MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PennRobotics | 2025-05-28 01:00:59+00:00
Ugly. Goofy. Uninspired.

Awful color palettes and far too many shades of each hue. If the bluetooth icon is lit but the containing button is unlit, is bluetooth active or not? The icons are some of the worst ever; just a monochrome abstract mess. Of the 12 shown in the quick settings example, I cannot recognize 4 of them. Blurred background in the notification shade is worse than both a solid color or a fully transparent background. The former emphasizes privacy and information clarity; the latter doesn't interrupt whatever you're doing. Blurred means you can't refer to the app screen while looking at a notification but nosey passersby (or clever application of the right deconvolution on a screenshot) can get a general sense of what you were doing.

Too much padding. Alignment is often not thoughtful. Many of the shapes are just strange. The use of different border radii on adjacent elements---notably at 1:09, but also nearly everywhere else---is like a lazy eye or snaggletooth. The "Clear all" notifications button is too big (i.e. easy to accidentally touch) but also an uncomfortable aspect ratio. This is significantly worse on the watch.

Animations totally unnecessary and often not visually intuitive. (Wtf is that jellyfish circle progress meter at timestamp 1:03?) Not every user wants a "cascading droplet effect" or "springy animation" or "happy moments". It's visually noisy. Shape morphing is sea sickness via OLED. It's the kid who can't stop tapping a pencil on a desk and loudly coughing up phlegm all day.

Font is informal and overused. The variable font has more than 10 axes and becomes unreadable at the extremes.

I predict there will be two camps: the developers who don't change their apps at all and those that lean too heavily into this ridiculousness. There will be virtually no tasteful Material Expressive apps.

The promise is "customizable", but it's not USER customizable. You're at the mercy of each app developer. You can't change those awful notification buttons, overly rounded dialogs, bubble images EVERYWHERE.

And it's always so ... busy. I want my most used portable appliance---my vessel of knowledge, communication, and productivity---to just stay still and quiet and do the tasks I request without trying to affect my emotional state and distract me with its unnecessary wiggling and weaving, less identifiable icons, inefficient presentation of info, and irritating nested clickable elements.

Complaining about it is pissing into the wind. Google has committed far too much in this newest terrible design evolution to try something wildly different and actually bold (a la Guardians of the Galaxy) or to return to a simple & timeless no-frills appearance, and there are plenty of users who can't get enough of the "Easter-colored cooked pasta taped to a leaf blower nozzle" aesthetic.

In other words: I don't like it.
by tbalsam | 2025-05-28 01:01:43+00:00
This is (and was) the dream of Cerebras and I am very glad to see it embraced if even in small part on a GPU. Wild to see how much performance is left on the table for these things, it's crazy to think how much can be done by a few bold individuals when it comes to pushing the SOTA of these kinds of things (not just in kernels either -- in other areas as well!)

My experience has been that getting over the daunting factor of feeling afraid of a big wide world with a lot of noise and marketing and simply committing to a problem, learning it, and slowly bootstrapping it over time, tends to yield phenomenal results in the long run for most applications. And, if not, then there's often an applicable one/side field that can be pivoted to for still making immense/incredible progress.

The big players may have the advantage of scale, but there is so, so much that can be done still if you look around and keep a good feel for it. <3 :)
by JadeNB | 2025-05-28 01:04:27+00:00
I know it's at best not quite off topic, but, if you like meta and you haven't already read it, then you will be delighted by "This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself" (https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/tit...).
by tibbar | 2025-05-28 01:05:01+00:00
> I’m not asking people to be experts, just to know how it works

But if you "know how something works" in detail, such that you fully understand its workings and behavior, you're pretty much an expert. To really know how a database works is a project that takes hundreds of hours of dedicated study, and the deeper you look, the more nuance you find. Otherwise, you'll inevitably make the kinds of flawed generalizations that you dislike about the OP's mental model.

As I say, I have sympathy for your argument. I have spent a lot of time studying databases, I've contributed some patches to Postgres, I like understanding how things really work. But the reality is: full-stack development today is fractally complex. There are MANY components that each might require hundreds of hours to understand, and it's actually not economically valuable for you or your employer to rabbit-hole down each one before you start using it. You need to be able to pick up the key idea of a technology, using the appropriate resources, without fully studying it out.

--

I think that perhaps we understand the article differently. I think you understand it as a tradeoff between "understanding a system a little bit" vs. "understanding deeply," in which case, sure, it's easy to argue that we should all understand technologies deeply. But I think the real tradeoff is for beginners -- "understanding only the apparent outer workings of a system" vs. "having a first-order model of the components that lead to that behavior." Going one level down is the first step to going all the way, and there is a big difference in even going one level down.
by BandButcher | 2025-05-28 01:05:09+00:00
Yea no mention of the layoffs the past couple of years although this blog post was published today. Satire? Fluff piece? Or maybe an advertisement for cursor and copilot??

Article supposedly published by a CS professor but if I had published something like this in uni I feel I may have gotten laughed at.

As per the topic, I could see software jobs increasing in total number due to the emergence of machine learning jobs but to generalize and say the demand is as strong as ever is a little disingenuous especially when ever other CEO claims ai will and has already reduced the workforce
by leeroihe | 2025-05-28 01:07:13+00:00
I really appreciate your thoughts here - I'll send my cv your way.

I'd say my strong-suit is in vaguely defined zero to one work and scale out for more sharply scoped functionality. That said, if you ask me to write a react app from scratch, I'm likely just going to lean on cursor / claude to do the boilerplate and hop in when I need to make sure things are surgically correct.
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 01:07:26+00:00
I guess I'll need clarification -- getting trapped in a non-productive quagmire is the experience of a lot of people. The author chooses when to use terms in different contexts to get out of arguments ... and also, we still don't have any good way to test these things, so I'm not sure where I'm running afoul of the rules when it seems like everyone else is.
by leeroihe | 2025-05-28 01:09:36+00:00
This is generally my take as well. I have a few friends who switched into the trades and realized that in modern times, cheap foreign labor and PE has done a number on the trades. Many of them also lamented that although their bosses were good - many ppl in the trades still treat coworkers like garbage and engage in blue collar hazing. It's not everyone but I just have no patience for that stuff.
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 01:11:33+00:00
> The fact that we can use computers to mostly understand human language

I agree that'd be amazing if they do that, but they most certainly do not. I think this is the core my disagreement here that you believe this and let this guide you. They don't understand anything and are matching and synthesizing patterns. I can see how that's enthralling like watching a rube goldberg machine go through its paces, but there is no there there. The idea that there is an emergent something there is at best an unproven theory, is documented as being an illusion, and at worst has become an unfounded messianic belief.
by monocasa | 2025-05-28 01:12:50+00:00
Like a lot of things, the taxonomy kind of breaks down at the edges and arguments can be made either way.

I will throw out there though that ALU width and buses are generally seen as orthogonal to 'bitness' of a processor, and more an implementation detail. The Z80 had a 4bit ALU, but is considered an 8bit CPU. The PDP-8/s and SERV have single bit ALUs, but are considered 12 and 32 bits respectively. The 8088 is considered a 16bit CPU despite having both an 8bit ALU and bus.

'Bitness' is generally defined more as 'what is the width of whatever is the closest thing to a GPR'.
by lmm | 2025-05-28 01:14:08+00:00
> An individual can farm out investments to a target date fund at Fidelity or wherever.

Sure, but they have no way of knowing that a target date fund is what they should be looking for, or which target date funds are good and which are high-fee scams (or rather, they have no way to know that high-fee is the thing to watch out for). The seemingly logical thing might be e.g. put everything in the fund with the biggest headline return number in the last year.
by bdangubic | 2025-05-28 01:14:20+00:00
This is a fact, I do not know many 70-year olds. I think this is a true statement for many people sans those working in retirement homes or the like. that being said, I know enough of them and see enough of them to know I don’t want them performing surgeries, building roads and bridges, fixing electrical poles, washing skyscraper windows and many other things they would have to do
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 01:15:00+00:00
They are not. I think it is a good criticism though. Many people seem to be touting productivity that is only in the context of productivity towards more LLM inference operations and not productive in the sense of solving real world computing problems. There is a lot of material that suggests positive results are a kind of wish casting and people are not aware of the agency they are bringing to the interaction. The fact that you can hack things that do cool stuff is more of a reflection that you do those things, and that these models are not capable of it. That's why I recommend you work with others and you'll see your concepts that you feel are generalizable are not, and any learnings or insights are not like learning math or how to read, but more like learning a specific video game's rules. This is also why it is enthralling to you because you actually have only the illusion of controlling it.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-28 01:15:17+00:00
No worries, one promising use of LLMs is that we could describe a level someday with all its key features and just have it created fully formed, instantly!

Imagine a game mode where you as a player can just describe what you want while the LLM builds something fun and challenging! I think in simpler games such as Doom this should be possible already.
by grg0 | 2025-05-28 01:17:27+00:00
The lost art? Shader programming is very much relevant to this day. Many of the statements in this post are also either incorrect or inaccurate, no need for the sensationalism. And like somebody else has mentioned below, WebGL 2 adds compute shaders. I think the post would be better if it just focused on the limitations of pre-compute APIs and how to run a network there, without the other statements.
by snvzz | 2025-05-28 01:18:50+00:00
The community behind POWER has long been overtaken by RISC-V.

This can easily be seen reflected in Debian (largest distribution by package collection), where RISC-V has recently overtaken[0] ppc64 as the third largest ISA in available software.

The expectation is that RISC-V will continue to climb and eventually overtake ARM and x86.

RISC-V is inevitable.

0. https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-28 01:20:59+00:00
I bought a $4k car a couple of years ago. It’s had a few issues but nothing I couldn’t handle in my garage with fairly common tools. I’d say you can still get a very good car for under $10k and much less if you are handy with wrenches.

When shopping for this sort of car look for private sellers. Used car dealers in this price range tend to be sketchy and none of them do any maintenance or repairs before the sale.
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 01:21:25+00:00
They are described as being useful for novel problems, but no matter the vendor or if it is an agentic system I set up, or I watch a reasoning model prattle on, I understand those things as filters that are limiting the conceptual search space, and regardless, it is very easy to bump up against the limits. I understand the use as a rubber duck, that's fine, but this cult like belief that we can't criticize is out of control. My skill issue is that I keep trying to use all of these skills and yet I don't have this default pro-LLM belief which seems to be the requirement. Just today I got multiple models to invent QEMU configuration items that don't exist while trying to solve my problem, which I guess I have to say now is novel by your list here, but it was also something pretty easily found in the documentation I later found out... and even knowing that I wasn't able to get the models to understand that even when I explicitly gave them that information. I've had other experiences like trying to squeeze a watermelon seed. At this point, there is just too much risk of anything they produce giving me a wild goose to hunt down. It is absolutely maddening, but also the people telling me I need to pray about it aren't helpful. These things have not fundamentally improved since they did an impression of D&D games, but I can totally see why people would think that. They approach a database with a natural language query interface but that implies that it knows the context of your language and that they have the data, and when they don't, they make it very difficult to find their errors because they are so adjacent to correct.
by hanatanaka1984 | 2025-05-28 01:21:43+00:00
A simple bash script provides quick command line access to the tool. Output is paged syntax highlighted markdown.

echo "$@" | llm "Provide a brief response to the question, if the question is related to command provide the command and short description" | bat --plain -l md

Lauch as:

llmquick "why is the sky blue?"
by quantadev | 2025-05-28 01:24:02+00:00
Doesn't matter. You could replicate the basic functionality of Hacker News in a single Coding Agent Prompt. Sorry, I'm not wrong.

I've been writing web apps since 1998. Just today I implemented a similar tree view, with ability to create, edit, rename, move files and folders in a TypeScript react web app, and my app that I wrote today is a vastly more sophisticated GUI than Hacker News. lol.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-28 01:25:33+00:00
In the 1980s there were no index funds. There were no discount brokers. There was no internet. Joe Average factory worker was not capable of picking up a phone during work hours to call his broker and manage his investments. There was not tax deferred IRS blessed retirement vehicle until 401ks were officially blessed in 1986. Before 401ks were CODAs which, again, tied a worker to investing in his employer. Retirement planning was whole life insurance and buying physical bonds down at the local bank branch, maybe investing in a single stock that paid a dividend with the hopes you could live off the dividend.
by quantadev | 2025-05-28 01:25:46+00:00
I've been coding for 35 years. I love HackerNews. Because it works. And it's all we need. But holding it up as some example of engineering would be silly. It's just a tree editor. I implemented a better tree editor myself today from scratch.

If you want to know what stuff I'm impressed by it's things like Mastodon, Nostr apps, and stuff that does more than edit a simple content tree of nothing but plain text. We can't even upload images. Can't do markdown. lol. It's definitely a "Less is More" app, from two decades ago. Just agree to agree with me on that. It's not an insult to them. It's just an observation.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-05-28 01:25:53+00:00
That's a little scary in this environment. Changing the Supplementary Leverage Ratio to make treasuries more enticing to banks could create a situation where the banks hold even more of their deposits in treasuries. If treasury yields then move up due to the aforementioned tariffs and doubts about the US honoring its debts, it would make those bonds held by the banks nearly worthless on the secondary market. At that point, all it takes is people pulling money out of savings en masse (which happens in an economic downturn) to create a collapse of the banking system. Banks would have to liquidate bonds at a massive discount on the secondary to honor withdrawals, which would further push up yields, at which point there would likely be contagion and panic, bank runs, and implosion.

This exact dynamic is what caused the 2023 banking crisis and the collapse of SVB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_States_banking_cri...

This administration keeps making the absolute worst possible choices, so none of this surprises me.
by snvzz | 2025-05-28 01:26:30+00:00
>You can accomplish the same task in substantially fewer instructions, leading to higher performance for a given level of design effort.

The statement is true and favorable to RISC-V, as it is the one with lowest instruction count and code size; RISC-V wins, and it is not even close.

>Also a more developed software ecosystem.

Historically true, but right now the momentum is with RISC-V, and it is absolutely is catching up, and no longer a point of contention.

e.g. Debian is the largest Linux distribution by its library of packaged software. There, RISC-V has already overtaken[0] it in available package count.

0. https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png
by bigyabai | 2025-05-28 01:26:57+00:00
You can't blame Bloomberg for holding SpaceX to their word. Expendable missions are held to expendable standards, and Starship very deliberately chases the controlled recovery method. We really should be starting to see Falcon-level recoveries shaping up now that SpaceX is getting good at it, there's no excuse for "it was to collect catastrophe data" when it's happened three times now.

I'm not a knee-jerk Musk critic but I think the kids would say you're "glazing" right now. The ship blew up, its not the end of the world.
by creer | 2025-05-28 01:27:07+00:00
> People just couldn't understand that we couldn't sell it for less without essentially making the thrift store not turn a profit, even though the products were donated.

Let's also watch out how we think about enterprises. (1) The customer - most anyway - isn't concerned with the purpose of the thrift store, with whether it's making a profit, or even really with how the store gets the product. They are looking for the things they need, at a better price than otherwise. Some costumers are exceptions, sure. (2) The thrift store needs to make money to pay a few employees, the lease, and its sponsor if there is one (like this animal charity). Running a thrift store does not garantee that it will make this much money. (3) Even the people providing the stuff have a choice of places where they can do that, including putting it in the trash or listing for free on Craigslist & Co. They may want to favor the thrift store but if the thrift store makes itself sufficiently difficult or irrelevant, they will choose another way. (4) Even you volunteering for the thrift store as a way to donate to the animal charity have choices: You evaluate that volunteering your time provides about minimal wage to the animal charity. This may or may not be your best deal on how to convey money to that charity.

More generally these are fundamental points of economics: (a) wishing for things doesn't make them so. (b) The economy is the result of a lot of independent people thinking for themselves.
by pash | 2025-05-28 01:28:26+00:00
I’m not sure what the author had in mind when he wrote the paper, but its light-hearted content reveals well how to structure a math paper: (1) state the problem and why the reader should care about it, (2) state how the paper builds on prior work, (3) summarize the main results, and then (4) develop them in theorem-proof style.

An economics paper in the same spirit (though of course economics addresses more practical problems than mathematics, in this case whether one should leave the toilet seat up or down) shows quite well how to present and develop an economic model [0].

0. https://jaypilchoi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Economic-I... [PDF]
by almadoro | 2025-05-28 01:29:57+00:00
Have you tried React Server Components? Do you like them? A lot of people (myself included) haven't tried them or don't like them. I found out sometimes it's because they don't want to use a giant and unnecessarily complex frameworks (e.g. Next, React Router v7, Redwood), they don't meet their needs or they are just worried about the vendor lock-in.

I wanted to just use the RSC spec: the 'use client' and 'use server' directives. I've been waiting for this "vanilla RSC" too long, so I decided to build it myself. It's called ReactJust.

Check the documentation at https://reactjust.dev. Would love feedback, issues, or contributions
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-28 01:31:09+00:00
The 80s were a different time. There were no index funds. No discount brokers. No internet. But from the 1800s up until the 1980s lots of people retired successfully and lived quite well via investing in a single company and receiving dividend returns from that company. But that was back when the stock market wasn't just short term gambling and short term stock manipulation via corporate stock buybacks and you actually invested in strong companies that you planned to hold through retirement.

Funny what incentives get you. We had incentives for long term consistent strength (people holding stocks for dividends) and got it. Today we hold for short term gambling profits so we get gambling style shell games of companies.
by snvzz | 2025-05-28 01:32:30+00:00
>RISC-V do not define a platform.

With a very strictly narrow lens, RISC-V is just the ISA.

In reality, a major part of RISC-V International standardization effort goes into non-ISA specs, which include the platform specs, a major focus from early on.

This is e.g. how I am able to run my VisionFive2 with a generic Debian kernel. It would be unthinkable on ARM.
by georgewfraser | 2025-05-28 01:33:38+00:00
They make a really good criticism of Iceberg: if we have a database anyway, why are we bothering to store metadata in files?

I don’t think DuckLake itself will succeed in getting adopted beyond DuckDB, but I would not be surprised if over time the catalog just absorbs the metadata, and the original Iceberg format fades into history as a transitional form.
by ogogmad | 2025-05-28 01:34:58+00:00
I think the article's point is that the notion of "groups" per se is too coarse for DH, because it abstracts away the data structure you use to represent the elements of the group. However, the notion of Algebraic Groups doesn't have this weakness, because it comes with an implied data structure: The data structure is tuples over finite fields, and the group operations are expressible as polynomials, which importantly are also algorithms. Done.

It then turns out that if you search for the algebraic groups that you can use for DH, you end up looking for candidates within the 2 possible kinds of algebraic groups: linear algebraic groups and abelian varieties. Within the abelian varieties, it turns out that elliptic curves are both the simplest kind, while also being perfect for DH. Within the linear algebraic groups, the possible cyclic groups are just the additive and multiplicative ones: The additive ones are hopelessly insecure, while the multiplicative ones are just the unit groups of a field, which are special cases of elliptic curves anyway. So elliptic curves really are all you need for DH.