MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-19 17:36:49+00:00
Ah, okay. I still don't quite know what it means. He clearly has something, as he's launched/run various successful and wildly innovative companies.

I think that's different to someone allocating public funds well. In my very limited experience of that in the UK, the people involved were completely unaware of what to do, and were convinced by salespeople and partisan semi-internal contractors with a bias. If Elon Musk wants to risk his own money on an internal decision at Twitter, so be it. That's a lot better than risking somebody else's money forcibly extracted from their pockets.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-19 17:36:51+00:00
Ugh. Moving back to the US after a decade abroad, I had to get credit cards to rebuild my nonexistent credit.

Discover and Capital One both had deposit-based credit cards for credit building, so that's what I started with.

Discover's customer support system was polished and felt like a small company. I'd always speak to a polite native English speaker. When I gave authentication information to the pre-call robot (like card number, name, exp date), the customer service rep could pull up that info instead of asking me to repeat it.

Also, my Discover card kept me up to date with it's upgrade status, eventually going from a $150 credit line to a $1500 automatically and predictably. And again going to a $2500 credit line without my intervention; just from making steady payments.

Capital One's customer support system was awful. It's outsourced and I can't always understand the rep who sometimes gets mad at me for it. Any authentication information I give to the pre-call robot, the rep will ask me for again. Even the dang credit card number that is hard to give to a human. "No, that's Two as in Todd, Four as in Forage..."

And the Capital One credit card I got 3 years ago is still at $150 credit line. Apparently I have to pester them to get the credit line upgrade that the card promises, but why bother with a crappy company when I have a $2500 Discover card and good enough credit to have gotten better cards since then?

But I guess it's no surprise that the worse company to work with is swallowing the pleasant company. Just imagine all that money Discover was wasting by being a pleasant experience, like having credit lines that upgrade automatically and a customer support rep that speaks the same language.
by godelski | 2025-05-19 17:37:14+00:00
I think you really misunderstand the situation in Ukraine and with PRC-Taiwan. I made a much more in-depth comment here that you may want to read. Both are still carefully maintaining a very specific image, though yes Putin is becoming more desperate, but that's resulting in Xi lowering support.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44032181
by FaridIO | 2025-05-19 17:37:23+00:00
I hope all this stays true without growth. I hope it wasn’t a temporary utopia built on the tail end of centuries of theft and violence all over the world, and a relative peace subsidized by the US Navy. American problems generally last 4 years, and even our bigger problems sit on top of relative self-reliance. As far as I can tell you can’t even heat your homes in winter without Russian or American gas.
by davidcbc | 2025-05-19 17:37:29+00:00
In the same way that people have "known" for decades that smoking causes cancer and smoked anyway, however efforts to keep that knowledge at the forefront of people's minds at the point of consumption by requiring extremely clear messaging on cigarette packaging (in countries other than the US) have been shown to decrease smoking rates.

If these companies were required to put up a big banner before you check out saying "By purchasing this and giving us your data we have the right to sell it to whoever we want" with examples of how the data may be misused by bad actors people may think twice. Not everyone will, but I suspect it would be more effective than you think
by connicpu | 2025-05-19 17:37:55+00:00
I think it really depends on what you do and whether the Linux side of it has hard dependencies on system packages. Personally, at work I much prefer working directly on my Linux workstation, and at home have even switched to using Linux for my gaming desktop. I really don't like the direction Windows has been trending for the past few years, and with the specter of a forced Windows 11 upgrade on the horizon I decided it's time to go all in. My system runs better and I can still play all my games. The jankiest thing I do is I have a mingw toolchain so I can compile some game mods into Windows DLLs to be loaded by Wine, but even that ended up being pretty seamless. Just install the toolchain and the project just compiled.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-19 17:38:13+00:00
I don't think it's just "what our path of learning was", though that plays a role. I think that different personalities prefer different styles (functional vs procedural), different languages (static vs dynamic typing), and probably several other axes.

This explains, for example, why one person sees functional programming as a massive revelation, where suddenly everything "just fits", and assumes that anyone who doesn't have the same reaction hasn't "gotten it" yet. And others, despite diligent trying, never have that reaction.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-19 17:38:21+00:00
> You are free to abandon iPhones and live under a rock.

This seems like a disingenuous and fallacious response. Would you like to try replying in a more good faith manner? It might convince others to keep reading, rather than stopping at the first sentence.

It certainly did not seem to convince anyone that a hammer manufacturer which charges rent for every nail the user drives (in addition to charging for the hammer) is better than a regular hammer pricing model, and I still don't consider that rent-seeking "innovation" to be good for humankind.
by ravenstine | 2025-05-19 17:38:30+00:00
That would explain his rather obvious lack of energy these days.

Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.

He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.
by iLemming | 2025-05-19 17:38:34+00:00
> I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs

What are you even talking about? It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM. While that's theoretically possible to a certain degree (using Graal and Lumen), it's not easily achievable.

Org-mode is written in Elisp, of course it needs Emacs to run. You just need Emacs executable and you can absolutely run scripts in batch mode. I have done it many times, running tests on GitHub Actions, etc.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-19 17:38:43+00:00
> If you want to see bizarre sort rules, look up how french sorts accent characters.

I tried to do this, but there do not appear to be any sources addressing this question.

I did find a French Stack Exchange question asking for this exact information, and complaining that there are no sources (other than an uncited wikipedia page) that address it. There is no answer posted, but there is a comment from a French guy suggesting that there are no official rules.

https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/54217/french-dict...

How were you imagining I would look this up?
by joezydeco | 2025-05-19 17:39:14+00:00
Jed Margolin, ex-Atari engineer, did a great pair of articles about the secrets of the Atari vector games. Highly worth your time if you're curious.

The Secret Life of Vector Generators: https://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

The Secret Life of XY Monitors: https://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm
by dfxm12 | 2025-05-19 17:39:15+00:00
Don't forget that tastes change over time, too. I would hope that our infrastructure is built to last for a great many generations. What was considered beautiful when I was born might very well be garish to my grandkids. This deserves some consideration. A blank canvas that can be painted, buffed and painted again (by the people from its community) is a decent compromise.
by xitang | 2025-05-19 17:39:28+00:00
Thanks for sharing the industry insights! Very cool to learn about CPC job distribution, etc.

I have also read the LinkedIn vs. hiQ Labs lawsuit. The ruling is significant because the court finds that scraping public data did not violate the CFAA, though it violated LinkedIn's tos. LinkedIn ultimately wins at the end because hiQ was bankrupted. One of my take away is to scrape responsibly by rate limiting the requests and not overloading the server, etc
by bluGill | 2025-05-19 17:39:32+00:00
"total involvement", or confaguration, is what matters true. However fires are more complex than that. Generally the wood frame isn't a source of fuel for the fire until later. The carpet and other furniture that is the same in all builds is likely to burn first. Not long after the wood frame is burning the steel frame absorbs enough heat to fail - but either way you really want to be out long before it gets that bad (and probably are dead if you are not)
by nodja | 2025-05-19 17:39:42+00:00
I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is not productive. It's literally faster to open claude/chatgpt on a new tab and paste the question and code there and paste it back into vscode than using their ask/edit/agent tools.

I've cancelled my copilot subscription last week and when it expires in two weeks I'll mostly likely shift to local models for autocomplete/simple stuff.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-19 17:39:44+00:00
Funny, I was thinking exactly the opposite. Stack traces, logs, test failures, warning, etc will always reference an absolute number. If you want to tell a coworker where to find a section of code, you use the absolute number.

Relative numbers are useful to save a few keystrokes. But in every other context, absolute numbers are what's relevant.
by Pulcinella | 2025-05-19 17:39:55+00:00
Even "plagiarism" is putting way to positive a spin on it. "Rampant copyright infringement" is more accurate.

I'm sure we all have our own feelings about IP law, but remember what happens to regular people who try stuff like this. I don't think the RIAA, Disney, or Nintendo (or the government) are going to be pleased to hear "it's not piracy! It's a transformative experience protected by fair use!"
by Jarwain | 2025-05-19 17:40:00+00:00
Oh that all sounds super neat!

My current workflow is to drop almost everything into my daily notes, whether time-based, time independent, or reference. The non-time-based notes I'll #tag and logseq will create a new page for the tag or add the block to that page's references.

That way I have both my thoughts on a #topic, and when I thought about it. If I go back and look at the topic and notice a bunch of notes about it spread across time I know that it's a more consistent interest of mine, and can consolidate that info into the body of the topic page, and might start adding further thoughts there directly.

Generally my goal is to get a distraction out of my head ASAP in a way that I feel like I'll be able to find it again later or it'll otherwise be useful, so that I can keep focusing on whatever I'm currently trying to do. Sometimes that'll mean I have notes on two or three different topics on the same daily page that's easy for me to hop between and add to, but it also stays relatively organized.

The other thing I like are "unreferenced blocks" where if I don't think to tag a stray thought I have about, say, RAG, it'll still show up on my #rag page.
by abhisek | 2025-05-19 17:40:00+00:00
The closest I can think of is Devise for Ruby on Rails ecosystem. While these solution provides great developer experience to get started, IMHO there are solid reasons to have separate identity providers like Auth0 or if you like to self-host, stuff like Keycloak, Dex and more. Consider your business logic backend need multi-region deployments, where will you keep the auth DB?

Personally, if I want my app to be future proof, I would probably keep auth as a separate service while speaking standard protocols like OAuth2 so that I can maintain single source of truth for my user identity and be able to build multiple applications based on it.
by SimianSci | 2025-05-19 17:40:26+00:00
Technology cannot be wholly divorced from its ethical considerations. If a technology's founder has a multitude of ethical blindspots and has shown a willingness to modify such technology to suit his own desires, it is something which should be noted, discussed, and considered.

As professionals, it is absolutely crucial that we discuss matters of ethics. One of which is the issue of an unethical founder.
by noitpmeder | 2025-05-19 17:40:54+00:00
I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon. I doubt I'm the only person with this knee jerk reaction (I say without any statistics or evidence I can link in).

Same with any product that is over or deceptively advertised.

If their stuff was good, provably so, then they'd prove it on their own merits. They wouldn't need to fill a website with 99% AI slop if they had anything else of any substance.

Or, it's definitely possible I'm in the % of people who is overly sensitive to bullshit, and I fall outside the target audience of their AI slop. Similarly to how spam emails include typos to filter out people who are actually paying attention.
by tadfisher | 2025-05-19 17:41:17+00:00
Gnome (a linux desktop environment) ships a "Boxes" app [0] that is very impressive. You can, with a few clicks, install one of a huge number of Linux distros in an auto-provisioned VM, enable hardware passthrough for USB devices and host 3D acceleration, and manage files with drag-and-drop from the host system. I also use it for Windows and MacOS VMs (don't tell Apple), but you need to provide your own images.

[0]: https://apps.gnome.org/Boxes/
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-19 17:41:25+00:00
Maybe it is both-sidesism but the motd you get by default on Ubuntu these days is as bad as any OS. (“Ubuntu Advantage” sounds about as good as https://prospect.org/health/2024-01-12-great-medicare-advant...)

At least the nags in Windows look like modern web-based UI (so far that ‘use Electron’ seems to be the post-Win 8 answer to ‘how to make Windows apps’) in contrast to MacOS which drove my wife crazy with nag dialogs that look like a 1999 refresh of what modal dialogs looked like on the classic Mac in 1984.
by canucker2016 | 2025-05-19 17:42:10+00:00
Tom Cruise buys a white chocolate coconut bundt cake for each of his (mostly famous) friends each year - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/15/tom-cruise-deca...

If you're in the Los Angeles area, you can visit the bakery yourself or if you're in the USA, you can order a cake from them - https://www.goldbelly.com/restaurants/doans-bakery/white-cho...

N.B. No affiliation with Tom Cruise, Doan's, or Goldbelly.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-19 17:42:50+00:00
> as of 2017

That's when the change began.

China began limiting foreign withdrawals to $50,000 a year [0], which made it hard for Chinese international students at the undergrad level to join.

At the same time, the US began cracking down on Chinese nationals at American programs due to economic espionage attempts and monitoring Chinese nationals at American universities [1]

On top of that, the material condition did become better for Chinese scholars in high priority fields, so you did see a significant number of Chinese nationals who did research graduate programs return to China to either get tenure track or start a business in that space.

Finally, during Zero COVID (2020-2023), China placed extremely harsh exit and entry controls that basically cut Mainland China off from much of the world, and the subsequent economic slowdown made the cost proposition of studying in the US prohibitive if it wasn't a top tier program.

At this point, it has become a headache for Chinese students to go abroad, but nowadays, those that do try are doing so with the intention of staying abroad.

[0] - https://www.safe.gov.cn/en/2017/1230/1397.html

[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/18/the-chinese-communist-p...
by tptacek | 2025-05-19 17:42:56+00:00
It is, but one of the virtues of the Go ecosystem is that it's also often very easy to fork the standard library; people do it with the whole TLS stack all the time.

The tension Ted is raising at the end of the article --- either this is an illustration of how useful casting is, or a showcase of design slipups in the standard library --- well, :why-not-both:. Go is very careful about both the stability of its standard library and the coherency of its interfaces (no popen, popen2, subprocess). Something has to be traded off to get that; this is one of the things. OK!
by diggan | 2025-05-19 17:43:20+00:00
> why keep both old and new code together like a Frankeinstein project?

It seems like Zod is a library that provides schema to your (domain) objects in JS/TS projects, so if you're all-in with this library, it's probably a base-layer for a ton of stuff in the entire codebase.

Now imagine that the codebase is worked on by multiple parties, in different areas, and you're dealing with 100K-1M lines of code. Realistically, you can't coordinate such a huge change with just one "Migrated to Zod 4" commit and call it a day, and you most likely want to do it in pieces.

I'm not convinced publishing V4 as version 3 on npm is the best way of achieving this, but to make that process easier seems to be the goal of that as far as I understand.
by skydhash | 2025-05-19 17:43:26+00:00
The main browser API is pretty stable, all things considered. It's just that people can't seem to stay put on a given design, instead trying everything under the sun.

When you have something like SDL which is at it's third version at 27 years old, I'm very doubtful about the culture of NPM/JS world. A closer example is jQuery which is also in its third version at 18 years old.
by dkarl | 2025-05-19 17:43:33+00:00
The author seems obsessed with what their code says about them personally, and only mentions other people to discuss other points of view on this question. At no point do they say anything about how working with other people influenced their thinking about programming or their technical preferences. In fact they only mention peers a single time:

> I met many people whose programming approach was my polar opposite.... I don’t have any issues with their way, as long as we don’t work on the same system

Being obsessed with what your code says about you is a concern that competes with and inevitably detracts from other desirable outcomes. This is true even when working by yourself, but it is especially true and especially obvious when working with other people.
by llmurder | 2025-05-19 17:43:49+00:00
I found this very interesting and tried to find the most surprising entries on the list. One of them is Šiprage, a settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a population of 992. It has wikipedia pages in 225 languages, more than "Internet" (224). I wonder why.

Fascinating post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0iprage
by dlubarov | 2025-05-19 17:44:06+00:00
Air has very low thermal conductivity, so for a lot of materials, thermal conductivity is primarily a function of how much air they contain and how it's structured (ideally in tiny pockets to minimize heat transfer through convection). Like spray foams, fiberglass insulation, etc are basically designed to hold air while minimizing convection.

I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.

It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-19 17:44:17+00:00
I can't think of a less trustworthy group of people on model alignment.

They claimed that they had a rogue actor who deployed their 'white genocide' prompt, but that either means they have zero technical controls in their release pipeline (unforgivable at their scale) or they are lying (unforgivable given their level of responsibility).

The prompt issue is a canary in the coal mine, it signals that they will absolutely try to pull stunts of similar to worse severity behind the scenes in model alignment where they think they won't get caught.
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-19 17:44:53+00:00
As a reminder, xAI is an organization which lies to its users (declaring they will develop their system prompts as open source) and has the most utterly flimsy processes imaginable: https://smol.news/p/the-utter-flimsiness-of-xais-processes

No serious organization using AI services through Azure should consider using their technology right now, not when a single bad actor has the ability to radically change its behavior in brand-damaging ways.
by bgnn | 2025-05-19 17:45:10+00:00
Very nicely put! I have been in discussions with these type of people, several times, to start a company in semiconductors and quantum computing. I was often the only one who can "do" things and it was not appreciated. Academics didn't have the time or will to start a company (and had no industry experience), but wanted to have more than 50% of the shares because the government or EU gave the money to them, in return the university wanted 30% cut because they bring "a prestigious name", bug companies forced on you by EU funds did't want shares but they wanted control (board seat) and IP rights. All these were for <500k seed fund which would barely cover couple of engineers salary for a year!
by MegaDeKay | 2025-05-19 17:45:45+00:00
My buddy and I bought a Space Duel machine from a local pool hall many years ago for $100. I'd consider that game to be Asteroid's spiritual successor. You've still got a ship floating around in space, but it is colored vectors instead of B&W and most of the objects are 3D wireframe things like cubes.

There is a two player game mode that is incredible: both players play simultaneously and there is a short rod connecting the ships together at all times. Chaos ensues as players thrust pointed in different directions, causing the two ships to spin around wildly. Good times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Duel
by scuol | 2025-05-19 17:45:56+00:00
It still seems to have the problems most other LLMs suffer with except Gemini: it loses context so quickly.

I asked it about a paper I was looking at (SLOG [0]) and it basically lost the context of what "slog" referred to after 3 prompts.

1. I asked for an example transaction illustrating the key advantages of the SLOG approach. It responded with some general DB transaction stuff.

2. I then said "no use slog like we were talking about" and then it gave me a golang example using the log/slog package

Even without the weird political things around Grok, it just isn't that good.

[0] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p1747-ren.pdf