MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djha-skin | 2025-04-11 13:25:17+00:00
I agree with some statements OP makes but not others. Ultimately, I write in lisp because it's fun to write in Lisp due to its expressive power, ease of refactoring, and the Lisp Discord[1].

> Lisp is easier to remember,

I don't feel this way. I'm always consulting the HyperSpec or googling the function names. It's the same as any other dynamically typed language, such as Python, this way to me.

> has fewer limitations and hoops you have to jump through,

Lisp as a language has incredibly powerful features find nowhere else, but there are plenty of hoops. The CLOS truly feels like a superpower. That said, there is a huge dearth of libraries. So in that sense, there's usually lots of hoops to jump through to write an app. It's just I like jumping through them because I like writing code as a hobby. So fewer limitations, more hoops (supporting libraries I feel the need to write).

> has lower “friction” between my thoughts and my program,

Unfortunately I often think in Python or Bash because those are my day job languages, so there's often friction between how I think and what I need to write. Also AI is allegedly bad at lisp due to reduced training corpus. Copilot works, sorta.

> is easily customizable,

Yup, that's its defining feature. Easy to add to the language with macros. This can be very bad, but also very good, depending on its use. It can be very worth it both to implementer and user to add to the language as part of a library if documented well and done right, or it can make code hard to read or use. It must be used with care.

> and, frankly, more fun.

This is the true reason I actually use Lisp. I don't know why. I think it's because it's really fun to write it. There are no limitations. It's super expressive. The article goes into the substitution principle, and this makes it easy to refactor. It just feels good having a REPL that makes it easy to try new ideas and a syntax that makes refactoring a piece of cake. The Lisp Discord[1] has some of the best programmers on the planet in it, all easy to talk to, with many channels spanning a wide range of programming interests. It just feels good to do lisp.

1: https://discord.gg/HsxkkvQ
by behnamoh | 2025-04-11 13:25:58+00:00
> It's always hard to parse if people mean functional programming when bringing up Lisp. Common Lisp certainly is anything but a functional language. Sure, you have first order functions, but you in a way have that in pretty much all programming languages (including C!).

It's less about what the language "allows" you to do and more about how the ecosystem and libraries "encourage" you to do.
by damnitbuilds | 2025-04-11 13:26:13+00:00
A mention for Amazon search here. Which is a very slow horse and always has been, when even a horse that can walk would greatly benefit their customers.

I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only actually returning things with the search term or, work specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above 6TB.

But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
by ramses0 | 2025-04-11 13:26:35+00:00
"Lisp and Email" ... all languages grow a half-baked lisp, all programs expand to read email. Now: all content/social sites devolve to tik-tok?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
by thomassmith65 | 2025-04-11 13:26:45+00:00
Apple began its decline the instant Steve Jobs went on sick leave.

The sorry OS X Lion was the harbinger. From there, it has been one thing after another - FCP X, dongle-gate, rose gold, abandonment of the 4 quadrant system, flat design, yearly release schedule (and associated bugs), touch bar, no Mac Pro, then trash can Mac Pro... so many more.

The business press, and average consumer, hardly noticed the dip in product design. Apple raked in more money than ever, and had plenty of reputation to burn. Apple today is like a once-great movie studio that lives off sequels.

But Apple still has genius when it comes to fixing supply chain problems. They'll pull through this downturn. Even with the Trump tariffs, they'll be fine.
by bambax | 2025-04-11 13:27:15+00:00
If you want a faster horse, your best bet is to make it yourself.

For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files locally on a NAS.

I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or other from hosting providers.

I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.

And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I do.
by nyclounge | 2025-04-11 13:27:29+00:00
>But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement

That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.

Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.

How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!
by mantas | 2025-04-11 13:27:41+00:00
Better education or propaganda to brainwash people to keep producing? :) Funnily enough, USSR loved all sort of propaganda of the worker of the month, stachanovists and all that jazz :) Yet it didn't work. Maybe the real better education would be to teach people to enjoy peaceful idleness and live with less?

Ultimately people don't need that much to live. Once you remove consumerist desire to keep up with the jones, the only motivation is to get roof, food and some supplies to have fun with. Currently passing this threshold requires quite a bit of effort. Then there's relatively little extra effort to get somewhat nicer toys. Yes, some people will work extra hard and make €€€€, but vast majority of people ain't workaholics. If that base threshold was removed with UBI, then it'd be a massively different effort to get somewhat nicer toys. This would change the equation a lot. I've a feeling the jones might be in trouble then.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-04-11 13:28:11+00:00
When I was a kid, I made a bow using the instructions from Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton [1]. It was fun making it, but I didn't actually learn to use it properly.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13499/13499-h/13499-h.htm#2I...
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-11 13:28:16+00:00
This is an "old man shakes fist at clouds" opinion, but I think HD video is a huge waste of time/money for living room watching. Your eyes cannot effectively resolve that resolution at normal "couch" viewing distances for common TV sizes. This is kind of like how audio quality peaked at CDish quality. Anything better is largely inaudible.
by kelnos | 2025-04-11 13:28:33+00:00
Part of the problem specifically with Netflix is that they lost the rights to most of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that everyone wants to see, because the Disneys of the world set up their own streaming services and pulled their content from Netflix.

So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed.

Even the good stuff Netflix has (like say Black Mirror) isn't going to be enough to keep customers unless they get people watching some slop.
by MaxPock | 2025-04-11 13:28:44+00:00
Sure! Here's a more polished version:

"A reminder: Apple sells nearly 50 million iPhones(50 billion dollars)in China every year — and there’s no other market as lucrative to offset the loss.

As Jensen Huang aptly put it, the problem with China is that there’s no other China.

India is too poor and dysfunctional to offset loss of Chinese market.
by rayiner | 2025-04-11 13:29:04+00:00
> What about forest fires in the years measured? Hurricane activity? Humidity and wind patterns? What was the data like in Chicago vs Seattle vs Houston, what were the state and municipal policies?

Yeah, exactly! I’m not saying Biden caused air quality to get worse in 2023. That was probably the Canadian forest fires that year. My point is that the reporting on this is bullshit. Lots of outlets ran stories about the 5% increase from 2016 to 2018 in this air quality metric. But then they ignored the much bigger fluctuations that came after.

I’m not saying the opposite happened, my point is that you cant trust the media any farther than you can throw it.
by apercu | 2025-04-11 13:29:11+00:00
I get that, that's why you spend your time trying to find work, until you do have that nest egg. I spent my early 20's with multiple jobs (e.g., working as an LTE (Limited Term Employee) at the local University 30 hours a week and then working nights at a club 2.5 hours away Friday-Sunday - getting a couple hours of sleep Sunday night, driving back and going straight to my day job. I don't think I could do that now, but my LTE jobs were never that complicated (or high paying).
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-11 13:29:18+00:00
There is a flip side to this graph.

Every entertainment platform becomes video centric.

Every discussion platform becomes political.

As someone who prefers text and static images and doesn't like politics, this is really bothering me right now.

Adding to the list: image-sharing platforms, Instagram, Pinterest and Imgur, are also Tiktok now, specially if you use the apps instead of the website.

Tumblr and Flickr somehow have resisted Tiktok-fication so far.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-11 13:30:00+00:00
I'd run into problems before where I showed up at the desk at Planet Fitness, got told my cancellation would be forwarded to the manager and it wasn't.

When my evil twin made my situation at Planet Fitness untenable [1] "we" found the life hack of going to the desk with my tall and awkward looking son and an overweight and foul smelling friend which resulted in my not getting the runaround at all.

[1] fortunately the end of my evil twin
by tlogan | 2025-04-11 13:30:13+00:00
> But who knows - maybe that really

> is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that’s achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same.

That said, I don’t think there’s much room left for significant innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge continues to be content — whoever offers the best or most compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement metrics by a few percentage points, but they’re marginal compared to the impact of strong content.

At the end of the day, if there’s a great movie or series to watch, people will show up. If the content isn’t there, no amount of clever interface design will convince someone to spend 30 minutes on something they’re not actually interested in.
by mppm | 2025-04-11 13:30:43+00:00
> And most people on this planet are more or less happy with whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.

I think this is a debatable statement. It could be true, but I am increasingly convinced that enshittification, TikTokification, AIfication, etc. is proceeding despite what the average person wants. Average does not mean gaping, uninspired idiot. I think people in general do notice that everything is broken, short-lived, watered down and ad-ridden. But what to do? When every company does it, voting with your wallet becomes practically impossible.
by mubou | 2025-04-11 13:31:09+00:00
I'm not really understanding what this does specifically. It looks like it creates the filesystem on the host machine using chroot and then tarballs it?

Is there an advantage to that over combining layers and using cache mounts to avoid those redundant downloads?

A side-by-side comparison of dive's output would be helpful (https://github.com/wagoodman/dive).

Also can you clarify what you mean by "requiring full rebuilds of all previous steps"?
by ksec | 2025-04-11 13:31:22+00:00
>At the time, Apple’s data centers had about 50,000 GPUs that were more than five years old — far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of chips being bought at the time by A.I. leaders like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta, these people said.

I think people should give credit to Apple when they only have 50K GPU that were from 2018. I am surprised some of the AI function even worked at all.
by splitrocket | 2025-04-11 13:32:17+00:00
It will not be announced.

Fun fact: the current Republican administration was pushing a budget that substantially increased the federal deficit. The one that was finally approved is still a massive budget deficit increase.

Obama reduced the deficit by nearly half during his presidency, the current FY2025 budget has authorized a $1.9 trillion deficit (6.2% of GDP), with reconciliation instructions potentially allowing for a staggering $3.3-5.8 trillion in additional deficit increases over the next decade.

* Obama's final deficit (2017): $666 billion

* Current 2025 projected deficit: $1.9 trillion

This represents an increase of approximately $1.23 trillion, or about 185% higher than Obama's final deficit. The current deficit is nearly triple what it was at the end of the Obama administration.

Republicans have mastered the art of fiscal hypocrisy: campaigning against deficits to win elections, then ballooning them with tax cuts for the wealthy, only to leave Democrats with the thankless job of fiscal cleanup—for which voters reliably punish them at the polls.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-11 13:32:45+00:00
Optimistic scifi properties:

* The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (+ sequels)

* Monk & Robot by Becky Chambers (+ sequel)

* Most of, but not all of, Star Trek. This is getting infected with cynicism in some places, but still largely optimistic about a utopian future.

* The Martian by Andy Weir

* For All Mankind on Apple TV+

* Arrival movie

That's what I can think of since the 90s. Doubt it's a complete list, but really Becky Chambers is the optimistic voice in the domain, primarily since she focuses her works on interpersonal vs. galactic or societal dynamics.
by jaymzcampbell | 2025-04-11 13:32:47+00:00
I originally read this as "No, code is dead..." and thought here we go. I agree with the sentiment in this, and seems to line up with my experience with friends and colleagues of various persuasions. Certainly for anything React-like and front end heavy, people can scratch itches like never before. I still think it's heavily towards the "throwaway" and relatively small side of this, beyond that I think if you're not already somewhat familiar, you'll hit a brick wall.
by kibwen | 2025-04-11 13:32:56+00:00
> It turns out people didn’t want less code — they wanted a better way to write code.

Wanting "a better way to write code" is one thing. Finding a way to usefully fit LLMs into your workflow is another thing. "Vibe coding" is yet another thing, distinct from the first two. Vibe coding is to programming as throwing a water balloon full of paint at a canvas is to painting. It works just as long as you don't actually care about the result.
by LauraMedia | 2025-04-11 13:33:28+00:00
The problem with this little post is, that vibe coding just is not a "better" way to code. It strips development of something from all the fun developing, from circling around an idea, from figuring out something with your own brain, from trying and testing new stuff, from actually working as a developer...

If you genuinely "vibe-code 24/7", you don't develop software, you are translating business logic rules to a set of long explained commands and put it in a black box and hope it works...

Integrating AI in a meaningful way while keeping the same consistency and maintainability of a software project is hard, just throwing EVERYTHING at an LLM has not really worked out in the last few months to a year yet...
by wlesieutre | 2025-04-11 13:33:39+00:00
Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name.

There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports cars.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-11 13:33:41+00:00
> Just curious if you have ever felt that it's hard to demonstrate your value to the organization if you're a "glue" guy like that. (I have also worked in several small companies, but only as a partner or an executive.)

I'm probably the outlier who don't care too much about showing my value to my employer as long as they pay me. Somehow getting appreciation (whether true-hearted or not) is not a huge motivation to me. The reason I moved forward with this role was because miscommunication or zero-communication bogged down my work and created potential hazards in the maintenance phase. I'd like to remove those obstacles so I stepped forward to clean it up. I always protect myself by ccing everyone and try to reduce my responsibility in all of these -- because it is not clean cut who should do this communication type of work.

Maybe that's why I hate it.
by Ukv | 2025-04-11 13:34:37+00:00
> That would make sense for someone with all the relevant context about this story.

Earlier, for instance, you said "it sounds like he has done this before and refused to pay a fine". Could you not similarly say whether, based on the information we have now, it sounds to you as if the fine is reasonable?

My understanding of the context is that:

1. Nancy Faeser was photographed holding a sign saying "WE REMEMBER"

2. That picture was turned into a blank meme template to fill with text intended to be satirical/humorous (e.g: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnrNpDzXgAEsmtI.jpg - not actually humorous, but intended to be by its author)

3. Among those posting memes was David Bendels, who put "I hate freedom of speech!" (in black impact-font text) on the sign and posted it on X/Twitter

4. "Faeser was reportedly alerted to the post by the police, and subsequently filed a criminal complaint"

5. Bendels, who "has no prior criminal convictions", was initially ordered by the court to pay his daily income times 210

6. Bendels "filed an objection against the penalty, which automatically led to a trial"

7. The court considered the Bendels "made a deliberately false factual statement", and Bendels subsequently recieved a seven-month suspended prison sentence (plus a €1500 fine, and must "apologise in writing to Faeser")

> This case feels like the same thing -- it started with someone claiming that a journalist was jailed for sharing a meme, then I learned this is a complete distortion.

The original claim in this chain was:

> > A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying "I hate free speech".

Which still seems true to me. I don't think anyone here is a crackpot.

> And if I'm being honest, I'm only writing this reply because it doesn't feel good to read "assuming you can be intellectually honest" while engaging in what I assumed was a cordial exchange, so I can't help but defend myself -- which I think I'll stop now and just let go.

Sorry - that probably came across as more accusatory than I intended. Meant to be read more as reasoning for my belief that you could admit it seems disproportionate based on current information, as opposed to an accusation that you haven't been intellectually honest thus far.
by _kush | 2025-04-11 13:34:45+00:00
This is the cycle I keep seeing:

Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting.

Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions.

Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them.

So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused on the niche.
by jghn | 2025-04-11 13:34:58+00:00
Yes, the scale is a huge part of it. If some program has a $1mil budget and you were to tell me that 25% of it was wasted. Well who cares? $250k in the US budget is a rounding error on a rounding error.

But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget was waste? That's a big deal.

Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to focus on the small fries.
by barnabee | 2025-04-11 13:35:55+00:00
Having observed and been part of contracts involving these companies, it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.

It’s not usually the type of work, it’s the specific commercial model and mode of engagement with them that’s generally at fault, often aided and abetted by procurement processes.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-11 13:36:10+00:00
While I fully agree with you on the absence of good benchmarks and the growing LLM slop ...

"running a model trained in FP8 in 16bit, something noone would do, etc"

I did that because on the RTX 3090 - which can be a good bang per buck for inference - the FP8 support is nerfed at the driver level. So a kernel that upscales FP8 to FP16 inside SRAM, then does the matmul, then downscales to FP8 again can bring massive performance benefits on those consumer cards.

BTW, you can run a good DeepSeek3 quant on a single H200.
by baseballdork | 2025-04-11 13:36:24+00:00
> Banning them doesn’t get rid of them.

Check historical instances of gun bans. They don’t line up with this assertion.

> They will be emboldened by knowing that every potential victim they come across will be unarmed.

Check historical instances of gun bans. They don’t line up with this assertion.

> What is preventing a government from declaring marshal law and suspending elections as soon as the citizens are disarmed?

The same thing that prevents this in countries with gun bans.
by andsoitis | 2025-04-11 13:36:45+00:00
The brain turns the raw input from the eyes into the rich, layered visual experience we have of the world:

- basic features (color, brightness and contrast, edges and shapes, motion and direction)

- depth and spatial relationships

- recognition

- location and movement

- focus and attention

- prediction and filling in gaps

“Seeing” real world requires much more than simply seeing with one eye.
by jmholla | 2025-04-11 13:37:11+00:00
I'll quote the line more explicitly from this article:

> If nobody on the list accepts it, then as a last resort the kernel will attempt to treat it as a shell script without a shebang line.

They said that the kernel is responsible for invoking the shell. I honestly think this was just a brain fart and the author meant to put shell and not kernel. With both words flying around in your head, it's an easy mistake to make.

But, the again, the article goes on to talk about how it decides to even try that last step:

> Interesting side note: The kernel decides whether or not to try to parse a file as a shell script by whether or not it contains a line break in the first few hundred bytes — specifically if it contains a line break before the first zero byte. Thus a data file that just happens to have a "\n" near the top can produce some odd-looking error messages if you try to execute it.

So I don't know.