MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zachlatta | 2025-05-05 02:22:15+00:00
I run a nonprofit called Hack Club that helps organize most of the hackathons for high schoolers in the USA.

We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!

You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

What makes Hack Club events different is:

1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count

2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not

3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures

One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.

https://bucketfish.itch.io/desktop-circus

It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.

It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.
by Jaauthor | 2025-05-05 02:22:51+00:00
Sitting around on a Sunday morning – started thinking about solarpunk and Andrew Carnegie. Wealth inequality and the problems it causes dominates our headlines. Common media topics include re-enacting the French Revolution or ‘eating the rich,’ but is there a better way? Are we doomed to repeat the failed hatreds and phyrric victories of the past?

Not necessarily. You know, some ultra-rich people decided to use their wealth to make others’ lives better. Modern examples of wealthy philanthropists include people like Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, and MacKenzie Scott come to mind, as do Chuck Feeney, Gordon and Betty Moore, and Barron Hilton. These are great, but they all remind me of one historical figure – Andrew Carnegie.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-05-05 02:23:01+00:00
That's a wild claim considering Category Theory is a branch of mathematics

It's not a wild claim since you misquoted me.

A lot of non-mathematicians disagreed with mathematicians.

Mathematicians can claim whatever they want, when it comes to programming, programmers understand it better and they're trying to explain to you why this is nonsense. Vanderbilt claims to be "the harvard of the south" but wouldn't you know it, harvard doesn't claim to be "the vanderbilt of the north".

Show me programming languages designed by mathematicians to be 'mathematically pure' and I'll show you a language that hasn't been used to ship software that people want to use.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-05 02:25:23+00:00
I was on a vacation with a gf 10 years ago or so, and we had a rented car and were driving across [European country] and we had taken a lot of photos and I just started feeling like we were focused on the camera too much instead of just experiencing where we were. So I said "let's put the cameras away and let's just be in the moment".

so we did. and 30 seconds later we saw something incredible and I screamed "GETTTTTT THE CAAAAAMERAAAA!"

for the rest of our vacation, that was our tagline. You can't live outside the time you live in. Everything is a trade off. We enjoyed the trip a lot.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-05 02:26:21+00:00
Don't forget:

- penalizing a pro player for picking a particular champ and rune combo due to it being bugged (which is their fault) even though the player didn't abuse the bug

- the CEO of the company doxxing the developer of a competing game

- the insane AI-powered "zero tolerance chat filter" that regularly catches comments that, upon human review, are clearly inoffensive

- the "lane swap detection" anti-feature

- autofill

- client and server crashes being blamed on the players

...and many, many, many more examples.
by surajrmal | 2025-05-05 02:26:56+00:00
The real problem in Linux is the lack of a stable abi for anything other than the kernels UAPI. Perhaps one day we will standardize enough of the lower layers of Linux and provide real stability. There is definitely a line between packaging all of your dependencies and packaging none of them. We probably want something in the middle, or else perhaps more functionality which is currently provided via shared libraries should be moved behind stable IPC instead.
by dcre | 2025-05-05 02:27:14+00:00
A couple of examples from influential open source developers: Adam Wathan (Tailwind) agreeing with Mitchell Hashimoto that LLMs are making them more productive. "in their area of expertise" is not obvious from this post alone, but I am pretty confident from the way they talk about it that they are not exclusively using LLMs on side projects where they're inexpert.

https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1911845073286803923

Armin Ronacher also talks about using LLMs quite a bit, but I don't have as good of an example from his tweets of him straightforwardly saying "yes, they are useful to me!"
by ribfeasty | 2025-05-05 02:27:54+00:00
The Save the Kiwi trust mentioned on a Kiwi release day that when releasing Kiwis back into the wild there's a weight that the Kiwi must reach (1kg) before having a chance to survive against ferrets, rats, and stoats.

Perhaps the larger egg ensures a reduced exposure time between birth and 1kg for young Kiwis, which has helped those with larger eggs propagate more successfully?
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-05 02:28:27+00:00
Islam has a very similar concept in the Dajjal (deceptive Messiah) at the end times. Explicitly described as a young man with a blind right eye, however, at least he should be obvious when he comes! But there are also warnings about other false prophets.

(It also says Qiyamah will occur when "wealth overflows" and people compete over it: make of that what you will).

I think all religions have built in protections calling every other religion somehow false, or they will not have the self-reinforcement needed for multi-generational memetic transfer.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-05 02:29:20+00:00
> When in 5-10+ years you'll really regret not having a few pictures (and videos!) here and there.

I can't say I ever have. I think that different people are happy with different things (hot take, I know lol). That doesn't make the advice bullshit, it just means that it will be valuable for some and not sure others.
by bheadmaster | 2025-05-05 02:30:25+00:00
Sometimes, every config parser that is popular enough to be considered trusted is just chock full of features that you don't need and increases both your build time and binary size, without bringing much value beyond doing the config parsing you could've written yourself in a few minutes.

Sometimes, what you want is just a simple key=value config parser.

A little re-inventing the wheel is better than a little dependency.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-05 02:31:07+00:00
> but mostly I think, Trump cost them the election.

There was theory floated at the last election about what would happen this election. They observed the LNP had gone so far to the right they lost traditional the small l liberals to the Teals. The theory was that would create a positive feed back loop as the liberals that lost their seats to the Teals were the moderates, so the party would lurch to the right.

When I saw Dutton channelling Trump with stunts like proposing Jacinta Price head a an Australian DOGE, I decided that had happened. Anybody who thought that would work was living in a right wing echo chamber. The idea the parliamentary LNP had created an echo chamber so they could not hear the electorate is a bit disturbing. You might hope this result might shock then out of the loop, but it's happened again. It looks like all moderates have lost their seats this time.

We have an example of this loop getting out of control in WA. It destroyed the LNP there.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-05 02:31:13+00:00
> Might as well say something useful for those who do have a clue about the solar system.

The source we are discussing is space.com, a website which frequently mentions Star Wars and whose stated mission is to "transport our visitors across the solar system and beyond through accessible, comprehensive coverage of the latest news and discoveries." My comment was about communicating this research in a way that better fits "most readers" of space.com. If you think qualitative orrery models are beneath you and want to exclude those people, then you are not the target audience. Just go read the actual paper.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-05-05 02:31:34+00:00
That's fair. You are correct on potential for addiction.

But let's be honest - most of these people, the ones the article is taking about, where they think they are some messiah, would have just latched onto some pre-internet cult regardless. Where sycophancy and love bombing was perfected. Though I do see the problem of AI assistants being much more accessible, so likely many more drawn in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bombing.

I was mainly referencing my own experience. I remember locking myself in my room on IRC, writing shell scripts, and playing StarCraft for days on end. Meanwhile, parents and news anchors were losing their minds, convinced the internet and Marilyn Manson were turning us all into devil-worshipping zombies.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-05 02:31:52+00:00
just be honest, you don't like GPL. The reason you don't like GPL is not because it's not enforceable, but because you don't want to enforce it, or be subject to its strictures. Your argument that you use MIT because GPL is unenforceable makes no sense, as I pointed out.

(also, it is enforceable and has been enforced, but that's a separate topic.)
by godelski | 2025-05-05 02:31:55+00:00
> I'm there for the degree

Would you hire someone without a degree?

When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees?

I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where they have significant influence over hiring. So when that time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done with little to no risk to your own employment.
by nextaccountic | 2025-05-05 02:33:15+00:00
> They are in the process of switching,

Nice! Do you have a link with the progress of this? Maybe in a mailing list or something. I can't manage to find it

Also, do you know whether grub plans to support luks2?

And maybe even veracrypt - ok this one is unlikely. (cryptsetup can read veracrypt just fine and the Linux kernel copes with it, maybe it's a matter of porting this code to grub? One issue is that grub would need to embed the number of iterations of the key derivation function somehow - the thing veracrypt calls PIM - because unlike luks, veracrypt doesn't store it in a header that can be read before unencrypting)
by evil-olive | 2025-05-05 02:33:50+00:00
Prometheus doesn't necessarily lock you into the "pull" model, see [0].

however, there are some benefits to the pull model, which is why I think Prometheus does it by default.

with a push model, your service needs to spawn a background thread/goroutine/whatever that pushes metrics on a given interval.

if that background thread crashes or hangs, metrics from that service instance stop getting reported. how do you detect that, and fire an alert about it happening?

"cloud-native" gets thrown around as a buzzword, but this is an example where it's actually meaningful. Prometheus assumes that whatever service you're trying to monitor, you're probably already registering each instance in a service-discovery system of some kind, so that other things (such as a load-balancer) know where to find it.

you tell Prometheus how to query that service-discovery system (Kubernetes, for example [1]) and it will automatically discover all your service instances, and start scraping their /metrics endpoints.

this provides an elegant solution to the "how do you monitor a service that is up and running, except its metrics-reporting thread has crashed?" problem. if it's up and running, it should be registered for service-discovery, and Prometheus can trivially record (this is the `up` metric) if it discovers a service but it's not responding to /metrics requests.

and this greatly simplifies the client-side metrics implementation, because you don't need a separate metrics thread in your service. you don't need to ensure it runs forever and never hangs and always retries and all that. you just need to implement a single HTTP GET endpoint, and have it return text in a format simple enough that you can sprintf it yourself if you need to.

for a more theoretical understanding, you can also look at it in terms of the "supervision trees" popularized by Erlang. parents monitor their children, by pulling status from them. children are not responsible for pushing status reports to their parents (or siblings). with the push model, you have a supervision graph instead of a supervision tree, with all the added complexity that entails.

0: https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/pushing/

1: https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/c...
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-05 02:35:00+00:00
It would be a fascinating thing to happen though. It makes me think of the Greg Egan story Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies. But instead of being attracted into religions based on physical position relative to a strange attractor, you're sucked in based on your location in the phase space of an AI's (for whatever definition of AI we're using today) collection of contexts.

It's also a little bit worrying because the information here isn't mysterious or ineffable, it's neatly filed in a database somewhere and there's an organisation that can see it and use it. Cambridge Analytica and the social fallout of realtime sentiment analysis correlation to actions taken has got us from 2016 to here. This data has potential to be a lot richer, and permit not only very detailed individual and ensemble inferences of mental states, opinions, etc., but also very personalised "push updates" in the other direction. It's going to be quite interesting.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-05-05 02:35:07+00:00
I think you're confused. I'm not making any moral judgements or prescriptions here. If you want to change society such that we're not working in exchange for money, then go ahead. Overtime is an example of a policy which limits that relationship.

However, while we live in the world where we're exchanging labor for money, it's not as simple as what you originally wrote: "I think it’s just the result of disproportionate political influence held by the wealthy, who are heavily incentivized to maximize working hours."

You're not considering the choices being made by the people actually doing the work. People work for a significant amount of their life because they're paid to do it. There's no council of wealthy people conspiring to achieve this conclusion: they have work that needs to be done, and they're willing to pay for people to do it.

My thesis was just this: while people are exchanging labor for money, people will work. If you introduce a policy where people are given some UBI regardless of employment, they will still work. They want the money. They will buy more televisions, better food, more vacations. If I'm paid my current salary to work for 5 hours a week, I will start interviewing for more jobs. And yes, inflation may soon render the UBI you've introduced to be not so great.
by Animats | 2025-05-05 02:36:22+00:00
With a heavy enough dosage, people get lost in spiritual fantasies. The religions which encourage or compel religious activity several times per day exploit this. It's the dosage, not the theology.

Video game addiction used to be a big thing. Especially for MMOs where you were expected to be there for the raid. That seems to have declined somewhat.

Maybe there's something to be said for limiting some types of screen time.
by al_borland | 2025-05-05 02:36:58+00:00
These sound pretty productive, which is nice. I’d love for me team to have hackathons weeks to fix annoying stuff.

My company puts on an internal hackathons, but it feels fake. Looking at the winners, it seemed like a team had been working on the project for months, and the hackathon was the company’s way of marketing it internally before launch.

There is precedence for this kind of action, which is why I’m skeptical of the legitimacy of the hackathons. There was a video contest and the top 3 were shown at a town hall. My team was one of the top 3. I had never seen the video and had no idea about this contest, nor had my boss (Sr Dir), nor had his boss (VP). As far as we could tell, some video production team was tapped to hack together a video in 30 minutes, they threw our name on it, and shipped it. I don’t trust much after that.
by sigseg1v | 2025-05-05 02:37:26+00:00
Agreed. I'm an amateur archer and I asked my archery instructor the highest poundage recurve bow he's ever seen someone fire, and he says that one time someone came to the range with a 100 pound draw bow, but he's only seen that once in 10 years.

Compound bows of course you can go higher because of mechanical advantage, but either way I don't think that people realize how difficult it is to draw a 100 pound bow. Typical professional recurve bow users would rarely want to exceed 50 pounds as I understand it.
by Sabinus | 2025-05-05 02:39:42+00:00
I highly encourage you all the watch the various 100 days interviews Trump gave, they're interesting.

Take the ABC News one, it's all very normal and cordial and you can almost believe he's a competent president until they actually get past the niceties to policies and procedure.

https://youtu.be/GBwCUPttprw
by faizmokh | 2025-05-05 02:40:00+00:00
The first time I went to a hackathon early in my career, the team that won doesn't even have a working product. It's just a screenshots of a multiple websites that was stitched together to visualize what the product will be. Kinda bullshit but the presenter was very well spoken.

I've never been to a hackathon ever since then.
by devsda | 2025-05-05 02:40:44+00:00
> participated in company-sponsored hackathons

Company sponsored hackathons are better if you have a large one that works on diverse fields and products.

Usually org-wide hackathons within a company are plain nonsense and soul sucking. Participation will be voluntary but "strongly recommended". Collecting "ideas" is mostly picking off stories from JIRA.

We just call it a two/three day sprint.
by aoeusnth1 | 2025-05-05 02:41:00+00:00
This post is a very weak and incoherent criticism of a well formulated benchmark: task length bucket for which a model succeeds 50% of the time.

Gary says: - This is just the task length that the models were able to solve in THIS dataset. What about other tasks?

Yeah, obviously. The point is that models are improving on these tasks in a predicable fashion. If you care about software, you should care how good ai is at software.

- Gary says: Task length is a bad metric. What about a bunch of other factors of difficulty which might not factor into task length?

Task length is a pretty good proxy for difficulty, that's why people grade a bug in days. Of course many factors contribute to this estimate, but averaged over many tasks, time is a great metric for difficulty.

Finally, Gary just ignores that despite his perspective that the metric makes no sense and is meaningless, it has extremely strong predictive value. This should give you pause - how can an arbitrary metric with no connection to the true difficulty of a task, with no real way of comparing its validity of measuring difficulty across tasks or across task-takers, result in such a retrospectively smooth curve, and so closely predict the recent data points from sonnet and o3? something IS going on there, which cannot fit into Gary's ~spin~ narrative that nothing ever happens.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-05-05 02:41:14+00:00
Where did it say that? The most they said was the following and that says nothing about "left vs right" beyond basic "nazis are bad" and "racism is bad".

> And specifically, history teaches us that certain narratives are dangerous to civic sanity and human life: Naziism, revanchism, hypernationalism, fomenting ethnic hatred, and so on.

Otherwise they only really get into the politics side of things in the "Rule of Law" section and my read on that was "this is my opinion and the opinion of my community". That entire section was about how politics varies greatly by region and doesn't (at least to me) suggest that certain ideas are inherently dangerous by their binary "left-right" political affiliation.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-05 02:41:26+00:00
>Your post sounds like you're basically giving up on playing the tech startup game. Before you do, at least consider there may be ways to redefine the game so that it matters to more people than you and your friends, so that money is not the only metric and so that "winning" is mostly within your control.

Correct. I'm still open to working for startups, but as far as coming up with my own ideas, I've accepted it's probably not going to happen.

I still plan on making some side projects, working on an open source game now, and I've written a script ( probably going to switch it to a short graphical novel I can self fund).

I definitely will revisit your comment in the future, I think you've just provided a full semester of Business School in a few paragraphs. What I take from this is I need to find the tools that people want, and actually build those instead of building tools and then telling people how amazing and great they are.

I think the next big B2B opportunity would be something like Pivotal Tracker / Jira , but with intelligent LLM generated summaries of what each team member is working on. As well as the option to assign small scale tickets to code agents which would either write the code or at a minimum create a branch with the methods stubbed out.

I don't really think I have the capital to do this personally. But hypothetically if I did, I'd build a POC and then offer it to members of my game dev group.

Or maybe I should just go down to this one bar where I know a lot of old school business folks hang out. These are men and women with relatively high net worths, and just ask straight up what problems they'd liked solved.

Do you have any suggestions for books on your business philosophy ? I might have free time in a few months.
by tcmart14 | 2025-05-05 02:41:30+00:00
I would also say some of the attitude shift is also contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who have a lot of bad things to say about the education who tell me universities should focus on education in a general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard before, something along the lines of, "why don't high schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so students can get jobs."
by manwe150 | 2025-05-05 02:42:13+00:00
Small nit: this is for objects approaching from infinity in a two body system. Otherwise the object can be in orbit and already be “captured” there. For example, the moon also approaches earth slightly over the month while speeding up, then slows down while moving away. Or it could just be a 3 body system, which is chaotic and can’t be modeled accurately and can have objects spontaneously eject from the stable system (even though the physics is indeed reversible)