MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by herbst | 2025-05-24 08:19:55+00:00
I don't know about America. But for me here in Switzerland additional transportation cost is actually cheaper in a rural area than parking costs in any city. A standard parking space about 100$ a month (not including going anywhere and park there, which is also es expensive closer to the city).

Every round trip ads maybe $5 right now. We don't have to drive to the city every second day.
by tomnipotent | 2025-05-24 08:23:07+00:00
> It would have been fine if MS had started with their Python extension being proprietary

Except that never happened. Pyright was released first and was and continues to be open source. Pylance was built on Pyright but has never been open source. No promises or commitments were made otherwise. Deprecating the open source Python Language Server in favor of Pylance is also a perfectly reasonable and valid decision - the community was more than welcome to continue maintaining it, but most people I know continue to rely on Pylance.

> Instead, they lured folks in

Saying this doesn't make it true.

> Instead, they lured folks in (no small part due to open source), and once it became popular, they started turning the screws and making things proprietary and locking it down.

Microsoft has not once backtracked on anything vscode-related that's been open sourced. Trying to villianize them for not making everything open source is an argument with no legs.

> I don't think it is unreasonable to ask someone to make their intentions known up front do you?

They have. Point me to a single actual example of Microsoft operating in bad faith, that isn't them deciding to keep some parts of the ecosystem proprietary while 99% remains FOSS.

> Vscodium is an entirely free and open source fork

Microsoft and the vscode team is not making long-term decisions with vscodium in mind. But they are probably worried about Windsurf and Cursor, the latter of which (a billion-dollar company) was caught violating MS's TOS around the plugin ecosystem.

Microsoft has spent over a decade investing in, curating, and improving the vscode first-party plugin ecosystem and being a rather good steward. I think they're perfectly reasonable in keeping it to themselves. Creators are free to upload their plugins to any alternative marketplace. I don't see any arguments being made that can diminish the open source contribution they've made with code - oss just because parts of the branded vscode are proprietary.

> They released the Python stack as fully open source.

Again, no they didn't. Pyright open source. Pylance always closed source. PLS deprecated. But you're entitled to what you borrowed.
by anovikov | 2025-05-24 08:24:35+00:00
A friend of mine was determined to make an actual career as a writer, and she gradually followed the money switching jobs in the direction of those that paid the most. She now easily makes upwards of $15K per month writing, sustainably over years (although she does work a lot, like 60 hour weeks). Catch is, it is mostly marketing content for scam companies, crypto peddlers, illegal trading companies, and associated ecosystem (like lead suppliers, salesmen sourcers and so forth).
by troupo | 2025-05-24 08:25:22+00:00
> and packagers can be random contributors

So who's going to maintain the packages? Who's going to test them against other packages? Against distro upgrades? Who's going to fix issues?

> Not at all, but it seems like you don't know how it currently works in traditional distros

I do. A small number of people are doing the thankless job of packaging, maintaining, fixing, testing a multitude of packages.

And their efforts are needlessly duplicated across several packaging systems.

> What I don't like, is Windows-minded people ("I shouldn't have to understand how my computer works") who come to Linux and push for everybody to become like them

What I don't like is people assuming ill intent behind "you know what would be great? If we didn't assume that every user has to package their own packages across 15 different incompatible packaging systems".
by djhn | 2025-05-24 08:25:49+00:00
[Exaggerated rant incoming]

You clearly haven’t listened to enough ”state of the art” AI voices. Even in languages blessed with centuries’ worth of training data the butchered proper nouns and misemphasized syllables are grating.

As a misguided side effect of RLHF, the models which occasionally succeed in hiding their monotony will just indiscriminately vary the speech with a random patchwork of poorly timed pauses and melodic patterns. Good luck maintaining cohesion and semantic grouping of words.

And that’s for the five or so widely used easy languages.

God forbid your European car manufacturer, instead of using the completely adequate and predictably consistent Siri-style GOFAI solution, decided to use some cheap Elevenlabs-copycat API for localised driving directions.

Now you’re dealing with bandwidth and latency issues, pronunciation that constantly changes, and utterly unusable performance in your 10 million speaker ”niche” language. For many of these languages rule-based algorithms were good enough and our solar system will freeze before you accumulate enough training data for the current generation TTS to perform well.
by lazide | 2025-05-24 08:26:12+00:00
It was hotter, a lot hotter.

Like stars, radius for a gas giant is increased by heat, and decreased by increased mass.

These two factors are rarely completely independent, of course, so it gets complicated. Especially in a star where masses are large enough to result in densities sufficient to cause fusion - and large releases of heat, which then cause decreased density, etc.

But all other factors being constant, the volume of a gas increases (and density decreases) as temperature increases.

See page 6 and the first couple paragraphs of page 7 in the paper for a breakdown.

Eventually Jupiter will cool enough it will be a small fraction of it’s current size, assuming that our understanding is correct and it doesn’t have enough mass to meaningfully result in fusion regardless of how dense it gets. [https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~blackman/ast104/jinterior.htm...]

In theory, it will even eventually cool to the point all those clouds and atmosphere are liquid (or even solid!) gas oceans. That is going to take awhile.
by lucideer | 2025-05-24 08:26:39+00:00
Yeah I'm not running anything llms spit at me in a security-sensitive context.

That example is not so bad - you've already pointed out the main obvious supply-chain attack vector in referencing a random ephemeral fork, but otherwise it's certonly (presumably neil's default) so it's the simplest case. Many clients have more... intrusive defaults that prioritise first-run cert onboarding which is opening more surface area for write error.
by prohobo | 2025-05-24 08:27:18+00:00
Agreed with most of this except the last point. You are never going to make a foundational model, although you may contribute to one. Those foundational models are the product, yes, but if I could use an analogy: foundational models are like the state of the art 3D renderers in games. You still need to build the game. Some 3D renderers are used/licensed for many games.

Even the basic chat UI is a structure built around a foundational model; the model itself has no capability to maintain a chat thread. The model takes context and outputs a response, every time.

For more complex processes, you need to carefully curate what context to give the model and when. There are many applications where you can say "oh, chatgpt can analyze your business data and tell you how to optimize different processes", but good luck actually doing that. That requires complex prompts and sequences of LLM calls (or other ML models), mixed with well-defined tools that enable the AI to return a useful result.

This forms the basis of AI engineering - which is different from developing AI models - and this is what most software engineers will be doing in the next 5-10 years. This isn't some kind of hype that will die down as soon as the money gets spent, a la crypto. People will create agents that automate many processes, even within software development itself. This kind of utility is a no-brainer for anyone running a business, and hits deeply in consumer markets as well. Much of what OpenAI is currently working on is building agents around their own models to break into consumer markets.

I recommend anyone interested in this to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/AI-Engineering-Building-Applications-...
by mykowebhn | 2025-05-24 08:28:37+00:00
The part of this essay that convinced me that I like this person was this:

"Horse News makes me feel like a bad person sometimes. Racing is an odd, archaic, and often cruel sport. The more I read about it, the more convinced I become that it should not exist. I root for Horse Laws and grow sad when a state bucks them."

Part of her paycheck comes from the horse racing industry so to be honest in this way is courageous. If she were in any of the common HN industries she would've written how horses have been her life-long passion, ever since she saw a picture of one in some random children's book, and how writing about horse racing allows her to share her passion with the world. She'd also have another job as a life coach.
by atombender | 2025-05-24 08:28:46+00:00
Correct, my point is that it replaces storage at a higher level.

For example, mvsqlite implements a SQLite VFS that maps page to FoundationDB keys. This means that once the VFS is in place, everything is in FDB. But this means that you have to deal with page conflicts if you want multiple writers to mount the same database, so it's a somewhat coarse-grained system.

What this project is doing allows one to represent each row (tuple) as a FDB key/value, giving you finer-grained control. But it comes at a cost of having to implement all the access methods, including index scans, in terms of FDB.

This is presumably why database metadata (DDL) isn't currently persisted, because those structures aren't normal tables.
by joshdavham | 2025-05-24 08:31:11+00:00
I’d recommend you simply follow your curiosity and not take this choice too seriously. If you’re simply doing this for career purposes, then the honest answer is that absolutely no one knows where these fields will go in the next couple years so I wouldn’t take anyone’s advice too seriously.

But as for my 2 cents, knowing machine learning has been valuable to me, but not anywhere near as valuable as knowing software dev. Machine learning problems are much more rare and often don’t have a high return on investment.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-24 08:31:12+00:00
> If you want to innovate and push boundaries, I'd argue that competition is a more significant driver.

Competition is great, but there's no reason it needs to be negatively tinged (as in your example). Two people can compete and push themselves hard to come out ahead, but also cheer for each other to do well. After all, if your rival sucks they don't really push you to get better, so cheering for them is in a way cheering for yourself too.
by steezeburger | 2025-05-24 08:32:53+00:00
This is really cool. I self host a bookmark manager that has extensions and bookmarklets for mobile, but I really love your idea of cmd + c twice. How does it work on iOS? Or is the app just for viewing the bookmarks?

I use ClipMenu to save clipboard history and will often copy a bunch of things one right after the other, and can use other shortcuts to easily select whole lines or expressions in my editor, so time between copy could be as little as 750ms I'd bet. Is the timeout configurable?
by JackDanMeier | 2025-05-24 08:33:24+00:00
From my prespective it's a bubble, very similar to the dot com bubble. All businesses are integrating it into everything, often where it's unnecessary or just confusing.

But I believe that the value will come after the bubble is burst, and the companies which truly create value will survive, same as with webpages after the dot com bubble.
by flir | 2025-05-24 08:33:30+00:00
I've watched it now, and while I've no doubt he's a good science communicator, and the topic and examples are solid, I think he falls between two stools here. I think he goes too fast for a neophyte, and the topic is too basic for someone with experience.

If you watch the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (which I think are pitched at the same level) you'll see they generally slow things down a bit.

Would have benefitted from fewer examples, with more time spent on each.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-24 08:34:01+00:00
> I'm of the belief that LLMs are too verbose and energy intensive to go from language regurgitation machines to moving in the real world according to free form prompting.

This is not just possible, it is already happening. It just gets drowned in the media noise about chatbots. Look at some current research in this area (e.g. by Nvidia last year).
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-24 08:34:05+00:00
> It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more important to us, with 8 billion people on earth, if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.

Yep, but we collectively decided that it is more profitable to put the best minds that manage to survive the education trials to either shaving off 0.0000001 cents of each financial transaction and to still make billions of dollars off of that or to sell ads so people get convinced they need to buy something. And those that get dropped along the education pipeline, we either let them stay on the road side and let them rot in poverty or we just use them as yet another source of labor ready to be exploited.
by mschild | 2025-05-24 08:35:13+00:00
To continue with your analogy: maybe they don't need understand every detail, but they should know how they function, what safety precautions to take, and when it is a better/more useful tool compared to what they're currently using.

That doesn't mean knowing every single bit there is to know about it, but a basic understanding will go a long way in correctly using it.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-24 08:35:59+00:00
Depends on what you want to do. But my 2 cents are that like all new technology, LLMs will become a commodity. Which means that everybody uses them but few people are able to develop them from scratch. It's not different from other things like databases, GPU drivers, 3D engines for games, etc. That all involves a lot of hardcore computer science and math. But lots of people use these things without being hindered by such skills.

It probably helps a little to understand some of the internals and math. Just to get a feel for what the limitations are.

But your job as a software engineer is probably to stick things together and bang on them until they work. I sometimes describe what I do as being a glorified plumber. It requires skills but surprisingly few skills related to math and algorithms. That stuff comes in library form mostly.

So, get good at using LLMs and integrating what they do into agentic systems. Figure out APIs, limitations, and learn about different use cases. Because we'll all be doing a lot of work related to that in the next few years.
by chungy | 2025-05-24 08:36:21+00:00
> How tall are you, maybe 70 inches? Or 5⅚ft?

Are you purposely doing this? That is obviously not what I meant. Nobody says "3 miles, 500 feet", they say "3.1 miles". Effectively two systems of distance measurement: inches/feet/yards (near scale), and miles (distant scale).

"5 feet 10 inches" is completely normal and fine.

> This requires you to start with 12 inches. If you're making a cupboard to fit in an 18¾" (476mm) space, it's no use, or is only randomly useful.

So you cut the cupboard to fit a 18¾" space, no big deal. Same as anything else, and just as random as 476mm.

Typically they come in (integer!) 12-inch, 24-inch, 36-inch, or 48-inch variants.
by Findecanor | 2025-05-24 08:37:14+00:00
Here in Sweden, a carton of 10 × 500 mg is the most you can find without a subscription. (Boxes of twice that amount is supposed to exists but I've never seen it)

Two years ago, I was prescribed the maximum dosage: 2 × 500 mg every six hours for a couple of months. Because it wears off more quickly than that, I tried to reduce it to one and a half pill more often but that wasn't enough to have any effect. Caffeine is supposed to reinforce the effect, but of course I had to avoid that to sleep.

I also got it as intravenous liquid at a time when I couldn't swallow.
by dmwilcox | 2025-05-24 08:38:39+00:00
__attribute__(packed) structs with an enum at the front indicating their type. The receivers use a switch to figure out which sub-message to interpret the strict as...

It isn't pretty and you better be able to control the rollout of both sides because backwards compatibility will not be a thing. But I'll take it over a giant pile of code generation in many circumstances
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-24 08:40:55+00:00
Craig Reynolds - Original 1986 Boids simulation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86iQiV3-3IA

Boids Demo Reel 1987 — Part B:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBniZYiyrb4

>Early motion tests of the boids model of flocking and related collective motion (herds, schools, crowds). Recorded on a Symbolics Lisp Machine between 1986 and 1987.

Stanley and Stella in “BREAKING THE ICE” - Original Symbolics Tapes Restored & Remastered, 1080p:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYEp26g14Wk

Craig Reynolds #SCCS2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqP_c5zm89Q

>Pioneer Craig Reynolds shares his groundbreaking work in artificial life and computer animation. Reynolds describes his lifelong fascination with simulating natural complexity computationally. By modeling flocking birds from the bottom up, based on simple rules for how individual birds move, Reynolds made the astonishing flock emerge. This agent-based approach allowed new insights into collective behavior impossible to gather from nature alone. Reynolds reflects on the significance of his iconic 1987 "Boids" model for animating birds in films like Batman Returns. But its influence extends further - to complexity science and understanding real-world systems like traffic flow and crowd dynamics. According to Reynolds, the beauty of simple models is their emergent properties. By distilling phenomena to basic rules, computer simulation uncovers new truths about the world. Join this fascinating conversation with a legend of artificial life and computer graphics.

Blender Tutorial - Full Guide to Boid Particles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3TUPYVsxow

"Concierge" clip from 1968 Mel Brooks' "The Producers":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6mTMShVyk

>Doity, disgusting, filthy, lice ridden boids.
by mras0 | 2025-05-24 08:42:04+00:00
The standard format for RSA private keys is ASN.1 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8017#appendix-C) with the components encoded as INTEGERs. An INTEGER is always signed in ASN.1, so you need the leading 0 byte if the MSB of your positive number is set.

OpenSSL is just dumping the raw bytes comprising the value. Tools that don't show a leading zero in this case are doing a bit more interpretation (or just treating it as an unsigned value) to show you the number you expect.
by charcircuit | 2025-05-24 08:44:23+00:00
>If I want to use these things let me opt in.

This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.

>Here's one.

An app store recommendation is not an ad. The OS is helping the user find content that they may be looking for. It isn't an ad surface where companies are bidding to show up for keywords. The word ad is used by the article to stir drama and drive clicks.

>If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.

But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
by DGPRIME | 2025-05-24 08:44:39+00:00
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by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-24 08:46:33+00:00
>There's a perception that young people (for probably 60 years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life goal.

It sort of is. Opportunities in the small towns is limited compared to urban areas. As well as other social aspects like night life, entertainment, the culture of the residents, etc. The people argument of being irreplaceable works both ways; you're simply going to get more options when you're around more people.

> if you have a job which can be done remotely, then Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.

Perhaps. Both Starlink and jobs in general really don't want us to have such options, as seen in the last few years of layoffs and crashouts. Add in the cable monopolies and you see how WFH really isn't stable right now without a good connection.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-24 08:46:40+00:00
> It's only a problem if you think it is.

No. It's a problem, if you as distro maker support non-technical consumers as well.

Imagine troubleshooting Windows but you also have to figure out which DE, WM, libraries the user updated and so on.

> desktop side flatpak resolves many issues

You mean AppImage, Snap, etc.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-24 08:47:27+00:00
> Is this another bubble that might burst

I see this a lot, but I think it's irrelevant. Even if this is a bubble, and even if (when?) it bursts, the underlying tech is not going anywhere. Just like the last dotcom bubble gave us FAANG+, so will this give us the next letters. Sure, agentsdotcom or flowsdotcom or ragdotcom might fail (likely IMO), but the stack is here to stay, and it's only gonna get better, cheaper, more integrated.

What is becoming increasingly clear, IMO, is that you have to spend some time with this. Prompting an LLM is like the old google-fu. You need to gain experience with it, to make the most out of it. Same with coding stacks. There are plenty of ways to use what's available now, as "tools". Play around, see what they can do for you now, see where it might lead. You don't need to buy into the hype, and some skepticism is warranted, but you shouldn't ignore the entire field either.
by bsaul | 2025-05-24 08:47:30+00:00
the reason he did that was for business reasons. He wanted to be able to expose any part of the stack as a public service to external customers, and vice versa, to let his internal service compete against the publicly available ones.

But this is only valid when you're trying to build AWS. Not everyone does that.

Relational databases have extensive permission systems for a reason.
by h1fra | 2025-05-24 08:48:49+00:00
I agree, sometimes it's hard to put a label that would fit what most people expect. In the case of Angular I have put it in languages because I put React there too, React is there because it has a specific file extension and language. I could put them in framework but they would be mix with a lot of stuff that people do consider framework and not languages.

Same for Deno (and nodejs and bun) they would fit better in a Runtime category maybe but I'm not sure people would understand that category and that it would make a meaningful comparison.