MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andybak | 2025-04-09 13:45:52+00:00
So - we are at an impasse. Both suspect the other of motivated reasoning and an internal bias that distorts their ability for rational thinking.

It's entirely possible we're both irrational to some degree. But that's irrelevant to answering the question at hand.

Do you claim you are using it regularly and in good faith - enough to honestly form a reliable view on its utility?

I would claim that I am using it in such a way. It would take more effort than I'm prepared to put in to provide evidence of this but please - ask away.

(for the record - I have no financial or professional involvement directly with AI. I simply find the technology fascinating and I use it daily - both playfully and for it's practical utility)
by pc86 | 2025-04-09 13:46:00+00:00
A friend of mine - against my loud objections - hired some Pakistani offshore group to build an app for him around 2015 or so. $15k "estimate" but it was all time & materials not flat rate. They had an "office" with a "CEO" in NYC but no staff, just a PO Box. The whole thing was super fishy and I said as much but he didn't care because they were cheap.

Fast forward nearly 18 months into the 6 month contract, and about $40k later, there is no working app and the "CEO" says "well I would love to give you some of your money back but the contract has expired so I am no longer able to do that, we could sign another one for $20k to finish if you'd like."

I've worked with probably a dozen offshoring companies in my life in one way or another and every single one of them has been deceitful to the point of being fraudulent, and puts out some of the worst code you have ever seen.

I tell everyone considering it that if you can afford it, you're getting scammed in one way or another. You're better off going with a US-based firm that guarantees you'll get American workers who are physically in the US working on your product.

I'd rather hire Deloitte or Accenture for 10x the price - I know they offshore a ton but you'll at least have avenues to get your money back if they don't deliver.
by piva00 | 2025-04-09 13:46:04+00:00
Disclaimer: not American, not living in the USA.

All the analysis I've read about it say that the one-sided implementation of broad tariffs is not legal according to current US laws.

It doesn't matter though until it's litigated, goes through courts, appeals, Supreme Court, while all that process is ongoing the tariffs are there. And who the fuck knows how the Supreme Court will decide on this in the end?
by tikkabhuna | 2025-04-09 13:46:07+00:00
I've never considered ownership in an IaC repo down to the individual resource and I'm struggling to see the usecase.

We also use tags/labels to link the generated "thing" back to the repository that created it with:

- The repo URL

- The pipeline URL

- The commit hash (also retrievable from the pipeline details)

These are all discovered via GitLab CI variables [1].

From this we would use the Git repository to identify ownership. We have the benefit of our Infosec team having wide access to our GitLab instance, which might hamper other companies.

How would you handle a situation where someone creates a resource but then leaves?

The good thing about looking at an entire repository is that it gives you the entire history and who else might have worked on it. In hierarchical Git providers (eg. GitLab), it can also indicate where the project sits relative to others. If you just have a single person, you may struggle to find out who now owns a resource.

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/variables/predefined_variables/
by marcuskane2 | 2025-04-09 13:46:18+00:00
> As someone with a disability, I expect my application will go right in the trash if I answer yes or blank on the disability question

That's an interesting hypothesis.

I've seen many people suggest just the opposite- pretending to have a mild disability when filling in the form so that they get the boost from companies which use recruiting software that prioritizes diversity and inclusiveness in candidate pool.

Federal contractors are explicitly required to "take affirmative action to recruit, hire, promote and retain" people with disabilities, with a target of at least 7% of their employees be from that group. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/fe...
by rsynnott | 2025-04-09 13:46:42+00:00
This is related to _last_ month's tariffs on aluminium and steel. The EU tends to be measured on this sort of thing.

The EU did offer Trump zero-for-zero as a result of the _current_ tariffs; he wasn't interested (which isn't particularly surprising, given that he seems to want trade deficits to magically go away).
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by johnrgrace | 2025-04-09 13:47:28+00:00
Your understanding about OIL is very out of date. The US is the worlds largest oil producer and a net exporter of oil and oil based products.

The US does import some low quality cheaper crudes (heavy, sour) to be processed by US refineries that have much higher complexity and capital investment than other regions. Effectively people send their OIL to the US to be refined and that is where most of our imports come from.
by grafmax | 2025-04-09 13:47:48+00:00
“Threatens American national security” is just the administration’s double speak to justify cynical foreign policy decisions. Since 1945 America has struggled with the prospect of its decline. The US would come to exchange a trade deficit for being the world’s reserve currency. However the reserve currency boat has growing leaks. Trump’s administration has circled the wagons, withdrawn support from Ukraine, antagonized allies, raised tariffs. Essentially American international hegemony is collapsing and we are seeing the latest desperate moves made to retain power.
by nocman | 2025-04-09 13:47:51+00:00
> presuming to be able to identify "the best programmers"

He was identifying the best programmers he knows (as is obvious from the title). I don't think it is unreasonable at all for even a semi-technical person to be able to do that.

Also, it is highly likely that the author never expected their article to receive a high volume of web traffic, and allocated resources to it with that assumption. That doesn't say a thing about their technical abilities. You could be the best programmer in the world and make an incorrect assumption like that.
by zabzonk | 2025-04-09 13:48:07+00:00
Ah, Tetris. I remember stripping out the copy protection from the MSDOS version with a debugger. Not because I wanted to resell it, which would have been difficult back then, just because I found it irritating.

I also added mouse support, once again using a debugger, for Hercules Graphics to a wargame - it was the ever popular Battle of the Bulge, by a famous designer who's name I can't remember. Guy that did Eastern Front on the Atari.

Edit: Chris Crawford
by suraci | 2025-04-09 13:48:14+00:00
it's written in here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/04/cea-...

* First, other countries can accept tariffs on their exports to the United States without retaliation, providing revenue to the U.S. Treasury to finance public goods provision. Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods.

Second, they can stop unfair and harmful trading practices by opening their markets and buying more from America;

Third, they can boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S., buying more U.S.-made goods, and taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here;

Fourth, they can invest in and install factories in America. They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country;

Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods. *
by swat535 | 2025-04-09 13:48:21+00:00
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the West about Iranians, or as we call ourselves "Persians." (I suppose to avoid the negative "Islamic" connotation..) Despite how the country is portrayed, the people themselves tend to be pro Western, educated, and fairly liberal.

So the unfortunate reality is that the government is highly repressive. It tightly controls communication and enforces a strict theocratic system that doesn’t reflect the will of much of the population.

If you're curious about what Iranian society is all about, look at the photos before the 1979 revolution. That change wasn't long ago, it was just a generation back. My parents lived through it. Many from that time believed they were rising up for democracy, not realizing what would replace the Shah was something even more authoritarian. My own father admits they were misled and now actively curses the regime and himself.. the peak being burning the US embassy because they were told it's a foreign spy command center..

What's especially tragic is that Iran today has a very young population, many of whom strongly oppose the current regime. But peaceful change feels unlikely, look up what happened anytime people took to the streets. And if the government were to collapse without a clear path forward, there's a real risk of something even worse filling the vacuum.

That said, there are reasons for hope. During the most recent uprising, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, women led the charge, and the government was forced to back down somewhat after international outcry. Since then, many women have continued to defy mandatory hijab laws, walking around without head coverings despite the real risks of arrest or violence. It’s incredibly brave, and it speaks to a deep, ongoing resistance that’s hard to suppress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman,_Life,_Freedom_movement
by Mashimo | 2025-04-09 13:48:22+00:00
Rare win for Germany, the the land of bureaucracy, made it easy to install *small* residential solar.

You can buy small solar panels in the supermarket, and plug them into the wall socket, which normally is a no no. Per household a maximum of 800 watt though.[1] For more you need something proper that does not just connect via a normal wall socket.

[1] Maybe also 2000 watt but only 800 feed into the grid?
by socksy | 2025-04-09 13:48:25+00:00
I think my preferred LLM usage style these days is to try something on my own, and then get the LLM to critique what I did. I think it's both better for learning (just like learning natural languages, it's better for learning to make a mistake and be corrected than it is to look up the right answer each time), and also I think the stakes are lower since you're not relying on the LLM to not hallucinate. You can also learn some new threads to pull on that you can investigate on your own etc
by rsynnott | 2025-04-09 13:48:29+00:00
What Trump's doing may be illegal, either on the basis that the law under which it is being done is itself unconstitutional (in that it delegates the power to set taxes from Congress, which isn't supposed to happen) or in that he is misusing that law (in that it is supposed to be for emergencies). Lawsuits are being taken against the state on both bases.
by throwanem | 2025-04-09 13:49:02+00:00
Ever thus. The first programming job I had after high school, I got in part by pointing out that I hadn't previously seen Windows XP Pro machines with publicly routable IPv4 addresses, and suggesting one reason for their persistent slowness might be the effect of putting unfirewalled XP machines on the public Internet - a very bad idea, even in 2004.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-09 13:49:23+00:00
Readability is putting it mildly; do you write your shell scripts using that && style? No? Why not, is it for readability?

I also have a hard time reasoning about && with anything other than the most braindead sequence of commands because: $(thing && if other_thing; then inner_thing1 && thing2; fi && ohgawd)

And I just realized while typing that out that if its parser doesn't support ; then I guess one needs to

RUN if conditional_thing \ then good_luck && \ fi && \ echo "whew"
by ronameles | 2025-04-09 13:49:27+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_WE6cZeDG8 - I work at an industrial software company. You can kind of think of us as an API layer to factory data, that is generally a mess. This video shows you what MCP can do for us in terms of connecting factory data to LLMS. Maybe it will help. A2A is new to me, and I need to dig in.

Basically if we expose our API over MCP, agents can "figure it out". But MCP isn't secure enough today, so hoping that gets enhanced.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-04-09 13:49:28+00:00
Then they can also decide you can't have a license to drive a car, that you can't fly, that you can't own a home, that you can't pass a background check, that you can't have a social security number, that you owe an exorbitant amount of tax, that you should be in jail, that your immigration status is revoked because you wrote a news article they don't let, etc etc etc

Your government already has a monopoly on violence and owns your whole life.
by profstasiak | 2025-04-09 13:49:33+00:00
I wonder if American's know how much goodwill was destroyed by this president.

I hear a lot from my friends how we need to boycot USA, don't buy iphones etc...

Now, most people would probably still buy iphones, but people changed their favourable view of USA pretty quickly.

And I am talking about Poland, which was probably one of the most pro USA country in EU
by bolster8505 | 2025-04-09 13:50:06+00:00
Netbeans is not for real development. Sorry, I love Netbeans. I grew up using it. It just doesn't have good support for real world Java development. As for Eclipse, I'll use notepad over that any day. I've been programming in Java since highschool, 20+ years ago.

IntelliJ is the best there is for Java, warts and all.
by netsharc | 2025-04-09 13:50:21+00:00
I remember looking at a friend's bookshelves and noticing a travel guide to the Soviet Union. It had a short chapter on what to expect when crossing the border and the fact you might be followed by the security services.

And what do we have in 2025?

I don't think it was a Lonely Planet https://www.bbc.com/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/AP5ln7N8TRGkf...
by krapp | 2025-04-09 13:50:26+00:00
The big reason the Democrats lost is that they tried to appeal to the right and only alienated their own base which was already disillusioned by Biden. They keep running as the status quo party when neither side wants the status quo.

These people put up a gallows and noose on the Capitol, but ours is the side which has to remain civil? You don't defeat fascism by capitulating to it.
by greatgib | 2025-04-09 13:50:45+00:00
All around the "developed world", the shop/retailer/supermarket/distribution part of the price of a product is around 50%. Whatever the product or its price.

I'm wondering if part of our issue with crazy inflated prices despite low margin for industry and manufacturing actors is not because of this abused margin for retailers. That have also a huge power as it is difficult to negotiate when you depend on your product to be buyable in the market.

To me, that explain a big difference with asian world, where you notice, even for asian shops in western countries that prices are still quite cheap.

Something parallel to that that I have noticed is that decades ago we were used to buy from small individual shops, but now a few retailers and chains have almost a monopoly on the market.

I see the same pattern for movie theaters. They used to be independent mostly with affordable prices. Now 2 or 3 big chains bought them all, and it is very rare to still encounter independent movie theater. And once they got a good monopoly, ticket prices skyrocketed to insane levels.
by lylejantzi3rd | 2025-04-09 13:50:50+00:00
I know of precisely one company that does this: 10X Management. It's similar to the top Hollywood agencies like CAA in that it's extremely hard to get them to represent you.

I'm not sure why there aren't any "free agents" running around Silicon Valley like they do in Hollywood. If I had to guess, it's probably because the same skills you need to do that job in Silicon Valley pay more in other sectors, like Hollywood.
by runako | 2025-04-09 13:51:26+00:00
The example is bad because nobody thinks of $100k as "concentrated wealth" and your argument has some purchase at those numbers.

At $100 million, $1 billion, $10 billion, or $100 billion, the argument you put forth does not make sense.

There is no motivational quantum for attaining the second, or third, or fourth billion, much less the 200th.

Incidentally, most of the people who might be considered to be concentrating wealth do not and have not done so primarily on the basis of their labor and creativity like in the example. There is no credible argument that Jim Walton ($119 billion net worth) ever built or created anything of value anywhere near commensurate with his wealth. His path from $30 billion to nearly $120 billion had nothing to do with rewarding him for value creation.
by manbitesdog | 2025-04-09 13:51:27+00:00
Very insightful! the 4-window blacklist is such a good idea. I feel like 7-bag is a bit too predictable if you're able to keep up with the counting.

And you're right, some of the rotation and kick rules you mentioned are actually not changing much in this game because there's not a collision between pieces, only overlap: since floor kicks and t-spins are not possible, we optimized those for simplicity (it's a 48h game jam in PICO-8 after all)
by jchw | 2025-04-09 13:51:37+00:00
The pricing issue is complicated because you can't consider the price of the Apple CPU on its own. However, you can get a Mac with 16 GiB of RAM, 256 GiB of SSD storage, and 10 cores of Apple M4 for $600. Even if you use the least charitable benchmarks for the M4, that is going to put it way above a similarly-priced PC. Of course, once you start upgrading the RAM and SSD, the prices will lift into the sky.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-09 13:51:46+00:00
This is all extremely vague, and Japan and Korea have absolutely not "caved in" on this basis. Japan and Korea talking to the US; the EU did too, and Trump refused their zero-for-zero offer. But if those talks come to nothing, which seems likely, then Japan and Korea will absolutely introduce retaliatory tariffs, too; the game theory of the thing makes it more or less inevitable.
by cassepipe | 2025-04-09 13:51:49+00:00
As a vimmer I was glad to discover that `less` supports j/k scrolling, search with / + n/N, gg and G.

A neat trick is :

export MANPAGER="less --incsearch"

which mimicks the behaviour of `:set incsearch` in vim and allows you no quickly move around

It really increased the usefulness of man pages by a lot for me.

`info` has a vim mode but it's more obscure to me how to use it properly

Any other useful tricks ?

Edit: s/man/less
by blueflow | 2025-04-09 13:51:58+00:00
I disagree. I have been writing man pages for a while, and mastering the language is hard. The documentation for both mdoc and mandb format is not covering the whole language, and the only remaining reference for roff itself seems to be the book by Brian Kernigham. mdoc and mandb are like a macro set on top of roff.

Just this week i considered proposing to $distro to convert all manpages to markdown as part of the build process, and then use a markdown renderer on the shipped system to display them. This would allow the distro to stop shipping *roff per default.

Markdown profits from the much larger amount of tooling. There are a ton of WYSIWYG editors that would allow non-technical users to write such documentation. I imagine we would all profit if creating manual pages was that easy.

On the other side, Markdown is even less formalized. Its like 15 different dialects from different programs that differ in their feature sets and parsing rules. I do not believe things like "How do i quote an asterisk or underscore so it is rendered verbatim" can be portably achieved in Markdown.
by some_developer | 2025-04-09 13:52:00+00:00
Years ago I wanted to use native FTS (because of tall the things mentioned, having to sync to external simply adds complexity) and it failed at another point.

Not completely surprising, but on a table with _potentially_ couple of thousand of inserts / seconds, it slowed down the overall updates to the point that transactions timed out.

We already added an index for one of the columns we wanted to index and were running the statement for the second one. The moment this the second index finished, we started to see timeouts from our system when writing to that table, transaction failing etc.

We had to drop the indices again. So, sadly, we did never get to the point to test the actual FTS performance :/ I would have like to test this, because didn't necessarily had to search hundreds of millions of documents, due to customer tenants this would always be constrained to a few million _at most_.

ps: I already wrote about this -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977526 . Never got a chance to try it nowadays (newer versions of everything, never hardware, etc.)
by simonw | 2025-04-09 13:52:09+00:00
I just published some notes on MCP security and prompt injection. MCP doesn't have security flaws in the protocol itself, but the patterns it encourage (providing LLMs with access to tools that can act on the user's behalf while they also may be exposed to text from untrusted sources) are rife for prompt injection attacks: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/9/mcp-prompt-injection/
by wpietri | 2025-04-09 13:52:13+00:00
And I think there are plenty of people who aren't even consciously intending to scam. A while back I interviewed somebody for a 100%-time contracting position that will convert to employment. His LinkedIn listed him involved in a couple of other companies that he started. When I asked about this glaring incongruity he looked startled and said that, yes of course he was shutting those down. It felt to me like a lie made up on the spot.

He struck me as somebody who was just overextended and flailing around for immediate cash revenue. So I think he had convinced himself he could do his two companies and a full-time job. But I expect that in practice he'd stint us on hours and be so sleep-deprived during them that he'd be somewhere between marginally and negatively productive until we fired him.

But then it's hard to tell the difference between a desperate schmuck and a scammer, as I think it's a continuum. A lot of out-and-out scams get started like that.
by riskable | 2025-04-09 13:52:36+00:00
"Flooding US companies"? I don't think so. The article lost my trust when it framed the North Korea incident like this:

> More than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea for IT work

"Impostors" implies that the people they hired couldn't do the job. That's not true: These were people who just faked their location/identity. They had the skills and worked for a long time for those companies. As far as the company was concerned, they were just regular employees. If they couldn't do the job they would've been fired.

If these "impostor" employees actually couldn't do the job and they somehow were able to stick around for as long as they did there's a different sort of crisis going on in "US companies" that has to do with management.