MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-16 06:38:09+00:00
If you listen to RMS’ talks, arguably this is a feature, not a bug.

Most people pick up on the idea of freedom as in liberty with OSS: that you should be able to amend software at will. Strangely there are limits in his mind (at one talk I attended he insisted he didn’t care about being able to amend the software in his microwave, so didn’t care if it was Free or not).

However when asked about how programmers should make a living, his economic argument is that we should be paid for our hours, not for our software. In his telling, the right economic model is not the author who writes something once and is paid forever by everyone who wants to consume that “art”, but more like the trading crafter who makes and sells things on an on-going basis.

In support of that model, the “devaluation” of software, has meant we have a planet running on it that would not have been possible if every library and application on ever machine had cost $100-$500 each. The advances in scientific and medical research powered by that software driven World would not have been achieved yet, but neither would the damage caused by social media and adtech.

I’m not sure which side of the fence I sit on. I’ve had a good career being paid to write software because of its growing influence in the World, which likely would have stalled if OSS didn’t exist. But sure, I like the idea of spending a year writing something and living the rest of my life off the proceeds, like most people would.
by shakna | 2025-05-16 06:39:02+00:00
By cultural use, I meant a phrase whose direct translation makes no sense. An idiom ("cultural phrase").

Nominative case - Its how its used. Can't say I've studied the evolution of that particular idiom, but breaking expected rules is not unusual.

There might have been a verb, once. But as with all slang, what gets dropped tends to confuse the foreigner, but be understood to the local.
by Patrick_Devine | 2025-05-16 06:40:03+00:00
I worked on the text portion of gemma3 (as well as gemma2) for the Ollama engine, and worked directly with the Gemma team at Google on the implementation. I didn't base the implementation off of the llama.cpp implementation which was done in parallel. We did our implementation in golang, and llama.cpp did theirs in C++. There was no "copy-and-pasting" as you are implying, although I do think collaborating together on these new models would help us get them out the door faster. I am really appreciative of Georgi catching a few things we got wrong in our implementation.
by casenmgreen | 2025-05-16 06:40:29+00:00
From mid-2024.

I regard all FinTech-type companies as unreliable, after incredible (in the literal sense of the word) experiences with Revolut (seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned, and that actually happened only after I made a GDPR request, and they got it done - seems its less work for them to close than meet the request) and Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).

By all means have an account with them, but never, ever, ever, rely on it, and plan on the basis that the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone, and that customer support is a defensive shield the company uses to keep customers at arms length.

If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-16 06:41:13+00:00
>> the main one is speeding

> Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits.

>> The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk -

> This is still illegal. Blaming it on cars is lame- these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient

???

The dissonance is insane

Also, between cyclists and motorists, which one is always grown adults, who passed an exam to use their vehicle, and which one includes children, the mentally disabled and all of those who can't drive and their right to the road cannot be stripped away?

Whoops, I gave it away.

You can in fact blame it on cars

Actually, do you remember that the report mentioned bike lanes solve this problem? You can blame street design, too. Except if cars weren't there, you wouldn't even need the bike lanes.
by yusina | 2025-05-16 06:41:32+00:00
Why does a language even allow dereferencing nil? Many languages make this impossible. If you anyway go and design a new language, why stay stuck in the old ways and carry that flaw with you?

Let me explain. Conceptually, a pointer is an optional reference. Either it's nil or it references some object. (That reference may be valid or not, but that's a separate topic.) Optionals have been well understood in the programming language community for a long time. Many modern languages get them right, usually with some form of what Haskell calls the Maybe monad. May sound intimidating, but the gist is that in order to unwrap the thing inside, you pattern match on its structure. It's either Nothing or it's a value. You can't even syntactically talk about the wrapped thing outside this pattern matching. With such a construction, "dereferencing nil" is not a thing. You either have a pointer (optional reference) which needs the unwrapping, or you already did unwrap, then you have a non-null-pointer (non-optional reference). So, a language can easily encode all this in its type system without runtime overhead.

When inventing a new language that fixes flaws of C, why not fix this one as well?
by EbNar | 2025-05-16 06:41:52+00:00
By "complexity" I meant that they are "opaque" to me and somewhat not tied to and identity (be it email or username). Maybe it's me being inept, but I used them once or twice just for fun in Bitwarden and now I can't find them anywhere in my vault.

https://community.bitwarden.com/t/special-vault-search-keywo...

Maybe it's just a Bitwarden issue.

The 2FA issue isn't such for me. As I explained in a different comment, 2FA pins are copied automatically and are thus just a "ctrl+v" away.
by globular-toast | 2025-05-16 06:42:59+00:00
> Do companies like this have a need for SWEs? Are there opportunities for a backend SWE without any background in hardware or biology?

Of course they do. Biology and medical research can't get enough software people. But they're not as well funded as advertising or spying companies, for example, so you might have to take a significant pay cut.

I wouldn't pigeon hole yourself as a "backend engineer". Why do people do that? Software is software. The bit that matters is the core model and algorithms etc. Whether it's exposed as a web server, a CLI or just a library is a peripheral detail.

It's totally possible for a decent software engineer to learn just enough biology to get by. The limiting factor might be your interest, though. But if you have that then go for it. Get a book on genomics right now.
by jraph | 2025-05-16 06:44:12+00:00
No gender is weirdly specific in your version.

Not sure about the reduction, but "Wine, women and song" somewhat assumes the point of view from an heterosexual male and could feel offensive just for this.

"Wine, man and song" would sound weird, but it should not sound weirder than the "women" version. That's because we are all used to the male pov assumption and that's the core of the issue.

And of course, to add insult to injury, the phrase will feel like the reduction the grand parent describes to many.

So I think we'd be better off dropping those old phrases in favor of things like your version, which doesn't have these issues.

Note: not a German nor an English native speaker so I might be missing some cultural subtlety that could make my POV a bit wrong and disconnected from reality.
by lqet | 2025-05-16 06:45:03+00:00
As a German, I enjoy reading the Dutch text on supermarket products and manuals, it is a source of great fun in my family :) Children especially love it. Dutch just has so many words that sound extremely cute and funny to Germans:

"Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty".

"Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty"

"Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore".

"Oorbellen" -> "earrings", "ear bells".
by secure | 2025-05-16 06:45:32+00:00
True, but I tested the Radeon RX9070’s power consumption with a 4K monitor.

* ASUS, builtin-GPU@4K: ≈39W * ASUS + nVidia GF4070@4K idle: ≈50W * ASUS + radeon RX9070 (Linux 6.15): ≈80W
by wuj | 2025-05-16 06:46:28+00:00
The part on stories reminded me of Neil Postman's arguments in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

> Being told a story is to be infantilised, somewhat: to suspend one’s critical faculties.

One key argument in the book is that TV shows offer significantly less information density nor coherence as that of written mediums. They are optimized to reduce cognitive load. Thus our ability to think and process information diminishes greatly when there's nothing to think about. This is essentially what storytelling is - piecing together loosely related information to elicit an emotional response. The more harmful aspect is that they give us an illusion of learning, which the author also articulated with this quote:

> ‘The story wouldn’t be any good if you came back to your normal life completely unchanged, and having learned nothing, or having had no new observation,’ Vogler told me. ‘I think that we are always searching for upgrades, improvements in our behaviour, in our performance, in our relationships with other people.’ Films, he says, offer the opportunity for ‘slight improvement’.

TV shows wrap thin veils of lessons around stories. We feel like doing something fun and learning while learning something. Why not do more? So we consume more of it and spirals down into a self-reinforcing loop. But it is often not the case in real world. Learning is challenging. It's meant to confuse you and question your preexisting beliefs. We are numbing ourselves by associating what we watched in flashy media as concrete and substantial knowledge. The real takeaway is the experience and the emotional response from those dopamine-inducing flash cuts. When we associate learning and by extension, thinking, with emotions, that's when our critical thinking degrades and we become "infantalised."
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-16 06:47:15+00:00
I have actually had great success with agentic coding by sitting down with a LLM to tell it what I'm trying to build and have it be socratic with me, really trying to ask as many questions as it can think of to help tease out my requirements. While it's doing this, it's updating the project readme to outline this vision and create a "planned work" section that is basically a roadmap for an agent to follow.

Once I'm happy that the readme accurately reflects what I want to build and all the architectural/technical/usage challenges have been addressed, I let the agent rip, instructing it to build one thing at a time, then typecheck, lint and test the code to ensure correctness, fixing any errors it finds (and re-running automated checks) before moving on to the next task. Given this workflow I've built complex software using agents with basically no intervention needed, with the exception of rare cases where its testing strategy is flakey in a way that makes it hard to get the tests passing.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-16 06:47:21+00:00
> The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.

This is true for any military conflict and always has been. It's basically a game of resource denial/destruction.

If you poke through all the propaganda, ideology, etc. most wars boil down to which side has the best economics and can best deny access to essential resources for the other side in order to gain access to resources the other side controls (oil, minerals, land, water ways, trade routes, etc.).

Many modern conflicts are actually proxy wars where large countries subsidize minor conflicts in a plausibly deniable but otherwise very open way. China, the US, EU, Russia, the Saudi's, etc. are all parties in such conflicts and they are fighting against each other and with each other depending on where you look (Middle East, Africa, South America, etc.). In the background you have trade relation ships, oil & minerals, and economical sanctions. And in some parts of the world water access. Those are the resources that sustain conflicts.

Modern weaponry changes the tactics. But the strategy is always the same: go after resource access and you might win. You can see that happening in Ukraine and if China goes there, it will be a factor in Taiwan. It's why they mainly talk about that without going there. China is much smarter than Russia on this.
by deepsummer | 2025-05-16 06:47:56+00:00
I think "number of questions asked" is the wrong metric. Because it feels like all the questions have already been asked. Whenever I need to know something, I can google it and find answers on Stack Overflow. I can't remember the last time I actually had to ask something. Or the last time I found a question that didn't already have a good answer. Stack Overflow's library of question is pretty complete, and the only reason for new questions are new tools.

Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.
Show HN: A beginner's attempt with no coding background – FunnyAI.ART
by Maiyizhi | 2025-05-16 06:48:33+00:00
I don't really understand code, but the emergence of AI has given me the opportunity to try developing web pages. I have already started trying and have come up with a few features. For now, I am imitating others' styles, and I hope everyone can give me some suggestions. By the way, I'm not trying to promote myself with this.
by 80hd | 2025-05-16 06:48:40+00:00
I've been asking myself this since AI started to become useful.

Most people would guess it threatens their identity. Sensitive intellectuals who found a way to feel safe by acquiring deep domain-specific expertise suddenly feel vulnerable.

In addition, a programmer's job, on the whole, has always been something like modelling the world in a predictable way so as to minimise surprise.

When things change at this rate/scale, it also goes against deep rooted feelings about the way things should work (they shouldn't change!)

Change forces all of us to continually adapt and to not rest on our laurels. Laziness is totally understandable, as is the resulting anger, but there's no running away from entropy :}
by JohnKemeny | 2025-05-16 06:48:45+00:00
Not really. Coloring a graph is almost always talking about proper coloring, meaning that things that objects that are related receive different colors.

If you read the introduction, you'll also read that the goal is to "color each of your lines and require that for every point, no two lines connected to it have the same color."

Ps. "How many colors a graph needs" is a very well established term in computer science and graph theory.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-16 06:49:40+00:00
You miss the point. What actually makes the difference secure is the basic things like not being able to install an app that steals your banking info. If the government is after you you are toast regardless of whether alt stores are allowed. Believe me none of the three letter agencies or companies mentioned care about the average joe. But that average joe is the one making apple money.

So if company promising security and privacy promises cannot provide average joe security and privacy (often by saving him from his own choices by not allowing insecure behavior) it is very existential for it yes
by jraph | 2025-05-16 06:49:50+00:00
Yes, sexism is not a new thing from today, and such sentences are witnesses of this. We might be interpreting stuff from the past with today's eyes, true, but that doesn't make the interpretation wrong. There are a lot of things we know now and didn't before. It's even totally possible we have reading keys that might have been unavailable back then.

We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)
by bradley13 | 2025-05-16 06:50:26+00:00
I hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example:

The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff

This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft

The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze

On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf

You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik

And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor

In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.

The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
by VBprogrammer | 2025-05-16 06:52:34+00:00
I was lax about going to certain classes. Not always because of laziness (though, I'll admit it was occasionally a factor) but often because the format of one person, who lacked any particular talent for teaching, reading mostly from notes or scribbling incomprehensible symbology on a blackboard in a room filed with hundreds of people wasn't really a teaching format that did anything for me.
by speedgoose | 2025-05-16 06:52:53+00:00
To me, Ollama is a bit the Docker of LLMs. The user experience is inspired and the model file syntax is also inspired by the Dockerfile syntax. [0]

In the early days of Docker, we had the debate of Docker vs LXC. At the time, Docker was mostly a wrapper over LXC and people were dismissing the great user experience improvements of Docker.

I agree however that the lack of acknowledgement to llama.cpp for a long time has been problematic. They acknowledge the project now.

[0]: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/modelfile.md
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 06:54:22+00:00
> Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).

Oh wow. Well, at least donations to NGOs / individuals seem to work.

Agreed, IBKR are a nice bunch. I wouldn’t rely on them either, but it’s always better to have more options, in case everything else fails. And of course, when banks can block your accounts at any moment just because they don’t like your passport, crypto is king.
by Borg3 | 2025-05-16 06:54:48+00:00
Okey, yes.. Its a mix of HW/OS issue indeed. I remember my old gaming rig I assembled more than 10 years ago. Asus mother board, i5-760 CPU, ATI HD 6850. Win2003 as OS. All was tuned and it was really great. Basic DPC latency was around 30-40us. Under load it increased slighty but it was always <100us.

Now catastrohpic (with I didnt knew at that time) event occured. After 10 years, Internal NIC burnded. I was like, okey.. I have dozens of PCI NICs, lets plug one and vioala. And I did. But, there was problems, after a while (hour or so) I noticed Audio glitches, especially when when there was network activitiy. After more investigation and reading mobo manual I noticed that IRQs were nicely spread for all internal mobo components + PCIe x16 bus. Other PCI ports were always shared one or another. I could do nothing to fix it.

PC now catch dust, I bought used HP 8200 PC with works nice, but its not gaming rig, standard DPC latency is around 2000us, with is quite large.. Still, for normal use that latency is great, Im very sensitive to lag and latency so if I had issues here, I would be mad.

At the end, some pics from my DPC stall fight:

http://ds-1.ovh.uu3.net/~borg/pics/DPClat.png

http://ds-1.ovh.uu3.net/~borg/pics/DPC_stall.png
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-16 06:55:59+00:00
> In reality, plenty of folks just turned vim into a fighter jet and did just as well without super-heavyweight llms.

No, they didn't.

You can get vim and Emacs on par with IDEs[0] somewhat easily thanks to Language Server Protocol. You can't turn them into "fighter jets" without "super-heavyweight LLMs" because that's literally what, per GP, makes an editor/IDE a fighter jet. Yes, Emacs has packages for LLM integration, and presumably so does Vim, but the whole "fighter jet vs. bicycle" is entirely about SOTA LLMs being involved or not.

--

[0] - On par wrt. project-level features IDEs excel at; both editors of course have other aspects that none of the IDEs ever come close to.
by mvanveen | 2025-05-16 06:57:55+00:00
I think this is true if there aren't new questions to be asked. But technologies shift and evolve all of the time.

One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.

It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.
by arnsholt | 2025-05-16 06:59:06+00:00
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
by EZ-E | 2025-05-16 06:59:36+00:00
Potentially unpopular opinion but ultimately it's a private service and they decided to disable payout methods which negatively affects Ukrainian users for the sake of integrating new changes/avoiding legal risk. They don't have to support all countries. I feel sorry for the users though, especially I imagine by asking supporters to move to another platform will result in some of them dropping which is the result of platform lock in..
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-16 06:59:56+00:00
Senior engineers delegate in part because they're coaxed into a faux-management role (all of the responsibilities, none of the privileges). Coding is done by juniors; by the time anyone gains enough experience to finally begin to know what they're doing, they're relegated to "mentoring" and "training" new cohort of fresh juniors.

Explains a lot about software quality these days.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-16 06:59:58+00:00
We all agree, poor defaults were chosen in C++ across the board. we have learned a lot about languages since then.

The question is what to do about it - balancing the cost of change to code and to engineers who learned it.

> but there appears to be no interest in the committee to do anything with safety other than talk about it.

There is plenty of interest in improving C++ safety. It’s a regular topic of discussion.

Part of that discussion is how it will help actual code bases that exist.

Should the committee do some breaking changes to make HN commenters happier, who don’t even use the language?