MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikhailfranco | 2025-05-06 12:57:32+00:00
It's all about Easter.

The church chose a mildly ridiculous, astronomically difficult and contentious definition of Easter: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox.

So it combines 3 complex systems: sun, moon and calendar.

Religious extremism and pedantry increased the priority of accuracy and agreement. For some reason, Christians argued (fought wars) over the definition of Easter, and then regarded anyone picking the wrong day as a malevolent heretic.

I imagine Easter could be one of the issues that led Swift to write the Lilliputian egg dispute in Gulliver's Travels.
by whizzter | 2025-05-06 12:57:53+00:00
You're right, I mostly mostly pointed out civil rather than criminal law differences since that was what I've gotten studies on and concerned myself with due to having a contracting business.

As for the mind-boggling verdicts those seem to more often stem from the politically appointed judges from the media reporting.

The plea deals part is interesting since it's been more frequently bought up to become legal in relation to combating the rising organized crime (but the perverse incentive problem seems to have kept those discussions from going further so far).
by techpineapple | 2025-05-06 12:58:06+00:00
I see this argument a lot, people are really bad at extrapolating out into the future, but and maybe this is controversial, but I feel like most technologies don’t get _that_ much better as time goes on. I guess it’s like, people assume LLM’s are like the first CPU’s, where they doubled in speed every year, but maybe they’re more like the internet. A little more high fidelity but mostly just used to sell you shit and show you ads.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-06 12:58:13+00:00
> A certain sensibility of care and craftsmanship has faded away.

It got replaced with professionalism, as in "being a professional", which nowadays seems to mean prioritizing business needs above all.

Caring about quality and craftsmanship is not professional - it's just not being economical with company time and money. It's better for the business for dev teams to tick features off a list as quickly as they can, because marketing can polish a turd and shove it down customers' throats much more cost-effectively than devs can make a half-decent piece of software that provides genuine value.

No surprise more and more people don't care. They keep hearing everywhere - including here - they should abandon childish pursuits, stop reinventing the wheel, writing too clever code, shaving yaks, going down rabbit holes, etc. - they should be professional. Well, that's what we're getting now.
by lolinder | 2025-05-06 12:58:53+00:00
The next step for Cursor and Windsurf both is that they need to work together to provide an answer for what it means to be a VS Code fork in the new era where Microsoft is trying to strangle the forks. If they're not already they should be teaming up with each other and with the VSCodium team and with the Open VSX marketplace.

Microsoft is an existential threat to their model here, but with the money they each have coming in they together have the opportunity to make the whole ecosystem better by building out viable infrastructure for all VS Code forks, if they can cooperate.
by vidarh | 2025-05-06 12:58:55+00:00
The effect of what you argue for would be 1) to make innocent children who have no control over whether or not their parents are too poor to fund education for their children suffer, and 2) to seriously negatively affect society as a whole by reducing the education-level of the public.

Society needs children to remain functioning and stable as people age and can't sustain themselves, and so from even a purely selfish angle, funding the welbeing of children and ensuring that having more children is viable to ensure an ongoing supply of labour to keep society functioning is the rational choice.
by jonstewart | 2025-05-06 12:58:58+00:00
Related, it’s more fun to engage in your own theory building by programming, right?

One thing that has changed in the industry, I think due to a combination of labor force expansion, DevOps, and greater reuse, is software engineers have increasingly become users of software. It’s… less fun. Where have all the sysadmins gone? Oh wait, we’re the sysadmins now. :-/
by virgilp | 2025-05-06 12:59:30+00:00
Agreed - the better take is "getting promoted in large tech companies requires marketing" (and even that is only true for the senior roles, in the junior roles, being good at your trade is typically enough to get promoted to "less junior").

But people have different ways of expressing this same idea, because it gets tiring to see/read it in only one form.... so I guess one has to get a bit provocative in order to draw attention :)

(and to be fair, given how distasteful many programmers find the "marketing" part, it's somewhat useful to have many different ways to tell them that it's needed).
by acdha | 2025-05-06 13:01:00+00:00
> if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least?

More can, but American poverty is harsh for people who haven’t seen it. There are kids who don’t have stable living conditions (my wife has had students who rarely sleep under the same roof two nights in a row, one school in the district had a homelessness rate around 40%), or who might not have access to a refrigerator or rodent-proof storage, or who have abusive/mentally ill parents who don’t give them enough food, withhold it as a punishment, or think that enough Jesus will cure an allergy or other medical condition which means they can’t eat some things, etc. Social services may eventually catch up to this at some point but they’re chronically underfunded even in blue states and that can take a good chunk of someone’s childhood.

At this point, we have over a century of studies concluding that one of the easiest ways to improve education is to make sure kids aren’t hungry and the cost of doing so is cheaper than almost anything else (free glasses probably win there) so, like OP, I basically treat this as a litmus test for human decency.
by rvz | 2025-05-06 13:01:27+00:00
...as done with Teams.

Microsoft Build is this month [0] and it will tell where they are going next (other than price cuts).

I'm expecting disappointment for now, but also expecting GitHub Copilot to be upgraded. Then we'll see if they are ahead or so far behind.

[0] https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/home
by Androider | 2025-05-06 13:02:15+00:00
VSCode must have over 100 times the user base of Windsurf and Cursor combined. All Microsoft needs to do is implement a halfway decent version of the context management features these forks added. That alone would be enough to halt user migration.

For users who've already switched to the forks, the cost of switching back is essentially zero, especially if Microsoft begins introducing changes that break fork compatibility. In that case, the migration direction would reverse almost overnight.
by thechao | 2025-05-06 13:02:55+00:00
Understood, but the heat pump, itself, depreciates. They're good for about 10 years, out here, so you'd have to knock 900$/yr off the "investment". That takes it down to 6%, which is better than a high yield savings account, for sure. My suspicion is that the folk who make these heat pumps are well aware of the pricing structure in central Texas.
by timabdulla | 2025-05-06 13:03:48+00:00
I mean, the fact that OpenAI, at the bleeding edge of it all, has decided to buy an IDE is a rather strong hint that the future of agents handling entire engineering tickets might be further out than many believe.

If autonomous agents were just around the corner, then why wouldn't OpenAI bet on their own Codex product obviating (most) need for an IDE and save themselves the $3 billion?
by robinhood | 2025-05-06 13:04:11+00:00
"riddled with bugs". "incredibly poorly implemented". Man, what are you talking about? Your comment seems based on nothing but what you read online.

Have you used Cursor on a daily basis? I have. Every day for six months now. I haven't encountered a single bug that prevent me to work.

Moreover, while Microsoft tries to catch up lately, it's still very far behind, especially on the "tab autocompletion" front.
by mystraline | 2025-05-06 13:04:34+00:00
No, there, at least in the USA, a large amount of very dumb people. They also tend to be quite sadistic as well, thinking 'those people' deserve the sadism and torment.

This percolates through our whole society, one case of which is this scholastic food 'debt'.

And also, during some of Biden's years, there was a few years of free school lunches. And was also summarily cancelled. Even democrats have this pervasive 'those people don't deserve X'.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/free-school-lunches-set...
by johngossman | 2025-05-06 13:04:37+00:00
While I generally agree with this, I’d add one thing: to understand what your managers want, you really need to understand the business. At the highest level, how does your company make money, or at least think it’s going to make money? What other things does the company value? It’s surprising how often I find developers who don’t know, either because they aren’t curious, are too busy to learn, or (surprisingly common) think it’s somebody else’s job to make money…they’re just doing what they’re told. My advice is to actively try to meet upper managers, sales and support people, marketing people, and ideally customers. You almost always learn something you can apply. In big tech it is way too easy to be insulated from what the output of your job actually is. This applies even if you work on internal systems—-somewhere those systems either add value or protect the company, and understanding that helps get your job done. And if it turns out your group doesn’t add value, or you can’t figure out how it does, then start looking at what groups do add value and whether you can move there. I did a few jobs that were not clearly aligned with the company needs and those always turned out to be a mistake. The valued work not only pays better is (usually) more satisfying.
by bluGill | 2025-05-06 13:05:13+00:00
I'm guessing you don't work on programs with millions of lines of code. What you say makes perfect sense for programs that are only a few thousand lines wrong. Nothing wrong with small programs, there are a lot of useful programs that only need to be that long. However when you start writing something more complex you need all the help you can get, and suddenly tests become a valueable way to ensure you don't break some working feature when you add the next.
by kibwen | 2025-05-06 13:06:15+00:00
Re: function overloading, Rust doesn't support overloaded functions in the same manner as Java or C++, which is important to emphasize to people coming from those languages.

However, if you then show those people that this is legal Rust:

let addr1 = Ipv4Addr::from([13, 12, 11, 10]); let addr2 = Ipv4Addr::from(218893066);

...that also runs the risk of confusing them, because this is indistinguishable from function overloading, because it basically is function overloading.

I'm not actually sure what to call this, because unlike Java-style overloading, Rust isn't ad-hoc; everything it's doing is fundamentally integrated into the type system. But unlike strict parametric polymorphism (and like Java), both of the above functions have totally distinct implementations.
by bfeynman | 2025-05-06 13:06:33+00:00
talented and smart folks for sure but can't not notice how much luck it is especially because its like 100% just better models. Windsurf raised a ton of money and then said they pivoted which they had millions raised to just do something completely different that likely wouldn't have been easier to raise for. Even in an interview with the cursor founder he kind of dumbly rambles that they launched and then basically lost a ton of traction until GPT4 came out. They have some core features like autocomplete but I'm struggling to see vision other than getting training data for iterative dev is a partial moat compared to just seeing commits and final code bases.
by technothrasher | 2025-05-06 13:06:35+00:00
My great grandfather wrote down some stories of his life in Southern Kansas at the time, and I was always struck by how less exciting it was than you’d think.

He talks about taking a horse and cart alone into Oklahoma “Indian territory” and how he scrounged up an old pistol because he was afraid of being scalped. He spends two nights camped out and every group of native Americans that pass by him just entirely ignores him.

He also talks about going to see the Dalton gang just after their famous shootout, and mentions how it was weird to see the bodies just laid out and people cutting scraps of clothing off them as souvenirs. He said it wasn’t romantic at all, just depressing.
by horhay | 2025-05-06 13:06:41+00:00
You keep saying reiterating this like the people in charge of researching for this agree with this bar that you set. These qualified people can't even agree amongst themselves.

Also. That second point is like the most unhelpful point I've ever seen saying that "we just need to look at us, we're the real GI, we're proof AGI can exist". What are you even talking about? You don't think people have taken that philosophy before? We're not even close to figuring out all the nuts and bolts that go into /natural/ general intelligence. What makes you think it's easier here?
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-05-06 13:07:02+00:00
>I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity.

I'll bite (pun alert).

It isn't about free handout, it's about ROI. The valid counterpoint to free lunch for children is any program can become grossly mismanaged because of "think of the children". There are recent stories of unhealthy and expired food being served to children that made them sick. Moreover, what they are getting can be something that puts more bad-calories than good into them (processed, high in corn-syrup). While I agree that no child should go hungry, can you both understand and not disagree this isn't a fire and forget problem? Taxpayers need their hard-earned income only going into high nutrition food; food that will not exacerbate the nationwide obesity problem!

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/expired-food-served-...

https://wchsinsight.org/33581/opinion/school-food-causes-com...

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood-obesity-facts/childhoo...
by elikoga | 2025-05-06 13:08:41+00:00
In my opinion it's a tragedy there are so few resources in using "Propositions as Types"/"Curry–Howard correspondence"[0] in didactics in tandem with teaching functional programming to teach structured proof-writing.

Many students do not feel comfortable with proof-writing and cannot dispatch/discharge implications or quantifications correctly when writing proofs and I believe that a structured approach using the Curry-Howard correspondence could help.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...
by throw101010 | 2025-05-06 13:08:45+00:00
It literally isn't, changing/reversing a premise and not adressing the point that was made is not a valid way to counter the initial argument in a logical way.

Just like your proposition that any "small" chance justifies investing "everything" disregards the same argument regarding the precautionary principle of potentially devastating technologies. You've also slipped in an additonal "with no real downside" which you cannot predict with certainty anyways, rendering this argument infalsifiable. At least tsimionescu didn't dare making such a sweeping (but baseless) statement.
by whstl | 2025-05-06 13:09:00+00:00
Bingo.

It's exactly the same for designers.

Good ones can shave days off complex tasks, and even help the code be more beautiful.

Bad ones can turn a 5-min feature into a week's worth of work. For absolutely no gain, and possibly creating a few bugs along the way.

Unfortunately the only way designers and PMs can learn this is by working together with engineers. Everyone needs to check the ego at the door. Which is borderline impossible with some personalities (from all sides).
by aaronyarborough | 2025-05-06 13:09:15+00:00
Hey, I'm this guy :) And I think you're right. The technological solution was semi-serious (though I'm not sure that it came across in the write-up)

What I expect to get from it are hopefully new insights on the behaviours I described, not from my dumb Airtable setup, but from just putting _something_ new in to try and break the cycle. While setting it up (and writing this post), I was thinking about the problem in-depth, which is what's really valuable here.

Tip #4 on your list might work for me. I'm going to try that next time it comes up. Thanks!
by MisterTea | 2025-05-06 13:10:46+00:00
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.
by yc-kraln | 2025-05-06 13:11:22+00:00
Systemd is great if your use case is Linux on a modern Desktop or Server, or something which resembles that. If you want to do anything else that doesn't fit into the project view of what you should be doing, you will be met with scorn and resistance (ask the musl team...).

What isn't great, and where the hate comes from, is that it makes the life of a distribution or upstream super easy, at the expense of adding a (slowly growing) complexity at the lowest levels of your system that--depending your perspective--does not follow the "unix way": journalctl, timedatectl, dependencies on/replacing dbus, etc. etc. It's also somehow been conflated with Poettering (he can be grating in his correctness), as well as the other projects Poettering works on (Avahi, Pulse Audio).

If all you want to do is coordinate some processes and ensure they run in the right order with automatic activation, etc. it's certainly capable and, I'd argue, the right level of tool as compared to something like k8s or docker.
by doix | 2025-05-06 13:11:35+00:00
> At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

I agree with the first part, I'm much less optimistic about the second part. I suspect they will create something that is worse, but cheaper if you already pay for Github/Office 365/whatever. Then many large enterprises will switch to save money whilst the engineers complain, just like with Teams.
by prmph | 2025-05-06 13:11:42+00:00
Exactly.

Many materials would have compressive strength easily, just by being relatively uncompressible.

But most loads have a (troublesome) tensile component. Fundamentally, the ability of a rigid material to resist deformation (in the most general sense) is what is most important, and that requires tensile strength.

See this comment elsewhere in this sub-thread that explains it probably better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904800
by diggan | 2025-05-06 13:12:00+00:00
If you use something like uv (expanded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904078), I think it does. But if you just do `python -m venv .venv`, you get the specific version you used to create the virtual environment with. Some OSes seem to distribute binaries like `python3.8`, `python3.9` and so on so you could do `python3.8 -m venv .venv` to look one env to a specific version, but a bit of a hassle.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-06 13:12:00+00:00
When you go see renaissance cultural stuff romanticizing the ancient romans and greeks do you crap all over it on the basis that the societies they're romanticizing had spicy takes on women or that their economies were comparatively primitive? Are you going to complain that they didn't have running water and electricity in the old west while you're at it?

The past was generally rife with problems that hadn't yet been solved. Some of those were technical and some of them social. But dismissing it all as racism or whatever is misleading at best. People (generally, I'm sure there's a few exceptions) aren't romanticizing the racism or the violence or the outhouses or the lack of antibiotics or any other negatives that have since been solved or improved upon, when they romanticize these periods of history.
by cljacoby | 2025-05-06 13:12:15+00:00
I have mixed feeling on this.

Some parts of this are probably good advise, at least with respect to clocking titular promotions. No disagreement around visibility of delivered "big wins" being key.

However, I feel like this article is subliminally pro-management, with the thesis statement essentially being just make your manager (and their manager) happy. But what happens when there's no clear direction from management on what the team's goals are? Or when priorities shift on a weekly, or even daily basis? It seems pretty hard to deliver anything meaningful, if by the time you're finished they've already moved on to the next shiny thing.

Additionally, in my experience this "make your manager happy" approach goes hand-in-hand with a "yes boss" manager-subordinate relationship. Managers are empowered to flurry out executive dispatches on what, when, and how things ought to be done, and engineers are encouraged to follow orders. Results are normally not great.
by duxup | 2025-05-06 13:12:20+00:00
Agreed, I respect those folks a lot, not exactly a high paying job / seems like a very personal calling kinda job.

They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day. Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that personally.

At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to perform.
by bluGill | 2025-05-06 13:12:45+00:00
> Caring about quality and craftsmanship is not professional - it's just not being economical with company time and money.

I disagree, but only partially. The real question is when is the project done as in you would shred the source code and nobody would ever care. Some projects are done when they ship version one - you wouldn't fix any bugs or add new features, so code quality doesn't matter. Some projects are never done - someone will be touching this code in 50 years (after you are dead), so quality matters.

If the code is done then craftsmanship doesn't matter and putting effort into it is an unprofessional waste of time. However if the code will be maintained for years in the future then not putting effort into craftsmanship is unprofessional. You need to know where you are. Sometimes writing ugly code is a good use of your time, sometimes writing good clean code is well worth it.

The important thing is to know where you really are. The wrong choice will hurt you.