MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexITC | 2025-05-08 15:01:31+00:00
I have been running a company like this for ~6 years, we are only engineers, and, I'm the only one handling sales.

Getting started is the hardest part, like many are saying, its simpler when you can rely on your network.

Everything is about trust, by this, start reaching out to people who already trust you, there is a chance that this will get you either a project or a referral. Once you build a portfolio, you will keep getting these referrals.

In my case, I have got most of our contracts by sending cold emails, I have got a few customers through the "Who's looking for freelancers" posts + many others by just talking to people.

Lately, market is flooded with AI-generated stuff and fake job seekers which is causing people to distrust others, it seems harder to get contracts through cold outreach and the referrals we have got have done wonders.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-08 15:01:40+00:00
> "That is one bus, even a tiny city will need more than 100 buses to just provide bad service, and would need 5-10 times as many just to give good service"

You say that as if it's an unthinkable impossibility. As of 2017 London had 8,600 busses carrying 6.5M passengers every day. Yes a big city needs a lot of buses, so they have a lot of buses. No problem. What would it cost if there were no buses and 6.5M more car journeys every day? And the roads and parking spaces for - what - 1M+ more cars to account for that?

What financial cost to the city for roads and infrastructure and traffic lights and signs and maintenance, what financial cost to the people needing cars, what time cost of humans stuck in traffic, what health cost of less exercise, what health cost of pollution, what accident cost?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-08 15:02:31+00:00
I definitely agree that the crusade against inheritance is just a fad and not based on good reasoning. Every time people say "inheritance is garbage that people only use because they learned it in school" it pains me because it's like, really? You can't imagine that it's because those people have thought about the options and concluded that inheritance is the best way to model the problem they are facing?

Contrary to what the hype of the 90s said, I don't think OOP is the ultimate programming technique which will obsolete all others. But I think that it's equally inaccurate to make wild claims about how OOP is useless garbage that only makes software worse. Yes, you can make an unholy mess of class structures, but you can do that with every programming language. The prejudice some people have against OOP is really unfounded.
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-08 15:02:39+00:00
I'm not sure this is the way to think about it. It obviously matters if money is being wasted, but the question is to what end is the money utilized?

In capitalism, roughly speaking, the purpose of spending money is to generate a return on investment and the market does a reasonable job of doing that and a reasonable knock-on effect is rising standards of living, etc.

But in health care, for example, we might decide that a return on investment isn't the point, but the efficient allocation of resources still matters, to the end of making people healthier. Its more that free markets really struggle to optimize efficiency that isn't directed towards ROI. I think its a genuinely moral philosophical question - if you really prioritize freedom over all else, then markets are sort of the best you can do and you just give up on collective or philosophically motivated goals. But, genuinely, and I think the current political moment underscores this basic fact, people care about plenty of other things besides freedom and even besides democracy.
by sebastialonso | 2025-05-08 15:02:47+00:00
Never understood the "I'm solar" or "I'm nuclear" crowd. The issue is an engineering problem, not a baseball match.

As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-tuning weaknesses with strengths.

Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.
by majora2007 | 2025-05-08 15:03:36+00:00
I tried Cursor as I was excited it used Tree Maps for RAG. I tried it for 3 different medium asks on a medium sized project (https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita).

I was extremely disappointed. It recreated enum files with the same values, tons of changes, overall I rolled back.

I use copy/paste into ChatGPT/Claude a lot. I will stick with that. I control the scope, I control what I copy or how I take the solutions.

I stand by my belief that AI cannot work on medium to large codebases. I know we see vibe coding as a trend, but those are usually greenfield applications.
by mersorion | 2025-05-08 15:04:00+00:00
Stories like this are why we started the gospl.chat project I've been part of. Most so called “secure” systems sabotage themselves not by accident, but because of compromises. There's always an attempt to “secure the system” for the system which often results in architectures that fail the people they're supposed to protect. Industry headliners often focus on encryption protocols, but E2EE alone doesn’t guarantee safety. If a user or business finds themselves in a life-threatening situation most messaging platforms will do nothing to protect them and may even become part of the threat. We approached gospl.chat from the opposite direction - modeled real world threats and built a communication system that minimizes the risk of harm, even in worst-case scenarios. Security isn’t just about math. It’s about context. It’s about the environment where an app is used and how it behaves when things go wrong. Our goal isn’t to win a crypto audit. It’s to make sure no one loses their freedom, safety, or life because of a message.
by radiorental | 2025-05-08 15:04:14+00:00
Grafana can get pretty info dense very quickly. Try some of the dashboards or the Explore feature here https://play.grafana.org/

I worked there as a product designer for a couple of years, I now work on even more data dense UI in the cyber security domain, e.g. https://elastio.com/blog/cyber-recovery/three-clicks-to-rans...

As with almost all UI design the answer is "It Depends". If you could provide a little more context around the domain you're working in I'm sure I could point you at some specific examples
by yowzadave | 2025-05-08 15:04:20+00:00
> I worked in retail loss prevention

Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact the business in other ways), so there definitely is an "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and preventive measures.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-05-08 15:04:39+00:00
I was talking about this with a friend recently -- Romans flaunted their wealth by improving shared social infrastructure (open market spaces, parks, etc), and the robber barons of the 19th century flaunted their wealth by building cultural institutions (eg Carnegie libraries).

It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
by joezydeco | 2025-05-08 15:04:40+00:00
You could maybe compensate all the people and companies you put out of business by throwing your weight around in the 80s and 90s.

Maybe throw Jerry Kaplan a billion or two for fucking up his launch of the Go Communicator.

Seeing downvotes, which means you haven't been around long enough to remember all the shit Gates pulled back in the go-go 90s. ANY new technology would instantly get a press release from Microsoft saying they were working on the same thing, leaving customers and investors to wait for Microsoft's product. Which most of the time never came or was stillborn. Gates was an asshole, and he might still be, but a tidal wave of greenwashing can fix anything in the good 'ol USA. Now he's a fucking saint, right?
by jedberg | 2025-05-08 15:04:43+00:00
https://old.reddit.com

We used to have an even denser display, but they sadly got rid of it. It was the original reddit mobile interface (served as a webpage, not an app).

There is a screenshot on this blog post (by one of the guys who worked on it): https://pdx.su/blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/
by mapt | 2025-05-08 15:05:21+00:00
> Then there's the diesel cost. A large bus must get ~ 10 mpg highway, but a city bus is all stop and go - disastrous for a vehicle as massive as a bus. Let's say it gets 4 mpg. $4/gal diesel * 30 mph average speed / 4 mpg = $30 / hr on diesel.

We've already got decent electric bus options implemented in a number of cities, and they're only going to get better. That's before you consider hooking them up to wires like a sensible transit network.

Municipal fleets often make it a point to use alternative energy with buses, like CNG before batteries were a practical option. They do it for public image, because of the urban air quality issues with old-school diesel exhaust, and for cost reasons.

A more interesting point is pavement. Public buses, garbage trucks, and schoolbuses are some of the most significant non-weather-related causes of road wear, and this is only going to get worse the heavier the axle weight if you try to run long-range battery banks. Road wear scales with axle weight raised to the fourth power. Arguably there is a case to be made for the articulated or even bi-articulated designs if it allowed you to drop axle weight, with significant benefit to the Packed Like Sardines problem. Articulated EVs have a lot more freedom to redistribute the weight and to power individual axles more intelligently.
by rswail | 2025-05-08 15:05:24+00:00
Why do you think something that is getting extensive investment from private sources needs philanthropy?

Also, billg has laid out the goals of his Foundation and what they aspire to achieve. Which one of those aspirations do you think should be replaced with "fundamental AI research"?

A lot of the Foundation money goes on disease research and preventative and curative vaccine and medicine development. All of those areas are already being transformed by AI as a tool, and a lot of that development happens as a result of philanthropic, government, and private investment.
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-08 15:05:28+00:00
Been experimenting with Roo-Code in VSCode on Sonnet 3.7, but my daily driver is ChatGTP.

I guess it's mostly because of my usage type, more 'explain these few lines of code' or 'write a short funcion for X' in Python or JS, not the 'create this complete app' I see people using the agentic approaches for.

OpenAI is mostly out of habit and because I have grinded out a high tier because I use it through the api in my production systems. With Anthropic I still run into throtteling, even though it's output seems better in terms of less halucinating.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-08 15:05:37+00:00
> The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver.

This has been my own observation as well. Although I do have to say, System76's COSMIC DE has been the first one that is actually making me consider going to Linux full time since I've switched to Mac from it. macOS has only been continuing to annoy me more and more lately.

The problem for me is hardware. Asahi isn't there yet, and I'm not giving up my M4 Pro MBP. There's no other laptop on the market that checks all the same boxes. But for now, I've just bypassed the mac's weak points by using Aerospace, and if I'm honest with myself I don't want to give up the ecosystem integration either.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-05-08 15:05:39+00:00
It’s too bad this guy turned into one of the bigger fear mongers during Covid times. He was one of the main pushers of the whole “New Normal” narrative and his doomsday prognostications did significant damage to society and generally went completely against every value he claimed to have.

But hey, people like him got a free pass to spit whatever nonsense came out of their mouth as long as it was pro-doom. Good news was never allowed and Gates was great at stirring up fear, panic and bad news.
by throwaway5752 | 2025-05-08 15:07:00+00:00
Exactly. Look at the Walton and other families hoarding wealth by abusing tax law and lobbying to make it even worse, and the armies of advisors and attorneys parasitically helping them.

Gates is thousands of times better than most. He and Melinda have done more good for the world than all but a few handfuls of individuals. I've heard estimates his original MSFT stake would be worth over a trillion dollars now.
by benjaminktamras | 2025-05-08 15:07:02+00:00
Totally agree—and that’s actually where DVI starts to break from legacy systems.

Escrow + verification exists, yes—but it’s fragmented, manual, and reactive. What I’m proposing with DVI is a protocol layer that combines passive presence, programmable transaction rules, and autonomous settlement.

Think less “escrow agent + QA team” and more:

"If deliverable confirmed by X API + location + timestamp, auto-release funds."

"If 2/3 validators approve within 24 hours, trigger split settlement to contractor + reviewer."

"If transaction exceeds $150, route to identity-assured validator pool for audit."

It’s programmable trust, not just third-party enforcement. And it opens the door to scalable contract validation without human bottlenecks.

Appreciate the deep comments—this is exactly the level of feedback I was hoping for.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-08 15:07:31+00:00
It’s kind of tough when you see 70M of your countrymen vote for a traitor and another 70M implicitly allowing it by not voting.

He proved he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it, so that someone could be whatever government employee tries to go after him (already evidenced using the purse strings and lawyers of the government rather than a bullet).

And congressional reps have seen others lose elections for going after Trump. The root problem is the voters, and that’s a tough one to fix.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:07:32+00:00
This seems to be working backward from having decided that we must handout untold trillions to the comparatively insignificant nuclear industry.

In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.

Let’s compare to renewables:

- 600 GW solar PV added [1]

- 117 GW wind power [2]

- ~100 GW battery storage

Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.

But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.

[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...

[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...
by rdtsc | 2025-05-08 15:07:35+00:00
Perhaps they are targeting community colleges in general, because of the proportion of online course there is higher and they usually have fewer IT and administrative workers to keep an eye on things. That's disheartening, community college, are gems and it help many people get up on their feet who can't afford to go to the larger universities.

It's was sad to see in https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/pell-grant-fr... that in one case the administrators of the college were the criminals doing it.
by milanm081 | 2025-05-08 15:07:36+00:00
Technical debt has haunted development teams for decades, yet remains surprisingly difficult to explain. Everyone has their definition of Technical Debt. You will probably get three different answers if you ask three people what it is.

Google recently faced this challenge at scale – a substantial percentage of its engineers reported being blocked by “unnecessary complexity and technical debt” in internal surveys. In a paper titled “Defining, Measuring, and Managing Technical Debt,” Google Engineers Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green systematically understood this concept that slows down even the most talented engineering teams.

They tried to answer the following questions: How do you measure something so intangible? And once you identify it, how do you manage it without halting new development?

This research matters because technical debt is often blamed for productivity issues, but rarely defined or measured with precision. Google's work offers concrete strategies that any engineering organization can adopt.
by BSOhealth | 2025-05-08 15:07:42+00:00
My guess would be, actually a very small number of people think he’s the antichrist. Why would anyone other than someone with decades of operating system passion even care who this guy is? They know he’s a rich guy. Big deal. I’d guess most people just live their lives and don’t care about Microsoft monopoly or FOSS or anything. The same can probably be said for his altruism—most people probably have no idea.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-08 15:08:32+00:00
Reminder that anti-nuclear activism started against nuclear weapons and nuclear dumping, and then after Chernobyl the realization that it was possible to mess up agriculture across a continent from the failure of a single plant. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372

Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.

In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
by throwaway5752 | 2025-05-08 15:09:03+00:00
Some people will always believe some dumb shit. There is no tragedy, just the regular condition of many people being ignorant.

He also did awful things in the business world when he was younger. He's no saint, either, he is just a normal, messy person. But he's done more for the poorest and neediest people in the world than most countries.
by jcalx | 2025-05-08 15:09:21+00:00
The Bloomberg Terminal [0] has been very high-density and high-contrast since its early days of being an 80x25 terminal interface. Some would say it's not the prettiest UI (although as a former employee I still have a soft spot for it) but it's incredibly functional and also unmistakeable at a distance.

[0] https://assets.bbhub.io/image/v1/resize?width=auto&type=webp...
by noddybear | 2025-05-08 15:09:29+00:00
Hey everyone,

It's Mart, Neel and Jack from the Factorio Learning Environment team.

Since our initial release, we have been working hard to expand the environment to support multi-agent scenarios, reasoning models and MCP for human-in-the-loop evals.

We have also spent time experimenting with different ways to elicit more performance out of agents in the game, namely tools for vision and reflection.

Today, we are proud to release v0.2.0, which includes several exciting new features and improvements.

Thanks for checking this out.
by ghaff | 2025-05-08 15:10:20+00:00
>You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.

That's not really true if you have sufficiently appreciated assets and are in a high tax bracket. You can donate those appreciated assets and collect an annuity from some percentage of the face value donation and basically be shielded from any capital gains.

See e.g. https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/philanthropy/cha...

I'm sure there are other mechanisms as well.
by _spduchamp | 2025-05-08 15:10:44+00:00
AI experiments on babies and anxious parents does not sound like a good plan. Maybe think more about curated streams, and that the actual service is vetted by researchers rather than a conjecture of what research says.

The research may says things about benefits of music, and about stimulation, but it does not promote the use of AI. Can AI "music" impact how one develops musicality? And perhaps more importantly, music is part of culture. There is a lot to unpack separating music experience from culture and it could have devastating consequences in the long-term if this becomes a trend.
by sagarm | 2025-05-08 15:10:55+00:00
This is the idiomatic way in C++. I'm not even sure what your proposed alternative is -- as other commenters have noted, an exception or "panic" are not actual options.

Every pointer dereference, array access, and even integer truncation is UB in C++. This isn't rust.

A static analyzer can and does catch these errors and others internally. Typical usage of StatusOr is via macros like ASSIGN_OR_RETURN and RETURN_IF_ERROR; actually using the * operator would definitely draw my attention in code review.
by wormlord | 2025-05-08 15:11:03+00:00
Bernie is a good example of the alternative approach. I personally don't think he's radical enough, but he promises people things and makes people feel listened to. If you can establish a two-way street where people feel seen and heard, they will start to believe you again when you show them numbers. Of course you can see the response of the Democratic party to progressives like Bernie and AOC. The democratic party isn't going to win until they abandon the neoliberal technocrat schtick, literally nobody likes it. (also who knows if we will even have elections anymore so whatever)
by Ccecil | 2025-05-08 15:11:42+00:00
I'll start out by saying that the article seemed to cover most/all of the areas I would advise people tune around...great work to the OP.

About a decade ago I was pushing for more "designing for 3d printing" classes, not only in my own curriculum but also telling anyone who would listen how important it is. Having a design that is designed from the start knowing that it will be manufactured on a printer makes the end result much more usable.

Having a solid machine is the first step (this was a major limiting factor to a large number of people in Reprap). This though...is not the most important step. The slicer is the most difficult thing for people to actually "learn". This is why printers like Bambu have such a large "new user" following...they have presets that "just work". To most who have printed for a long time this is less of an issue (which is part of why printers like Voron are still popular).

By designing properly you can ease the pain of slicer "tuning", as well as, making your parts stronger in the use case they are planned for. Orientation for strength is a major thing that the inexperienced seem to forget about. I don't know how many designs have been given to me to print that not only are bad for printing, but also, they are not designed in a way which ANY conventional machining/molding can make in a cost effective way. I have wasted a lot of time explaining the things that are in this article to designers...often for them to have me print it as is.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-08 15:11:55+00:00
> It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.

You seem to have very weird ideas about how EA funding works in practice. Long-termism is flashy and peculiar so it gets a lot of excess visibility, but "fighting poverty" tends to get the bulk of EA money, and the most controversial cause that still gets real sizeable funding seems to be animal welfare.
by schlauerfox | 2025-05-08 15:12:28+00:00
in the 80s AVG built a robotic Andy Warhol but he was enthused about it. Abraham lincoln is an American icon. Not sure someone who still has family in living memory is the same category despite being a sort of icon for a big corporation and a big emerging ethical concern of the 21st century seems to be bodily autonomy and consent. I see a lot of AI generated 'animated' photos, of the living and the dead. I tend to see a lot of people ignore someone's consent like they ignore media piracy, with a disinterested immoral hand-wave.