MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freehorse | 2025-04-13 13:49:58+00:00
To be fair, comment^^ actually said

choice between "reading docs/changelogs carefully, implementing functions", and "adding an extra dependency"

which is what comment^ answers to, which to me actually sounds like that the added dependency comes in place of "reading docs/changelogs carefully".

I think it matters a lot how much one can trust a 3rd party library, how much it is used, how much it is maintained etc. Moreover, it also matters how central and important this is to what you are actually doing, for example if the datetimes I come across are pretty much specific and with limited scope, I would probably care about reading docs less than if I am reading data with datetimes that may be totally wild. Furthermore, there are some libraries that are just considered the standard in some fields. If I use python I call pandas to read csvs, I am obviously not gonna write my own csv parser. It will also make your code more readable for others that already know and use the same libraries if they are so standard. But that's probably a very small minority of libraries that people actually use in certain languages.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-13 13:50:37+00:00
My latest bad experience was whatever version fluffychat used last December, thst was the most recent time I've tried to make a web app work for me. Before that, every version of Flutter I've tried myself, both in debug and release builds. The UI is stuttery and unresponsive in a way that's not happening in mobile platforms, although even on desktop platforms I find the latency rather high. That also includes some rather small Flutter desktop+web applications I've written myself.

It seems like Flutter apps run better in Chrome, but I'm on Firefox. Could be a Flutter optimisation issue or something in Flutter triggering a Firefox bug. Whatever it is, it's making me avoid Flutter web apps.
by xattt | 2025-04-13 13:50:44+00:00
I didn’t have the vocabulary to see it this way, nor the 35 PPD standard. My experience with headwear is from circa 2016 VR headsets that were running a racing sim, with awful screen door effects.

I realize there’s been a decade of progress. However, seeing random no-name AR glasses and being encouraged to buy them “sight-unseen” by a native content article seems like a recipe for being bamboozled.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-13 13:51:20+00:00
Precisely this. What a bizarre, whiny article. That they try to crocodile-tear about people who lost children is deplorable. People who lost children never forget, and they don't need this guy plying their strange anti-child screed pretending to speak for them.

I lost my mother when I was very young, and I remember being in middle school and being told by a well-meaning teacher that institutions should be more considerate of people like me and stop observing mother's day because it's triggering or something, or brings back memories. This stuck with me because while I appreciated that they were trying to be considerate, it was a ridiculous, ill-conceived suggestion. I never forgot that I lost my mother, and pretending that everyone else also didn't have mothers wasn't helpful. It was actually harmful.

Netflix is often something that people share with family in social settings. Even people who don't have children, who lost children, or who hate children like this weird guy, have family situations that sometimes involve children and they want to pull up a children profile. Maybe there should be a setting this guy can set to hide this because it's so triggering to his anger, but what a lame thing to whine about.
by sgt101 | 2025-04-13 13:51:30+00:00
>hey plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2].

I don't think that I've ever heard of an area of software where folks say "it's got great documentation and the code's really good". In fact many programmers react allergically to any code that they review (including code that they wrote themselves but have forgotten about).
by NBJack | 2025-04-13 13:53:09+00:00
My hot take on context is that it's secretly an anti-pattern used only because of resistance to thread locals. While I understand the desire to avoid spooky action at a distance, the fact that I have to include it in every function signature I could possibly use it in is just a bit exhausting. Given I could inadvertently spin up a new one at will also makes me a bit uneasy.
by palata | 2025-04-13 13:54:07+00:00
Switzerland (which is not a country that doesn't know how to do banking :-) ) uses Twint (a Swiss app) with QR codes instead of NFC. To me it's better than NFC (it works with printed QR codes, e.g. on parking payment machines).

I don't know anyone in Switzerland using Apple/Google Pay, which IMO is a national success.
by geerlingguy | 2025-04-13 13:54:13+00:00
At NAB someone asked one of the ATSC folks what would happen if the key is compromised and someone didn't connect a receiver to the Internet. The answer was "the receivers have many built in public keys. They should last the lifetime of the device."

Concerning because they could have a situation like with some 4K blu ray discs, your hardware becomes obsolete because DRM requires that cat and mouse game...
by Hizonner | 2025-04-13 13:54:43+00:00
Your parents have had one shot at deciding how to save for retirement, at one time. They've had an extremely limited number of shots at choosing health plans. Maybe they have a couple of friends with weird, memorable stories about those things... probably memorable because they're outliers.

Their experience is approximately useless.

... whereas there's a huge amount of well-supported expert advice out there. You don't even need to take a course. Search the damned Internet.

... and don't give me any "cocky youth" bullshit. I'm old enough to be the parent of a large fraction of people on Hacker News.
by miramba | 2025-04-13 13:54:53+00:00
It wasn't rethorical and I appreciate your extensive answer. Being male myself, I can relate to some of the points you made. But I don't feel threatened. I guess there is a wide range of the meaning of this word, but I would describe it as perceiving a danger to ones life, livelihood, happiness or something. I did not experience any more disadvantages from being male than being young or old, short, brown-eyed, not too smart, overweight etc.

And your reasonable demands...are you seriously at a workplace where meritocracy is lived? Ever? Out of the many different non-meritocratic factors that come into play in a workplace, being male certainly was never in the top 10 for me. If anything it was an advantage. I'm sorry if you had different experiences. It's not true, where I live, that men can't apply for certain jobs, and I doubt that is the reality for you. The usual term is "everything else equal, a female candidate will be preferred", which is just an encouragement to women to apply. If you want the male candidate, you always find a reason that he is not equal to the female applicant. So if you have the feeling that you didn't get a job because you are male - perhaps it was because the female candidate was better.

And those recurring "leftist", "leftism" references make your statements a bit biased. The time to put everything in left and right categories is somewhat last century. It's all more complicated than that. Nobody hates you because your male and white. But it sure sounds a bit whiny what you are complaining about - imagine you'd be black and female, you really think you would be in a better position, you would have an advantage then? Come on.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-04-13 13:55:20+00:00
>what kind of kaska-esque system is this?!

It's the system that us Americans are tricked into believing is the best and nOt sOciAlIsM. Certainly USA healthcare is "the best" — if you can afford it!

My personal belief is that the kafkaesque nature of so many systems is designed to keep people destitute and despondent — to quote ole TedK: "our system keeps people demoralized because a demoralized person won't fight back."

~"We'll keep them poor and tired; if they're poor they can't afford to fight back, and if they're tired they won't have energy to..."~ —Jeff (Jonestown Massacre)

Having dropped out of a US medical school (almost two decades ago), I can assure you things have only gotten worse (from a bottom 80% POV). My best method of pyhhric victory is to not reproduce, earn just enough to live minimally (i.e. lessen tax burden/revenue), and never pay for health insurance.

YMMV — I quit, a long time ago.
by palata | 2025-04-13 13:57:34+00:00
I don't get why you're being downvoted here.

I don't know that AI won't be able to do that, just like I don't know that AGI won't be a thing.

It just feels like it's harder to have the AI detect your dependencies, maybe browse the web for the sources (?) and offer to make a contribution upstream. Or would you envision downloading all the sources of all the dependencies (transitive included) and telling the AI where to find them? And to give it access to all the private repositories of your company?

And then, upstreaming something is a bit "strategic", I would say: you have to be able to say "I think it makes sense to have this logic in the dependency instead of in my project". Not sure if AIs can do that at all.

To me, it feels like it's at the same level of abstraction as something like "I will go with CMake because my coworkers are familiar with it", or "I will use C++ instead of Rust because the community in this field is bigger". Does an AI know that?
by akudha | 2025-04-13 13:57:37+00:00
Not disagreeing with you, but education and intelligence without qualities like empathy, common sense etc is useless. There are lots and lots of people with advanced degrees who lack basic common sense, basic decency, empathy for fellow humans etc.

I'd rather take a kind uneducated person over a cold hearted person with 10 PhDs to his name. I have no clue about the right way to teach empathy etc though :(
by technothrasher | 2025-04-13 13:57:39+00:00
> I don't really know what to do about it, if there's anything that can even be done.

I wouldn't really worry about it too much. A certain amount of this is normal, happens to all of us, and just an illustration of how our brains aren't perfect machines. You can certainly mention it to your doctor, and they can give you an idea if it is happening to you more than what would be considered normal.
by zaphar | 2025-04-13 13:57:57+00:00
Then don't visit the site. Cloudflare is in the loop because the owner of the site wanted to buy not build a solution to the problems that Cloudflare solves. This is well within their rights and a perfectly understandable reason for Cloudflare to be there. Just as you are perfectly within your rights to object and avoid the site.

What is not within your rights is to require the site owner to build their own solution to your specs to solve those problems or to require the site owner to just live with those problems because you want to view the content.
by thomashabets2 | 2025-04-13 13:58:31+00:00
Unlike the author, I would actually say that Go is bad. This article illustrates my frustration with Go very well, on a meta level.

Go's design consistently at every turn chose the simplest (one might say "dumbest", but I don't mean it entirely derogatory) way to do something. It was the simplest most obvious choice made by a very competent engineer. But it was entirely made in isolation, not by a language design expert.

Go designs did not actually go out and research language design. It just went with the gut feel of the designers.

But that's just it, those rules are there for a reason. It's like the rules of airplane design: Every single rule was written in blood. You toss those rules out (or don't even research them) at your own, and your user's, peril.

Go's design reminds me of Brexit, and the famous "The people of this country have had enough of experts". And like with Brexit, it's easy to give a lame catch phrase, which seems convincing and makes people go "well what's the problem with that, keeping it simple?".

Explaining just what the problem is with this "design by catchphrase" is illustrated by the article. It needs ~100 paragraphs (a quick error prone scan was 86 plus sample code) to explain just why these choices leads to a darkened room with rakes sprinkled all over it.

And this article is just about Go channels!

Go could get a 100 articles like this written about it, covering various aspects of its design. They all have the same root cause: Go's designers had enough of experts, and it takes longer to explain why something leads to bad outcomes, than to just show the catchphrase level "look at the happy path. Look at it!".

I dislike Java more than I dislike Go. But at least Java was designed, and doesn't have this particular meta-problem. When Go was made we knew better than to design languages this way.
by SubzeroCarnage | 2025-04-13 14:00:03+00:00
The oneplus3 cannot be relocked as it wrongly trusts test-keys. It also has public EDL firehose files available allowing anyone to flash it arbitrarily even when locked or further dump ram or userdata.

I previously documented this here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250120181249/https://divestos....
by layer8 | 2025-04-13 14:00:19+00:00
I would wish for that as well, but it’s unlikely to happen. In the EU for example, some countries would be on the losing side, either by getting “bad” hours or by having to move to a different time zone than their neighbor, which has significant economic consequences. Such countries won’t agree to a DST abolishment that disadvantages them.

And for program code, it wouldn’t really help as long as it’s still expected to be able to correctly handle dates in the past.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-13 14:00:21+00:00
> I honestly don't see appeal why anyone would use Facebook when you literally have better alternatives that are specialized for the particular niche you might be interested in e.g. images, videos, gaming etc.

The particular niche I am into is staying connected to friends and people I like or have an interest in. And reading their posts.

I like to mainly read posts, not watch short videos or see images without too much explanation.
by dtagames | 2025-04-13 14:00:26+00:00
Serious gambling in most industries like casinos, NFTs, F2P and PTW games is all driven by whales[0]. Horse racing has been taken over by math whales, too. The house knows the small fish are only there as food for the whales.

[0] Source: I'm a former dev at an NFT/F2P game studio owned by a large slot machine maker.
by freeone3000 | 2025-04-13 14:00:59+00:00
… are you hearing yourself? “It’s a good time to buy!” has the plain english meaning “you should buy stock”. Everyone, you included, understood he was talking about US company stocks. Which, if you did, you would have profited. This theoretical code would be “when i say it’s a good time to buy stock, we should all buy stock!”. That is, well, not a code.
by jasode | 2025-04-13 14:01:54+00:00
>I never worked at Google (or any other large corp for that matter), but this sounds like the exact opposite of an environment that spawned GMail.

Friendly fyi... GMail was not a "20% project" which I mentioned previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39052748

Somebody (not me but maybe a Google employee) also revised the Wikipedia article a few hours after my comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Side_project_time...

Before LLMs and ChatGPT even existed ... a lot of us somehow hallucinated the idea that GMail came from Google's 20% Rule. E.g. from 2013-08-16 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466
by Propelloni | 2025-04-13 14:03:44+00:00
OK, I've heard of the second part about being unable to devalue the Euro because it basically reflects the economic power of the Eurozone as a whole and that e.g. Greece leaving the Eurozone could have helped Greece in 2008. But as a whole I'd guess that especially export-focused Eurozone members like Germany would welcome a depreciation of the Euro. At the very least I think they would not try to bolster it.

It does, however, not bring me any closer to understanding the "exporting unemployment" statement. I guess it is some kind of multi-step reasoning that is eluding me, or maybe it is an example of a control illusion? I don't know.
by NBJack | 2025-04-13 14:05:17+00:00
The latest Xreal glasses provide 3DoF tracking natively in the hardware. Your eyes in this case would perceive the screen as stationary as you and it inevitably "bounce" during motion.

I still don't recommend walking around with them on while reading.

I will also plus one Samsung Dex. It really is amazing to have a desktop like experience with just glasses on, and feels properly cyberpunk.
by gruez | 2025-04-13 14:05:40+00:00
>You're telling me cloudflare has to store something on my computer to let them know I passed a captcha?

You realize this is the same as session cookies, which are used on nearly every site, even those where you're not logging in?

>This sounds like "we only save hashed minutiae of your biometrics"

A randomly generated identifier is nowhere close to "hashed minutiae of your biometrics".
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-13 14:06:04+00:00
Its pure insanity. Tracks change their metadata seemingly on a whim. Tracks that I own straight up disappear from albums for reasons that the user is never notified of. Its always the most popular tracks which makes me think its about licensing..

Anyway the situation is dire. I'm moving my music into PlexAmp, which has a CarPlay app. This is 99% of my use case! :)
by andai | 2025-04-13 14:06:04+00:00
Training a splitter based on existing paragraph conventions is really cool. Actually, that's a task I run into frequently (trying to turn YouTube auto-transcript blob of text into readable sentences). LLMs tend to rewrite the text a bit too much instead of just adding punctuation.

As for RAG, I haven't noticed LLMs struggling with poorly structured text (e.g. the YouTube wall of text blob can just be fed directly into LLMs), though I haven't measured this.

In fact my own "webgrep" (convert top 10 search results into text and run grep on them, optionally followed by LLM summary) works on the byte level (gave up chunking words, sentences and paragraphs entirely): I just shove the 1kb before and after the match into the context. This works fine because LLMs just ignore the "mutilated" word parts at the beginning and end.

The only downside of this approach is that if I was the LLM, I would probably be unhappy with my job!

As for semantic chunking (in the context of, maximize the relevance of stuff that goes into the LLM, or indeed as a semantic search for the user), I haven't solved it yet, but I can share one amusing experiment: to find the relevant part of the text (having already returned a mostly-relevant big chunk of text), chop off one sentence at a time and re-run the similarity check! So you "distil" the text down to that which is most relevant (according to the embedding model) to the user query.

This is very slow and stupid, especially in real-time (though kinda fun to watch), but kinda works for the "approximately one sentence answers my question" scenario. A much cheaper approximation here would just be to embed at the sentence level as well as the page/paragraph level.
by palata | 2025-04-13 14:06:38+00:00
I can relate to that.

Personally, right now I find it difficult to imagine saying "I made this" if I got an AI to generate all the code of a project. If I go to a bookstore, ask for some kind of book ("I want it to be with a hard cover, and talk about X, and be written in language Y, ..."), I don't think that at the end I will feel like I "made the book". I merely chose it, someone else made it (actually it's multiple jobs, between whoever wrote it and whoever actually printed and distributed it).

Now if I can describe a program to an AI and it results in a functioning program, can I say that I made it?

Of course it's more efficient to use knitting machines, but if I actually knit a piece of clothing, then I can say I made it. And that's what I like: I like to make things.
by gruez | 2025-04-13 14:07:08+00:00
>Cloudflare is too stupid to realize that carrier grade NATs exist a lot in Germany. So there's that, sharing an IP with literally 20000 people around me doesn't make me suspicious when it's them that trigger that behavior.

Tor and VPNs arguably have the same issue. I use both and haven't experienced "infinite loops" with either. The same can't be said of google, reddit, or many other sites using other security providers. Those either have outright bans, or show captchas that require far more effort to solve than clicking a checkbox.
by pmdulaney | 2025-04-13 14:07:10+00:00
This is a nice little article. The doula doesn't have any hidden agenda, and the regrets she identifies are entirely credible.

I would just posit this: If you have reached mature adulthood (not necessarily "old") and are someone who regularly sets aside time for a healthy kind of introspection, then the regrets you will have at the end of your life will be quite similar to the regrets you have now about how you are living your life.
by keepamovin | 2025-04-13 14:07:41+00:00
I often wondered about an alternative but related metric called "organization"

Entropy, in some sense would seem to measure "complexity", but it's more accurately related as "surprise" I think.

It's useful but limited (for example, you can measure the "entropy" present in a string -- of keystrokes, or text -- and determine how likely it is that it's "coherent" or "intelligent" but this is fuzzy, i.e., "too much" entropy, and you are at "randomness", too little and you are at "banality"). It seems like a more precise (but still 0 - 1 bounded) metric would be possible to measure "order" or "organization". Entropy fails at this: 0 entropy does not equal "total order". Just "total boringness" (heh :))

I considered something related to some archetypal canonical compression scheme (like LZ), but didn't flesh it out. Considering again now, what about the "self similarity" of the dictionary, combined with the diversity of the dictionary?

It's more of a "two-axis" metric but surely we can find a way to corral it into 0..1.

Very self-similar, and rather diverse? Highly organized.

Low self-similarity, and highly diverse? High entropy / highly disorganized.

Low self-similarity, and low diversity? Low entropy / high banality. I.e., simplicity heh :)

High self-similarity, low diversity - organized, but "less organized" than something with more diversity.

I don't think this is quite there yet, but there's intuitive sync with this.

Any takers???? :)
by trollied | 2025-04-13 14:08:29+00:00
You’re correct that modern web apps support keyboard shortcuts just fine. Unfortunately the reality of it is that the modern web is bogged down by the mess that is npm modules, react etc, and the majority of web apps are slow. Oldschool terminal apps you can just type away, and you know your keystrokes will just happen. The modern web? Urgh.

Don’t get me wrong, you can do it right, but most don’t bother with non- functional requirements “this should take 5ms” etc, so you just end up with pointless animations and transitions that stop useful work being done. This is often simple things like the tab order being wrong, or an AJAX request blocking the next thing you want to do.