MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yurishimo | 2025-04-29 05:30:29+00:00
Laravel. Massive batteries included ecosystem and the mental model for PHP programming fits the web so freaking good. Rails 8 tried to catch up by beginning to shape the first party queue story, while Laravel has been there for a decade and the tools have been vetted at scale.

For a skilled developer who knows any of the major MVC web frameworks, they’re all really productive, just in slightly different ways.
by cess11 | 2025-04-29 05:30:39+00:00
No. Anecdote, ἀνέκδοτον, is a story that points to some abstract idea, commonly having something to do with morals. The word means 'not given out'/'not-out-given'. Data is the plural of datum, and arrives in english not from greek, but from latin. The root is however the same as in anecdote, and datum means 'given'. Saying that 'not-given' and 'collection of givens' is the same is clearly nonsensical.

A datum has a value and a context in which it was 'given'. What you mean by "points" eludes me, maybe you could elaborate.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-04-29 05:30:44+00:00
Researchers found that factors such as higher consumption of champagne and white wine, increased fruit intake, along with maintaining a positive mood, weight management, blood pressure control and improved education, may serve as important protective factors. They concluded that between 40% and 63% of sudden cardiac arrest cases could be avoidable when looking at all 56 risk factors. Their findings were published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Right, champagne alone. Or getting a PhD.
by tikotus | 2025-04-29 05:32:01+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to go through this. The hint should be clarified. It means "somewhere to the left", so on the same row to the left. It is either Freya or Gary since they are both to the left og Harold, and common neighbors of Barb and Cheryl. You have no way of knowing which one yet. This will be clarified in future puzzles.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-29 05:32:19+00:00
This is not a convincing argument for C. None of this matches my experience across many companies. In particular, the specific things you cite — excessive dynamic memory usage, exceptions, bloat — are typically only raised by people who don’t actually use C++ in the kinds of serious applications where C++ is the tool of choice. Sure, you could write C++ the way you describe but that is just poor code. You can do that in any language.

For example, exceptions have been explicitly disabled on every C++ code base I’ve ever worked on, whether FAANG or a smaller industrial company. It isn’t compatible with some idiomatic high-performance software architectures so it would be weird to even turn it on. C++ allows you to strip all bloat at compile-time and provides tools to make it easy in a way that C could only dream of, a standard metaprogramming optimization. Excessive dynamic allocation isn’t a thing in real code bases unless you are naive. It is idiomatic for many C++ code bases to never do any dynamic allocation at runtime, never mind “excessive”.

C++ has many weaknesses. You are failing to identify any that a serious C++ practitioner would recognize as valid. In all of this you also failed to make an argument for why anyone should use C. It isn’t like C++ can’t use C code.
by simonw | 2025-04-29 05:32:25+00:00
I hadn't heard that, but it would certainly explain why the model made a mess of this task.

Tried it again like this, using a regular prompt rather than a system prompt (with the https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news plugin for the hn: prefix):

llm -f hn:43825900 \ 'Summarize the themes of the opinions expressed here. For each theme, output a markdown header. Include direct "quotations" (with author attribution) where appropriate. You MUST quote directly from users when crediting them, with double quotes. Fix HTML entities. Output markdown. Go long. Include a section of quotes that illustrate opinions uncommon in the rest of the piece' \ -m qwen3:32b

This worked much better! https://gist.github.com/simonw/3b7dbb2432814ebc8615304756395...
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-29 05:34:18+00:00
Without structural assumptions, there is no necessity - only observed regularity. Necessity literally does not exist. You will never find it anywhere.

Hume figured this out quite a while ago and Kant had an interesting response to it. Think the lack of “necessity” is a problem? Try to find “time” or “space” in the data.

Data by itself is useless. It’s interesting to see peoples’ reaction to this.
by pests | 2025-04-29 05:34:29+00:00
Slightly OT, just to rant about input methods a bit.

This looks great. The lag in on screen keyboards have really been annoying me lately.

Youtube, Prime, Max all have issues on multiple devices (chromecast tv, ps5 - I guess semi on topic since it’s a game pad) where if you move the cursor too fast there a delay where the letter typed is after youve already moved and you type gibberish. I have to pause now on each letter before moving on to the next to ensure it registered correctly.
by _gmax0 | 2025-04-29 05:35:41+00:00
While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.

“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
by toast0 | 2025-04-29 05:36:02+00:00
What's the biggest thing that's improved? We have 4x the pixels, so we spend 4x the rendering time to draw everything with 4x as many pixels, when it works, and complain when it doesn't.

Would have been easier to stick with the pixel density we had.

Oh, and we have to wait a frame to see everything because of compositing that I still don't quite understand what it's supposed to do? Something something backing store?
by mzl | 2025-04-29 05:36:03+00:00
I tried Gemini Pro 2.5 with a lot of context: all the documentation for a system and several papers of interest, then asking it to use the system tom implement the proposed solution in the papers. The total context was over 500k words, so with usual estimates probably over 700k tokens.

The answers started out ok, but fairly quickly it seemed to loose track of the mid-stuff in the documentation, insisting on using one concept instead of another even when I explicitly told it not to. Full attention on 1M context is not really feasible (I don't believe that Google actually stores upwards of 1T of data just for my query), and there are various ways LLMs use selective attention. I'm not sure if Google has published anything on how they do it?
Sephera – A fast, YAML-configurable LOC analyzer that supports any language
by reimdev | 2025-04-29 05:36:11+00:00
Sephera is a native-speed, cross-platform line counter designed to be highly customizable. Unlike cloc or tokei, it supports:

Full YAML-based config, including defining new languages with regex

Separate global/user overrides, like .gitconfig style

Output in JSON, Markdown

Built-in updater command

Compiled to a portable binary with Nuitka (Python → native)

I built it because other tools were either fast but inflexible, or customizable but too slow. Sephera can analyze ~570MB of mixed-language source (40 langs) in ~30 seconds.

Released under GPLv3.
by kavalg | 2025-04-29 05:36:29+00:00
I am not sure that I understand your question correctly, but given more precise sunflower density estimation, the farmer has three options:

1. Plow the field and seed again (same or different variety or grain). This is a very crude measure, but it is sometimes the right thing to do, because as I said most of the expenses have not been realized yet (fertilizer, pesticide, fuel, payroll, paying rent for the land). It is also a time critical decision, because the window of opportunity for plowing and reseeding is not very wide.

2. Accept the lower yield if it is within a reasonable margin (e.g. comparable to the expenses to plow and reseed).

3. Do partial reseeding over the existing plants (without plowing). This is an emerging strategy with the proliferation of smart seeders, but it requires a precise seeding map to be created beforehand (i.e. based on the density estimate). As an advantage, you spare the expenses for seeds and plowing, however there is some disadvantage as well, due to the different rate of development of the newly seeded plants. Farmers usually need plants to be ready for harvest at the same time, otherwise the quality of the grains suffers and hence the selling price is lower.

In addition to these points, having precise density information after germination helps with the identification of problems, such as seeder malfunction (e.g. nozzles getting clogged), seed quality and meteo data (e.g. too much rain, low temperatures etc).
by xlii | 2025-04-29 05:37:43+00:00
> In some contexts the impact of shipping defects is very high (…)

I agree however I think that many overestimate how frequent those environments are. Almost everything can be updated (and that includes dumb appliances with hardware chips replaced by technician) and the only real question is what is your reliability vector.

At the end of the spectrum there’s Two Generals Problem and Space Bit Flip and so much complexity that’s mind blowing. I’ve seen on my own eyes industry wide screwups that were fixed with month full of phone calls and paper slips exchange, so it’s not like we (as humans) cannot live with unreliable systems.

I’ve been researching formal verification for a while and IMO they are not fit for general use through lack of ergonomics. I might have some ideas how to solve it but I rather try to put in a commercial box <insert dr evil meme>
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-29 05:38:45+00:00
I arrive 30 minutes before boarding, sail through security, and work on the internet on a plane. I don’t check a bag, either, so I’m out in twenty reliably enough that I can call a car when I deplane. Unless you live in San Francisco or LA, loyalty programmes probably mean you’ll default to taking a flight between cities.

(Saying this as someone who likes flying, loves trains and dislikes driving.)
by chii | 2025-04-29 05:38:57+00:00
it's very easy to imagine the scenario where this happens.

Those photos may have already been uploaded to google's web servers (from my understanding, this happens with google photos by default?), from which a preview has been generated. The permission is at the android app level, and is requested at some point to ensure that the permission model is respected from the POV of the user. I can imagine the permission request being out of sync!
by harrall | 2025-04-29 05:39:09+00:00
It’s cool that I kind of knew where each letter was going to be.

I actually liked typing on the YouTube app on the PS4 controller. Wasn’t super fast but was one of the fastest typing on the controller for me.

I find one limitation of typing speed is sometimes the input rate that a device picks up presses is so low. I can get 75 WPM on an iPhone but I can barely type my phone number into Target self-checkout because it picks up presses so slowly. Roku input is also really slow. Yet I can absolutely rip on my grocery store credit card keypad.
by Zanfa | 2025-04-29 05:39:27+00:00
> AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?

It will be a flop. Either it won't get implemented like the C-levels dreamed in the first place and will remain policy on paper only or it will be rolled back quietly once reality hits.

"AI-first" is the "blockchain" of 2025.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-04-29 05:40:09+00:00
I think you're not giving yourself enough credits and you're giving Rails too much.

I know a developer who followed a similar approach in PHP.

A relative of mine is running his company as a single dev in node.js + react.

My company runs on Python.

The key skill is being a good generalist willing and capable to do all the roles you need. Every tech stack can be automated for most small business needs, so that you can reduce the time spent on it.
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-29 05:40:52+00:00
> The AD ensures that the decryption will explode if you try to cut and paste chunks of the file into different positions.

Ah, that's the key bit of perspective. Just talking about "context" is so abstract. That's a case where you don't even need to transmit the AD, right? Do you ever have cases where the AD is a mix of transmitted and locally/"contextually" derived data?
by kortilla | 2025-04-29 05:40:58+00:00
>Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency

To what? Starlink is getting you to a major exchange in two direct shots. When I was testing it in North Dakota I was getting lower latency to Google and Cloudflare through Starlink than I was through local fiber providers (likely due to their long circuitous route to Minneapolis).
by findingMeaning | 2025-04-29 05:41:41+00:00
I come from a world where I faced power outage for 17 hours for weeks. Each day there would be power at random time of the day. Life is just bleak. And when I see these kind of posts, I sympathize with them. You can't do anything in that situation. Modern world itself is so complex, you are left to thoughts. If this continues for a month, most people will go insanse especially those who rely on technology to stay sane.

I hope this comes back ASAP.
by jshaivitz | 2025-04-29 05:41:56+00:00
Appreciate your feedback here. Don't want to get into a back and forth -- just want to note, at no point did I resist the moderator's action. To the contrary, when my posts were removed and they messaged me and asked I not post about the new meme subreddit anymore, I complied immediately, and offered clarification on my intent that I meant no disrespect, and would not post about it in their subreddit again. And I never did.
by 3036e4 | 2025-04-29 05:42:39+00:00
One of the few things I do bother to configure is my window manager, but only because it happens to be well designed and make it easy to store all configuration in my config git repo.

Too much software put host-specific stuff in settings files (like absolute paths) or just are not stable enough in general that it is worth trying to maintain a portable configuration.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-29 05:43:37+00:00
When I went through the E.D. for a kidney stone, I was admittedly having a huge agonizing wave of abdominal pain and it was visibly uncomfortable, causing me to writhe about and moan. Nonetheless, I was nonplussed when an injection of some sort was administered. Then, the nurse who did it hissed at me: "this is like an NSAID on Crack!" and I was just appalled that a HCP in her professional capacity would just refer to a "dangerous illegal" drug in order to explain how a legal one worked.

The pain went away in short order, likely because the stone itself had passed, and again I was sort of pissed at whatever treatments were being given, because the pain was so transitory, all I really needed was some reassurance that the worst would be over soon.

This has always haunted my conscience in regards to pain-relieving drugs: how to know they worked? how to know it was the drug effect and not a remission of pain itself? how to know when to stop taking them?! YOU CAN'T!!!

Many people seem to be more sensitive to their belief in a drug's properties than in the drug itself. Others trust the doctor, and therefore whatever the doctor prescribes is accepted transitively. I mistrust everything uniformly, and so eventually any medication-based therapy needs to cease, because they all suck!
by viraptor | 2025-04-29 05:43:39+00:00
That's cool, I haven't heard of this idea before. There's a lot of prediction magic possibility in many places. For example I've tried the swift key keyboard on Android for comparison with the Google one and it's so bad at swiping. Somehow gboard can guess almost every single word correctly, but swiftkey chose the wrong one almost every time. (I stuck with it for a month to make sure it's not just my familiarity)
by SR2Z | 2025-04-29 05:44:07+00:00
I mean, sure, but the objective truth is that we SHOULD fear and distrust human beings driving cars faster than about 10mph.

We're not good at it. It doesn't really fit our reaction times, it doesn't really fit our attention spans, and it keeps trading places with gun violence for the #1 acute condition (i.e excluding heart disease) that kills people.

The article could certainly have done a better job of pointing this out, but the unfortunate truth is that people still believe the exact opposite of the facts and insist that they should be allowed to drive fast and not be hassled over traffic laws.
by Yasuraka | 2025-04-29 05:44:52+00:00
The Rust of today wouldn't be chosen over the Go of a decade ago, it is fundamentally a bad fit, for similar reasons that the already mature C++ wasn't. Java (similar to C#) would've been viable mainly due to maturity and ecosystem effects, Kotlin/Native might be a contender in another half decade, sooner if the team were to shift priorities.

I say this not just for Kubernetes etc., but greenfield projects today as well.
by cess11 | 2025-04-29 05:45:37+00:00
I have trouble taking people that consider romance and intimacy a form of market gambling seriously.

Looking at their previous posts they also seem to not cook their own food, at least not a couple of years ago:

https://www.withentropy.com/blog/2023-10-24-its_impossible_t...

They also believed nature was "a well-defined system" that provided "rewards":

https://www.withentropy.com/blog/2025-04-13-a_banal_paradise...

But it seems that they have now started to open up to the idea that, at least, social realities might not be well-defined, which they approach through a series of contrived thought experiments.

While there sometimes might be wisdom to crowds, there commonly isn't. Concepts like 'groupthink', 'cult' and 'mass hysteria' hint at this. If you aren't part of any crowd you'll also be alone and quite vulnerable.
by mawww | 2025-04-29 05:46:30+00:00
C and C++ can be made to generate pretty much the same assembly, sure. I find it much easier to maintain a template function than a macro that expands to a function as you did in the B-Tree code, but reasonable people can disagree on that.

Abstractions can hide bloat for sure, but the lack of abstraction can also push coders towards suboptimal solutions. For example C code tends to use linked lists just because its easy to implement when a dynamic array such as std::vector would have been more performant.

Too much inlining can of course be a problem, the optimizer has loads of heuristics to decide if inlinining is worth it or not, and the programmer can always mark the function as `[[gnu::noinline]]` if necessary. It is not because C++ makes it possible for the sort comparator to be inlined that it will.

In my experience, exceptions have a slightly positive impact on codegen (compared to code that actually checks error return values, not code that ignores them) because there is no error checking on the happy path at all. The sad path is greatly slowed down though.

Having worked in highly performance sensitive code all of my career (video game engines and trading software), I would miss a lot of my toolbox if I limited myself to plain C and would expect to need much more effort to achieve the same result.
by talldan | 2025-04-29 05:46:37+00:00
It does solve the gameplay development use case too. Bevy encourages using lots of small 'systems' to build out logic. These are functions that can spawn entities or query for entities in the game world and modify them and there's also a way to schedule when these systems should run.

I don't think Bevy has a built-in way to integrate with other languages like Godot does, it's probably too early in the project's life for that to be on the roadmap.
by Seb-C | 2025-04-29 05:46:51+00:00
If you ask any high-functioning or late-diagnosed autistic person who knows about the topic, you can bet that he will tell you his family (parents and grand-parents included) shows the same signs of autism, but that they do not wish to aknowledge it or be diagnosed. These people will never be included in any proper statistics because they see themselves as "normal" or "just a little different", despite being widely known as "weird".

Previous generations didn't grow up with all the comfort that we have today, such as games, internet and technology, and thus didn't have as many ways to isolate themselves in more comfortable hobbies. Because of this, they could develop stronger masking skills, which helps them a bit more than current generations, but does not fix the problem and made the understanding of it more difficult.
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-29 05:47:33+00:00
Let’s be clear - the success is not because of Ruby on Rails.

You could build the same thing with nodes or python or golang or whatever.

There’s nothing special about rails, except that the developers speak like it’s special.

There’s nothing that can be quantified in any tangible way to indicate it’s actually better in any way. Rails has enthusiastic words, but it’s not actually better.
Show HN: Super Fast Multi-User Open Source LLM WebUI
by RamboRogers | 2025-04-29 05:47:51+00:00
It's a 20MB static binary, or docker container with integrated DB. Perfect to hacking/testing LLMs with built in SQLite DB for history, config, etc.

https://x.com/rogerscissp/status/1917092440068047334
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-29 05:48:09+00:00
The poster you are responding to is correct. Modern C++ has established idiomatic code practices that are widely used in industry. Imagining how someone could use legacy language features in the most naive possible way, contrary to industry practice, is not a good faith argument. You can do that with any programming language.

You are arguing against what the language was 30-40 years ago. The language has undergone two pretty fundamental revisions since then.
by spudlyo | 2025-04-29 05:48:36+00:00
Having enjoyable text to read/listen to that is just comprehensible enough to get you to keep working at it really a pleasurable way to learn a language. LLPSI is also great, and at times is a delightful read. I find myself also really enjoying Ørberg's student manual, in which he reveals (in English) all the finer points of the Grammar the text is trying to get you to internalize. It's amazing how much grammar you can just intuit by reading -- like I understood participles without explicitly realizing they had been introduced in Chapter 14.
by hi_hi | 2025-04-29 05:49:22+00:00
I'm currently building out an app using AdonisJS. Its billed as a Rails like experience but in node. https://adonisjs.com/

I did a comparison between Rails, Adonis and Fiber (a Go "framework") before settling on Adonis (mostly due to node ecosystem and type safety).

It's been excellent so far, and the creator has an excellent series of tutorial videos that can get you up to speed quickly https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=jf5hHU0KT3Q. The documentation is also good. LLMs can get tripped up by older versions which you need to look out for.
by bijant | 2025-04-29 05:49:27+00:00
@whatnow37373 — Three sentences and you’ve done what a semester with Kritik der reinen Vernunft couldn’t: made the Hume-vs-Kant standoff obvious. The idea that “necessity” is just the exhaust of our structural assumptions (and that data, naked, can’t even locate time or space) finally snapped into focus.

This is exactly the kind of epistemic lens-polishing that keeps me reloading HN.
by 3036e4 | 2025-04-29 05:50:06+00:00
I don't know vim well. Why is it not easy to just keep using the same settings?

The oldest parts of my emacs config go back at least 30 years and I have had it in a git repo for ~15. I keep my entire .emacs.d versioned, including all third-party packages I depend on (so no fetching of anything from the cloud).

Have had to do at most minimal changes when upgrading to newer versions and with some tiny amount of work the same config still works for emacs from around version 21 to 31 (but features are of course missing in older versions).