anti-fan of kafka, but I do wonder about the hate it gets.

We use it for streaming tick data, system events, order events, etc, into kdb. We write to kafka and forget. The messages are persisted, and we don't have to worry if kdb has an issue. Out of band consumers read from the topics and persist to kdb.

In several years of doing this we haven't really had any major issues. It does the job we want. Of course, we use the aws managed service, so that simplifies quite a few things.

I read all the hate comments and wonder what we're missing.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-25 09:31:40+00:00
The period you're describing is that of old quantum theory, which was hugely inconsistent and predates our theories of modern quantum mechanics which is post 1925 or so.

The inventor of the arc converter was 18 at the time radio waves were discovered, 34 at the time he invented the arc converter, but 56 and with only 17 years left till his death when the era of modern quantum mechanics started with the invention of wave mechanics. It's a lifetime apart.

Some discoveries were made during that period that are of course still relevant.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-25 09:32:17+00:00
All profit made by an employee is value invested by a business' owners and creditors extracted from it.

So what? You just seem to have found a perjorative way to describe work. If I pay someone to fix my tap the comfort I have now my taps work comes from me "extracting" value from the plumber?

And it's worse than that. Profit isn't just employee work. If I buy a robot to replace an employee, I might have more profit. And it's not just that work. It's also contracts with other suppliers, and risks, and debt to pay back, and decisions made, and agreements and relationships, and automation.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-04-25 09:32:31+00:00
I had a similar train of thought like the author has, but it happened while I was playing Expedition 33, which is a game made by former Ubisoft developers who decided to go indie, and made something that is really cool.

It made me realize that there's an innumerable amount of talented people out there, who are most definitely capable enough or willing to grow enough, that can produce something that makes you think that Ubisoft could have made it, because those people were always right there!

And if they weren't motivated enough to risk it all, because you're only starting from a mere idea, we would never have seen the fruits of their labor.

I'm not claiming that they're comparable with the greatest artists of our time but, the probability of someone out there becoming great will be silenced and squashed before it even has a chance to show up, either because they must conform to the job market to survive day to day, or because of office politics, or out of their own temperament avoiding risks. Especially if that risk is unemployment and homelessness.

As a fan of John Carmack, for example, I have to wonder if he would've ever hit the status he achieved if Doom wasn't this fun to play, or if he kept shipping monthly video games by mail instead. I'm not talking about whether he would be this intelligent or not, but whether he would be known.
by jdietrich | 2025-04-25 09:33:07+00:00
Essentially all manufacturers have that policy, because key replacement is a profit center for dealerships. Independent auto locksmiths depend on third-party programming tools and keys by companies like Autel and Xhorse. There's a constant game of cat-and-mouse, with manufacturers developing new immobilizer systems and the third-party companies reverse-engineering those systems. An auto locksmith with the right equipment should be able to copy a key, remote or keyless fob for any current US Toyota model.
by deze333 | 2025-04-25 09:34:40+00:00
What is Swift? Why Swift? A lot of discussion here touched this topic. My experience here after 10 years with Swift, starting from version 1. This is how I understood the language through the process of creating several apps (and web services) of non-trivial complexity.

Swift helps those who want to build end-user products.

Swift is the language for those who need to deliver end-user products, deliver fast and iterate often with minimal friction. You got to be a practical creator who needs to create and deploy to market fast. It's all about achievability of end result within modern world's time constraints. This is where it shines.

Swift may not fit more pure paradigms.

If you're after the pure art of programming then other languages may speak to you better.

In other words, Swift is extremely PRACTICAL – meaning create, deploy and earn living – and is squarely focused on people who need that. Naturally, not everybody will resonate with its core mission statement.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-04-25 09:34:54+00:00
At least in my personal experience, the combination of doing interesting things and talking about them in a somewhat public setting is something almost all really successful people do, and what few don't have a friend who is a hype man for them.

While there are charlatans that are all talk, it's extremely common among genuinely brilliant people to work too much and don't do enough talking about it. Talking about what you're doing opens doors. It connects you with other people. It gets you funded. Being brilliant in obscurity does not.

Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger won the nobel prize the same year. Both are fairly brilliant theoretical physicists and the prize was well deserved, but only one of them was charismatic and loved to talk about himself and what he was doing, and as a result, is much more of a household name even today.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-25 09:35:06+00:00
Nope. They just have more bodies to appeal to. Especially to western companies that already captured the US/EU.

Other factors include lower cost of living, cultural factors that reduce individualism, and a semblance of basic safety nets (the ones America sucks at and is actively trying to burn the remains of). Being poor in China (or Asia in general) looks nothing like being poor in the US.
by balfirevic | 2025-04-25 09:35:07+00:00
> What if you WANT to have a career or a job which is now done exclusively by AGI?

> If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.

Do you want to have a software developer career for the sake of having a software developer career (because you enjoy it), or are you worried about your livelihood?
by frizlab | 2025-04-25 09:35:46+00:00
You don’t have to be on the Apple ecosystem to use Swift. They have full Linux compatibility and an official (as is supported by the Swiftlang group, not even Apple, thought it’s more or less the same) VSCode extension.

They have a lot of server-side projects going on. They are also increasingly using Swift on the server themselves (not on macOS).

Finally, small nitpick, but it shows you don’t care, it’s written Xcode.
by Ukv | 2025-04-25 09:36:10+00:00
Of the signals used to indicate crawling is prohibited, robots.txt is probably the most effective; OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and CommonCrawl all claim to respect it. That often provokes a response of "well they're lying", but I've yet to actually find any cases of the IPs they use for crawling accessing content prohibited by robots.txt.

Newly proposed standards will probably take a while to catch on, if they ever do.

Not a lawyer, but I believe such measures could in theory become legally enforceable in the US without any new legislation if the fair use defense fails but an implied license defense (the reason you can cache/rehost copies of webpages that don't have a <noarchive> meta tag, as in Field v. Google Inc) succeeds.