MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LikesPwsh | 2025-04-12 10:03:56+00:00
I realise this is meant to be a jab at high-level programming languages, but SQL really did succeed at that.

Its abstraction may leak sometimes, but most people using it are incredibly productive without needing to learn what a spool operator or bitmap does.

Even though the GUI and natural language aspects of 4GL failed, declarative programming was worth it.
by epolanski | 2025-04-12 10:05:54+00:00
I don't know your experience doesn't match mine.

NotebookLM by Google is in a class of its own in the use case of "provide documents and ask a chat or questions about them" for personal use. ChatGPT and Claude are nowhere near. ChatGPT uses RAG so it "understands" less about the topic and sometimes hallucinate.

When it comes to coding Claude 3.5/3.7 embedded in Cursor or stand alone kept giving better results in real world coding, and even there Gemini 2.5 blew it away in my experience.

Antirez, hping and Redis creator among many others releases a video on AI pretty much every day (albeit in Italian) and his tests where Gemini reviews his PRs for Redis are by far the better out of all the models available.
by Epa095 | 2025-04-12 10:06:20+00:00
Damn, as another nordic male, why did nobody tell me?

I noticed that someone in America said so, but the US had been extreme, in all ways, for many years and no sane person takes the stuff coming from there as gospel.

I am not responsible for 'all the world’s injustices', and nobody had tried to make me. Maybe if I spend some time on YouTube I can find someone at an American college thinking so, or a right-wing podcast saying that people think so about me. But that is not the mainstream here.
by pzo | 2025-04-12 10:07:14+00:00
Apart from Gemini 2.5 Pro they have a decent Jack-of-all-trades master of none/price Gemini 2.0 Flash.

1) is dirty cheap ($0.1M/$0.4M),

2) is multimodal (image and audio),

3) reliable rate limit (comparing to OSS ml ai providers),

4) fast (200 tokens/s).

5) if need realtime API they provide as well for more expensive price (audio-to-audio)

It's my go to model for using as an API for some apps/products. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-2-0-flash/provid...
by huijzer | 2025-04-12 10:07:40+00:00
> Doesn't that mean he was long volatility?

Now that you say it could be that he misspoke indeed.

> Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day

Okay so Taleb was literally an "option trader" as in he traded one option on one day in his life?

> Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.

How is Taleb, who is an option trader and who has written about options trading for years, not related to an article on an options trade?
by FractalFir | 2025-04-12 10:09:22+00:00
Correct me if I am wrong C, unsigned overflow is well-defined - at least the GCC manual says so, but I'll have to check the standard.

https://www.gnu.org/software/c-intro-and-ref/manual/html_nod...

Since signed multiplication is bitwise-equivalent to unsigned multiplication, I use unsigned multiplication to emulate UB-free signed multiplication. The signed variant of this overflow check is a bit harder to read because of that, but it still works just fine.

bool i128_mul_ovf_check(__int128 A0 ,__int128 A1 ){

bb0:

if((A1) != (0)) goto bb1;

return false;

bb1:

return (((__int128)((__uint128_t)(A0) * (__uint128_t)(A1))) / (A1)) == (A1);

}

As for using `__builtin_popcountll` instead - you are right, my mistake. Thanks for pointing that out :).

I did not use the word "unsigned" before long long for the sake of readability - I know that repeating a word so many times can make it harder to parse for some folk. The project itself uses the correct types in the code, I was just kind of loose with the language in the article itself. My bad, I'll fix that and be a bit more accurate.

Once again, thanks for the feedback!
by metalman | 2025-04-12 10:11:03+00:00
It's a deep dive, but an example or two might help, a great deal of food is processed and handled under purely industrial conditions, with all of it strored for some time, and shipped long distances, this causes oxidation and reduction of the most volitile and flavorfull/coulorfull components, which then must be protected or added back in when it is packaged for sale. Hence a vast industry devoted to flavorings, and coulorants, where many of these substances that were used are now banned, at least in a patch work fashion. Lead and other heavy metals are added to alter flavor and coulor, they are cheap and readily availible and also I suspect work as preservatives, allowing unscrupulous middlemen to by up large quantities of substandard product, and alter it enough to make it appear good enough for retailers to sell. Then there are agricultural areas that have been poluted by industry, mining, war, or naturaly, or even by past agricultural "mistakes", and again unscrupulous people can make large proffits by concealing the origin of what they are selling. So I buy spices as whole unground items, and choose carefully from small ethnic groceries, that cater to people keeping culinary traditions alive, and know by sight and smell the quality of what they are buying, and are often very hapoy to share there way of determining the good from the bad, and precisely, what to look for.
by netsharc | 2025-04-12 10:11:10+00:00
Trump and meritocracy? You are insane. Oh, Hegseth the wife-(and alcohol-)abusing TV-presenter should be in charge the world's most powerful military? Brett Kavanaugh, who in the balance of probability did assault that woman, should be forced into the supreme court (even blocking the FBI investigation)? You're just going to excuse these flaws away, aren't you?

To be honest, this thread has shown what weak fragile egos some white men have. So your kind has had it easy for centuries. Yeah, probably the rhetoric that's made you "the enemy" is really dumb (hey it poisoned the mind of the richest man in the world, for one), but what do you expect, mollycoddling?

Hah, maybe the whole (white) world should have a truth-and-reconciliation committee, where men are invited to discuss their privilege, and what can be changed to make an equal world. (Actually not just white, men all over the world have had this tyranny. Then again maybe it's just the animal/biological nature that we shouldn't just suppress). But even with "committee", there'll be weak egos screaming about the tyranny against them. A bit like states wanting to hide away the civil war from their education, or not even allowing discussion about systemic racism or "critical race theory" (uh oh sorry if that triggers you, if I were mocking you I'd call you a snowflake now).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-12 10:11:30+00:00
I ran a pretty high-functioning team of experienced C++ image processing pipeline programmers, for 25 years. We were part of a much larger, international (and interdisciplinary) team. We worked for one of the most renowned imaging companies in the world.

Some of the folks we dealt with, were the top people in their field, and not everyone was especially good at getting along with others.

Everyone thought they had The Answer, and everyone was totally passionate about doing their best work.

Needless to say, we often had heated discussions.

For the most part, we did excellent work (not always, but team infighting was not the reason for issues).

My personal experience, is that creative, passionate, high-talent teams can be pretty messy, and managing them, is tricky.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-12 10:12:16+00:00
>Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant.

In my experience, this is not true because, in high-trust teams, there is "harmonious conflict." People offer criticism without getting heated.

Getting heated often results from a strong opinion combined with a lack of faith that other people are genuinely considering your opinion. People who get heated feel they have to be forceful to convince others to listen. Knowing your opinion will be hard and carefully considered, you don't need to get heated.
by andersmurphy | 2025-04-12 10:15:06+00:00
Cool. I didn't notice either. :)

With http2/3 the it's all multiplexed over the same connection, and as far as your server is concerned that up request/connection is very short lived.

Yeah mixed formats for compression is probably a use case (like you said once you commit with compression with SSE there's no switching during the connection). But, then you still need to configure compression yourself with websockets. The main compression advantage of SSE is it's not per message it's for the whole stream. The implementations of compression with websockets I've seen have mostly been per message compression which is much less of a win (I'd get around 6:1, maybe 10:1 with the game example not 200:1, and pay a much higher server/client CPU cost).

Websockets have similar issues with firewalls and TCP. So in my mind if I'm already dealing with that I might as well go UDP.

As for ordering, that's part of the problem that makes websockets messy (with reconnects etc). I prefer to build resilience into the system, so in the case of that demo I shared, if you disconnect/reconnect lose your connection you automatically get the latest view (there's no play back of events that needs to happen). SSE will automatically send up the last received event id up on reconnect (so you can play back missed events if you want, not my thing personally). I mainly use event ID as a hash of content, if the hash is the same don't send any data the client already has the latest state.

By design, the way I build things with CQRS. Up events never have to be ordered with down events. Think about a game loop, my down events are basically a render loop. They just return the latest state of the view.

If you want to order up events (rarely necessary). I can batch on the client to preserver order. I can use client time stamp/hash of the last event (if you want to get fancy), and the server orders and batches those events in sync with the loop, i.e everything you got in the last X time (like blockchains/trading systems). This is only for per client based ordering, no distributed client ordering otherwise you get into lamport clocks etc.

I've been burnt too many times by thinking websockets will solve the network/race conditions for me (and then failing spectacularly), so I'd rather build the system to handle disconnects rather than rely on ordering guarantees that sometimes break.

Again, though my experience has made me biased. This is just my take.
by flux293m | 2025-04-12 10:15:22+00:00
Something I've noticed is that Gemini through gemini.google.com or through the mobile apps is vastly inferior to Gemini through aistudio.google.com. Much worse handling of long contexts amongst other things. Very odd that a product that is free (AI Studio use is free), is much worse than the product I am paying 20 quid a month for.

I find this to be especially true for the newer models like "gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25", so if you haven't tried AI Studio yet, I'd give that a go.
by slightwinder | 2025-04-12 10:15:40+00:00
> Almost all Python programmers should be familiar with list comprehensions

Being familiar doesn't mean it's readable. They can be useful, but readability is usually not on that list.

> I think for someone with a basic knowledge of Ruby, it's more understandable than the Python.

I know both, and still consider it awful. Readability is not about making it short or being able to decipher it.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-04-12 10:15:59+00:00
Europe isn't playing aggressively enough or really doing enough to innovate. China is in a position to reap a huge windfall from Trump putting the US in the dumpster. China will bring Europe into the fold with the promise of gradual reforms, and they'll win the global south with soft power and trade agreements.

My fear is that Trump sees America's position eroding quickly relative to China before his eyes and decides to do something an order of magnitude dumber than anything he's done before.
by mjburgess | 2025-04-12 10:16:28+00:00
All articles of this class, whether positive or negative, begin "I was working on a hobby project" or some variation thereof.

The purpose of hobbies is to be a hobby, archetypical tech projects are about self-mastery. You cannot improve your mastery with a "tool" that robs you of most of the minor and major creative and technical decisions of the task. Building IKEA furniture will not make you a better carpenter.

Why be a better carpenter? Because software engineering is not about hobby projects. It's about research and development at the fringes of a business (, orgs, projects...) requirements -- to evolve their software towards solving them.

Carpentry ("programming craft") will always (modulo 100+ years) be essential here. Powertools do not reduce the essential craft, they increase the "time to craft being required" -- they mean we run into walls of required expertise faster.

AI as applied to non-hobby projects -- R&D programming in the large -- where requirements aren't specified already as prior art programs (of func & non-func variety, etc.) ---- just accelerates the time to hitting the wall where you're going to shoot yourself in the foot if you're not an expert.

I have not seen a single take by an experienced software engineer have a "sky is falling" take, ie., those operating at typical "in the large" programming scales, in typical R&D projects (revision to legacy, or greenfield -- just reqs are new).
by hedgew | 2025-04-12 10:17:09+00:00
>Why bother playing when I knew there was an easier way to win? This is the exact same feeling I’m left with after a few days of using Claude Code. I don’t enjoy using the tool as much as I enjoy writing code.

My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher level choices and overall design and code quality, rather than searching specific usages of libraries or applying other minutiae. Learning is accelerated and the loop of making choices and seeing code generated for them, is a bit addictive.

I'm mostly worried that it might not take long for me to be a hindrance in the loop more than anything. For now I still have better overall design sense than AI, but it's already much better than I am at producing code for many common tasks. If AI develops more overall insight and sense, and the ability to handle larger code bases, it's not hard to imagine a world where I no longer even look at or know what code is written.
by mppm | 2025-04-12 10:17:17+00:00
As others have pointed out, writing is a very recent phenomenon, but your intuition seems correct in general - what sets humans apart from chimps and bonobos is efficient transfer learning to future generations. If you are interested, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello makes this point in detail. Tomasello argues that chimps, while being impressive learners and problem solvers in some ways, actually have extremely inefficient cultural transfer, which prevents runaway cultural evolution that has happened in humans.
by anovikov | 2025-04-12 10:17:30+00:00
I can't see why it's a bitter prediction. It's an observation from all my life that boring, mind-numbing but high impact work makes the best money. Now smart people go into coding because it's a thrill, they enjoy doing it for the sake of it. Once this is no longer the case, these people will be out, and competition will become lower and there will be easier bucks to make.
by nchmy | 2025-04-12 10:18:03+00:00
Did you mean to respond to another comment? Because I'm not following either the relevance or tone of your comment.

The parent comment wanted a way to "serve" requests on the client device, so I suggested a way to do that that is also compatible with normal d* usage...

How to get the data to the client and keep it in sync is an entirely other problem that they'd face with any framework/approach. Would be foolish for some applications and perfectly possible for others. Offline/local-first apps are getting considerable attention these days, for good reason.

I'm a big fan and cheerleader of everything you've done. Keep up the great work.
by M4v3R | 2025-04-12 10:18:24+00:00
To me it’s the exact opposite. I was writing code for the past 20+ years and I recently realized it’s not the act of writing code I love, but the act of creating something from nothing. Over the past few months I wrote two non-trivial utility apps that otherwise I would most probably not write because I didn’t have enough time to do that, but Cursor + Claude gave me the 5x productivity boost that enabled me to do so, and I really enjoyed doing that.

My only gripe is that the models are still pretty slow, and that discourages iteration and experimentation. I can’t wait for the day a Claude 3.5 grade model with 1000 tok/s speed releases, this will be a total game changer for me. Gemini 2.5 recently came closer, but it’s still not there.
by sapiogram | 2025-04-12 10:18:37+00:00
> When I moved them over to Kubernetes, I also applied CPU resource limit, each in its own pod. I set the limits based on what I measured when they were all running on PM2 ... but the same code running on Kubernetes ran with 10x less CPU overall. Why? Because the async code were not allowed to just run grabbing as much CPU as it can for as long as it can, and the kernel scheduler was able to fairly run. That allowed the entire system to run with less resources overall.

As someone who has advocated against Kubernetes CPU limits everywhere I've worked, I'm really struggling to see how they helped you here. The code used 10x less CPU with CPU limits, with no adverse effects? What were all those CPU cycles going before?
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-12 10:19:32+00:00
> Ideas get challenged based on what they are, not who said them

Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ?

It's not just that single quote, the whole article felt like a Don Quixote battling the windmills that keep silencing the wise engineers bearing their valid criticism as a spear. Or perhaps it was aimed at dictator types of figures who reign fear on their troups ? But then, will they even listen to this author ?

> My best engineering teams were never the quiet ones—they were the ones where technical debates got spirited, where different perspectives were welcomed, and where we could disagree while still respecting each other.

Who's raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ?

--

The previous piece discussed here [1] was definitely more interesting and bringing more to the table as a thought piece.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652024
by LeafItAlone | 2025-04-12 10:19:55+00:00
>Why did they sell a lot of Visa stocks?

Ok, I guess you got me there. I guess there is no explanation why they sold $500k-$1m Visa on July 01, 2024, almost 3 months before the Sep 24, 2024 DOJ lawsuit. It's not like Visa was in a already in in a slump since the beginning of the 2024, going in the opposite direction of their tech-based stocks [it was]. It's not like they have been slowly shedding Visa for the past decade, every couple of years [they have been]. And they must certainly have closed out their full position in Visa at tht time [they didn't]. In theory it could be possible that they were shedding that to load up on $2m-$10m of NVDA around the same time [like everybody else was]. But that would be too convenient [it's not]. And they certainly made the right choice, Visa currently being ~22% above the point that they sold at; they sure saved a lot of money doing that [they lost out on money].

Rather than taking for gospel what the leader of the opposing party and it's media arms are telling you to believe (especially when many get the value wrong), I strongly urge you to consider the factual data and draw conclusions for yourself.

And then, when you want to basically match Pelosi's trades - go load up on VOO or similar like the rest of us did in 2024.

- https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/V/ - https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/V/VOO - https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy... - https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/202... - https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/FinancialDisclosure
by dambusm | 2025-04-12 10:20:21+00:00
> As a business Google's interest is in showing ads that make it the most money - if they quickly show just the relevant information then Google loses advertising opportunities.

This is just a question of UX- the purpose of their search engine was already to show the most relevant information (ie. links), but they just put some semi-relevant information (ie. sponsored links) first, and make a fortune. They can just do the same with AI results.
by zwnow | 2025-04-12 10:21:18+00:00
Incredible take considering using AI robs new learners of off real learning. There is a reason lots of experienced devs are dropping it from their editors. Using AI will not make you a better dev, it simply accelerates you building a failing product faster, because ultimately you wont understand your own product. Most devs that use AI blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces.
by bjackman | 2025-04-12 10:21:51+00:00
Well, Google is also very well placed to integrate with other products that have big market share.

So far this has been nothing but a PM wankfest but if Gemini-in-{Gmail,Meet,Docs,etc} actually gets useful, it could be a big deal.

I also don't think any of those concerns are as important for API users as direct consumers. I think that's gonna be a bugger part of my the market as time goes on.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-12 10:22:08+00:00
The government has two jobs: 1. Steal your money, 2. Send you to die in a war.

Unless your country is a war, that means they can focus entirely on stealing your money. You're never going to be able to change that. The only thing you can do is protect your money outside their reach. Then you can decide freely how it is used.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-12 10:22:15+00:00
WebSockets are full duplex, so both sides of a connection are equally transmitting sides. There first section fails to understands this and then builds some insane concern for state on top of this faulty notion. WebSockets don't care about your UI framework just like your car doesn't care what time you want to eat dinner.

> You have to manage the socket lifecycle

You have to do the very same thing with HTTP keep-alive or use a separate socket for each and every HTTP request, which is much slower. Fortunately the browser makes this stupid simple in regards to WebSockets with only a few well named events.

> When a new WebSocket connection is initiated, your server has to handle the HTTP “upgrade” request handshake.

If the author cannot split a tiny string on CRLF sequences they likely shouldn't be programming and absolutely shouldn't be writing an article about transmission. There is only 1 line of data you really need from that handshake request: Sec-WebSocket-Key.

Despite the upgrade header in the handshake the handshake is not actually HTTP. According to RFC6455 it is a tiny bit of text conforming to the syntax of RFC2616, which is basically just: lines separated by CRLF, terminated by two CRLFs, and headers separated from values with a colon. Really its just RFC822 according to RFC2616.

This is not challenging.

I take it this article is written by a JavaScript framework junkie that cannot program, because there is so much in the article that is just wrong.

EDITED: because people get sad.