MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitpush | 2025-05-29 21:58:07+00:00
> All the world's smartest minds are racing towards replacing themselves

Isnt every little script, every little automation us programmers do in the same spirit? "I dont like doing this, so I'm going to automate it, so that I can focus on other work".

Sure, we're racing towards replacing ourselves, but there would be (and will be) other more interesting work for us to do when we're free to do that. Perhaps, all of us will finally have time to learn surfing, or garden, or something. Some might still write code themselves by hand, just like how some folks like making bread .. but making bread by hand is not how you feed a civilization - even if hundreds of bakers were put out of business.
by acdha | 2025-05-29 21:58:16+00:00
Your first paragraph is repeating my point: Christians are not bound by the same rules as the Jews in the Old Testament.

As for the second, you’re leaving out the last couple of millennia of Christians debating the exact nature of God and fissuring into different groups over the details. Most variants recognize some difference between the OT and NT gods, however, because you have to explain the difference in their actions and instructions.
by dcreager | 2025-05-29 21:58:28+00:00
I think that's a genuine error, since as you say, `None` is a possible value for `b` according to your signature.

To handle this you would need to use "narrowing" to separately handle the case where `b` is `None`, and the case where it is not:

def square(a: Union[int, float], b: Optional[int] = 2) -> float: if b is None: return 0 else: c = a**b return c

https://play.ty.dev/97fe4a09-d988-4cc3-9937-8822e292f8d1

(This is not specific to ty, that narrowing check should work in most Python type checkers.)
by nialse | 2025-05-29 21:58:32+00:00
Being ahead of the curve is a recipe for not being left behind. There is no better time for action than now. And regarding the competition from peers, the key is likely differentiation. As it always has been.

Hardship or not, restarting from the bottom of the ladder or not, betting on status quo is a loosing game at the moment. Software development is being disrupted, I would expect developers to produce 2-4x more now than two years ago. However, that is the pure dev work. The architecture, engineering, requirements, specification etc parts will likely see another trajectory. Much due to the raise of automation in dev and other parts of the company. The flip side is that the raise of non-dev automation is coming, with the possibility of automating other tasks, in turn making engineers (maybe not devs though) vital to the companies process change.

Another, semi related, thought is that software development has automated away millions of jobs and it’s just developers time to be on the other end of the stick.
by epistasis | 2025-05-29 21:59:03+00:00
We will find out soon about the environmental impact from soil testing. Results are supposed to be on the county website [1] at the end of May [2], and that's a few days away.

This is pretty much a worst-case scenario for battery fire size and spreading. It is a very early large-scale battery deployment with what appears to be completely insufficient fire suppression, and very little thought for fire isolation. It was a tightly packed indoor multi-story facility, very unlike the more typical outdoor shipping-container style facility.

[1] https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-land...

[2] https://santacruzlocal.org/2025/05/15/new-soil-tests-start-a...
by JeremyNT | 2025-05-29 21:59:15+00:00
I'm in this camp... today.

But there's going to be an inflection point - soon - as things continue to improve. The industry is going to change rapidly.

Now is the time to either get ready for that - by being ahead of the curve, at least by being familiar with the tooling - or switch careers and cede your job to somebody who will play ball.

I don't like any of this, but I see it as inevitable.
by msgilligan | 2025-05-29 21:59:43+00:00
With the latest EA release (EA 24) of JDK 25 [1], you no longer need the `--enable-preview`. You can also simplify the println to:

void main() { IO.println("Hello, World!"); }

JEP 445 has been followed by JEP 512 which contained minor improvements and finalizes the feature [2].

If you want to use 3rd-party libraries, I highly recommend trying JBang [3].

[1] https://jdk.java.net/25/release-notes

[2] https://openjdk.org/jeps/512

[3] https://www.jbang.dev
by bitpush | 2025-05-29 21:59:58+00:00
Humans are also almost always operating on patterns. This is why "experience" matters a lot.

Very few people are doing truly cutting edge stuff - we call them visionaries. But most of the time, we're just merely doing what's expected

And yes, that includes this comment. This wasnt creative or an original thought at all. I'm sure hundreds of people have had similar thought, and I'm probably parroting someone else's idea here. So if I can do it, why cant LLM?
by bawolff | 2025-05-29 22:00:05+00:00
Hypothetically, its an expensive commitment that proves one's faith. Anyone can say jesus is coming, but less people are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

The upside isn't the important part - the downside is. It proves that you really believe what you say.

This happens all the time with countries when they are negotiating. E.g. Russia is pretty unimpressed when countries say they are going to give ukraine weapons unless there is a ceasefire. Its all cheap talk. If one of the countries bought the weapons first (that they otherwise would not of) and then threatens to give them to ukraine, its much more credible since they have sunk money into it.

Or you could look at the animal kingdom with energy expensive mating rituals. The point is to waste resources in order to prove your commitment.

Examples of this sort of thing show up all over the world.
by kgeist | 2025-05-29 22:00:10+00:00
>I rewrote a simple RAG ingestion pipeline from Python to Go

I also wrote a RAG pipeline in Go, using OpenSearch for hybrid search (full-text + semantic) and the OpenAI API. I reused OpenSearch because our product was already using it for other purposes, and it supports vector search.

For me, the hardest part was figuring out all the additional settings and knobs in OpenSearch to achieve around 90% successful retrieval, as well as determining the right prompt and various settings for the LLM. I've found that these settings can be very sensitive to the type of data you're applying RAG to. I'm not sure if there's a Python library that solves this out of the box without requiring manual tuning too
by baw-bag | 2025-05-29 22:00:58+00:00
I worked as a Nailgun operative in a Palette factory for a few dollars with people shooting nails at eachother for fun. I seen turtleshell.com one day and at the time I was like woah.

Flash was my route out of garbage and I miss it on behalf of younger people. I remember making a circle and keyframes. Attaching bits of code to frames to make it do what I want. Remember living at my moms house in the bath reading Flash Math Creativity or Colin Moock's books. I spent so so long understanding the concept of an Object or a Class or functions that call functions.

I feel that if I went back today, I'd be assaulted by package managers, dependencies, build systems, frameworks. No easy and beautiful way to draw a circle that weekend and animate it to an oval.

It is a real loss.

Stuff moves on and I am a developer, but my interest in motion (Penner! Keith Peters!) gave me a real solid feeling of what feels good with interactivity and motion and sometimes I open that ticket but it is rare. Everything is just the same now and I solve the same problems many of you do over and over again. It's boring. No creativity, no inspiration.
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-05-29 22:02:36+00:00
It does, actually, as the syntax is a result of the language's design and a simpler and more human-like syntax requires a higher level of abstraction that reduces efficiency.

The design of a language, including its syntax, has a great bearing on its speed and efficiency.

Compare C with Assembly, for example, and you will see that higher level languages take complex actions and simplify them into a more terse syntax.

You will also observe that languages such as Python are not nearly as suitable for lower level tasks like writing operating systems where C is much more suitable due to speed.

Languages like Python and Ruby include a higher level of built-in logic to make writing in them more natural and easy at the cost of efficiency.
by physix | 2025-05-29 22:03:33+00:00
> You cannot say HTAP is dead when the alternative is so much complexity and so many moving parts. Most enterprises are burning huge amounts of resources literally just shuffling data around for zero business value.

We built an HTAP platform as a layer over Cassandra for precisely that reason round about when Gartner invented the term.

In finance and fintech, there are ample use cases where the need for transactional consistency and horizontal scalability to process and report on large volumes come together, and where the banks really struggle to meet requirements.

I dug out an old description of our platform, updated it a bit, and put it on Medium, in case anyone is interested: https://medium.com/@paul_42036/a-technical-description-of-th...
by to11mtm | 2025-05-29 22:05:20+00:00
Hey if the check clears for the bonus they got for hitting 'reduce costs in the IT department', they often bail before things rear their ugly head, or in the ugly case, Reality Distortion Field's the entire org into making the bad anti patterns permanent, even while acknowledging the cost/delivery/quality inefficiencies[0].

This is especially prevalent in waterfall orgs that refuse change. Body shops are more than happy to waste a huge portion of their billable hours on planning meetings and roadmap revisions as the obviousness of the mythical man month comes to bear on the org.

Corners get cut to meet deadlines, because the people who started/perpetuated whatever myth need to save their skins (and hopefully continue to get bonuses.)

The engineers become a scapegoat for the org's management problems (And watch, it very likely will happen at some shops with the 'AI push'). In the nasty cases, the org actively disempowers engineers in the process[0][1].

[0] - At one shop, there was grief we got that we hadn't shipped a feature, but the only reason we hadn't, was IT was not allowed to decide between a set of radio buttons or a drop-down on a screen. Hell I got yelled at for just making the change locally and sending screenshots.

[1] - At more than one shop, FTE devs were responsible for providing support for code written by offshore that they were never even given the opportunity to review. And hell yes myself and others pushed for change, but it's never been a simple change. It almost always is 'GLWT'->'You get to review the final delivery but get 2 days'->'You get to review the set of changes'->'Ok you can review their sprint'->'OK just start reviewing every PR'.
by lxgr | 2025-05-29 22:06:11+00:00
Opera Mini was (or rather is – the servers are still up!) the best.

My 100 MB/month plan on an early Symbian smartphone went incredibly far with it, and the browsing experience was usually better than on both the integrated WebKit browser and Opera Mobile – so much so that I actually ended up switching back to a feature phone with J2ME.
by swores | 2025-05-29 22:06:13+00:00
> I imagine soon enough this too will become enshittified. I mean, its already happening: https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/

For now, at least, OpenAI claim that those product suggestions (almost tempted to leave in my typo / phone's autocorrect of "subversions") are not ads, and that it's purely a feature designed to be useful for ChatGPT users.

Although this from the FAQ is a bit strange, and I do wonder if there's any business relationship between OpenAI and the "third party providers" that happens to involve money passing from the latter to OpenAI in commercial deals that are definitely not ad purchases...

> How Merchants Are Selected

> When a user clicks on a product, we may show a list of merchants offering it. This list is generated based on merchant and product metadata we receive from third-party providers. Currently, the order in which we display merchants is predominantly determined by these providers. We do not re-rank merchants based on factors such as price, shipping, or return policies. We expect this to evolve as we continue to improve the shopping experience.

> To that end, we’re exploring ways for merchants to provide us their product feeds directly, which will help ensure more accurate and current listings. If you're interested in participating, complete the interest form here, and we’ll notify you once submissions open.

( https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11128490-improved-shoppi... )
by em-bee | 2025-05-29 22:06:34+00:00
first of all, i am not making the claim that religions are ‘right’ and/or have better answers. i am making the argument that if you want to find out if they are giving better answers or any answers for that matter, then you need to research them.

i can tell you what i believe but i am not here to represent any particular religion, and i can't speak for all the religions. you will get better results and answers if you look at each religion yourself, and come to your own conclusion.
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-29 22:06:40+00:00
You can blame the primes, but the fundamental problem lies within DOD, the Executive broadly, and Congress. DOD program management has been terrible for decades, especially any system that has software as the sole, key, or critical component. They just can't figure it out and billions are wasted every year with nothing delivered.

> A February 2022 study by the Department of Defense (DOD) found that after decades of consolidation, the number of defense prime contractors had shrunk from 51 to fewer than 10. Further, many segments of the defense market have become controlled by companies with monopoly or near-monopoly positions.

This consolidation was explicitly promoted in the 1990s. This promotion and the permission for the mergers was a choice on the part of the US gov't and DOD. This isn't an accident of history, there was no decline in military spending that caused companies to fail and merge like this. It was a deliberate choice during decades of increasing defense spending to promote and permit consolidation of the defense industry.
by jcaguilar | 2025-05-29 22:06:43+00:00
I only wish that the syntax was changed to make it easier to search/grep for the definition of functions and types. Odin makes this so nice, you can search for “<function|type name> ::”. Maybe moving the return type to after the closing parenthesis would be enough?

2 more wishes: add named parameters and structured concurrency and I think it would be a very cool language.
by aapoalas | 2025-05-29 22:06:57+00:00
This is definitely the more meaningful/influential performance benefit of ECS in game development, I believe. JavaScript will not allow for that as you point out. Perhaps a sufficiently crazy JIT might claw some of those benefits back, though? Not sure.

But: the lesser but still impactful performance benefit of ECS is the usage of Struct-of-Array vectors for data storage. JavaScript can still ruin that benefit by always accessing all parts and features of an Object every time it touches one, but it is a less likely thing to happen. So, there is a benefit that JavaScript code itself can enjoy.

Finally, there is one single "true System" in a JavaScript engine's ECS: the garbage collector. The GC will run through a good part of the engine heap, and you can fairly easily write it to be a batched operation where eg. "all newly found ordinary Objects" are iterated through in memory access order, have their mark checked, and then gather up their referents if they were unmarked. Rinse and repeat to find all live/reachable objects by constantly iterating mostly sequential memory in batches. This can also be parallelised, though then the batch queue needs to become shareable across threads.

The sweep of the heap after this is then a True-True System where all items are iterated in order, unmarked ones are ignored, marked ones are copied to their post-compaction location, and any references they hold are shifted down to account for the locations of items changing post-compaction.
by bawolff | 2025-05-29 22:07:33+00:00
This is a bit of a bizarre argument.

> you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we)

Physics (quantum physics specificly) posits a non-deterministic universe.

However even with a deterministic universe, i don't see how it neccesatates removing free will. Perhaps you (your soul or whatever) can choose whatever you want to, you just always have to make the same choice given the same input. Maybe you dont literally have free will in what you immediately do, but you have free will in defining what type of person you are, which informs what you will do in response to some input.

[Im an atheist if that matters]
by subjectsigma | 2025-05-29 22:07:41+00:00
If you want to use make, power to you, it’s definitely a useful tool. (What I’m trying to say is I’m bashing make, not you.)

That being said, I absolutely hate make, there are so many footguns and weird quirks and implicit behavior that always end up biting me.

I find that 90% of the time what I actually want is a command runner like Just (https://github.com/casey/just) and have the make file contain the absolute sheer minimum required to build code.

While we’re at it, CMake is another build tool with the same problems as make - powerful, with an ugly syntax, unintuitive semantics, hidden dragons, and a manual that’s torturous to read.
by jjulius | 2025-05-29 22:08:08+00:00
>But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.

Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product.

The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting only makes the site, and the message in this piece, more endearing to me. If you're griping about the appearance, or think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've missed the point.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-05-29 22:08:28+00:00
The only pattern I know for sure is that compound words in English tend to begin their lives in hyphenated form (news-paper, life-style, e-mail) and then the hyphen gradually disappears over time. Old enough newspapers still show these words with hyphens in.

I think the hyphen removal follows the typical speech pattern in which the syllables are rushed together just like the syllables of other words, but I'm not sure.
by dughnut | 2025-05-29 22:08:59+00:00
Do you want to work with LLMs or H1Bs and interns… choose wisely.

Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-05-29 22:09:12+00:00
I wouldn't use Zig for something production critical, but other people like TigerBeetle have decided its good enough for them, and they seem to be doing fine commercially, so I just refrain from saying its not production ready.

But one things for sure ... there's just not a lot of sample Zig code out there. Granted its simpler than Rust, but your average AI tool doesn't get how to write idiomatic Zig. Whereas most AI tools seem to get Rust code okay. Maybe idiomatic Zig just isn't a thing yet. Or maybe idiomatic Zig is just like idiomatic C ... in the eye of the beholder.
by jszymborski | 2025-05-29 22:09:43+00:00
> IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.

Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.
by trhway | 2025-05-29 22:10:02+00:00
Napkin. Batteries are $100 per KWH (say prismatic, 5000 cycles). So at $0.1 per KWH - say diff between high demand rate and the low demand - it takes only 3 years (1000 cycles) to break even. Practically a gold rush just a bit worse than crypto :)

It becomes even better if you add vertical integration optimization - i.e. your own solar farm in addition to your own battery farm.
by rossant | 2025-05-29 22:10:48+00:00
My visualization library [1] is written in C and exposes a visualization API in C. It is packaged as a Python wheel using auto-generated ctypes bindings, which includes the shared library (so, dylib, or dll) and a few dependencies. This setup works very well, with no need to compile against each Python version. I only need to build it for the supported platforms, which is handled automatically by GitHub Actions. The library is designed to minimize the number of C calls, making the ctypes overhead negligible in practice.

[1] https://datoviz.org/
by bandoti | 2025-05-29 22:11:07+00:00
My take is that AI is very one-dimensional (within its many dimensions). For instance, I might close my eyes and imagine an image of a tree structure, or a hash table, or a list-of-trees, or whatever else; then I might imagine grabbing and moving the pieces around, expanding or compressing them like a magician; my brain connects sight and sound, or texture, to an algorithm. However people think about problems is grounded in how we perceive the world in its infinite complexity.

Another example: saying out loud the colors red, blue, yellow, purple, orange, green—each color creates a feeling that goes beyond its physical properties into the emotions and experiences. AI image-generation might know the binary arrangement of an RGBA image but actually, it has NO IDEA what it is to experience colour. No idea how to use the experience of colour to teach a peer of an algorithm. It regurgitates a binary representation.

At some point we’ll get there though—no doubt. It would be foolish to say never! For those who want to get there before everyone else probably should focus on the organoids—because most powerful things come from some Faustian monstrosity.
by em-bee | 2025-05-29 22:11:59+00:00
The person who doesn’t accept something blindly has no obligation to question anything

not accepting something blindly IS the same as questioning something. or reverse, if you do not question your beliefs then you are accepting them blindly.

There is no obligation to obtain a belief system

i didn't say there is, except maybe that rejecting all belief systems is also a kind of belief.

Someone who is agnostic is not blindly accepting anything.

again, i didn't intend to make that claim. if anything that was more targeted at those who do follow a particular religion and stopped asking questions.
by arp242 | 2025-05-29 22:12:55+00:00
The dmd compiler not being open source until 2017[1] made it more or less a non-starter for a great many use cases. That would have been okay in the 80s, but with tons of languages to choose from since the 90s/00s, your language needs something very special to sell licenses.

[1]: Specifically: "The Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user license, and may not be redistributed. If you wish to obtain a redistribution license, please contact Digital Mars."