MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-19 15:27:28+00:00
Surprised that "controlling cost" isn't a section in this post. Here's my attempt.

---

If you get a hang of controlling costs, it's much cheaper. If you're exhausting the context window, I would not be surprised if you're seeing high cost.

Be aware of the "cache".

Tell it to read specific files (and only those!), if you don't, it'll read unnecessary files, or repeatedly read sections of files or even search through files.

Avoid letting it search - even halt it. Find / rg can have a thousands of tokens of output depending on the search.

Never edit files manually during a session (that'll bust cache). THIS INCLUDES LINT.

The cache also goes away after 5-15 minutes or so (not sure) - so avoid leaving sessions open and coming back later.

Never use /compact (that'll bust cache, if you need to, you're going back and forth too much or using too many files at once).

Don't let files get too big (it's good hygiene too) to keep the context window sizes smaller.

Have a clear goal in mind and keep sessions to as few messages as possible.

Write / generate markdown files with needed documentation using claude.ai, and save those as files in the repo and tell it to read that file as part of a question. I'm at about ~$0.5-0.75 for most "tasks" I give it. I'm not a super heavy user, but it definitely helps me (it's like having a super focused smart intern that makes dumb mistakes).

If i need to feed it a ton of docs etc. for some task, it'll be more in the few $, rather than < $1. But I really only do this to try some prototype with a library claude doesn't know about (or is outdated). For hobby stuff, it adds up - totally.

For a company, massively worth it. Insanely cheap productivity boost (if developers are responsible / don't get lazy / don't misuse it).
by owebmaster | 2025-04-19 15:29:00+00:00
No, it doesn't. If you are still looking for product market fit, it is just cost.

After 2 years of GPT4 release, we can safely say that LLMs don't make finding PMF that much easier nor improve general quality/UX of products, as we still see a general enshittification trend.

If this spending was really game-changing, ChatGPT frontend/apps wouldn't be so bad after so long.
by fcoury | 2025-04-19 15:29:13+00:00
Well, take that into consideration then. Just make it an option. Instead of getting 1000 requests per day with code, you get 100 on the $10/month plan, and then let users decide whether they want to migrate to a higher tier or continue using the API model.

I am not saying Claude should stop making money, I'm just advocating for giving users the value of getting some Code coverage when you migrate from the basic plan to the pro or max.

Does that make sense?
by crazygringo | 2025-04-19 15:29:47+00:00
> Coming back to an annoyingly locked phone after forgetting it for a weekend very much is.

It is?

I mean, my iPhone asks me for my passcode every 7 days anyways. And that's the only thing that happens on reboot anyways.

Also, you forget your phone for a weekend? How do you do anything during that weekend, like keep in touch with loved ones, get driving directions, pull up a boarding pass, check for delays, look up restaurants?
by woodruffw | 2025-04-19 15:30:23+00:00
You don’t have to master Rust to use this, the same way you don’t have to master C to use all of the critical extensions written in it.

(Besides, no language has this regardless of native extensions: a huge part of Python’s success comes from the fact that there isn’t a perfect graph of competencies in the community, and instead that community members provide high quality abstractions over their respective competencies.)
by latexr | 2025-04-19 15:30:47+00:00
I genuinely wish whatever is hurting you in life ceases. You are being deeply, irrationally antagonistic and sound profoundly unwell. I hope you’ll be able to perceive that. I honestly recommend you take some time off from the internet, we all should from time to time. You clearly are currently unfit for a reasoned discussion and I do not wish to add to your pain. All the best.
by chongli | 2025-04-19 15:30:51+00:00
As someone down below mentioned, programming is not as much editing text as it is massaging the underlying AST. Proper IDEs (not VSCode) in a hands of a power user who knows what his "hammer" can do (and how to invoke the necessary behaviour) are much more efficient at it compared to any text editor.

That's assuming you're spending all day editing files written in the language(s) supported by your IDE. That assumes a great deal about your programming environment, toolchain, plugins, and configuration. Switch to a different language with different syntax, different idiomatic style, different IDE plugins, and you may be faced with a totally different editing paradigm.

This is where vi shines: the tool is excellent at editing text and is therefore 100% language-agnostic. It can easily handle jumping between files written in different languages, including plaintext files, configuration files, domain-specific language files, and otherwise many other files with syntax that may not be supported by your favourite IDE. Furthermore, it is equally happy working on files that combine different sections written in different languages. Sure, some other editors (such as emacs) and IDEs (such as RStudio) also support this sort of editing, but vi doesn't need any special support for it.

This philosophy, of making text the first-class citizen, in many ways mirrors the Unix philosophy. It also happens to be the case that vi (as well as its ex command line) provides a very convenient command for piping lines, paragraphs, and any other motion you desire through a shell command (or pipeline) of your choosing. This makes it very easy to format text using commands such as `fmt` or `column`, or apply line-numbers using `nl`. This, I believe, makes vi the ideal text editor for developers working on Unix or Linux software.
by hn_acker | 2025-04-19 15:31:20+00:00
The case is UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive (3:23-cv-06522) at [1], regarding The Great 78 Project [2].

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68101636/umg-recordings...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_78_Project
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-19 15:32:10+00:00
We can use an actual example. Joe Biden going into the 2020 election pledged that he would choose a black woman as his running mate. This pledge excluded half the population on gender grounds, and 87% of the population on racial grounds. When you are only looking at half of 13% of the population you're going to be turning away a lot of qualified people. And we saw the consequences of Joe Bidens 2020 election pledge in the 2024 election
by disambiguation | 2025-04-19 15:32:13+00:00
Of course, that's the reality of it - fairness is iterative and reactive. My questions are:

- Do you think DEI was the right path forward? Did it achieve its goals? If not was that because of counter currents or something else?

- If and when we have "perfect DEI" will we declare the world a fair place? If not, what comes next?
by the-lazy-guy | 2025-04-19 15:33:22+00:00
> A 15,000-line proof is going to have a mistake somewhere.

If this proof is formal, than it is not going to. That is why writing formal proofs is such a PITA, you actually have to specify every little detail, or it doesn't work at all.

> Verifying that those 15,000 lines do what they do doesn't give me much more confidence than thorough unit testing would.

It actually does. Programs written in statically typed languages (with reasonably strong type systems) empirically have less errors than the ones written in dynamically typed languages. Formal verification as done by F* is like static typing on (a lot of) steroids. And HACL has unit tests among other things.
by naasking | 2025-04-19 15:34:11+00:00
> Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody.

Even if this were true, its application was typically reserved for people already infamous for doing something heinous, eg. murderers, despots, thieves, etc. Social media virality has applied this to individuals whose worst crime was maybe making an off-colour joke. The disproportionate response to the transgression is what most people dislike about modern cancel culture, and I don't think this disproportional response was that common in the past.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-19 15:34:39+00:00
Indeed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_War

Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.

I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-19 15:34:56+00:00
That single sentence, which is the totality of the description given in the long and winding article, doesn't actually explain anything - the efficient use of water is the obvious goal of any irrigation system, especially in a desert. But how did it efficiently use water? The only hint of information is "synchronized cleaning and maintenance", and not a word on synchronized how or with what, or why this should help.

It's like describing how a car works with just "it is efficiently designed to help you travel faster, and uses skilled maintenance workers".
by im3w1l | 2025-04-19 15:34:57+00:00
Not him, but I would also consider making FooBarWidget have a FooWidget rather than be a FooWidget.

Normally with a FooWidget you can create one on some thread and then perform operations on it on that thread. But in the case of the FooBarWidget you can not do operations on it because operations must be done in the special thread that is inaccessible.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-19 15:35:03+00:00
Federal funding for universities is not "free cash for universities to subsidize students."

When people talk about federal funding we are talking about research funding. The NSF decides that they want to fund research on topic X for reason Y. They put a call for grant applications. Labs submit grant applications and the NSF chooses the ones they think are most valuable. Those labs get money to pay for faculty and grad student salaries and lab equipment. The labs perform the research and publish it for the broader societal good.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-19 15:36:14+00:00
For the record: I shopped this project to them; it didn’t originate as an idea from LF or any major company. The idea itself came from PyCA’s maintainers, who have wanted this for a while.

(The native code desirability question is also a red herring here, since PyCA has and will always need to have native code for cryptographic operations. So having a first class ASN.1 API in PyCA was always going to involve native code, with the only variable being how.)
by wolrah | 2025-04-19 15:36:46+00:00
> Trunked is essentially useless to HAMs, and we never really use it much.

I wouldn't say it's useless, but the utility is reduced because we typically don't have the density of users where two timeslots on a single channel becomes a real limiting factor. A repeater that's set up for local talkgroups on one timeslot and then open access on the second is generally more than enough unless you have a lot of people trying to use it at once, especially in a world where anyone who wants to can have their own personal hotspot for less than the cost of a HT.

Also the usual "ham not HAM" thing.
by ninalanyon | 2025-04-19 15:37:51+00:00
My wife was from Orkney and we spent a few months in the US. So we had US biscuits which are not the same as UK biscuits, US cookies which are not Orcadian cookies, West Country English buns which are definitely not US buns.

Your (Yorkshire?) teacakes are almost but not exactly like my buns.

You can imagine the confusion when the children asked for a cookie, a bun, or a biscuit while in the US.
by science4sail | 2025-04-19 15:38:10+00:00
> Nvidia, the report said, will “continue to spare no effort” to make products that comply with regulations and “unswervingly serve the Chinese market.”

> A few weeks ago, Mr. Huang met with Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago at a dinner that cost $1 million per person.

Nvidia reminds me of third-world countries during the Cold War - playing off superpower suitors against each other. Potentially very lucrative, but also a very dangerous game.
by Goronmon | 2025-04-19 15:38:48+00:00
My local library was much denser as a child as well.

Except that's because the library was tiny. The denseness was a necessity and the library was constantly trying to get rid of books to make room for newer books.

Thankfully they eventually replaced that tiny library with a much bigger one. And the one we live near now is also much bigger and much better. I think the kids section of the library is probably double the size of the entire library we had growing up, with more books as well.
by dboreham | 2025-04-19 15:39:16+00:00
Hydrogen isn't chosen because it's the optimal technical solution (or even a solution at all). It's purpose is to prevent the transition to BEV technology (as a proposed alternative) and thereby protect the businesses making ICEs. It therefore can serve its purpose even if zero Hydrogen vehicles are made.

Of course this was all for the past 30 years. Since everyone can see with their eyes that BEVs work, Hydrogen's job is over.
by vihren | 2025-04-19 15:39:21+00:00
We do have a pretty substansive evidence that dark matter exists: from the cosmic background radiation, gravitational lensing, galaxy formation simulations, galaxy rotation curves, etc.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that there are some particles that are not interacting with electromagnetism that we haven't detected directly yet? It's not even a precedent, the neutrino is just like that.

I guess the name "dark" matter was a mistake because it implies something weird, when in fact it just means whatever this is, doesn't have electric (or chromo) charge.
by shiandow | 2025-04-19 15:40:16+00:00
I can't come up with a single good reason why you would wish to use inheritance in this case.

Except possibly for type checking, but

1. Python has duck typing anyway

2. It's debatable whether these two classes should be interchangeable

3. You shouldn't need to use inheritance just to make the type checking work.

It could be considered a clever hack in some situations, but it's completely unsurprising that it causes issues. Putting band-aids on it after you find a bug does not fix the real problem.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-04-19 15:40:53+00:00
I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.

However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.

Guess people just don't like "outsiders".
by theF00l | 2025-04-19 15:41:55+00:00
That is interesting and I think it's a popular opinion. I think in line with the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Old Testament.

But allow me present another opinion.

Snakes don't do things they don't have to do. They don't kill for no reason (cf humans, cats). They do what they have to do, without much emotion or fanfare. They shed their skin and don't carry extra weight. In other cultures, a snake is a symbol of wisdom, rebirth and healing (eg the rod of Asclepius).

Outside the symbolic arguments, I think snake venom does have some research use (eg blood thinners) and some would argue snakes are mechanically cool.

Just another perspecive ofc, and I respect yours.

In the end, snakes want to survive in a competitive world.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-19 15:42:05+00:00
The story of Post-Quantum algorithms.

Classic McEliece is getting adopted because it's solid, but not recommended. While lattice based cryptography get recommendations while having some weaknesses.

New paper from Classic McEliece team has difficulty of getting past Joppe W. Bos (FrodoKEM , Kyber) and things get heated.

For McEliece, when a new paper says one can see that your public key is a public key in only 2^529 operations, the reaction is: Wow, best-paper award! For Kyber, when a new paper says an attack recovers secret keys faster than breaking AES-128, the reaction is: Yeah, it's Monday. https://mathstodon.xyz/@djb@cr.yp.to/114353096622329030
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-19 15:43:26+00:00
Diseases imo are empathized because they contribute to the body count and have an “act of god” nature to them. It’s an easier story than to describe a type of industrial genocide.

Read about the Mit'a system that was perverted by the colonial government to essentially improve the return on assets of the colony versus slaves or other means of cheap labor. It broke down the society of the native population completely and made it impossible for them to respond or react to disasters.
by twalkz | 2025-04-19 15:44:22+00:00
I’ve been using codemcp (https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp) to get “most” of the functionality of Claude code (I believe it uses prompts extracted from Claude Code), but using my existing pro plan.

It’s less autonomous, since it’s based on the Claude chat interface, and you need to write “continue” every so often, but it’s nice to save the $$
by mellosouls | 2025-04-19 15:44:29+00:00
(British OP)

I agree that British sitcoms (not comedy generally) were superior for a couple of decades, but think we need to give modern American comedy much more credit; Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry Sanders, various animation series, etc, etc have established them back at the top. I can't see the UK as that competitive these days.

That's not considering American standup, movies etc which leave us in the dust.
by romaaeterna | 2025-04-19 15:44:32+00:00
I have begun taking my children to the local library, and I am shocked at how bad the selection is. There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest. And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang. This is wildly different from the collections that I grew up with, in libraries trashed now by standard publishing spam, despite having vastly more money and space than they did when I was a kid.

Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
by 0x696C6961 | 2025-04-19 15:44:55+00:00
I mostly work in neovim, but I'll open cursor to write boilerplate code. I'd love to use something cli based like Claude Code or Codex, but neither of them implement semantic indexing (vector embeddings) the way Cursor does. It should be possible to implement an MCP server which does this, but I haven't found a good one.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-19 15:45:06+00:00
> ACP is a protocol spearheaded by IBM’s BeeAI team

I guess that's why I never heard of it :)

MCP is only popular because it was proposed and adopted by a large player in this space in the first place. I doubt IBM's teams have that much pull. If Anthropic/oAI/Goog/MS launch something like this, maybe it will become standard. Otherwise, it's back to everyone writing the same thing over and over.
by elashri | 2025-04-19 15:45:45+00:00
I used to skip school for at least two days to go to the big library in my city. I taught myself a lot of things. Did have access to books and high speed internet (by this era standards anyway) that I couldn't have or afford at home.

I wouldn't encourage people to skip school to do that of course. But I owe this period of my life a lot of what I am today. Someone with interest in science and tech. I have known some of the people working there and they were happy helping me navigating the library (and grap books for the short boy who is too short for most of the shelves).

I wasn't happy with how it turned out the last year when I visited.
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-19 15:47:38+00:00
What about Brown v. Board of Education? Do you think that Southern schools had an obligation to accept black students or did they not have to accept anyone at all? Do you think in 1900-1945 when Harvard Yale and Columbia were putting a quota on the number of Jewish students to limit their enrollment that was fine, as Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone, Jewish or otherwise?
by reify | 2025-04-19 15:48:49+00:00
The same here on Airstrip One.

roll out the facial recognition and ID cards so we can catch those dodgy shoplifters costing us £billions in losses each year.

All media outlets pumping out stories of mass shoplifting.

I always thought that any shoplifting losses were tax deductable.

and it seems to be true on .gov.

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-man...

Allow to the extent not covered by insurance.

The loss of stock-in-trade or of cash in hand by fire, burglary, theft or the negligence of an employee is, in the ordinary course of events, an allowable deduction.

shoplifting is theft
by lurk2 | 2025-04-19 15:50:40+00:00
> Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile of random definitely-not-climate-science papers

The author describes herself in these terms:

> While I’m an archaeologist, I consider my research to be directed at the modern-day climate crisis. I investigate how resilient farming systems emerge and adapt to climate change and natural disasters. My fieldwork takes place on the north coast of Peru, where I study ancient irrigation in arid farming zones.

She doesn’t have any other social media profile so I don’t want to be overly cynical about her motives. Anyway, I think the climate angle is potentially huge in a lot of these fields.

There has been a trend in academia in the last few decades to focus on holistic analysis. This has led to a lot of academics trying to tie their research to disparate issues for both grant money and social status, but I also suspect that a lot of it is born of a genuine to come up with a grand unified theory of all the world’s problems. You see it with figures like Aldous Huxley around the mid-20th century (Huxley’s conclusion in his final novel, Island, is that “Nothing short of everything will do,”). The new wave that seems to have started in the 2010s has taken on a considerably more political bent (“Everything is political,” “Climate change is a product of white supremacy,” intersectional feminism, etc.).

These theories aren’t necessarily “wrong,” but the scholarship they produce is so bad that they are hard to take seriously.
by dijit | 2025-04-19 15:51:31+00:00
I always found it interesting how hacker culture is largely propped up on the protections society has carved out for librarians following world war 2 (where certain sections of society had been identified based on what books they had looked at).

The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.

Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.