MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-21 16:44:22+00:00
I wonder if this might be a situation where the spatial navigation concepts found in the original macOS would be beneficial. It leveraged the user’s spatial and muscle memory to enable quick navigation of the filesystem by giving each directory its own dedicated window with a user-defined size and screen location. The effect is very much like navigating a physical space, with each file and folder having a spatial “path” that’s effortlessly encoded in memory.

While this may not scale well to the complexity of modern filesystems, it might work well for a stylus-based digital notetaking device.
by yesfitz | 2025-04-21 16:44:41+00:00
I hope you meant "enormous" as in "commendable" because it's a fantastic bargain compared to what they get for that money.

$151,360,905 of King County's property tax revenue in 2024 went to the library.[1]

From Wikipedia[2]: "KCLS consists of 49 branches, one standalone book locker, the Traveling Library Center, ABC Express Vans, a mobile TechLab, and 11 bookmobiles."

"As of 2023, the library system serves a population of 1.6 million residents and has 3.7 million items in its collection . . ."

"Circulation 21.5 million"

And according to their 2025 budget, employs 842 people.[3]

I encourage you to review those statistics, and then look at the library system's website[4] for a sample of the events, access, and services they provide.

1: 2024 Property Tax Distribution for King County, Washington: https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/assesso... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_County_Library_System# 3:https://kcls.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/12/2025-KC... 4: https://kcls.org/
by lherron | 2025-04-21 16:44:56+00:00
I agree for method-level changes, but the more you’re willing to cede control for larger changes, even in a familiar language, the more an LLM accelerates you.

For me, I give Gemini the full context of my repo, tell it the sweeping changes I want to make, and let it do the zero to one planning step. Then I modify (mostly prune) the output and let Cursor get to work.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-21 16:44:57+00:00
>And in other cases, maybe a rough solution is better than not having anything at all.

POCs are better for customer-facing, product management driven work. This is because they can be bad at describing what they want. There's more risk of building the wrong thing.

POCs can be okay for system design or back-end work (or really anything not involving vague asks), but chances are planning and deeper thinking will help you more there because the problems you solve tend to be less subjective. Less risk of building the wrong thing.
by numbers_guy | 2025-04-21 16:45:30+00:00
No the Pope is not infallible and you can disagree with the Pope. Sure. But you cannot use that as a cop out to turn Catholicism into an arbitrary Protestant sect where you make up moral values as you go based on your political inclinations. The whole point of Catholicism is that you have a whole institution whose job it is to guide the Church. If you believe you know better than the clergy on every single topic, you are by definition a Protestant. Lots of these Protesting Catholics have worldviews that are entirely incompatible with the fundamentals of Catholicism, but they do not want to drop the Catholic aesthetic, because it gives them an air of superiority over their fellow Protestants which they look down upon.
by gertlex | 2025-04-21 16:45:35+00:00
Fair question! My speculation here comes from thermistors being relatively common replacement parts. (clothes dryers, ovens) As you mentioned, temperature-invariant is tricky, and I think it's often a non-linear but close-enough for the design. I have the impression a failure mode can be if the temperature-response behavior changes over time.

A bi-metal contact is only good for a single temperature, I think? (can be adjustable like thermostats) (I'm sure many but not all dish-washers probably do only need a single temperature...)
by bigjimmyk3 | 2025-04-21 16:45:46+00:00
I recently started doing some genealogy work for my family, and I was not excited at the prospect of using most of the paid family tree sites -- dark patterns, etc. I recently ran across this site and it seems much more agreeable. I like the wiki-style collaboration, and the emphasis on primary sources is also a big plus vs "this is what I was told."
by roughly | 2025-04-21 16:45:51+00:00
There’s a long history of coffee as a social force - namely because the alternative was usually beer, and you can imagine the wild swing in a population going from beer to coffee as their recreational beverage of choice. Coffee’s been implicated in the surge of “enlightenment” thinking, as well as the development of the financial industry (and, due to the former, also has a long history of catching the ire of kings and rulers.)
by alganet | 2025-04-21 16:46:39+00:00
Ah, the chicken and the pig story. The writers and developers only lays eggs, the venture capitalist puts its skin at the table. I heard that before.

Again, think of it as a guide. AI has been used to detect fraud, it is already trusted in financial systems. It could be used as a tool to keep VCs in check. With this automated moral guide, it could help train VCs that are accountable not only in theory, but in practice too!

I find offensive that you are claiming AI could lead to a lack of accountability. Can you show me an example of some VC that used it to unfairly explore the system?

AI is a friend. It is already everywhere, why not concede to it? Concede to AI.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-21 16:47:06+00:00
> apparently paying students to attend online community college

No, they provide student aid that covers some (it's not much) of low income students' living expenses so that they can actually study and get through college, instead of working fulltime and it taking 2-3 times as long.

It's the same type of financial aid scholarships 4-year universities give out too, and in most/all States.
by hackrmn | 2025-04-21 16:47:50+00:00
I suppose lack of overlap in the "interface surface" (attributes, including callables) between `str` and `Template` should nip the kind of issue in the bud -- being passed a `Template` and needing to actually "instantiate" it -- accessing `strings` and `values` attributes on the passed object, will likely fail at runtime when attempted on a string someone passed instead (e.g. confusing a `t`-string with an `f`-string)?
by sabellito | 2025-04-21 16:48:14+00:00
I agree with this sentiment. The one thing I liked about Clojure was the simplicity of the syntax, as long as you kept away from writing macros.

In general, after so many decades programming, I've come to dislike languages with optional periods (a.foo) and optional parenthesis for function calls - little gain to a confusion of precedence, what's a field vs method. Seems that the whole DSL craze of 15 years ago was a mistake after all.

Having said all that, I think haskell is awesome, in the original sense of the word. I became a better programmer after working with it for a bit.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-04-21 16:48:36+00:00
> why pretend that such a low bar could prevent anyone from understanding?

I don't know why this is a startling take. If you encode your ideas in an unfamilar symbology, of course that's going to make it more difficult for someone who isn't familiar with the space.

I'm not arguing that we should teach real analysis this way, or any other high level math class. I'm only contesting GP's comment that there is NO value to be had in using more familiar language to explain a new concept to an unfamiliar audience.

This is the entire reasoning behind "word problems" at the elementary level; they're meant to ground the abstract modeling of a math problem (193 - 3 * 12 = ?) into something more intuitive for a child to understand (If you start with 193 eggs, and you take three dozen away to bake a cake, how many are left?)

> are you really saying that "let function(argument has type RealNumber) has type RealNumber be a function from a real number argument to a real number" is somehow superior to "let f(x) : R->R"

No, I'm saying the there's tradeoffs on either side, and our educators ought to be aware of this.

> math notation is by and for professional mathematicians.

I agree, but we teach math to plenty of people who aren't professional mathematicians. I wouldn't want to do formal abstract algebra proofs in a more verbose form, I'm perfectly happy using the domain notation, but my friends from biological sciences who have to take a calculus course now have to learn both a new symbology alongside the problem domain. I've watched enough of my (clearly intelligent) biology friends slam face first into calculus and spin out. They're not dumb, they can do circles around me when it comes to chemistry, yet they Just Can't wrap their heads around calculus-style math, which leads me to wonder what the difference is between how we teach complex chemistry vs complex math. Questioning the pedagogy is a fairly logical extension of that.
by ryanobjc | 2025-04-21 16:48:39+00:00
A restaurant out of your home presents a public health risk sadly. Foodborne illnesses are rare, because of the regulations placed on commercial food sellers.

There are likely ways we can give more latitude, but home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.

Unfortunately in terms of "overreaching" regulations, this is the worst example: food borne illneses are very real killers, and a major risk.

Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.

Really in terms of overbearing regulations, these two actually protect lives every single day. Remember the "Ghost Ship" fire? Caused by electrical fire. Norovirus on cruise ships? Cause hospitalization and evacuation.

I'm all for minimizing regulations, but many many of them are literally written in blood, and the notion that we can wholesale relax them with no ill consequence is just not true.
by fanatic2pope | 2025-04-21 16:48:50+00:00
> When Motor Trend last tested the Rimac Nevera, it did 0-186 mph in 15.6 seconds.

The Rimac Nevera R is road legal and does 0-186 mph in under 9 seconds.

https://www.theautopian.com/the-2025-rimac-nevera-r-and-its-...
by 9rx | 2025-04-21 16:49:01+00:00
> and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life.

Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.

Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
by lofaszvanitt | 2025-04-21 16:49:13+00:00
NO, just NO!

And this is done by the owners of Github. Throw away open source licenses, create your own, make anyone who forks your code perpetually pay for your work, or ask money for your work.

"Luckily, I persisted. Spegel still continues strong with over 1.7k stars and 14.4 million pulls"

Yeah, your time is your most precious resource and what you get in return? Recognition? virtual stars, pulls, essentially numbers, essentially nothing. And then you get robbed.

WAKE THE FUCK UP PEOPLE.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-21 16:49:23+00:00
which tools are you using? And if you do end up trying us, let me know what you'd like to see or if we can help with anything!

It is remarkable how fast pure prompting can get you an interactive prototype.

We recently added the ability for our system to reference markdown files, so one thing you can do is paste a PRD into Magic Patterns and then tell it to reference that PRD as it builds out your spec.
by sitkack | 2025-04-21 16:49:26+00:00
Totally agree, researchers shouldn't rely on ArXiv as being their only publishing platform. Also due to the rigid narrow format of the paper, each paper should have a page, to link to the code, link to the talk about the paper, etc.

It is unbelievable how much more communicative power a paper with a site vs just a paper on arxiv.
by overu589 | 2025-04-21 16:50:21+00:00
There is this thing we might refer to as “the burn.” You know, like “burn your ass to get it done.” Only for knowledge workers, it is an ember in the mind that goes and goes and goes and goes.

Learn to fan that flame without the burn out.

That is the secret of the way.

Burn your ass until your mind incinerates self doubt. You will learn it is faster to try some things than wonder if they might work.

Burn your ass until those reasons why not are forgotten, or are repulsive.

Burn your ass until all of those things others say cannot be done without a team are done out of boredom waiting for others to get on the same page.

There is no book, only determination, and outcome.

Some day you will realize everyone else is 90% lazy and you will adjust your work life balance in accordance.
by jerf | 2025-04-21 16:51:05+00:00
Many languages have similar features.

For instance, Python has the % operator that is a template format that allows interpolating values based on a template string with a variety of printf-like features: https://python-reference.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/str/f...

Also, Python has the .format method on strings, which is a template format that allows interpolating values based on a template string: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python-string-format-method/

As another example, Python has f-strings that are a template format that allows interpolating values based on a template string: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/formatted-string-literals-f-st...

Also, you can also find languages like Python that have a rich ecosystem of third party templating solutions. These are often intended for things like rendering entire web pages but many of them have relatively simple ways of using their templating functionality in a fairly reasonable amount of code, if you just want to have a template format that allows interpolating values based on a template string.

So, as you can see, many other languages have this feature, as you can tell from all the examples I have shown you here.

(To spell it out for those who may find this too subtle... somehow... I'm not a fan of this simply because Python has gone from "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." to "there's half-a-dozen ways to do it and if they are all wrong Python 3.x+1 will introduce a seventh" and I'm just not seeing the benefits worth the tradeoffs here.)
by firesteelrain | 2025-04-21 16:51:08+00:00
First, if Microsoft used any of the Spegel code then it should provide proper attribution. A best practice is to put the LICENSE file in the root of project (both peerd and spegel do). But also, you need to put the license in the header of each file as a best practice. Like Microsoft did here https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/api/docs.go#L1

spegel did not follow best practices to put the copyright in the file itself: https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/internal/web/...

Ideally starting with something like this

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
by kamikaz1k | 2025-04-21 16:51:15+00:00
by making it a generic `t` you lose explicit syntax highlighting. Where something like JS template`string` could determine which syntax to use based on the template value.

I supposed when assigning it to a, variable: SyntaxRecognizableTemplate, you could give it the hint necessary.

was this discussed in the PEP?

*edit: reading the PEP-750[1] it doesn't seem like it..

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0750/#the-interpolation-type
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-21 16:51:16+00:00
And he signaled pretty strongly in his first term that he was pissed he didn't have more control over the Fed. It was a safe bet that was one of the "deep state" (I cannot roll my eyes hard enough on that one, in case that doesn't come through from the scare quotes) hurdles he and his P2025 pals were planning to remove at some point so they couldn't get in the way of the autocracy agenda, this term, and that his next appointment (whether it comes after a questionably-legal firing this year, or next year at the end of Powell's term) will be someone who'll do whatever Trump wants.

I don't even know what'll happen if there's a blatantly politically-motivated interest rate drop. Nothing good. I'm not even sure consumer and business rates will follow suit like they normally do, due to the perceived risk in the current economy. It's gonna be weird.
by p_ing | 2025-04-21 16:53:34+00:00
I don't understand the utility. If I'm depressed, I can confirm that with a therapist or psychiatrist, and I can simply feel it -- I don't need a Debbie Downer Validator.

I agree with medication/devices the efficacy for the individual is often an unknown until you try it. It's the curse of not understanding exactly how these things work, simply that (at scale) they do.

As for someone entrapping you to treat you, that presents serious ethical red flags that can get someone's license yanked (in the US). Such practitioners should be few and far between, especially with the little amount of money they're reimbursed from insurance by.

Can you describe the goal of this app in a single sentence? What does it do for the individual/how does it make the individual 'better'? And could this individual get this sort of feedback on their own (anyone can take PHQ-9 at any time they wish)?
by ryanobjc | 2025-04-21 16:53:40+00:00
The notion that "many localities completely controlled by Democrats" is just not really true. The idea that zoning reform is a no-brainer and easy is also clearly not true: it's been a major teeth pull in SF and California, and many different people are pushing back.

Additionally somewhere like SF isn't a monolith, and despite voting heavily for federal democrats, the local elections aren't so clear cut.

Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?

I would say this: modern development doesn't always make the kinds of mixed used neighborhoods that people truly want and love. The cost of development often results in street level vacant commercial space, and that is not good for neighborhoods. Yes a complete revamp of zoning could change this - but would it? How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?

It just isn't trivial sadly.
by projectazorian | 2025-04-21 16:54:38+00:00
> Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.

Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountability for these decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out whom to approach to reverse them.

Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-wing group sooner or later.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-04-21 16:54:50+00:00
I hadn't thought of sheet music in this context before; that's a helpful counter-example, thanks.

Broadly I agree; the semantic density of domain-specific language is often required to operate well in that domain. I disagree some with the "Math doesn't start on hard mode," but I think that's just bikeshedding at some level.

The endemic "I just don't understand math" that my (American) peers have espoused, to me, points to a failure in our (American, public school) instruction practices around it.
by 1-more | 2025-04-21 16:55:12+00:00
Elm (written in Haskell) uses |> and <| for pipelining forwards and backwards, and function composition is >> and <<. These have made it into Haskell via nri-prelude https://hackage.haskell.org/package/nri-prelude (written by a company that uses a lot of Elm in order to make writing Haskell look more like writing Elm).

There is also https://hackage.haskell.org/package/flow which uses .> and <. for function composition.

EDIT: in no way do I want to claim the originality of these things in Elm or the Haskell package inspired by it. AFAIK |> came from F# but it could be miles earlier.
by im3w1l | 2025-04-21 16:55:21+00:00
There is in fact a common strategy for dealing with those errors. Shut the process down. That relies on another strategy. Reliable persisted state. Best practice here is to use mechanisms that ensures that at every moment the persisted state is valid. Some databases can guarantee this. You can also write out the new state to a temp file and atomically replace the old state with the new one.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-21 16:55:36+00:00
I think this behavior stems from how big companies do performance reviews and promotions for developers.

Contributing to someone else's open source project is for schmucks and juniors. Authoring a "new" open source project in the company's name, getting recognition and solving problems is seen as "leading the industry" and whatever other wankery sophistry they come up with to try to motivate employees with.
by orthoxerox | 2025-04-21 16:55:51+00:00
In addition to what buzzy_hacker has written, in a normal FOSS project A I can ask maintainer X to include a feature from a compatible FOSS project B written by programmer Y. The maintainer can do it themselves, or I can adapt the code myself and submit a patch, referencing the original authors. That's how FOSS is supposed to work.

In a CLA-restricted project, there's only one entitity that can contribute copyleft code. Everyone else must donate the code to them, and they forbid themselves from using other people's copyleft code, because they can't relicense it.
by culi | 2025-04-21 16:56:23+00:00
What's your point? This point is completely off topic

The original comment made it seem like it was a completely arbitrary point of comparison for what "humans like". Instead, the benchmark that is used is what the environment would be like if we took out the massive contributions to global warming and CO2 concentration caused by industrialism

Are pre-industrial levels "more comfortable" for humans? Sure, maybe I guess. It's probably "more comfortable" for the vast majority of species that are currently adapted for that biosphere. Why does that matter? The point is we're rapidly changing the global temperature levels as well as the co2 concentration rates (and many other environmental "abiotic" factors) at a rate that threatens most of life on earth. Shooting for "pre-industrial levels" as a benchmark is an obvious and easy, if a bit lazy, way to work towards an environment that most of life on earth is already adapted for
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 16:56:47+00:00
That tells you they were the tech of when they were built. Current French nuclear power shows nuclear could've been the tech of the tomorrows of decades past, not today.

There's two different ways for wind and sun to be available continuously:

While I like the idea of a global* power grid, and have in fact done the maths on it working just fine and not being silly cost or ridiculously long periods of global aluminium production, geopolitical realities prevent it.

Storage is the other. The storage requirements for electrified personal transport are so large, several dozen kWh even for a small family car and much more for professional vehicles, that mere normal electrical usage is something you can do with spare capacity.

* Regional grids also help reduce the influence and severity of Dunkellaufe, but the models I've seen for dealing with these cost-effectively is "overbuild capacity by a few hundred percent because it's cheap, then add a few days worth of batteries because they're relatively pricy", so I count that as primarily option #2, storage.