MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ratatoskrt | 2025-05-09 14:00:29+00:00
As someone who moved to the UK from abroad, it was crazy for me to see how unequal the UK is geographically. The main one is obviously the divide between London/everywhere else, but the general lack of infrastructure between places is wild.

On the other hand, the whole HS2 debacle is a great way to explain this to my friends outside the UK. Bizarre to think it was promised as a way to connect the north of England (and Scotland) to London and the SE...
by catlifeonmars | 2025-05-09 14:00:32+00:00
Why not JSX? There’s no real cost to making the API JSX compatible, from what I can tell, and tsc has builtin support for transpiling JSX. It would also make porting code a lot easier. I’m only saying this because the type signature of $ is so similar to createElement.

As an aside, I really like the class name and text content ergonomics (e.g div.someclass, span:some content). Reminiscent of pug/jade
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-09 14:01:11+00:00
The article says there’s a problem but doesn’t state it clearly. There are some hints that the unstated problem is assimilation (English language proficiency is mentioned, for example).

All these immigrants with their families and their permissive work visas will help mitigate Australia’s oncoming demographic collapse (fertility rate 1.5 in 2024), which seems to me like the bigger problem?
Show HN: ThotStream – An AI-Moderated Feed of Anonymous Human Thoughts
by aswinsilvadasan | 2025-05-09 14:01:26+00:00
Hi HN, ThotStream is a futuristic, ambient social experience built for quiet reflection and real-time connection—without the noise of likes, follows, or profiles.

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Let AI assign Topic and Emotion tags to each thought

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I would love to hear what the Hacker News community thinks (pun intended)! Try it out, share a thought, and let us know how we can make this stream even deeper. https://thotstream.com
by dgb23 | 2025-05-09 14:01:31+00:00
It's not necessary to think about the data interface in terms of object orientation.

You can think about it as being a composition of fields, which are individually stored in their respective array.

(Slightly beside the point: Often they are also stored in pairs or larger, for example coordinates, slices and so on are almost always operated on in the same function or block.)

The benefit comes from execution. If you have functions that iterate over these structs, they only need to load the arrays that contain the fields they need.

Zig does some magic here based on comptime to make this happen automatically.

An ECS does something similar at a fundamental level. But usually there's a whole bunch of additional stuff on top, such as mapping ids to indices, registering individual components on the fly, selecting a components for entities and so on. So it can be a lot more complicated than what is presented here and more stuff happens at runtime. It is also a bit of a one size fits all kind of deal.

The article recommends watching Andrew Kelley's Talk on DoD, which inspired the post. I agree wholeheartedly, it's a very fun and interesting one.

One of the key takeaways for me is that he didn't just slap on a design pattern (like ECS), but went to each piece individually, thought about memory layout, execution, trade offs in storing information versus recalculating, doing measurements and back of the envelope calculations etc.

So the end result is a conglomerate of cleverly applied principles and learnings.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-09 14:02:23+00:00
What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing.

14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generations, not about incentivizing creativity. It undermines the public domain.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-09 14:03:14+00:00
It's 2.9B for a facility that can accommodate up to 3000 children simultaneously, as well as the support services to run it and provide the medical care and social workers needed to take care of them. It's not $3B for a specific 3000 children somewhere, so it's nonsense to try counting the cost per child that way.
by jjice | 2025-05-09 14:03:38+00:00
Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs.

Does anyone have advice for maintaining this feeling but also going with the flow and using LLMs to be more productive (since it feels like it'll be required in the next few years at many jobs)? Do I just have to accept that work will become work and I'll have to get my fix through hobby projects?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-09 14:03:58+00:00
> We do not need to saddle Rust with garbage that will feel dated like Python's standard library.

Python's standard library is a strength, not a weakness. Rust should be so lucky. It's wonderful to have basic functionality which is guaranteed to be there no matter what. Many people work in environments where they can't just YOLO download packages from the Internet, so they have to make do with whatever is in the stdlib or what they can write themselves.
by tachim | 2025-05-09 14:04:03+00:00
> You are implying a few things here; that it is the responsibility of others to fund your success and that there were not, or will not be, alternative means of such funding.

Yes, the government funds research, the benefit of which accrues to all of society. There is no credible alternative to government funding for public research; the scales are not the same. Private funding of basic research (internal R&D budgets) accrues benefits to the funders directly.

Knock-on effects to cutting the government funding include a decimation of future research leadership by the US by making it unattractive to study and do basic research here. Other countries are taking advantage of this (like any private sector company would if one of its competitors makes such a drastic mistake).

> Lastly you are implying that your graduate research was something that advanced some combination of science, humanity, the country...or maybe that the current work you do is of such value that the government should have paid your way to your current status.

You're overly indexing on the benefits any specific researcher gets from research funding. Research is currently done by humans; if we want more research done, then the people doing that research will necessarily get some of the benefits.

Also, since you're commenting on a software-focused web forum -- you should be aware that the compensation for government-funded researchers is a fraction of what these folks could make in the private sector. Framing it as some greedy theft of resources from the public is foolish and disingenuous to readers who don't know about how science funding works in the US.
by e2le | 2025-05-09 14:04:31+00:00
I can't imagine why that would be reasonable for an environment that demands a higher degree of security.

I imagine the most ideal situation would be 1) minimising the number keys, 2) use hardware backed authentication or certificate based authentication, 3) lock up the private keys somewhere safe.

The idea of 41 points of failure that can SSH into any starlink terminal is not appealing.
by lolinder | 2025-05-09 14:05:00+00:00
> This is not true for garbage collected languages

JavaScript is backwards compatible going back effectively forever, as is Java. Rust's unique system is having a way to make breaking changes to the language without breaking old code, not that they prioritize supporting old code indefinitely.

The libraries are a different story—you're likely to have things break under you that rely on older versions of libraries when you update—but I don't see Rust actually having solved that.

> You can audit and most importantly modify the code. This is not that easy if you were using Nodejs where the runtimes are behind node/v8 or whatever.

Node and V8 are open source, which makes the code just as auditable and modifiable as the 3.6 million lines of Rust. Which is to say, both are equally unapproachable.
by shepmaster | 2025-05-09 14:05:11+00:00
I agree. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of the people who ask for a bigger standard library really just want (a) someone else to do the work (b) someone they can trust.

The people working on Rust are a finite (probably overextended!) set of people and you can't just add more work to their plate. "Just" making the standard library bigger is probably a non-starter.

I think it'd be great if some group of people took up the very hard work to curate a set of crates that everyone would use and provide a nice façade to them, completely outside of the Rust team umbrella. Then people can start using this Katamari crate to prove out the usefulness of it.

However, many people wouldn't use it. I wouldn't because I simply don't care and am happy adding my dependencies one-by-one with minimal feature sets. Others wouldn't because it doesn't have the mystical blessing/seal-of-approval of the Rust team.
by jzb | 2025-05-09 14:05:11+00:00
As someone inside the United States... I sort of agree with you, though not entirely. Where we are today is the culmination of decades of attacks on our institutions and public discourse. This is not majority will, but it is a failure of the majority to curb the attacks on our institutions. Collectively, we're to blame -- but at the same time, is it hard to understand why the majority of people in the U.S. haven't been able to push back given what people are up against?

The wealthiest folks have the resources to continually and almost casually undermine institutions, while it takes enormous effort for the larger public to push back. Most people are just trying to live their lives while the Murdochs, Kochs, and others can keep throwing money and bodies at corrupting the country. For every win against the anti-Democratic corruptions, there's two or five losses. They pile up.

But the fall of the U.S. has seemed inevitable for decades. As someone who is here and isn't likely to leave -- my family is here, too many people to muster out and I won't leave them behind -- this is going to suck pretty horribly for some time. If we're very lucky, this will be the wakeup call the U.S. needs and when the dust clears we may rebuild something better. If we're not... well, I don't want to dwell on that.
by vanviegen | 2025-05-09 14:05:46+00:00
It takes some getting used to, but the advantage of using JavaScript for layout, is that it mixes well with your control logic. JSX makes loops and ifs hard to look at. Svelte/Vue/etc invent templating languages with their own control logic - while we're already running within a full-fledged language.

Originally, we did this style of programming in CoffeeScript. Without all of the braces, it looks at lot cleaner. :-)

Svelte is one of the frameworks I stuck with the longest. There's a lot to like. What I didn't like was the gotchas around change tracking. I guess runes is intended to fix that, but... damn. :-)
by schmichael | 2025-05-09 14:06:31+00:00
We need a term like “Mature” or similar for dependencies that are done. Mature dependencies have two characteristics:

1. Well defined scope

2. Infrequent changes

Nomad has many of these (msgpack, envparse, cli, etc). These dependencies go years without changing so the dependency management burden rapidly approaches zero. This is an especially useful property for “leaf” dependencies with no dependencies of their own.

I wish libraries could advertise their intent to be Mature. I’d choose a Mature protobuf library over one that constantly tweaked its ergonomics and performance. Continual iterative improvement is often a boon, but sometimes it’s not worth the cost.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-09 14:06:33+00:00
Conceptually, this sounds incredibly similar to what Vue was in the 0.x stage. Are you familiar with Vue perhaps? What would you say are the core conceptual differences? At a glance, both aim for the same idea, that your data is proxied, you detect what changes actually matter, and you try and wrap all of that up in a neat little package. These days of course Vue is a larger beast, but I feel like the origins were very similar to what you have here. Interested to hear what you think about this comparison.
by jaas | 2025-05-09 14:06:38+00:00
I don't think an additional standard library layer, whatever you call it, has to have the same tight controls on backwards compatibility and evolution that the actual standard library has. IMO the goal of creating it should be to improve supply chain security, not to provide an extremely stable API, which might be more of a priority at lower levels but chokes off the kind of evolution that will be needed.

I think what you're suggesting is a great idea for a new standard library layer, you're just not using that label. A set of packages in a Rust namespace, maintained by the same community of folks but under policies that comply with best practices for security and some additional support to meet those best practices. The crates shouldn't be required, so no_std should work just as it would prior to such a collection.
by bcoughlan | 2025-05-09 14:07:00+00:00
Something an older and wiser programmer taught me, is to think of the infrastructure costs as a per-user cost. These numbers look enormous next to my bank balance, but if you save 500k per year to service 1 million users, it's nothing to your bottom line.

Meanwhile there's the opportunity cost of moving. All of the people who put effort into this migration, who could otherwise be building something revenue-generating. I think that's why in many companies cloud costs are a problem, but never enough to make it high up the backlog.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-09 14:07:21+00:00
The most valuable LLM use case right now is allowing people who don't know how to program to get their computer to do what they want it to do.

They might not be aware of this, they don't know how to use an IDE, but the hardest part - the code writing part, is solved.

Every week Rachel in [small company] accounting is manually scanning the same column in the same structured excel documents for amounts that don't align with the master amount for that week. She then creates another excel document to properly structure these findings. Then she fills out a report to submit it.

Rachel is a paragraph prompt away from not ever having to do that again, she just hasn't been given the right nudge yet.
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-09 14:08:17+00:00
It's a special case, but in times like this I think about the antique cars. There are still Model T owners out there driving around with oil-soaked cotton brakes. That's the same material my pants are made out of. And it's not one brake per wheel, it's one brake for the entire car! Also, the wheels are made from wood.

This is not only street legal, but insurable too.
by nemothekid | 2025-05-09 14:08:31+00:00
I feel like leftpad has given package managers a very bad name. I understand the OP's hesitation, but it feels a little ridiculous to me.

tokio is a work-stealing, asynchronous runtime. This is a feature that would be an entire language. Does OP consider it reasonable to audit the entire Go language? or the V8 engine for Node? v8 is ~10x more lines than tokio.

If Cloudflare uses Node, would you expect Cloudflare to audit v8 quarterly?
by dsr_ | 2025-05-09 14:08:36+00:00
s/Best way/The only safe way/

Anything else will get abused in the name of expediency and just-this-one-time.

Also, the process for adding a crate/gem/module/library needs to be the same as anything else: license review, code review, subscription to the appropriate mailing list or other announce channel, and assignment of responsibility. All of these except code review can be really, really fast once you have the process going.

All problems are, at least in part, dependency chain management problems.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-09 14:09:33+00:00
The two downsides you list ("lack of community" and "lack of ecosystem") are not really downsides. If something is good enough, people will simply adopt it out of excitement, and those two problems will disappear entirely. See Rust and React.

This looks and sounds incredibly clever, and seems to be what I always wanted React to be. I'm eager to try it out!

Could you make a demo of a simple Todo list app in it that lets you edit items, toggle them complete individually, inverse all items, and delete all done items? That way we can see how this works with relatively complex hierarchies.
by anonymars | 2025-05-09 14:09:36+00:00
Reminds me of https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

> Let me give you a concrete example. I recently heard from a competitor, let’s call them ACME Bookmarking Co., who are looking to leave the bookmarking game and sell their website.

While ACME has much more traffic than I do, I learned they only have half the daily active users. This was reassuring, because the hard part of scaling a bookmarking site is dealing with people saving stuff.

We both had the same number of employees. They have an intern working on the project part time, while I dither around and travel the world giving talks. Say half a full-time employee for each of us.

We have similar revenue per active user. I gross $12,000 a month, they gross $5,000.

But where the projects differ radically is cost. ACME hosts their service on AWS, and at one point they were paying $23,000 (!!) in monthly fees. Through titanic effort, they have been able to reduce that to $9,000 a month.

I pay just over a thousand dollars a month for hosting, using my own equipment. That figure includes the amortized cost of my hardware, and sodas from the vending machine at the colo.

So while I consider bookmarking a profitable business, to them it's a $4,000/month money pit. I'm living large off the same income stream that is driving them to sell their user data to marketers and get the hell out of the game.

The point is that assumptions about complexity will anchor your expectations, and limit what you're willing to try. If you think a 'real' website has to live in the cloud and run across a dozen machines, a whole range of otherwise viable projects will seem unprofitable.

Similarly, if you think you need a many-layered CMS and extensive custom javascript for an online publishing venture, the range of things you will try becomes very constricted.

Rather than trying to make your overbuilt projects look simple, ask yourself if they can't just be simple.
by ebfe1 | 2025-05-09 14:10:06+00:00
Yea hence it prompts for you to check the first time but once you verify the hash for particular version of action, it would automatically apply the hash to that same version of action everywhere. Also you can reuse the same config for all other repos so it is only tedious the first time but after that it is pretty quick to apply to the rest of the org :)

The tool is indeed meant for semi-auto flow to ensure human eye looked at the action being used.
by Gracana | 2025-05-09 14:10:07+00:00
Oh yeah I agree with what you're saying, and of course they're working on this because they think it makes sense to do so, I just figure it's still a tricky sell even to replace $20/h humans.

FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.
by omneity | 2025-05-09 14:10:59+00:00
Very interesting approach, congrats on your release!

Have you noticed any practical performance overhead related to the usage of Proxy objects? Granted, that might not be the area of focus you have in mind for Aberdeen. I'm just asking as I mused on a similar idea some time ago and always felt hindered by this point.

My second question is related to composition and reactivity (computed fields and other transformations happening _outside_ the components). Do you see any particular pattern working well with Aberdeen?
by pona-a | 2025-05-09 14:11:10+00:00
"Feels" and "is" are quite different in these domains. Self-driving feels like it's 5 years away for 10 years straight, and biology is infinitely more complex than automation. See this comment from this thread [0].

> These techniques operate on the V1, V4 and inferior temporal cortex areas of the brain. These areas will fire in response to retina stimulation regardless of what's happening in the rest of your brain. V1 in particular is connected directly to your retinas. While deeper areas may be sympathetically activated by hallucinations etc, they aren't really related to your conception of things. In general if you want to read someone's thoughts you would look elsewhere in the brain.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910953
by jaggs | 2025-05-09 14:12:03+00:00
Really interesting from a 'in a bubble' point of view. I've been using Void for the past few weeks as a replacement for Bolt, Lovable, Tempo and the rest. Which is nothing like the use cases mentioned in this thread. Just shows how we're each focused on different parts of an environment? Of course I'm not a programmer, I'm just a slash-and-hack vibe coder. :)

For the record, I really like Void. It's great at utilising local models, which no-one else does. Although I'd love to know which are the best Ollama local coding models. I've failed with a few so the moment I'm sticking to Sonnet 3.7 and GPT 4.1. With 03 as the 'big daddy'. :)

I'm also a fan because it's open source, which is really needed in this space I feel. One question for the devs, what do you think about this? https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/vs-code-forks-are-facing-a-grim
by vessenes | 2025-05-09 14:12:19+00:00
Postage stamps are a surprisingly deep topic, overlapping with money, collectibility and bank notes. I’m not a postage stamp enthusiast myself, but it’s one of those “the universe is surprisingly detailed” type topics.

Your optimism on humans is appreciated, although arguably not backed up by history: it seems to me like most places times and economic systems turn out a similar percentage of knowledge explorers: ask yourself what percentage of the landed gentry in the UK did this, for instance, and what percent just leisured away. I propose with no data the numbers are largely invariant; what a society or economic systems does change is the ability of the x% to make progress and impact/implement.
by ljm | 2025-05-09 14:12:35+00:00
I think there will always be jobs out there that don't demand you write code with an LLM, just the same that most jobs don't demand you use vim or emacs or LSP-based autocomplete as part of your workflow.

You don't have to go with the flow. I took a step back from AI tech because a lot of startups in that field come with extra cultural baggage that doesn't sit well with me.