MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephg | 2025-05-09 00:32:26+00:00
Yep. That’s why I prefer to criticise OOP (and in particular, inheritance). Not specific languages.

I met this old guy at a conference one, ~15 years ago. He said he didn’t get why people say Java is slow. His Java, he said, runs just as fast as C. I asked him to show me his code - and I’m so glad I did. It was amazing. He did everything in one big static class, and treated Java as if it were a funny way to write C. He ignored almost the entire standard library. No wonder his code ran fast. It was basically JIT-compiled C code.

Java isn’t the problem. “Java best practices” are the problem. It’s a culture thing. Likewise, can write heavily OOP code in C if you really put your mind to it and write your own struct full of function pointers. But it’s not in culture of the C community to overuse that design.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-09 00:32:57+00:00
I use - but cautiouslyc, that is I don’t do ‘vide coding’ (I hate the term). Why? I started building a project in Rust - which I was very new. Using LLMs helped me speed up the process of development and testing, and I verify what was spit out by the LLM (unlike vibe coding).

Granted, it is frustrating at times since I end up spending lot of time verifying and iterating.

But overall it is definitely efficient to use LLMs for developing software.
by mrbluecoat | 2025-05-09 00:33:53+00:00
My vote would be https://vector.dev/ or https://nanomq.io/ over Fluent Bit for performance reasons. That said, S3/MinIO is fairly universal so that along with stdout should be fine. I'd be interested to learn more about your custom local Pulse Service: https://docs.qpoint.io/readme/data-flow#fully-self-hosted-ma...
by spauldo | 2025-05-09 00:34:07+00:00
I'm not sure I agree with the number and size of packages people install (unless you're comparing them to, say, org-mode), but that's not really what I'm talking about.

Emacs runs all elisp code as if it's part of Emacs. Think about what Emacs is capable of, and compare that to what a browser allows its extensions to do. No widely used software works like that because it's way too easy to abuse. Emacs gets away with it because it's not widely used.

I don't know the first thing about VSCode but I'm willing to bet there are strict limits to what its plugins are allowed to do.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-09 00:34:13+00:00
This is a good example of "lying with statistics". You are doing this by implying we are paying more for the same thing. You are then doing more of this by equating healthcare spend to the total welfare state. Europe is still spending a lot of money on healthcare; less than us, but their healthcare is pretty crappy.

Healthcare is one part of the profligate safety net europe has maintained for decades, not the whole thing. Europe has more pensions, more unemployment, more retirement benefits, more childcare, more socialized housing, more of almost every flavor of welfare. They pay for this by shifting the burden of defending themselves to America.

Here's a good and more in-depth analysis: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/04/europe-military-welfare...

It's a hell of a lot more useful than one graph. Please read it.
by cyberax | 2025-05-09 00:34:55+00:00
> ITER doesn't use high temperature superconductors.

It does, for high-current buses that interface with regular resistive power distribution. They are also planned for some auxiliary components (like the neutral beam injectors).

> ITER has been criticized since early days as a dead end, for example because of its enormous size relative to the power produced.

ITER is NOT designed for power generation. It's essentially a lab experiment to see how plasma behaves in magnetic confinement and test various technologies.

That's why ITER was designed with a very conservative approach to reduce the technical risk. We don't need it to be compact, this can come later. We just need it to work.

And yes, it is necessary. Plasma behavior can't be simulated numerically or analytically. It always provides surprises, sometimes even good ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-confinement_mode
by jaqalopes | 2025-05-09 00:35:11+00:00
A friend and I were at the WW2 museum in New Orleans a couple years ago and he said something that really stuck with me. Amazed at an exhibit on wartime manufacturing, he turned to me and said, "This is so unbelievable to me. To think what we accomplished when everyone in the country was pulling in the same direction. There's no way that could happen anymore." I hardly want to glorify warfare, but he has a point. As a young person in our chaotic and ambiguous present day looking back into the haze of the past, there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-09 00:36:22+00:00
I really don't see how anything I wrote was that controversial; he's free to disagree and pursue his own beliefs, obviously. Everything someone says that's not wrapped up in formal logic or statistics is implicitly opinion; the fact that I find repeatedly saying so tedious and ridiculous doesn't mean I'm asserting I am somehow an arbiter of the One True Faith.

We all act as we think best. I can try to change how others think. That's about the start and end of it.
by outcoldman | 2025-05-09 00:37:12+00:00
I have found most of the apps I tried so complicated, and have a learning curve. At the end I realized I just need regular expressions and JavaScript to do almost anything with the filename.

Add to that, that it extracts EXIF from images/photos, and additional metadata from videos and audio - I feel like this tool should be sufficient enough for most users (actually developers, or people who can ask LLM how to write regular expressions and JavaScript for them).
by jamesfinlayson | 2025-05-09 00:37:16+00:00
> In my experience, it seems the majority of folks know the pitfalls of microservices, and have since like... 2016?

Majority maybe, but not everyone. I was at a place in 2018 where a guy turned up declaring that microservices would solve all of the company's performance issues (he'd heard that AWS S3 was made up of over 500 microservices so we must do the same, but he obviously had no idea about the depth of features in S3 so hit take was more is better).

So we got like 30 microservices in the space of year which gave the company 10x complexity, complicated and fragile local development and... dubious wins like faster email sending, but no improvements to true bottle-necks of the system.
by RandomWorker | 2025-05-09 00:37:16+00:00
As a recent Clojure convert of 3 years or so, I love reading how amazing Clojure is. As a solo Dec there is simply no alternative. It’s so nice to return to a project 2 or 3 years ago and everything is still running and humming along smoothly as it did when I started the project.

I previously worked in PHP, Perl-cgi, Java, and Python- webtools mostly based on MySQL and other SQL database flavours.

I worked in a Clojure only shop for a while and they taught me the ways after that you don’t go back. Everything can quickly click into place, it’s daunting to start the learning curve is very unsteep, takes long to get anywhere, but as a curiosity it was fun, then I started to hate how everything else was done now I’m sold my soul to the Clojure devil.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-09 00:37:33+00:00
Isn't that how most disagreements shake out at one level or another, once you strip away enough of the garnish? I am by nature either blunt or an asshole, depending on whom you ask, and may have come across more as the latter here, but the core message is about the same as most disagreements: "I believe my position is right because ABC, your position is wrong because DEF, you should believe mine instead."
by zeroq | 2025-05-09 00:38:42+00:00
Just today I had yet another conversation about how BigCo doesn't give a damn about cost.

Just to give you one example - last BigCo I worked for had a schematic for new projects which resulted in... 2k EUR per month cloud cost for serving a single static html file.

At one point someone up top decided that kubes is the way to go and scrambled an impromptu schematic for new projects which could be simply described as a continental class dreadnought of a kubernetes cluster on AWS.

And it was signed off, and later followed like a scripture.

Couple stories lower we're having hard time arguing for 50 EUR budget for a weekly beer for the team, but the company is A fine with paying 2K EUR for a landing page.
by jimjimjim | 2025-05-09 00:39:31+00:00
By that logic who does it belong to? How long does someone need to be in an area to be the "owner" of it. The people on Egypt currently weren't there when it was moved. Why should they get it? The people that were there when it was moved definitely weren't there 3000 years ago when it was made. Did they own it? In fact who owns anything in the world?
by ghiculescu | 2025-05-09 00:39:34+00:00
They are really good if you give them guidance and tight scope. For example for the database migrations review bot, we give it our Cursor rules file on database migrations (which is about 200 lines) and tell it to review the PR based on that.

It works particularly well for migrations because all the context is in the PR. We haven't had as much luck with reviewing general PRs where the reason for a change being good or bad could be outside the diff, and where there aren't as clearly defined rules for what should be avoided.
by proc0 | 2025-05-09 00:39:55+00:00
> This could be a highly structured JSON file, YAML, or a new declarative language designed for this purpose.

That shouldn't be needed. The current "promise" is that AI should reason like a human, so in theory (or at least in the original definition of AGI) it should be literally the same as if giving instructions to a human engineer.

The problem right now is that the models display higher than average expertise but only in specific and narrow ways. In my opinion we still have narrow AI with LLMs, it's just that it's narrow in language and context processing, which makes it seem like it's doing actual reasoning. If it's doing any reasoning it is only indirectly by some coincidence that transformers are capturing some higher order structure of the world. What we need is an AI that thinks and reasons like a human so that it can easily take a task from beginning to end without needing any assistance at all.
by josephg | 2025-05-09 00:40:03+00:00
> But what do those functions return? Oh look, it's DOM nodes, which are described by and implemented with inheritance.

Well of course. React builds on what the browser provides. And the DOM has been defined as a class hierarchy since forever. But react components don’t inherit from one another. If the react devs could reinvent the DOM, I think it would look very different than it looks today.
Show HN: Vom Decision Platform (Cursor for Decision Analyst)
by davidreisbr | 2025-05-09 00:40:33+00:00
Vom is decision platform to automate decisions, like credit or insurance underwriting. It's a low-code tool with an AI copilot/agent to help analyze and author decisions, as well as writing and running tests.

It has built-in integrations to many data sources (like Plaid, Nova, Teller, any HTTP endpoint in fact) with caching and lazy evaluation for cost savings.

Happy to talk about it and share ideas of what would make it even more useful.
by jamesfinlayson | 2025-05-09 00:42:51+00:00
Oh yeah, I've come to realise that the people at the top are just as bad. I was at a place where "consultants decided" that the company's two backbone systems should be replaced with off-the-shelf solutions. Very obviously a resume-padding project from the CIO who was in their first large company job, but which would have almost certainly crippled the company if it went ahead.

Thankfully the business and finance people at the company decided it would be an expensive and stupid idea it was shut down.
by gcheong | 2025-05-09 00:43:25+00:00
I’m not saying they don’t but I am saying looking at sheer numbers of deaths as a comparison is misleading because it’s the details of what kinds of deaths that make the difference. Your linked article even mentions this: “ While the relationship between wind turbines and different types of bird populations, particularly apex birds, is understudied, there is some evidence that turbines can hurt those populations.”
by sepositus | 2025-05-09 00:44:14+00:00
I said you were trivializing it, not that it was impossible. My original comment is it's "far outside the bounds" of what has been traditionally done by Pope's. To suggest that the answer to the question on marriage is to introduce an entirely new canon to the Bible that appears to contradict previous books of the canon (I supposed he'd have to remove those at the same time) is simply unprecedented and has never once occurred in the history of the church since the Bible was canonized.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-09 00:45:24+00:00
For the article on the pope, Clarin seems to have used estadounidense, norteamericano and americano to refer to things and people from the US, though americano in reference to "imperialismo americano." Well, I'm assuming that's the US given the mention of the CIA, but perhaps they are referring to some sort of pan-continental imperialism I'm unaware of.

La Nacion uses americano, but has to specify "continente americano" as if simply saying "americano" wouldn't be clear to readers. They otherwise also use estadounidense and norteamericano.

Neither appears to ever use "americano" by itself to refer to people from the continent, but if you're telling me that if you walked up to someone on the street and said you were an American and they would interpret that as you from the continente americano, then I believe you.

I'm still going to use the demonym American for myself (as everyone gets to pick their own demonym in their own language) and use it to refer to people from the US, but if you to call you an American, who am I to say no? You can call yourself an American, I can call myself an American and everyone is happy.
by stavros | 2025-05-09 00:47:22+00:00
What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me).

AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size.

I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
by refurb | 2025-05-09 00:48:17+00:00
This article only touches on it but the data stored is far more than just the base pairs.

DNA is like a computer program that when it runs, it provides feedback for the code and determines which parts of it should run. It can also modify the code (DNA methylation).

Then add on top the external environment - external molecules can interact with the machinery which then impact which code is executed.

If code is self-regulating, the amount of information it encodes is far higher than that defined by its base pairs.
by solardev | 2025-05-09 00:49:21+00:00
I use 1password for passwords, Dark Reader to make give all sites dark mode (including HN), Hide Google AI Overviews, and Kagi Search.

Also use SponsorBlock for YouTube to auto-skip over sponsored sections (not commercials, but in-video product placement and sponsorship messages) and uBlacklist to filter a bunch of things out of Google Search (like Medium, Quora, Twitter).
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-09 00:50:16+00:00
Yep, purpose.

Societies today have immense latent potential. So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose. An existential threat - war - is a well known way to bring that out. But war is too destructive for modern tastes.

We've seen developing countries get great results by government directing private industry in stronger ways than we're used to in the West. For example China's regularly published national development priorities for the next 5 years. If you hew to these you'll be helped in various ways. Singapore's and South Korea's rises to global powers were helped along by government getting everyone to row in the same direction - among other things, I'm greatly simplifying. But to focus on this one idea, I hope you can agree that providing purpose through top-down leadership is a great way to harness societies' latent potential and mobilize in a given direction..

Rudderless, laissez-faire governance got the US a surprisingly long way. But we are seeing the resultant directionlessness leave leaders unable to agree on whether to tear up what's been built, leave it in place, or go some completely random direction.

It's not the ships that were built, it's what they represented. That was what got them built.
by igor_exp | 2025-05-09 00:50:46+00:00
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by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-09 00:52:58+00:00
I don't see anything romantic about this. The mass mobilization of a society so well over 400,000 members of its youngest and brightest can die grotesquely overseas while industry, society and culture are forcefully synchronized to a single government issued purpose is not usually something to desire.

I do understand the needs of that particular war, The Nazis and Imperial Japan were truly invasive evils, big and globally dangerous enough to be worth fighting, even if it meant mass mobilization, but generally, there's no nostalgic beauty to such vast butchery, destruction and creation for the sake of destruction. I prefer finding my own purpose in life, and knowing that my children won't be ripped apart by artillery in some blood-soaked field of mud due to government decree.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-09 00:52:58+00:00
I'd be really interested in seeing the source for this, if it's an open-source project, along with the prompts and some examples. Or other source/prompt examples you know of.

A lot of people seem to have these magic incantations that somehow make LLMs work really well, at the level marketing and investor hype says they do. However, I rarely see that in the real world. I'm not saying this is true for you, but absent vaguely replicable examples that aren't just basic webshit, I find it super hard to believe they're actually this capable.
by singhrac | 2025-05-09 00:53:10+00:00
Here's a very small piece of I code I generated quickly (i.e. <5 min) for a small task (I generated some data and wanted to check the best way to compress it):

https://gist.github.com/rachtsingh/e3d2e2b495d631b736d24b56e...

Is it correct? Sort of; I don't trust the duration benchmark because benchmarking is hard, but the size should be approximately right. It gave me a pretty clear answer to the question I had and did it quickly. I could have done it myself but it would have taken me longer to type it out.

I don't use it in large codebases (all agentic tools for me choke quickly), but part of our skillset is taking large problems and breaking them into smaller testable ones, and I give that to the agents. It's not frequent (~1/wk).
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-09 00:53:52+00:00
> And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else.

For anybody reading this and thinking it looks reasonable, one outcome of having all these ISP is net neutrality isn't a problem in Australia.

ISP's used to often offer discounted services for certain traffic, like Netflix or traffic that originated in Australia. "Used to" because landline traffic is so cheap now I haven't seen a data limited landline plan in a long while. Charging differently depending on where bytes came from wasn't a problem precisely because there are so many ISP's to chose from. If you didn't like one, move to another. Download limits are still a thing on mobile data plans, so you still occasionally see it happen there.

Also, the NBN isn't technically a monopoly. Anyone is free to pay a third party to run fiber to their house. The NBN is a practical monopoly because it's very expensive to run a new fibre through kilometres of suburban footpaths, and it makes absolutely no sense when the NBN already has fibre in those footpaths and will supply any house beside it with a 1Gbps connection. However, it does make sense for business to run their own fibre because they usually aren't in the burb's (so it's cheap'ish) and don't want to share a line (privacy and predictable latencies), so they often do pay for parties a third part like VOCUS to run fibre to them.

Finally, even though the NBN is a practical monopoly on landline for households, there are competing technologies like 5G and starlink which everyone is free to use. In fact I'm using 5G right at home because I'm waiting for fibre. The reason they don't use it is these competing technologies are slower, have higher latencies, and are more expensive.

I'm not sure who is the brainwashed one here - the Australian public quite correctly understands the vast bulk of Australians have lots of choice on what to internet connection options they have available to them.
by Vaslo | 2025-05-09 00:54:29+00:00
I struggle in two places - algorithms and understanding all the possible inputs to make a graph in something like MatPlotLib. I find most of my time is wasted trying to get something like those to work and I can do it easily in cursor with Claude 3.7.

I’m rapidly producing something now, and feel uncomfortable with the leverage I’m giving cursor/claude but I am trying to get it done and come back and refactor.
by jfengel | 2025-05-09 00:54:38+00:00
Poe didn't really write books. He's most famous for poems and short stories. He wrote one novel ( The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) and published a collection of poems.

Not that it matters. Just a bit of trivia. The only thing you need to know is that he's a gazillion times better than Kerouac, who did write books and shouldn't have.
by roenxi | 2025-05-09 00:54:57+00:00
Well; some solution has to be found. There are probably options other than relocation - look at Venice. But the market is signalling how much money should be diverted into finding solutions and whether it is cost-effective to do so rather than just moving.

And I have no sympathy towards the "been there for generations" argument. The circumstances of your grandma just can't be a reason for what people do in the present - it s too unfair.