MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-05-16 23:24:16+00:00
> “The original Apple II did not support lowercase letters which is kind of surprising to most people,” Hertzfeld tells Inverse, laughing. “But the designer, Wozniak, made a trade-off that blinking characters were more important than lowercase letters.”

Herzfeld is mistaken: Wozniak himself says the lack of lowercase had a completely different reason:

So, in the end, the basic reason for no lowercase on the Apple I and Apple II was my own lack of money. Zero checking. Zero savings.

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 23:25:50+00:00
> That sucked in its own way because I had to serialize lots of large data structures to pass around, so 2x the cores got me about 1.5x the speed and a warmer server room.

In many cases you can't reasonably expect better than that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law). If your algorithm involves sharing "large data structures" in the first place, that's a bad sign.
by RangerScience | 2025-05-16 23:26:57+00:00
This is very cool, somewhat inspiring, and (personally) very informative: I didn't actually know what "agentic" AI use was, but this did an excellent job (incidentally!) explaining it.

Might poke around...

What makes something a good potential tool, if the shell command can (technically) can do anything - like running tests?

(or it is just the things requiring user permission vs not?)
by louison11 | 2025-05-16 23:27:09+00:00
Nah it's still very easy. The logic is pretty simple. Europe could really use more talent... and the bar is quite low. Any developer/engineer of any grade will easily get a visa. Any retiree will also easily get a non-work long-term visa with just 1 year worth of minimum wage (around 20k in most of Western Europe) as savings to prove self-sufficiency. So it's extremely easy and almost a non-issue compared to the other side of the pond.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-05-16 23:28:22+00:00
This comment appears frequently and always surprises me. Do people just... not know regex? It seems so foreign to me.

It's not like it's some obscure thing, it's absolutely ubiquitous.

Relatively speaking it's not very complicated, it's widely documented, has vast learning resources, and has some of the best ROI of any DSL. It's funny to joke that it looks like line noise, but really, there is not a lot to learn to understand 90% of the expressions people actually write.

It takes far longer to tell an AI what you want than to write a regex yourself.
by Hotbasil | 2025-05-16 23:29:10+00:00
Hi Peter, thank you for doing this.

I am on H1b visa and my partner is on H4 dependent visa. On H4, my partner wants to open a startup but is afraid if I lose my job then she has to stop working on the H4 visa as well.

I have my cousin who has a green card who is willing to be part of it, but I don't want to dependent on them.

What other paths are possible?

Cheers!
by insin | 2025-05-16 23:30:02+00:00
I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own.

This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app:

https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/

I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course.

The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.
by xigency | 2025-05-16 23:30:11+00:00
Humans are social creatures. The existence of a tool that can replace humans is not nearly so depressing as the realization that a loud and powerful group of people are zealous and joyful to use it to such ends. The assumption that people come first is rapidly becoming a logical fallacy in a world that seeks to optimize paperclips first.

Anyway, the pendulum will swing the other way eventually, but it's a rough ride hanging on until then.

Glad to see stimulating discussion here falling on both sides.
by Jarwain | 2025-05-16 23:30:32+00:00
Another way to see it is that physical $100 has $300 of value.

But eventually, Alice wants her money back, the bank cashes in the bond, the government repays the cash.

So part of that value is the value of trust as a function of time. Trust in the bank, trust in the government, trust that they'll pay back their debts on a defined schedule. Plus interest.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-05-16 23:31:31+00:00
There's a huge trend here, and in general comment sections online, where if you made a mistake, even a catastrophic one, then as an organization you are useless.

Moody's has been in this game a long time, I'm sure they're not perfect, but also being wrong once doesn't mean you're always wrong.

Doesn't anyone here think the US recent economic instability merits a reduction in credit rating? We have a massive amount of debt (we borrowed to pay something like $800 billion in interest on our debt last year) and are essentially betting on our rocketship economy to offset our enormous debt in the future. The latest economic turmoil does cast a bit of doubt on that ability to pay off this huge debt later on no? I mean, isn't that a reasonable conclusion, regardless of whether you hate Moody's or think they are stupid?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-16 23:31:35+00:00
<< there will be no default.

Heh. You have a point on a technicality, but I can assure you that people, who lend other people money would likely be a lot less technical about it. In other words, the default may be a shorthand for 'immediately unable to borrow more at the previous rate', but I suppose it is not as catchy.
by jinseokim | 2025-05-16 23:31:41+00:00
That's what happens when a paper is withdrawn [1], and MIT requested to withdraw the paper [2]. This news title saying that they requested to take down the paper is subtly incorrect.

[1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/withdraw.html#:~:text=Previous%2...

[2]: https://economics.mit.edu/news/assuring-accurate-research-re...
by wrsh07 | 2025-05-16 23:32:00+00:00
The junior engineers on my team are just supercharged and their job is different from when I was a junior engineer.

I would say: ten years ago there was a huge shortage of engineers. Today, there is still lots of coding to be done, but everyone is writing code much faster and driven people learn to code to solve their own problems

Part of the reason it was so easy to get hired as a junior ten years ago was because there was so much to do. There will still be demand for engineers for a little while and then it's possible we will all be creating fairly bespoke apps and I'm not sure old me would call what future me does "programming".
by standardUser | 2025-05-16 23:33:45+00:00
The elephant in the room is that the US had been operating as the chief architect and manager of the global economy for the last 80 years, a role that made it the wealthiest and most powerful and most technologically advanced nation on the planet. Under Trump the US has voluntarily relinquished that role, and we're seeing lots of these little adjustments as the system flails as it adapts to it's previously steadfast leadership contorting erratically. But the real damage done isn't about credit ratings or trade agreements or Trump's ridiculous kidding-not-kidding tariffs. It's about a different power settling into the role as the indispensable trading nation, and one that prides itself on its stability and unopinionated economic cooperation. In other words, we're hosed.
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 23:34:30+00:00
You'd presumably need to do something involving weakrefs, since it would be really bad if you told Python that the elements can be GCd at all (never mind whether it can be done all at once) but someone else had a reference.

Or completely rearchitect the language to have a model of automatic (in the C sense) allocation. I can't see that ever happening.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-16 23:34:42+00:00
Everyone has their pet projects is a part of it. I tried saying that we will need to raise taxes AND reduce spending and lemme tell you, it did not go over very well. Hell, in my home state of Illinois, in the face of federal cuts, our brave leaders tell us we should brace for increases to offset those 'losses'.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 23:35:11+00:00
Actually, ShareableList feels like a tuple really (as it’s impossible to change its length). If we could mix ShareableList and collections.namedtuple together, it would get us 90% there (99.9% if we use typing.NamedTuple). Unfortunately, I can’t decipher either one [1, 2] from the first glance – maybe if I get some more sleep?

[1]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.13/Lib/collections/...

[2]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.13/Lib/typing.py#L2...
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-16 23:35:21+00:00
> These don’t seem like text2sql problems:

Correct, but I would propose two things to add to your analysis:

1. Natural language text is a universal input to LLM systems

2. text2sql makes the foundation of retrieving the information that can help answer these higher-level questions

And so in my mind, the goals for text2sql might be a copilot (near-term), but the long-term is to have a good foundation for automating text2sql calls, comparing results, and pulling them into a larger workflow precisely to help answer the kinds of questions you're proposing.

There's clearly much work needed to achieve that goal.
by hocuspocus | 2025-05-16 23:37:30+00:00
Java could have easily caught up with C# in the early 2000s. In 2001 Pizza (Scala's ancestor) showcased generics, higher-order functions, ADTs and pattern matching. Interestingly enough only generics made it to Java in a reasonable timeframe, the rest came only much later.

Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and break backwards compatibility with major versions of C# and the .NET runtime, Java was deliberately moving at a much slower pace.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-05-16 23:38:13+00:00
Can I just say that Google AI Studio with latest Gemini is stunningly, amazingly, game changingly impressive.

It leaves Claude and ChatGPT's coding looking like they are from a different century. It's hard to believe these changes are coming in factors of weeks and months. Last month i could not believe how good Claude is. Today I'm not sure how I could continue programming without Google Gemini in my toolkit.

Gemini AI Studio is such a giant leap ahead in programming I have to pinch myself when I'm using it.
by hammock | 2025-05-16 23:39:47+00:00
> I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them.

What does that mean, I’m curious?

The schools and university I grew up in had a “single-sanction honor code” which meant if you were caught lying or cheating even once you would be expelled. And you signed the honor code at the top of every test.

My more progressive friends at other schools who didn’t have an honor code happily poo-pooed it as a repugnantly harsh old fashioned standard. But I don’t see a better way today of enforcing “don’t use AI” in schools, than it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-16 23:39:55+00:00
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...

“For reference, the total net worth of all U.S. households is close to $160 trillion. The rich half (top 50%) own about $156 trillion (or about 98% of it). The poorer half only own about $4 trillion. Breaking down that top half even further, the top 1% (1.3 million families) owns about $49 trillion (or about one-third of the total share) by themselves. And going even further, about half of that $49 trillion is owned by the top 0.1%. That’s only around 136,000 households and includes all of America’s wealthiest people.”

Tax wealth, not work, roughly speaking. With that said, stagnation is inevitable due to demographic dynamics. Historical economic prosperity was because of a demographic dividend that won’t be repeated in our lifetimes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861997 (citations)
by richardw | 2025-05-16 23:40:00+00:00
Any algo that a human would follow can be built and tested. If you have 10 analysts you have 10 different skill levels, with differing understanding of the database and business context. So automation gives you a platform to achieve a floor of skill and knowledge. The humans can now be “at least this good or better”. A new analyst instantly gets better, faster.

I assume a useful goal would be to guide development of the system in coordination with experts, test it, have the AI explain all trade offs, potential bugs, sense check it against expected results etc.

Taste is hard to automate. Real insight is hard to automate. But a domain expert who isn’t an “analyst” can go extremely far with well designed automation and a sense of what rational results should look like. Obviously the state of the art isn’t perfect but you asked about goals, so those would be my goals.
by knuppar | 2025-05-16 23:40:00+00:00
Being quite blunt, just a cs degree from a good school has not been enough for quite some time. Research experience, OSS contribs, some specialty (ML, compilers, ...) are a must. I don't find this to be a problem, since it dilutes the value of an ivy league education.

On top of that, you need to be really sharp at leetcode for any large-ish company.

I find the "ai tools are junior engineers" narrative flawed, but it has any way accelerated the higher and higher expectations for a junior.
by don_neufeld | 2025-05-16 23:40:25+00:00
I was expecting some response like this, because schools have “banned” things in the past.

While this is superficially similar, I believe we are talking about substantially different things.

Learning (the goal) is a process. In the case of an assignment, the resulting answer / work product, while it is what is requested, is critically not the goal. However, it is what is evaluated, so many confuse it with the goal (“I want to get a good grade”)

Anything which bypasses the process makes the goal (learning) less likely to be achieved.

So, I think it is fine to use a calculator to accelerate your use of operations you have already learned and understand.

However, I don’t think you should give 3rd graders calculators that just give them the answer to a multiplication or division when they are learning how those things work in the first place.

Similarly, I think it’s fine to do research using the internet to read sources you use to create your own work.

Meanwhile, I don’t think it’s fine to do research using the internet to find a site where you can buy a paper you can submit as your own work.

Right now, LLMs can be used to bypass a great deal of process, which is why I support them not being used.

It’s possible, maybe even likely that we’ll end up with a “supervised learning by AI” approach where the assignment is replaced by “proof of process”, a record of how the student explored the topic interactively. I could see that working if done right.
by BizarroLand | 2025-05-16 23:40:31+00:00
I know what you mean, I had the same effect from the David Lynch Dune movie. I went in blind, had no idea what I was about to see other than that it was scifi.

Put it on and didn't even make it to a chair before I was spellbound. I stood for the whole movie, feeling as if ages had passed while I was rooted to the ground like a mountain watching seasons pass in stop motion.

I've watched it maybe 6 times since, nothing has quite recaptured that perfect first watch.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-16 23:41:10+00:00
because "reduce spending" sounds nice in a vacuum (sure, there are a lot of things our government spends money on that i don't agree with) but in reality it usually plays out as a cynical ideologically-driven misdirection with little basis in the needs of the country and the people inside it.

spending is a good thing. roads, schools, healthcare, research funding - we need these things in order for america and its people to thrive.

our representation just has this awful aversion to increasing taxes on those who can actually afford to bear the increases.
by eikenberry | 2025-05-16 23:41:13+00:00
For things like cache I generally have 2 goroutines communicating with it. One that directs reads and one that directs writes. Using CSP style you can pass the data (by value) through to the cache (or any other CSP style process) without copying and it performs quite well. I've written several high performance systems in this way with great results.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-16 23:41:15+00:00
For syntax, maybe this general Lisp advice will help: consider a normal function call, like f(a, b). To make this into a Lisp function call, drop the unnecessary comma (whitespace is enough to separate tokens) like f(a b), and then move the function name inside the parentheses, like (f a b). Applying operators that are considered "primitive" in other languages are syntactically treated the same as functions. So imagine an add function like add(a, b), but instead of being named 'add', it's just named '+', like +(a, b). Applying the same transformation as before, this turns into (+ a b).

Using the function application syntax for primitives like + is nice because you get the same flexibility of normal functions, like variable argument length: (+ a b c).

Clojure is a little bit less uniform than other Lispy languages in that it has special brackets for lists (square brackets) and for maps (curly brackets), but that's pretty much it.
by layer8 | 2025-05-16 23:42:09+00:00
The first versions of both Visual Basic and Borland C++ were released in 1991. Turbo C 1.0 was in 1987. Maybe you are thinking of Turbo Pascal 1.0, released in late 1983, but I’d argue that one wasn’t confusing, if you were in the business of using early DOS at all.
by actuallyalys | 2025-05-16 23:42:10+00:00
I daresay ClojureScript typically has a significant influence, but it's more social than technical. Many of the examples and tutorials are going to favor a certain style, and people who choose ClojureScript mostly do so because they like Clojure.

But if you want to do tons of JavaScript interop, you can. If you want to adopt some syntax, you can (through macros). If you want to use jQuery directly, you can. If you want to use a React wrapper, you can. There's not really technical limits pushing you toward a style or architecture, although you still have the underlying limits of JavaScript and the runtime environment.
by jacob019 | 2025-05-16 23:42:23+00:00
The first languge I used to solve real problems was perl, where regex is a first class citizen. In python less so, most of my python scripts don't use it. I love regex but know several developers who avoid it like plague. You don't know what you don't know, and there's nothing wrong with that. LLM's are super helpful for getting up to speed on stuff.
by lysace | 2025-05-16 23:44:25+00:00
The JVM was the first VM I got to know, at uni in like 1996 or so. Had fun building stuff using the Jasmin "assembler". Seems like it's on Github now: https://github.com/davidar/jasmin

> Jasmin was written because, at the time that we wrote the Java Virtual Machine book for O'Reilly, Sun had not published an assembler format for the Java virtual machine.

> Generating a binary Java .class file is pretty fiddly. Its like creating an a.out (or .exe) file by hand. Even using a Java package like JAS (a Java API for creating class files, used internally by Jasmin and written by KB Sriram), you need to know a lot about the philosophy of the Java Virtual Machine before you can write something at the Virtual Machine level and generate a Java class.

> We wanted something that made it very easy for a student or programmer to explore the Java Virtual Machine, or write a new language which targets the VM, without getting into the details of constant pool indices, attribute tables, and so on.
by insin | 2025-05-16 23:45:54+00:00
IME it's not just longer, but also more difficult to tell the LLM precisely what you want than to write it yourself if you need a somewhat novel RegExp, which won't be all over the training data.

I needed one to do something with Markdown which was a very internal BigCo thing to need to do, something I'd never have written without weird requirements in play. It wasn't that tricky, but going back trying to get LLMs to replicate it after the fact from the same description I was working from, they were hopeless. I need to dig that out again and try it on the latest models.
by insin | 2025-05-16 23:46:47+00:00
Is it just me or did they turn off reasoning mode in free Gemini Pro this week?

It's pretty useful as long as you hold it back from writing code too early, or too generally, or sometimes at all. It's a chronic over-writer of code, too. Ignoring most of what it attempts to write and using it to explore the design space without ever getting bogged down in code and other implementation details is great though.

I've been doing something that's new to me but is going to be all over the training data (subscription service using stripe) and have often been able to pivot the planned design of different aspects before writing a single line of code because I can get all the data it already has regurgitated in the context of my particular tech stack and use case.
by siliconc0w | 2025-05-16 23:49:41+00:00
There is a ton of low-hanging fruit that could lower the debt that would result in little to no austerity. Carried interest/corporate tax avoidance, means-test social security, remove needless subsidies for fossil fuels or corn/sugar that add to health costs, or eliminate PBM formularies and enable medicare drug negotiation and fraud reduction. Maybe a few hundred billion right there.

Long term reforms to make education and healthcare outcomes focused, punishing administrative overhead and rewarding performance. Similarly defense could be massively downsized IMO to just expendable drones and submarine based nuclear deterrence, we don't need a 'triad' - one ballistic sub can basically end the world. Replace defense contracts with guaranteed purchase orders and let the private markets figure out how to do hypersonics or missile defense.
by dvrp | 2025-05-16 23:50:05+00:00
This is a byproduct of abundance.

In this case, abundance of cognitive ability.

We say that our food sucks. Yet, our elite athletes would crush Hercules or other God-like figures from our mythology. At the same time, we suffer from obesity.

The answer to the paradox comes from abundance. I don’t know why it happens, but I’ve noticed it on food, information retrieval, and now cognitive capacity.

Think about what happened to our capacity to search information on books. Librarians are masters of organizing chaos and filtering through information. But most of us don’t know a tiny fraction of their knowledge because we grew up with Google.

My hope is that, just like eating healthy is not as pleasurable as processed sugars but it’s necessary for a fit life, we will need to go through the process of thinking healthy even though is not as pleasurable as tinkering with LLM prompts.

This doesn’t mean escapism however. Modern athletes take advantage of the industrial world too, but they’re smart about it. I don’t think thinking will be much different.
by Reubend | 2025-05-16 23:51:20+00:00
Yeah, it's funny to see them going in opposite directions. Then again, Squarespace is operating at a far bigger scale than Motion is, so it kind of makes sense. I partially believe them when they say that "we had already pushed vertical scaling to its limits". My guess is that continuing to use Postgres would have been totally possible, but perhaps much more annoying.