MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-09 12:33:03+00:00
>Gold isn't really wealth any more than paper money is.

Any scarce resource people want is worth very much. Be it gold or bitcoin.

You can't make gold (technically you can by transmuting elements but it will cost you more gold than the gold you will produce) but you can mine it with great cost.

Why do you think Amazon warehouse workers are payed less than Amazon coders? Because it's easier to find a warehouse worker than a coder.

What something is "worth" is dictated by the market. Which means it is dictated by the laws of supply and demand.

If we're both on a secluded island and you have 10 tons of gold and I have one hundred kilos of potatoes, my potatoes are worth more.

If we're both in NY City, my potatoes are almost worthless and you are incredibly rich.
by b112 | 2025-04-09 12:33:09+00:00
Do this, and then use Firefox's profiles to have weaker instances without these configs.

Why? Some sites implement then break this, sadly.

I have extremely locked down instances for banks and so on. On Linux I have an icon which lets me easily launch those extra profiles.

I also use user.js, which means I can just drop in changes, and write comments for each config line, and keep it version controlled too. Great for cloning to other devices too.
by karmakaze | 2025-04-09 12:33:47+00:00
Not to be snarky, but my definition of best programmers would balance these. I do spend more time than most understanding the depths of tech stacks and the breadth of potentially useful ones. At the same time I strive to make software that gets the job done with only the abstractions that pay off in a short to medium timeframe.

The trap avoid are those business impact folks that demonstrate an unwillingness to get better at actual programming, which ironically would increase their impact.

Edit: an example is fixing a problem without understanding its cause.
by myth_drannon | 2025-04-09 12:34:00+00:00
So true. Imagine the third and fourth generation to Holocaust survivors had to fight a newly emerged Nazi society. From talking to friends and relatives who were in Gaza, like a quarter of appartments/houses had Mein Kampf or Hitler's photos. And it's not like Palestinians are particularly well read people... Just Koran and Mein Kampf. Anyways, it's just bonkers. The orders were to burn those apartments.
by JadoJodo | 2025-04-09 12:35:47+00:00
I don’t mind partial news. What I _do_ mind is partial news that _masquerades_ as impartial news.

I will happily read a well written piece authored by someone with whom I may or may not disagree who is up front about their bend. But when you’re telling me that this policy is Donald Trump playing 4D chess or that Joe Biden is the sharpest he’s ever been, and follow it up with some variation of “I’m a[n unbiased] journalist”, I’m out.
by alkonaut | 2025-04-09 12:35:56+00:00
Re: panics: If you have a single long lived process that must do multiple short-lived things (web requests, say) and a panic in one of them MUST NOT take down the whole process, is that extremely difficult to pull off in Rust? I thought you could set up panic boundaries much like you would use catch-all exception handlers around e.g. each web request or similar, in other languages?
by roenxi | 2025-04-09 12:36:01+00:00
Is it weird to be consistent? The "federal government is inherently evil" is a principle that doesn't magically go away when small-government people get in to power.

The argument never was nor will be that [this thing] is bad when [the wrong people] do it; the argument is that [this thing] is bad. There isn't an expectation that a right wing government will somehow transcend the realities of government. The ideal social contract with the politicians - from the liberal part of the right wing - is that they do whatever it is that motivates them to take on the job and that is tolerated to some extent - but in exchange they shrink the size and scope of the government bureaucracy.

Obviously the ideal is a distant dream at this point, but the principle lingers. It is the only realistic option.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-09 12:36:06+00:00
Personally, I feel uncomfortable in any suit, not because of size or fit, but because I must be wary not to make it dirty at all, otherwise cleaning is a pita. Say you want to go for lunch with coworkers and someone orders spaghetti/pasta. Great ... I rather wear something simple, so there is no problem, if something unfortunate happens.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-09 12:36:15+00:00
A very thorough and interesting article -- probably the only thing you ever need read about Cyc. An example of where it shines is the way it carefully pinpoints Lenat contradicting himself on the question of converting English into Cyc's internal form -- Lenat claims that this could likely be done with NNs, but also that NNs are not capable of "common sense", which he himself (correctly) claims is necessary for language translation.

It's not without some flaws, though. The continual harping on how secretive Cyc was doesn't seem fair, given that (with the improbable exception of Meta) none of the currently leading NN-based LLMs have revealed their "source code" (weights) either. Also, I don't agree that Lenat's single-mindedness was a bad thing (I'm glad somebody explored this unpopular concept), nor even that he was necessarily wrong in believing that building a huge, curated fact base is a path to AGI -- the graph showing the exponential increase in the number of assertions in Cyc over time, despite roughly constant headcount, points towards the possibility that a critical threshold was nearby. In fact, the history of NNs is eerily similar: at first found to be promising, then abandoned, then -- against all prevailing wisdom at the time -- found to actually perform very well if you simply scaled them far more than you "should".
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-09 12:36:22+00:00
> Read the Reference

> Don’t Guess

I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference.

Why?

Often there's a lot of context in the reference that only makes sense once I've had some hands-on time with whatever the reference is describing.

This is especially the case when learning a new language or API: I'll go through a tutorial / quickstart; "guess" at making a change; and then go back and read the reference with a better understanding of the context.

BTW: This is why I like languages and IDEs that support things like intellisense. It's great to be able to see little bits of documentation show up in my IDE to help me in my "guess" stage of learning.
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-09 12:36:38+00:00
The thing is, Trump needs some exit ramp for this. He's incapable of admitting fault, and will keep going until something catastrophic happens - only to throw other under the bus.

China knows how to play him, he's an open book. Predictable as the clock.

But he can't end this himself, someone else has to pull that lever and take the blame - unfortunate as it is.
by aurizon | 2025-04-09 12:37:32+00:00
Yes, radiators for one, this insistence of evaporating water in dry areas = a fools game. Sure it costs more and needs sanitation/treatment of the trapped water but it is done in many places. Bad water management in evaporative towers has killed many, legionnaires disease, amoeba, flies/frogs/etc as well as the need for more and more water that needs replacement/ion exchange. Often the cheapest answer is not the best.
by riffraff | 2025-04-09 12:37:32+00:00
They also switched to the peculiar slanted round font ("wise sans"), and padded every page with whitespace so it has a much lower information density. The actual experience past login never had much so yeah it's not as much a change as the public branding.

But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how the blog looks[1] compared to the main site. Then again, de gustibus.

[0] https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look [1] https://wise.com/gb/blog/welcoming-libby-to-the-board
by b112 | 2025-04-09 12:37:37+00:00
"Business types" get a funny look on their face, when I explain to them that they're the domain expert I seek to eliminate.

In fact, we should try to LLM them away. I wonder, would LLMs then be promoted less?

Actually, I feel like executing this startup and pitching would be hilarious and therapeutic.

"How we will eliminate your job with LLMs, MBA."
by axegon_ | 2025-04-09 12:37:43+00:00
Qwant has been reasonably good with programming for me though or maybe I'm more commonly going straight to the documentation or source code, idk. My only complaint is that wikipedia tends to be pretty far down in the results for non-programming questions. LLMs(all of them) have been terrible with programming questions too. Imaginary APIs, leaks, code that outright breaks your data, you name it. Oh and don't get me started on optimization and performance(which is ultimately one of my main concerns on day to day basis). They are absolutely horrible.
by griffzhowl | 2025-04-09 12:37:47+00:00
> despite this not making any sense.

Most commentary, for and against, has been exclusively on the economics, and from that perspective it makes little to no sense. But I've seen suggestions in a couple of places that there are relevant "national security" motivations, or to put it bluntly, a greater freedom to wage war - or at least to put oneself in a position where the threat of it would be more realistic. Decoupling the US economy from the rest of the world, but especially from China, makes sense if the strategic cost-benefit analysis sees a significant potential for war with that country. It's a commonplace of international relations, and intuitively obvious, that the more integrated are the economies of two countries, the less likely they are to start wars with each other (no doubt there are exceptions, but as a rule...). That doesn't have to mean anything imminent or indicate concrete plans on the part of US, but it's plausibly a factor in the overall calculations.

In fact, the economic interdependence of the US and China had seemed to be a big reason to remain hopeful that there wouldn't be a war between them, among other reasons of course. Reducing this interdependence seems to destabilize this situation. The unfortunate fact is that I can't see the US military establishment just peacefully allowing China to become more militarily powerful than itself. I'd be happy to hear other perspectives on this, I'm far from an expert and haven't seen this angle discussed much.
by leereeves | 2025-04-09 12:39:24+00:00
I'm afraid the President's critics aren't always capable of critical reading. Consider:

> Ten-year Treasury yields have risen 39 basis points to 4.38% this week alone as prices tumble.

Ok, but the recent high point for 10-year yields was 4.79% on January 13. Why is this 4.38% alarming? And why is a brief intraday spike above 4.5% (in a foreign market) newsworthy? This reads like someone was looking for bad news to report.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/10_year_treasury_rate
by eptcyka | 2025-04-09 12:39:29+00:00
How does single ownership conflict with the idea that memory is a flat array of bytes?

Further, the borrow checker does not care about pointers, only references. With pointers, you are on your own. It is true that using pointers in Rust is more cumbersome than it could be. But it is much easier to compartmentalise the pointer parts into separate functions and expose references instead.

I agree that some paradigms and patterns are genuinely difficult to use, e.g. any intrusive data structure, but I do not see the contentious link between simple memory models and the borrow checker and the like.
by ericmay | 2025-04-09 12:39:34+00:00
It’s also a double gut punch for China, and its manufacturing subsidiaries in other countries.

China is extremely reliant on manufacturing exports. Their options such as finding new markets for these products is limited, because other countries want to maintain their industries too.

For example:

“BRUSSELS — The European Union on Tuesday reached out to Beijing for help in tracking a wave of Chinese imports that is expected to pour toward the EU after U.S. Donald Trump ramped up tariffs on China.

…

Should the diplomatic initiative with China fail, the EU would probably have to introduce “safeguard measures,” which are special duties intended block to sudden diverted trade flows.” [1]

Funny how it’s “safeguard measures” when the EU does it. Why would they need safeguard measures? They don’t want extremely cheap products? Anyway.

It’s kind of a judo move - using China’s excess manufacturing capacity against itself. The US can find other countries to manufacture goods over time and also manufacture them here. Prices will go up but it’s not the end of the world. Apple is going to serve 50% of the US market with Indian made iPhones, for example, where they face lower tariffs.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-pencils-in-china-summit-f...

[2] I should note I’m not necessarily for or against these tariff actions, but the ongoing rhetoric around them has been kind of annoying and one-sidedly anti-American.
by alkonaut | 2025-04-09 12:40:06+00:00
ChatGPT takes 5-10 seconds to respond. Until it's as fast as google, i'm not switching.

The question is: are you searching for answers to something, or are you searching for a site/article/journal/whatever in order to consume the actual content? If you are searching for a page/article/journal/ in order to find an answer, then the journal/article itself was just a detour, if the LLM could give you the answer and you could trust it. But if you were looking for the page/article itself, not some piece of information IN the article then ChatGPT can (at best) give you the same URL google did, but 100x slower?
by ido | 2025-04-09 12:40:32+00:00
The argument is war. If china and the us go to war tomorrow, the us is at an industrial disadvantage.

Does this mean you need to build “everything”? No, that would be inefficient (and probably unrealistic). But the more critical something is the “closer to home” (geopolitically speaking) it should be able to be sourced.

Buying semiconductor manufacturing equipment from Germany and the Netherlands? Fine (same for the rest of the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, etc).

Buying it from Taiwan? Probably ok but riskier cause China can impact it in the future (either by conquest, destruction or blocking access).

Buying essential equipment or resources from China, Russia or Iran? That’s a risk, long term at least. You don’t want to depend on them.
by l5870uoo9y | 2025-04-09 12:40:32+00:00
I know the Recharts[1] library have been trying to make their charts more accessibility, but so far I haven't seen any users with screen readers give feedback. If there are any users here with screenreaders, can you read the chart on this link: https://www.chartmaker.io/charts/Ra1UTI7gArCTO0o2MV4zZ

[1]: https://recharts.org/
by jollyllama | 2025-04-09 12:40:32+00:00
In my country (USA) it was very common for people to build their own houses less than 80 years ago. Also, it was very common for people to fix everything on their own cars. I would argue that this has only changed because of extractive capitalism. The fact that you're saying these things as though they are ridiculous is indicative of a mindset shift that occurred some time in the not-so-distant past, and many of your assumptions do not have to be taken as a given.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-09 12:40:49+00:00
> So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.

But that is also a narrow view of the world, no? Who says a suit looks good? What if I think pajamas looks good? I am exaggerating of course, but I often think suits don't look particularly better or anything. It is just some random norm, that society has ascribed to that particular piece of clothing. I often find simple, one color only, no writing on it, clothing looking better.

> And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.

I don't, but I do get a sense of them possibly being a bit vain. But more importantly, I think about why I don't wear such a beard. It is annoying when eating, and I don't want my beard in my food. So I will be a little bit baffled by their choice, but it is their choice anyway. I don't have to like it.
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 12:40:53+00:00
>> "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written."

> It's a bit like math books. I dreaded reading formal math during my engineering -- always read accessible text. Got a little better in my master's and could read demse chapters which got to the point quickly. At least now I can appreciate why people write terse references, even Tutte books.

I don't think that's what he means by the advice. I think it's more about systematic knowledge vs. fragmented knowledge. Someone who "learns" through an LLM or Stack Overflow is not going to have the overall knowledge of the tool to be able to reason what's available, so will tend to use it in very stereotyped ways and do things in harder ways because they don't know what's possible. You can still get that systematic knowledge through an accessible text.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-09 12:41:16+00:00
Does something like Whisky work in the new macOS Apple Silicon world? I assume its quite a bit slower to simulate Windows while at the same time translating x86 to Apple Silicon. I ask because this would be a justified break from this project, it's kind of a nightmare setup, you're better off just buying a $300 Windows laptop at Walmart or something.
by piva00 | 2025-04-09 12:41:35+00:00
I don't see many incentives in the current American corporate culture to keep a company leading in technical proficiency to maintain that status after they acquire the market they are looking for.

All the incentives are tilted over financial engineering rather than actual product/hard engineering, after the initial lift-off from technical prowess there's very little embedded in the capital system to keep that corporate culture instead of derailing it into financial juggling.
by tim333 | 2025-04-09 12:41:47+00:00
It's complicated but I think 10 year rates are going up mostly because people think there'll be inflation and your dollars will buy less in ten years than they would have without the tariffs. Certainly 100% tariffs on China will make stuff from China cost more in the shops.

There may also be some panic selling by speculators or people worried about their bonds - higher market rates makes the prices of bonds fall.
by octopoc | 2025-04-09 12:42:24+00:00
> No excuses for rockets that don't work in this day and age.

Please point out the rocket that has a perfect record. Saturn V had failures too FYI. Besides, cost and global politics are at play as well. Musk and Putin are indeed the only options but Musk is American and also cheaper ($2,720/kg) than Putin's ($4,320/kg)[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
by sph | 2025-04-09 12:42:29+00:00
Since Rust is not a managed/high-level language, panics are unrecoverable crashes so they need to be dealt at a higher-level, i.e the OS, with appropriate supervisor systems like systemd, or having a master Rust process that spawns subprocesses, and react when one of them abnormally terminates with regular POSIX APIs.

On a platform like Elixir, for example, you can deal with process crashes because everything runs on top of a VM, which is at all effects and purposes your OS, and provides process supervision APIs.
by strken | 2025-04-09 12:43:07+00:00
I think you might be misreading "don't be afraid to get your hands dirty" as "go poking at stuff for trivial reasons without following any proper process" instead of "don't offload parts of your job to other people out of fear".

I imagine that, if an engineer at Pacemaker Incorporated is given a task that's touching an area they're not comfortable working on, the author would suggest that "sorry, talk to Alice" is not a good attitude while "okay, but I'll need to go through some training, do you mind if I reach out to Alice for mentorship?" is.
by mr_toad | 2025-04-09 12:43:39+00:00
> But this is again something that applies to individuals rather than countries.

It applies to countries too. It’s the core argument of comparative advantage, and it’s been mainstream economic theory for over 200 years. Your argument is incomplete because you’re not considering the wages paid in other countries, and crucially, the exchange rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
by StefanBatory | 2025-04-09 12:44:46+00:00
Yes, exactly. I had no idea what to do with myself, and thus all I did was browsed Internet. I thought that getting rid of it will "fix" me (to be honest, I think I confused cause and effect). And so, I tried.

But I had nothing to replace this with, and I didn't magically became a disciplined or productive person. And then I would go back to my bad habits, just feeling even stronger self-hatred.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-04-09 12:45:26+00:00
> Because they act in good faith and expect that consent is collected before their script is executed.

This is the unaddressed rub here. If the doctor commits malpractice in good faith, they’re still liable. If the structural engineer built a bridge that collapsed in good faith, they’re still liable. Why does the marketing firm get off the hook here?

The argument being presented here, that regular people should continue to be allowed to do Sloppy and Dangerous Thing, because it’s normal, is not sufficient. It also used to be normal and way easier for people to get on a plane without being strip searched and their privacy being violated. Society decided that forcing regular people to go through a ton of more hassle for safety was worth the trade off. The security is mostly theater, the implementation is burdensome, onerous and unpopular and a regular person is expected to navigate some kafkaesque nightmare with a bunch of rules and might unknowingly burn themselves. But we sure as hell don’t see a ton of plane hijackings any more, do we?
by rsynnott | 2025-04-09 12:46:08+00:00
This is what he's talking about, but... it doesn't make any sense, at all. What would "forcing the EU to buy coal" entail? The EU isn't a command economy and has no potential use for coal _itself_. The EU contains companies which require coal (albeit demand has been dropping for some time) but they're just going to buy whatever's cheapest, and particularly given it's _coal_, and has a very low value per tonne, that's generally more or less going to mean whatever's closest. Unless American coal was _radically_ cheaper than any other coal, it would be hard to cover the extra transport cost.
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 12:46:36+00:00
>> Read the Reference

>> Don’t Guess

> I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference.

I think that's fair. I've definitely seen "not best" programmers only guess and only read stackoverflow, over and over, forever, and never read the reference. They have no idea what's going on and just spin making a mess in until something sticks. I kinda read that item as a response to people like that.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-04-09 12:47:25+00:00
I used Bottle in the past and I must say I was quite surprised of the software I managed to run on Linux... For instance, Cinema 4D (up to R24 I think?). The hardest was to install flatpak on Porteus to install bottle...

So it is bottle but for Mac? Never heard of it before. I used crossover once on a Macbook 2010 to Run Deus Ex,... anyway these are great projects. I guess booting linux from a USB stick should work on a modern mac too? rather than emulating it.