MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zambyte | 2025-04-07 11:58:34+00:00
The lack of baggage is definitely a huge improvement, but I believe Zig also has this advantage over C. Rust and C++ also seem to encourage a similar style of programming (particularly newer C++), and so do Zig and C. The former encourages creating a library of types with inheritance, using syntactic sugar where applicable (ie operator overloading), and a functional style, whereas the latter limits the programmer to simple compound types without inheritance (manual, explicit dispatching), obvious syntax, and an imperative style.

Both seem to have their place in the ecosystem to me, but I'm really excited to see Zig mature.
by keyle | 2025-04-07 11:58:58+00:00
I spend maybe 5 mins a day tops on social media(1)...

I'm not particularly invested in Bluesky, but I found it to be the polar opposite of Twitter. It's like everyone who quit the twitter band wagon just went to the twitter clone, as a middle finger move. It's a ying and yang.

I'm still on Twitter, because some people just haven't moved on and I still find their content valid. I vomit a little if I happen to click the sidebar and I want to close my account nearly every visit. I honestly hang by a thread just because some accounts there don't offer an alternative (and Musk removed reading content unauthenticated).

I'm not particularly invested in Mastodon, but I must say that it is where I found the best value per minute. It feels like the natural follow up to Google+. I find it the most 'balanced' between Bluesky and Twitter.

[1] HN excluded, I spend many 5' sessions a day here...
by BozeWolf | 2025-04-07 11:59:17+00:00
I feel bad to say this, but it looks like it failed already to be non toxic. It at least is a lot less toxic than X. For now.

It is X vs BlueSky. It participates in the argument between two groups of people. It does not solve anything.

X is a lot worse, but with a growing number of users, a growing number of negativity will come. It starts on the political parts of the platform, but will trickle down to other parts as well.

By Bluesky being put away as a platform for 'lefties' on X and users on Bluesky saying "Go to your fascist platform X" to other users it essentially participates in dividing people. At least, on the political parts of the platform.

It confirms what an amazing job HN did in the last decade or more. Still a nice community, nice people and quality comments. Although some people will say it is in decline, it is still quite a nice and friendly community.

I still enjoy fintwit and like bluesky for energy related things.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-07 11:59:20+00:00
> That being said, I would not want this sentiment formalized in code guidelines :)

Surely. I'm all for code formatting standards as long as they're MY code formatting standards :-)

Ideally, I'd like the IDE to format the code to the user/programmer's style on open, but save the series of tokens to the code database in a formatting-agnostic fashion.

Then we could each have our own style but still have a consistent codebase.

And, I should add that my formatting conventions have gotten more extreme and persnickety over the years, and I now put spaces on both sides of my commas, because they're a separate token and are not a part of the expression on either side of it. I did this purely for readability, but I have NEVER seen anyone do that in all my decades on the internet reading code and working on large codebases. But I really like how spacing it out separates the expression information from the structural information.

It also helps me deal with my jettisoning code color formatting, as, as useful as I've found it in the past, I don't want to deal with having to import/set all that environmental stuff in new environments. So, I just use bland vi with no intelligence, pushing those UI bells and whistles out of it into my code formatting.

And, I fully endorse whatever it takes for you to deal with JS, as I have loathed it since it appeared on the scene, but that's just me being an old-school C guy.
by saghm | 2025-04-07 11:59:51+00:00
My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argument is that the main difference between then and now isn't companies fundamentally caring more about their employees, but improved safeguards for workers. Outside of those safeguards, sadly I'd find it more surprising if companies _didn't_ push to the absolute limit of what they could get away with rather than actually considering whether what they were doing was reasonable.
by ljm | 2025-04-07 11:59:55+00:00
I see it the same as serverless, which is almost-but-not-quite a backend in the same way that D1 is almost-but-not-quite a database.

Your persistent servers may have a larger fixed cost up-front, but you can save on engineering hours otherwise spent handling serverless foot-guns.

If you introduce a cartesian explosion of database queries on your persistent instance, it'll fairly quickly just crash and give you downtime. On your serverless version, it'll just keep going for as long as it can and you won't find out until an eye-watering bill lands in your inbox at the end of the month.

Hard downtime is not desirable, but that 10x initial cost can be dwarfed by an errant commit that leads to a practically endless execution loop on your API or DB.
by timhh | 2025-04-07 12:00:09+00:00
> We count about 40% of our security vulnerabilities to date to have been the direct result of us using C instead of a memory-safe language alternative. This is however a much lower number than the 60-70% that are commonly repeated, originating from a few big companies and projects. If this is because of a difference in counting or us actually having a lower amount of C problems, I cannot tell.

When I counted I got about 55% which is pretty close to the standard 2/3.

https://blog.timhutt.co.uk/curl-vulnerabilities-rust/
by mrweasel | 2025-04-07 12:01:07+00:00
We had a similar request for a sales team once: "If this fails we want an email".... Okay, but we never seen this fail, so you'll never get the email. As expected, they never got an email, because no failures. So instead they wanted an email every time the job ran (once every night), so they'd know that the job had failed, if they DIDN'T get the email. Only time that happened was because the email got trapped in a spamfilter I think.

There must be thousands of copies of that email sitting in inboxes say: Job X ran successfully @ 04:30.
by JohnDeHope | 2025-04-07 12:01:14+00:00
There's too much overtly political content on HN, and it trends towards liberal, anti-Trump, etc. I agree with it about half the time. But the other half of the time it's like some mainstream leftist media stream got randomly interspersed into HN. I have a ton of places to go to find out how awful the regime is, no matter if it's 2020 or 2024 or whatever. They're all equally awful. Please get them all out of HN!
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-07 12:01:25+00:00
Please enlighten me, what are objects in zig? As far as i know this is not a defined concept in the language, so I'm assuming you think that structs are objects because struct namespace functions can be called with a syntactic sugar that makes it look like an object in a language that has them.

Do you mean object like object file (to be linked)? Those don't have member functions as far as I know.
by viraptor | 2025-04-07 12:02:16+00:00
It's interesting to see, but I'm not sure what we should learn from this. It may be useful for multiagent coordination, but in direct interactions... no idea.

This one did make me laugh though: 'Claude 3.5 Sonnet 2024-10-22: "Adjusts seat with a confident yet approachable demeanor"' - an AI communicating to other AIs in a descriptive version of non-verbal behaviour is hilarious.
by sebastianz | 2025-04-07 12:02:38+00:00
> A market without advertising isn't a level playing field, but a near-unbreakable oligopoly.

Why would it be an oligopoly any more than it is now? You go to a shop (in your city, or online), trust their curation, and buy something. If it's garbage, next time you will pick another shop or curator, or discuss with your friends / colleagues. Repeat until you find a place with satisfactory curation.

Why would this dynamic be bad? Why would I as a customer be better served by banners shoved in my face by the producers with the highest pockets?
by pidgeon_lover | 2025-04-07 12:03:46+00:00
I'm disappointed to learn of this editing in Standard Ebooks, having had the misfortune to buy a Barnes & Noble copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes that had a similar approach taken. Book looks lovely, but has an altered chapter order, Americanised spellings and lots of typos. There is a certain amount of editing needed to render the likes of Shakespeare and Samuel Pepys readable, as Middle/Old English is quite a different language, but slight variants from 150ish years ago, or dialects, or the correct spelling according to the Queen's English, add flavour and should not be altered.
by diggan | 2025-04-07 12:04:12+00:00
Since moderation of some sort is pretty essential on the open web today, you can either subscribe to the "group think" of the platform you're currently using (like X/Twitter today), or you could do it the Bluesky way, let people chose what blocklists to follow.

As someone who generally don't do blocklists/mutes/blocking much at all, I know what approach I prefer. I like that people have a choice at least, compared to the alternative approaches.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-07 12:04:24+00:00
> Why not just source batteries anywhere you have to, then start launching EV models just to get the production improvement curves started on the new tech

Why give money to direct competitors like BYD or CATL? The whole reason Japan has been hesitant on traditional li-ion batteries has been because they do not own the IP, and do not want to become dependent on a competitor - Japan and China have been in a trade war since 2011-2012 when the naval showdown happened, and Japan and South Korea were in a trade war from 2019 to 2022.

METI has spent tens of billions and decades working on and subsidizing research in domestic li-s battery tech, and Japanese companies have been waiting it out as a result.

> Japan cannot afford to begin this process in 2028

They can. EV sales remain a minor fraction of the overwhelming majority of automotive sales globally.

And because the entire supply chain and IP for li-s batteries is being built out in Japan and the US, it means that Japanese battery firms like Idemetsu Kosan and Japanese automotive firms are in a unique position to become the dominant supplier.

Much of the capex for re-tooling for this already happened in the 2021-2023 period - Honda, Toyota, and Nissan's IRA benefits were directly tied to this expansion, and all these firms spent billions of their own capital expanding capacity on the assumption that they can begin production by 2028.
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-07 12:04:58+00:00
"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company"

You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that.

Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical.

Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. If engineering is not a commodity, they fear being called out for not being in touch with the grounded reality of the business, and fear the unpredictability this entails for their own operation.

So they will tend to treat engineering like a commodity, generic and interchangable at will, and even deliberatly not recognize differential contribution by engineers to the company's success.

This is also why once non-technical management has consolidated, rising from engineering into management will become very difficult, often requiring you deny your technical competences.
by anthk | 2025-04-07 12:05:04+00:00
Neither I am a sole Unix user; I have Risc OS open (Apache 2.0?) on an RPI to experiment something else beyond Unix/C.

But Windows it's too heavyweight, from 8 it has been a disaster. And the NT kernel+explorer can be really slim (look at ReactOS, or XP, or a debloated W7).

The problem it's that Apple and MS (and RedHat) are just selling shiny turds wasting tons of cycles to do trivial tasks.

Worse, you can't slim down your install so it behaves like a sane system for 1GB of RAM.

I can watch 720p@30FPS videos under a n270 netbook with MPV. Something even native players for WXP can't do with low level direct draw calls well enough.

The Windows > XP philosophy among RedHat and Apple it's: let bloat and crap out our OSes with unnecesary services and XML crap (and interpreted languages such as JS and C#) for the desktop until hardware vendors idolize US so the average user has to buy new crap to do the same task ever and ever.

Security? Why the fuck does Gnome 3 need JS at first? Where's Vala, where it could shine here and Mutter could get a big boost and memory leaks could be a thing of the past?
Ask HN: How many people are using OpenAI vs. self deployed models?
by asim | 2025-04-07 12:05:19+00:00
Curious to know how many people make use of OpenAI versus self deployed local models like say Gemma 2 or similar. I have a project that was using OpenAI but I hit some sort of request limit and I'm a bit jaded by that and my experiences with cloud costs over the years. I feel like Gemma 2 might serve my purpose well enough since I've already indexed the content and need it for RAG plus some summarisation. So curious to hear what others are doing.
by colejohnson66 | 2025-04-07 12:05:38+00:00
S̶o̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶u̶i̶t̶i̶v̶e̶?̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶r̶n̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶"̶s̶i̶m̶p̶l̶e̶"̶.̶
by freen | 2025-04-07 12:05:51+00:00
Not the governments job to address exogenous threats that could negatively impact the health and wellbeing of every American?

Are you saying the government shouldn’t have a military either?

What, pray tell, is the governments job?

By the by, avarice and cowardice ARE values. Very few people outright say “I’m a coward”, or “my wealth is more important than your life”.

Instead, when faced with a difficult choice, say for instance, have more personal disposable income or lessen the suffering of others, those values are often expressed more euphemistically, and when even that is unpalatable, then the old “it’s wasteful and inefficient” argument comes into play.

You’ll note that those who argue “waste and inefficiency!” never seem to actually attempt to address the problem that money was “wasted” trying to address. (If they did, they’d soon discover why it’s so hard, complicated, and expensive to try to actually address social issues, which is what folks who actually care about governance have known all along.)

That’s because generally speaking the “the government is wasteful and inefficient” people’s real values are greed, not frugality.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-07 12:06:41+00:00
Now we're also getting into the topic of "what is waste". Because the majority of the books that are opened are rehashes of the same murder mystery over and over and over.

I'd guess that 75% of all new books sold here are variations on "Someone is murdered in a brutal fashion. A old drunken cop from somewhere in Scandinavia is assigned the case. He's helped by a young woman, who may be his daughter or who he'll a father daughter relationship to. They solve the case, maybe, the end. You just tweak the details a little, but it's the same bloody story over and over.

That seems like such a waste of paper in my mind.
by leereeves | 2025-04-07 12:07:21+00:00
> For many people, sure. I can always find exceptions to the rule. I am talking statistically. Fact of the matter is, the bottom 20% QoL has improved significantly, correct?

That's really a decision each person should make for themselves, and it was a big part of the reason Trump won the election. Most people don't think their QoL has improved.

Obviously the perspective here is different due to the success of the US software industry, but that industry only employs a tiny fraction of the population.
by vitus | 2025-04-07 12:07:48+00:00
Yeah, Bernie Sanders has consistently staked out a number of protectionist / populist positions, but he is not representative of the Democratic party as a whole.

In case you're wondering, the resolution in question failed with large margins in both parties (although it garnered a somewhat larger share of D votes -- 23% versus 17%).

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2005239

Outside of a few limited occurrences, from 1980 up to the early 2010s, both Republicans and Democrats generally supported free trade and lowering tariffs. (This may extend all the way back to 1934, but I haven't checked all the votes in Congress to see, for instance, if this sentiment extended beyond Eisenhower to the rest of his party in the 1950s.)
by dkersten | 2025-04-07 12:10:49+00:00
How can you build something in Jai before you have access to Jai?

I heard he only gives access to people who more out less guarantee they will use it relatively heavily, but how can I know of I will before I can scarily try it?

Basically I heard he only gives access if he thinks you will use it — not just so you can try it. That might work fine for people with enough time on their hands that they can say “I’ll do this full project in it, regardless of how it goes”, but I prefer to be able to tinker first to see if I find it suitable. For example, I’ve had projects where I though “ok I’m going to do this in Rust|Zig” and after trying for a few days realising that it’s not the route I want to take.

In any case, anyone can just download C3 and try it. You can’t just download Jai to try it. So my statement is still true.
by wyldfire | 2025-04-07 12:10:56+00:00
> Other than that it is very hard to tax profits generated in another country.

But it's easy to tax personal wealth. It's new and different to tax wealth instead of income but it's not totally unreasonable IMO.

EDIT: also, the highest income tax rate in the US has dropped significantly since the 1950s. Maybe that was what made America great then?
by gwd | 2025-04-07 12:11:05+00:00
Was interested to find that the Claudes did the most betraying, and were betrayed very little; somewhat surprising given its boy-scout exterior.

(Then again, apparently the president of the local Diplomacy Society attends my church; I discovered this when another friend whom I'd invited saw him, and quipped that he was surprised he hadn't been struck by lightning at the door.)

DeepSeek and Gemini 2.5 had both a low betrayer and betrayed rate.

o3-mini and DeepSeek had the highest number of first-place finishes, but were only in the upper quartile in the TrueSkill leaderboard; presumably because they played more risky strategies, that would either lead ot complete winning or early drop-out?

Also interesting that o1 was only way to sway the final jury a bit more than 50% of the time, while o3-mini managed 63% of the time.

Anyway, really cool stuff!
by Zak | 2025-04-07 12:11:16+00:00
> They won’t discuss their Raw format in detail

Can you share the reason for that?

It seems to me that long ago, camera companies thought they would charge money for their proprietary conversion software. It has been obvious for nearly as long that nobody is going to pay for it, and delayed compatibility with the software people actually want to use will only slow down sales of new models.

With that reasoning long-dead, is there some other competitive advantage they perceive to keeping details of the raw format secret?
by marcinzm | 2025-04-07 12:11:49+00:00
Startups aim to grow quickly.

Every single definition highlights that difference versus traditional small businesses. Trying to re-brand small businesses into "startups" for the cool name factor just seems silly to me. If you're making a sustainable small business then call it that. Don't call it a startup. You'll get more customers that way as well and more relevant business contacts.

People care about startups because of the high growth rate. Renaming a small business to a startup achieves as much as slapping a porsche logo onto a honda civic. The civic is a solid car but you won't make people'd heads turn with that logo on it or not.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-07 12:11:49+00:00
> By Bluesky being put away as a platform for 'lefties' on X and users on Bluesky saying "Go to your fascist platform X" to other users it essentially participates in dividing people. At least, on the political parts of the platform.

What's wrong with that? I mean, yes, lefties can be pretty scathing against their own - particularly the questions of Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia come to my mind as major dividers.

But even then: the death threats, "I wish you'd get raped by the n----s you invited to Germany, then you see the results of the great replacement yourself" and similarly inclined comments on Twitter are all but completely absent on Bluesky, and instead of feeding even the most obvious trolls, the general policy is to block them and move on - which is why the far-right is complaining so often about Bluesky being a "librul echo chamber". They just can't fathom that people might not be interested in interacting with them.
by mapt | 2025-04-07 12:11:51+00:00
Every interaction you have with a social network nudges you into one mode of interacting or other.

The biggest deviation from the norm with Twitter is the ideas of quote-tweeting and subtweeting, making a new post rather than replying to something you disagree with in the comments. The automatic signal boost this achieves incentivizes it strongly, and when the larger account is the quote-tweeting account, they are inclined to hear reply comments almost exclusively from people who support their critique. The structural decision to make this form of interaction easy and productive leads to very Twitter-specific sort of toxic groupthink.

"You, a Twitter nobody, just disagreed with someone on their misinterpretation of a well-documented point of history. In response, they made a new post to their 700k followers calling you a chickenshit know-nothing. Your followers heard nothing. 300 of their followers have piled on to elaborate on your faults."

This used to be limited to the sort of instant cancellation associated with "Central Park Karen," who IIRC went viral just after boarding a flight and was fired before she landed.
by tim333 | 2025-04-07 12:12:02+00:00
A lot of humans are similarly good at some stuff and bad at other things.

Looking up the math ability of the average American this is given as an example for the median (from https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/11/whats-the-latest-u-s-numer...):

>Review a motor vehicle logbook with columns for dates of trip, odometer readings and distance traveled; then calculate trip expenses at 35 cents a mile plus $40 a day.

Which is ok but easier than golf balls in a 747 and hugely easier than USAMO.

Another question you could try from the easy math end is: Someone calculated the tariff rate for a country as (trade deficit)/(total imports from the country). Explain why this is wrong.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-07 12:12:13+00:00
For short identifiers, I think you missed an important detail.

> Also related: (in particular local) identifiers and names should be short.

The general idea is that the more distant the identifier is, the more descriptive is should be. Because you don't have as much context, and it is also a hint: if you see a long, descriptive name, it is more likely to be global.

And descriptive doesn't mean long. You still need to try making your descriptive names as short as possible. For example "timeSinceMidnightInSeconds" can be shortened to "secondsSinceMidnight" without loss of information: seconds are a unit of time, no need to repeat it.