MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-04-13 17:25:03+00:00
It feels like you're mixing together a lot of ideas that don't really fit together very well. In terms of syntax, only four of the languages you describe as "more or less the same" in terms of how they look use "type before identifier" like you mention. On the other hand, four of them use the ML-style syntax of identifier-colon-type, one uses identifier before type with no colon, and the final one doesn't even have type annotations. At least four of them don't require semicolons either, and I'd argue that at least in Go, having semicolons at all would probably strike people as odd. You've also left out Python, which doesn't fit any of those syntax descriptions you gave and more popular than at least half of the ones you did include.

The timeline of 70s and 80s also doesn't really seem to fit with what you're saying either. Of the languages you mention either as "more or less the same" or "refreshingly new", the ones from either the 70s or 80s are C, C++, ML, Smalltalk, Pascal, and Smalltalk; all of the other "refreshingly new" ones are from either before or after those years. Common Lisp was from the 80s, but the syntax originated with LISP in the 50s, so if you're going to go with the most common variant, I'd argue you should also remove ML from the list and replace it with OCaml, which is from the 90s.

Even more significantly, it feels like you're comparing apples and oranges with the discussion of syntax at the beginning and then talking about bringing something new to the PL design space after. I'd guess that most people involved in PL design find syntax to be the least interesting aspect of it, and I think it's hard to argue that none of the languages you described as looking similar brought anything new to the PL design space.
by eptcyka | 2025-04-13 17:27:02+00:00
Coloring is a non-issue, context itself is. Newcomers find it unintuitive, and implementing a cancellable piece of work is incredibly cumbersome. One can only cancel a read/write to a channel, implementing cancellation implies a 3 line increase to every channel operation, cancelling blocking I/O defers to the catchphrase that utilises the name of the language itself.
by zokier | 2025-04-13 17:27:13+00:00
> even if you count ncurses, the tty stuff is way, way lighter than all the rendering code, componentry, and hierarchical dispatch stuff that goes into a typical GUI toolkit

But using tty/ncurses does not avoid the costs of GUI, your terminal emulator will still need to have that. So using terminal can only add additional cost, not reduce it.
by novia | 2025-04-13 17:27:57+00:00
Dual use!

(I looked up what dual use meant right after I posted this, and apparently it has military implications usually?)

(The thing I'm trying to point at here is that we have limited resources, and whenever we can use a single thing for more than one purpose, it's good.)

(Maybe the term I was looking for was dual-purpose? But even that doesn't really seem to map quite right.)
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-13 17:27:57+00:00
>But over the decades, most converged to the Algol-style (statements, curly braces, often using semicolons, type before identifier, etc.). Look at what we did to programming:

>- Java, C, C++, C#, Kotlin, Rust, Swift, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, ... → they look more or less the same

The upside being that if you come from C or Java you will fill at home with Go.
by dlivingston | 2025-04-13 17:28:05+00:00
I think it's the format combined with some particular type of demographic (I'm not entirely sure what that demographic is).

X, for example, doesn't have much of that. It has its own flavor of toxicity, which is in many ways worse, but not that particular flavor of toxic.

I also see it on Reddit in certain subreddits but not in others.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-04-13 17:30:13+00:00
While I started with Basic and and Turbo Pascal, I started to appreciate a lot the curly braces and semicolons because it makes a lot of sense for me (*). Therefore I see the convergence as a good thing, keeping the best parts of everything and improving with good parts from others.

* As opposed to BEGIN-END in SQL, indenting in Python or weirdness of Cobol in the 90s.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-13 17:30:27+00:00
I don't know enough about the republican party's campaign finances to know whether Trump controls most or all of it. Even if he does, though, it doesn't have to work that way.

Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games. The fact that they aren't willing to is a large part of why we're in this mess.

What we need are leaders that actually have principles they're willing to fight for, and ultimately that still rolls further down hill to the voters who have collectively created these incentives.

When Ron Paul was still in office lobbyists learned to not even bother talking to him. Agree or disagree with him, the man had strong views of how governments should work, was clear about those views to his electorate, and stood by them consistently. We need more of that.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-13 17:31:27+00:00
I'd love them to get around to attempting Ubik - it's a shame that Gondry abandoned his attempt.

In terms of ambiguity, surely Blade Runner is a prime example of ambiguity and the dichotomies between real/fake, light/dark, salvation/damnation, hunter/hunter etc. There's also the very significant portrayal of Roy Batty as both the villain and a Christ-like figure (e.g. nail in his hand, confronting his maker and both kissing and killing him).
by leptons | 2025-04-13 17:31:32+00:00
> laggy experience on a very powerful M1 Pro laptop

Apple's M series chips aren't really all that powerful, but they are very power efficient. There are far faster laptops out there than what Apple offers, though they do consume more power. My AMD-based laptop outperforms the M1 Pro by a wide margin, though it is a power hog. I had no problem viewing the Unkey website. If you're using Safari, that may also be a problem, because Safari honestly sucks.
by tekacs | 2025-04-13 17:32:39+00:00
So... I know that people frame these sorts of things as if it's some kind of quantization conspiracy, but as someone who started using Claude Code the _moment_ that it came out, it felt particularly strong. Then, it feels like they... tweaked something, whether in CC or Sonnet 3.7 and it went a little downhill. It's still very impressive, but something was lost.

I've found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be extremely impressive and much more able to run in an extended fashion by itself, although I've found very high variability in how well 'agent mode' works between different editors. Cursor has been very very weak in this regard for me, with Windsurf working a little better. Claude Code is excellent, but at the moment does feel let down by the model.

I've been using Aider with Gemini 2.5 Pro and found that it's very much able to 'just go' by itself. I shipped a mode for Aider that lets it do so (sibling comment here) and I've had it do some huge things that run for an hour or more, but assuredly it does get stuck and act stupidly on other tasks as well.

My point, more than anything, is that... I'd try different editors and different (stronger) models and see - and that small tweaks to prompt and tooling are making a big difference to these tools' effectiveness right now. Also, different models seem to excel at different problems, so switching models is often a good choice.
by jingkai_he | 2025-04-13 17:32:42+00:00
Hi, I am the creator of opsmate. Here are some interesting use cases of opsmate:

* write prometheus query for you - https://asciinema.org/a/715257

* troubleshoot a kubernetes production issue - https://asciinema.org/a/fNsUcClB2X1hupC8pY3Aatag1

* troubleshoot a remote vm that doesn't have opsmate installed - https://asciinema.org/a/715281

* analyse your database schema - https://asciinema.org/a/3FNuT7JdySxnAM29GUdXuqw6L
by packetlost | 2025-04-13 17:32:42+00:00
Bugs and performance mostly. The elusive database refactor might bring me back but we'll see.

I definitely have a preference for outliner, flat zk style, but I'm able to get the majority of the benefit from Obsidian while having access to a stronger ecosystem of plugins and first class publishing and syncing support. Meanwhile Logseq seems to have lost a lot of steam.
by doug_durham | 2025-04-13 17:32:43+00:00
I agree with you that traditionally that is the bottleneck. Think about why poor specifications are a problem. It's a problem because software is so costly and time consuming to create. Many times the stakeholders don't know that something isn't right until they can actually use it. What if it takes 50% less time to create code? Code becomes less precious. Throwing away failed ideas isn't as big an issue. Of course it is trivially easy to think of cases where this could also lead to never shipping your code.
by catlover76 | 2025-04-13 17:32:43+00:00
> almost no one uses a debugger, yet everyone, including me, goes deep into the mines, debugging with their printf pickaxe and console.log lantern, everyday, getting frustrated over it and losing everyone’s precious time, which would be better spent:

I use an actual debugger all the time, and so do many other engineers I have worked with (though a surprising number do constrain themselves to print debugging only)
by rjinman | 2025-04-13 17:33:05+00:00
I wrote a game of Tetris in JavaScript with SVG many years ago. It had nice graphics and was smoothly animated. I hadn’t heard of anyone else using SVG like that at the time.

I also made a game called Pro Office Calculator (available on Steam), which includes a Doom-style 3D engine for which I used Inkscape as my map editor. Here’s an example of a map: https://github.com/robjinman/pro_office_calc/blob/develop/da...
by arghwhat | 2025-04-13 17:34:30+00:00
You are comparing the max loaded weight of the polo with the unloaded weight of a dolphin.

VW Polo Mk6 is 1751mm wide, 1461mm tall, 4067mm long and has an unloaded curb weight of 1105 kg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Polo_Mk6

The BYD Dolphin 2025 60kWh is 1770mm wide, 1570mm tall, 4290mm long, and has an unloaded curb weight of 1658 kg. https://bydautomotive.com.au/brochures/BYD-DOLPHIN-2025.pdf.

The VW Golf Mk8 might be a better comparison with an unloaded curb weight of 1255 kg, which reduces the gap from 543kg to 403kg.

(Note that for the gasoline and diesel cars, lighter trims give longer range, whereas it is opposite for electric cars, and that a fully loaded 45L tank of a polo weighs less than 40kg, especially if gasoline)
by J_Shelby_J | 2025-04-13 17:34:51+00:00
That makes me feel better about spending so much time implementing this balanced text chunker last year. https://github.com/ShelbyJenkins/llm_utils

It splits an input text into equal sized chunks using DFS and parallelization (rayon) to do so relatively quickly.

However, the goal for me is to use a n LLM to split text by topic. I’m thinking I will implement it as an API saas service on top of it being OSS. Do you think it’s a viable business? You send a library of text, and receive a library of single topic context chunks as output.
by pizzadog | 2025-04-13 17:36:12+00:00
This is a huge point I think. I live in metro Seattle as well. I've lived in a few other American cities in my life, all bigger than Seattle, but I've never felt further away from the rest of a city than I have living here. The city is just downright terrible to navigate and the normal kind of urban sprawl that gives a city its "heart" is totally choked by the terrain. I've lived in places where I wouldn't blink at a 30 minute walk to and from a friend's house or a bar, but in Seattle that almost inevitably means hiking up at 45 degree incline for half of the route. Genuinely I don't know what could be done to solve this aside from saturating the city with transit options, but it's in the back of my head whenever I hear people complaining about problems around here. "Why is the traffic so bad?" "Why is housing so expensive?" "Why is everyone sad?" It's because the topography of the city looks like a fucking rollercoaster.
by rudedogg | 2025-04-13 17:36:41+00:00
I always wonder how the licensing works with stuff like this.

Say I create a logo with one of these fonts, and immediately cancel afterword. Do I get to continue using the logo? Or is my license to the font technically revoked?

Also, font licensing elsewhere sucks for making native applications. They have this bizarre price structure where for web it's cheap, but if you want to embed it in an App it's 10x the price. It bums me out because occasionally I'd like to use/buy fonts for projects but they're out of reach. I took the first google result to test this real quick, "Web" or "Desktop" usage is $78, but "App" is $1,326 (https://www.myfonts.com/products/astros-package-83387/licens...).

And I guess they've moved to doing subscriptions for all licenses there too.. so I guess I'll never be buying a font again. Maybe that was the answer all along https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-13 17:37:16+00:00
I don't think many working physicists pay attention to her, she's turned herself into more of a "pop sci" icon. The problem I think is that she frequently strays far outside of her realm of expertise without the humility required, not unlike Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku.

If you find that sort of thing entertaining then there's no shame in it, just realize that expertise is generally narrow, non-transferable, and perishable.
by vuciv | 2025-04-13 17:37:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m excited to share golf.vim, a Vim plugin that delivers daily editing challenges right inside your editor—like a crossover between VimGolf and Wordle. Each day (or on-demand by difficulty), you get a short puzzle where you aim to match a target text in the fewest keystrokes possible. Once you succeed, your strokes and time are submitted to a leaderboard, where you can compare your scores (Eagle, Birdie, Bogey, etc.) with others.

Key Highlights:

- Daily Challenges: Automatically fetch a fresh puzzle each day, or select challenges by difficulty, date, or tag.

- Leaderboards: After completing each puzzle, you will see the top 5 shortest keylogs from start to puzzle completion.

- Scoring: Each puzzle has a par; your final result could be an Eagle, Birdie, Par, Bogey, or worse.

- Built in Public: The community suggested extra commands like :Golf easy and more flexible scoreboard displays, and helped shape the MVP.

Repo: https://github.com/vuciv/golf.vim

Check out the README for setup instructions, screenshots, and details. I’d love your feedback—especially if you have challenge ideas or feature suggestions. Enjoy, and happy golfing!
by tehjoker | 2025-04-13 17:37:47+00:00
In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks. You have to call everything a "dictatorship". You are (maybe not anymore soon?) allowed to publish things at the margins of society that few will read or watch, hence the claim of free speech within a wider propaganda system.

Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.
by arp242 | 2025-04-13 17:38:14+00:00
I have a machine with a N4500, and it's actually fine for web browsing in regular Firefox.

The main problem I experience with it are: 1) Go compile times on some projects, and 2) JS frontend builds.

The Go compiler is fairly fast, but there are some patterns that can make the compiler much slower, and the difference can be pretty dramatic.

I don't do that much frontend stuff and many projects are fine, but some projects are just a horse to build. At my last job it took at least ~5G of RAM and ~3 minutes on my i5-8350U (never tried on the N4500). This is a main reason I bought a new machine; otherwise I'd still be using the i5 (a second-hand x280 I got for ~€200 because the screen on the N4500 broke, although that has magically fixed itself in the meanwhile and now I have 3 laptops).
by Rochus | 2025-04-13 17:38:51+00:00
Interesting paper, thanks. The findings concerning C seem reasonable. I would add the very weak type checker and the silly syntax, of which the majority of people only use a fraction (many C constructs are surprising and not generally known) to the issue of the small Hamming distance from one valid syntax construct to another, not intended one. Though I doubt that (Common) Lisp is a valid alternative for the typical C use cases.
by jamestimmins | 2025-04-13 17:39:00+00:00
This seems like a common misunderstanding. Lots of SaaS have cheaper annual pricing. IIUC Adobe lets you get the cheaper annual pricing and then pay for it on a monthly basis. If you cancel early, you have to pay out the rest of your annual plan. This is no different than if you'd paid for it up front, and prevents people from signing up for the annual plan to get a cheaper monthly price and then canceling early.
by arthurtully | 2025-04-13 17:39:27+00:00
Step 1. Make a stock photos library for everyone to upload. Step 2. Use that stock photo library to train your AI without letting users opt out. You couldn't remove photos without accepting the licence. Step 3. Allow users to use AI generated art on said stock library, even further ignoring artists by regurgitating art from other models. Step 4. Force new licences to users that use any file as potential training data. Step 5. Act shocked when everyone is mad.
by timewizard | 2025-04-13 17:39:34+00:00
> “This type of initiative is always a plus. If someone has a cardiac arrest, the more people trained and defibrillators available, the better,”

I suspect there is a limit to this ideology. It's not an area where I'd expect more to automatically equal better. Moreover, if you want AEDs in residential areas, why not just install them there? Make it part of code for new constructions.

> “And for Amazon, it valorizes their image.”

At the expense of their employees. Do your delivery drivers get a pay bump? Do they get hazard pay? These scenarios can get pretty hairy and there's a decent chance they may end up watching someone die. Do they get time off? Counseling? Anything like what other first responders are expected to get?

> The program’s backers also speculated that Project Pulse could improve driver retention.

Managerial nonsense. They're trying to solve public perception problems of congestion and driver quality of life issues by having them run around with AEDs? This is pure corporate insanity.
by chrisweekly | 2025-04-13 17:40:28+00:00
There's definitely a lot to recommend w/ your approach, which actually overlaps a bit w/ my reasons for using Obsidian.

My obd vault is "a folder of markdown docs" (which retains the "future-proof, no lock-in" benefits you cited). But the excellent WYSIWYG UX (open files in Edit mode, w/ "Live Preview" enabled) is something I haven't seen replicated in any VSCode or Cursor extension/plugin. I also prefer a dedicated tool for note-taking and "PKM" (Personal Knowledge Management"), as a peer of my IDE(s) for coding. I get to use the best tool for the job, w/ no compromises. Switching to a different IDE for a given project (eg IntelliJ for wrangling Kotlin) doesn't disrupt my workflow, and having clear context boundaries (note-taking vs coding) is a personal preference.

YMMV, different strokes,.... I know some emacs org-mode fans out there will extoll the benefits of using "one tool to rule them all", which does sound compelling... (shrug).

I love that there are such a variety of quality tools and approaches -- and, I'm very happy with mine.
by thwarted | 2025-04-13 17:40:55+00:00
Editing and proofreading, of code and prose, are work themselves, which is often not appreciated enough to be recognized as work, and I think this is the basis for the perspective that if you can get the LLMs to do the coding/writing and all you need to do is just proof the result as if that's somehow easier because proofing is not the real work.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-13 17:42:25+00:00
I want to be careful about how I frame this, because I don't want to make it sound like Trump or AfD don't have agency and can't be held responsible for their own actions. But if you're curious what it is that enabled both cults, the answer is pretty clear: there's significant popular demand for harsh immigration restrictions, and in much of the West only crazy far-right parties are willing to listen to it. The Danish political establishment successfully defused the far right by moderating heavily on immigration, and I don't think it's too late for other countries to accomplish the same.
by duskwuff | 2025-04-13 17:42:28+00:00
On the other hand: having your standard string type limited to 255 characters - requiring a completely different set of functions to manipulate longer ones - is painful in its own way.

(You can avoid some of the pain by using a big-endian length, and converting immutable Str64K pointers to Str255 by taking a pointer to the second byte of the length. But that's a terrible hack.)
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-13 17:43:11+00:00
Disrupting global alignment creates risks and unpredictability. Especially when driven by a cult of personality. Things that had 1% probabilities in 2010 will have 25% probabilities on 2030.

Zeihan lives in a 1960 worldview - oceans are not a meaningful barrier now as space and nuclear technology proliferates.

Withdrawal from the world was stupid in 1920 and doubly so now. There’s a lot of magical thinking that humans who live in places that aren’t in North America lack the ability to think or plan.
by culebron21 | 2025-04-13 17:43:27+00:00
Question to Swedes: what were you child impressions of "Pettson och Findus"? I read it to children as an adult, and impressions are that it tells of the funny & sad sides of taking care of children, and I sympathize to Pettson, of course. I wonder how you saw it as children.

On topic: interesting read. I'd never think these stories had so much dark side to them.

I got all 9 stories in 3 books at the age of 11 and read most of them, and was very happy with the stories, never noticing any of the dread the article speaks about.

Especially the Midwinter story was fascinating - we lived not that North, but in cold winter mid-continent, and the story was like looking out watching for the first signs of the spring, that eventually always comes, but you shouldn't celebrate any of those too early -- when day temperature comes above 0 in March, you know it's going to be freezing in the evening. (Later I was stunned with foreigners in our city complain of this March weather, call it "winter" and be depressed!)

A few years ago someone on social networks posted her impressions from reading them out loud to children -- that indeed it's depressive.

So I guess, the conclusion is that people make opposite meanings and moods of the same events.
by marcusverus | 2025-04-13 17:43:27+00:00
You seem to have lost the thread of the argument. The original comment was

> no Americans, rich or poor, black or white, are starving. Frankly, we could all use a little more starving.

You responding by providing evidence that some people had difficulty, at least once per year, in putting food on the table. This in no way contradicts the original claim, as having difficulty doing a thing is not synonymous with being unable to do a thing.

> Here's collaborating trends for the same calendar year

This shows that people are getting food. As presented, this is not evidence that people are going hungry.

> I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?

If you want to contradict the claim that Americans aren't starving, you would want to provide evidence that Americans are starving.