MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-29 07:07:27+00:00
I don't think things are quite that bad. I'd take a csproj files over many Maven files or Makefiles. The three or four ways I've seen Python manage dependencies didn't improve things either. I'm quite comfortable with Rust's toml files these days but they're also far from easy to write as a human. I still don't quite understand how Go does things, it feels like I'm either missing something or Go just makes you run commands manually when it comes to project management and build features.

I don't think there are any good project definition files. At least csproj is standardised XML, so your IDE can tell if you're allowed to do something or not before you try to hit build.

As for targeting frameworks and versions, I think that's only a problem on Windows (where you have the built in one and the one(s) you download to run applications) and even then you can just target the latest version of whatever framework you need and compile to a standard executable if you don't want to deal with framework stuff. The frameworks themselves don't have an equivalent in most languages, but that's a feature, not a bug. It's not even C# exclusive, I've had to download specific JREs to run Java code because the standard JRE was missing a few DLLs for instance.
by kiselitza | 2025-05-29 07:07:47+00:00
You almost had me until the "5px font" line, then it just went into waffle territory.

As for the Hurl comparison: that’s like saying Hurl is the same as Bruno, Yaak, and the rest of the crew - if aiming there, sure. Voiden isn’t a themed CLI, so visually it’s not even in the same category. And functionally, the whole point is having docs, tests, and the spec all in one place. That's something CLI tools don’t really aim to solve.

Some overlap in request-sending, sure, but very different purposes.
by roenxi | 2025-05-29 07:07:57+00:00
> The sort of havoc Mao wreaked made the greatest state in the world in 2025 by any capitalist measure.

Not in terms of the general welfare. If the question is "which peoples have the most money" the leaderboards are still dominated by historically capitalist economies in the US and Europe. Its true that China's trajectory is much more promising and their industrial policy has the west licked (although I argue mainly because the west has banned industry more than because China is some paragon of efficiency). But they started a long way behind because the west mainly relied on wealthy inter-state actors and the Chinese were burdened with a remarkably strong civic leader named Mao.

> All we get with this agreement is stability

No; the deal is massive wealth creation and rapid improvements in material prosperity. It is all driven by factories, and the thing that comes with factories is factory owners. Every time people tried factories without factory owners it ended poorly. The west is running a deindustrialisation experiment and it doesn't look like a winner to me either. I wish we'd leave the experimenting to 3rd parties instead of let China experiment with capitalism while we go off into the economic never-never.

More factories -> more stuff is the basic correlation to keep an eye on. Factory owners are going to be a part of that too; they're probably going to be obscenely well off. I support it. The important thing is rewarding the people who build and run factories.
by bubblyworld | 2025-05-29 07:08:32+00:00
A solution to the Halting problem can be repurposed as a general-purpose theorem prover. The author is correct. You simply write a program that searches all possible valid proofs till it finds the one you are looking for (or maybe doesn't and runs forever). Then you check whether it halts with your Halting solution - if that returns true, you know that a proof exists, otherwise you know that one doesn't.

In other words, you can use undecidability of first-order logic to prove undecidability of the Halting problem if you like, although it's a bit of a chicken-egg thing historically (I believe).
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-29 07:09:09+00:00
It is true that your reputation follows you, but how are going to judge whether the knowledge gathered from that video is sufficiently thorough without actually watching it or at least going through generated notes. This will be generated and left for another llm to summarize and forgotten on a drive somewhere. No one will see any of it unless there is an actual issue.. at which point, it likely won't matter for the purpose of recommendation.
by kfreds | 2025-05-29 07:09:49+00:00
> Did they get a cash infusion? Why all of the sudden are they expanding?

No cash infusion. We've been growing for years, just like many other VPN services. We're still quite a bit smaller than e.g. Nord and Express though.

As for our choice of advertising, we don't run an affiliate program, nor do we want to track our customers through online ads, so we're trying this instead. It's cheaper than you might think.

// Fredrik (cofounder of Mullvad)
by panstromek | 2025-05-29 07:11:06+00:00
Can we finally stop this "kids these days... " "back in my day..." attitude around this? Literally non of this is anything new. Before AI slop, TV's were full of soap opera nonsense that my mom would watch while doing laundry or cooking. Stephen Leacock was making fun of throwaway detective novels hundred years ago. The lesson here is not that "nobody cares." It's that nobody cares about slop, and that's why it's slop. It's now cheaper than ever to produce, so we have more of it but I doubt it occupies more space in our life than occupied before.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-29 07:12:29+00:00
The problem is the author's giving a misleading picture of the problem space with those examples.

Tasks like optimizing whole programs or running a theorem prover are difficult/impossible tasks to do perfectly. We don't have a solution verifier that we can plug into the "free" brute force framework. With theorem provers, even when restricted to fixed finite (non-trivial) lengths, I don't think we have one that always gives the right answer. And fully optimizing programs is similarly impossible to be perfect at. But if you had a halting solver you could bypass those difficulties for all of those problems.

Tasks like breaking encryption or playing chess have super simple verifiers. A halting solver would solve them sure, but we already have programs to solve them. We only lack fast enough computer to run those programs.

These are both big and significant classes of problem. The latter is not just a couple scattered examples. It has its own answers to the important questions like whether you can try every answer to make an "everything" calculator. For the first class you can't, for the second class you can. The intuition that such a thing is "too powerful" is actually a pretty bad intuition here.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-29 07:12:30+00:00
<< not HR pointing them at an uncanny-valley robo-debriefer program that the company paid for, as a termination checklist item

And yet, I think a lot of people in this thread suggest this would likely be the exact fate of this service should it be adopted. And it would be a shame, because lost institutional knowledge is a real issue.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-29 07:13:35+00:00
IIR, being obsessed with brain size & weight overlaps with phrenology, but is a distinct (and generally simpler) set of beliefs.

But both have very long and dubious reputations. And the article's failure to mention or disclaim either is (IMO) a rather serious fault.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
by scuderiaseb | 2025-05-29 07:14:02+00:00
Yeah but they should get lighter ideally and not heavier because the BMW 3 ICE has also gotten unreasonably heavy.

I'm a huge proponent of biking and electric bikes but there is too bad infrastructure, storage, safety concerns etc that are not being addressed properly. For instance I wish I could buy a Cargo bike and use that for grocery shopping and most other transportation of my kids but I don't have room in our bike storage (where I've had two bikes stolen) and I don't have room in our storage room and live in an apartment. The cars parking take up more square meters than the squaremeters of the building or close to it while the bike storage is a fraction of that.
by scuderiaseb | 2025-05-29 07:15:51+00:00
I'm not a bot but I regret posting that as my first comment and to be honest I didn't read the article before it was just my thoughts from prior knowledge. I've been on Hacker News for many years but decided a week ago to make an account.

Still you have a good point, one should be skeptical of what is written by bots.
by yusina | 2025-05-29 07:15:58+00:00
The halting problem applies also for finite-but-unbounded memory.

If you give me a decider that can tell me for any program with a state space up to size N whether it halts or not, then I will be able to produce another program with a larger state space and which then your decider won't be able to decide. This new program doesn't use infinite space. Just more than your decider can handle. You can't produce a single decider that works for all inputs.

It is often ok to approximate "finite but unbounded" with "infinite", and surely anyhing that can handle infinite inputs will be able to handle finite-but-unbounded inputs too, but in this context the two are not the same.

The term "infinite" is often misused to mean "finite but unbounded" but it is an important distinction.
by chneu | 2025-05-29 07:18:45+00:00
Basically every aspect of modern life is new. It's weird how people yearn for "the old ways" yet they don't even know what they're yearning for.

There is p much nothing in our life that wasn't an invention of the industrial revolution or later. Every aspect of our life was invented within the last 2-3 generations.

But yet people talk like these weird, mostly white Christian ideals, are how life has always been throughout history. People believe what they want to feel good about their extreme overconsumption in todays modern world.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-29 07:20:43+00:00
You previously said this: "They only way work [for humans] as a concept runs out is if we as a species decide we want it to"

Do you now agree that that is false? Because I think I've shown it to be false. There is nothing unique about humans that precludes robots/AI/inorganics from doing every job a human can better and cheaper at some point in the future.
by tgv | 2025-05-29 07:22:22+00:00
Without school and tests, the majority of the people won't learn a thing. They are too dumb, selfish and lazy to do so. They need to be coerced into learning. The system may not be the rosy image you have in mind, but human nature makes it almost unavoidable.

> it is a tool for capitalism

All communist states had normal schools and certification. Without it, the state would collapse.

We're not completely free agents, and we can't be. That's one of those Rousseau-ian delusions. We need to cooperate to form a society, and it needs to be fairly strong in order to thrive. Hence, education.
by davely | 2025-05-29 07:22:59+00:00
git worktrees optimize how data is shared across multiple directories. So, you’re not cloning and duplicating a bunch of code on your machine and just referencing data from the original .git folder.

The only downsides I’ve seen:

1. For JS projects at least, you still need to npm install or yarn install for all packages. This can take a bit of time.

2. Potentially breaks if you have bespoke monorepo tooling that your infra team won’t accept updates for, why is this example so specific, I don’t know just accept my PR please. But I digress.
by tapirl | 2025-05-29 07:23:28+00:00
I have never seen any AI system could explain correctly on the following Golang code:

package main func alwaysFalse() bool { return false } func main() { switch alwaysFalse() // don't format the code { case true: println("true") case false: println("false") } }

> Go community was trained for the longest time not to make backward-incompatible API updates so that helps quite a bit in consistency of dependencies across time

Not true for Go 1.22 toolchains. When you use Go 1.21-, 1.22 and 1.23+ toolchains to build the following Go code, the outputs are not consistent:

//go:build go1.21 package main import "fmt" func main() { for counter, n := 0, 2; n >= 0; n-- { defer func(v int) { fmt.Print("#", counter, ": ", v, "\n") counter++ }(n) } }
by ddingus | 2025-05-29 07:24:01+00:00
I know someone who uses FLTK for cross platform development. That one has a dated look too, and it's roots go back to that SGI Indigo Magic desktop I wrote about elsewhere in this discussion.

Sometimes it can be hard because people want to see the same GUI. And this is true even when it is input equal, I mean click to keystroke identical!

Most will say "modern" when they mean, "the one I drive daily."

And in many cases, those are one and the same. Modern simply is the daily driver, be it MacOS or Windows, or...

Doing that cross platform is hard!

With FLTK, a solo dev can write once, build for almost anything and it will work great. This is especially true for a C++ developer, which they are.

Over time, we have found building a modern GUI either takes a ton of time tweaking FLTK to look damn close, or it requires essentially different builds and dependencies, one set per platform supported, or...

Don't do it.

The thing is, we really value being able to bring the application to the user on their platform of choice. And today doing that is damn near free.

Basically, we just need to build FLTK on the target once, and the app will build with few to no problems. Easy peasy.

Users currently use Win 7 through 11 (yes, there are more of those out there than we may want to admit), Mac Intel and MX Apple Silicon, and a Linux user or two.

No Droid yet.

I wish it were different, but it isn't.

This tool seems high value because, like the other one mentioned here "dialog", which simply does the GUI in a terminal, command line tools are often the easiest, most portable build.

From there, one needs to adopt GUI foundation tools, which are specific to an OS, or like FLTK, look different.

Or, spend a ton more money, hire more devs and brute force cross platform tools.

I wish it were different. Is it?

Are we missing somethng?
by 3vidence | 2025-05-29 07:26:25+00:00
The supply and purchase of Dairy in Canada is centralized through the government.

Government sets a supply goal and buys that amount from farmers and then resells to the grocers / public.

It's been this way for a long time. The tarrifs are there to control for a case of oversupply in the market, but I also seem to remember that those supply targets haven't actually been met in a single year so the tarrifs effectively don't apply.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-29 07:26:34+00:00
> the training process doesn't seem to be replicable anyway

The training process is fully deterministic. It's just an algorithm. Feed the same data in and you'll get the same weights out.

If you're speaking about the computational cost, it used to be that way for compilers too. Give it 20 years and you'll be able to train one of today's models on your phone.
by Caelus9 | 2025-05-29 07:27:19+00:00
I’ve always felt that every animal probably has its own kind of language. We humans just can’t always hear it or make sense of it. I remember reading about a study on dolphin sounds that actually won an award. The patterns in how they communicate were surprisingly complex. These kinds of studies don’t just help us understand animals better. They can also inspire new ideas in other parts of life. Pretty cool stuff.
by drewhk | 2025-05-29 07:27:24+00:00
> The set of all possible mapping from all possible finite strings to booleans is definitely not countable.

Just to add another perspective to this, this is one of the places where classical and constructive mathematics diverge. Do those functions that are not expressible by algorithms (algorithms are countable) even exist? Of course you can define them into existence, but what does that mean?

Another food for thought is to consider if the limits imposed on computation by the Turing machine is a law of physics? Is this an actual physical limit? If so, what does that mean about the functions not expressible by algorithms? What is so exciting about programs/algorithms that they are both a well-defined mathematical object suitable for formal analysis, but they are actually machines as well, fully realizable physically and their properties physically falsifiable.

Before anyone starting to nit-pick, I just put this comment here as a conversation starter, not a precise thought-train: this is a deep rabbit whole that I think is worth to explore for everyone interested in the computational world. I am pretty sure other commenters can add more accurate details!
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-29 07:27:53+00:00
To my understanding, for an absolute majority of cancer cases in general (discounting the vagaries of specific cancer types and their very particular causes) the single biggest causal factor is uncontrollable genetic luck. I've seen this described many times, and even recall (without searching in detail right now) that something like 60% of all diagnosed cancers have no specific known cause except the luck of the DNA draw.
by delusional | 2025-05-29 07:28:54+00:00
> One of my favorite genres of weird project is "thing running in the browser that should absolutely not be running in the browser". Some of my favorites are the [...] the direct recompilation of Minecraft 1.12

Heh, you'd think Minecraft would be exactly the sort of thing that absolutely should be running in the browser, considering it was originally a Java applet.

I understand the point, I just find it amusing.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-29 07:30:02+00:00
Yeah, but who owns the name? That's what this is about.

Let's say I fork Firefox. I can do that because it's open. I can't call my thing Firefox though (that's that's trademark owned by Mozilla).

It turns out, the brand name is actually the thing that matters, not the code. He who owns the name owns the users.

In terms of the code, he who owns the contributers owns the code. But it takes a LOT of work to switch people from one brand to another, even if the new brand is the old developers.

Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.
by Flemlo | 2025-05-29 07:33:48+00:00
Nope not marketing. I researched this topic myself. I'm not aware that Nvidia mentioned this.

But hey it seems I can't convince you of my enthusiasm regarding ai. It's fine I still will play around with it often and looking forward to it's progress.

Regarding your researcher: NotebookLM is great and you might need to invest a few hundred bucks to really try out more.

We will see anyway we're it's going
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-29 07:33:58+00:00
Great, but unfortunately, even when compiled, the startup overhead is about half a second, which makes it unsuitable for many applications. Still I applaud it, as Shell scripting is finicky, people thend to rely on bash features, and perl is kind of over. Ruby was, and still is, my go-to language for this purpose, but I've recently migrated some scripts over to Swift.

Swift does a much better job at this as interprets by default, and a compiled version starts instantaneously. I made a transparent caching layer for your Swift cli apps.Result: instant native tools in one of the best languages out there.

Swift Script Caching Compiler (https://github.com/jrz/tools)

dotnet run doesn't need it, as it already caches the compiled version (you can disable with --no-build or inspect the binaries with --artifacts-path)
by sundarurfriend | 2025-05-29 07:34:52+00:00
Ah FireShip, I forgot that channel existed at all. I asked YouTube to not recommend that channel after every vaguely AI-related news was "BIG NEWS!!!", the videos were also thin on actual content, and there were repeated factual errors over multiple videos too. At that point, the only thing it's good for is to make yourself (falsely) feel like you're keeping up.
by mreid | 2025-05-29 07:35:27+00:00
Sure, “arbitrary” is a suitable term here too. A random process is just one way to generate an arbitrary function.

My use of “random” here was referring to the coin flipping process and was more for building intuition than precisely specifying all the other non-expressible functions. I was trying to allude to the fact that these other type of functions don’t have any easily expressible process behind them. When I’ve taught this stuff in the past I’ve found that people latch onto coin flipping more easily that imagining some arbitrary assignment of values.

For what it’s worth, I used to be a researcher in probability and information theory and have published papers on those topics so I am aware of the various technical definitions of randomness (Kolmogorov axioms, algorithmic probability theory, etc.)

I think you’re right about my comment being a little too lengthy for most people to find useful. I started explaining this stuff and got carried away.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-29 07:36:50+00:00
<< I feel like more and more one of the biggest requirements for success in business (not to mention politics) is just total shamelessness.

I am going through 'Signal and Noise' by Nate Silver and, after dismissing it at first read, now I am starting to wonder if his attempt to categorize some people on how well they can predict things is onto something. The boorish bravado ( or at least a perception of it ) is clearly part of the requirement though. You simply cannot even register to people with all the noise around them.
by whatever1 | 2025-05-29 07:38:24+00:00
Here is a contrarian view. How about keeping a valuable team member instead of getting rid of them at the first chance? I can bet that the past 2-3 decades or so the American organizations forgot collectively the most they have ever forgotten since the Industrial Revolution.

A skill cannot be handed over. You can painfully train someone to acquire some of it over time, but certainly you cannot “hand it over”
by jmiskovic | 2025-05-29 07:42:41+00:00
I would rather recommend this video [1] from SimonDev. It is much more enjoyable to watch. But all of these explain the exact same approach of rendering instanced geometry, with wind dynamics made in vertex shader.

I used this as reference to implement an infinite grass world in ~300 LoC of Lua and GLSL.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4 [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua
by charcircuit | 2025-05-29 07:43:12+00:00
>monoculture for the win

The browser is the actual product. An open source browser engine lowers the barrier of entry of creating new browsers.

>Likewise I guess there is no problem that game developers mainly care about Windows, Proton is open source, so no big deal

Which is why Valve recommends game developers to target Windows and use Proton for compatibility. Having one platform to target simplifies developers lives. Before developers were making bad ports to Linux because they did not have the resources to properly support another tech stacks. The value of developers being able to target a single platform can not be understated.

Though this is fundamentally a different situation as the leading implementation is closed source and is more capable.
by lqet | 2025-05-29 07:44:50+00:00
7 digits can be written much faster than 3 words, and (most) digits are free of any unintended association. Also, the 7 digits may contain the house number. You cannot reliably use what3words for a delivery address, because the house on the square may have several house numbers. I also don't like the commercialism behind what3words.