MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-07 02:58:00+00:00
Posix compliance isn't holding back progress. You are welcome to make the most advanced, paradigm-smashing new shell in the universe. If it's good, people will use it. If you want it to replace Posix compliant shells, you might want to consider why people might not want to leave Posix and address that first, rather than ask everyone to abandon them "because we're advanced now"

But please don't ruin the one great thing about shell scripting, which is that it's still possible to write one shell script that runs everywhere. Yes it's old, antiquated and quirky. It's also very convenient not to have to 1) install new tools on every system, 2) adapt a billion old scripts for a new tool, and 3) learn yet-another-new-paradigm.
by jdlyga | 2025-05-07 02:58:44+00:00
I lost 60 pounds on WeightWatchers back 15 years ago. I signed up again recently but quit after a month after finding better methods and realizing they've lost their way. What made WeightWatchers great back in the day was its no-nonsense approach, great word of mouth, and excellent in-person sessions and resources. You lose weight, and if you achieve your goal you get a lifetime membership.

In the years since, WeightWatchers got caught up with customizable and ever-changing programs that were far too soft and excessively permissive. And they lost sight of why people joined the program. It felt like they wanted to become a lifestyle brand instead of a support group of people focused on achieving a goal.

They also drastically cut down on in-person sessions, and the virtual sessions are a poor replacement. It's a zoom call with a few dozen people and the entire thing feels very phoned in.

And while they were among the first to have a points tracking website (I loved e-tools!), which was excellent in 2009, Weight Watchers never really improved upon the technology and got left behind. Nowadays there's cheaper apps that do the same thing, and more advanced LLM apps where you take pictures of your food or describe it and it figures out the nutrient values.

My advice to post-bankrupcy weight watchers: focus on in-person sessions, and make it more goal and education oriented.
by mirekrusin | 2025-05-07 02:58:48+00:00
Windsurf is not present in enterprise.

Github copilot, vscode and apis through azure - basically everything through Microsoft - is.

Alternative to Microsoft's monopoly in enterprise that exists is open source.

Comparing this situation to twitter is more like if there was some chat api service, known more than twitter itself, that twitter is using/wrapping where other alternative clients exist, some with stronger popularity, some being open source.
by mardifoufs | 2025-05-07 02:58:49+00:00
Why does it matter, really? I mean sure, ada could've been an alternative language that everyone pushed for using but it kind of missed the boat due to historical circumstances , the context around its early use, etc. It might even be that rust users are just more enthusiastic and have been able to push more... But so what?

But why does it matter if the language that has seen some traction in terms of "rewriting software in safer languages" is rust? At that point it becomes even more religious to just reflexively oppose rust because "well why didn't x or y see the same push??"? Again, it really doesn't matter why!
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-07 02:59:09+00:00
I hear that argument often (although less than in the past) and always shake my head. In phones, Apple, Samsung, Google are analogous to Coke and Pepsi. Premium product, but achievable luxury. Apple is not Chanel.

Price sensitive folks go to MVNOs with off brand or lower spec devices - the equivalent to Dr Thunder at WalMart.

Apple is dominant in the US because they got their ass kicked in the services space by Google and learned their lesson. iCloud is an incredible platform today.

There’s really two androids. “Fancy Android” with Samsung Galaxy and Nexus - nice phones whose users seek them out. “Dumb Android” with customers steered by price or phone guys getting spiffed. The users don’t know or care about the device and have low value. The reality is, as with soda, the cheap product is marginally cheaper, but less pleasant and usually a poor value.
by yodon | 2025-05-07 03:00:20+00:00
Yes. 100%. Before energy star, refrigerators were made with heating coils glued to the outer panels because it was cheaper to warm the outside of the fridge to avoid condensation than it was to install adequate insulation inside the fridge. The operating cost of those lightly insulated fridges was much higher, but the parts cost was a few dollars lower. Energy star and those yellow power consumption stickers changed that.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-05-07 03:00:55+00:00
I will be honest, I have long assumed everything in the store has Energy Star on it, and I am sorta doubtful companies will deliberately make less efficient appliances if it goes away.

But it also seems like one of those things that surely doesn't cost much to keep around either. Getting rid of it is just virtue signaling to anti-climate people.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-07 03:01:46+00:00
And once a level of "story points" is achieved within a Sprint you can't go backwards and you can't deliver less value to the Customer. There is no room for re-evaluation. Forwards, moar!

As per Tame Impala's Elephant:

He pulled the mirrors off his Cadillac

Because he doesn't like it looking like he looks back

Looking back gives the impression of missteps or regret. We have no such thing!
by standardUser | 2025-05-07 03:03:05+00:00
When it comes to reducing emissions, increased efficiency has been a bigger factor than green energy production, at least historically. Perhaps that's changed by now with the rapid growth of wind and solar in recent years. But energy efficiency technology isn't performative or "woke", it equates to power plants that didn't have to be built and money you and me saved on our electric bills every month our whole lives.

But to be honest, I'm not even sure how efficient Energy Star is these days. It feels like the US is behind Europe and East Asia by a decade, at least from a consumer perspective.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-07 03:03:33+00:00
> UAE and KSA have interests, but insufficient influence to force outcomes

2019 is a good example of UAE using it's heft [0][1]. In a couple years we'll probably see leaks in Bloomberg or AJ about KSA doing something similar rn.

> India has less motivation for war. But it’s also done nothing to negotiate a peace.

Both have worked on reconciliation immediately before some incident arises that causes talks to collapse.

For example, the last couple months before this incident happened [2], in 2021 thanks to the UAE [1][3] before Bajwa-IK-Munir's tussle, 2017-18 before Balakot according to Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy [4], and 2016 before the Pathankot Attack [5].

In most cases, both attempts are made at negotiating normalization, but some faction attempts to undermine it.

And there were multiple other examples before the Modi admin, at least 2-3 other attempts in the MMS-Musharraf admin and 1 attempt in the Vajpayee-Sharif admin, but they were all undermined by some faction in the Pak Armed forces.

I'd recommend reading "The Spy Chronicles" by AS Dulat (former head of India's intel agency) and Asad Durrani (former head of Pakistan's intel agency) where they decided to leak a number of these incidents. The book ended up causing a major political scandal in both India and Pakistan.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-28/india-...

[1] - https://tribune.com.pk/story/2417903/gen-bajwas-india-peace-...

[2] - https://tribune.com.pk/story/2460279/fm-says-govt-to-serious...

[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-22/secret-in...

[4] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14799855.2019.16...

[5] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35240272
by mardifoufs | 2025-05-07 03:06:42+00:00
Are your sources mostly Indian sources? Do you think those are somehow less biased than whatever sources I use?

Also you can check my post history if you really want to, I always call out "we are just fighting terror" arguments.

But still, I hope you realize that what India sees as terrorism in this case (which means Kashmiri separatism, which again I agree is mostly a Pakistani funded thing) is very tied to Indian nationalism.

Obviously the Kashmir is used by Pakistan as a way to destabilize its opponent (they don't particularly care about Kashmiri emancipation lol). But India would never recognize any form of separatism (peaceful or violent) from the Kashmir anyways, and will label it as terrorism anyways regardless. Just like the British did to justify putting down any rebellion in the British Raj for example.

Now, India has obvious the right to protect its national integrity but it still makes said war against terror incredibly nationalistic, since terror is (broadly) defined as anything that goes against national unity.
by slt2021 | 2025-05-07 03:07:37+00:00
It is useful for the US to isolate China from Iranian oil resources. Currently Iranian oil can go via Pakistan to China.

Thats how Us operates: exploits old conflicts for its own immediate benefit, like it did with Ukr-Rus war.

If some people die on both side it is acceptable for the Us, because these are not Us citizens dying
by xyzzy123 | 2025-05-07 03:10:09+00:00
I can't point to any evidence. Also I can't think of what direct evidence I could present that would be convincing, short of an actual demonstration? I would like to try to justify my intuition though:

Seems like the key question is: should we expect AI programming performance to scale well as more compute and specialised training is thrown at it? I don't see why not, it seems an almost ideal problem domain?

* Short and direct feedback loops

* Relatively easy to "ground" the LLM by running code

* Self-play / RL should be possible (it seems likely that you could also optimise for aesthetics of solutions based on common human preferences)

* Obvious economic value (based on the multi-billion dollar valuations of vscode forks)

All these things point to programming being "solved" much sooner than say, chemistry.
by quantadev | 2025-05-07 03:10:11+00:00
Yeah it seems like there's really no "adult supervision" at all in OpenAI. This purchase was a panic move. Windsurf would be worthless without the AI. Probably OpenAI knows that AI is now a commodity technology and no longer a space they can monopolize so they're just trying to get off a ship that's sinking, and find some viable path to having a tech that doesn't ultimately depend on OpenAI even having a monopoly any longer.
by autoexec | 2025-05-07 03:10:21+00:00
As it stands today, making sure that all children who need them are provided with healthy school lunches is far from a solved problem.

There are problems and inefficiencies in the NSLP. Making free lunches available to every child would solve some of them. That's unlikely to happen any time soon though. The current administration has repeatedly threatened and chipped away at the program while also making it harder to provide safe and healthy food to the children who are currently enrolled.

At the rate things are going I wouldn't have so much faith that the program will continue or, if it is to continue, that it wont continue to be made worse and leave an increasing number of children going hungry.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-07 03:10:28+00:00
> That area is devastated

Most of Jammu Division is alright (eg. Kishtwar is relatively quiet). The issues are more prominent towards the ilakeh near the LoC and international border. It's like the bad old days again from what I'm hearing, back when you'd hear about some shelling in pind X killing 2-3 unlucky souls who couldn't make it to a bunker on time.
by retornam | 2025-05-07 03:11:19+00:00
$400M in real revenue versus $300M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) are totally different things. Real revenue is money actually earned, while ARR just multiplies one month's subscription revenue ($25M) by 12, ignoring customer churn.

Startups love flashing ARR figures because "$300M ARR" sounds impressive, but without knowing churn rates, they might never actually collect that full amount.

JetBrains however collected real $400M in a year.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-07 03:11:53+00:00
I already hated C++ (having written 100s of thousands of lines of it in games and at FAANG)

I'd be curious to know what if any true fixes are coming down the line.

This talk: "To Int or to Uint, This is the Question - Alex Dathskovsky - CppCon 2024" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnaZ0x9Mmm0

Seems to make it clear C++ is just broken. That said, and I wish he'd covered this, he didn't mention if the flags he brings up would warn/fix these issues.

I don't want a C++ where I have to remember 1000 rules and if I get one wrong my code is exploitable. I want a C++ where I just can't break the rules except when I explicitly opt into breaking them.

speaking of which, according to another C++ talk, something like 60% of rust crates are dependent on unsafe rust. The point isn't to diss rust. The point is that a safe C++ with opt into unsafe could be similar to rust's opt into unsafe
by Arnavion | 2025-05-07 03:12:25+00:00
Various kind of "desktop" applications like databases and video games use custom non-global allocators - per-thread, per arena, etc - because they have specific memory allocation and usage patterns that a generic allocator does not handle as well as targeted ones can.

My current $dayjob involves a "server" application that needs to run in a strict memory limit. We had to write our own allocator and collections because the default ones' insistence on using GlobalAlloc infallibly doesn't work for us.

Thinking that only "embedded" cares about custom allocators is just naive.
by kazinator | 2025-05-07 03:12:46+00:00
A prominent project in which people have a stake in seeing bugs fixed can afford to charge a refundable deposit against reporters.

Say, $100.

If your report is true, or even if it is incorrect but honestly mistaken, you get your $100 back.

If it is time-wasting slop with hallucinated gdb crash traces, then you don't get your money back (and so you don't pay the deposit in the first place, and don't send such a report, unless you're completely stupid, or too rich to care about $100).

If AI slopsters have to pay to play, with bad odds and no upside, they will go elsewhere.
by chmod775 | 2025-05-07 03:13:43+00:00
Compared to the rest of the school system, the price of a kid's lunch is a small amount of money, and it's certainly not worth the overhead of bookkeeping, administration, payment processing, and checking eligibility for each individual kid.

Take Finland as an example. Schools are paid for by taxpayers, costing around 8,000 euros per student per year [1] (the numbers don't change much regardless of which level of education you look at). Of that just 570 euro pay for balanced and healthy meals (mostly labor costs).[2] That works out to roughly 3 euro per meal.

The benefit of a good meal probably outweigh many other things you could do with that money when it comes to educating children that are your future taxpayers.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134054/finland-regular-... [2] https://www.schoolmealscoalition.org/sites/default/files/202...
by eclipticplane | 2025-05-07 03:14:02+00:00
Without Energy Star or regulations, what incentive do manufacturers have to display this information, and display it accurately? Consumers cannot hold manufacturers accountable. Even boycotts are under legal scrutiny. Our only option are class action lawsuits, which take years or longer and can be considered a cost of doing business, and have been stymied by binding arbitration contracts.
by sampullman | 2025-05-07 03:16:23+00:00
I agree that they can do extraordinary things already, but have a different impression of the trajectory. I don't think it's possible for me to provide hard evidence, but between GPT2 and 3.5 I felt that there was an incredible improvement, and probably would have agreed with you at that time.

GPT4 was another big improvement, and was the first time I found it useful for non-trivial queries. 4o was nice, and there was decent bump with the reasoning models, especially for coding. However, since o1 it's felt a lot more like optimization than systematic improvement, and I don't see a way for current reasoning models to advance to the point of designing and implementing medium+ coding projects without the assistance of a human.

Like the other commenter mention, I'm sure it will happen eventually with architectural improvements, but I wouldn't bet on 1-5 years.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 03:17:19+00:00
> US isn't interested in picking sides. Historically it has tried to be friendly with both

Sure, but one side offers clear benefits over the "ally from hell." (Islamabad, at the very least, has clearly picked a side.)

Also, I'm not arguing what I think will happen. I'm arguing how this could escalate. And the only way I see it doing so is (a) someone bombs the wrong thing or (b) Beijing or Washington see an opportunity to win chips.
by slt2021 | 2025-05-07 03:18:15+00:00
I tend to take Marxist view: elites always exploit the common man, and when the common man becomes unhappy, it is the best strategy to channel hate towards the Other so that regular folk dont start asking inconvenient questions.

Like every time there is small blip in economy in the Us, it is always illegals and immigrants in general and poor people are blamed. Always.

Never have I ever seen a PE billionaire getting blamed for acquiring companies by borrowing at 0% rates and firing people to and outsource jobs

People in Bay Area feel it is okay to pay 50% in marginal taxes on payroll, while billionaire class either doesnt pay at all, or pays 10% capital gain at best
by bb88 | 2025-05-07 03:19:18+00:00
virtualenvs are great, but they're not great on their own. requirements.txt work sorta, but then any package with more than 50 requirements requires a non-trivial amount of manual labor to maintain. (Hell even 20 deps are a pain)

Astral uv and poetry both maintain the pyproject.toml for you -- and as a bonus, they maintain the virtualenv underneath.

Then for the complete python newbs, they can run 'uv sync' or 'poetry install' and they don't have to understand what a virtualenv is -- and they don't need root, and they don't have to worry about conflicts, or which virtualenv is which, etc.

So the simple case:

mkdir test cd test # init a new project with python 3.13 uv init -p 3.13 # Add project deps uv add numpy uv add ... # Delete the venv rm -rf .venv # reinstall everything (with the exact versions) uv sync # Install a test package in your venv uv pip install poetry # force the virtualenv back into a sane state (removing poetry and all it's deps) uv sync # update all deps rm uv.lock uv lock

Now cat your pyproject.toml, and you'll see something like this:

[project] name = "test" version = "0.1.0" description = "Add your description here" readme = "README.md" requires-python = ">=3.13" dependencies = [ "numpy>=2.2.5", "pillow>=11.2.1", "scipy>=1.15.2", ]
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 03:19:34+00:00
> Thats how Us operates: exploits old conflicts for its own immediate benefit, like it did with Ukr-Rus war.

This is realpolitik 101, and every powerful society does it. Like, India didn't help sever Bangladesh f/k/a East Pakistan from Islamabad because it was being nice. (I'm not saying every society exploits every old conflict. Just that if you need to do something, you start with extant fault lines. Like, if you're going to war with Nazi Germany you don't sideline the Soviets and British because that's mean or whatnot.)

Also, the problem with Pakistan isn't that its ports could be used to import oil. It's that the ports are being configured for Chinese blue-water operations.
by xarope | 2025-05-07 03:21:49+00:00
This reminds me of SQL's constraints, or pydantic's custom types and validators, which can validate that a value should be an int, and between 0-999, and not exceed, e.g. -1 or 1000.

pydantic is a library for python, but I'm not aware of anything similar in rust or golang that can do this yet? (i.e. not just schema validation, but value range validation too)
by retornam | 2025-05-07 03:21:59+00:00
Cursor purports $300M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) but stays silent on churn.

They made $25M from subscriptions one month, took that number, multiplied it by 12, arrived at $300M and everyone has been running with that line without ever asking what their churn looks like.

They could have churned $24M the next month, ask yourself why they are silent on churn if they are doing so well.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 03:22:45+00:00
> 2019 is a good example of UAE using it's heft

This is not projecting power, it's the UAE (and Qatar) playing their aspirational roles as the new Davos/Switzerland for diplomacy.

Pakistan is definitely more anti-peace than India. But while Islamabad undermines peace, New Delhi is mostly uninterested in it.
by analog31 | 2025-05-07 03:22:54+00:00
A weird coincidence: I had a copy of [0], the violin making book. I'd rate it as being sufficient to make a passable violin for an amateur or fiddler, if that person had already seen and played violins. But nothing close to a high quality contemporary instrument.

Also, the violin-making art is evolving over time, and it's speculated that designs will have to change in response to the disappearance of old growth timber. A rumored consequence of global warming is that trees grow faster, changing the grain structure of the wood. There's been great progress in making bows from carbon fiber.

It strikes me as a bit weird that violin playing could be taught from a book, especially Suzuki 1 (both my kids used it, and it's great). Again, theories about how the violin is played have changed since that book was written. For instance, there has been a growing emphasis on ergonomics and physical health, that was glossed over when I learned as a kid.

Of course these are just two books. It's not unthinkable that the knowledge from multiple books could be combined with recordings, videos, and even measurements of known violins if things like 3d imaging become cheap.
by adventured | 2025-05-07 03:23:18+00:00
Live in a college town. Either do contracting, or work at eg CVS/Walgreens/Sam's Club/Costco etc for $16-$20 per hour. Pay your bills with that. Work on your start-up ambitions. It will provide you a forever runway. Is it easy? Of course not, it's very long hours. It's very viable however. I did that path at one point so I wouldn't need VC while I hacked away at ideas, wouldn't have any contracting conflicts, and wouldn't have to touch my investments to sustain myself. And those businesses will also give you decent health insurance (worth $8k-$10k in terms of if you had to foot the bill solo).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 03:23:42+00:00
> Pakistan-India conflict is orthogonal to America and China's

India is negotiating trade deals and weapons purchases with the West. (Historically, Moscow was its security source.) Pakistan got some F-16s in 2022, but otherwise has been deepending ties with Beijing. It's wild to suggest America's cold war with China is orthogonal to this conflict.
by photonthug | 2025-05-07 03:24:01+00:00
I'm not claiming that, just asking what this is really about, but anyway your defense of this is easy to debunk by just noticing how ambiguous language actually is. Consider the prompt "You are a helpful assistant. I want to do a thing. What should our approach be?"

Does that look like consent to paw through documents, or like a normal inclusion of speaker and spoken-to as if they were a group? I don't think this is consent, but ultimately we all know consent is going to be assumed or directly implied by current or future ToS.