MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trinix912 | 2025-05-07 08:38:52+00:00
> Since I started using Nix flakes to build everything and pin to specific versions this largely stopped being a problem for me. I happily run things I last touched many, many years ago without worrying about stupid stuff like this ^

It only solves the "Libraries deprecate" part. APIs (at least the internet ones) still change, hardware still changes, problems you're trying to solve change, all outside of your control. Nix doesn't solve any of those.
by ArthurStacks | 2025-05-07 08:39:28+00:00
We have a very successful company that has been running 30 years, with developers across 6 countries. We just make sure we hire developers who know that theyre here to do a job, on our terms, for which they will get paid, and its our way or the highway. If they dont like it, they dont have to stay. However, through doing this we have maintained a standard that our competitors fail at, partly because they spend their time tiptoeing around staff and their comforts and preferences.
by cyberax | 2025-05-07 08:39:41+00:00
> This is why I called this view grossly ignorant. No, it's not easy when you have the added constraint of producing a language that is practical enough to write an OS and applications with. Have you tried?

I actually did, as a part of my CS course. My compiler had COM support (hey, it was late 90-s!) with IUnknown and IDispatch, optional static typing, and interface-based polymorphism. I could use it to compile the code for DOS, Windows, and Netware (don't ask). So yeah, I know exactly what is needed to design a compiler that can be used to write an OS.

It is not hard at all. And I did not know about Oberon at that time.

> Oberon was the distillation of many years, and several iterations, of work to find what worked effectively while remaining simple, and proving that it was practical to write a OS, and applications in it.

Oberon is an utter failure, in everything it touched. It failed in academia, it failed in industry, it failed everywhere. Despite being forced onto students in the ETH.

> Go might be practical, but calling it minimalistic is comical, and pleasant-to-use is highly subjective - I find it horribly unergonomic.

I though that Go was practically Oberon?!?

> A choice you're free to dislike, of course, but another example of why it is not "half-assed", but the culmination of many years of research by a lot of people.

Yeah? What culmination? What has Oberon achieved? Where are the masterpieces in Oberon? It's been 30 years since its original edition and the only major university that touched it was the ETH.

All the code I've seen in Oberon is just gross. Look at the Bluebottle/A2 source code, it's just terrible. No coherent error handling, poor structure, lots of unnecessary nesting in the source code, etc. You can even open something like UHCI USB implementation and compare it with Linux drivers.

> I did not argue against package name prefixes, so this is entirely a strawman with no relevance whatsoever to my objection.

When why did you mention it?
by simonask | 2025-05-07 08:39:54+00:00
Novice programmers will take longer to be productive in Rust compared to Go. Rust primarily improves the productivity of people who know what they are doing, because it gives them much better tools to manage complexity.

Games are written in C++ because game engines and tooling have person-centuries of work poured into them. Reimplementing Unreal Engine in Rust would require another few person-centuries of work, which is an investment that doesn't really make sense. Economically, dealing with the shortcomings of C++ is much, much cheaper.

But Rust is definitely encroaching in all of these areas. Embedded Rust is doing great, scientific Rust is getting there (check pola.rs). Rust is an obvious candidate for the next big game engine, and it is already quite viable for indie undertakings, though it is still early days.
by gwd | 2025-05-07 08:40:44+00:00
> novice programmers

I think Rust has too high a learning curve, and too many features, for novice programmers in general.

> Embedded is still C, games are C++, scientific and data are Python and R (I'm talking in general here). What is the niche for Rust?

Rust has already made huge inroads in CLIs and TUIs, as far as I can tell. Embedded is a slow-moving beast by design, but it seems to me (as someone in an adjacent area) that it could be a big win there, particularly in places that need safety certification.

All the stories of people using Rust for game development are about people who tried it and find that it doesn't fit: It makes experimentation and exploration slow enough that the reduction in minor bugs in game logic isn't really worth it.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-07 08:41:13+00:00
> People choose C++ because it's a flexible language that lets you do whatever you want.

You went on a bit too long. C++ lets you do whatever. Whether you wanted that is not its concern. That's handily illustrated in Matt Godbolt's talk - you provided a floating point value but that's inappropriate? Whatever. Negative values for unsigned? Whatever.

This has terrible ergonomics and the consequences were entirely predictable.
by fooker | 2025-05-07 08:41:26+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

Usually it is the US influencing small countries and having a say in military decisions. Also coming up next is a full blown Chinese military base in Gwadar, something the USSR broke itself trying to get to.

> Far greater than 50%.

If you want to go with the stick yes. For the carrot, it's a bit different, you just have to dangle it. If China says jump, Pakistan will ask how high.
by simion314 | 2025-05-07 08:41:38+00:00
>What kinds of contents do you want them to produce that they currently do not?

OpenAI models refuse to translate or do any transformation for some traditional, popular stories because of violence, the story was about a bad wolf eating some young goats that did not listen the advice from their mother.

So now try to give me a prompt that works with any text and that convinces the AI that is ok in fiction to have violence or bad guys/animals that get punished.

Now I am also considering if it censors the bible where some pretend good God kills young chilren with ugly illnesses to punish the adults, or for this book they made excaptions.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-07 08:41:48+00:00
You need to double check all your beliefs about the media before continuing this thread. There's no nice way to say this, but your posts have been a stream of totally made up "facts" that are making this discussion worse.

- You claimed Fox never reported on the stock market crash, something easily disproved with a five second web search.

- You claimed having two sources yields 99% accuracy, a made up number.

- You claimed NPR, BBC and PBS have to show their sources, although they regularly report single-sourced or anonymously sourced stories.

- You claim you can hear a falsehood within one second of turning on Fox.

You're in the habit of routinely inventing numbers whilst criticizing others for perceived failures to be accurate. Given you're talking about the importance of an informed populace that's ironic and embarrassing.
by alt227 | 2025-05-07 08:42:45+00:00
> Apple's security team (which is surely world-class)

Hahaha, do you read HN much? There are stories on here all the time of security holes in Apples products which they refuse to fix.

Heres a recent example of their M series CPUs having similar exploits in them to SPECTRE and MELTDOWN in Intel CPUs. The difference is Intel fixed it and took the 20% performance hit. Apple refuses to fix it because it would make their processors slower.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract...
by ta1243 | 2025-05-07 08:43:44+00:00
Yup, before "tech" arrived food delivery was quite normal in the UK, and from watching 80s and 90s sitcoms quite normal in the US too. Indeed the "pizza porn trope" is as old as the hills [0]

I don't know anyone that regularly orders a takeaway by looking at some random website for some random crap, maybe it's a big city thing. I've tried to use things like ubereats in the past when away on business - last time in New York where everywhere was closed downtown at about 11pm, including the hotel room service. I was very disappointed, and vowed never again. I did something similar a couple of years earlier with the same vow though.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PizzaBoySpecialD...
by youngtaff | 2025-05-07 08:45:54+00:00
Sure that work is going to happen but often what you see is multiple stylesheets loaded using the async hack which results in multiple style and layout calculations as the browser can coalesce them because it doesn’t know that they’re stylesheets or when they will arrive

The whole philosophy of critical styles philosophy being those about the fold is a mistake in my view

Far better to adopt approaches like those recommended by Andy Bell that dramatically reduces stylesheet size

And do critical styles “correctly” i.e. load those that are needed to render the initial page and load the ones that rely on interactions separately
by chvid | 2025-05-07 08:45:59+00:00
There is a lot of Indian English-language media on YouTube and Twitter. There the war drums have been sounding strongly for the past weeks.

They seem to draw a parallel between India/Kashmir/Pakistan and Israel/Gaza/Iran - seeing India as the superior and morally just super power against a weak corrupt dysfunctional terrorist-sponsoring Pakistan.

So in that thinking right now there is an opportunity to get a final solution on Kashmir and throw a punch against Pakistan so strong that it will fall apart for good.
by ethersteeds | 2025-05-07 08:46:24+00:00
With a broad brush, German brands are more expensive to buy, as a premium for the mythical quality reputation which never seems diminished by the high failure rates and incredibly expensive repair costs.

Cutting edge technologies can eke out higher efficiencies, but at the cost of all the downsides of new tech - cost premium, unproven designs, potential evolutionary dead end.

I'm in no way in favor of ending Energy Star, but it's risible to assert that stupidity is the only the only reason a consumer would favor a straightforward, easily repaired design over an over-engineered turd stuffed with controller boards that regularly go bad and cost more than the appliance is worth to replace.
Show HN: A tool for folks to check their Substack writing habits
by kelsier1 | 2025-05-07 08:46:46+00:00
I created a tool for folks to check their Substack writing habits!

Not sure why Substack doesn't have it natively (and hopefully it will soon), but I created a free tool - "When did I last Substack?" - so you can check how regularly you've been writing and navigate to past posts easily. Currently viewable only on desktops/laptops.

For example, The Pragmatic Programmer, who is an excellent writer for Software professionals has been writing every Tuesday and Thursday for the whole of 2024!

This year he's stepped it up to write on 3 days a week.

Now I know quantity is NO indicator of quality And that this is not the most complicated tool under the hood. But as a programmer who gets amped up to code more with because I can see my Github heatmap, I thought this would help writers keep track of their writing as well.

Sidebar : I have been made aware of some alignment issues for Safari users. I will fix them!
by cyberax | 2025-05-07 08:46:59+00:00
> His views on it are as much or little ideology as your views on it are. They are rooted in a view of design you clearly don't share. That's fine.

No. The practice of writing code has clearly shown that early returns lead to better structured code. It's not even disputable anymore.

> they do affect reasoning about a piece of code, and Wirth cared deeply about the ability to reason about the code more than about convenience.

Then he should have looked at functional languages, rather than missing the point of them completely.

> That's extreme hyperbole, and just suggests you haven't read much of ETHZ's research output, which is full of dissertations and papers doing things Wirth didn't want in the standard Oberon. Including plenty of works he was the adviser for.

OK. What are the superstar Oberon projects that are used by a large number of people? Can you name ANY? I don't know any, and I know unfortunately a lot about Oberon and its cult members.

I am familiar with ETH research, and I actually employ an ETH professor, and an alumnus. I don't think I've seen any mentions of Oberon in their highest rated recent ETH research.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-07 08:48:21+00:00
Uber has already been replaced, at least in some parts of the world. We recently went on holiday to Malta and on check-in the hotel staff told us not to bother with Uber, Bolt worked way better and had more drivers (Bolt is a European Uber competitor based in Estonia).

So we signed up for Bolt and sure enough drivers were plentiful, the app worked great and there was no downside over Uber. I'll certainly be trying it again in future in other markets.

The reason Uber invested in self-driving cars for years is that otherwise they have no sustainable edge. It's just a taxi company, which is a low margin business. People who can make slick mobile apps are plentiful and it takes a minute or less to sign up for a new service. Uber grew to its current size by buying market share using investors dollars, which was always a time-limited strategy. Once they started having to turn a profit prices rose and their edge over their competitors was lost.
by shakna | 2025-05-07 08:48:45+00:00
One example from the site:

import module from 'node:module' const tree = new FileTree('site', import.meta.url) module.registerHooks(hooks.useTree(tree)) import('site/myfile.js')

Here, site/myfile.js doesn't exist. It gets created as a reference by the FileTree library. Node thinks it is importing it. The import is also automatically reloaded, if the backend changes it. Caches are invalidated and objects replaced.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-07 08:50:10+00:00
You can't really do Try (which is that operator's name in Rust) because C++ lacks a ControlFlow type which is how Try reflects the type's decision about whether to exit early.

You can imitate the beginner experience of the ? operator as magically handling trivial error cases by "just knowing" what should happen, but it's not the same thing as the current Try feature.

Barry Revzin has a proposal for some future C++ (lets say C++ 29) to introduce statement expressions, the syntax is very ugly even by C++ standards but it would semantically solve the problem you had.
by noodletheworld | 2025-05-07 08:51:05+00:00
It makes no difference.

Theres no difference between feeding an LLM a prompt and feeding it half the prompt, saving the state, restoring the state and feeding it other half of the prompt.

Ie. The data processed by the LLM is prompt P.

P can be composed of any number of segments.

Any number of segments can be cached, as long as all preceeding segments are cached.

The final input is P, regardless.

So; tldr; yes? Anything you can do with a prompt you can do, becasue its just a prompt.
by trinix912 | 2025-05-07 08:51:36+00:00
> 2) the translation models often vary widely between languages so doing well on French doesn't mean they will do well on something else.

Especially this. I often come across AI products that claim to do well in 100+ languages, show some really good DE/FR/SP/RU examples, then I try it with my language (Slovene) and am just disappointed. If you claim to support all those languages, please have a sample result in all of them. Even if they aren't all equally good, it comes across as more genuine than making bold claims that anyone who speaks a language with < 10 million speakers knows likely aren't true.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-07 08:52:05+00:00
It is engagement bait, but I don't think there is an explicit rule against that. There should be, though.

The blog itself doesn't really contain any interesting insights, imho. It's just a rant against coding with AI assistants ending with the inane unworkable idea of watermarking AI-assisted code.

I guess you could argue that applying the RIAA-level logic of "LLMs learning from existing material is stealing!" to code is somewhat novel, albeit equally stupid ("You wouldn't download an open source repo!").
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-07 08:53:16+00:00
JetBrains launched their cursor competitor a few weeks ago.

I prefer Claude Code still because it has access to more tools - Junie seems unable to fetch URLs and do other things. But that's a tiny gap that JetBrains can close quickly, and the Junie UI is quite pretty. Plus, inside the IDE they can equip the model with far more advanced tools than Claude Code will have from the CLI: inside Code Claude has to explore the codebase by banging stones together with ripgrep, whereas in the IDE it can be equipped with tools to access the indexes and navigate around like a human would.

In theory, JetBrains should be able to compete very strongly in this market. Their single line completion model is already excellent.
by n_ary | 2025-05-07 08:54:29+00:00
Tipping is NOT omnipresent in the European capital I live in. Of course some apps have tipping options but I never found correlation in service quality to tipping. On the contrary, when I tipped, service quality was “less optimal” and I noticed visible entitlement.

That being said, it is cultural norm here to tip by rounding up the order(say total is 2.59/ you tip by asking to make it 3.00/) when you are ordering in person and the service is/was good and the food is/was also good quality. Alternatively, in some restaurant, it is not usual to tip as order is collected by someone near the cash register while served by someone else entirely and someone else is preparing it. Once you are done eating, you return the dishes and go home, so there is no option to tip as you simply don’t tip at the prepayment step because you don’t know the food and service yet, you don’t tip the server as they simply bring the food and walk away.
by Gigamegs | 2025-05-07 08:54:48+00:00
:: RangeSlider for Winforms :: 1. What it does it do? RangeSlider is a WPF .dll for Winforms.

1.2. Features Trackbar with 2 thumbs where you can select a range not just a value.

2. Requirements - Winforms

3. Installation Download source code and compile.

4. Tutorial Add a reference to the .dll to your project. In designer add an ElementHost Element to your Winforms. In your main class add this code in the constructor:

rs = new BetterControl.RangeSlider(); rs.InitializeComponent(); rs.LowerValue = 30; rs.UpperValue = 90; rs.Minimum = 0; rs.Maximum = 100; this.elementHost1.Child = rs; rs.OnLowerSlider_ValueChanged += new BetterControl.RangeSlider.MyControlEventHandler(rs_OnLowerSlider_ValueChanged); rs.OnUpperSlider_ValueChanged += new BetterControl.RangeSlider.MyControlEventHandler(rs_OnUpperSlider_ValueChanged);

and add the function for the value changed:

void rs_OnLowerSlider_ValueChanged(object sender, double result)

{ MessageBox.Show("L"+result.ToString()); }

void rs_OnUpperSlider_ValueChanged(object sender, double result) { MessageBox.Show("U" + result.ToString()); }

web+Git: https://tetramatrix.github.io/rangeslider/
by amjnsx | 2025-05-07 08:55:05+00:00
Are you talking from experience with DoorDash or Deliveroo? This has not been my experience with Deliveroo in London, UK. There’s just no way I could get the same food quicker, everyone is on motor/pedal bikes so delivery is usually about 20-30 minutes. Food is always hot on arrival bar the odd item (Nandos chips specifically, always cold).

Also I’m ordering Deliveroo specifically so I can get the time back, that’s the price you’re really paying - I had a long day at work and I want the time to relax and not spend it sourcing and making dinner.
by Oxodao | 2025-05-07 08:56:20+00:00
This! Absolutely. I can't stand neither social login or magic link both of those are a pain. Password manager are a thing for a reason, just give me username+password or email+password + application based 2fa and thats it. Webauthn will be good at some point when everyone settled on how to use it properly (and as long as its paired with other way of logging in)
by aw1621107 | 2025-05-07 08:56:24+00:00
Perhaps I got the quip wrong. I was basically trying to reference discussions I've seen elsewhere along the lines of "Rust is not actually memory-safe because it needs unsafe", sometimes followed by the argument you outlined. Those discussions can get a bit involved and I don't think this is a good time/place for them, so I more or less just wanted to reference it without spending much time/words on actually delving into it.
by perihelions | 2025-05-07 08:56:33+00:00
I think that's about right, but the real purpose isn't resolving spatial details on the planet (which you correctly found isn't possible), but to find the planet at all—to distinguish a point of light out of background noise. A fine angular resolution is still helpful, for SNR reasons: smaller pixels contain less noise, wheras the signal pixel contains the same amount of signal!
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-05-07 08:57:26+00:00
I find it very interesting that the LLM is told so little details but seems to just intuitively understand based on the english words used for the tool name and function arguments.

I know from earlier discussions that this is partially because many LLMs have been fine tuned on function calling, however the model providers don’t share this training dataset unfortunately. I think models that haven’t been fine tuned can still do function calling with careful instructions in their system prompt but are much worse at it.

Thank you for comments that help with learning and understanding MCP and tools better.
by macieklamberski | 2025-05-07 08:57:57+00:00
I was in the same situation — using rss-parser, but eventually faced with some issues.

It also turned out, its performance is not that good. In benchmarks, it's 4-5x slower. In my case, switching to Feedsmith almost doubled the overall parsing speed. This is including the fetching of feeds, which is the main bottleneck.

PS. Great projects, I know and follow both. :)
by quietbritishjim | 2025-05-07 08:58:03+00:00
I always enjoy reading articles like this. But the truth is, having written several 100s of KLOC in C++ (i.e., not an enormous amount but certainly my fair share) I just almost never have problems with this sort accidental conversion in practice. Perhaps it might trip me up occasionally, but will be noticed by literally just running the code once. Yes, that is an extra hurdle to trip over and resolve but that is trivial compared to the alternative of creating and using wrapper types - regardless of whether I'm using Rust or C++. And the cost of visual noise of wrapper types, already higher just at the writing stage, then continues to be a cost every time you read the code. It's just not worth it for the very minor benefit it brings.

(Named parameters would definitely be great, though. I use little structs of parameters where I think that's useful, and set their members one line at a time.)

I know that this is an extremist view, but: I feel the same way about Rust's borrow checker. I just very rarely have problems with memory errors in C++ code bases with a little thought applied to lifetimes and use of smart pointers. Certainly, lifetime bugs are massively overshadowed by logic and algorithmic bugs. Why would I want to totally reshape the way that I code in order to fix one of the least significant problems I encounter? I actually wish there were a variant of Rust with all its nice clean improvements over C++ except for lifetime annotations and the borrow checker.

Perhaps this is a symptom of the code I tend to write: code that has a lot of tricky mathematical algorithms in it, rather than just "plumbing" data between different sources. But actually I doubt it, so I'm surprised this isn't a more common view.