MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Veserv | 2025-05-23 23:00:01+00:00
If you have a US employer who is unwilling to spend 8 k$ on software engineering productivity then they are pennywise, pound foolish. It literally costs 10x that for a single junior engineer. And, as I pointed out, the net productivity improvement you need to see to justify that expense is miniscule.

If your employer really is skeptical, then they can run a A/B test over a small group of engineers to prove out changes in productivity. But not even being willing to run that test when it is so cheap is just management incompetence.

Engineers are ridiculously expensive. In electrical engineering, where the engineers are generally less well-paid than in software, employers routinely spend multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per engineer per year in tooling. Not being willing to spend 8 k$ on a test of well known technology and attempting to identify mere single digit percentage improvements is just stupid.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-23 23:00:03+00:00
It's really dangerous if you don't know what your doing. I'm about .5 km from the closest supermarket.

If it's snowing or just cold out I'm still ordering food.

If I'm mildly sick, ordering food.

I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most Americans can do that.
by metalman | 2025-05-23 23:00:07+00:00
it could actualy be phrased the other way.... "the lack of a meter caused the french revolution" ok, no, but it most definetly contributed to the revolution, as France was a maze of competing local measurement "standards" that caused a lot of problems and expense in business and trade, some of it wildly subjective, like an acre of land was not an area measurement, but was based on how much grain a given piece of land could grow.......and at one point before the revolution, there had begun a highly contentious attempt to straiten the whole mess out
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-23 23:00:17+00:00
Right, and the current state of tech - from accounts I’ve read, though not first hand experienced - is the “black box” methods of AI are absolutely questionable when delivering citations and factual basis for their conclusions. As in, the most real world challenge, in the basic sense, of getting facts right is still a bridge too far for OpenAI, ChatGPT, Grok, et al.

See also: specious ethics regarding the training of LLMs on copyright protected artistic works, not paying anything to the creators, and pocketing investor money while trying to legislate their way around decency in engineering as a science.

Carmack has a solid track record as an engineer, innovator, and above the board actor in the tech community. I cannot say the same for the AI cohort and I believe such a distinction is important when gauging the validity of critique or self-aggrandizement by the latter, especially at the expense of the former. I am an outlier in this community because of this perspective, but as a creator and knowledgeable enough about tech to see things through this lens, I am fine being in this position. 10 years from now will be a great time to look back on AI the way we’re looking back at Carmack’s game changing contributions 30 years ago.
by hello_computer | 2025-05-23 23:02:17+00:00
PC-98 eroge art is beautiful. These writers—who freely take pot-shots at the “perverted” hikikomori of 30 years ago—wouldn’t dare criticize the hardcore pornography (Bonnie Blue? The OnlyFans Economy!) the world is presently steeped in. It’s like they know which waggle dance lets you in, and which one gets you booted from the hive…
by tinyplanets | 2025-05-23 23:03:54+00:00
I think the author's main argument is interesting, and despite the good counter arguments already made in this thread (health care, car dependency, social isolation), it does make me think a bit about where I could possibly retire. I live in a smallish, highly-desirable city just north of Seattle that - while being pleasant to live in - is becoming extremely expensive.

For me, one of the biggest issues with living out in a small rural town like this is the culture. From my experience, the majority of rural areas in the United States are now extremely politically conservative. Going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound metroplex always reminds me of this reality... lots of MAGA and confederate flags, billboards promoting the latest ultra right wing candidate, etc.
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 23:06:17+00:00
I agree that the bus in the scenario is implausible for most. But in real life, most rural people would simply own a car. The author describes car ownership's costs hyperbolically, but unless you're doing long-distance commuting, driving a $5000 car wouldn't add more than $200 to his monthly budget, which wouldn't change the math dramatically, while I'd argue it would improve quality of life tremendously, especially because rural America of 2025 most definitely assumes car ownership in a way that it didn't 100 years ago.
by lareter77 | 2025-05-23 23:06:47+00:00
I am American but I know many conservative Canadians that this was basically the last straw. I am not even sure conservative is the right word. Just not liberal. They work a trade, like bars, beer, hockey and hanging out. They really don't care about politics at a deep level.

I had been sick of hearing them complain about Trudeau for years.

They thought it was obvious things were going to swing the other way and instead the country voted to stay on the same path that Trudeau literally resigned from.

Canada is basically a one party state at this point. It would be like if the only US media was the NY Times, MSNBC and CNN. The media jumped on Trump's comments about the 51st state and swung the election with ease.

It is not just Alberta, the people I know are in Ontario but there is nothing they can do. They would for sure move to Alberta if this happened. It will all be framed like this is some crazy fringe idea though even though 19 of 20 Canadians I know would agree.

The absurd thing to me with Alberta separatism is that there is no way the US would allow this. They would be a defenseless resource rich territory for Chinese infiltration.

Canada is in huge trouble. They are basically single party, money laundering haven at this point with a Soviet style media brainwashing regime.

Ultimately, In the long run I think Canada ends up a casualty caught in the cross fire between the US and China.
by SahAssar | 2025-05-23 23:07:05+00:00
So you are saying that the parts of for example MIT or similar licenses that in clear terms say:

"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

do not constitute something that frees you from those liabilities?

Cause if so I think basically most of open-source would just shut down tomorrow.
by seabird | 2025-05-23 23:07:06+00:00
Different than what's in a city, and generally not as enjoyable if you're just passively consuming it. Lots of motorsport (auto manufacturing was huge in the area, very long tradition of it), fishing/hunting, local music (some styles represented better than others, but that goes for everywhere), hobbyist heavy industry. There's definitely plenty of other stuff going on that I just haven't heard about. Pretty often I run into situations where I'm talking to somebody about a new interest and they say "yeah, there's actually plenty of that going on, look into/talk to X, Y, or Z". Not so much culinary or visual/fine arts stuff happening, so if you're looking to participate/collaborate as far as that goes, I can tell you off the top of my head that the area would be a bad fit.

If you're looking to be involved in culture for just a few hours at a time by going to a restaurant or show and not being involved much past that, you're going to be painfully bored here. I don't think doing that is a moral shortcoming or anything like that, but there are a lot of people that are doing that, don't realize it, and misinterpret the lack of opportunities to do so outside of a large city as that place just not having any culture at all.
by palata | 2025-05-23 23:07:29+00:00
> Erm... Your original comment said "you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources."

Yes. I said "distros", not "the distro maintainers". The distro is the maintainers + the packagers, and packagers can be random contributors (I package stuff for my distro when needed, but I am not a distro maintainer).

> So... Who's gonna package it if you say that distros should package it?

People who will use Erlang on that particular distro. Under the supervision of the distro maintainers. There is typically some kind of hierarchy where there are the "community" packages that are just "untested" (sometimes they can get promoted to a more trusted level), and the "core" packages that are handled by the distro maintainers.

> What you advocate for is "why bother with ease of use and convenience, everyone should learn how to compile and package everything from scratch"

Not at all, but it seems like you don't know how it currently works in traditional distros, and you don't understand what I'm saying (probably I'm not being clear, that's on me).

What I advocate seems absolute common sense: "the package maintainer(s) should understand and use the package on the distro for which is is packaged".

The vast majority (probably almost the totality of) users of Ubuntu or Arch have never had a need to package anything, because everything is already there. Because those distros are very popular. Depending on your choice of distro, it may happen that a package hasn't been contributed or even that it doesn't compile (e.g. if you use musl). In that case, if you want it, you need to contribute it. But if you use musl, you implicitly accept this and are supposed to know what you are doing.

> The user of a package doesn't necessarily know how to package something, and shouldn't need to.

That's your opinion. I would say that a Gentoo user is expected to have some idea about compiling packages, otherwise they should not use Gentoo. Ubuntu is targetting people who don't want to know how it works, that's fine too. Diversity is good.

What I don't like, is Windows-minded people ("I shouldn't have to understand how my computer works") who come to Linux and push for everybody to become like them. "We should all use systemd and Flatpak, and pay one team of 50 people who know how that works, and the rest of us should just use it and not know about it" -> I disagree with that. Those who think that should just use Ubuntu/Windows/macOS and leave me alone. And for those who use Ubuntu, they should remember that they don't pay for it next time they say "it's shit because it doesn't do exactly what I want".
by xyzzy123 | 2025-05-23 23:07:53+00:00
One way (not the only way and I get this won't work well for people with medical needs or kids) to handle this is stock up on rice, beans, nonperishables and have a good first aid kit. You go out to get your "freshies" but it's not an issue to be stuck at home for a week except in the most dire circumstances.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-23 23:08:56+00:00
Looks like they packaged Expo into VSCode-based web editor.

I just signed up, clicked the preexisting prompt "Create an Airbnb-style home screen with a search bar at the top, filters for dates and guests, and a scrollable grid of property listings. Each listing should show an image carousel, price, rating, and basic details." and was able to preview a tab in the app on my iPhone within 5 minutes.

Pretty impressive.

But here is where the work / fun starts! You would still need a developer to revise the code, push to source control, add tests, run tests, understand how to deploy to appstore.

Vibe coding is a bit like coding 'hello world'. The actual work starts now! And that can't be vide coded away.
by viraptor | 2025-05-23 23:09:33+00:00
I understand the issues listed, but some assumptions at the beginning are not really problems in practice. Or at least not of your alternative is a custom implementation.

> They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!)

None of that is needed. You can setup the update system in isolation, redirect the required paths and copy the keys manually. None of that needs to run as root either if you can set the permissions correctly or delegate actions to other processes.
by mrandish | 2025-05-23 23:09:51+00:00
> this now-forgotten art style native to Japan is known, shorthand, as “PC-98”

I'm really into retro computing having collected over a hundred 80s 'home' computers (all non-PC/Mac), including at least a dozen Japanese models, but have never heard the term "PC-98" to describe a particular style of pixel art, probably because I don't speak Japanese and haven't lived there. However, I do see some traits in how the examples shown were constructed which strike me as unique beyond just the obvious Japanese aesthetic of the content.

While the article highlights that Japanese computers had greater memory and graphics capabilities earlier due to the need to represent more complex fonts, there's another factor I suspect is behind the differences I'm seeing in those images. Japanese business computers tended to have analog RGB output and displays earlier and more commonly than those in the U.S. Of course, analog RGB was available in the U.S. around the same time but it wasn't usually considered worth the increased cost for mainstream desktop use in the early 80s. Monochrome or 4 colors were generally considered sufficient for 80-column capable text displays (~640 pixels wide).

Some of the dot patterns I'm seeing in those examples work well on RGB displays but wouldn't work as well on composite video displays or TVs. In the US, early home computer pixel art targeted resolutions like 256 x 192 and 320 x 200 in 4 or 16 colors but generally assumed the pixels would be displayed on a TV or composite monitor and so leveraged the pixel blending and additional artifact colors composite video can uniquely create to enhance their artwork. These composite-exploiting blends and colors are lost when those images are displayed in RGB, leaving only the original pixel patterns which aren't what the original pixel artist saw or intended when they created the image (which is why original composite-targeted pixel art is best viewed on a composite CRT or CRT emulation). I think these Japanese artists being able to target analog RGB output is behind some of the subtle (but cool) uniqueness I'm seeing in the "PC-98" pixel patterns.
by atonse | 2025-05-23 23:10:56+00:00
Yup I would be concerned about how easy it is to find people.

And I say this as an elixir employer and whose company has done only elixir projects for 8 years.

In all cases though, our client just wanted us to solve a problem and didn’t care how we did it. So we’ve been very lucky. But have also earned their trust over the years by delivering.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-23 23:12:08+00:00
But the requirements you listed aren't actually requirements of ACME, they're lazy choices you could make but they aren't necessary. Some clients do better.

For example the client needs a Certificate Signing Request, one way to achieve that is to either have the client choose the private keys or give it access to a chosen key, but the whole point of a CSR is that you don't need the private key, the CSR can be made by another system, including manually by a human and it can even be re-used repeatedly so that you don't need new ones until you decide to replace your keys.

Yes, if we look back at my hopes when Let's Encrypt launched we can be very disappointed that although this effort was a huge success almost all the server vendors continued to ship garbage designed for a long past era where HTTPS is a niche technology they barely support.
by delichon | 2025-05-23 23:12:33+00:00
> flagging viewership numbers

I was excited to see it but my viewership flagged within a few minutes, when they tossed out the whole gendered One Power yin yang conceit so central to the books. Did I miss anything good?

Something similar happened at the start of the Hunger Games, when one character playfully makes the protagonist miss her shot at a deer, when both of them have starving families to feed. That one did get a little better, partly because it was hard to get worse.

If you're going to betray the source material best to get it over with quickly, so I can go do something else. Thanks for that.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-23 23:13:07+00:00
JSON is better than XML, but it really isn’t great.

JSON doesn't even support comments, c'mon. I mean, it's handy for some things, but I don't know if I'd say "JSON is better than XML" in any universal sense. I still go by the old saw "use the right tool for the job at hand". In some cases maybe it's JSON. In others XML. In others S-Exprs encoded in EBCDIC or something. Whatever works...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-23 23:13:43+00:00
The lifetime value of a college degree in the United States is very high.

College is expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the high private university tuitions you read about ($200K+). Most people have access to state universities that are much cheaper. Even at private universities most students are on sliding scale payments with scholarships. It's common for 10-20% or more of a university's students to be paying effectively $0 tuition.

While you definitely can skip college and still have a good career, the trades never really pay as well as internet lore suggests and the number of people who start startups and succeed is very small.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-05-23 23:14:08+00:00
When you have the blueprint of what to build with a large export market ready to buy, it's easier to plan an economy.

Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow.

Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie.

Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates.

Nothing works forever.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 23:14:09+00:00
Sure but there are established alternatives for that also. The internet supports looking up DNS records (A, MX, SRV, TXT, etc), the web offers /.well-known as a place to store things like API endpoint specs, etc. The main difference with MCP is that the discoverability comes with the stream-oriented communication semantics.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-05-23 23:14:53+00:00
Yep, it could work for some. And I think that's his point. Depending on how much meatspace socializing / culture one wants/needs. Library internet, meh ... but working 3 more hours at Stewart's would take care of that ... and access to a hyuge amount of entertainment, news, online spaces. Readers, writers, painters, DIYers. At $0.04 per kWh, keeping a small room warm in the winter is trivial ... could be worse!
by DFHippie | 2025-05-23 23:15:25+00:00
Here's another observation (not a thought experiment): To figure out which scenario pollutes more, one could add up the various inputs and outputs. A producer is limited by the volume and cost of different means of transportation. It isn't apodictically true that the same volume of tar is delivered regardless of the means, so preventing a pipeline from being built does not necessarily increase net pollution. That being nebulous, the Democrats' motivations are less nebulous.
by skydhash | 2025-05-23 23:16:37+00:00
> dired gets some hate, I think because it creates a lot of buffers and they tend to stick around, but it's never bothered me.

There's a variable in recent versions of emacs that deals with that

dired-kill-when-opening-new-dired-buffer

I'm glad it's a switch, though. I set it to true, but I can see someone being used to the dired command to go to a specific directory, and then manage things with dired-insert-subdir.
by coolcase | 2025-05-23 23:17:03+00:00
> I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most Americans can do that.

Shit that's horrifying.

I have health issues and walking 2km a day to try to help fix. So I see 2km a day as basic. 6-10km run a day would be "fit" IMO. things as humans are designed to walk.

Living in suburbia means I have to walk "for the sake of it" although I cam make it useful e.g. get some milk!

As for cold. Anything above minus 5 should be OK just wear stuff like skiiers wear which can be got cheap off brand.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-05-23 23:17:11+00:00
It's fine as long as they're open about it. It's when they say "We're a very selective institution that only accepts the academic best of the best from the entire world" and then also allow pay to play, clarifying "Also the people whose parents donated us buildings juuuuust so happen to be the academic best of the best from the the entire world" that people start to question just how selective admission really is, and just how world-class their student body and standards really are.

If they kept stats on who was an endowment/legacy admit and gave them a different colored diploma so people could filter them out when assessing things like grades and graduation rate and they didn't effect the curve I think there would be less criticism of the process.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-23 23:17:18+00:00
My main takeaway from the article is that I agree it benefits the younger generation of Americans to consider moving abroad if they are comfortable with a different lifestyle where consumerism is secondary to adaptation. Personally I’m looking forward to traveling to places where being a Blues Guitarist from Texas might be a curiosity rather than a liability (such as in Texas). The biggest export, decade after decade, the US can cite is “culture” and “what is cool” and though other countries do have significantly different political / authority structures, I’m interested in exploring them. Nepal, Panama, Albania, and Vietnam are all on my list.

Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on limited means.
by TOMDM | 2025-05-23 23:17:54+00:00
This doesn't match Anthropics research on the subject

> Claude sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal “language of thought.” We show this by translating simple sentences into multiple languages and tracing the overlap in how Claude processes them.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
by adidoit | 2025-05-23 23:18:04+00:00
Exactly. Ultimately the economic incentives rather than tech frothiness will tell.

One thing different from APIs is the LLM makers get tokens for every MCP call so they have incentives to hype this up significantly.

MCP is useful - i use it quite a bit internally for some testing/QA workflows. However, the hype level is disproportionate to utility.
by fullStackOasis | 2025-05-23 23:18:38+00:00
> They're angry that ... selfish older generations selling their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc.

Wait, so they're angry because people are spending their money on themselves for fun stuff at the end of their lives? Or maybe even using it for un-fun medical care? Rather than handing it over to their kids? I don't know what to say. Except that I'm glad I never had kids.