MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dimal | 2025-05-16 23:07:00+00:00
Depending on corporations to have a moral foundation is a losing bet. It has to come from the outside.

Here’s a possible out: Senior engineers stop working huge corporations and use these tools to start their own businesses. (Given today’s hiring situation, this may not even be a choice.) As the business grows, hire junior developers as apprentices to handle day to day tasks while senior engineer works on bigger picture stuff. Junior engineer grows into a senior engineer who eventually uses AI to start their own business. This is a very abbreviated version of what I hope I can do, at least.
by rglover | 2025-05-16 23:07:29+00:00
> Customers will notice if software has weird bugs, is slow, clunky to use, etc. Some bugs can result in legal liability.

I'd like to believe this, but some ~30 years into the popular internet, we still have bug-riddled websites and struggle to build simple software that's both usable (UX) and stable. You're right that if a company offers an SLA they're liable, but there's a wide range of software out there that isn't bound by an SLA.

That means that as this thing unfurls, we either get a lot of broken/low quality stuff, or even more consolidation into a few big player's hands.

> When this happens, other firms will be happy to build a better mousetrap to earn the business, and that’s an incentive against stagnation.

I agree this is likely, but the how is important. The hypothetical cost reduction of doing away with competent staff in favor of AI-augmented devs (or just agents) is too juicy for it to not become the norm (at least in the short-term). We're already seeing major players enforce AI-driven development (and in some cases, like Salesforce, impose hiring freezes under the assumption that AI is enough for most tasks).

The optimist in me agrees with what you're saying, but my gut take is that there will be a whole boatload of irrational, careless behavior before we see any meaningful correction.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-16 23:09:42+00:00
I will admit that, at the time, I did not see EU debt holders accept it, but accept they did. I know that cultural differences in US may require a different approach that go beyond PR spin ala 'temporary refund adjustment' since there is money on the line, but I can't help but wonder if it is not coming anyway.
by 1shooner | 2025-05-16 23:09:43+00:00
This is wild, but it seems correct, none of the documentation I can find mentions opting out as a sensor that will pass data to Apple. On the other hand, on my Mac no apps are granted access to Location Services, which includes Find My. I don't have an iOS device but it seems like maybe you'd have similarly granular control?

If they are forcing you to transmit data, then it might make even more sense that Apple would steer clear of usage that could create liability for their users.
by rglover | 2025-05-16 23:10:05+00:00
That's the thing, though, it does work. Does it need a fair amount of hand holding to get there for non-trivial tasks? Yes. But if you have a basic skill set and some patience, you can get impressive results with a shocking number of common problems.

You're right that the "working" is superficial in a one-shot sense. But if you spend the time to nudge it in the right direction, you can accomplish a lot.
by 0x5f3759df-i | 2025-05-16 23:10:39+00:00
We have the worst possible people in government for the financial environment the US is in.

Not only are we already in a bad place with government spending/debt given the new world of high interest rates. We’re just going to blow many trillions of dollars worth of new holes in the budget.

Then throw in the endless tariff stupidity and it’s all just bad, bad, bad.
by therealsmith | 2025-05-16 23:10:40+00:00
Am I missing something? As far as I can see this patch does nothing except add new options that replicate the functionality of the existing --cache-type-k and --cache-type-v options.

Using `--flash-attn --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0` is a very well known optimization to save VRAM.

And it's also very well known that the keys are more sensitive to quantization than values. E.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15075
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 23:11:03+00:00
> A language changes how something behaves in a new revision, suddenly 20 year old bedrock tools are getting massively patched to accommodate both new and old behavior.

In my estimation, the only "20 year old bedrock tools" in Python are in the standard library - which currently holds itself free to deprecate entire modules in any minor version, and remove them two minor versions later - note that this is a pseudo-calver created by a coincidentally annual release cadence. (A bunch of stuff that old was taken out recently, but it can't really be considered "bedrock" - see https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/).

Unless you include NumPy's predecessors when dating it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumPy#History). And the latest versions of NumPy don't even support Python 3.9 which is still not EOL.

Requests turns 15 next February (https://pypi.org/project/requests/#history).

Pip isn't 20 years old yet (https://pypi.org/project/pip/#history) even counting the version 0.1 "pyinstall" prototype (not shown).

Setuptools (which generally supports only the Python versions supported by CPython, hasn't supported Python 2.x since version 45 and is currently on version 80) only appears to go back to 2006, although I can't find release dates for versions before what's on PyPI (their own changelog goes back to 0.3a1, but without dates).
by kstrauser | 2025-05-16 23:11:31+00:00
I really wish Python had a way to annotate things you don't care about cleaning up. I don't know what the API would look like, but I imagine something like:

l = list(cleanup=False) for i in range(1_000_000_000): l.append(i)

telling the runtime that we don't need to individually GC each of those tiny objects and just let the OS's process model free the whole thing at once.

Sure, close TCP connections before you kill the whole thing. I couldn't care less about most objects, though.
by julianpye | 2025-05-16 23:12:02+00:00
I watched Tree of Life in the cinema. I was spellbound. It spoke directly to me, no mental processing of a story, I was tuned to this film. I didn't feel its time. As the film ended a girl behind me said to her friends 'this was the biggest piece of shit I have ever seen'. I understood her and it was a perfectly fine opinion. She didn't 'get it', but it didn't have to do with taste or intelligence or anything like this. She was just not able to receive it - as if it was a signal sent she could not process.

Our wedding rings have these words from the film engraved: 'unless you love, your life will flash by'. We married late - our kids were already almost at school. The love in the words is about the love of your family, just like in the film.

And why the Thin Red Line is perfect - just view the "Swing Scene" as a work of religious art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s40YpEsVkxk The inner monologue of Ben Chaplin's private Bell about what the role of love is when you encounter war, asking 'Who lit this flame in us' is a visual prayer.

(And yes, this is Miranda Otto, aka Eowyn)
by smcin | 2025-05-16 23:12:28+00:00
But you can (and should) ask if you're being detained on suspicion of a specific (criminal) offense, or not (e.g. officer wants to doublecheck your story, or background, or thinks there are irregularities), or (esp. for non-citizen) refusing to consent to unlocking your devices.

The answer to the above should give you some idea what's likely to happen, and what CBP has flagged you for, if anything.
by nine_zeros | 2025-05-16 23:12:34+00:00
> What actual value do they provide? (esp. in light of the housing crisis proving they weren't providing any value at all?)

A significant amount of retail and institutional investment still use these ratings as a guiding indicator.

Not everyone does due diligence. If you have ever worked for a corporation, you know that they love cutting corners. And one corner they'd happily cut is time on due diligence - even if it causes a crash later on. It is not a problem for this quarter.
by ptx | 2025-05-16 23:12:50+00:00
The tricky part is coming back onto the UI thread when the background work finishes. Your transcription thread has to somehow trigger the UI work to be done on the UI thread.

It seems the way to do it in Qt is with signals and slots, emitting a signal from your QThread and binding it to a slot in the UI thread, making sure to specify a "queued connection" [1]. There's also a lower-level postEvent method [2] but people disagree [3] on whether that's OK to call from a regular Python thread or has to be called from a QThread.

So I would try doing it with Qt's thread classes, not with concurrent.futures.

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/threads-synchronizing.html#high-level...

[2] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qcoreapplication.html#postEvent

[3] https://www.mail-archive.com/pyqt@riverbankcomputing.com/msg...
by tao_oat | 2025-05-16 23:13:27+00:00
Hi Peter, thanks for doing this AMA! I'm an EU citizen. I got my H1B in late 2023, but ended up not moving to the US after all. When I travel to the US for short business trips (same employer as back then), should I enter using this H1B or ESTA? And could this unused H1B become an issue now that there seems to be increased scrutiny at the border? Thank you.
by nextos | 2025-05-16 23:13:36+00:00
C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky.

Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.
by louison11 | 2025-05-16 23:14:18+00:00
You are correct, however the criteria are a lot more relaxed in Europe comparatively. Most positions in tech, engineering and healthcare are often exempt from labor market tests. Also, there are plenty of options for "entrepreneurs" and self-employed digital nomads, often requiring some savings to prove sufficiency. I live in Portugal, and I believe the amount required when we moved was about 12k. In France, I believe it is closer to 21k (which is basically minimum wage multiplied by 12). Still dramatically easier than 800k in the US.
by genewitch | 2025-05-16 23:14:59+00:00
While poast works, I strongly feel most people on this site are not aligned with what poast represents. Graf has to spend a lot of time (and time = money) getting accounts set up to run nitter, and it would suck if the views of poast users wound up costing the internet a twitter mirror.

I strongly recommend people not investigate this unless they think 4chan is quaint. As in, if the reason you are not using X is because of the outrage at Elon and the "typical user" of X, then maybe use xcancel instead.
by czhu12 | 2025-05-16 23:15:05+00:00
Curious as to why this comment got downvoted.

From my basic understanding, this is indeed true. At the cost of rampant inflation, the US can simply print more currency, inflate away historical debts, and not have to default.

If the Moody's credit rating is a measure of the stability of the asset, then a downgrade makes sense. If its to measure the likelihood of a default -- it does seem unlikely the US would simply default.

But maybe there's something I'm missing
by cdavid | 2025-05-16 23:15:32+00:00
My observation is the latter, but I agree the results fall short of expectations. Business will often want last minute change in reporting, don't get what they want at the right time because lack of analysts, and hope having "infinite speed" will solve the problem.

But ofc the real issue is that if your report metrics change last minute, you're unlikely to get good report. That's a symptom of not thinking much about your metrics.

Also, reports / analysis generally take time because the underlying data are messy, lots of business knowledge encoded "out of band", and poor data infrastructure. The smarter analytics leaders will use the AI push to invest in the foundations.
by nis251413 | 2025-05-16 23:18:10+00:00
I mean, the article and discussion are about numpy's syntax around vectorised code and problems people have with that. Many comments make comparisons with matlab, and I am pointing that a language allowing you do use arrays and write vectorised code, and a language being an array language are not the same thing. Writing vectorised code in a language were everything is based on arrays is in general more natural. The variable definitions are simpler (you do not specify what is array and what is not because everything is an array), and operations tend to work more consistently. Eg in matlab operations are by default done column-wise, because that's how the language is designed and works internally. So functions acting on 2+D arrays act by default column-wise, it does not depend on other context, and they are designed so in order to be faster, not merely consistent to the user. Consistency comes from how arrays are internally represented in memory and the need to have fast code, not just as an arbitrary design choice at the highest level.

Most developers do not touch array languages but I guess most developpers don't in general (need to) vectorise code this way and avoid loops (because they work in other problem domains, use lower level languages etc). If anything, not all problems can be vectorised anyway (or at least elegantly). But if one writes vectorised code, doing that in an array language makes more sense.
by coastalpuma | 2025-05-16 23:18:17+00:00
I think the original Material 3 was more sensible. Coming from ios-land, its color palette formula was a nice break from the glassy apple standard. It looks like this new version goes overboard on the boldness and especially on the typography. Looks like it uses the same palette generator but is encouraging use of the more vibrant colors in it? Seems to draw inspiration from magazine design (content is ads or interspersed between ads, appropriately enough for an ad company). Indeed, the brief is written like a pitch to "brands" (not UX designers for useful apps). The reference to "dialing up the feeling" makes me think of the extremely uncomfortable feeling I get when watching TV or film ads for the first time in awhile -- that it's a manipulative assault on my lizard brain.

In my opinion, the main promise of M3 wasn't apps triggering "more feeling" in users, but in users' ability to personalize their color theme to their taste to make themselves feel more comfortable and at home. Instead of this iteration, the best direction for google would have been to push apps to implement dynamic color (themeability) as a matter of best practice, increasing user sovereignty over their experience.

The example touting the huge send button with the tiny email composition space is baffling. This is peak "call to actionism".

Dot cursor that doesn't let you select text properly and link highlights that aren't visible against the page background are not a great look.

Side note, surprised to see some commenters wishing for the return of Material 1. I simply couldn't get over the aspect that each google app chose an arbitrary garish primary color, and you were stuck with that as the user chrome for that app. I still cringe when I see docs formatted with (for instance) random bright purple chrome using a M1 theme.
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 23:18:40+00:00
Suppose they do. How is the LLM supposed to build a model of what will or won't break without a GIL purely from a textual analysis?

Especially when they've already been force-fed with ungodly amounts of buggy threaded code that has been mistakenly advertised as bug-free simply because nobody managed to catch the problem with a fuzzer yet (and which is more likely to expose its faults in a no-GIL environment, even though it's still fundamentally broken with a GIL)?
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-16 23:20:19+00:00
In real life I find using AI for SQL dangerous. It allows people that don't know what they do to write queries that can significantly impact servers. In my world databases are relatively big for most developers, but not huge.

Sometimes when I want to fine tune a query I am challenging AI to provide a better solution. I give it the already optimized query and I ask for better. I never got a better answer, sometimes because AI is hallucinating or because the changes that it proposes are not working in a way that is beneficial, it is like an idiot parrot is telling what it overheard in the brothel - good info if it is a war brothel frequented by enemy officers in 1916, but not these days.
by the_af | 2025-05-16 23:20:29+00:00
(Read until the end, I'm merely commenting on the Stalin God thing, I do agree some things are weird).

I just read it, and the excerpts, the random images she chooses to include in it, the straightfaced giant leaps in logic (Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge, the Christian god came from the Middle East, therefore they -- and Stalin -- are one and the same), all reek of something that could have been posted in Something Awful.

I mean, come on:

> Hence Stalin was not just an ancient pagan god - but he was that God christians believe in. In a critical moment for the country and for the whole humanity he came down to Earth, wearing a cool mustache avatar, and restored the order: he revived economics and created the powerful science. He created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG. He won the war against the evil forces of Hitler, and even restored Israel, as he promised to do long time ago.

"Wearing a cool mustache avatar"? You really believe she wrote this in earnest?

Russians have a warped sense of humor. Though I suppose in this day and age, it's impossible to tell when someone is being sarcastic on the Internet ;) I know I can't anymore!

Edit: I do admit her subjects of interest are all over the place though. I'll grant you that!
by ay | 2025-05-16 23:21:42+00:00
Could totally be the case, that, as I wrote in the very first sentence, I am holding it wrong.

But I am not saying LLMs are impotent - the other week Claude happily churned me ~3500 lines of C code that allowed to implement a prototype capture facility for network packets with flexible filters and saving the contents into pcapng files. I had to fix a couple of bugs that it made, but overall it was certainly at least 5x-10x productivity improvement compared to me typing these lines of code by hand. I don’t dispute that it’s a pretty useful tool in coding, or as a thinking assistant (see the last paragraph of my comment).

What I challenged is the submissive self deprecating adoration across the entire spectrum.
by gcanyon | 2025-05-16 23:22:11+00:00
> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but what makes you think senior engineers will be in short supply in "the future"?

I'm not even a developer (anymore, I was in the past), I'm a product manager, and I'm pretty sure I can see the point in a few years where not just developers but people like me get disintermediated. My customers have a semi-reasonable grasp of what they're looking for, and they can speak. In a few years -- ten at the absolute most -- my customers will say to an AI, "I need an application that does XYZ" and the AI will reply, "Are you sure about that? Most people who say they need XYZ end up using an app that does WXY." My (former) users will reply, "Let's try it my way and see what happens." And the AI will say, "Okay, here are three popular UI styles, which do you prefer?" etc. etc.

We're headed for Interesting Times.
by iancmceachern | 2025-05-16 23:22:27+00:00
You missed a lot of its value, which the parent commenter highlighted.

Agreed, it's terrible if you have to maintain something from before, especially as over the years they get bad as one engineer after another adds or fixes one thing or another. It's terrible for that, and those codebases and tools should have been migrated to python etc. long ago.

It is great for getting a piece of hardware working and being tested today. In the next 2 hours. Sometimes you just don't have thr time or money in the budget to write custom code for everything. Sometimes you just need to make it work and move on. Labview is great for that.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-16 23:22:47+00:00
Social change was global. It had different local outcomes.

1918 was end of 2WW, most of Europe went from monarchy to democracy, except Russia which went from monarchy to autocracy. This change had orders of magnitude less victims in west.

1917 - 1990 soviets killed more of their own fellow citizens than Hitler did kill any citizen. so if soviets / current Russian establishment says Nazis were bad, then logically they have to say that they were bigger monsters themselves.

And if we talking about 6 million people dead in Holocaust, than current Russian establishment killed 1/6 of that amount in current war ON Ukraine. Just think about that perverse disaster currently happening and we live like it does not matter...

A lot of Russian capital from selling natural gas to Europe went to US.... most of NY diamond district is about Russian money. at least 30 % of Israelis are descendants of Russians. These thing mean nothing to anyone.

EDIT: 1918 was end of 1WW of course...

EDIT2:

Also, Germany was prohibited to have army by The Treaty of Versailles 1919.

1922 - Rapallo treaty was treaty between Germany and Russia. where Germany build factories on Russian soil with assistance of bolsheviks. they were building tanks, airplanes, chemical weapons (Shikhany / Tomka ),... so Russia was solely responsible that Germany had weapons with which they started 2ww

and Germany was solely responsible that Russia had copied weapon designs and had manufacturing capability to be in position to sign 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and attack western Europe TOGETHER with Nazi Germany. small pause in realations after NSDAP won is just that PAUSE.

Russians say that 2WW started 1942 because that is year when Germany attacked Germany allied Russia.

For western Europe 2WW started at 1939 when Germany AND Russia attacked Polland.

For Chinese 2WW started 1937 when japan invaded china.

chemical weapons kind of relations with fascist Italy were nonstop.
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-16 23:23:20+00:00
Why is the phrase "reduce spending" never anywhere to be seen with these awful takes?

The only solution is for the Gov to stop spending money it doesn't have. I don't know how you can insinuate that de-industrialization and taxes are a viable strategy without addressing the root of the problem. It would be like telling someone with a gambling problem that spending more time at the casino and less time at work would improve their finances.
by nickledave | 2025-05-16 23:23:56+00:00
:100: the fact that these technofascists are willing to amputate the hand that feeds them (NSF, DARPA, NIH) tells you everything you need to know about how deluded they are. It's literally Terminal Engineer Brain.

Very much agree we need to make and shame these dufuses who think they'll be the God kings of federated techno states, like Thiel and his ersatz court philosopher Moldbug.

To your list of names I would also add Paris Marx

https://techwontsave.us/

and Robert Evans has done a lot of great series on Elon et al as well

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MLizYdfQT-Y

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrPNvVhKLU