MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perrygeo | 2025-04-09 15:18:53+00:00
Agreed. Make a guess, then verify that guess with running code, repeat.

I'm surprised this is controversial; engineering ostensibly follows the scientific method. Without forming hypotheses and testing them, there is no scientific method. Unless we want to nitpick the difference between guessing and hypothesizing, making guesses is a critical part of programming.

I always come back to Peter Naur’s essay "Programming as Theory Building". It's 40 years old now but still nails the essence of programming. The value produced by programming is a shared working theory of the system, not the source code itself. I can't see how you would develop a sufficient theory without first forming hypotheses.
by pjerem | 2025-04-09 15:18:57+00:00
Ironically, I tried to use the official "github-mcp" and failed to make it work with my company's repos, even with a properly configured token. The thing comes with a full blown server running inside a docker container.

Well, I just told my llm agent to use the `gh` cli instead.

It seems all those new protocols are there to re-invent wheels just to create a new ecosystem of free programs that corporations will be able to use to extract value without writing the safety guards themselves.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-04-09 15:19:12+00:00
It reminds me a lot of Brexit. Politicians in the south of the country were warning that the financial sector (predominantly in London) would loose 100,000 jobs and people in the north were saying "oh, that sounds pretty good".

A few years later when that didn't happen to that extent I remember an interview with someone from a fishing port which lost a lot of business that previously went to Europe. They were complaining that Brexit wasn't hurting the right people and why are prices increasing all the time.

It seems no amount of logic is going to convince some people.
by yifeiyifei | 2025-04-09 15:19:59+00:00
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by spacemadness | 2025-04-09 15:20:04+00:00
Thank you. I see these coping strategies everywhere, from sources I would never imagine would try to find reason within the damage these will do. People want to feel like these are rational well thought out choices with experts behind the reasoning and that they must be missing something. Because how could the POTUS willingly cause so much harm to the country? So there is cope instead of coming to terms that this man is single handedly destroying the economy and their future.
by grayhatter | 2025-04-09 15:21:07+00:00
How many ways are their to build a site that doesn't have these defects and risks?

Good engineers build things that eliminate failure modes, rather than just plan for "reasonable traffic". Short of DDoS, a simple blog shouldn't be able to die from reaching a rate limit. But given the site is dead, I can't tell, maybe it's not just a blog.
by parpfish | 2025-04-09 15:21:08+00:00
> I get that government subsidies tilt the scales

it's not just the subsidies that tilt the scales, its also efficiency of scale with the chains being able to do more/cheaper because they are a big chain. and it's really hard to fight that, or even argue against it because it is more efficient.

the only thing a small local could do to compete on that front would be able to exploit local features that the chains don't know about -- tailoring inventory to local taste, making deals with other small local producers -- but once you start doing that it's more like the local is evolving into a different niche of 'serve regionally-specific needs' while the bigbox is 'serve generic needs'
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-09 15:21:17+00:00
I think this outcome is obvious, actually

Of course we will rely on AI too much

Just like we rely on vehicles too much and our general health has suffered as our activity levels have decreased

Yes, the invention of the automobile was incredible! It enables us to travel much longer distances than before! It also means we walk and run less. Yes of course our diets are also terrible which is probably the main problem with our overall health, but less frequent exercise is absolutely still a factor here

AI is incredible! It will enable us to build things faster! It will also mean we think for ourselves less. There is no doubt in my mind that it will lead to less critical thinking for many, many people
by justanotherjoe | 2025-04-09 15:21:30+00:00
it's accurate. I'm willing to bet those games wouldn't have 10% of it's players without the waifu and sex bait and the gambling mechanics. And there are gambling mechanics present even if you are f2p in those games, i bet. You just gamble your daily currencies or whatever. And it's always just one click away to actually spend money.

Not to say I'm a hater or something like that. I played a lot of those back in the day. But it's more honest to admit the art and the casino mechanic make the brain excited... the mechanics are 'okay'.

Edit: I just had a random thought. One of the strongest desire of a person is that of aesthetic desire. To feel that our life is 'picturesque' or aesthetic or beautiful. Overloading the game with aesthetic beauty is actually genius since it's an easy and strong form of aesthetic (beautiful girls. not just sexy but 'beautiful'. As in their whole face and outfit. Also other aesthetic quality like purity, innocence, cheerfulness, cuteness etc. Waifu stuffs.). And it's often so saturated with beauty that all ugly things in the players' real lifes fade away. It numbs our 'life aesthetic check' since it's flooded with so much 'beauty'. That's why people who play these games say 'i dont even think about the waifus anymore, so the mechanic must be good,' cause that numbed state is the intended state. Wheny our aesthetic center is kinda 'numbed'. And that's probably why it feels so good to play these games. When you play other games your sense of beauty is not similarly flooded and numbed, so you're all too aware that this action of playing games is not 'beautiful' in some real sense.
by wang_li | 2025-04-09 15:21:39+00:00
The tools shouldn't require the use of chroot. It is quite common on Solaris to be able to specify a path that should be considered the root directory for the tool, usually -R. This was super useful in a netboot world using nfs, and also for crash recovery.

If a system is screwed up enough, then a chroot strategy won't work because it relies on the path you are chrooting to to be generally valid and functional. If it's missing libraries you may well be screwed.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-09 15:21:44+00:00
> "Trump is only in power because millions of Biden voters stayed home."

From a detailed post-election analysis posted on HN a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400172): "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a 'we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone' strategy would’ve made things worse." Anyone who still thinks that there's some latent segment of the voting public that's on the Democrats' side needs a wake up call.
by maxglute | 2025-04-09 15:21:56+00:00
It's not big deal for MOST Chinese, who are used to consuming cheap Chinese goods and will continue to. It's a big deal for MOST Americans, who are used to consuming cheap Chinese goods but will not continue to. It's also a big deal for some Chinese producers that depend on US which is minority, because US though largest, is not significant share of PRC exports, and US producers who depend on PRC. The former I've acknowledged.

I don't think Americans will see large price increases, as in nothing most households can't absorb / pile on their credit... but US is debt society, so many will drown. The pain is not the same as PRC dipping more into savings if they deal with price increase.

So no, IMO the most likely scenario is many americans are going to feel the tariffs, some will drown, some PRC producers that depend on US and american producers (that depends on PRC inputs) are going to drown. But your average Chinese will tighten belt like then did in 2024, because vibe sucks, not because they're losing purchasing power or going bankrupt, since PRC has high savings society.

> seen this manifest

Again, wipe 3% off PRC GDP (i.e. near total cessation of US trade) and they're back to 9 months ago. They'll broadly feel what they feel then. Some will feel it worse, because they're specifically exposed to US trade. But most will not. The average American will feel the trade war more than the average Chinese, because the average Chinese will continue to get cheap Chinese goods. The psychology is going to hit different on society level and influence accordingly.
by Volundr | 2025-04-09 15:22:12+00:00
> If I’m hiring “senior” developers, being comfortable communicating technical topics and answering questions is a requirement.

While I agree completely, I also know plenty of people who fit this description, but would probably aren't the folks you ask to give a power point on a technical topic.

TBH I've done my time in management and done my fair share of presentations, but I would HATE this to the point that I might well opt out.

There's a reason I'm not in management anymore, and a presentation like described is a far cry from working with stakeholders and engineers to define and document technical requirements. Or even presenting those to a group with shared context.

I might well take the fact that you've made it a part of the interview process to be an indication that this is a regular job requirement as opposed to something I have to do here and there.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-09 15:22:17+00:00
> I can imagine Amazon's AWS (or MS, Google etc) can be banned in Europe in same way Huawei tech was banned. That will hurt US economy.

I'm surprised that with the current shenanigans around DOGE and security that Europe hasn't banned them as I don't see how they can be considered GDPR compliant if the data can be plundered whenever Trump and his menagerie decide that they want to look for dissenting opinions.
by jodrellblank | 2025-04-09 15:22:43+00:00
It can be more briefly solved without constraints than the linked code, brute-forcing through the possible correct-answer permutations:

member_of(List, X) :- % helper swaps args for use with maplist. member(X, List). score(Given, Correct, Adder, NewScore) :- (Given = Correct % Prolog if/else -> NewScore is Adder + 10 ; NewScore = Adder). puzzle(ColinScore) :- length(CorrectAnswers, 10), % ten unknown correct answers, maplist(member_of([a,b]), CorrectAnswers), % each 'a' or 'b' % compare player answers to correct answers, add their scores. foldl(score, [b,b,a,b,a,b,b,a,b,b], CorrectAnswers, 0, 70), % Mary foldl(score, [b,a,a,a,b,a,b,a,a,a], CorrectAnswers, 0, 50), % Dan foldl(score, [b,a,a,a,b,b,b,a,b,a], CorrectAnswers, 0, 30), % Lisa foldl(score, [b,b,a,a,a,b,b,a,a,a], CorrectAnswers, 0, ColinScore).

Then:

?- puzzle(ColinScore). ColinScore = 60

It's fine for a toy puzzle and it uses fewer resources than invoking the constraint solver, but it's a poor way to approach a puzzle or real world task with a larger search space.
by mlenhard | 2025-04-09 15:22:47+00:00
I was in the same boat in regards to trying to find the actual JSON that was going over the wire. I ended up using Charles to capture all the network requests. I haven't finished the post yet, but if you want to see the actual JSON I have all of the request and responses here https://www.catiemcp.com/blog/mcp-transport-layer/
by berkes | 2025-04-09 15:22:50+00:00
I understand it as that too. But even then, I dislike it.

Yes, "shipped, but terrible software" is far more valuable than "perfect software that's not available". But that's a goal.

The "move fast and break things" is a means to that goal. One of many ways to achieve this. In this, "move fast" is evident: who would ever want to move slowly if moving fast has the exact same trade-offs?

"Break things" is the part that I truly dislike. No. We don't "break things" for our users, our colleagues or our future-selves (ie tech debt).

In other situations, the "move fast and break things" implies a preferred leaning towards low-quality in the famous "Speed / Cost / Quality Trade-off". Where, by decreasing quality, we gain speed (while keeping cost the same?).

This fallacy has long been debunked, with actual research and data to back it up¹: Software Engineering projects that focus on quality, actually gain speed! Even without reading research or papers, this makes sense: we all know how much time is wasted on fixing regressions, muddling through technical debt, rewriting unreadable/-manageable/-extensible code etc. A clean, well-maintained, neatly tested, up-to-date codebase allows one to add features much faster than that horrible ball of mud that accumulated hacks and debt and bugs for decades.

¹e.g. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations is a nice starting point with lots of references to research and data on this.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-09 15:24:03+00:00
> Their population is declining

Not where it matters. China has a much larger under-employed population base than the US has. They still have a few hundred million peasant farmers whose children can and are getting educated and moving to the city. Their pool of labour is growing while the US's is stagnant.

Not that it needs to grow -- over the last decade or so China's factory employment has been relatively constant while output has surged dramatically. Their factories are rapidly automating.
by DanielHB | 2025-04-09 15:24:27+00:00
Oh I didn't know that, the Swedish system doesn't have anything like that as far as I am aware. But credit card fraud reimbursements are relatively straightforward. The PIX one seems more complicated, but the chance of being defrauded on PIX transactions is much smaller as well.

as in you can't get your card cloned and then a bunch of transactions show up.
by nerdile | 2025-04-09 15:24:34+00:00
Reneging on an offer means revoking it after it has been accepted, and that's poor form.

Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.
by morsecodist | 2025-04-09 15:24:59+00:00
I don't take their explanation at face value. I think you very well could be right in your analysis here.

It is more interesting to me that actual targeting is based on trade imbalance. They could easily have used the same rhetoric and targeted the tariffs based on something else. I think the way they are targeted is sufficient to rule out a lot of explanations I have seen proposed like I mentioned above. What you are mentioning seems super plausible to me I just can't be sure yet.
by metalman | 2025-04-09 15:25:28+00:00
the same phone, but with nothing usefull or important on it, no apps with personal info banking done through email sign in.....everything done through email sign in switching my email to webmail sign in, so there will be nothing on the device at all just random pics, sd card,music, meaningless files for jobs plus there is no password or encryption, want it? have it.......sims got a pass code though
by 9rx | 2025-04-09 15:25:56+00:00
> It's not a reasonable place to start.

Why not? If it works it works. Not everyone is concerned with receiving the award for best programmer.

> they won't be able to answer because they don't know.

I do understand that you are thinking of a specific person here, but broadly, you will know how it works more or less because you'll already know how you would implement yourself if you had to. But since someone's else code already did, no need to think about it further. This remains a reasonable place to start.

> but not the why

If you are not capturing "why" in your tests, what are you testing, exactly? The "what" is already captured in the implementation. You don't need that written down twice. Worse, if you do end up testing "what" you are bound to have to deal with broken tests every time you have to make a change. That is a horrid situation to find yourself in.

I do agree that writing useful tests is really hard, at least as hard as writing good reference material, and thus beyond the skill of most. But if you have to work with something built by the unskilled, all bets are off no matter which way you look.
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by lenerdenator | 2025-04-09 15:26:48+00:00
That, and cultural.

Irish-Americans are less ambivalent about their roots than many other people of European descent - being excited about being part-German in Missouri is tantamount to being excited about watching paint dry, for example - and the fact that a man of Irish descent was President of the United States within two centuries of the "famine" and after centuries of oppression by the English boosts the credibility of America as a "land of opportunity", even if only in retrospect.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-09 15:27:09+00:00
> it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic

This is the rationalization being projected onto the situation, but it doesn’t make logical sense.

The administration launched a trade war with 100+ fronts and left no time to negotiate with all of them, let alone the biggest players.

The biggest players are already calling the administration’s bluff with counter-tariffs. If there was an expectation to use the threat of irrational tariffs as a bargaining chip, they didn’t leave enough time to do it.
by nickpp | 2025-04-09 15:27:25+00:00
Taking advantage of self-driven people and stealing the results of their hard work is something communist dictators tried quite hard. Also brainwashing people to work their asses off for some other reason than the selfish one.

It didn’t work. The society produced less and less value, crappier and crappier quality, uglier and uglier and grayer and grayer.
by apexalpha | 2025-04-09 15:27:46+00:00
As a Dutch person I'm baffled that you're saying the PV industry has headwinds.

Recently added another 4000kWh of yearly production to my garage for €4000 all in because why not. I also have a 20 kWh LFP battery now, €7000 all-in (and dropping quickly!), which works out fine.

Many people now buy "plug-in" products: small batteries or single PV panel that you just plug into the grid directly, no installation required.

All the issues you list are governmental issues, not PV issues. The global PV indsutry is EXPLODING.
by heymijo | 2025-04-09 15:27:57+00:00
GPUs, very good for pretraining. Inefficient for inference.

Why?

For each new word a transformer generates it has to move the entire set of model weights from memory to compute units. For a 70 billion parameter model with 16-bit weights that requires moving approximately 140 gigabytes of data to generate just a single word.

GPUs have off-chip memory. That means a GPU has to push data across a chip - memory bridge for every single word it creates. This architectural choice, is an advantage for graphics processing where large amounts of data needs to be stored but not necessarily accessed as rapidly for every single computation. It's a liability in inference where quick and frequent data access is critical.

Listening to Andrew Feldman of Cerebras [0] is what helped me grok the differences. Caveat, he is a founder/CEO of a company that sells hardware for AI inference, so the guy is talking his book.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW9vwF7TUI8&list=PLnJFlI3aIN...
by croemer | 2025-04-09 15:28:17+00:00
Coffee futures prices do not include tariffs. They reflect the base market price of coffee for delivery at a future date, typically free on board (FOB) at a specified origin port (e.g., Brazil or Colombia). Tariffs, import duties, and local taxes are added later by the importer based on destination country policies.

Prices including tariffs might well go up but that's not what the article is about.

Since prices for consumers go up due to tariffs, demand goes down, hence prices ex-tariff go down. Standard stuff with tariffs, they make things cheaper on the outside.
by q_andrew | 2025-04-09 15:28:25+00:00
Dollar General is a mega corporation that can operate on an entirely different level than local stores. They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state. On a store-by-store basis though, Dollar general is a fragile establishment, management will not hesitate to abandon the location if they are spending too much money propping up the store. And the overhead for these stores is higher than it needs to be - they build way larger stores and parking lots than they actually need. The local dry goods store has grown only to the size that it requires, and those profits go towards its own survival. It provides cultural value, economic opportunities, and is more likely to improve the lives of people living nearby.

Strong towns (who made the article) is a grassroots nonprofit that finds concrete ways for US cities to curb the effects of urban sprawl. One of those ways is to acknowledge that inviting huge commercial ventures into your small local economy is like bringing a giant mammal to roam free on a small island nation. It's probably going to affect the ecosystem in ways that don't suit the environment.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-09 15:28:28+00:00
>Strong Towns is a leading voice on YIMBY, but this is reminiscent of the common arguments I hear from NIMBY folks..."they shouldn't be allowed to build here because ____" is definitionally NIMBY.

I've come to the realization that strong towns are basically just moderate NIMBYs.

On a scale from 65yo California suburbanite to Ron Paul they're basically the suburbanite but they're but they're self aware enough to realize if they push too far, ask too much, destroy too much wealth, that they'll bring the whole house of cards crashing down.

Ultimately I think it's best to just shitcan all pretense of local zoning, let the states regulate the stuff they do (i.e. hazmat processing and junkyards and the other truly unsightly things that NIMBYs always pretend they are the only line of defense from) and let the developers and the businesses and residents deal with the opportunities and the fallout that arises. Sure, there will be some losers but everyone will lose a heck of a lot less than they do with the status quo wherein only big interests can actually do much of anything.