MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JackedLisp | 2025-05-21 04:20:37+00:00
All excellent and true points. However, it is my personal opinion that first impressions matter. When a newbie installs Gnu Emacs the default theme and overall appearance of the GUI is shockingly dated and the defaults are bizarre compared to 'modern' UX. That's what happens when you create software 40 years before there were any UX standards. Heck there was no mouse and no arrow keys on most keyboards at the time. Full screen editing was brand spanking new. The vi editor came after Emacs because UNIX came after Emacs.

Most new young potential Emacs users are students and new developers being raised on VS Code or JetBrains IDEs. Which out of the box appear modern to their young eyes. So when they see vanilla Gnu Emacs the reaction may be, "Okay Boomer, whateva".

I would argue that the reason Spacemacs and Doom resulted in such massive growth of the Emacs user base had less to do with evil-mode and more to do with attractive theming and applying reasonable default settings that match how those modern UX IDE's work. Not to mention the myriad of YouTube videos about them.

I fail to comprehend why the old school graybeards refuse to update the default appearance of Emacs. Of course the out of box experience should be mostly spartan but it could look a whole lot prettier. I would like to see Emacs devs adopt Prot's standard light and dark themes, they need to replace the traditional default theme and be distributed with Emacs. The default theme can hardly be called a theme, it likely predates theming in Emacs.

I don't know anyone who sticks with the out of box appearance of Emacs.

I think we are going to need some curated video demonstrations including slow-motion and key presses being shown. Real world tasks being demonstrated. Including eshell and REPL, etc.

I too have been toying with creating some of these demos. We need to create focused compelling videos that are rather short. Showing off just how great Emacs is overall. Seeing is believing.

So many junior devs never saw Emacs and only maybe they heard something about it but never took a deeper look. It is always some rogue graybeard who shows off in front of junior dev and that dev needs to pick their jaw off the floor. similar occurs with Neovim.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-21 04:20:38+00:00
> Can you... talk to a human for support?

You raise an interesting point. I wonder if there is a (low margin) business waiting to be started that provides technical support for LLMs. As I understand, none of the major, commercial LLMs provide technical support (I don't count stuff like billing or password resets.). You could hire some motivated fresh grads in Philippines and India who speak English, then offer technical support for LLMs. It could be a subscription model (ideal) or per-incident (corps pay 1000 USD upfront, then each incident is 25 USD, etc.). Literally: They will help you write a better prompt for the LLM. I don't think it is a billion dollar business, but it might work. I also think you could easily attract fresh grads because they would be excited to using a wide variety of LLMs and can pad their CV/resume with all of this LLM prompting experience. (This will be a valuable skill going forward!)
by wrs | 2025-05-21 04:20:43+00:00
That assumes the compiler reserves one continuous place for the value, which isn’t always true (hardly ever true in the case of registers). If the compiler is required to make all code paths result in the same uninitialized value, that can limit code generation options, which might reduce performance (and performance is the whole reason to use uninitialized values!).

Also, an uninitialized value might be in a memory page that gets reclaimed and then mapped in again, in which case (because it hasn’t been written to) the OS doesn’t guarantee it will have the same value the second time. There was recently a bug discovered in one of the few algorithms that uses uninitialized values, because of this effect.
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-05-21 04:22:14+00:00
I agree that this particular coding example looks good. I find it aesthetically pleasing for some reason. But like you I don’t know the language, which leaves me with a question, does this code make understanding the function’s operation and implicit usage contract (i.e. the function’s type) clear to a dev that does know the language?

I would assume it does, because I assume I be able to know these things in a comparable JS or Python example. But if that assumption is correct I really like the ‘look’ of Red.
by gitremote | 2025-05-21 04:22:45+00:00
The comment implied that women left engineering because they preferred taking care of children over working as engineers. The context is that they wanted to choose both, but their work didn't allow it. If young children exist and are neglected, then society blames the mother, not the father. A responsible mother has no choice but to choose family over career if she can't choose both. Young humans cannot survive on their own without being cared for by adult humans.
by wonnage | 2025-05-21 04:22:59+00:00
"Saving" in the accounting identity is just money not spent on consumption. Cheaper imports can increase domestic saving because people now spend less for the same goods. That could then increase domestic investment due to the increased savings.

Or the same situation could reduce savings, if people increasing consumption because the imports are so cheap.

The accounting identity doesn't explain anything other than the mathematical truth that the money needs to add up in the end. Savings are not inherently good, deficits are not inherently bad
by Nevermark | 2025-05-21 04:24:24+00:00
> Software engineering still lacks the certainty that physical engineering figured out long ago. Apparently software isn't important enough

I think it is widely viewed as important enough, and every serious attempt at a new language or many software tools involve massive efforts (when their ecosystems are considered).

But one challenge is, we can't really measure a new language until its been put to use by a lot people, encouraging an ecosystem of libraries and tools, in a virtuous circle.

By the time that virtuous circle confirms that yes, A B and C are great improvements, its very difficult to take the next step and add D, E, and F that worked so well in another language.

It happens, but it tends to happen slowly and paid for with complexity that a new language with A, B, C, D, E and F at the start would not have had to pay. But getting a new language and ecosystem revved up is much harder than adding complexity. Until someone else with a great deal of passion and time takes another big gamble and succeeds.

Meanwhile, all that code in all those languages doesn't go away.

C++ complexity is where every language that never gives up, never surrenders, maintains backward compatibility, and continues folding in more good ideas, is slowly heading toward.

Its like trying to improve standards while building an "organically growing mountain terrain" type city, where the city has three main ground levels, covering vast areas of land, with smaller 2nd level areas on top of each, then smaller 3rd levels on all those 2nd level regions, etc. The different innovations happening in particular towers are very difficult for other towers built with other standards to adopt. But all the towers need to keep growing.

Someone says, lets start over with a new city, and it may be a much better city in many ways, but not all, and if enough people help they get a good enough first level up so more people start building there. But the same problem accrues.
by ggm | 2025-05-21 04:24:48+00:00
"best" is highly subjective. It certainly might not deliver the highest dollar value across the exchange.

The reason for this highly unfair soundbite is that most international trade treaty processes are designed NOT to favour one economy over the others and use "most favoured nation" language to try and put equity on the table. Thats before the US enters the room: My reading online in years past says that every economy which did the TPP said it did better overall when the US walked away from that deal.

Trump and his negotiators are not remotely interested in fixing problems globally, they're fixing their own vision of internal problems. A 10% across the board impost on goods coming in is frankly ludicrous, and the lack of awareness about how VAT/GST models work for importers and exporters in Europe and like economies is pretty stunning: In no way does VAT impose a burden on US incoming goods. it's neutral to all sources. Yet, Trump and his negotiators want to pretend they don't know that.

I'm not an economist or a game theoretician. I'm fine with you correcting my simplified language, but I do not think it was unfairly applied to the current political situation. I'm a simpleton shouting about another simpleton: the one who thinks the only negotiation worth doing is one he "wins" in and for him, winning definitionally means somebody has to lose.
by huimang | 2025-05-21 04:25:54+00:00
I think effort is a signal that whatever the thing is, the artist/team -really- wanted to put it out there and have people view it. They had -something- that drove them to take the time and effort to make the thing.

Zero-effort output generators like prompting means people are just generating trash that they themselves don't even care about. So why should I take my time to watch/experience that?

The whole "GenAI is accessible" sentiment is ridiculous in my opinion. Absolutely nothing is stopping people from learning various art mediums, and those are skills they'll always have unlike image generators which can change subscription plans or outright the underlying model.

Absolutely no one should be lauding being chained to a big corp's tool/model to produce output.

---

Why should being an artist be a viable job? Well, people should get paid for their work. That applies to all domains except technical people love to look down on art while still wanting to watch movies, well produced youtube videos, etc. You can see it in action here on HN frequently: someone will link a blog post they took time to write and edit... and then generate an image instead of paying an artist. They want whatever effect a big header image provides, but are not willing to pay a human to do it or do it themselves. Somehow because it's "just art" it's okay to steal.

---

If tech has progressed to the point of true "general artificial intelligence", then likely all jobs will be obsolete and we're going to have to rethink this whole capitalism thing.

I think all industries should be utilizing tech to augment their capabilities, but I don't think actual people should be replaced with our current guesstimator/bullshitter "AI". Especially not critical roles like doctors and nurses.
by ahmadtbk | 2025-05-21 04:26:02+00:00
After reading Cal Newports book on digital minimalism I've removed Instagram entirely cold turkey. It's been three years now and I occasionally use the desktop version to message some friends.

The great thing about it is that I've saved myself many hours. I use that time for reading and walking and a variety of other activities. Also my attention span and mental health improved drastically.
by rasz | 2025-05-21 04:26:34+00:00
The way Amiga was build, graphic subsystem being its own thing with CPU clued on the side, swapping CPUs would be the easiest task. Even the slowest available RISC CPU would emulate <1mips 68000-7 above real time speed with ease. PA-RISC werent sold on open market, but Amd 29K, Sun Spark, MIPS R3000 and Motorola 88100 were. 1991 Q1 25MHz CPU prices:

Am29K $135 ~15-20 mips only with expensive SRAM/caches 88100 $82 ~15 mips but supposedly its a TERRIBLE CPU according to Apple engineers R3000 $150 25 mips? almost Playstation 1 :) SPARC $100 20 mips

for comparison Motorola 68030 9mips $160, 68040 supposedly ~25mips !!$640!! with limited supply, Intel 486DX2 66MHz ~25mips $400-700 available late 1992. But Commodore was more interested in waiting for 1992 cost reduced 4mips $24 68EC020-16 crap comparable to $40 386SX-16.

> $150M loan from Bill Gates

There was no loan. Microsoft lost lawsuit over theft of Apple Quicktime code https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
by michaelbacani | 2025-05-21 04:26:49+00:00
Great question! With inspection reports there is typical commentary/phrasing that inspectors use in each of the reports. Since companies give us access to their historical reports we can fill in their report with this typical commentary by drawing context from their short notes.

Additionally, with applications such as environmental assessments, standards may need to be referenced. So the LLM may draw from those standards to fill in the report as well.
by mk12 | 2025-05-21 04:27:19+00:00
There is an important difference for this case though. It C it’s fine to have pointers into uninitialized memory as you as you don’t read them until after initializing. You can write through those pointers the same way you always do. In Rust it’s UB as soon as you “produce” an invalid value, which includes references to uninitialized memory. Everything uses references in Rust but when dealing with uninitialized memory you have to scrupulously avoid them, and instead write through raw pointers. This means you can’t reuse any code that writes through &mut. Also, the rules change over time. At one point I had unsafe code that had a Vec of uninitialized elements, which was ok because I never produced a reference to any element until after I had written them (through raw pointers). But they later changed the Vec docs to say that’s UB, I guess because they want to reserve the right to use references even if you never call a method that returns a reference.
by Cordiali | 2025-05-21 04:27:27+00:00
LibreOffice still doesn't have tables! Not to mention the new(ish) functions in Excel, like LET and LAMBDA.

Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.

The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.

Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.
by yonatan8070 | 2025-05-21 04:29:35+00:00
GN has released a video talking about how NVIDIA attempted to get them to show their new cards in a certain way, showing Multi Frame Gen prominently on graphs and such. The issue is that NVIDIA threatened to cut off access to technical interviews with engineers if GN didn't make the reviews inthe way that NVIDIA wanted.

This means that now watching or reading any positive NVIDIA coverage is going to leave you wondering if NVIDIA threatened the creators in similar ways into giving them a favorable review.

https://youtu.be/AiekGcwaIho
by JackedLisp | 2025-05-21 04:29:41+00:00
We also should be targeting non-developers such as writers and researchers and students. I know some people who use Emacs to manage their Dungeons & Dragons games. Both as a dungeon master and as a player. Heck I use org to take notes while I am playing a complex video game.

We should espouse the wonders of Plain Text and how you'll never be locked into a proprietary file format. You can use it with Git for revision history and tracking changes. The power of Elisp enables non-developers.

We need to start a sort of grassroots marketing campaign to spread the word. In a nice way. i.e. don't bash the competition. Just show what Emacs can do in short highly focused videos. Emacs can speak for itself.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-21 04:29:54+00:00
To be clear, 8hrs/day, 40hrs/week, 50weeks/year is about 2,000 hours. Are you really saying that "senior developers" make 250USD * 2,000 = 500K USD? 250K is more like it, and only in very high cost locations -- Silicon Valley or NYC. More like 150K in rich countries, but not the richest city. Hell, 100K EUR can get you some very good developers on the European continent.
by BobbyJo | 2025-05-21 04:31:38+00:00
I worked on CUDA and OpenCL in the 2010-2014 timeframe, well before buttcoin and LLMs were profit centers, and Nvidia was already well ahead in the "GPUs as general compute" area. Literally everyone doing highly parallel HPC wanted to use Nvidia, despite AMD having higher throughout for some workloads. It was better, easier to use software.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-21 04:32:48+00:00
This is interesting! I assumed the same thing, so I just skimmed through the game with an engine. The world, on average, was definitely not cheating. As early as move 7 Magnus was outright winning!

But there's an interesting meta in that Magnus played far more passively than he normally would. And so I think he also expected he was probably playing an engine by proxy, and wanted to keep the position completely under control. If he knew the world was legit, they probably would have lost!

I'm still trying to reconcile how it came to be that the world didn't cheat though. Lowest common denominator amongst 140k+ people paired with inevitable chatter of 'Hey best engine move is blah' seems unavoidable.
by erulabs | 2025-05-21 04:33:04+00:00
You're going a bit far with "no longer worth anything" but indeed, if the entire world holds a particular nation-state's currency, and uses it to exchange goods and pay down debts, then it gives that nation-state tremendous power.

Printing dollars is often considered a tax on dollar-holders: I print dollars, your dollars become less valuable as my new dollars are circulated into the market. Effectively, this means the global reserve currency's nation-state can impose a tax on the world, instead of just on its citizens.
by maxdamantus | 2025-05-21 04:33:43+00:00
Since this parent post is getting downvoted, maybe I should have elaborated: the claims in the title of this article ("proof of X") seem to be a lot stronger than the actual research paper it references ("suggests that X").

This subject is something that has been discussed for over a century (to be honest I'm not sure how much it's been considered seriously by linguists in recent years, but hey, I remember it being brought up back in LING201).

The title of the article just seems a bit extreme to me, as if the debate around linguistic relativity is over now that someone ran a counter over some bilingual dictionaries. It's an interesting approach, and maybe it can give some direction into where to look, but I think we'd need a lot more than numerical analysis on dictionaries to prove something about language, and we need to account for other causes of correlations.

Eg, bilingual dictionaries (which this research analyses) are likely to be compiled by people who are aware of these claims about their language. If you're creating a dictionary for a language that is known for having "X words for snow", you'll put more effort into listing many words for snow than many words for taste. Note that bilingual dictionaries often exist for language learning purposes, so they intentionally won't paint a complete picture of the language.
by Uehreka | 2025-05-21 04:35:59+00:00
Not only did the iPhone 9 never exist, the iPhone X was a huge paradigm shift in design and capabilities. That was the phone that introduced edge-to-edge OLED screens to the iPhone line, as well as the IR camera that enabled FaceID and the first generation of Portrait mode. I know it well since it also introduced the ability for developers to build facial motion capture apps that would’ve previously required expensive pro hardware and allowed people like me to build live facial motion capture effects for theatre.

Sorry to dunk so hard, but your example of technology stagnating is actually an example of breakthrough technological innovation deep into a product’s lifecycle: the very thing you were trying to say doesn’t happen.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-21 04:36:10+00:00
I get that you're kind of joking but your right! Because nobody can "change" the Win32 ABI except Microsoft you don't get contributors pushing various "feature improvements" on it, not that there aren't a bunch of things one might do differently than the way the Win32 API does them, right? It's that externally enforced control that isn't possible with Linux/FOSS ecosystems. The 'why' of that is because people like Canonical can't afford to pay enough engineers to 'own' the whole system, and their user base gets bent out of shape when they do. It breaks the social contract that Linux has established.

The only way to change that is to start with a new social contract which is "You pay us to license a copy of this OS and we'll keep it compatible for all your apps that run on it."
by erulabs | 2025-05-21 04:38:22+00:00
> Finally, achieving the goal of a smaller trade deficit will likely be painful

While true, this is economics in a bottle. A world war would also "likely be painful", and one would require factories on-shore and a devalued currency to improve ones odds. In a perfectly peaceful and massive and stable vacuum-world, being the global reserve currency and running a trade deficit and "raising the economy’s productive capacity" is much better than the alternative. Things aren't so simple.

What do you import, and from whom? Are your now unemployed working-class political benign or politically violent? Is your productive capacity capable of producing ships and missiles? Sure ad revenue is great, but can it intercept ICBMs?

If all goods are widgets and we're discussing economics without politics, this is completely spot-on. Alas...
by mrkiouak | 2025-05-21 04:38:57+00:00
Uses the gemini flash 2.5 preview version from today, but still uses Imagen 3 for image generation (I was getting a "publisher endpoint does not exist" when trying to use the Imagen 4 preview model name).

Requires you go through a sign up process, but the data just goes to me, I don't use the email for anything other than confirming the email can be read for the sign up link, and then rate limiting the account (5/requests per day).

The story generation prompt still needs some improvement, but had some success in getting the generator to follow more of a "Hero's Journey" type structure, so it prompts moving the narrative forward -- just need to tighten up it resolving conflict if the user doesn't.

I think its interesting seeing what works well/gets generated well, vs whats wonky (images can be great, but the model also seems to get confused and start doing fairly unnatural things, even when its getting fairly tame, normal input)
by rowborg | 2025-05-21 04:39:55+00:00
This is really impressive! Great job.

One small piece of feedback… There were a couple times where I asked to learn something, and it asked me to repeat a phrase back, which was great. But when I repeated it back, I know I didn’t quite nail it (eg perhaps said “un” instead of “una”) and rather than correcting me, it actually told me I did it perfectly. Maybe there’s some tuning with the prompts that may help turn down the natural sycophancy of the model and make sure it’s a little more strict.

Keep up the great work!
by Technopress | 2025-05-21 04:40:44+00:00
The global artificial intelligence (AI) market is on a trajectory of remarkable growth, with projections indicating a substantial increase in market size by 2032. According to Fortune Business Insights, the AI market, valued at USD 233.46 billion in 2024, is expected to reach USD 1,771.62 billion by 2032, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.2% during the forecast period.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-21 04:40:45+00:00
Carbon taxes could be phased in over time, to give people a chance to make that decision over the course of natural appliances update lifecycles.

Even if rich people don’t consume much more energy than poor people (I have no idea, just engaging with your idea as stated), they must be buying something with their money… carbon taxes should raise the price of goods with lots of embodied carbon.

If they aren’t consuming much energy and am they aren’t buying stuff with much embodied carbon… I dunno, I guess that’s the goal, right?