MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-11 21:23:29+00:00
Black_13 appears to be shadowbanned so I'm reproducing their comment here:

black_13 11 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | unvouch | favorite | on: Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for res...

The cynicism in these comments is telling, but misses crucial realities about Germany's capabilities and social achievements. Yes, Germany creates bureaucracies. Yes, Dorothee Bär's digital infrastructure record isn't impressive. And yes, German bureaucracy can be stifling. But this myopic focus on administrative inefficiency overlooks Germany's formidable strengths.

Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network while America has hollowed out its industrial base. German research institutions like Max Planck and Fraunhofer consistently produce breakthrough innovations in renewable energy, advanced materials, and chemical engineering. Their aerospace contributions through Airbus and DLR deliver real technological advances.

More importantly, Germany excels precisely where America falters. Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.

The results speak for themselves: Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4), face virtually no gun violence (2 deaths per million annually vs America's 120), and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing, healthcare, and education markets.

Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms. Their painful historical lessons have created institutional guardrails against authoritarianism that America increasingly lacks.

Let's be honest about who's posting these dismissive takes - primarily privileged tech workers disconnected from the material realities faced by average citizens. While you mock German bureaucracy from comfortable positions, their social systems deliver concrete benefits that many Americans can only dream of.

Germany's approach allows for longer, healthier lives with dramatically less precarity than what Americans experience. Their new ministry may face bureaucratic challenges, but it builds on foundations of technical excellence and social achievement that deserve genuine consideration rather than facile mockery.
by pasabagi | 2025-04-11 21:24:48+00:00
I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer. Germany is immensely proud of its history of creating standards - there's literally a place in berlin called DIN Platz. Germany is also very proud, and rightly so, in its history of mathematical innovation.

Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.
by dpc_01234 | 2025-04-11 21:25:42+00:00
This matches 100% my experience and thoughts.

I really enjoy HTMX and it's a blessing for my small-scale reactivity web interfaces, but I can immediately tell: "Well, this is hard to organize in a way that will scale with complexity well. It works great now, but I can tell where are the limits". And when I had to add alpine.js to do client-side reactivity, it immediately was obvious that I'd love to have both sides (backend and frontent) unified.

Still need more time opportunities to roll some stuff with datastar in it, but ATM I'm convinced datastar is the way to go.

For reference, my typical "web tech stack": Rust, axum, maud, datastar, redb.
by maeil | 2025-04-11 21:26:31+00:00
"The lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you."

> So the only correct thing to do is vote for Republicans?

How could this possibly be the conclusion to someone saying the Dems are what led us to Trump?
by Animats | 2025-04-11 21:26:31+00:00
If the US wants to get manufacturing back, the only areas that matter are electronics and, to a lesser extent, machinery. See this chart.[1] That's an achievable goal.

Here's a useful smartphone that could become big:

- Solid state battery that will last at least 5 years.

- 5 year full warranty.

- No connectors. Inductive charging only.

- Screen as unbreakable as possible.

- Sealed unit. No holes in case. Filled with inert gas at factory.

- Totally unmaintainable.

- US $199.95.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports/united-states
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-11 21:27:16+00:00
I must have missed that memo. Sure it's remarkably flexible and simultaneously accommodates other approaches, but most of the code I see in the wild leans fairly heavily into a functional style. I posted a CL link in an adjacent comment.

Here's an example that mixes in a decent amount of procedural code that I'd consider idiomatic. https://github.com/ghollisjr/cl-ana/blob/master/hdf-table/hd...
by ricardobeat | 2025-04-11 21:27:23+00:00
> if the outline is broken, the website you're viewing uses default styles and relies on behaviour that was removed in 2022

By "outline" in this context I'm referring to the computed hierarchy of heading elements in the content. Not the styles.

What I meant is that removing the default styles is an admission of defeat, that we are giving up on the whole idea of automatically leveled headings - it's now definitely not going to be implemented by any software.
by TuringTest | 2025-04-11 21:28:30+00:00
> how do you know that the code it just created actually does what you want it to

I believe that problem can be solved, and will be with the correct new tools.

I think a new type of "low-code" programming language will evolve tailored for domain experts that don't know coding, but understand how to guide an LLM.

The development environment should be a crossover between a project-management tool (Jira or Azure devops style) with literate programming: something that allows organising all the separate parts that compose the program in a way understandable by the human and the AI bot.

Online notebooks are a good first step in that direction, in special the "reactive" kind where the runtime logic does not depend on the order you change things in the page.
by calmoo | 2025-04-11 21:28:39+00:00
Both can be true, and what you described is, in my opinion, one of the primary causes of insane bureaucracy in Germany. This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions, turning a blind eye. This cultural inflexibility, traditionalism and risk-aversion all ties together into a paperwork and red-tape nigthmare.
by Riverheart | 2025-04-11 21:28:44+00:00
The collection of the training data is the “scooping up” I mentioned. I assume you acknowledge the training data doesn’t spontaneously burst out of the aether?

As for the model, it’s still creating deterministic, derivative works based off its inputs and the only thing that makes it random is the seed so it being a database of vectors is irrelevant.
by kjreact | 2025-04-11 21:28:48+00:00
> Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position.

This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells them to.
by Cyph0n | 2025-04-11 21:28:56+00:00
“According to internal communications reviewed by Drop Site, as recently as March, Cutler actively instructed employees of the company to search for and review content mentioning Ghassan Kanafani, an Arab novelist considered to be a pioneer of Palestinian literature.”

So this person is actively thinking about a Palestinian revolutionary that was assassinated by Mossad over half a century ago, and is using their position to push for internal censorship of him accordingly.

Imagine if a Palestinian employee at Meta suggested censoring mentions of past members of Haganah.
by tristor | 2025-04-11 21:29:10+00:00
I'm arguing because I have used /both/ Chrome and Firefox in parallel since the initial release of both pieces of software, including regularly benchmarking them. In the sum totality of the data I have seen, there have been many moments of back and forth where one was "better" than the other, but in the end they are roughly equivalent. When Chrome /first/ released, it had a huge performance advantage explicitly due to V8 and how heavy JS usage was on the web (which has only gotten heavier over time). After that advantage was mostly nullified by the rewrite of the JS engine in Firefox, the performance differential was around a maximum of 5-10% at any given time in one direction or another as both teams worked on improving performance.

> You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.

As mentioned, I have run them side by side daily for a decade+, including for many long stretches of times both the stable and nightly builds of both. I /still/ to this day, use both browsers every single day. I have not seen anything which would make me believe that one is more stable than the other, or that absent the performance gains on heavy JS sites (early SPAs), that one had a particular advantage in tab-count/memory footprint compared to the other.

Almost all the performance differences were deeply tied to the JS engine, and actually still are (but now wasm too).

> Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.

I might do that over the weekend for kicks and grins. I assure you, I am being honest and fairly objective.

It's funny how everyone is so certain I'm wrong, but provided no evidence, other than to point out things that are based /exactly/ on the one major technical win I acknowledged in my original comment and have completely ignored the very public benchmarking efforts that have gone on the entire lifecycle of Chrome.
by pxc | 2025-04-11 21:29:49+00:00
And with even a little bit of imagination, it's easy to think of other possible measures of degrees of reproducibility, e.g.:

• % of deployed systems which consist only of reproducibly built packages • % of commonly downloaded disk images (install media, live media, VM images, etc.) consist only of reproducibly built packages • total # of reproducibly built packages available • comparative measures of what NixOS is doing right like: of packages that are reproducibly built in some distros but not others, how many are built reproducibly in NixOS • binary bootstrap size (smaller is better, obviously)

It's really not difficult to think of meaningful ways that reproducibility of different distros might be compared, even quantitatively.
by crote | 2025-04-11 21:29:54+00:00
> Democrats, well-meaning as they are, are too consumed with doing right and not with actually being in a position to do right.

I'd argue the opposite, actually. The Democratic party is obsessed with staying in power, but unwilling to have any halfway-interesting policies because they fear missing out on lobbyist bribes or losing any chance of getting the independent/undecided/centrist vote. Every time the Republicans move to the right, the Democratic party does a small step to the right as well to "compromise".

The Democratic party isn't interested in doing the right thing, and as a result the left-wing voter base turns to complete apathy or wastes their vote on independent candidates. If the US had a functioning democracy, there would've been a new left-wing party ages ago.
by wesselbindt | 2025-04-11 21:30:06+00:00
I think there's an erroneous implicit assumption in your reasoning, namely that to be Zionist is equivalent to be Jewish, and to be anti-zionist is to be Muslim (otherwise, why would you be talking about Jew:Muslim ratios). The fact of the matter is that not every Zionist* is Jewish (in fact, the vast majority of Zionists are christian), and vice versa not every Jewish person is a Zionist (Jewish voice for peace, the ultra orthodox, etc).

But even beyond that, I think engaging in censorship to hide an ethnic cleansing is an affront to humanity.

* Here, I'm taking Zionism to mean to be in support of the way Israel has formed and continued to form in the past 77 or so years. I am aware that there are many different interpretations of Zionism (to illustrate the breadth; Noam Chomsky considered himself a Zionist), but this particular interpretation is the one that is relevant to this conversation.
by wwolffrec | 2025-04-11 21:30:53+00:00
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by throwanem | 2025-04-11 21:31:03+00:00
> Fuck off, you condescending prick.

Ah, here we go. I understand why you're using a fresh throwaway for this sort of thing, of course. Can't risk being seen for no better than you have to be, eh? But this at least - and, I strongly suspect, at last - is honest.

You can't abuse me in any way you're wise or sensible enough to imagine finding, so now you'll go mistreat someone inside the span of your arm's reach, blaming me all the while for your own infantile urge to do so. I wish you every bit as much joy of it as you deserve. And I hope they know your current Hacker News handle.
by googlryas | 2025-04-11 21:31:25+00:00
This is exactly why I want to see the posts, because I don't really trust 3rd parties to accurately classify "peaceful content in support of Palestine". It's possible Facebook is wrong. It's also possible that it's filled with content that is peaceful in only the most shallow, ignorant reading possible. e.g. (paraphrasing from my facebook feed last year, on a post which was not taken down): "I'm planning a celebration on October 7th in support of my Palestinian friends, who wants to join me :)"
by Daniel_Eth | 2025-04-11 21:31:32+00:00
AI companies are increasingly using AI systems to accelerate AI R&D. Today’s AI systems help researchers write code, analyze research papers, and generate training data. Future systems could be significantly more capable – potentially automating the entire AI development cycle from formulating research questions and designing experiments to implementing, testing, and refining new AI systems. We argue that such systems could trigger a runaway feedback loop in which they quickly develop more advanced AI, which itself speeds up the development of even more advanced AI, resulting in extremely fast AI progress, even without the need for additional computer chips. Empirical evidence on the rate at which AI research efforts improve AI algorithms suggests that this positive feedback loop could overcome diminishing returns to continued AI research efforts. We evaluate two additional bottlenecks to rapid progress: training AI systems from scratch takes months, and improving AI algorithms often requires computationally expensive experiments. However, we find that there are possible workarounds that could enable a runaway feedback loop nonetheless.
by calmoo | 2025-04-11 21:31:47+00:00
I recently signed up for a simple prepaid phone plan in Germany (I have lived here for 2 years already, fully registered etc). I had to go through the full KYC process, after waiting over a week for a physical SIM card to be sent by post to me. After this, I wanted an eSIM (this was my original goal but this was not possible on initial signup).

I had to contact customer support to send me one... by post. They only activate and send eSIMs by mail. This will take another week.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-11 21:32:26+00:00
We actually have a rather recent government agency called "DigitalHub" for that, too, which has been quite successful at pushing open standards and open source. Then there's https://zendis.de/#produkte whose sole purpose is to replace non-EU closed-source software, for example by replacing Windows + Office with Linux and the custom desktop software suite https://opendesk.eu/
by Fripplebubby | 2025-04-11 21:32:58+00:00
> So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.

No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what to greenlight, but they don't. They use the judgment (and politics, and egos) of Hollywood studio executives (and often the same Hollywood execs that a few years ago were employed in "legacy" media). Although I will grant that they've been innovative in producing/distributing international content, this is really just globalization and labor arbitrage (it is cheaper produce content not in Hollywood, that's not news - they just spend the extra $$$ localizing international content to different global target distribution markets but again, this flow has happened forever, it's just typically been Hollywood -> localization -> foreign market rather than foreign production -> localization -> Anglophone market).

Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time - that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic - that's why strange and seemingly random media become big hits on Netflix while being largely ignored by the commentariat, and vice versa, why series with dedicated fanbases don't get renewed (the analytics tell you that, despite the apparent success, further investment will not improve user engagement with the platform by enough to be worth the spend).
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-11 21:32:58+00:00
> Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on.

"Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject, but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial information to infer probable reliability of said authorities, I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority.

In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the superficial notion of "language" that's often employed. "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and the kind of signification human language engages in is not merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a big difference between a distress call and expressing the proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter proposition requires five. While we can say there is something like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts. And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we can reason about the world. They are the seat of intentionality, not mere imagism.
by Chinjut | 2025-04-11 21:33:04+00:00
A lot of the commentary suggests that this motivation for e in terms of continuously compounded interest is introduced for misguidedly contrived pedagogical reasons. But this is historically the way e was first discovered. e was first discovered precisely through Jacob Bernoulli wanting to understand continuously compounded interest.

Of course, the arithmetic laws of exponential growth of money are exactly the same as the arithmetic laws of exponential growth of anything else. And there is no reason that, just because a topic is historically discovered in some fashion, that must be the way it is taught, or even is a good way to teach it.

But it's not some made up conceit by teachers to connect e and continuously compounded interest. That is historically how e came to be investigated.
by dkersten | 2025-04-11 21:33:11+00:00
I’m not even sure that’s entirely true either though. By the end of the PS3 generation, people had gotten to grips with it and were pushing it far further than first assumed possible. If you watch the GDC talks, it seemed to me that people were happy enough with it by that point (relatively speaking at least) and were able to squeeze quite a bit of performance out of it. It seems that it was hated for the first while of its life because developers hadn’t settled on a good model for programming it but by the end task based concurrency like we have now started to gain popularity (eg see the naughty dog engine talk).

Is cell really so different from computer shaders with something like Vulkan? I feel if a performance-competitive cell were made today, it might not receive so much hate, as people today are more prepared for its flavour of programming. Nowadays we have 8 to 16 cores, more on P/E setups, vastly more on workstation/server setups, and we have gpu’s and low level gpu APIs. Cell came out in a time when dual core was the norm and engines still did multi threading by having a graphics thread and a logic thread.
by geophile | 2025-04-11 21:33:29+00:00
In 2003 I joined a startup building a horizontally scalable archive. You could add nodes to add capacity for storing data and metadata, and the system could tolerate up to a configured number of failures and carry on without loss of data or service. (This was not a general-purpose file system, it was for write-once/read-many objects.)

We built the system in Java and C. The distribution layer was done completely in Java. It was only after the system was done that I discovered Erlang. I REALLY wish I had known about it earlier. Erlang solved so many of the problems we had to solve by ourselves.