MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shinycode | 2025-04-10 13:34:00+00:00
So like arguably when people were not using calculators they made calculations by hand and there was a room full of people that did calculations. That’s gone now thanks to calculators. But it the analogy goes to an order of magnitude higher, now fewer people can « do » the job of many so less hiring maybe but not just on « do calculations by hand » but almost all fields where the use of software is required.

Where will all those new students find a job if : - they did not learn much because LLM did work for them - there is no new jobs required because we are more productive ?
by jadar | 2025-04-10 13:34:13+00:00
> Its probably true that UBI can be used instead of targeted industrial investment by government.

In a small village, maybe on the metric of wealth per capita. But there are going to be massive externalities because there is nothing intrinsic there to perpetuate or grow that wealth through industry. That old proverb rings true, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish…”
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-10 13:34:41+00:00
Build systems are workflow engines.

Workflow engines fundamentally separate and structure code and execution in discrete steps with a graph visualizer (hopefully the graph is acyclical).

Maybe it's just a bad example, but the code I saw looked very very unseparated. I understand most people who do builds want start out with the one build file to rule them all model.

But ultimately you are dealing with a workflow execution. If you were doing anything aside the most trivial single library build.

Next generation of whatever build needs to have the visualization and visualized execution assets.

There's a great many things that workflow engines fundamentally applied to. Unfortunately they have been politically associated with management trying to replace developer labor, usually because of the snake oil salesman, the workflow engine people are selling to the the c-suite people.

A good common visualization and execution set that's cross language would have been really helpful in so many computing domains. It's almost like we need the SQL of workflow engines to be invented
by energy123 | 2025-04-10 13:34:51+00:00
That's lying with statistics. They arrived at their conclusion and then cherry picked a metric that supports it.

Per-capita emissions is the only metric that has any meaning, since it isn't altered by historical happenstance as to whether a country is large or was split into multiple countries due to historical events.

If China split into two countries tomorrow, suddenly they would be doing better on this deceitful metric but the ground truth has not changed one bit.
by Didicodes | 2025-04-10 13:35:24+00:00
Hey @aleksi. The code synchronization between our internal development branches and public repository was impaired due to modifications needed in our branching strategy. We disabled the synchronization while completing these changes, which took longer than anticipated. However, we have now restored it and apologize for the inconvenience and confusion this may have caused. MongoDB remains fully committed to open source and to providing the community with dependable access to our software and services. We are exploring internal controls so that this doesn’t happen in the future.

We have restored the synchronization, and the latest code updates are now available via GitHub. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
by rayiner | 2025-04-10 13:36:04+00:00
Air quality improvements seem to have leveled off in the second Obama administration, and stayed more or less the same through the first Trump and the Biden administration: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=c2...

News media ran this exact story back in 2019. E.g. https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-air-quality-declines-years-impr.... This particular article is a gem, because it portrayed a 5.5% increase from 2016-2018 is a regression. There was no follow-up article when air pollution decreased more than 40% the next year. Nor was there an article when pollution spiked 76% from the Trump-administration low during the Biden administration.
by hn_acker | 2025-04-10 13:36:08+00:00
The original title is:

> An Algorithm Deemed This Nearly Blind 70-Year-Old Prisoner a "Moderate Risk." Now He's No Longer Eligible for Parole.

I changed the meaning of the title substantially to fit the 80 character limit. The algorithm (TIGER) is a "risk assessment tool" and was not made to directly decide parole eligibility. However, a law signed in 2024 made TIGER results equivalent to parole eligibility:

> Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility.

> Similar algorithms are used throughout the country in the parole decision-making process, but legal scholars say the way such risk tools calculate a person’s odds of reoffending is among the reasons why no other state exclusively uses them to bar individuals from parole. While algorithms like TIGER can predict on a group level that 40 out of 100 people will reoffend upon their release, they can’t pinpoint exactly who those 40 people will be, according to experts.
by theryan | 2025-04-10 13:36:15+00:00
We just migrated our massive WPF application to .NET 8 and there are a handful of libraries that are not supported or had to be replaced but overall it was surprisingly smooth. The biggest issue we have is that garbage collection seems to have taken a huge hit and there are bugs in the Microsoft WPF components (any sort of list view in particular) but it's all relatively easy to work around.
by duxup | 2025-04-10 13:36:19+00:00
That's pretty neat, although $250 feels like a lot for that at first glance. I get it has a lot of features but it's hard to get past the "it's a $250 busy indicator".

Not that I'd spend $250, but even something like that sold more as an open device to be used for a lot of different things changes (for the better) the value proposition in my mind a little than just sold as a busy sign with lots of integrations. Granted ... this appears to be that too. That's more a of a commentary on perception.
by ben_w | 2025-04-10 13:36:28+00:00
Mm. When I go on holiday, I take notice of mundane things in the new place that are different to mundane things in my normal life. Street furniture, pylons, graffiti, the contents of supermarket shelves, dusty unpaved roads[0].

But over the years I have come to realise that I'm very odd.

When you go on holiday, how many photos do you take of regular people, vs. tourist attractions? Or, in reverse, do you know regular people[1] who often find tourists visiting their area like to take photos of their homes?

[0] When I visited Nairobi a decade back, one of my photos was along the lines of this Google Street View image: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2811367,36.9148575,3a,75y,17...

[1] This site being what it is, there's a decent chance you know someone world-famous and people do actually want photos of their home. They're not "regular people".
by nkrisc | 2025-04-10 13:36:43+00:00
I don't know what country you live in, but social standing in the US typically has more to do with wealth, not the color of your collar, so to speak. It is not hard to find wealthy blue collar workers who have high social standing in their communities and beyond. Take for example a master plumber who owns their own business, or a general contractor who's grown their business in a large city. I suppose you could argue their roles tend to transform more into white collar roles of managing the business, but it's blue collar work and work that they did and probably still do themselves.

On the contrary you can absolutely be a white collar worker with low social standing in the US. It's not hard, I'd even argue most white collar workers fit that description. Think of a customer support representative working in a call center for wages. Their job is definitely white collar but it does not pay well and is the type of job you typically associate with someone struggling financially. Not someone of high "social standing".

In the US blue collar/white collar does not directly correlate to low/high social status. While it is probably true that white collar work is correlated with higher wages or salaries, it's the money that drives social status, not the color of your collar.
by throw0101c | 2025-04-10 13:37:47+00:00
Perhaps somewhat related: in the Canada we have/had a price on carbon to help meet our goals per the Paris Agreement. The goals were negotiated by the Conservative government of PM Stephen Harper, and accepted by a new Liberal government under Trudeau.

A national price on carbon was introduced (money was collected, but then refunded to individual annually/quarterly), but provinces could implement something different if it met the same goals (Quebec and (at first) Ontario went with cap-and-trade). The federal Liberals were attacked for a tax grab (even though monies were refunded, and the SCOC ruled it was not a tax):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada

Those that attacked the federal Liberals were generally [Cc]onservatives… never mind that folks like Milton Friedman thought putting a price/tax on pollution was a good 'market based' mechanism:

> In 1979, Friedman expressed support for environmental taxes in general in an interview on The Phil Donahue Show, saying "the best way to [deal with pollution] is to impose a tax on the cost of the pollutants emitted by a car and make an incentive for car manufacturers and for consumers to keep down the amount of pollution."[157] In Free to Choose, Friedman reiterated his support for environmental taxes as compared with increased environmental regulation, stating "The preservation of the environment and the avoidance of undue pollution are real problems and they are problems concerning which the government has an important role to play. ... Most economists agree that a far better way to control pollution than the present method of specific regulation and supervision is to introduce market discipline by imposing effluent charges."[158][159]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Governmental_i...

And folks like Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker recommended something similar for the US:

* https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...

Some provincial leaders looked at other options to carbon pricing and found the alternatives would cost more:

* https://nationalpost.com/news/scott-moe-says-saskatchewan-co...
by Natfan | 2025-04-10 13:38:16+00:00
Brexit was a terrible idea sold to the public on the back of a litteny of lies (where's that £350m/wk I was promised would go to the NHS?), and caused us to put a shotgun to our economic and travel kneecaps and gleefully pull the damned trigger.

The OSB is also a terrible idea sold to MPs on the back of a litteny of lies (just because you "broke" encryption for a popular application or service (see: Apple(?)) doesn't mean that real criminals/terrorists won't just use PGP and their own keys), and caused us to put a shotgun to our privacy and security kneecaps and gleefully pull the damned trigger.

Disclaimer: I was about 6 months too young to vote in the Brexit referendum, so a bunch of old [REDACTED]s who are mostly dead now have forced me into a declining economic future I neither want nor asked for.
by watwut | 2025-04-10 13:38:23+00:00
I do not think there is space for solidarity where these changes are going. The people voting for president and supporting him see solidarity as a weakness and something for suckers - or worst as taking something away from them. Again and again, republicans are against any measure or action where someone might get something.

Even if factories are rebuild, there will be no solidarity. Nor work that gives you much meaning - factory work is repetitive no fun no spiritual anything work. With a lot of steps that seem pointless to the person doing them.
by transpute | 2025-04-10 13:38:51+00:00
Ron Minnich, On The Metal (2020), https://archive.org/details/on-the-metal-season-1-wrap-up

Chromebooks have nailed the, "Oh, by the way, hold down this magic key combo, and it's yours. It's your laptop now. We will put up a crazy warning screen, but then we'll boot to whatever you want to boot to." The deep dark secret that nobody knows about Chromebooks, and I've been trying to give talks about this for years, but people still don't know it, is you can further take that Chromebook, re-key it with your personal key, and build an operating system image which you sign with your personal key, and that Chromebook from then on will only boot your version of your operating system that you load. It won't even recognize Google's operating system as legitimate .. [but] .. there is no way back when you blow those Google keys out of your Chromebook. You're running your version of Chrome OS or whatever forever
by ericmay | 2025-04-10 13:40:08+00:00
Yep, the Chinese basically invented the State and bureaucracy as we know it. In fact it was so good (despite its faults) that when China was invaded by outside forces and occupied, those forces themselves adopted the Chinese state to administer their new holdings.

I'm not being critical of China here though, I'm just being critical of the original discussion point. Quantity has a quality of its own, but it has trade-offs.
by rickydroll | 2025-04-10 13:40:15+00:00
I've been using Aqua since it was announced on HNN. I've survived the teething pains by using a mixture of Aqua and Dragon, depending on what I was doing. With this new Windows app, I've given up using Dragon for anything.

Things I've learned are:

1. It works better if you're connected by Ethernet than by Wi-Fi.

2. It needs to have a longer recognition history because sometimes you hit the wrong key to end a recognition session, and it loses everything.

3. Besides the longer history, a debugging mode that records all the characters sent to the dictation box would be useful. Sometimes, I see one set of words, blink, and then it's replaced with a new recognition result. Capturing would be useful in describing what went wrong.

4. There should be a way to tell us when a new version is running. Occasionally, I've run into problems where I'm getting errors, and I can't tell if it's my speaking, my audio chain, my computer, the network, or the app.

5. Grammarly is a great add-on because it helps me correct mis-speakings and odd little errors, like too many spaces caused by starting and stopping recognition.

When Dragon Systems went through bankruptcy court, a public benefits corporation bid for the core technology because it recognized that Dragon was a critical tool for people with disabilities to function in a digital world.

In my opinion, Aqua has reached a similar status as an essential tool. Well, it doesn't fully replace Dragon for those who need command and control (yet). The recognition accuracy and smoothness are so amazing that I can't envision returning to Dragon Systems without much pain. The only thing worse would be going back to a keyboard.

Aqua Guys, don't fuck it up.
by acrooks | 2025-04-10 13:40:17+00:00
Maybe easiest to explain from a software perspective.

So if you build a SaaS app, your company will incur a number of costs. You need to pay AWS for hosting, your support team, your sales team, your annual team retreat to Mexico, etc.

When you start measuring your profitability you then will separately measure the profitability of your product vs. your business.

The profitability of the product is your gross margin - essentially your revenue minus your cost of goods sold (COGS). Not all of your business expenses fall into here - only the costs that directly relate to supporting the product.

So… - Your annual team retreat won’t hit your gross margin: this cost isn’t essential to supporting the product - Your AWS costs will hit your gross margin (if you turned off AWS tomorrow, your product stops working) - Your Slack bill does not hit gross margin - Your product & engineering team normally doesn’t hit gross margin, but DevOps does (because DevOps is seen as essential to supporting the product while R&D is not)

Now in reality it does get a bit more messy. Businesses might allocate a % of engineering costs to GM to account for essential maintenance and bugfixes.

So the way to look at it is: what costs are essential to the continued delivery of the product and what are nice-to-have?

And then operating margin essentially considers all of the non capital costs. It’s a more comprehensive view of all the businesses revenue and costs.

For a smaller business it’s very normal for operating margin to be razor thin or even negative. Because just one or two engineers could cost more than your entire revenue.

But this entire concept is why software companies have historically been able to be unprofitable for so long. A business that’s losing a ton of money every month might only be losing that money because it’s investing very heavily in R&D. Or maybe it just moved into a new

As you scale the relative impact of a lot of those costs will go down significantly - e.g. your engineering team cost will stop being 300% of your revenue and will start being 20% (you don’t hire engineers linearly with growth).

So the theory is that if you can find a software that has: - a big market - great gross margin

Then with just some upfront cash investment you can provide the business enough runway to grow the revenue to the point where the impact of some of these expenses becomes very small. At a certain scale, a product with 50%+ gross margin will be producing so much cash that it can pay for the rest of your operational expenses without further investment.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-10 13:40:17+00:00
I don't understand the appeal. I like writing, especially on my blog. It's fun! Why would I want a computer to do it for me? So it can express itself and I don't get to?

What's next, it rides my bicycle for me? Plays my instrument for me? Fucks my wife on my behalf?

These are all activities I would like to just do myself and I do not need a computer to do for me!
by CableNinja | 2025-04-10 13:40:51+00:00
The VR style talk was weird, but had a lot of good stuff.

And i feel this guys pain so much. I got 85% of the way through a USB project, and then USB-IF made new changes and really screwed up my project. USB, what was supposed to be *universal* is not so universal. Its gone too far.

Naturally, a new standard needs born (braced for incoming relevant xkcd), but it needs to have forethought, and, not to be designed by USB-IF, or Apple.
by energy123 | 2025-04-10 13:40:54+00:00
One side effect of the tariffs will be that oil and gas will be more attractive to developers relative to renewables. Oil down in price due to recession, and solar and storage up in price due to tariffs, and added political risks and harder permitting on federal lands.

Last year, the US nearly stopped installing fossil fuels on a net basis thanks to Wright's Law price declines and federal incentives (IRA).
by hylaride | 2025-04-10 13:41:41+00:00
Yeah, the Typhoon sub was like two submarines side-by-side inside the external shell. The scene in the movie where Alec Baldwin fights the KGB agent between the missile silos ("Some things there don't react well to bullets") couldn't have happened as the missile tubes are between those internal hulls, though one could have argued this sub was built differently with it's "silent drive".

Still an amazing movie.

Diagram here: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/5f40d7...
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-10 13:41:45+00:00
There's a really interesting book that became about this because of an accident of timing and the author's research it's called Strangers in Their Own Land.

The author was writing about a specific region of louisiana that is all three of farther right than the norm even for a US rural area, more polluted than almost anywhere, and having a local culture that prizes connection to the land and natural systems present there.

It's very good! The author approaches these contradictions with more curiosity and care than you're going to find on HN even on its best days. https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land
by arminiusreturns | 2025-04-10 13:42:30+00:00
I'll never forget having to SSH into Bejing servers because nobody on that side could fix a problem... (working at a Chinese heavy company for a bit)...

I walked away realizing they are still copying the tech (IP theft, etc), but don't understand it nearly as well. The main thing that changed was the time-gaps, and by bypassing safety and other regs/norms, they just get to market first, but with a subpar product, usually with major issues.

I'm not nearly as afraid of this version of the future having experienced that, but of course, that was from a limited perspective.

That said, the sheer amount of $ being pumped into infrastructure of all types in China is a sight to behold, and also woke me up to how much our own government and big business entrenchment is suppressing American ingenuity.
by anxoo | 2025-04-10 13:42:58+00:00
"I set a plate on a table, and glass next to it. I set a marble on the plate. Then I pick up the marble, drop it in the glass. Then I turn the glass upside down and set it on the plate. Then, I pick up the glass and put it in the microwave. Where is the marble?"

the author claims that visual reasoning will help the model solve this problem, noting that gpt-4o got the question right after making a mistake in the beginning of the response. i asked gpt-4o, claude 3.7, and gemini 2.5 pro experimental, who all answered 100% correctly.

the author also demonstrates trying to do "visual reasoning" with gpt-4o, notes that the model got it wrong, then handwaves it away by saying the model wasn't trained for visual reasoning.

"visual reasoning" is a tweet-worthy thought that the author completely fails to justify
by amy214 | 2025-04-10 13:43:00+00:00
We should get a better change root yes, and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH gets autoupdated with respect to the new root. A few flags here and there to set permissions of the child process and we're off too the races.

Oh wow, wow. That all sounded so intensely complex, incomprehensible. What we are going to need to do is build a program to handle all that, highly formalized. Let's make it so formalized it's one of those things like taxes or AWS where people can just make a living from understanding the beast. It can be like systemd meets multics meets java. have it's own various complicated commands, complicated file formats, and so on. The chroot() is only historically understood by everyone, so let's steal a page from the java playbook and just rename everything with our own terminology. The product will be so outstanding, wow, I call it "Shocker"
by Youden | 2025-04-10 13:43:01+00:00
That's some pretty aggressive editorializing in the title. The linked page doesn't once use "faster", "VIPS" or "PIL".

The page does link to benchmarks [0] but Photon isn't the clear victor. It's slower on the PNG benchmark but faster on the JPG benchmark. There are no benchmarks for PIL.

It's an interesting project but the differentiating factor is more portability and security than speed. WASM means that this can be run in a nice sandbox where its ability to harm the system is drastically reduced.

[0]: https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon/wiki/Benchmarks