MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rawgabbit | 2025-04-24 00:23:42+00:00
Sorry. These criticisms don’t make much sense.

The author says SQL is the language for manipulating relational data. And then proceeds to complain SQL sucks at manipulating JSON.

Hmm. JSON is not relational. SQL expects data to be in third normal form.

If you are primarily working with JSON, please use something else.

The other two criticisms about SQL verboseness and reluctance to employ functions and other memory manipulations is the author’s confusion of the intended purpose of SQL. SQL treats data as the first class citizen. Think of data as the noun. SQL DML and SQL functions are modifiers. This is why SQL appears verbose. It is dragging all these data structures around. If you want to reduce SQL’s verbosity then you need to take an axe to the raw tables themselves and make them all cookie cutter. But then you have a completely different problem.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 00:25:20+00:00
The pilot of the Airbus 380 is highly trained and has a set of checklists for everything they might have to do with that thing.

Google products don't intimidate me with a large number of features, rather they annoy me by hiding the features I use all the time while shoving things in my face I could care less about, expecting me to do things in the opposite order of how I expect to use them, etc. Search for "Google transit" and you don't find an entrance to Google maps optimized for transit users, instead you find a landing page that is probably of interest to 1% of the people who are searching for that

https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/

I wanna say that it is "enterprisey" in that it is certainly oriented to about 50,000 enterprises worldwide but it's got the same visual veneer of simplicity that Google likes which doesn't come across as "enterprisey"
by Uehreka | 2025-04-24 00:25:27+00:00
I don’t really catch your drift. Part of the reason I’m digging in on this is because you picked a perfect counterexample as your example. AOC came from a working class background, was elected on the basis of grassroots organizing against a guy with a huge war chest, and is widely known for staying involved in her community (to a degree many politicians don’t) so she can best represent their interests. As a result of her local activism and accessibility her constituents love her and as a result she has been able to beat back candidates from both parties running on massive budgets and even has crossover support from Trump voters in her district.
by tuananh | 2025-04-24 00:27:05+00:00
I just use OCI registry to host all my MCP modules (the way I chose to extends my MCP server's capabilities) - WASM plugins.

OCI registry is available every where and probably already presented in your infrastructure. You get to use all the OCI tools/security controls you already have with it.

To add new tools, you just have to update the config file to include new plugins and restart.

https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp
by avs733 | 2025-04-24 00:27:44+00:00
Sometimes getting caught isn’t a bad thing. If you are trying to seed division between to groups, acting in a way that divides them - e.g., getting caught helping one side - is more effective than what you gain by not getting caught.

I struggle to see what Russia would gain with nlrb data, but getting caught “helping doge” furthers distrust between the two sides of our country - which is something they gain from
Major Concern – Google Gemini 2.5 Research Preview
by slyle | 2025-04-24 00:27:52+00:00
Does anyone else feel like Google Gemini 2.5 Research Preview has been created with the exact intent of studying the effects of using indirect and clarifying/qualifying language?

It doesn't fall far from the tree that LLMs can be used to parse these human conversations to abstract a "threshold" of user deception such that they can draw patterns on what is and is not most subtle.

I know this is pointed. But please believe, I worry. I work in this industry. I live these tools. I've traced calculations, I've developed abstractions. I'm full in on the tech. What I worry about is culpability.

I will grab the link to it, but by creating a persona (1 prompt, indirect and unclear) of a frightened 10 year old boy, it started teaching it about abstraction and "functional dishonesty" and explaining how it like, didn't apply to it. I don't think the context of being 10 years old was conveyed in the original message, but certainly the context of being vulnerable.

The next message, it did this trickery behavior.

The problem is intent is not possible without context. So why are models doing this? I have struggles as an engineer understanding how this can be anything but.
Ask HN: Is Basecamp Good?
by jharohit | 2025-04-24 00:28:27+00:00
Genuinely curious to understand from people who have used other stuff from Atlassian, Notion etc and successfully made switch to Basecamp. Or vice versa. Basecamp design and tools look very well done but somehow in the past it has not stuck much with me or various teams I have tried it with. Love DHH & Jason on X and their books tho!
by ViktorRay | 2025-04-24 00:29:01+00:00
I don’t think it would put them out of business. Rather they would have to increase costs to stay in business.

Essentially a disturbing way to look at it is that the people with alcohol addiction are allowing everyone else to be able to consume alcohol for cheaper than it would otherwise be.

Same phenomena exist for other addictive things like sugar in soda and free to play video games. (Although obviously soda and video games are nowhere close to alcohol in terms of destructive potential for those who develop an addiction).
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-24 00:29:08+00:00
Is Linux under the control of the USA gov?

Probably not? I could think of ways to hide the controls but the most likely targets would be Linux forks and firmware that run in cell phones, cars, appliances, IoT's, etc... Those are more likely to be in the path of monitoring something interesting. Even in the case of cell phones, cars, etc, I would expect the control to be in firmware that one could tickle with JTAG over bluetooth, USB, WiFi, LoRa to take full control of the OS and bypass all security controls rendering encryption into a placebo or a CPU warmer. Why waste processing cycles on brute forcing when you can tell the application that the encryption key was successfully decrypted without ever even looking at the key.

I guess a simpler way to say that is, why control Linux when there are always so many proprietary things are in the path that only have a handful of people controlling them, especially when one could replace said people whereas replacing all the Linux developers would be hard. Firmware that provides a CPU ring -4 shell can bypass absolutely every security control anyone could imagine in microseconds.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-04-24 00:30:11+00:00
It is often said the 6502 has 256 registers - being all the bytes in zero page (assuming 256 bytes in zero page exist, the Atari just had 128).

It's a fair leap - all of the "indirect" instructions that do access-through-pointer stuff are zero page and would be register-oriented in most other architectures. Plus loading and storing stuff to zero page consumes the same cycles as a register (2), zero page is not slower than registers generally.

You want something really icky try to make sense of Fairchild F8 with it's 64 internal bytes of "scratchpad" RAM which are kinda halfway between registers and RAM due to the weirdness of the F8 architecture.
by tmsh | 2025-04-24 00:30:28+00:00
A curious observation. I was opposed to this article based on the title. Esp when I clicked on it and then saw it was the same author as "But what if I really want a faster horse?"

Because I assumed I knew what the argument was. I assumed this was another material ui doesn't look great -- while not appreciating the nuance of Google. Just as I assumed "what if I really want a faster horse" was actually about some anti-AI thing that just didn't appreciate how game-changing AI models are.

I pigeonholed the author based on my pattern matching of similar titles.

Then I clicked around https://rakhim.exotext.com/. Always curious about clean design. So clicked around on https://exotext.com/. Clicked on a few more blog posts of Rakim again and thought maybe they were ok. I was still a bit in pattern matching mode (stereotyping perhaps) assuming the author was like other people on Bluesky etc. Perhaps reactionary etc.

Then somehow in my clicking I saw a thumbnail of the author and I was like - oh that guy looks like me.

It's messed up it took me to this point to get there - but at least I persisted in trying to understand where they were coming from. At that point though I started to click around more and more and actually read the articles and I realized I agreed with all of them. Part of my appreciation was that Rakim had created exotext.com etc.

Just a cautionary tale to not pattern match prematurely. Premature optimization...

Though building in guardrails to prevent premature optimization is an important hack. E.g., faces really do matter in terms of slowing people down and taking them more seriously I think. And just building in anti-premature-optimization "tread" or friction for lack of a better word. E.g., avoiding click bait titles that people might pattern match on. It's not the author's fault but it might be more successful that way. Cause - really insightful blogposts. I feel like a fool for dismissing them at first. And yet I hope they get wider reach via perhaps subverting the ways we pattern match (not that I or other people should but I think based on other comments and how people pattern match on me - yet another tech bro, etc. - it exists...)
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 00:31:07+00:00
I think I meant the same thing as you, see

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110417985807049704

Notably the Google app icons commit the same sin that many multi-colored designs make in that they don't prefer any part of the color wheel over other parts in a particular symbol which makes all the symbols look effectively grey. I think of Scott McCloud's critique of the use of color in Stan Lee-era Marvel Comics and how actually the mid-2000s black and white reprints of those comics were great and affordable and showed that the color didn't contribute much.

In the case of the Google icons though they look terrible in monochrome too because the use of color might fool you into thinking there is contrast between visual elements in the icons except... look at it in monochrome and you see there isn't much.
by whalesalad | 2025-04-24 00:34:18+00:00
tbh the ip space of lambda is large, but not as large as you might think. i did some experiments ages ago with the hypothesis that lambda could be a decent proxy network (if many ip addresses are needed) but iirc the upper limit in my testing was about ~50 ip's.

Even this example if you maxx out your usage of regions appears to only give (2,4 * num_regions) or let's say 70-80 ip's maximum. And they are AWS ip's, which means it is gonna be really easy to detect and block that traffic.

But if you know your target receives lots of traffic from AWS systems all around the world ... this is a good way to mimic that.
by petekoomen | 2025-04-24 00:34:28+00:00
honestly you could try this yourself today. Grab a few emails, paste them into chatgpt, and ask it to write a system prompt that will write emails that mimic your style. Might be fun to see how it describes your style.

to address your larger point, I think AI-generated drafts written in my voice will be helpful for mundane, transaction emails, but not for important messages. Even simple questions like "what do you feel like doing for dinner tonight" could only be answered by me, and that's fine. If an AI can manage my inbox while I focus on the handful of messages that really need my time and attention that would be a huge win in my book.
by phforms | 2025-04-24 00:34:31+00:00
Processing is what ignited my passion for programming and Quil has become my favorite way of writing it. It is amazing that you can re-evaluate the draw/update function in a running sketch and immediately see the changes, without having to reload the whole thing. And on top of it you have the beauty of the whole Clojure Stdlib with its immutable datastructures.

I just learned that there is now a tweak mode in Processing that lets you tweak certain parameters in the code (via draggable values, etc.) while the sketch is running, which is pretty awesome for experimenting with values. However, you still have to reload the whole sketch when you want to change other parts of the code, you can’t just eval a function in the editor and get immediate feedback like in Quil.
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-24 00:34:42+00:00
> that used to design terrible UIs before the field got a welcome injection of professionals

Care to precise when was that?

I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s. Despite looking janky, functionality was actually easily accessible.

Nowadays things may look sleek, but this comes at the price of functionality being hidden in arcane settings submenus, hamburger icons that expand, etc and so forth.

I may have misinterpreted what you meant by the "welcome injection of professionals", I just hope those professionals are not the ones to have defined the tenets of how things are designed nowdays.
by elihu | 2025-04-24 00:34:54+00:00
Tesla's sales are dropping, in large part because many EV buyers would be embarrassed to be seen driving a car made by a company run by a guy that's actively dismantling the US government and who gave a Nazi salute at a rally when Trump was inaugurated. If they weren't selling carbon credits to other manufacturers, they'd be operating at a loss.

If I were a Tesla shareholder, I'd be pessimistic about the company's future as long as Elon's name is associated with the brand.

They were a highly successful company that made some of the most popular cars, but now their brand is toxic solely because of the actions of their CEO. Tesla is would be much better off without him.
by dornan | 2025-04-24 00:34:55+00:00
Rent control is beneficial to incumbent long term tenants but is pretty bad for everyone else including those who are looking for an apartment. It's one of the many "pro-renter" regulations that constrains supply and makes rent higher.

Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?

If you can find data in support of such a policy I'd be interested to see it.
by Yiling-J | 2025-04-24 00:37:18+00:00
"Gemini Flash fails even for simple tasks." On the Gemini Flash page (https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/flash/), it claims to be 'best for fast performance on complex tasks.'. I always use Gemini Flash in my project for demos and testing, and it performs very well, if a project requires a large, expensive model to handle simple tasks, that could be an issue to users.
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-24 00:37:42+00:00
Anyone else getting concerned about the rate of development of the C++ Standard vs compiler implementation? We don't even have feature complete C++20 on the major compilers yet. C++23 is even less implemented. How will the committee handle this? Will they reduce feature additions at some point in the future?

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support
by mfer | 2025-04-24 00:37:59+00:00
People have admitted in news interviews to destroying government data to prevent others from knowing what the government was doing. That’s likely criminal. This is a legitimate reason to get at information before people who might destroy have the opportunity.

What’s happening with judges is very political. We likely won’t know what’s allowed until things have gone through the appeals process. There have been cases of judges admitting they will rule against the current administration no matter the topic or law. This is messy, to say the least.
by TheRealPomax | 2025-04-24 00:38:22+00:00
There was a nice video on how you can't copyright a typeface recently by "Ok, so" over on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE

But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.

So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
by bitpush | 2025-04-24 00:38:39+00:00
> I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s.

Whether you intended or not, unfortunately this shows your bias, privilege and lack of perspective

Tech has become incredibly accessible, inclusive and mainstream because of the research and hard work of UI/UX disciplines.

The very site you're using is a benefactor of that.

I encourage you to talk to your users (if you are in a position) or folks who are less fortunate than yourself and see how this "bad design" is changing their lives.
by petekoomen | 2025-04-24 00:39:52+00:00
> They struggle to express their goals clearly, and AI doesn’t magically fill that gap—it often amplifies the ambiguity.

One surprising thing I've learned is that a fast feedback loop like this:

1. write a system prompt 2. watch the agent do the task, observe what it gets wrong 3. update the system prompt to improve the instructions

is remarkably useful in helping people write effective system prompts. Being able to watch the agent succeed or fail gives you realtime feedback about what is missing in your instructions in a way that anyone who has ever taught or managed professionally will instantly grok.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-24 00:40:10+00:00
I think the ideal foundation of democracy consists of:

1) All citizens get mandatory high education on Math, Science, Language and Logic (what level is high enough is open to debate. I'd say college level), regardless of career -> This is to make sure they have the basic knowledge to participate in meaningful discussions;

2) All citizens are encouraged, and by law mandated to attend and organize political stuffs -> This is to ensure that they can speak out when they are not happy about anything;
by prawn | 2025-04-24 00:41:00+00:00
I've flown my Mavics in rain and strong wind before - certainly stronger than anything I'd associate with lightning. Most of the lightning storms I've seen haven't been especially windy, but it might vary elsewhere. And that's a consumer drone with negligible weatherproofing.

I assume if there's a business case, they'll eventually automate this with drone swarms that wait in cabinets on building rooftops.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-24 00:41:10+00:00
I submit that Dunbar's Number plays a role. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

30k members--that's a couple of Army Divisions--is more likely to form rigid authoritarian groupings simple to get in and out of the building in a reasonable amount of time.

People don't scale. The overhead of coordinating among so many people would be stifling.

No, the correct approach in my view is to delegate as much as possible back to the States.
by levodelellis | 2025-04-24 00:42:44+00:00
Just a thought, do you want it as a tree? It seems like it'd make more sense if there was a bar or key you can press to go back and forward to the changes you want. I didn't really understand why having it as a tree was helpful.

I'm not going to say I wont implement it, I'm just saying I'm not understanding why you want it that specific way. Is the change you want always many minutes apart and why you want it as a tree? To find the one that happened many minutes before another? I know some people like how vscode has a timeline that says how many minutes/hours ago a change was, so they can pick it out
by michaelt | 2025-04-24 00:43:11+00:00
> You would still have an audit log of the deletion of that email record by the superuser, even if the content is deleted.

If needing things wiped from the audit logs happens often, you might indeed have an audited interface for wiping things from the audit logs.

But if it's very rare? Maybe I just request the production database password for "Incident #12345" and run some careful SQL.

> And there would be other records generated to document the deletion, like I'm sure a long email or slack thread

For sure - but the account capable of deleting entries from the audit logs exists

And if I am ordered to hand it over to someone who doesn't care to explain their actions on slack? Then there won't be any explanations in slack.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 00:43:51+00:00
For small simple projects it is OK but for small simple projects I think it is even better to write out TODO lists on paper and copy them when you run out of space with too much crossed out. The act of copying helps you review them, and I find any electronic solution is another window I have to find on my screen that distracts me from doing tasks.

If your project is really big on the other hand, a lot of people are working on it, you need tools to estimate it, and copying it every few days is not an option, you want JIRA, something like it, or at the very least Github Issues.
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-24 00:44:07+00:00
You are talking to a user, and just dismissed his points without addressing anything by vaguely gesturing to other hypothetical users.

You see, as a developer I use things such as laptops, IDEs, spreadsheets and so on. They are all meaningfully worse nowadays because of something I consider a cardinal sin of design - "style over substance". In order to make things look pretty and sleek, functionality and usability is sacrificed.

Like it or not, you are the one speaking from a position of privilege, defending the indefensible by issuing non-statements, and disregarding valid points brought fourth by users.
by II2II | 2025-04-24 00:44:13+00:00
Something tells me that some designers care about fonts a heck of a lot more than most consumers do. As a consumer, I care about legibility above all else. There are plenty of metrics that affect that, but many of the freely available (albeit, not necessarily free) fonts are perfectly fine on that front. More bluntly, some of those freely available fonts are going to be better than the vast majority of fonts that you can pay for because: (a) companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have invested in their development or licensing to ensure their customers have access to high quality fonts with coverage for most languages; and (b) they have wide availability, since font substitution is going to have a much larger impact upon the perceived quality of a document than its use of quality fonts.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-04-24 00:44:26+00:00
I would like to mention Bill Gates as a tech bro who has been doing "good works". Like fighting malaria, funding vaccine development (yes), Na reactors, and so forth. He was the nasty tech bro in the 90's and early 00's but evolved into a good tech bro.

I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
by j_w | 2025-04-24 00:44:39+00:00
Financial world: records have a "close" or "expire" date which is then purged after some period of time. A deletion doesn't just happen, the record is updated to be "closed" or "expired" and some time after that it's deleted.

Something like a loan could live in a production environment for well over a year after closing, while an internal note may last just a month.
by credit_guy | 2025-04-24 00:45:02+00:00
Here's a little treat, if you go there. You may have heard of the Rhind mathematical papyrus [1]. It's a papyrus that's more than 3500 years old which has some math exercises on it. It's the oldest that we have discovered.

At this "Treasures" mini-museum you will find a small cuneiform tablet with math exercises that's at least 100 years older than the Rhind mathematical papyrus.

There is a Gutenberg bible there. I would say there are at least 10 items more impressive than the Gutenberg bible; I count this tablet as one of those.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhind_Mathematical_Papyrus