MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-22 16:20:55+00:00
This was your original question:

> How did you come to the conclusion that Clinton balanced the budget?

Having a surplus means your budget is balanced and then some.

> When have any of these presidents successfully pushed for reducing the federal deficit during their tenures? Any actual reductions to the debt you’ve seen?

You specifically mention deficits, and a surplus leads to an actual reduction in debt.

> What’s causing you to focus on presidents rather than congressional actions?

The same congress that was in charge during surplus was more than happy to put us in high deficit again.

> How do you think fiscal policy keeps getting passed through congress when there’s largely two parties that have to agree to get it done?

Gridlock is a great way of not spending money. More to the point: Clinton was ok with cutting spending as much as he was with raising taxes. He treated the deficit as if it were actually important unlike Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden.
by crabbone | 2025-05-22 16:21:01+00:00
> It's easy enough to include a bug number in commit messages to tie the two together.

No. This is absolutely not enough. Does the commit resolve the issue? Does it add a test to the issue? Does it disable the buggy feature?

Also, I'm of an opinion that if you are hired to work in software development company, you need to learn how to use version control. Just suck it up, if you don't like it. No excuses. Version control is the protocol for sharing information, especially useful because it's understood by the "grunts" actually creating the product. If a manger doesn't understand this language he or she will be as useless as a manager who doesn't speak any natural language his or her team speaks.

In general, from the QA perspective, QA wants to know a lot more about the connection between the bug and the source code. It may ask questions s.a. "What general group of issues is affected by the change?" or "Is this a work-in-progress kind of change?" or "Does this change affect the performance of the system?" or "Is this change known to affect another change, perhaps these changes are mutually exclusive?" or "Is this change intended for a particular release of the product?". This and similar information is necessary for QA to minimize the number of useless tests to run, to minimize the number of pointless alerts, to have a hope of producing reliable metrics that show overall product quality level increase / decrease.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-22 16:21:08+00:00
The industry feels so much more mature, in a bad way. We had such an exciting set of decades of making new software, new frameworks, finding out new ways to do things. Devs would be working on all kinds of exciting interesting personal matters. It was frontiers work, expanding possibility.

Everything feels so set now. Ever larger industry dominating ever more, with large scale software using established frameworks and technologies. Less vibrant scene of new and mid-life companies, still with exciting things brewing.

I struggle to elaborate why I feel it, but the lack of vibrancy, the lack of spark within the industry feels like it would lead so directly to these conditions of there being less entry-level jobs.
by Ocerge | 2025-05-22 16:21:30+00:00
I wish I hadn't worked 2 jobs while getting my CS degree. I have lots of acquaintences and friends in my mid-30s, but no friends from college or earlier. I have a lot of memories that I can't really share with anybody who was also there, and it's only sort of showing up now that I don't have any really deep friendships, and it mostly started from me doing nothing but work or study during the time when I should have been growing socially.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-22 16:22:23+00:00
Yeah I think a sibling has it right: DRM factors into this, and TPTB do not want another Winamp or VLC that gives freedom to users to play what we want.

The situation for me on Android would be hilarious if it weren't so saddening. Since I purchased a KitKat tablet in 2015, I've more or less stuck to the "Android Files" app to play music files. Yes, that has been the best solution: no app install required, bare bones, no feature demands from me. In fact, rather than making playlists, I would just copy out tracks to a new folder and play them in there. Want to repeat one? Make five copies of it!

On Chromebook I'm using the builtin app, Gallery. It's utterly barebones as well. All I want to do is listen to a track.

This has continued even to the present day, but you know what? Our days are numbered, because apps are staking out moats in terms of file types they will handle. They're looking to reduce generic handling of multiple file types.

I've been trying to conform to this "new normal" by using YouTube Music. With my Premium subscriptions I should be able to download any streamable track, and also listen to files on-device. This is working out poorly. The on-device management is abysmal and makes you want to die. The downloading feature just sort of... fills up my storage, and I don't really even use it. I still fall back on Android Files because Music is such a horrible app, except when I'm using it to stream.
by RobirdLiu | 2025-05-22 16:22:29+00:00
Let me briefly share some of my experiences and thoughts. I grew up playing games like The Legend of Zelda, Knights and Merchants, StarCraft. From a young age, I dreamed of creating a multiplayer Final Fantasy II. Continuously honed my skills and after graduating college in 2007, fulfilled my dream of becoming an MMORPG developer.

However, this marked the beginning of a long struggle. I wanted to create 'healing remedies' but the company demanded 'addictive drugs' designed to drain player's time and money. I realized the problem wasn't product design itself, but the business model shaping the product. So, I started my own venture.

I'm now trying to build a 'creator-consumer' ecosystem, similar to short-form video platforms. This involves developing a DSL to easily create narrative adventure game scripts (text and image based), performed by pre-made, standardized virtual characters. It will use a serialized release model, with artists and musicians sharing in the revenue.

Ultimately, the business model dictates the product. It doesn't matter who successfully builds this; success doesn't have to be mine. I just hope everyone can live a life without regrets.
by huhkerrf | 2025-05-22 16:22:49+00:00
I feel like there's something wrong with me for not understanding the big leap with MCP and the proponents aren't helping.

I saw a tweet stream that said something like "if you think MCP is the same as REST, you're not thinking big enough" followed by a bunch of marketing speak that gave off LinkedIn web3 influencer vibes. I saw a blog post that says MCP is better because it bridges multiple protocols. Okay, and?

I really want to get this, but I don't know how to square "LLMs are hyper intelligent" with "LLMs can't figure out OpenAPI documentation."
by MandieD | 2025-05-22 16:23:45+00:00
When Docker pulled their subscription shenanigans, the global auto parts manufacturer I work for wasn't delighted when they saw $5 (or was it 7?)/month/user, but were ready to suck it up for a few hundred devs.

They noped right out when it turned out to be more like $20/month/user, not payable by purchase order, and instead spent a developer month cobbling together our own substitute involving Windows Subsystem for Linux, because it would pay off within two months.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-05-22 16:24:02+00:00
For anyone interested in exploring Godot are working on a json spec for 4D Shapes for rendering and physics -- it's called G4MF (Good 4D Model Format) loosely based on Khronos glTF -- still a work in progress but there is playground editor support for x/y/z/w

https://github.com/godot-dimensions/g4mf
by nemothekid | 2025-05-22 16:24:05+00:00
I don't think this is a matter of like or disliking someone. While I can appreciate his candor in what he's trying to do - just because he's "honest" doesn't mean I agree with his policy.

What he is effectively saying is that large swaths of the American populace need to accept lower economic strength in order to decouple our reliance on our trading partners. And his reason for doing so is so that we can wage war on them. It's a completely nonsensical approach to maintain American hegemony. Why would any prefer strength through violence rather than maintaining the current system of American hegemony through trade?

While reserve currency status has it's warts, especially like he points out, the absolute immense amount of demand for US debt which fuels an uncontrolled spending crisis domestically I believe that is 1000% preferable to my daughters working in factories, and my sons dying in the Taiwan strait? For what? So that maybe the US can forcibly bomb China back into a nation of poor farmers and claim ideological victory over the communist project? It's completely inane.

You need to go one step further and ask yourself why he's proposing this. Instead of reexamining our relationship with China and asking ourselves how can we win in a multi-polar future, Miran and Trump have taken the view that China must remain a global adversary and we must maintain some sort of leverage on them.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-22 16:24:26+00:00
But is there even an official docker image for deploying applications using 3.13t and 3.14t? Looking at https://hub.docker.com/_/python/ and https://github.com/docker-library/python/issues/947 , it seems to have been ignored. Without one, it's all useless. Almost no one wants to compile Python from source.
by rob_c | 2025-05-22 16:24:51+00:00
No, electronics at scale isn't the same as a 9v and filament bulb. There's real effects which aren't overly observable in a small setup that need to be addressed.

It's like pretending all of compiling is a direct translation to a lower language all the way down. It's not you make changes, adapt and optimise for the language and system you're in not just write Fortran in assembly
by znpy | 2025-05-22 16:27:06+00:00
> and in a space that wasn't easy for guys from other parts of tech to join easily and call it out (e.g., SRE, Backend, Design, Front-end, Systems Engineering, etc.).

As an SRE/SysEng/Devops/SysAdmin (depending on the company that hires me): most people in the same job as me could easily call it out.

You don't have to be such a big nerds to know that you can fit 6TB of memory in a single (physical) server. That's been true for a few years. Heck, AWS had 1TB+ memory instances for a few years now.

The thing is... Upper management wanted "big data" and the marketing people wanted to put the fancy buzzword on the company website and on linkedin. The data people wanted to be able to put the fancy buzzword on their CV (and on their Linkedin profile -- and command higher salaries due to that - can you blame them?).

> In other words, it's quite simple to sell complexity or obscure technology for most of these people

The unspoken secret is that this kind of BS wasn't/isn't only going on in the data fields (in my opinion).
by s900mhz | 2025-05-22 16:27:09+00:00
You can, most MCP servers are just wrappers around existing SDKs or even rest endpoints.

I think it all comes down to discovery. MCP has a lot of natural language written in each of its “calls” allowing the LLM to understand context.

MCP is also not stateless, but to keep it short. I believe it’s just a way to make these tools more discoverable for the LLM. MCP doesn’t do much that you can’t with other options. Just makes it easier on the LLM.

That’s my take as someone who wrote a few.

Edit: I like to think of them as RCP for LLM
by slmjkdbtl | 2025-05-22 16:27:17+00:00
Managing local music with Music.app and syncing with Finder iPhone sync still works good for me, but Music.app does seem unmaintained for a couple years now with some annoying bugs since the terrible Big Sur rewrite. Despite the flaws this combination is still the best music library management + mobile sync solution I've seen (plz recommend!), but I feel eventually will have to write a system myself since the software is not maintained and not cross platform.
by skydhash | 2025-05-22 16:27:48+00:00
Yes the code is not actually important as two different teams will solve the same problem in different manners. Just like a great painting and a bad one can use the same base materials. What’s important is the purpose and the constraints of any solution. Any decision you take propagates down the timeline and outward in the project. And they preclude other decisions from being taken.

So whatever you do will live a mark. But there are some spaces that should not be filled in. While it may look nice in the moment or taken in isolation. When looking at the whole, it makes it a mess.
by keeda | 2025-05-22 16:28:12+00:00
It's not even H1Bs, all of Big Tech is shifting jobs in bulk to their offshore development centers. It may not necessarily be overt layoffs and increased hiring there, but simply through un-backfilled attrition in the US while maintaining headcount overseas. As a sibling comment mentions, this is simply because that is even cheaper than hiring a H1B, and probably has fewer strings attached.

The trick is that they increasingly outsource not just individual projects, but entire business or technical domains. This significantly reduces the communication and collaboration overhead, as each project does not need to be babysat. They typically have trusted, effective, high-agency leadership (often senior folks who have relocated back to their home country) that take broad strategic direction and execute on it locally.

Of course, there is still a lot of cross time-zone collaboration due to technical dependencies across geos, but that is limited due to a strong push to make all infrastructure "self-serve" (microservices yay!)

I think the shift started spiking shortly after the pandemic when companies realized fully remote work can work well, even across timezones. I am not sure what data the execs saw, but they all seemed to decide on this strategy at the same time.
by ke88y | 2025-05-22 16:28:20+00:00
Sorry, you’re totally correct!

It’s important to point out that US professors are sometimes able to go without public patronage, but that this is very much an anomaly.

The US private sector funds A LOT of R&D relative to other countries, and the US attracts an outsized amount of FDI targeted at R&D.

As a result, in the USA there are occasionally rare instances where professors can mostly fund labs without government patronage.

Scientists in other counties are even more desperate for public patronage (and its associated political games) than US scientists
by StableAlkyne | 2025-05-22 16:28:21+00:00
> Sometimes mega is squared as in megapixels. Sometime not as in megabytes.

Even worse is Mega in Megabytes could be 1,000,000 or 1,048,576 and it's more or less up to you to know what's what

(Yeah, there are formally megabytes/mebiibytes/MiB/MB, but I honestly cannot recall the last time I heard anyone use anything other than just "megabyte" for 2^20 bytes... Or even wanted to refer to exactly 1,000,000 bytes. Other than decades ago when disk manufacturers wanted to make their hardware seem higher capacity than it really was)
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-05-22 16:28:21+00:00
>stealth will be important for their ultimate success to avoid competitors copying the product before it’s ready.

shouldn't statements like this be bearish for OpenAI? If what they had internally was so far ahead of everyone else then why would it matter if the physical hardware were cloned, the model would make the difference in the same way the iPhone software and focus on scroll fidelity made it leagues above the LG Prada.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-05-22 16:28:34+00:00
> > It's easy enough to include a bug number in commit messages to tie the two together.

> No. This is absolutely not enough. Does the commit resolve the issue? Does it add a test to the issue? Does it disable the buggy feature?

They just said that the bug number was enough to "to tie the two together". They didn't claim that was all that the commit message can or should say. For example, "added tests for #24" (followed by some details) would follow that template.

> Also, I'm of an opinion that if you are hired to work in software development company, you need to learn how to use version control. Just suck it up, if you don't like it. No excuses. Version control is the protocol for sharing information, especially useful because it's understood by the "grunts" actually creating the product. If a manger doesn't understand this language he or she will be as useless as a manager who doesn't speak any natural language his or her team speaks.

This is ludicrous. The point of version control is to understand the way that the source code changes. Managers do not need to understand the software at that level of granularity, that is our job as software developers. Issue trackers are a much better fit for that.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-22 16:29:15+00:00
> If you're going to do that, then you should actually let people know. Otherwise don't do it. It's not about "but the license allows it", it's about what the right thing to do is.

Okay, I am hereby letting you know: Every single distro patches software. All of them. Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, NixOS, Alpine, Void, big, small, commercial, hobbyist. All of them.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-22 16:29:51+00:00
It’s nice to have options. IntelliJ IDEs may be popular and well-regarded, but they’re not everybody’s cup of tea. As someone who’s spending a lot of time in Android Studio, it’s not unusual for me to become frustrated with it due to various behaviors and bits of UI design that can’t be changed, as well as fancy “smart” functionality that gets in the way almost as often as it helps.

I’m not terribly enthused with VS Code either but I’ll probably give this plugin a try, and since this has a standalone LSP it should be reasonable to write Kotlin plugins for other editors.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-22 16:31:04+00:00
It's honestly only because apple and google have so locked down their devices that we can't use them as little digital motherships for all of our peripherals.

the whole pattern of usage for the slab phone medium is based on sucking up as much of our attention as possible.

That and doing anything with bluetooth makes one long for a simple life in the woods.
by thorum | 2025-05-22 16:31:36+00:00
The solution I found after approximately two months of struggling with this problem: you have to generate an audio file that is a few seconds of silence, play it on a loop, and play it at the same time as the actual audio file you want to play (via separate audio elements, or an AudioContext). Specifically I believe you need to make sure the silence is “playing” at track boundaries for the real audio, so there is never a single moment where your webapp stops playing audio.
by internetter | 2025-05-22 16:32:07+00:00
"Passed in late 2024, it requires DJI to clear a national security review or face an automatic ban by the end of 2025. No review has yet been scheduled, and the legislation does not specify which agency should carry it out."

Wtf? is there any evidence dji is uploading videos to china without user consent?

“Restricting DJI is a justified and necessary action to protect U.S. security interests,” Guest said, confirming that no agency has been tasked to conduct a review."
by seydor | 2025-05-22 16:32:16+00:00
I would bet it will be called "The Dramamaker"

> will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk,

Sounds an awful lot like the phone. But it s not a phone. But people forget that a tool with the form factor of a phone has been man's best friend for millenia: it was a knife, a purse, a notebook, and now a phone. They are not going to beat that , is my bet. If it can be integrated in a phone, it's a phone

> a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

That's my car keys. now i will have to charge them too?
by pcwelder | 2025-05-22 16:32:28+00:00
OpenAPI definitions are verbose and exhaustive. In MCPs you can remove a lot of extra material, saving tokens.

For example in [1], whole `responses` schema can be eliminated. The error texts can instead be surfaced when they appear. You also don't need duplicate json/xml/url-encoded input formats.

Secondly, whole lot of complexities are eliminated, arbitrary data can't be sent and received. Finally, the tool output are prompts to the model too, so you can leverage the output for better accuracy, which you can't do with general purpose apis.

[1] https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-petstore/blob/master/...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-22 16:33:07+00:00
Exactly. We already have lots of standards for defining APIs (OpenAPI, GraphQL, SOAP if I'm showing my age, etc. etc.) Part of my original "wow this is magic" moment with AI came when OpenAI released some of their plugins and showed how you could just point it at an API spec and the LLM could just figure out, on its own, how to use it.

So one real beauty of AI is that it is so good at taking "semi structured" data and structuring it. So perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how MCP benefits you over existing API documentation formats. It seems like an "old way" of thinking, where we always wanted to define these interoperation contract formats and protocols, but a huge point of AI is you shouldn't really need any more protocols to start with.

Again, I don't know all the ins and outs of MCP, so I'm happy to be corrected. It's just that whenever I see examples like in the article, I'm always left wondering what benefit MCP gives you in the first place.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-22 16:33:23+00:00
> Saying this makes it sound like you work at a startup for an AI powered armed drone, and your view of it is 'eh, ethics is subjective, this is fine' when asked how do you feel about responsibility and AI killing people.

Is it always wrong to kill people? If you say yes, then you are also saying it's wrong to defend yourself from people who are trying to kill you.

This is what I mean by subjective.

And then since Google is beholden to US laws, if the US government suddenly decides that helping Ukraine to defend itself is wrong, but you personally believe defending Ukraine is right, suddenly you have a problem...
by colanderman | 2025-05-22 16:33:44+00:00
If you've found the private key for myveryveryveryverylongvanitypublickey, then so can an adversary.

Perhaps they already have reversed it because they guessed it might be desirable. Or maybe it has numeric properties which make it specifically easy to reverse (perhaps why you were able to discover it yourself).

(Also note that selecting the entire key to be vanity doesn't reduce the entropy to 0, just to the entropy of the vanity phrase. So a full vanity key may be equivalent to something like a 32-bit random public key.)
by tgv | 2025-05-22 16:33:52+00:00
It's simpler: in the major scale, every fifth down removes a # or adds a b, every quint up removes b or adds a #, and it's the 7th degree. Other church modes can be derived from a major scale. But that doesn't help you while playing. You have to know the key and scale you're in, and read the accidentals (and what op didn't mention: naturals and double #/b).
by strbean | 2025-05-22 16:33:57+00:00
I think the biggest issue by far is that many of the different contextual uses for dB are all in the same domain, or very close.

When you're talking about the loudness of sound, in the same exact context you might care about SPL, perceived loudness, AND gain.

If it was just a matter of "in electrical engineering / physics, dB implies this unit + baseline, when dealing with acoustics, it implies this other unit + baseline", it would be less problematic.