MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rubitxxx2 | 2025-05-10 16:48:43+00:00
Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.

Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?

This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)

I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-05-10 16:48:53+00:00
> No need for your client to even know that OAuth exists

Yes, you can do that, however the problem is getting a client_id/client_secret in the first place. You need to register yourself for one, you need to (nowadays) whitelist every single account or go through a google verification process. At one point you could apply for a client_id that allowed anyone to use it, but that ship has sailed.
by mattnewton | 2025-05-10 16:50:01+00:00
Cursor does actually train their own models, most importantly models that apply edits to files, and models that assemble context for the llm agents. Has the author actually used the tools they are writing about?

Cursor/windsurf/roo/kilo/zed are about smoothing over rough edges in actually getting work done with agenetic models. And somewhat surprisingly, the details matter a lot in unlocking value.
by James_K | 2025-05-10 16:50:32+00:00
I have long been aware of that particular user of Odin, after all the creators mention it frequently. The fact remains that the US government has warned against the use of languages such as Odin [1]. As such, it is competing in the extremely small niche of "languages best suited for embedded computing and operating systems". Suffice to say that most of its users likely do not use it for that. Finally there is the matter of trust. A while ago I was shopping around these new languages that have sprouted out of LLVM and watched a few talks from the creators of various languages. The Zig team were both ambitions and clear in their presentation. They gave me the impression of an experienced and motivated team. By contrast the Odin presentation I saw was utterly directionless and filled with fluff. I like to think I have a good nose for BS, and Odin trips it. That great wall of random corporate logos of companies which don't use Odin on their website doesn't help. Upon investigating, I find that the creator of the language is also a developer at JangaFX, so is either using the Odin website to advertise his own software, or hoping to obtain clout by mentioning large companies as if they used Odin when they do not. You might think I'm being overly critical, but I've learned the hard way to avoid things like this. It's a mighty pain depending on something which ends up abandoned or unused. The Zig compile supports multiple codegen backends, compiling C/C++ code, and easy cross-compilation. It is a considerable feat of engineering and shows a lot of dedication on the part of the creators. I can see nothing comparable on the Odin front.

Additionally, I don't think a C replacement should be immediately intuitive to someone who has only ever used C. To entice people away from on of the most popular and stable programming languages ever created, you must offer more than an incremental improvement. There needs to be a paradigm shift, which necessitates some degree of learning on the part of the developer.

[1] https://techtheworld.net/2024/03/06/the-nsa-list-of-memory-s...
by FredPret | 2025-05-10 16:50:37+00:00
Exactly. Each of us is standing on the shoulders of giants - technological, scientific, commercial, political, and many other kinds of contributions.

Life may not be perfect, but we all live downstream from Ugh the Caveman who once held a blunt rock in each hand, decided to whack them together, and bootstrapped the entire human tech tree, all while facing lions, sabre-toothed tigers, mammoths, ice ages, terrible diseases, and hunger.
by hirsin | 2025-05-10 16:50:56+00:00
This is one of the few places I think it's obvious why MCP provides value - an OpenAPI document is static and does no lifting for the LLM, forcing the LLM to handle all of the call construction and correctness on its own. MCP servers reduce LLM load by providing abstractions over concepts, with basically the same benefits we get by not having to write assembly by hand.

In a literal sense it's easier, safer, faster, etc for an LLM to remember "use server Foo to do X" than "I read a document that talks about calling api z with token q to get data b, and I can combine three or four api calls using this http library to...."
by WalterBright | 2025-05-10 16:51:05+00:00
You're right that learning can be its own reward.

But the point remains, doing things that won't pay off in your expected remaining life are not worth doing.

For another example, I was looking at when to start receiving social security benefits. If I start them earlier, the payments are lower. But, if I invest those lower payments, then the built up portfolio will be generating investment returns.

Where is the crossover point, where you're better off taking the earlier, lower payment vs the later, higher payment? For me, that point was at age 83. So I decided to take the earlier payments.

The weird thing is nobody ever mentions this when discussing the option of when to start taking the payments. Except my accountant, who figured this out for himself, too.

People just don't understand the time value of money.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-10 16:51:25+00:00
> Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD?

Depends. If you're looking for consumer goods, they're just as dogshit as everyone else. Products intended for large commercial customers, particularly where support contracts are involved, tend to be actually decent.

> Or European companies: Philips, Siemens?

Never had an issue with Hue, never had an issue with Bosch-Siemens "white goods".

> Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..

iOS certainly is not an abomination. I'm using both Android and iOS, and the latter is much more polished.
by barnacl437 | 2025-05-10 16:51:34+00:00
> When asked which programming language to learn first - especially for kids - my usual answer is JavaScript.

i've never really thought about learning js first, my mind was something more toward python. also i feel like im not a kid anymore -- i'll turn 18 in a few (not specific) days.

i dont really know anything beyond html and some python if/else and basic operators. maybe id consider throwing myself into a random course if i have time and am really motivated (the only proper way that would keep myself learning on track).
by renewiltord | 2025-05-10 16:51:34+00:00
Famous economist story https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/regrets-of-a-dying-econo...

Goes like this:

My father, like me, was an economist. He was not a star, but if you work in asset pricing you probably know of his work. This past weekend, he passed away.

As the end approached, he became very philosophical. At one point, I asked him if he had any regrets. He replied:

"Do you remember that summer when we rented a cottage in Maine?"

He was talking about a memorable family vacation. One where we spent three carefree weeks together on a lake. My kid sister took her first steps there and I learned to swim there.

I told him that I did. Then, he said the following:

"That summer, I had an idea for an extension of the CAPM model. But being on vacation, someone beat me to it. I regret ever taking that trip. If we stayed home, it could have been me publishing in Economica."

A few hours later, he died.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-10 16:51:41+00:00
> Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc.

It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.”

We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on.

> I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met.

I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice.

> All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day.

I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that.

I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.
by amelius | 2025-05-10 16:51:54+00:00
Thanks but I was thinking more about how fields drop off in 2D space versus 3D space. Simple electrostatic example: consider a 1D string of identical resistors. Voltage drops linearly as you go along this string. Now consider a 2D grid of resistors: voltage does not change linearly anymore if you move between two points (current will move in a more complicated spread-out pattern). So the dimensionality changes how fields behave.
by phil21 | 2025-05-10 16:51:55+00:00
Very late reply, but as someone who lost a lot of weight on Mounjaro and has so far (2 years after the fact or so) kept it off via lifestyle changes this is how I see it as well.

When you are constantly trying something and failing at it, you get into negative feedback loops. At least I do. Why even try? Then you get into depressive behavior and other such toxic lifestyle issues that effect far more than your physical health and appearance.

Tirzepatide was simply a tool that let me engage in self control and better behavior towards food while I learned what will and will not work for me long term. Call it a crutch, cheating, whatever - I don't care. All those are absolutely true in some sense. It gave me space to dial in consistency and habits when it came to eating and exercise.

After not stepping foot in a gym my entire life I now make zero excuses and show up 3 days a week rain, shine, depression, anxiety, lack of time time, whatever. Zero excuses. Same goes for eating and diet. I know where my weaknesses lie now, and simply don't put myself in a position to fail very often.

This in turn let me realize (well, remember!) that yeah, I can accomplish incredibly hard things if I put my mind to it. I knew this logically as I'm an extremely accomplished person (in my own mind at least!) - but now it's felt at a more emotional and subjective level. I used this feedback loop and am applying it to other areas of my life. It's all about consistency and good habits for me.

There isn't any rocket science or magic behind it. It's just a positive feedback loop replacing a negative one, and that pushing outwards to other areas of my life. It's still incredibly hard work, same with losing weight was even with the chemical help.

It's also why upthread I said that morbid obesity is a strong correlation to lack of self control. There are many reasons for not having self control, and I honestly think humans really don't have it in the sense most like to think about it. I don't see it as a moral issue as most do, so I can offend folks by saying so without meaning it that way. It's just habits and consistency and putting yourself in the right environment. Very difficult to do when surrounded by the negative forces modern society tosses you in by default, and it's zero surprise to me or indication of a moral failing when so many simply go with the default option. I sure did! It's also very easy to focus on one area of your life at the exclusion of the rest - starting and running a successful company gives you a million excuses to not worry about your health or weight, but it's still toxic to you in the end regardless of other successes in life.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-10 16:52:10+00:00
I want to think that at least some are using the new found focus to get shit done for good, perhaps at the expense of looking like puppets or yes men/women (publicly).

I imagine a lot of them rationalized their decisions that way, as you suggested earlier. "If I don't take this job with Trump, he'll give it to a corrupt crony or some random nutcase. But if I do take it, I can work for positive change from the inside. Hmm. I really don't have a choice, do I?"
by weinzierl | 2025-05-10 16:53:34+00:00
In case of glibc I think what you said is orthogonal to its bloat. Yes, it has complex implementations but since they are for a good reason I'd hardly call them bloat.

Independently from that glibc implements a lot of stuff that could be considered bloat:

- Extensive internationalization support

- Extensive backward compatibility

- Support for numerous architectures and platforms

- Comprehensive implementations of optional standards
by sean_ | 2025-05-10 16:53:54+00:00
yea this boilerplate is super simple and effective. It's essentially mimicing how I use claude code and cursor, but with low level control.

A very cool thing I'm working on in this space is having an llm code with the codesys sdk, then run the code.

So imagine cursor coding a codesys file instead of doing the task directly so that it instead scripts claude code to do a sequence of actions and allows cursor/the user to simply analyze the results.

this also enables parralel claude code sessions which is super cool!
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-05-10 16:54:05+00:00
I hear this and I agree. It's obviously a serious problem.

As a side issue. There's also a different, deeper problem. Any Q&A site that's actively hostile to people who ask questions is going to become toxic and intolerable within a few years. I'm pretty sure that's true even if the hostility is reasonable and justified.

As a newsgroup user since 1986: The problem with the original Eternal September was not only a tidal wave of ignorant new users. It was also that a large fraction of the experienced user base were smug lunatics long before September finally arrived.

Sorry for the like "radical candor" here.
by remexre | 2025-05-10 16:54:05+00:00
Idiomatic design would be a big one; there are a lot of ways to design a program in a higher-level OO language that, if followed in C, will lead to a program with lots of bugs around error handling and resource cleanup.

This kind of ties into the argument made by some in the Rust community that "the ownership was there the whole time" -- in a language without automatic memory management, you really do need to be aware of the life-cycle of an object in memory. Rust's specific rules aren't fundamental, but "even when an error occurs, I know what cleans up this object / this state" is.
by simonw | 2025-05-10 16:54:07+00:00
My theory is that a lot of the buzz around MCP is actually buzz around the fact that LLM tool usage works pretty well now.

OpenAI plugins flopped back in 2023 because the LLMs at the time weren't reliable enough for tool usage to be anything more than interesting-but-flawed.

MCP's timing was much better.
by hedora | 2025-05-10 16:54:38+00:00
Under Linux, you can still use the -dpi setting in xrandr (or in your x.conf). It sets the font bigger without blurring all the icons.

I prefer it over the replacement approach that modern desktop environments (and wayland) use. I've been exclusively using high-DPI displays for much longer than Mac OS or Windows have supported them, and the old approach was much better.

There's some argument that you need to blur everything badly (instead of setting a session-wide DPI) if the user is simultaneously using two displays with wildly different DPI's. That user is going to have a bad experience no matter what, so I've never understood that argument.
by chasd00 | 2025-05-10 16:54:58+00:00
Yeah I think about things like that too. My grandfather was born in the Great Depression, fought in the pacific during ww2 is some of the worst battles. Came home and went to work driving an oil truck in west Texas. He raised a happy, healthy family and never hurt any of them. Despite the hardships and horrors he endured he was a man full of love. If, on my death bed, I can say I’ve earned the right to stand in the shadow of his grave then I’ve done pretty well.
by riku_iki | 2025-05-10 16:55:14+00:00
> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.

it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.

I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
by sean_ | 2025-05-10 16:55:56+00:00
The source code is 155 lines.

You can vibe through asking cursor if it has any bugs and let me know or create a PR!

But by having 155 lines of source code and through continuous use of the sdk, I haven't experienced any problems

Actually this comment just gave me the idea of creating a file of codesys doing just this in its own repo!
by sean_ | 2025-05-10 16:57:23+00:00
But yes, the LLM could go wrong because it's simply a wrapper around scripting claude code in non-interactive mode.

the immediate use cases are more towards automatically creating tests and documentation, as well as other non-destructive actions

such as read-only mode: https://github.com/RVCA212/codesys/blob/main/examples/exampl...
by hanson108 | 2025-05-10 16:57:24+00:00
The Digital Equity Act would have expanded internet access to rural, disabled, veteran, and low-income Americans.

And I’m sure we’ve heard Trump called it “racist “unconstitutional” and viewed to kill it.

Republicans also just nuked the program providing hotspots to kids that didn’t have internet access.

So I keep wonder why - why are the most powerful killing internet access to those who infrastructure has left out?

So Starlink gets the contract. I got that.

But is that the whole plan — or just the cover for something more?
by hirsin | 2025-05-10 16:57:39+00:00
In the same way that crypto folks speedran "why we have finance regulations and standards", LLM folks are now speedrunning "how to build software paradigms".

The concept they're trying to accomplish (expose possibly remote functions to a caller in an interrogable manner) has plenty of existing examples in DLLs, gRPC, SOAP, IDL, dCOM, etc, but they don't seem to have learned from any of them, let alone be aware that they exist.

Give it more than a couple months though and I think we'll see it mature some more. We just got their auth patterns to use existing rails and concepts, just have to eat the rest of the camel.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-10 16:57:55+00:00
Yeah, one of the qualities of the abstraction is how often you have to reach for the escape hatch, how nice it is to use the escape hatch, and whether it's an escape hatch vs. just two clean modes of tooling working together.

SwiftUI has failed pretty much all of those for me.

In react-pixi / react-three, you have your declarative component tree alongside a `useTick`/`useFrame` function that you can use to do more surgical work, and it works well together. Each component can tap into the tick to update itself.

const Enemy = ({ initalPos, size }) => { const [pos, setPos] = useState(initialPos) useTick(dt => { setPos(/* Move in a circle */) }) return <Sprite src="/enemy.png" size={size} pos={pos} /> }

I've migrated a few medium-sized pixi/three projects to their React wrappers, and the code cleaned up so well that I could work on them again.

Before that, I'd tried modeling games in Elm and then using its port system to send the game state to JS which then updates the pixi/three world. But it's exactly this updateWorld(oldWorld, newState) that's hard to write, yet that's what these libs do for you.
by ikurei | 2025-05-10 16:57:55+00:00
I use both Linux and Mac, and in my experience Mac's handling of multi-monitor setups and, specially, of them changing, is only slightly better than Linux's.

For most situations you do not need to do anything difficult to plug any number of monitors to a Linux computer with a modern, full-featured distro, other than arranging them. Mac does a better job of remembering your setup and adapting to a monitor disappearing, but it's not that much better.

I'm still not sure I understand why the author needed this tool, may be because they have more than one computer plugged into the same monitor?
by david-gpu | 2025-05-10 16:59:52+00:00
> I don't do things that have a payoff time that is past my expected passing.

> Starting an investment program that won't pay off for decades doesn't make sense at my age, either.

I continue saving money because I want my kids to have opportunities that I didn't have, and avoid stresses that I did have. I will not live to see the consequences of my actions today, but they matter a whole lot to me.

Same with other decisions that will affect future generations beyond my family. I want, in some way, to leave this Earth in better shape than when I was born.

I'm not the only thing that matters.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-05-10 16:59:56+00:00
> (but why did they think the Gimp character was called that in Pulp Fiction?

Pleading ignorance here... When I saw Pulp Fiction as a teenager, and they refer to the BDSM guy as "the gimp", I thought that's what they called that outfit. I feel like it was a not-uncommon understanding in the US (even if an erroneous one)... All my friends and I at school referred the the character Voldo from Soul Calibur as "that creepy guy in the gimp suit":

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/ssb-tourney/images/f/fb...

We didn't mean it in the sense that he was crippled (he's actually quite agile), we meant it in the sense that he was wearing tight leather with bindings and zippers.