MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-21 13:23:31+00:00
Great article by a rust legend. Two points:

- The let-else syntax (Relatively new), anecdotally, removes many of my cases for unwrap. (But this may not apply to how others use it) - Unwrap's fine if it makes the code easier-to-read and you know it won't panic for a reason the compiler doesn't know about.
by srean | 2025-05-21 13:23:37+00:00
May I raise you a

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_function

It's right in the title.

In probability theory, integration theory, as well as electrical engineering, "distribution function", unless further clarified, means that cumulative thing.

In math, nomenclature overloading can be a problem. So context matters. In the context of dirac delta, distribution means something else entirely -- generalized functions.

Oh! So sad you deleted your point about densities. One can only laugh at and enjoy these idiosyncrasies of nomenclature.

In Electrical Engineering one uses j for imaginary numbers because i is taken (by current).
by kamaal | 2025-05-21 13:24:51+00:00
>>These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted.

This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are actually getting good work done.

Bad quality things are cheap != All cheap things are bad.

Same will work with AI too, while people continue to crap on AI, things will only improve, people will be more productive with AI, get more and bigger things done for cheaper and better. This is just inevitable given how things are going now.

>>There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something.

In the peak of outsourcing wave. Both the call center people and IT services people had internal training and graduation standards that were quite brutal and mad attrition rates.

Exams often went along the lines of having to write whole ass projects without internet help in hours. Theory exams that had like -2 marks on getting things wrong. Dozens of exams, projects, coding exams, on-floor internships, project interviews.

>>After dozens of hours billed you will, in fact, get code where the new file wasn't added to the csproj or something like that, and when you point it out, they will bill another 20 hours, and send you a new copy of the project, where the test always fails. It's exactly like this.

Most IT services billing had pivoted away from hourly billing, to fixed time and material in the 2000s itself.

>>It's exactly like this.

Very much like outsourcing. AI is here to stay man. Deal with it. Its not going anywhere. For like $20 a month, companies will have same capability as a full time junior dev.

This is NOT going away. Its here to stay. And will only get better with time.
by Galanwe | 2025-05-21 13:24:59+00:00
From my experience, Zig is the worst at error handling.

Not that the language itself make it hard, on the contrary, but the standard library itself is littered with opinionated error handling that straight up panic with no recovery at every corner.

For instance, it was decided that the kernel returning EINVAL for any syscall is worth panicking, even though there are a lot of cases where that is recoverable. The answer from Andrew? It's the kernel's fault. Very helpful.

Quotes are cute, but their actual implementation matters more.
by squiffy | 2025-05-21 13:25:06+00:00
I still think about some scenes in Naked having only seen it once. It's brutal and uncomfortable at many points, and a brilliant film.

I was visiting Dalston, London and thought I recognised a certain house and sure enough it was the (at least exterior) filming location for "the" house in the film. It was characteristic enough to recognise even after one viewing.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-21 13:25:07+00:00
Ouch. My 7.8kW system fully installed was 13k CAD ( a bunch was DIY)

Had it for a year now. Generated 7.7kWh which is worth $950. Took out natural gas, power bill for the entire year (heat pump, elec hot water) was $1000.

Snowy mountain town in a tight valley in BC.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-05-21 13:25:21+00:00
Sounds like its written by an AI non believer.

I've been able to write things in a week that would literally take me six moths previously.

The critics don't know the facts about how much time you can really save because their anti AI so they don't use it so they don't know, but they're happy to tell you some "facts" about how your new found AI assisted productivity is less than you really think it is.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-21 13:25:24+00:00
True, but if data centers were exclusively built along places like the Columbia River, as an example, that energy, even excess energy, is practically free once you have the hydro-electric plant. I guess the same is true for solar, wind — any power generated that does not require consumables.

Rivers gotta run, suns gotta shine, winds gotta blow.
by bluGill | 2025-05-21 13:25:32+00:00
A LLM response so don't trust it, but

Biological and Genetic Programming: In biology, BGP can refer to methods or algorithms used in genetic programming or bioinformatics. BGP (Bureau of Governmental Personnel): In some governmental contexts, BGP may refer to a specific bureau or office related to personnel management. BGP (Bureau of Geographical Planning): In urban planning or geography, it might refer to a bureau that focuses on geographical data and planning. BGP (Big Green Potato): In agriculture or gardening, it could refer to a specific type of potato or a gardening initiative. BGP (Bilateral Grant Program): In finance or international relations, it may refer to programs that provide grants between two countries.

Elsewhere someone posted a link to the wikipedia disambiguation page. It is very insightful to compare the two lists - you should do this.
by hbartab | 2025-05-21 13:25:33+00:00
> Rather than relying on backroom deals or dynastic succession, the party's internal promotions and candidate selections are governed by an AI-driven merit evaluation system.

Because an AI cannot be gamed? Or because the company behind it does not have its own agenda? Thanks, but no thanks.

Most governments are already opaque enough in their decisions, adding a black-box AI is not going to anything to improve that. And it'll just hand power to those who are behind the AI. So instead of a government for the people by the people (through representation), you end up with a government run by corporations.

And at the very end:

> Authors: Vysakh, ChatGPT(o3)
by seanhunter | 2025-05-21 13:26:09+00:00
The whole idea of balanced trade makes no sense at all.

Take New Zealand as an example. Last year the major import from NZ to the US was wine.

The major export from US to NZ was military hardware.

Now. Why should the dollar quantity of wine you buy from someone equal the dollar quantity of military hardware you sell them?

There really is no reason at all that the bilateral trade between countries should be balanced and therefore it's not reasonable to think that the aggregate trade with all countries should be balanced or that it would be more desirable if that were the case.
by skwee357 | 2025-05-21 13:26:11+00:00
Because this “marketing hype” is affecting the way we do our job.

Some of us are being laid off due to the hype; some are assigned to babysit the AI; and some are simply looked down on by higher ups who are eagerly waiting for a day to lay us all off.

You can convince yourself as much as you want that it’s “just a hype”, but regardless of your beliefs are, it has REAL world consequences.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-21 13:26:46+00:00
(Note: A lot of answers discuss LINQ to SQL, which ZLinq does not appear to optimize.)

Iterators: LINQ works on any type that supports iterators. In most languages, this is any type that you can write a for (foreach) loop on and perform an operation on each item in a collection / array / list. (In C#, the collection must implement the IEnumerable<T> interface.)

Lambda functions: LINQ then relies heavily on Lambda functions, which are used as filters or to transform / narrow down data. Most languages also have something similar to these.

Generics: C# allows for "list of foo objects" instead of "list of objects that I have to typecast to foo." Although not explicitly required to implement something LINQ-like in other languages, the compiler verifying type helps with autocomplete and in-IDE suggestions; and helps avoid silly typing bugs.

Generic inference: C# can infer the return type from a lambda function, and infer the argument type in a lambda function. This means you don't need to decorate LINQ syntax with type information; except in some rare corner cases.

This is why, for example, there are LINQ-like libraries in Javascript and Rust. Java supports something that is LINQ-like, although in my limited Java experience, I didn't use it enough to really "get the hang" of it.

---

Note that LINQ has a very serious pitfall: It's easy to accidentally build a filter, and then have a lot of overhead re-running an expensive operation to re-load the source collection. The simplest way to avoid this is to call .ToArray() or .ToList() at the end of the chain to ensure that you store the result in a collection once.
Show HN: Built a coffee tracker with AI and data viz to improve your next cup
by otto-cannes | 2025-05-21 13:26:47+00:00
I built a pour-over coffee tracker that logs your brews, visualizes extraction, and uses AI to suggest your next move. Made it to help myself dial in new beans more methodically - technically it can work with Espresso as well, but I haven't really tested it.

Based on my experience, the AI is helpful for identifying direction, but not great with specifics. For example, I often make larger adjustments when dialing in - if I’d normally grind 3 clicks finer on my Comandante, the AI suggests just 1 click or a 1°C temp change. I’m still fine-tuning the prompts, but I think it’s promising for those who are relatively new to specialty coffee.

If you make pourover or espresso at home, I'd love to hear what you think.
by ubermonkey | 2025-05-21 13:26:47+00:00
I LOVE that film -- which, by the way, was made in 1987, not 2001.

The only time I've ever stood in line for an autograph photo at a con was for Paul McGann. My best friend's birthday was the following week, and while he's not a Doctor Who person, he IS the person who introduced me to Withnail. McGann was quite happy to inscribe a photo of himself as the Doctor with a line of his from the film ("We've gone on holiday by mistake!").
by skydhash | 2025-05-21 13:26:47+00:00
Most of coding methodologies is about reducing the amount and the complexity of code that are written. And that's mostly why, on mature projects, most PRs (aside from refactoring) are tiny, because you're mostly refining an already existing model.

Writing code fast is never relevant to any tasks I've encountered. Instead it's mostly about fast editing (navigate quickly to the code I need to edit and efficiently modify it) and fast feedback (quick linting, compiling, and testing). That's the whole promise of IDEs, having a single dashboard for these.
by jpc0 | 2025-05-21 13:26:59+00:00
Someone linked a document a few weeks ago that address the topic of abbreviations and when the abbreviation is the common form it is acceptable to just use the abbreviation.

I don’t think anyone in their right mind would open every article with HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS( Cascading Style Sheets).

For networking it would be the same with BGP/OSPF/RIP.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-21 13:27:02+00:00
I don't think culture changes from the top, but rather from you and I. And that eventually leads to the top. Lincoln, for instance, did not end slavery - society ended slavery. Had it not been Lincoln it would have been somebody else imminently, perhaps done far more gracefully. Of course the top can enact change through forceful measures, and they can also try to influence culture, but more often than not they are products of us all.

And the idea for cultural shift is not hard or illogical in the least. Get rid of the consumerist mindset and you're probably 99% of the way there. Of course the problem there is that consumerism maximizes profits for corporations and GDP for politicians. Further emphasizing that the change must start with you and I. Like you said, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that infinite economic growth isn't really a realistic or even desirable goal.

There also seems to have been a collaborated push against traditional norms, which was probably just the natural extreme of expressions of freedom rather than any grand conspiracy - in fact Plato discussed this exact phenomena in his arguments against democracy thousands of years ago. And traditional norms should not define us, but they should be the norm. And indeed they already are, but you'd never know that if you paid any attention to marketing, media, and so on. Basically I think we want to create a society that walks a more reasonable middle ground rather than being on one extreme of norms = dogma, or on the other extreme of anti-norms = dogma.
by RobKohr | 2025-05-21 13:27:03+00:00
I use Cursor as an agent and sometimes I use autocomplete. Both tools are dependent on what you are doing at the moment. I like autocomplete when I am focused in tight on one file. I spell things out in depth in file and start out code and hand pick completions. It brings my mind in sharp on what I am doing. Agent is when I am doing big but simple stuff where I am crafting less in detail. Refactoring and setting up tests and basic shallow framework code.

But this article is on point. All of things listed are more impactful than LLMs
by aristofun | 2025-05-21 13:27:24+00:00
We live in a many dimensional phase space. Our life is a trajectory line in it, moving along the line is percepted as time.

God sees all the space at once (this is an “all knowing” part).

But we are left with the choice of which turn to take at every moment (this is the “free will” part), which picture to draw, which movie to create (this is the “in god’s image” part) etc.

From human perspective there is no difference if you create or explore the phase space. Just a wordplay. Because by definition you can’t distinguish those.
by neogodless | 2025-05-21 13:27:38+00:00
When you write things in a week rather than six months, what was the context?

Small teams, more frequent releases, solving problems incrementally, working across the solution rather than having to bridge silos, feeling empowered and safe to try things?

If you already had those things, and took them for granted, then it may be hard for you to estimate the impact they might have had if they weren't present.

Would you still have been able to use AI to build something so much more quickly if your hands were tied by organizational policy?
by mhuffman | 2025-05-21 13:28:41+00:00
>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership

Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends on "them" for our livelihoods and the lives of people that depend on us, but "them" doesn't doesn't have any dependency on you that can't be swapped out rather quickly.

I am a capitalist, don't get me wrong, but it is a very one-sided relationship not even-footed or rooted in two-way respect. You describe "them" as "leadership" while "Them" describe you as a "human resource" roughly equivalent to the way toilet paper and plastics for widgets are described.

If you have found a place to work where people respect you as a person, you should really cherish that job, because most are not that way.
by caseysoftware | 2025-05-21 13:28:55+00:00
I'm in Texas and designed our own solar+battery setup in '21. I had an installer handle that bit and the interconnect though. I found the "secret" was the to leave room for expansion.

In Texas, residential grid-tied solar can be up to 20kWh so I chose cells that got me to 19.96kWh

Then I added an 29kWh battery stacks (18kWh total) but each stack could go to 18kWh (36kWh total). Then I also used a pair of Generac inverters which lets me get two more stacks for 72kWh total.

My goal was resiliency, not sufficiency, so I use it grid-tied so I charge during the day and use at night. When there are storms coming, I flip it to "priority backup" which will prioritize charging.. even using the grid to do it if there's not enough sun.

Anyway, it's been in production since January '22 and my annual* electric bill is ~$1100. Even better, when we have an outage (occasional as we live in a heavily wooded area) if our stack is full, we have ~5 days of battery backup for the fridge, a handful of appliances, and our Starlink.. therefore we have safe food storage, safe food prep, and non-terrestrial communications.

Of course, this cost ~$80k to get there in 2021 (aka before crazy inflation)
by righthand | 2025-05-21 13:29:00+00:00
Any good engineer enjoys creating abstractions too instead of hoping a machine trained on code golf will solve the problems.

My manager probably adds 10+ hours to my week by pushing Llm code at our projects only to follow up with several merge requests to fix his work. I just approve whatever he pushes because he isn’t interested in actually solving the problem. He’s interested in seeing if he can fiddle the solution out of an Llm. Each time it involves me telling him the answer. His boss is the same way. Literally dragging the company efficiency down and proving the efficiency gains are meaningless.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-21 13:29:07+00:00
Maybe. A bigger impact factor imo is the distance between the tech you're using and the center of mass of training data. Showcase site in NextJS with a CSS gradient hero banner and a news letter? AI will be amazing. But then again, so will many no-code solutions. The sweet spot is probably custom enough that you're just outside of Wordpress but within well-trained domains like web and its popular frameworks. If you venture outside the mainstream, quality degrades rapidly.
by cccybernetic | 2025-05-21 13:29:22+00:00
An incredibly written film that's infinitely quotable.

"Balls. We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now!"

"Here Hare Here"

"I feel like a pig shat in my head."

"I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight."
by criddell | 2025-05-21 13:29:30+00:00
I think the productivity gains depend a great deal on the tools you use.

Writing Python or Javascript? You're in luck! Wrangling some gnarly SQL or complex Rust? Expect a modest boost. Modifying an old Eiffel program? You're on your own.

I work in WinDbg analyzing crash dumps and I'm trying to get better at it so I've been trying to get Claude and Gemini to help me get to the bottom of some memory dumps I have lying around and the experience hasn't been great.

I used Claude yesterday because I wanted to modify my gvim setup to remember the window size and position and after a few tries I finally got what I want (it really wanted to use mksession but that persists way more than window size and that isn't what I wanted).
by K0balt | 2025-05-21 13:29:45+00:00
I don’t have much in the way of links, but I can give you an overview.

We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from.

This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered.

The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water.

We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility.

There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use.

The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol.

Anyway, that’s the view from space.
by coliveira | 2025-05-21 13:30:08+00:00
That's just another strain of the doomsday economics that has been applied to China at least since 2005. Yet, the Chinese economy and its government have proven to be able to overcome all these supposed huge obstacles that would stop the Chinese growth at any moment... So I urge you to rethink your theories based on reality of what the Chinese people are capable of doing.
by ben-schaaf | 2025-05-21 13:30:22+00:00
IANAL. It's my understanding that this hasn't been determined yet. It could be under public domain, under the rights of everyone whose creations were used to train the AI or anywhere in-between.

We do know that LLMs will happily reproduce something from their training set and that is a clear copyright violation. So it can't be that everything they produce is public domain.
by asl2D | 2025-05-21 13:31:19+00:00
Yeah i fear that too, my grandma is already sending me links of AI animals that she thinks is real, and the horrible/beautiful art of facebook memes/holiday cards, seems to be completely overtaken by AI. We know that full fake video of you with your own voice asking for something or even interacting on a video call is basically solved problem. Prime time to reestablish and confirm trusted channels with the people you care about.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-05-21 13:31:47+00:00
this is true, but they also seemed to be deeply involved in the industries and products they promoted (or panned). It was much harder to start/run a magazine, and the market tiny compared to present; I can't help but believe it was more about the software than being the king maker. Stories abound of creators showing the editor their invention over the kitchen table. Today's influencers are hacks in comparison.