MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevekemp | 2025-04-29 14:00:40+00:00
Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.

If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.

This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)

Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.

Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.
by pbmonster | 2025-04-29 14:01:05+00:00
> Language learning is not for everyone.

That's certainly true, but there's probably another effect at play here: language learning is extremely time intensive, and you don't progress if you're not practicing a minimum amount of hours per month - you even lose progress again.

You probably could break through to hundreds of phrases with spaced repetition software and "only" a concentrated effort of a few dozen hours. But, yes, this requires almost daily practice. And then later, many hours of maintenance effort.
by accrual | 2025-04-29 14:01:48+00:00
> What's your experience with OpenBSD on RasPi4 specifically

Power loss and single user mode complications aside, OpenBSD 7.7 runs fantastic on the Pi 4. It feels no different from a standard AMD64 install for most tasks. I haven't used the GPIO pins under OpenBSD but it otherwise works like any other system. :)
by Zamaamiro | 2025-04-29 14:01:53+00:00
This is quite a display of mental gymnastics and historical revisionism.

The last couple of years have seen a massive post-COVID backlash to incumbent parties all over the world—Democrats were just caught in the wave.

Why on Earth would anyone not call them anything but Trump Tariffs when he is the one who imposed them and when they’re uniquely his idea?
by zzzeek | 2025-04-29 14:02:03+00:00
How long before the White House makes a "deal" with Amazon that somehow shields Amazon specifically from tariffs affecting their prices in exchange for removing the display; just shoveling US taxpayer money at them (after all we're saving billions that we used to spend on things like cancer research). Then we'd be at a place where Amazon's prices end up being dramatically lower than every other seller in the US, further entrenching their monopoly status, and taxpayers would actually be footing the bill. Talk about picking winners and losers...
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-04-29 14:02:06+00:00
The "problem" with renewables is that they are not dispatch-able, meaning you will never be 100% sure that tomorrow or a week for now there will be sun or wind in a specific region. On the other hand, a nuclear or a coal powered plant, know months in advance if they will be available for peak load or not.

Yes, if it is sunny or windy, they can be scaled in minutes, but only if conditions are met. The inverse is true for nuclear/coal - they cannot be scaled up & down in minutes.
by K0balt | 2025-04-29 14:02:19+00:00
I can only imagine the difficulties facing technicians and engineers black starting a nation-scale grid.

I operate a microgrid facility in Hispaniola and have wonderfully cooperative users backed by a separately powered communications and control system. Even for us, a facility serving a small neighborhood and farm, a black start must be performed as a careful choreography of systems and loads…and we can just pick up a radio and tell people to turn the main breaker of their house on or off, and to leave their AC units off until we finish bringing everything up. In 12 years we’ve only had to do it twice, but even for us it’s a tedious process.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-29 14:02:36+00:00
When in Israel some people insisted on using the Uber app. Well, all Uber did was dispatch a Gett taxi.. with a 15% surcharge. And it turns out they also de-prioritised Uber's requests.

So anyone who actually knew what they were doing would just install the Gett taxi app, which was cheaper and better than Uber. If such an app existed in DCA, I would certainly install it. But I wouldn't bother with an app at all in DCA, since they already have an excellent and affordable taxi system. (Taxis in DC are cheaper than Ubers, particularly during surge pricing; if you want an app, install Curb.)

"Uber for Business" is an even more giant scam, where it costs more than Uber does personally. At the last place I worked, employees were advised to go ahead and set it up but switch to Personal and just request reimbursement because of how large the price difference was.

But you're right, Uber will always have a niche of people who are unable to install or use anything other than the Uber app and want to be blissfully unaware that better alternatives exist.
by protimewaster | 2025-04-29 14:02:38+00:00
That's what I would think. Though, as other users have pointed out, Amazon is being selective about what what they show. If they really wanted to be transparent and neutral, they'd need to show everything that makes up the price (how much the seller/manufacturer gets paid, what Amazon's cut is, how much goes to the payment processor, etc.)

Personally, I think it would be pretty great if they showed all that, but I don't see that ever happening.
by variadix | 2025-04-29 14:02:38+00:00
Not directly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s enough of an efficiency improvement to obviate hiring an engineer or two (across 100+ people). In the same way that Google and StackOverflow made people more efficient when compared to having to otherwise search through and read physical documentation (to debug, to understand some API or hardware thing), LLMs have made me more efficient by being able to get tailored answers to my questions without having to do as much searching or reading. They can provide small code examples as clarification too.

In many ways LLMs feel like the next iteration of search engines: they’re easier to use, you can ask follow up questions or for examples and get an immediate response tailored to your scenario, you can provide the code and get a response for what the issue is and how to fix it, you can let it read internal documentation and get specialized support that wouldn’t be on the internet, you can let it read whole code bases and get reasonable answers to queries about said code, etc.

I don’t really see LLMs automating engineers end-to-end any time soon. They really are incapable of deductive reasoning, the extent to which they are is emergent from inductive phenomena, and breaks down massively when the input is outside the training distribution (see all the examples of LLMs failing basic deductive puzzles that are very similar to a well known one, but slightly tweaked).

Reading, understanding, and checking someone else’s code is harder than writing it correctly in the first place, and letting LLMs write entire code bases has produced immense garbage in all the examples I’ve seen. It’s not even junior level output, it’s something like _panicked CS major who started programming a year ago_ level output.

Eventually I think AI will automate software engineering, but by the time it’s capable of doing so _all_ intellectual pursuits will be automated because it requires human level cognition and adaptability. Until then it’s a moderate efficiency improvement.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-29 14:03:01+00:00
Comprehensible input works really well and was popularized by a video that went viral a few years ago entitled “How to acquire any language NOT learn it!” [0]

The method described in the video involves focusing on listening for the first year by having someone read magazines and books to you in the target language, pointing and using other gestures to convey the meaning of words you don’t understand. This method works quite well but it is very difficult to find anyone who will consistently meet with you and practice like this before you have reached a certain level of understanding, and very few people want to learn this way because they see it as a waste of time.

One of the key aspects of this model is that you should not be translating between your native and your target language, which is what you usually do on apps like Duolingo. This has led to a subset of comprehensible input evangelists to fixate on insisting that Duolingo doesn’t work. The reality is that the method that works is the method you use consistently over time. Once you get to a certain level of fluency, you can have actual conversations to reinforce your learning, at which point drill methods like Duolingo will usually plateau while exposure methods like comprehensible input will still be useful for improving grammar and pronunciation.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illApgaLgGA
by crazygringo | 2025-04-29 14:03:02+00:00
> However, for non-technical folks that are on the market, the distribution is worse.

And that's where I took issue with your post -- that you are lumping all these people as "business co-founders".

That's false. To call yourself a business co-founder, you need to have the same kind of business and management chops as a technical co-founder has technical chops.

Your post seems to be complaining about co-founders who are just idea people who don't have any business skills at all. It's misleading to call them "business co-founders". You should call them "idea co-founders" or something.
by davidvgilmore | 2025-04-29 14:03:24+00:00
We use Haiku for a bunch of small things ... naming a conversation, naming a project (if you don't provide a name), compressing long conversations to manage context window ...

Sonnet is the real workhorse, though. E.g., for all the thinking and tool use

Thanks and looking forward to any feedback you have! It was definitely a lift+risk to start from scratch instead of forking.
by stevekemp | 2025-04-29 14:03:27+00:00
I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.

A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.

Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-29 14:03:42+00:00
I have been worrying about remote work going away because I really don't want to go back to offices

I don't want to go back to being limited by my local labour market, and I don't want to go back to commuting daily and all the other stuff

So I'm really determined to stay fully remote, and glad to hear that people have been doing it for much longer than just since COVID

Any tips for maintaining this? I have been thinking that it would be easier to stay remote if I start contracting instead of being an employee
by masto | 2025-04-29 14:04:02+00:00
Python is in a category of things you can't just use without being an expert in the minutiae. This is unfortunate because there are a lot of people who are not Python developers who would like to run programs which happen to be written in Python.

Python is by no means alone in this or particularly egregious. Having been a heavy Perl developer in the 2000s, I was part of the problem. I didn't understand why other people had so much trouble doing things that seemed simple to me, because I was eating, breathing, and sleeping Perl. I knew how to prolong the intervals between breaking my installation, and how to troubleshoot and repair it, but there was no reason why anyone who wanted to deploy, or even develop on, my code base should have needed that encyclopedic knowledge.

This is why, for all their faults, I count containers as the biggest revolution in the software industry, at least for us "backend" folks.
by q1w2 | 2025-04-29 14:04:11+00:00
I'm share some skepticism. While I agree with their belief that prostates suffer from unappreciated "mechanical" issues, I'm less convinced of their method of resolution.

For my own worthless anecdote, I've noted that my (usually post-orgasm) prostate pain was significantly improved when I started taking Losartan - a anti-hypertension medication (angiotension II blocker (ARB)). The day after I started taking it, I could feel my prostate like never before (then that initial sensation went away), so there was very clearly an associative mechanism of action.
by lotharcable | 2025-04-29 14:04:20+00:00
wow, that is kinda dumb.

Governments can and do target GDP with their spending, with predictable results. The classic example is "ghost cities" in China. They have ghost cities nobody lives in, ghost roads nobody drives on, and ghost bullet trains that go nowhere useful. All because regional governors are expected, one way or the other, to match GDP targets for their regions.

Goodhart's law applies here. "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

GDP is subject to manipulation when it becomes a target. So is lots of other things like "Consumer Price Index", which nowadays doesn't index a whole lot other then what the goverment's target is for inflation (and yes, the Federal Reserve actually counts as part of the "government" here).

Which means that GDP, like the CPI, is not particularly useful measurement anymore.
by bluGill | 2025-04-29 14:04:29+00:00
Sales tax cannot be per-calculated, since it is charged on the total sale. Rounding errors will get you. (when I worked fast food 30 years ago one value meal was $3.18, but two were $6.27) The government pays attention to this type of thing and they will get you for those pennies. (remember there are many governments, it is possibly all the local governments in question would decide not to pay attention, but that doesn't mean those rules apply to someone else who lives in a different area and thus has different local governments)
by iwanttocomment | 2025-04-29 14:04:37+00:00
It was a truly strange experience being in San Francisco in the mid-aughts, with the vibes quickly turning away from the idealistic but flawed freaks and geeks (now largely retired) to the brogrammers and techbros of the latter half of the aughts who are still with us today.

It's as if the techbros tried to emulate the positive aspirations of their hippie-tech forefathers and, over the past decade, were just like "naah, forget it."

Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together. It's truly depressing seeing this generation of money-addled idiots set us back thousands of years using the tech we created.
by conductr | 2025-04-29 14:04:39+00:00
They have time and resources though. I think what you say makes sense for release. At some point you just need to stop adding things and release what you could, even at their scale this is true. The pattern I see is they just never polish things after releasing them. Although, in theory, the whole team is still there available. Internally I think the culture is they immediately look to the next version. Instead of polishing what users have available, tackling the 20%, etc. So in a sense, they stay busy constantly building just the 80% part over and over again (eg, right now I imagine they’re busy porting the 80 to Windows 12 or whatever is next for them, which is probably a big rewrite because the like to change the entire style guide on each release)
by justinhj | 2025-04-29 14:04:41+00:00
I worked on games for 20 years and was always interested in alternative languages to C and C++ for the purpose.

Java was my first hope. It was a bit safer than C++ but ultimately too verbose and the GC meant too much memory is wasted. Most games were very sensitive to memory use because consoles always had limited memory to keep costs down.

Next I spent years of side projects on Common Lisp based on Andy Gavin’s success there with Crash Bandicoot and more, showing it was possible to do. However, reports from the company were that it was hard to scale to more people and eventually a rewrite of the engine in C++ came.

I have explored Rust and Bevy. Bevy is bleeding edge and that’s okay, but Rust is not the right language. The focus on safety makes coding slow when you want it to be fast. The borrow checker frowns when you want to mutate things for speed.

In my opinion Zig is the most promising language for triple A game dev. If you are mid level stick to Godot and Unity, but if you want to build a fast, safe game engine then look at Zig first.
by alias_neo | 2025-04-29 14:04:46+00:00
When I work on my own code, at home, with no-one to assist or review, I write tests, and open a PR anyway, and review it myself, sometimes the next day with fresh eyes, or even 10 minutes later after a quick walk in and out of the room and a glass of water.

If you're not confident you can review a piece of code you wrote and spot a potentially disastrous bug like the one in OP, write more tests.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-04-29 14:04:50+00:00
I've been having a blast using Claude Code lately, I've spun about 3 fully functional mini apps I had in the backlog for ages and didnt wanted to touch because of boilerplate and really not feeling the love for the functionality.

I've installed this and will give it a try... these tools are so much fun to work with once you know how to build with them and you understand the limitations as well.
by TheRealQueequeg | 2025-04-29 14:05:04+00:00
> That sliver probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of AI generated images.

I prefer to get my illegally copied images from only the most humanely trained LLM instead of illegally copying them myself like some neanderthal or, heaven forbid, asking a human to make something. Such a though is revolting; humans breathe so loud and sweat so much and are so icky. Hold on - my wife just texted me. "Hey chat gipity, what is my wife asking about now?" /s
by pentamassiv | 2025-04-29 14:06:09+00:00
I think they want the price to be the amount they will have to pay to get the item or service. On the bill you can then split up the price into taxes, tariffs and whatever else you want so they are not thrown into the same bucket.

That way there's no surprise at the checkout and you still see how much of the money goes to whom.

It works very well in the rest of the world
by addoo | 2025-04-29 14:06:11+00:00
This is political, so are the tariffs. It’s the same cat and mouse game with local/state regulations on restaurant staff compensation and ‘service fees.’

No love for Amazon in general, they’ve been gaming the system for a long time, but it’s not hard to see why they would do this. Prices will go up, this an easy way to deflect the blame (and to be fair… it’s an accurate deflection).
by aomix | 2025-04-29 14:06:21+00:00
I wonder if you plotted layoffs cycles you’d see a big gaps for tech companies for the last couple years since RTO orders will have the same effect.

Reading about the different RTO rebellions is interesting. I know multiple people who have ended up in a half day schedule that they really like. All meetings scheduled before noon-ish, then head home to focus on work. These are all kind of against company policy but there’s a shield of willingly ignorant managers between the executives and workers. As long as the managers can say “as far as any metrics I have access to tell me my people are in the office the required days per week” they’re ok with it.
by mjburgess | 2025-04-29 14:06:43+00:00
My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-performative systems into a death spiral of pure uselessness.

In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts. Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it forces developers to engage in less "performative copy-paste of stackoverflow/code-docs/examples/etc." and engage the mind in what those lines should be. Even if, this engagement of the mind, is a prompt.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-29 14:06:44+00:00
At some point, the Jobs folks took the helm from the Woz folks, and it went from being curious, eccentric (a compliment, if ambiguous) people doing fun stuff to "How can we take over the world from the finance bros (“east coast”, NYC) and the political establishment (DC)?" Andreessen Horowitz, for example.
by tbct | 2025-04-29 14:07:32+00:00
Once you have algebraic data-types in a language, writing a recursive visitor pattern is pretty simple.

Encoding the semantics of a tree traversal operator likewise is difficult in the general case. What exactly would the order be, what if I want to traverse in a non-standard ordering, what about skipping branches; all would be difficult to cleanly represent.

I have seen it done where you return actions with key ones being recurse, stop, replace, and replace & then carry out some function, but again, this is pretty simple to implement.
by kylebenzle | 2025-04-29 14:07:38+00:00
I loved these books when they came out but the more time that has gone on it seems that much of the authors' data turned out to be statistiaclly insignificant and they took liberties with their conclusions. I always thought there was somehting seriously wrong with Steven Dubner, just his child-like "I-dont-know-anything" facade is a litle silly after 20+ years of it.
by Eextra953 | 2025-04-29 14:07:50+00:00
One thing I can't stand about the current administration is just how much they resemble a schoolyard bully. It's never their fault, they are always the victim, and they cry their actions have repercussions. Why is it hostile and political to display the tarriffs to the consumer? Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be if a local politician introduced a new sales tax and then got mad at the businesses for showing the new tax to consumers?
by Swizec | 2025-04-29 14:07:54+00:00
> Has there been any big changes

Yes and no. We’ll never know. There are small changes all the time. You and I wouldn’t even notice the difference.

But if you compared today’s flavor to the flavor of 100 years ago side-by-side, I bet it’s pretty noticeable. Today they use corn syrup instead of sugar, for example. Many of the flavoring ingredients from back then aren’t even legal for human consumption anymore either.

Exact ingredients also differ between markets so we’re not even all talking about the same coca cola.
by zelon88 | 2025-04-29 14:08:01+00:00
> As a designer, I value the experience product I create provides to the users. And this was not even a bad experience; it was actually harmful.

$229 per year on a closed source product and this is the level of quality you can expect.

You can have all the respect for users in the world, but if you write downright hazardous code then you're only doing them a disservice. What happened to all the metered internet plans you blasted for 3 months? Are you going to make those users whole?

Learning from and owning your mistake is great and all, but you shouldn't be proud or gloating about this in any way, shape, or form. It is a very awkward and disrespectful flex on your customers.
by slightwinder | 2025-04-29 14:08:13+00:00
> My theory is this is because people want to use rust primarily, the domain problem is just a challenge, like a level in a game.

So you mean, Rust is more of an intellectual playground, than an actual workbench? I'm curious how high the churn rate of packages in other languages is, like python or ruby (let's not talk about javascript). Could this be the result of rust being still rather young and moving fast?

> Conversely and ironically, this is why I love Go.

Is Go still forcing hard wired paths in $HOME for compiling, or what was it again?