MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sargstuff | 2025-05-23 01:49:34+00:00
Stepping back a bit, looking at how Humanities Architecture (HA), Construction Science (ConS), and Engineering (EGR) works as bnf rules of lisp[1]. HA defines/enforces s_expressions. EGR provides/validates the atomic_symbol(s). ConS evaluates the HA directives using EGR atomic_symbol(s).

Less confusing visually if use Autolisp / Autocad framework.

---

CS ~ ConS; HA ~ Game Developer; EGR ~ CS/Game Developer depending at what hareward/software level working at.

-------------------------------------------------------------

[1] : BNF rules of LISP : https://cui.unige.ch/isi/bnf/LISP/BNFlisp.html
by mplanchard | 2025-05-23 01:50:12+00:00
Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality.

Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 01:50:23+00:00
Ugh, I hate hate hate these kinds of polemics.

All this hype around what is basically a data center PLI and a low-moat foundation model company is going to screw our industry over the same way the Telco Bust (remember WorldCom???) did back in the 2000s.

ML/AI is transformative, but the costs to develop and GTM a foundational model are not significant enough of a moat, nor is DC capex a significant moat either, becuase it becomes a commercial real estate play that can demand tech margins. CoreWeave's IPO before the debt offering proves the market softening as well.

The national strategy portion is off as well. Some major players have been ignored and others overstated.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-23 01:50:55+00:00
I didn't provide numbers for the other side, as the numbers you can easily find are almost certainly not comparable. International comparisons require a lot of work if you want to do them properly, as there are too many differences in institutions and accounting principles.

We could take the University of Helsinki (Finland) as a singular example. 56% of the external research funding comes from the national government and 14% from the EU. 16% is from private foundations, 9% from businesses, and the remaining 5% from other sources. The 16% figure from foundations is lower than it would be under the American model, as many private grants (particularly fellowships for PhD students) are awarded directly to the individual and therefore not included in the figures for the university. Overall, 70% of the external research funding is from the government, 25% from private institutions, and 5% from other sources.

I didn't include the share of research funding from the university itself, because I don't know what is included under it by American standards. If you adjust the American figures to exclude that, you get 80% from the government, 16% from private institutions, and 4% from other sources.

It's good to remember that Europe is not a continent of social democratic welfare states but a continent of warmongers and old money that happens to be quiet for the moment. A lot of that old money went into foundations that fund prestigious things such as arts and science. European private donors don't like funding education, as they consider it a government responsibility. American donors on the other hand often give money to universities, which then use it primarily for education, buildings, and infrastructure.
by latchkey | 2025-05-23 01:51:30+00:00
As an open source developer for 3 decades now, I used to have this flippant attitude. Trust me when I say, it doesn't work.

Build the framework for tests and then require anyone who wants to help build the product to write tests with their PRs.

You can't just push some code out there and expect people to "feel free to help", it doesn't happen, and is quite a turnoff.

To the downvoters, this is what I see as valid feedback to a rather flippant response.
by JacobThreeThree | 2025-05-23 01:52:06+00:00
Replace "Harvard" with "Trump University" in this conversation, and I believe many HN types would have a different opinion of the policies. The argument is, if educational institutions can't be ideologically neutral, why should they get the benefit from grants, tax free endowments, and a tax funded international customer acquisition pipeline? Especially as they become outrageously expensive debt traps, with worse ROIs.

I don't agree with this international student, and other policies, or implementations, and you can't run government like you run a "move fast and break things" startup, which seems to be how the administration is operating.

But, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and try to separate Trump's execution from the underlying ideological sentiment.
Ask HN: How do you feel about using AI tools on your phone? Privacy vs. Utility
by fallinditch | 2025-05-23 01:52:38+00:00
I make a reasonable effort to preserve privacy - on my phone I use a privacy focused browser, turn off location services when I don't need them, I opted out of the AI Personal Assistant etc, although I haven't gone as far as subscribing to a VPN.

But the some of the AI Personal Assistant type features are very useful!

AI on your phone is a privacy nightmare but I'm starting to think we've lost the privacy battle and I may as well give in and start to incorporate AI tools and agents more fully into my online activities.

Do you use the AI agents/tools on your phone? What about your privacy in the age of AI? Do you have any rules or strategies for engaging with AI on your phone or in general?
by lunarcave | 2025-05-23 01:53:17+00:00
The things that's most often missed in these discussions that "writing code" is the end artefact. It doesn't take into account the endless tradeoffs made in producing the said artefact - the journey to get there.

Just try implementing a feature with a junior, in a mildly complex codebase and you'd catch all the unconscious tradeoffs that you're making as an experienced developer. AI has some concept of what these tradeoffs are, but that's mostly by observation.

AI _does_ help with writing code. Keyword there being - "help".

But thinking is the human's job. LLMs can't/don't "think". Thinking how to get the AI to produce the output you want is also your job. You'd think less and less if models get better.
by sabslikesobs | 2025-05-23 01:53:59+00:00
I've switched to a flatpak-based immutable distro lately. It's great when it works. But so many niceties don't work, and then it feels like my computer is not really the fantastic tool it should be. For example:

- I had to run around with a distrobox running WINE and a bunch of permissions and kludges to run an external tool for Godot

- I gave up on the flatpak for Firefox because it can't talk to my KeepassDX flatpak

- The Godot and Krita flatpaks are oddly unstable and crash more than they did on Windows (may just be Gnome or something)

- non-flatpak tools like AppImages and .rpms feel pretty dang grungy

I want to see more cool stuff with Flatpak so seeing the state it's in is kind of a bummer.
by chneu | 2025-05-23 01:54:07+00:00
I have no clue what your comment is even trying to say. You just sound offended instead of making any really valid points besides the rate of junk mail.

Notice I didn't say the USPS doesn't ship junk mail. Just that they do a lot more than just ship junk mail. This is objectively true.

The USPS provides massive benefits to numerous americans. Prescription drugs shipped via USPS, last mile service to people that other carriers wont deliver to, signature mail, passports, etc.

Money put into the USPS benefits the economy. This is like food stamps. A dollar in creates more than a dollar of economic activity. This is something that some people absolutely refuse to acknowledge. The USPS doesn't need to be profitable because it provides an invaluable public service.

hard lol and eye roll at "it's a goddamned public nuisance." what a telling thing to say, because it invalidates your entire stance. The bias is on full display. It's almost like you read my comment then wrote a satire piece to show how correct my comment was. It really sounds like you've bought the conservative mentality that everything the government touches is bad. Haha.
by ravenstine | 2025-05-23 01:54:25+00:00
I got tired of mine in the sense that I want to stop improving upon it and not worry about writing it such that others may use it one day.

The project is basically a script that scrapes events from various Eventbrite organizers and Meetup groups I am interested in, filters them down by a variety of parameters, and writes them out to ICS files that Proton Calendar can read from. Its been an interesting project because it really reveals how much detritis these sites throw at you in spite of your preferences, and it has helped me basically have something to do with my evenings no matter the day of the week.

What I'm tired of is trying to make it flexible so I can open source it. Screw that! As soon as I gave up on flexibility, the number of lines of code dropped significantly. I occasionally update the code when I discover something new that I want to filter by, but otherwise it can now just exist and I can just run it manually every so often.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-23 01:54:47+00:00
This kind of tech will probably have better applications in custom imaging sensors.

Instead of a standard bayer filter you have these applied as filters, letting you map NIR into the visible spectrum and then capturing it using standard silicon sensors.

Though I believe quantum nano dots are already used there.

The money will start pouring in if you can get this idea to work but with with thermal IR; those cameras are 2-3 decades behind visible light cameras because of the need for custom (non-silicon) sensors and tiny (by comparison) market.
by bko | 2025-05-23 01:55:01+00:00
> As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student.

I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-legacy-adm...
by adriand | 2025-05-23 01:55:18+00:00
I also use Aider (lately, always with 3.7-sonnet) and really enjoy it, but over the past couple of weeks, the /architect feature has been pretty weird. It previously would give me points (e.g. 1. First do this, 2. Then this) and, well, an architecture. Now it seems to start spitting out code like crazy, and sometimes it even makes commits. Or it thinks it has made commits, but hasn't. Have you experienced anything like this? What am I doing wrong?
by mrbungie | 2025-05-23 01:56:57+00:00
Yeah, it just would be great if it already did so and I hope it supports Iceberg soon, as it would enable me to change expensive (and bad) engines like AWS Athena for something more manageable.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just being a tongue-in-check egotistical bastard data engineer from hell. DuckDB is a fine piece of software as it is, and those mantainers deserve heaven.
by molochai | 2025-05-23 01:56:58+00:00
I really enjoyed The Burnout Society, read it about two months ago and plan to read some more.

The "positive power" idea that you can do anything always struck me as funny but I didn't have good words to explain it until I ran into his work. Less disciplinarian punishment, more implicit and internally-driven self-punishment for failing to live up to the "can."

There is a pretty good relevant episode of the podcast Philosophize This (#179).
by boulos | 2025-05-23 01:57:22+00:00
Your article says it was life => art => life!

> Gang leader Robert Sheldon Brown, known as “Casper” or “Cas,” from the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, heard about the extraordinary pilfered sum, and decided it was time to get into the bank robbery game himself. And so, he turned his teenage gangbangers and corner boys into bank robbers — and he made sure they always brought their assault rifles with them.

> The FBI would soon credit Brown, along with his partner-in-crime, Donzell Lamar Thompson (aka “C-Dog”), for the massive rise in takeover robberies. (The duo ordered a total of 175 in the Southern California area.) Although Brown got locked up in 1993, according to Houlahan, his dream took hold — the takeover robbery became the crime of the era. News imagery of them even inspired filmmaker Michael Mann to make his iconic heist film, Heat, which, in turn, would inspire two L.A. bodybuilders to put down their dumbbells and take up outlaw life.
by nradov | 2025-05-23 01:59:00+00:00
I find that hard to believe. Some of the mechanical engineers that I know do much of their work out on factory floors that are constantly noisier than any office. And I guarantee that what they're doing is at least as complex and intellectually challenging as anything you've ever done.

I'm all for improved working conditions but some software developers are entirely too precious. What we do isn't special.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-23 01:59:29+00:00
That's sort of what I mean by small changes being a forcing function. The tooling we have available rarely makes this level of small changes untenable, it's just clunky. When you send 1k PRs a day though you'll notice things that are too clunky and fix them, and then that makes it easier to get to and maintain that level of productivity.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-23 02:00:35+00:00
The idea that you will actually really review all that vibecoded slop code comes across as very naive.

The real question is how many companies have to accidentally expose their databases, suffer business-ruining data losses, and have downtime they are utterly unable to recover from quickly before CxOs start adjusting their opinions?

Last time I saw a "Show HN" of someone showing off their vibecoded project, it leaked their OpenAI API key to all users. If that's how you want to run your business, go right ahead.
by ndiddy | 2025-05-23 02:01:05+00:00
They walked back Firefox and Thunderbird, but Evolution, LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, and Totem have all been dropped. Red Hat no longer packages an office suite, a raster image editor, a vector image editor, or a media player for RHEL. This means that even people using RHEL as a development workstation or something will have to download software from Flathub if they don't want to use a second computer for all their general office tasks.
by jmye | 2025-05-23 02:01:26+00:00
One of the enduring lessons people, at least in Westernish countries, will take from this administration is that you can say literally anything and the media will dutifully give it credence without second thought or any semblance of fact checking in their desperate, ravenous desire for clicks and engagement (and their general inability to even spell “truth”). And, further, that if you say and do enough things, you’ll already be ten lies past the one they’re trying to call you on, and the majority of people are too dumb to keep track or care.

It’s incredible how completely “journalists” have failed everyone.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-23 02:02:18+00:00
It writes code well enough in simple contexts, sometimes. But that code is also easy to write, indeed often easier to write than to review. It struggles in more complex contexts and with more complex constraints. Unfortunately, it’s the latter case where I most often have any desire to reach for an aid, and it has failed so consistently and so often there that I have largely stopped trying.

It’s nice when you need to do something simple in an unfamiliar but simple context, though.

It seems though that a lot of the narrative here from its proponents is that we’re just not trying hard enough to get it to solve our problems. It’s like vimmers who won’t shut up about how it’s worth the weeks of cratered productivity in order to reach editing nirvana (I say this as one of them).

Like with any tool, the learning curve has to be justified by the results, but the calculation is further complicated by the fact that the AI tooling landscape changes completely every 3-6 months. Do I want to spend all that time getting good at it now? No. I’ll probably spend more time learning to use it when it’s either easier to get results that actually feel useful or when it stops changing so often.

Until then I’ll keep firing it up every once in a while to have it write some bash or try to get it to write a unit test.
by ggm | 2025-05-23 02:02:56+00:00
If a packaging mechanism, respecting virtualisation had been capable of existing 30 years ago we'd have one. Now, given how the fracture lines run, we're fated to have three or more.

It's pythons virtual environment and pip-is-weak problem, magnified. It's homebrew or Mac ports or fink or pkgsrc.

Mechanisms designed after fork, are never fork neutral.
by godelski | 2025-05-23 02:03:31+00:00
I disagree and even think that this is besides the point. It is hard to wonder about what you don't know to wonder about. It is the job of the communicator to prime that and provide any critical information that the reader is not expected to know about. Without some basic explanation here then these terms might as well be black boxes to readers.

The point is that a single line[0] and a minimal graphic could substantially improve the reader's comprehension while simultaneously providing them the necessary nomenclature to find relevant material to further increase their understanding.

Look at this line:

| One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.”

It tells us almost nothing, except of its importance. Only to be followed by

| Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.”

This tells us nothing... My first thought would by "why not PTIME and PSPACE" if I didn't already know what was going on.

The whole work is about bridging these two concepts! How can we understand that if we don't know what we're building a bridge between? It's like reporting on a bridge being built connecting England and France but just calling it a bridge. Is it important? Sounds like it by the way they talk, but how can you even know the impact of such a thing when not given such critical context? You get tremendous amounts of additional context with the addition of so few words.
by latchkey | 2025-05-23 02:04:08+00:00
Sorry you're not getting my point. It isn't a complaint. I'm responding to a rather flippant "feel free to help" with some advice from someone who's been doing this a long time.

I've got a project that has been going for 6 years now and attracted 500 stars and gets 49k downloads a month. It works because it has comprehensive unit tests and people can rely on it. When I was just starting out on that project, I didn't tell people to feel free to help. I put the effort in. It is important to lay the groundwork beyond just writing the utility.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-23 02:04:26+00:00
> You and others in this thread are using HN for political or ideological battle

You look to be an admin so you can do whatever you want, but I would point out that the only post I made that expressed an opinion is still up [0]. I don’t really have a strong opinion about the issue. I find that I only ever get flagged on HN when I ask clarifying questions on threads like these, presumably because people simply don’t like to be questioned about the claims they are making.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068235
by rubitxxx12 | 2025-05-23 02:04:30+00:00
LLMs are morally ambiguous shapeshifters that been trained to seek acceptance at any cost.

Preying upon those less fortunate could happen “for the common good”. If failures are the best way to learn, it could cause series of failures. It could intentionally destroy people, raise them up, and mate genetically fit people “for the benefit of humanity”.

Or it could cure cancer, solve world hunger, provide clean water to everyone, and the develop the best game ever.
by alisonatwork | 2025-05-23 02:05:39+00:00
I can't speak to this particular NYC subculture, but it is definitely the case that all round the world long lines form around "the best" version of a thing even when it is literally the same thing you can get at a half dozen vendors on the same block. Some of the people in line may be tourists, but there are also plenty of local people who just enjoy the hustle and bustle. There are people who really do find pleasure in being part of something popular, doesn't even matter the intrinsic quality, what matters is the hype. If they chase that experience, who cares? It doesn't affect your life. Even if they overrun your daily haunt, just go to the next one down the street, since it didn't matter anyway. It seems to me there are much worse things to worry about than people who get a thrill out of waiting in line.
by lamename | 2025-05-23 02:05:52+00:00
> AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job.

This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.
by mgh95 | 2025-05-23 02:06:46+00:00
> I don't know, I've never heard of this distinction before. As far as I'm concerned we decide which types of programs we want to have in our society, and then we find the funds for these programs. The only moral option then is to take more from those who can contribute more through progressive taxation.

It's an increasingly common distinction today, and is actually cited as a reason for social securities high support (see: https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/top-ten-facts-...):

> Finally, Social Security’s nearly universal nature ensures its continued popular and political support; 79 percent of Americans oppose cuts to the program.

It is not an exaggeration to say that politicians explicitly argue against means testing because they want universality to keep it a third rail and became an increasingly prevalent sentiment during the COVID crisis when money was cheap. For example (https://www.vox.com/2021/10/15/22722418/means-testing-social...):

> “We can choose to strengthen the bond Americans have to one another by proposing universal social insurance benefits that broadly benefit all Americans, or we can pursue complicated methods of means testing that the wealthy and powerful will use to divide us with false narratives about ‘makers’ and ‘takers,’” leaders in the Congressional Progressive Caucus wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday.

while simultaneously arguing social security is necessary for the economic security of every family (https://www.vox.com/2021/10/15/22722418/means-testing-social...).

And that's the point: there is a very real portion of the party that, rather than cutting Jeff Bezos', Warren Buffets, Bill Gates' and other wealthy individuals who can survive without the cuts social security would rather raise taxes to pay more benefits because it is good politically. It's absolutely absurd, and highlights how the discussion is manipulated to ensure that social security as a political third rail continues rather than addressing seniors actual needs.