MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cyphase | 2025-04-28 20:42:46+00:00
Ha. It's long been on my someday list, since before the rename from Hacker School, and something that I've been explicitly considering for my sabbatical. I've glanced at batch schedules more than once in the past weeks. Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778951
by ziddoap | 2025-04-28 20:42:54+00:00
Thanks, I appreciate the comment! I'm certain that my goal is not to work in a specific language, but to bring a long-time idea to life, and ideally minimize the amount of avoidable headaches along the way.

You're probably right that it'd be best to just jump in and get going with a few of them rather than analyze the choice to death (as I am prone to do when starting anything).
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-04-28 20:42:57+00:00
Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable? Here is a (french) example

This really underscores Klein and Thompson's argument: this infrastructure sclerosis seems to be a uniquely American problem.

This review of Klein and Thompson's book sums it up pretty well:

Adding a kilometre of subway track in the United States now costs twice what it does in Japan or Canada, and six times what it does in Portugal; in the past fifty years, the inflation-adjusted cost of a mile of interstate highway has tripled

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/10/abundance-ezra...
by eftychis | 2025-04-28 20:42:58+00:00
This comment might not be liked by the usual commenters in these threads, but I think it is worth stressing:

First: I have experience with Bevy and other game engine frameworks; including Unreal. And I consider myself a seasoned Rust, C etc developer.

I could sympathize with what was stated by the author.

I think the issue here is (mainly) Bevy. It is just not even close to the standard yet (if ever). It is hard for any generic game engine to compete with Unity/GoDot. Nevermind, the de facto standard of Unreal.

But if you are a C# developer and using Unity already, and not C++ in Unreal, going to a bloated framework that is missing features that is Bevy makes little sense. [And here is also the minor issue, that if you are a C# developer, honestly you don't care about low level code, or not having a garbage collector.]

Now if you are a C++ developer and use Unreal, they only point to move to Rust (which I would argue for the usual reasons) is if Unreal supports Rust. Otherwise, there is nothing that even compares to Unreal. (That is not custom made game engine.)
by kortilla | 2025-04-28 20:43:06+00:00
This isn’t true in the US and would be a huge dependency risk. Natural gas networks require electricity to operate.

> and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there.

This is based on FUD. This is the case all over the US and they don’t cause problems.

It’s interesting that Europe has taken such a brittle approach to infrastructure.
by danielodievich | 2025-04-28 20:43:09+00:00
We read hobbit and LOTR to our children while they were in kindergarden. Took 5 months. These are most LOVELY memories for both us and them. Unfortunately, not every child these days can focus on a book when they have so many screens out there beckoning them, and this way we were able to share our love of that story with them.
by adamrezich | 2025-04-28 20:43:27+00:00
I had the same issue a few months ago when I was trying to ask LLMs about Box2D 3.0. I kept getting answers that were either for Box2D 2.x, or some horrific mashup of 2.x and 3.0.

Now Box2D 3.1 has been released and there's zero chance any of the LLMs are going to emit any useful answers that integrate the newly introduced features and changes.
by nineplay | 2025-04-28 20:44:01+00:00
I'm not convinced. The train is not competing with driving to SF, the train is competing with flying to SF. LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours. There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station so the customer has to be convinced that the train is a time savings.

Plus, of course, SWA has 4 direct flights to SFO, 6 to Oakland, 4 to San Jose. If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-28 20:44:04+00:00
They out and out claimed these ridiculous adoption numbers for the new UI with the statement that new UI is not the default and every one of those users opted in.

That's an outright lie, no two ways about it. New UI has been the default for years, on all the JB IDEs I've used. I have no reason to think their adoption numbers aren't also entirely fabricated.

I'm just astonished with how jetbrains is speedrunning enshittification. I've been subscribed for a decade because they were best in class and respectful of their users. I guess that jetbrains is dead now.

Only a matter of time before JB alienates the rest of their users and fade into irrelevancy before selling to Microsoft or someone.
by rgyams | 2025-04-28 20:44:25+00:00
I totally understand the frustration with the common excuse of: oh it's the incentives, but I believe it oversimplifies the issue. While it's true that perverse incentives exist, we still have the agency to choose how we respond to them. If we can't resist cutting corners in small ways, we shouldn't be surprised when others do so in far more damaging ways.
by platevoltage | 2025-04-28 20:44:45+00:00
Thank you. Yeah, I would do Comp Sci. I wont say that I know everything about software development. Not even close, but I do think I'm in a position where I have the ability to continue to learn on my own. I mostly want the paper, but I'd be lying if I said I couldn't stand to drastically improve my CS fundamentals. Most of what I do is Typescript/Javascript, but I'm also into embedded development, for which I'm way less advanced at. I could really use some lower level training.
by Edman274 | 2025-04-28 20:44:50+00:00
People try to maximize the good and minimize the bad consequences of their actions. They might not do it using utils or with actual quantification but they are doing it. And definitionally, there's no way to get rid of an incentive to defect, because getting rid of it creates a new incentive to defect in a different way. Like, for the purposes of talking about this article, "incentive" could be shorthand for "any reason you could come up with to do something wrong to get ahead" but it could also more broadly be defined as "the expected good results of a choice". As an example, as long as money is important in society, there is always going to exist an "incentive" to rob a bank. That can't be removed. What we can do is make it harder to rob a bank, and force reputational damage and jail to thieves. Creating a society where money doesn't matter might be possible, but then there'd be no bank. By the same token, there will always be an incentive to fake data. We can make it harder to fake data and force reputational damage to people who fake data, but that incentive to fake will exist. The only way that it wouldn't exist would be if we made it so that the outcomes of research didn't matter at all, but it would be hard to imagine a society functioning where any research would be happening if no outcomes mattered. If that were the case, then high school dropouts would try to get research grants for baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. The only way to prevent that would be to create a system where people have to justify their research without caring about the results, but then you've reintroduced "incentives", just different ones that can still be cheated again.

By arguing that it's the moral character of people that's the problem and not the mere incentives, one key disincentive is reintroduced which is the reputational damage thing I alluded to earlier. Most people don't rob banks not because there's no incentive, but because the disincentive (jail, reputational damage) is so high as to make that course of action seem stupid. But if you argue that it's incentives and not moral character to blame, you remove the disincentive of making defectors suffer reputational damage. You can't remove an incentive entirely. You can only change them, and add disincentives. Reputational harm is one of those disincentives, and so is forcing things like pre-registering experiments, open access journals, etc.
by Breza | 2025-04-28 20:45:03+00:00
I'm surprised more people don't use images for this kind of thing. You could put an image with a green checkmark next to every live job posting, and change it to a red X once the job is no longer available. I worked for a publisher of email newsletters and we ran a bunch of tests into the caching behavior of email clients to see how viable this kind of thing would be. Turns out it's pretty easy to implement and works just about everywhere.
by ytpete | 2025-04-28 20:45:45+00:00
It seems narrower than that. Best I can gather from the text of the bill (https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025A...) is it applies to any state laws violated while engaged in:

- advertising/selling illegal drugs - selling firearms - sex trafficking - "sexually exploitative material"

But it doesn't appear to enumerate a fixed list of laws, no. And there are financial penalties if the social media company judges wrong.

There are also other parts of the bill which touch on age verification of users, screen time / bedtime warning popups, requirements on responding to warrants quickly, etc. And it carves out various exemptions for gaming sites, email, collaborative editing software, education software, LinkedIn-type sites, comment threads on non-user-generated streaming or news sites, ...whole bunch of stuff. Definitely not easy to parse for us non-lawyers.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-28 20:45:54+00:00
By the time we finished pouring a trillion dollars into the global broadband, fiber, and cellular network buildout between 1998 and 2008, the Internet was already adding a trillion dollars a year to the economy.

We've now got 10 years and about a trillion dollars invested in this latest AI bubble, and it's still a super-massive financial black hole.

Ten years and a trillion dollars can make great things like happen. AI ain't that.
by bunderbunder | 2025-04-28 20:46:06+00:00
Meh. I've tried "SIMD magic wand" tools before, and found them to be verschlimmbessern.

At least on the scientific computing side of things, having the way the code says the data is organized match the way the data is actually organized ends up being a lot easier in the long run than organizing it in a way that gives frontend developers warm fuzzies and then doing constant mental gymnastics to keep track of what the program is actually doing under the hood.

I think it's probably like sock knitting. People who do a lot of sock knitting tend to use double-pointed needles. They take some getting used to and look intimidating, though. So people who are just learning to knit socks tend to jump through all sorts of hoops and use clever tricks to allow them to continue using the same kind of knitting needles they're already used to. From there it can go two ways: either they get frustrated, decide sock knitting is not for them, and go back to knitting other things; or they get frustrated, decide magic loop is not for them, and learn how to use double-pointed needles.
by paulorlando | 2025-04-28 20:46:39+00:00
From Munger in The Psychology of Human Misjudgment: "And human nature, with its version of what I call incentive-caused bias, causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get. "Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately."
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-04-28 20:46:40+00:00
> The UK on a per capita GDP PPP basis is as poor, or poorer, than the poorest US state, Mississippi.

Lets go through some basics, 40% of missippi's budget comes from federal money. California aint paying the tab of the UK, so yeah numbers look worse.

the UK budget for a person includes healthcare, and rent is cheaper (except london). On average UK residents have more disposable income and higher quality of life (longer life, fewer jail time, less child and mother deaths).

No one in the UK would trade their life for the same money, way more driving, worse food, no healthcare and a opioid epidemic all over the place.

> Immigration, trade policy, privatization, and financialization have cut the working class population off at the knees

the highest spending of the working class is housing which was cut by a conservative goverment to entrench purchasing power on the boomer generation. Cutting council house builds in the 70s was the biggest mistake in the recent history of the country

the idea of those kind of trade offs, similar to the US becoming a world currency is that the population would up skill. Replace mines with modern industries and services, which have higher quality of life and lower risk.

> It's an economically miserable country temporarily sustained only by the continued extraction of wealth in London, activity that continues only through inertia. This should be shocking given the starting point.

cool theory, but london is not continuing through inertia, it got ahead of wall street as a financial hub. We are literally the worlds largest financial centre. The fact that its not shared properly is an issue, but no country gets to be numebr 1 in such an incredibly competitive industry "through inertia"

> I think the view that a country's good is defined by GDP is entirely wrong.

why bring up missisippis then?

> immigration is a matter of public policy. It is not possible unless the state encourages and allows it. It isn’t something that just happens because other people want to come.

yeah an there is a need for immigrants. Between the lack of births, the lack of university spaces etc we need way more nurses than the UK can graduate per year for example. You also have the historical context of the UK being an empire and still having relationships with the countries it owned. There are plenty of people in Australia, Canda, Nigeria, India whose grandparents were born in UK, then moved to a different country and now their grandkids might wanna come back. Or grew up in an ex colony and think of the UK like many UK students think of europe, as somewhere to go an study or visit or dream of moving to some day.

You can make immigration harder or easier as public policy but it is also something that just happens. Outside of like north korea pretty much every country has people who come in and go out, for a myriad of reasons
by sgt101 | 2025-04-28 20:46:45+00:00
I did a project where we predicted transformer failure (they blow up!) from changes in the oil that they have in them (its insulative properties suddenly change). This was 30 years ago so it's all a bit fuzzy, but the one thing that really stuck with me was the story that the SME that we were working with had about the UK grid teetering on the edge of failure during the "great storm" of 1987. His telling was that they really were unsure if they would get it back at all!
by doug_durham | 2025-04-28 20:46:54+00:00
What innovation? Languages with curly braces versus BEGIN/END? There is no innovation going on in computer languages. Rust is C with better ergonomics and rigorous memory management. This was made possible with better processors which made more elaborate compilers practical. It all gets compiled by LLVM down to the same object code. I think we are moving to an era of "read-only" languages. Languages that have horrible writing ergonomics yet are easy to understand when read. Humans won't write code. They will review code.
by bloppe | 2025-04-28 20:47:21+00:00
It's because there's conflict between individuals but also between groups. With inter-group competition, the tribe that cooperates better is going to out-compete the tribe that succumbs to in-fighting.

The alarming corollary is that, in the absence of inter-group competition, intra-group competition becomes the only relevant evolutionary pressure. Basically, a society without enemies may be destined to become more selfish over time. This could be the main driving force behind the "inevitable" rise and fall of dominant civilizations.

The big question is: how does one delineate the in-group from the out-group? How can we invent that boundary to minimize conflict overall?
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-28 20:47:25+00:00
I enjoyed reading the book "punished by rewards" that warned us that we often confuse rewards with activities if we are rewarded for doing the activity.

Think about sports. People play to win, when we really should be playing to play.

It may be "me", but I have to remind my self to play as well as I can and not think about win/loss
by LoganDark | 2025-04-28 20:47:32+00:00
I hate how this article constantly treats autism as "something you have" rather than "something you are". I don't "have autism" or "live with autism" (at least not in the sense that they're using it). I just am autistic.

I do appreciate that they say "autistic people" a few times, but leading with phrasing that makes autism look like some sort of disease or mental illness certainly makes me cringe a bit.
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-28 20:48:09+00:00
The way I read about Bevy in online discussions obfuscates this. Someone who is new to game development could be confused into thinking Bevy is a fair competitor with the other engines you mentioned. And equate Bevy with Rust, or Bevy with Rust in game dev. I think stomping this out is critical to expectation management, and perhaps rust's future in game dev.
by isaachinman | 2025-04-28 20:48:37+00:00
Excellent work!

We're building something similar at Marco:

https://marcoapp.io

If you're up for a chat sometime I'd be keen! Very impressed with your work.

We've taken longer to get to market, but will be launching with full IMAP support and web/desktop/mobile apps.

I like your pricing – hit the nail on the head.
by dTal | 2025-04-28 20:48:48+00:00
I think you do fear death, given that you plan to live until it is physically impossible for you to do so painlessly. If you don't fear death, an easy and reliable way to avoid suffering in your old age is to painlessly commit suicide right now. But be aware that we treat people who don't express a preference for staying alive as having a serious mental illness worth locking them up for.

Fear of death is not just natural, it is the most fundamental instinct of any creature besides reproduction. Those who don't have it, don't last long. Perhaps society's attitudes towards it could profitably be improved, but don't make out like it's an irrational personality flaw.
Show HN: Infrabase – Prompt-Ops for AWS
by igorzij | 2025-04-28 20:49:13+00:00
We too at first thought that letting an LLM manage your AWS account must be a bad idea. What could possibly go wrong?? However we couldn’t resist building it, and when we did, we were surprised how much it can do even in plain vanilla form, which currently is just the ai-sdk frontend with some aws sdk code generation (inspared by aws-mcp). We all but stopped using the AWS console internally and switched to Infrabase - a lot of the time it’s much faster to prompt than to click around in AWS console, especially for things that involve multiple steps, IAM roles, etc.

So we started to think of making a publicly-launchable product out of it. Some of the things that were missing:

- Auth - Some form of checking / validation of the generated aws-sdk code - OIDC or cloudformation template instead of keys to connect AWS accounts - Support more infra tools, not just AWS (datadog, github, sentry, …) - User actions for tool use / explicit approval of risky operations - Export to Terraform / OpenTofu

But then we thought, the only thing that is really missing is auth; the rest of the list would still be a blocker for many people, but not for everyone. So we shipped auth and here we are - perhaps someone is crazy enough to try it as-is and sharing your thoughts!
by yorwba | 2025-04-28 20:49:16+00:00
If you're looking at it from the perspective of business sustainability (i.e. what the article is about) "we keep lowering our prices" doesn't sound so great. The question is whether GPT-4.1 nano costs OpenAI 300x less than GPT-4 to run or not. If it costs exactly that much less, that still means demand needs to grow by more than 300x just to keep revenue constant. And if it does, then total inference cost correspondingly goes up again.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-04-28 20:49:16+00:00
Its not even innovation. I had a new Laravel project that i was chopping around to play with some new library and I couldn't the the dumbest stuff to work. Of course I went back to read the docs and - ah Laravel 19 or whatever is using config/boostrap.php again and no matter what chatgpt, or myself had figured, could understand why it wasnt working.

unfortunately, a lot of libraries and services - well I don't think chatGPT understands the differences or it would be hard to. At least I have found that with writing scriplets for RT, PHP tooling, etc. The web world seems to move fast enough (and RT moves hella slow) that its confusing libraries and interfaces through the versions.

It'd really need a wider project context where it can go look at how those includes, or functions, or whatever work instead of relying on 'built in' knowledge.

"Assume you know nothing, go look at this tool, api endpoint or, whatever, read the code, and tell me how to use it"
by asadotzler | 2025-04-28 20:49:24+00:00
Almost all of the internet build out happened between 1998 and 2008, and cost about $1T and was adding $1T to the economy annually by the end of that buildout.

This latest AI hype cycle is also about 10 years old and about $1T invested, and yet it's still a super-massive financial black hole with no economy-wide trillion dollar boost anywhere in sight.

The internet broadband, fiber, and cellular buildout changed the world significantly. This LLM buildout is doing no such thing and is unlikely to ever do so.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-28 20:49:37+00:00
Most people do that except in the rare instance where they find a product that really satisfies their needs. But farming those rare instances is precisely the goal of outbound marketing. You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets, and sitting in your inbox there's an email from someone who says they can start foobaring your widgets next week. The same email went out to a bunch of people who already have a team or don't run widgets, but neither you nor the salesperson cares about them.
by avree | 2025-04-28 20:49:57+00:00
What? Every single major power outage on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages has taken between a day to a week to diagnose. You can read about the list of detailed theories if you click through to any of them, here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Sri_Lankan_blackouts

Even your minor power outages take 30 minutes to an hour for your local power company to determine what failed.
by noelwelsh | 2025-04-28 20:50:26+00:00
Not a game dev, but thought I'd mess around with Bevy and Rust to learn a bit more about both. I was surprised that my code crashed at runtime due to basics I expected the type system to catch. The fancy ECS system may be great for AAA games, but it breaks the basic connections between data and use that type systems rely on. I felt that Bevy was, unfortunately, the worst of both worlds: slow iteration without safety.