MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by denotational | 2025-04-28 22:14:32+00:00
I think that's a pretty uncharitable take; I thought there were several interesting questions raised by the author:

1. Should conference "service" be something we expect of postdocs (and even PhD candidates) rather than established experts?

> Often, as a result, the PC is staffed by junior, ambitious academics intent on filling their résumés. Note that it does not matter for these résumés whether the person did a good or bad job as a referee! [...] I very much doubt that the submissions of Einstein, Curie, Planck, and such to the Solvay conferences were assessed by postdocs. Top conferences should be the responsibility of the established leaders in the field.

2. Should programme chairs strive to maintain exclusivity of their conference track, or look for important ideas that deserve to be communicated?

> As a simple example, consider a paper that introduces a new concept, but does not completely work out its implications and has a number of imperfections. In the careerist view, it is normal to reject it as not ready for full endorsement. In the scientific view, the question for the program committee (PC) becomes: is the idea important enough to warrant publication even if it still has rough edges? The answer may well be yes. [...] Since top conferences boast of their high rejection rates, typically 80% to 90%, referees must look for reasons to reject the papers in their pile rather than arguments for accepting them.

3. Is computer science suffering from a focus on orthopraxy rather than scientific method?

> What threatens to make conferences irrelevant is a specific case of the general phenomenon of bureaucratization of science. Some of the bureaucratization process is inevitable: research no longer involves a few thousand elite members in a dozen countries (as it did before the mid-1900s), but is a global academic and industry business drawing in enormous amounts of money and millions of players for whom a publication is not just an opportunity to share their latest results, but a career step.

What do you think about these?
by OptionOfT | 2025-04-28 22:15:01+00:00
Back in the day Internet Explorer could save a webpage. It would store an HTML page and a folder with all the images in it next to the HTML page.

And somehow they were linked. Deleting one deleted the other.

You could open the HTML page from your disk, in Internet Explorer. No internet required.

Update: they weren't linked at the filesystem level. Explorer.exe tracks .htm/.html and a folder_<something> together: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/manage...
by refulgentis | 2025-04-28 22:15:08+00:00
I'm curious if there's any data to come to that conclusion, its hard for me to do "They did the censor training to DeepSeek because they knew consumers would love free DeepSeek after seeing screenshots of Tiananmen censorship in screenshots of DeepSeek"

(the steelman here, ofc, is "the screenshots drove buzz which drove usage!", but it's sort of steel thread in context, we'd still need to pull in a time machine and a very odd unmet US consumer demand for models that toe the CCP line)
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-28 22:15:23+00:00
We also just used to chain the "weird" family members in the attic and pretend they didn't exist.

For a while, the popular treatment was mulching their brain matter through their eyeball. This was done to a lady kennedy for being too weird. The doctor who suggested we scramble people's brains if they had certain diseases that were hard to treat in other ways got a Nobel Prize.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-28 22:15:47+00:00
"Nowhere near done" seems like a bit of an exaggeration, given that the link at the top of your linked page suggests that it's over 3/4ths done[1].

It's also, to my understanding, not grade-separated in various important places. I was in College Park two weeks ago and saw lots of at-grade development on the line, which presumably gets bogged down by Route 1 and the other high-traffic roads nearby.

(This isn't to imply that the construction isn't slow or inefficient; it's almost certainly both of those things.)

[1]: https://purplelinemd.com/media/jdwhz3kj/purple-line-press-re...
by xienze | 2025-04-28 22:15:52+00:00
LOL I bet in 2010 if someone said that by 2025 the project would be grossly over budget and only have a short segment between nowhere and nowhere to show for 17 years of work you’d have called that propaganda by axe-grinding losers (paid off by big oil, naturally).

Just admit it, it’s a boondoggle just like everyone said it would be.
by lolinder | 2025-04-28 22:17:06+00:00
This seems entirely subjective, most importantly hinging on this part here: "all they wanted is to just make a game".

If you just want to make a game, yes, absolutely just go for Unity, for the same reason why if you just want to ship a CRUD app you should just use an established batteries-included web framework. But indie game developers come in all shapes and some of them don't just want to make a game, some of them actually do enjoy owning every part of the stack. People write their own OSes for fun, is it so hard to believe that people (who aren't you) might enjoy the process of building a game engine?
by codingdave | 2025-04-28 22:17:15+00:00
There is nothing to settle - it is all about personal preference. You would also need to define what "best results" even means. Measuring dev productivity is a notoriously bad idea, so I just go with "That which makes me enjoy the work the most."

That being said, I waffle between 90s singer/songwriter music, 80s alternative rock, and a constant soundtrack of Joan Armatrading.
by indoorcat | 2025-04-28 22:17:37+00:00
Extremely relatable. I was the first technical hire for a startup that ultimately failed last year. I did at least have a (below market) salary, and there were no outsourcing headaches, but I really did spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to perfect a product that the founders had no idea how to market. I certainly learned a lot, though it made me a little cynical about startups and the tech industry in general. Maybe in a couple more years I’ll feel more positively about the whole experience.
by Havoc | 2025-04-28 22:17:37+00:00
It’s a complete non-issue. Especially with open weights.

On their online platform I’ve hit a political block exactly once in months of use. Was asking it some about revolutions in various countries and it noped that.

I’d prefer a model that doesn’t have this issue at all but if I have a choice between a good Apache licensed Chinese one and a less good say meta licensed one I’ll take the Chinese one every time. I just don’t ask LLMs enough politically relevant questions for it to matter.

To be fair maybe that take is the LLM equivalent of „I have nothing to hide“ on surveillance
by BSTRhino | 2025-04-28 22:17:43+00:00
https://easel.games/about

A programming language for teenagers to learn to code by making multiplayer games. I've spent 3 years making the multiplayer completely automatic so you can just code it like a singleplayer game, then flick a switch and it just works. My hope is that teenagers will find it more engaging if they can play their games with their friends. A bit like a combination of Roblox and Scratch.

Currently trying to implement some region affinity so it doesn't just put everyone in the world in the same game. It's rollback netcode so the latency is very good even across continents, but it can't overcome the fact that the world is just too large.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-04-28 22:17:48+00:00
>You expect 95% accuracy matching activation phrases.

At this point I don’t even expect 50% (trying twice), and I’m still disappointed.

>It only needs to work some of the time for some of the people, especially if it makes $/click.

So where can one find this market? We know the price of traditional ad clicks. Surely we’d see a market for “voice-driven” ads with higher rates?
by signatoremo | 2025-04-28 22:17:49+00:00
JIT isn’t about reducing safety margin. It was pioneered by Japanese companies, namely Toyota. They are known for risk adverse, safety first.

> This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.

What kind of comment is this? Toyota has been using and refining it for decades. It wasn’t invented yesterday by some “teenagers”. Such a state of HN’s comment section.

JIT is definitely not perfect as exposed during the Covid period, but it isn’t without merits and its goal isn’t “reducing safety margin”.

Then we have JIT in computing, such as JVM.
by j1elo | 2025-04-28 22:18:05+00:00
Today I was able to walk into a grocery store, pay for food, and go home to have a warm lunch (having a gas stove also helped tremendously). The matter was having a 10€ note at home. Not what I'd call "piles of cash".

As an added benefit, no bank knows where I bought and when, which I find is a great advantage over the alternatives. (I also use Gpay; this comes from someone who just found a good middle point without forgetting about the more reliable, physical and privacy friendly option)
by palata | 2025-04-28 22:18:30+00:00
If you use Rust with `.clone()` and Arc/Mutex, why not just using one of the myriad of other modern and memory safe languages like Go, Scala/Kotlin/Java, C#, Swift?

The whole point of Rust is to bring memory safety with zero cost abstraction. It's essentially bringing memory safety to the use-cases that require C/C++. If you don't require that, then a whole world of modern languages becomes available :-).
by JohnnyHerz | 2025-04-28 22:18:59+00:00
Nothing in your post has anything to do with the fundamentals of Tesla's business. You are just echoing the anti-elon propoganda. The anti-Elon movement is a moment in time that will not affect the longterm viability of Tesla's business model.

Like it or not, Tesla as a company is still years ahead of other US competitors and has a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Tesla is not "in bad shape" relative to the competition. IF you are going to talk about auto companies in "bad shape", Tesla doesn't even make the top 10
by dh1011 | 2025-04-28 22:19:04+00:00
https://github.com/dh1011/c2p

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=H337.c2p

I’m developing a VS Code and Cursor extension that helps developers quickly copy all code in a workspace to the clipboard for use with LLMs.

It also displays the token count for each file, as well as the total token count across the workspace.

By default, it ignores files listed in .gitignore, but this behavior can be customized in the extension settings, along with many other options.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-04-28 22:20:14+00:00
I chose Django + htmx and a small amount of Alpine.js for a full-stack software project that is currently being launched. I had zero professional experience with Django (or Python really) before starting. I was able to develop the entire application on my own, in my spare time, and had time left over to also handle infrastructure and devops myself.

I prefer Python and it's web frameworks over Typescript/React because there is a lot more stability and lot less "framework-of-the-week"-itis to contend with. It's much easier to reason about Django code than any React project I've worked on professionally. IMO when you don't have a firehose of money aimed at you, then Python is the way to go
by benwilber0 | 2025-04-28 22:20:18+00:00
> Always use a BigInt (64 bits) or UUID for primary keys.

Use bigint, never UUID. UUIDs are massive (2x a bigint) and now your DBMS has to copy that enormous value to every side of a relation.

It will bloat your table and indexes 2x for no good reason whatsoever.

Never use UUIDs as your primary keys.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-28 22:20:25+00:00
Depends what fast means.

I’ve run llama and gemma3 on a base MacMini and it’s pretty decent for text processing. It has 16GB ram though which is mostly used by the GPU with inference. You need more juice for image stuff.

My son’s gaming box has a 4070 and it’s about 25% faster the last time I compared.

The mini is so cheap it’s worth trying out - you always find another use for it. Also the M4 sips power and is silent.
by neom | 2025-04-28 22:20:43+00:00
I'd seperate PMF hunting and go to market just in case that's not what you're doing. I've done tons of small/startup GTM projects, most notabily I was on the deviantart zero to 1 and the digitalocean zero to 1. I wasn't clear enough. I'm not advocating that you should skip validation or assume a PMF, rather, you shouldn't even be thinking about a full, formal GTM until you've proven repeatable product market fit.

You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.

The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.
by palata | 2025-04-28 22:21:13+00:00
To me, web dev really sounds like the one place where everything works and it's more a question of what is in fashion. Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, C, C++, Go, Rust, Scala, Kotlin, probably even Swift? And of course NodeJS was made for that, right?

I am absolutely convinced I can find success story of web backends built with all those languages.
by klik99 | 2025-04-28 22:22:31+00:00
Pushing back on extremely biased reads on China doesn’t mean denying things that look legit. China does engage in more transnational surveillance than most countries. Most of what I read on China is distorted, exaggerated or simply the same as every major world power does, but this one sounds pretty accurate and shitty. I don’t trust any government though, and think pointing fingers is not as useful as fixing our own house.
by timhigins | 2025-04-28 22:23:09+00:00
One guy simulated Australia's electrical grid for 3 years to show that the entire grid could run off of >98% renewable energy using the installed renewables with just a small amount of storage (e.g. 5 hours of average demand, ~10% of demand over the entire period).

To me this indicates that in many energy markets where renewables are sufficiently built out, the only factor for why we aren't using them more is the storage capacity and grid infrastructure to handle their variability -- and instead just running stable but dirty energy systems.

There are a lot of cool mechanical grid systems like gravity batteries (e.g. weights on a pulley system) [2] or compressed or liquid air storage systems [3] which provide cheaper storage at higher capacities and durations than electric batteries

1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trA5s2iGj2A 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjERw-Ol-_s
by frinxor | 2025-04-28 22:24:27+00:00
SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018.

Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF#Modern_era
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-28 22:24:33+00:00
Not sure what specifically is “california” about this - There is very little support from either side of the aisle in continuing this project, which of course, the article states because it is an unavoidable truth. The criticisms offered by both sides are valid and the few proponents that still hold water for this dismiss these arguments with very bad or incomplete reasoning as written here.

For instance, brushing over the “possible original sin” of the project was way underestimating cost. Yea, no shit, that’s like 95% of the problem voters have with it, that and how long it’s taken with very little usable progress. Author spends very little time on this.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-28 22:24:34+00:00
It’s well written, but I beg to differ.

You should never ever considerate other opinion to make your own choice.

We are the sum of our decisions, I don’t want to be the sum of the crowd decisions.

There is also the factor of pride. Either you’re confident enough in your judgement or you’re not, but taking a bold decision that goes against all odd and people’s opinion, and managing to make it work, is extremely satisfying.

If you start reviewing your opinion based on crowd opinion, all that’s going to happen is you will be more and more inclined to suppress your own opinion in favor of the majority, until you don’t trust your guts anymore and you become part of the crowd.

Bestie there is a saying « you learn from your own mistake ».
by jltsiren | 2025-04-28 22:25:21+00:00
Then you would have two retirees for every three working age people. And given that only ~70% of working age Americans are actually working, it would mean three non-working adults for every two adults with jobs. Either the retirees would have a really low standard of living, or workers would get much smaller share of the value they create than they currently do.

If you are not already retired or close to retirement, you should assume that the normal retirement age is ~70 years. Anything lower cannot be sustained with the current demographic structure.
by m000 | 2025-04-28 22:26:44+00:00
Might as well mean that they suspect the culprit, but they're not going to do anything anyway for this specific culprit, so let's all pretend it was an accident. Why make yourself look like a fool?

They already became a laughing stock once for promising the "strongest possible response" for the Nord Stream 2 sabotage [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-sees-sabotage-nor...
by eieio | 2025-04-28 22:26:57+00:00
oh huh, I'm not sure why this one made it to the front page and not the link to my site!

Anyway, yeah, I guess I could have gone with turns here but I thought that building a more realtime MMO thing where pieces could cross boards would be a little more interesting and novel. I also didn't feel like a version of this that was turn based would ever complete.

certainly a queen can go wipe out a whole board, but the game tries to place you next to other active players when you join, which hopefully promotes some interesting counterplay to that. And I think playing chess in realtime like this against someone is pretty fun. But I understand why it might not be for everyone!
by palata | 2025-04-28 22:28:39+00:00
My point is that there are situations where C++ (or Rust) is required because the JVM wouldn't work, but those are niche.

In my experience, most people who don't want a JVM language "because it is slow" tend to take this as a principle, and when you ask why their first answer is "because it's interpreted". I would say they are stuck in the 90s, but probably they just don't know and repeat something they have heard.

Similar to someone who would say "I use Gentoo because Ubuntu sucks: it is super slow". I have many reasons to like Gentoo better than Ubuntu as my main distro, but speed isn't one in almost all cases.
by lostmsu | 2025-04-28 22:29:03+00:00
Related: just tried to switch to Rust when starting a new project. The main motivation was the combination of fearless concurrency and exhaustive error handling - things that were very painful in the more mature endeavor.

Gave up after 3 days for 3 reasons:

1. Refactoring and IDE tooling in general are still lightyears away from JetBrains tooling and a few astronomical units away from Visual Studio. Extract function barely works.

2. Crates with non-Rust dependencies are nearly impossible to debug as debuggers don't evaluate expressions. So, if you have a Rust wrapper for Ogg reader, you can't look at ogg_file.duration() in the debugger because that requires function evaluation.

3. In contrast to .NET and NuGet ecosystem, non-Rust dependencies typically don't ship with precompiled binaries, meaning you basically have to have fun getting the right C++ compilers, CMake, sometimes even external SDKs and manually setting up your environment variables to get them to build.

With these roadblocks I would never have gotten the "mature" project to the point, where dealing with hard to debug concurrency issues and funky unforeseen errors became necessary.
by andai | 2025-04-28 22:29:27+00:00
If I understand correctly, the critique here is that is that LLMs cannot generate new knowledge, and/or that they cannot remember it.

The former is false, and the latter is kind of true -- the network does not update itself yet, unfortunately, but we work around it with careful manipulation of the context.

Part of the discussion here is that when an LLM is working with a system that it designed, it understands it better than one it didn't. Because the system matches its own "expectations", its own "habits" (overall design, naming conventions, etc.)

I often notice complicated systems created by humans (e.g. 20 page long prompts), adding more and more to the prompt, to compensate for the fact that the model is fundamentally struggling to work in the way asked of it, instead of letting the model design a workflow that comes naturally to it.
by lolinder | 2025-04-28 22:29:38+00:00
I have a personal-use app that has a hot loop that (after extensive optimization) runs for about a minute on a low-powered VPS to compute a result. I started in Java and then optimized the heck out of it with the JVM's (and IntelliJ's) excellent profiling tools. It took one day to eliminate all excess allocations. When I was confident I couldn't optimize the algorithm any further on the JVM I realized that what I'd boiled it down to looked an awful lot like Rust code, so I thought why not, let's rewrite it in Rust. I took another day to rewrite it all.

The result was not statistically different in performance than my Java implementation. Each took the same amount of time to complete. This surprised me, so I made triply sure that I was using the right optimization settings.

Lesson learned: Java is easy to get started with out of the box, memory safe, battle tested, and the powerful JIT means that if warmup times are a negligible factor in your usage patterns your Java code can later be optimized to be equivalent in performance to a Rust implementation.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-28 22:29:44+00:00
> We were writing an animation system in Bevy and were hit by the painful upgrade cycle twice.

I definitely sympathize with the frustration around the churn--I feel it too and regularly complain upstream--but I should mention that Bevy didn't really have anything production-quality for animation until I landed the animation graph in Bevy 0.15. So sticking with a compatible API wasn't really an option: if you don't have arbitrary blending between animations and opt-in additive blending then you can't really ship most 3D games.
by eieio | 2025-04-28 22:30:01+00:00
Ah hello! I made this :)

My blog describing it is pretty sparse, sorry about that. Happy to answer any questions that folks have about the architecture.

Not that it was necessary, but I got really into building this out as a single process that could handle many (10k+/sec) moves for thousands of concurrent clients. I learned a whole lot! And I found golang to be a really good fit for this, since you mostly want to give tons and tons of threads concurrent access to a little bit of shared memory.