MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jach | 2025-04-25 10:26:05+00:00
I frequently try to mention how Java with JRebel is the closest to the Lisp experience I've found with non-Lisp, it's more dynamic feeling than so-called dynamic languages. Having something like the condition system being ubiquitous would be golden. (I'm aware there is a Java port though I never got around to playing with it and it doesn't solve the problem of other people's code not using it..) My last big job involved a giant app server that would take minutes just to restart if you had to do it, JRebel saved so much time by making things much more reloadable including support for a lot of other libraries' quirks and in general a lot of Java-isms like things configured with XML. Looking under the hood at the JVM you can see traces of Lisp everywhere, like class loaders are just (load)s, it's easy to believe the quote about dragging C++ programmers halfway to Lisp.

Then there's things like rr (https://rr-project.org/) that also seem largely ignored by old unix systems people, despite being exactly appropriate for that environment.

Still, having the whole language available via REPL as Lisp does when you hit a break or error makes up for a lot of weaknesses in the rest of the debugging experience.

I haven't met the individuals like taeric but I do find it plausible that something has been lost for developers whose main experience is in highly separated cloud-oriented systems, whether they go as far as micro-services or not. When you don't have full end-to-end debugging and have to correlate everything with trace ids in logs, and also if policies prevent even getting a debugger hook in production, I can see how one would be less motivated to learn about debugging tools to begin with. (On the other hand you're encouraged to have better logging, and often that's enough to figure out a problem, no need to have a running application.)
by Juliate | 2025-04-25 10:26:10+00:00
No need to call to aliens for that, this happened within human history several times... towards other humans, and towards other species (which some were considered as pest, until it was discovered they were crucial to the ecosystem balance).

That's definitely where the danger of some AI builders is, one more example of how technology _is political_ and the reason it's not so surprising some tech leaders are totally aligned with Trump/Project 2025 (if not funding it).

(all while there is a _real_, _documented_, _non fictional_, _short term_ ubiquitous threat that is global climate change)
by lopanapol | 2025-04-25 10:26:28+00:00
Thanks to everyone for the comments, and also for the hard work of the cURL maintainer. This experiment has shown how AI can drain the energy of a maintainer, and how it feels to be overwhelmed by spammy reports. It also raises the question: what is the right way to handle spammers?

First, we must realize that no matter how annoying a spammer can be, they are still human—just like us. They have emotions. We are not robots.

In this experiment, you can see how privacy is affected. It still revealed my name, and also showed that ChatGPT’s custom instructions might not be safe.

I knew someone would eventually find it—and they did. This shows that AI still has a long way to go.

I accept that AI can be sloppy. That’s true. The fact that maintainers are drained is also true. And spammers will likely increase in the future. I chose cURL for this experiment because it’s a legendary tool, and its creator is a rockstar to me.

About being a native speaker or not—yes, I’m not a native English speaker. But on the other hand, you’re not a native Thai speaker either. In the end, we’re all just human.

Lastly, feel free to comment—good or bad, I’m okay with that. Be yourself, use your own words.

cURL is still a powerful tool for me, and for the world. I wish everyone here a happy and great day. No matter if some see me as an idiot or just another human like them.

Napol Thanarangkaun
by n_ary | 2025-04-25 10:26:47+00:00
Tbh, your job is secured as long as your boss is not brainwashed and FOMO by the infinite cash burning and lobbying to sell LLM as the all solving holy grail. Depending on how long it takes to brainwash all leadership into thinking, LLMs can do your job(despite reality, I mean it takes some time to fail and then additional to deal with sunk cost fallacy). One of my colleague went to work for a startup that promises to replace ALL general practitioner/family doctor within next 2-3 years by LLMs. While I hope they badly burn and go bankrupt, I am also worried about the future as this particular startup is also getting major backing from certain big deep pockets.
by philipallstar | 2025-04-25 10:26:52+00:00
> because, let's face it, she was a woman

I don't think this is at all true. The reason you've heard of Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace is precisely because they're women. No man who achieved similar levels of significant work is remembered outside of some niche publications.

> subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things

It just seems unlikely that Noether has several times done what Newton and Einstein did and she's so unknown. Why do I know about much less prolific women and not her, if sexism is the actual reason, and not just a thought-terminating word?
by bombcar | 2025-04-25 10:26:59+00:00
An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc.

And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.

Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.

Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
by josh2600 | 2025-04-25 10:27:24+00:00
I don’t understand what the issue is… here’s a couple outputs from my ChatGPT:

Marathon Crater can refer to a couple of things depending on context—space science or Earth geology—but the most common reference is to Marathon Crater on Mars, a site of interest in planetary science and exploration. Here’s a breakdown:

⸻

1. Marathon Crater (Mars)

Location: • Found in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. • Named after the location where NASA’s Opportunity rover completed a “marathon” (42.2 kilometers or 26.2 miles) of travel on the Martian surface in March 2015.

Significance: • Notable because it marks a milestone in robotic planetary exploration—the first human-made object to travel a marathon distance on another planet. • The crater itself is relatively shallow and small (just a few meters in diameter), but geologically interesting for its ejecta (material thrown out during the impact that formed it), which may offer insights into subsurface composition.

Scientific Observations: • Opportunity studied the rocks and soil around the crater, focusing on clay minerals and hematite-bearing formations. • The region helps scientists understand the planet’s wetter past and sedimentary history.

⸻

2. Marathon Crater (Moon or Earth - less common)

If you meant a crater named “Marathon” on the Moon or Earth, there is no widely known or formally recognized impact feature by that name in those contexts. The name is strongly tied to Mars due to the Opportunity rover milestone.

⸻

Symbolic Meaning

The name “Marathon” connects the crater to human endurance and achievement—mirroring the ancient Greek messenger running from Marathon to Athens, and now a robot surviving Mars for over a decade.

⸻

Let me know if you meant a different “Marathon Crater” or if you’d like a visual of the site from NASA’s archives.

_______

Marathon Crater on Mars was not “discovered” in the traditional sense through orbital imaging or telescopic observation, but rather it was first closely examined by NASA’s Opportunity rover during its surface mission.

Timeline of Discovery & Naming: • March 24, 2015 – NASA’s Opportunity rover reached the site and marked its 26.2-mile milestone (the length of a marathon). • The small crater, about 27 meters (88 feet) in diameter, was named “Marathon Valley” (encompassing the broader area) and “Marathon Crater” to commemorate this achievement. • The naming is informal and symbolic, coined by the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), not through official IAU designation.

Context • The Marathon Crater itself was identified from orbital data (likely by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), but it gained its name and significance once Opportunity physically reached it. • Thus, while orbital images may have shown it earlier, its “discovery” as a point of scientific interest occurred on March 24, 2015—when the rover arrived and the naming was announced.

Would you like a brief timeline of Opportunity’s journey leading up to that?
by formerly_proven | 2025-04-25 10:29:29+00:00
C's design is probably the most post-hoc rationalized thing in the world directly after Abrahamic scripture.

"Of course the null-terminated strings of C are more low-level than the length-prefixed strings of Pascal, because the elders of C wisely designed them to be so." Alternatively, something is low-level because it works like C because C semantics have simply become the universal definition of what is thought of as low-level, regardless of machine mismatch.

Likewise, maybe it's not such a good idea that UNIXv6 or other educational unix-likes are used in operating system classes in universities. It's well-applicable, sure, but that's not the point of that education. Maybe we should use a Japanese or German clone of some IBM mainframe system instead, so that people actually get exposed to different ideas, instead of slightly simpler and less sophisticated versions of the ideas they are already familiar with. Too much unix-inbreeding in CS education isn't good.
by taraharris | 2025-04-25 10:29:54+00:00
I got out of your situation by getting interested in investing in 2020. I made smart bets in march that year and had 5X the money when I dumped all my tsla stock teo years ago

I suggest getting a job that you like and is low stress. I spend all my free time studying everything there is to know about human interaction. there are all kinds of subtleties in dating an I'm learning the purpose of each structure. it's like a clutch

if you reveal your hand too fast, you dump the clutch and stall the entine and maybe jerk forward. if you do the the opposite, that's called riding the clutch and in this analogy you wait too long to act toward your nascent goal and the other party loses whatever interest they may have had

you have to constantly re-evaluate this after every single interaction

you have to take an interest in their lives and anticipate their needs
by ezekiel68 | 2025-04-25 10:30:10+00:00
You mentioned "initial downclocking effects", yet (for posterity) I want to emphasize that in 2020 Ice Lake (Sunny Cove core) and later Intel processors, the downclocking is really a nothingburger. The fusing off debacle in desktop CPU families like Alder Lake you mentioned definitely killed the momentum though.

I'm not sure why OS kernels couldn't have become partners in CPU capability queries (where a program starting execution could request a CPU core with 'X' such as AVX-512F, for example) -- but without that the whole P-core/E-core hybrid concept was DOA for capabilities which were not least-common denominators. If I had to guess, marketing got ahead of engineering and testing on that one.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-25 10:30:10+00:00
A bit harsh. This is not a "superiority complex" this is my experience of actually visiting third world countries and the reality of data (education, health, migration, etc). Also strange to hit on Westerners when you mentioned that you live in Europe.

This sounds a little like the utopian and ideological Westerner who thinks that the West is 'bad' (I don't even know what "over-financialized West" means...) and non-Westerners may be poorer but happier, which in the extreme archs all the way back to the "Myth of the Noble savage" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage
by bob1029 | 2025-04-25 10:31:58+00:00
B2C is virtually impossible compared to B2B. This may not be immediately apparent but it is so obvious in hindsight.

The biggest reason I think founders are going for B2C is because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them?

The advantage of B2B is that once you figure it out for the first customer, you are on an exponential path to happiness. You can practically cancel your marketing budget at that point. B2C requires an ongoing assault on the dopamine economy. Unless you can get someone on a subscription and program them to forget about it, you're gonna get steamrolled by TikTok & friends.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-25 10:32:12+00:00
It has to be coming.

Plenty of work done on virtualization, and you can see the VR and GenAI roadmaps playing out to the point where they want devs building for the Apple ecosystem to be able to run stuff securely in cloud, which means they will want a cloud offering to compete, which means they'll want their own container runtime with macOS APIs but in Apple's DCs.

This is an interesting first step though - it means devs who now want to build something that talks to cloud functionality in AWS or GCP have the option to stay in a single language. If it gets traction, you can imagine they'll accelerate investment.
by Someone | 2025-04-25 10:33:24+00:00
> It’s a contender for a "best idea and worst execution" award for programming languages in the last 20 years.

I’m not sure of the “worst execution” part. Is it even possible to make a Swift compiler that doesn’t occasionally hit those “humans immediately see what this code does, but it takes ages to compile this” moments?

I think there’s something about Swift’s type system that makes those moments unavoidable. If so, Swift is more “good idea, but too flexible to build a compiler for”, and they should have killed some of their darlings to get a better language.
by ajb | 2025-04-25 10:34:05+00:00
They own the trademark of "Open Source" and use it to exercise a right to define which licences are truly open source. Now, I guess they are becoming involved in the question of what it means for an AI model to be open source, hence the politicking

Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that water down the rights an open source license provides.
by exceptione | 2025-04-25 10:34:30+00:00
- Certain core, built-in plugins do still contact MS servers.

- Vscode has limited what extensions can do on the platform. MS own extensions can do things that others cannot.

- Theia extensions can do what oss vscode extensions cannot. Theia supports all the non-ms specific extension API's so it is fully compatible with all/most vscode extensions. But Theia goes further. Part of Theia's vision is that you could ship your own Theia, the whole platform is open.

So, Theia is a safer bet. There is no rug to pull.

Also, think about chrome <-> chromium. When Google pushes for a new API that limits what ad-blockers can do, then Chromium has a problem. Because then it becomes a fork, as upstream becomes incompatible with chromium.
by changadera | 2025-04-25 10:35:37+00:00
I used to order fragrance samples on eBay, The first order I received from them had a 10 1/2 pence stamp attached. I was perplexed as the half pence (ha'penny, pronounced HAPE-KNEE) coin had been discontinued in 1984, 30 years ago at the time, and I'd only seen them in an old collection of coins from my parents. Also the portrait of the Queen (I'm from the UK) was a bit outdated.

I contacted the seller and it turned out her husband was a stamp collector and gave her his low value cast-offs to use as postage. I found it amazing that 30+ year old stamps were still valid. It's only recently they've become invalid postage as now stamps require a barcode.

Also I used to get items delivered to my office, and the office manager's husband was a stamp collector, so she used to ask to keep the stamps I got (I used to order electronic components from all over the world) so this completed the philatelist cycle.

Another old currency anecdote. I used to work on the checkouts at a supermarket in Cambridge circa 2009 and at least two times we'd get visiting academics from the USA who had studied in the UK years before and they'd try to pay with currency they'd had from the time, except it was the awesome old pre-decimal money (We switched to decimal in 1971). I found it quaint that they thought it was still valid and thought to bring it with them.
by metalman | 2025-04-25 10:35:53+00:00
Pure lack of initiative and stuck in a retail mentality. There are 10's of thousands of privatly owned wells, and countless trucks and shipping hubs. It is EXACTLY the same situation with, oh, lets pick, wheat, and a "bushel" whatever the fuck that is, I wanted one, and got one, and corn by the ton, and fuel oil, and coal by the ton, loaded onto my 1 ton truck, drive up to the fucking place and get some.......they dont realy want to sell small quantities....but they will.....mainly they are worried about civilians getting hurt in what are purely industrial environments, but standing y ground and bieng patient and respectfull has gotten me through many gates, loaded, and gone.......often it's the secretary/receptionist who decides, and pulls out a cash slip, then.the rest just happens, sometimes it's the plant manager, who does a hand wave and points after determining that it will be ok, but all in all, it's the same for everything, just find the person who can say yes and ask.
by gchamonlive | 2025-04-25 10:35:59+00:00
We can finally just take a photo of a textbook problem that has no answer reference and no discussion about it and prompt an LLM to help us understand what's missing in our understanding of the problem, if our solution is plausible and how we could verify it.

LLM changed nothing though. It's just boosting people's intention. If your intention is to learn, you are in luck! It's never been easier to teach yourself some skill for free. But if you just want to be a poser and fake it until you make it, you are gonna be brainrot waaaay faster than usual.
by hk__2 | 2025-04-25 10:36:08+00:00
"In the age of endless books, we risk outsourcing our thinking. Instead of grappling with ideas ourselves, we just regurgitate what we read. Books should be fuel, not crutches—read less, think more."

Or even: "In the age of cave paintings, we risk outsourcing our memory. Instead of remembering or telling stories, we just slap them on walls. Art should be expression, not escape—paint less, live more."
by DrScientist | 2025-04-25 10:37:25+00:00
I think you under estimate how much of the angry political stuff is driven by paid for content by people with an agenda - and companies like Meta have just taken the money.

Sure in the end it sweeps up indviduals but money and professional narrative shapers are often behind these things.

There are a cadre of highly competance professionals in the advertising/PR area that were massively enabled by the tools that Meta et al provided ( for money ) - suddenly you could run campaigns that were highly effective, relatively cheap, and almost invisible.

This has been ruthlessly exploited by people and organisations with more money that morals.

Goverments have in part been asleep at the wheel, but also too keen to use such tools for their own ends.
by lproven | 2025-04-25 10:38:01+00:00
> I mean, part of the problem is I didn't own a pen at the time.

I find this mind-boggling.

I immediately came up with a parallel -- "they wanted me to walk to the counter but I do not own shoes."

Which took me to the universe of Pixar's _Wall-E_ and now I can't help but imagine that the subset of "people born after 1980" are helpless in their floating chairs and apparently I am aberrant because I learned to walk, and that makes me old.
by bgwalter | 2025-04-25 10:39:03+00:00
The IQ in the US started declining since the start of the Internet:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...

"Leading up to the 1990s, IQ scores were consistently going up, but in recent years, that trend seems to have flipped. The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill [sic!] very much up for debate."

The Internet is relatively benign compared to cribbing directly from an AI. At least you still read articles, RFCs, search for books etc.
by harley_bentley | 2025-04-25 10:39:29+00:00
I built this after losing access to a Supabase project I hadn’t touched for a few weeks. Turns out, on the free tier, Supabase pauses inactive projects — and after 90 days, you can’t recover them.

KeepMySupabaseAlive is a tool that solves that problem. It pings your project regularly to keep it active.

You add your Supabase Public URL and Anon key, choose a ping interval, and the tool takes care of the rest. There's also a simple dashboard with ping logs, status, and manual test options.

I built it using:

Next.js 15 (App Router + Server Components)

Supabase (for auth and DB)

Tailwind + ShadCN UI for the interface

Vercel + Cloudflare for hosting and performance

I'm planning to add features like automatic Supabase backups, downtime alerts, and team access.

Here's the link: https://keepmysupabasealive.com

producthunt https://www.producthunt.com/products/keepmysupabasealive

Would love feedback, feature suggestions, or critiques — especially from anyone working with Supabase or running side projects. Thanks!
by godelski | 2025-04-25 10:39:49+00:00
Yes. But did you read the article? The advice would still be good with Google and there's certainly a lot of programs who see their jobs as gluing together stack overflow code. It's even true that you should struggle a little before reaching for the manual! (It's just slower so you'll probably think a little while finding the right page)

The blog really says the same thing that's told in any educational setting: struggle a like first. Work your brain. Don't instantly reach for help when you don't know, try first, then reach out.

The difference with the llm is the scale and ease of being able to reach out. Making people use it too early and too often.
by dagw | 2025-04-25 10:42:31+00:00
I’d rather do the thing than talk about it.

That is fine if you're doing it for yourself, but rather unhelpful if you hope to make a living out of doing the thing. The people I know who make a living off their art are those who sink a lot of time into selling their art (and themselves). Those who sit and home and just make (often much better) art languish in obscurity.
by pas | 2025-04-25 10:43:22+00:00
I guess many people had this idea! (My thesis proposal around ~2011-2012 was almost the same [endpoint and service specific models to filter/act/remediate], but turned out to be a bit too big of a bite.)

The LHC already used a hierarchical filtering/aggregation before, that probably inspired some of it - at least in my case.