MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ratrocket | 2025-05-16 20:12:32+00:00
If you have 336 minutes to spare (although it's highly amendable to 1.5x listening) you can listen to four episodes of Behind the Bastards podcast asking and answering that very question over four episodes from 2023:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

The last episode listed there has the description "Robert sits down with Matt Lieb to discuss Scott Adams's worst novel, God's Debris." so if one really likes the book being discussed, probably best to go into that episode with an open mind.
by MinimalAction | 2025-05-16 20:12:53+00:00
> My thinking systems have atrophied, and I can feel it.

I do understand where the author is coming from. Most of the times, it is easy to read an answer---regardless of whether it is right/wrong, relevant or not---than think of an answer. So AI does take that friction of thinking away.

But, I am still disappointed of all this doom because of AI. I am inclined to throw my hands and say "just don't use it then". The process of thinking is where the fun lies, not in showing the world I am better or always right than so and so.
by neilv | 2025-05-16 20:13:23+00:00
Maybe it's just been a long week, but some of the examples reminded me of the day when a writing instructor spent a class session teaching everyone some loaded imagery/symbols to avoid writing accidentally.

After that, the instructor read a passage, by some earnest student somewhere, who seemed to unwittingly hit many of those things we'd just been told to avoid. The class was in stitches.
by apsurd | 2025-05-16 20:13:42+00:00
Interesting, I just replied to this post recommending the exact opposite: to focus on means vs ends.

The post laments how everything is useless when any conceivable "end state" a human can do will be inferior to what LLMs can do.

So an honest attention toward the means of how something comes about—the process of the thinking vs the polished great thought—is what life is made of.

Another comment talks about hand-made bread. People do it and enjoy it even though "making bread is a solved problem".
by atombender | 2025-05-16 20:14:11+00:00
I've been optimizing inserts recently, and I've already reached the limit here (i.e. already batching in parallel etc.).

The final thing I was considering doing was to implement a dynamic batch/concurrency scheduler. Something like hill climbing or AIMD, where the system tries to increase the batch size and concurrency until a sweet spot is found. It seems crazily unscientific to me for a system to hard-code the concurrency and batch size when said system may be running under different load at any time, not to mention on different hardware in the future.

Has anyone here found a nice algorithm for this? There seem to be a number of options.

Something else not mentioned in the article is that you can significantly increase insert performance by dropping indexes first and creating them after. That's normally not possible, of course, unless you are creating a table/partition just for the one insert job. I wish Postgres had a batch mode where you could say "here are all my rows, insert them and only build indexes when I commit".
by juancn | 2025-05-16 20:14:30+00:00
I kind of agree. There's another world, where software lasts a really long time, it's a much better world, but just a few of us get to live in it.

Building tools for other engineers is where it's at, the library maintainers for long lived libraries, like libc or any collections library.

If you get a sorting algorithm in a mainstream language library, it will likely live forever (or forever-ish in software terms).

The harder the problem you solve (in the math sense) the more likely that if you craft that code properly and carefully, it will outlive you.
by carabiner | 2025-05-16 20:14:32+00:00
Eric Berger has a frustratingly amateur perspective on his subjects. "Telescope" is incredibly vague. It's like saying "New computers in development" when referring to supercomputers in China and the US. For someone who's spent so much time on these subjects, he never has more than a surface level understanding of anything related to aerospace or astronomy. Compare to a guy like Bill Sweetman who writes with extraordinary detail on aviation despite never being an engineer himself.
by LauraMedia | 2025-05-16 20:15:42+00:00
Change for change sake is bad, yes. And the problem is, that these last changes have been half-baked, most things WITHIN GOOGLE still haven't fully done the switch to Material You / Material 3 Base, and now they decide to throw stuff around yet again.

It's hardly a design system if a random lead UI/UX designer redesigns core elements every 3 years
by williamcotton | 2025-05-16 20:15:49+00:00
> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

I find immense joy and satisfaction when I write poetry. It's like crafting a puzzle made of words and emotions. While I do enjoy the output, if there is any goal it is to tap into and be absorbed by the process itself.

Meanwhile, code? At least for me, and to speak nothing of those that approach the craft differently, it is (almost) nothing but a means to an ends! I do enjoy the little projects I work on. Hmm, maybe for me software is about adding another tool to the belt that will help with the ongoing journey. Who knows. It definitely feels very different to outsource coding than to outsource my artistic endeavors.

One thing that I know won't go away are the small pockets of poetry readings, singer-songwriters, and other artistic approaches that are decidedly more personal in both creation and audience. There are engaged audiences for art and there are passive consumers. I don't think this changes much with AI.
by _7acn | 2025-05-16 20:16:15+00:00
Create 2+ distinct LinkedIn profiles optimized for maximum SEO. No generalizations - focus on highly specific skills (omit irrelevant ones). Do not duplicate names, for example, use only the first initial in one case (must be real but not a 1:1 copy of another account). Fully complete the profiles (100%), adding comments and tags wherever possible. Then, prepare an epic CV that stands out from others (if someone has 100 CVs on their desk, they should pick yours without even reading it).
by curl-up | 2025-05-16 20:16:27+00:00
If the core idea that was intended to be broadcasted to the world was a "contribution", and LLM simply expanded on it, then I would view LLMs simply a component in that broadcasting operation (just as the internet infrastructure would be), and the author's contribution would still be intact, and so should his enjoyment.

But his argument does not align with that. His argument is that he enjoys the act of writing itself. If he views his act of writing (regardless of the idea being transmitted) as his "contribution to world's knowledge", then I have to say I disagree - I don't think his writing is particularly interesting in and of itself. His ideas might be interesting (even if I disagree), but he obviously doesn't find the formation of ideas enjoyable enough.
by aardvark179 | 2025-05-16 20:16:53+00:00
I think Gavin Bierman is an unsung hero as far as steering the Java language is concerned. I had the privilege to sit next to him in the office when I was working on TruffleRuby, and our conversations on language design were always elucidating, and his ability to gently steer others away from pitfalls was something I wish I could do as well.

Hearing the work he and others did to gradually introduce pattern matching without painting themselves into a corner was fascinating and inspiring.
by PyWoody | 2025-05-16 20:17:03+00:00
If you haven't seen it, A Hidden Life has the most Tarkovsky feel to it for me. It felt very inspired by Mirror, specifically. I say that as a person who loves both films, too.

I can't believe the author of the article so blithely dismissed To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and The New World. The New World is probably my favorite of all Malick's films so far.
by toast0 | 2025-05-16 20:17:05+00:00
The license says:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Is your argument that a binary is not a copy or substantial portion of the Software?

If you distribute a binary, I think it's pretty obvious that either the binary itself should include the notice and the license, or the archive with the binary should include it. Ex: most packaging systems include the licenses in the docs directory that nobody looks at, which is probably sufficient.
by jerf | 2025-05-16 20:17:34+00:00
Even computer programmers can get it wrong, and even reify the wrongness into interview questions. The correct answer to the common question of "how do you reverse an array" is that you don't reverse it. You read it backwards. Details vary from language to language; languages with iterators can find this particularly easy. But this is often not the "correct" answer according to the interviewer.

In the end, all data structures are functions. The academic applications of that may make your eyes glaze over, but the practical application is that if you want a reversed array/tree/etc., you just need the reading/iteration "function" for the array to return the data as if it was reversed. A matrix can be "transposed" just by reading its transpose. (Caching or other consequences may result in you choosing to manifest it in memory anyhow, but if it was stored cleverly in the first place, or you're only going to read it once anyhow such that using it once is as expensive as reading it once to reconstruct it anyhow, then there's no reason to.) An array can be randomly permuted simply by wrapping the read function with a permutation on the index, it need not be manifested in memory. etc.
by hintymad | 2025-05-16 20:18:22+00:00
I remember HN had a repeating popular post on the the most important data structures. They are all the basic ones that a first-year college student can learn. The youngest one was skiplist, which was invented in 1990. When I was a student, my class literally read the original paper and implemented the data structure and analyzed the complexity in our first data structure course.

This seems imply that the software engineering as a profession has been quite mature and saturated for a while, to the point that a model can predict most of the output. Yes, yes, I know there are thousands of advanced algorithms and amazing systems in production. It's just that the market does not need millions of engineers for such advanced skills.

Unless we get yet another new domain like cloud or like internet, I'm afraid the core value of software engineers: trailblazing for new business scenarios, will continue diminishing and being marginalized by AI. As a result, we get way less demand for our job, and many of us will either take a lower pay, or lose our jobs for extended time.
by exabrial | 2025-05-16 20:18:41+00:00
>My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA

Java has one the greatest debugging capabilities ever. dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a debugger to connect before starting. There is no equivalent in any other language that does _all_ of these things. And to top this off, there is 0 equivalent to Idea or Eclipse for any other language.

For runtime dynamics, JMX/JConsole is good enough for daily use, Java Flight Recorder gives you deep insight, or in a system you don't have direct access to. Hell even running jstack on a JVM is a good debug tool. If those don't do the trick, there's plain old HPROF (similar to other languages) and Eclipse Memory Analyzer.

>Then of course there's the weird licensing,

The JVM is open source. There are no licensing issues. OpenJDK can be freely downloaded and run in production without restrictions on any use. If you really want to buy a JVM from Oracle... well thats your prerogative.

> it's lack of it factor in 2025,

sdkman

> a huge boatload of legacy holding it back

what legacy code?
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-16 20:18:50+00:00
Not just legal/within the standards, but which actually meet the unspoken requirements of the request. "We just need a new checkbox that asks if you're left handed" might seem easy, but then it has ramifications for the Application PDF that gets generated, as well as any systems downstream, and maybe it requires a data conversion of some sort somewhere. I know that the PO's I work with miss stuff or assume that the request will just have features by default.
by interleave | 2025-05-16 20:19:30+00:00
Technically my wife would be a perfect customer because we literally just prototyped your solution at home. But I'm confused.

For context:

My wife does leadership coaching and recently used vanilla GPT-4o via ChatGPT to summarize a transcript of an hour-long conversation.

Then, last weekend we thought... "Hey, let's test local LLMs for more privacy control. The open source models must be pretty good in 2025."

So I installed Ollama + Open WebUI plus the models on a 128GB MacBook Pro.

I am genuinely dumbfounded about the actual results we got today of comparing ChatGPT/GPT-4o vs. Llama4, Llama3.3, Llama3.2, DeepSeekR1 and Gemma.

In short: Compared to our reference GPT-4o output, none (as in NONE, zero, zilch, nil) of the above-mentioned open source models were able to create even a basic summary based on the exact same prompt + text.

The open source summaries were offensively bad. It felt like reading the most bland, generic and idiotic SEO slop I've read since I last used Google. None of the obvious topics were part of the summary. Just blah. I tested this with 5 models to boot!

I'm not an OpenAI fan per se, but if this is truly OS/SOTA then, we shouldn't even mention Llama4 or the others in the same breath as the newer OpenAI models.

What do you think?
by Towaway69 | 2025-05-16 20:20:17+00:00
There really isn't a good way to compare visual code textually. It similar to attempting to compare 3D scenes in 2D - textual code and visual code are a dimension apart in their representation.

I created a visual comparison that combines both visual and semantic textual changes for NodeRED[1]. For me that is the only solution: visually comparing visual code.

[1] https://flows.nodered.org/node/@gregoriusrippenstein/node-re...
by SigmundA | 2025-05-16 20:20:20+00:00
I get why they went the async route due to performance implications and such, just like the old cooperative multi-tasking days everything was much lighter weight but one misbehaved process not yielding can block the whole OS.

Nice to see further improvement coming along in .Net however I conceptually prefer the everything is a lightweight process model to this function coloring async virus that invades the codebase now days, wouldn't be so bad if it had been easy to do sync over async from the beginning without caveat in .Net so you didn't need to have dual sync and async api all the way down the stack.
by Borkdude | 2025-05-16 20:20:20+00:00
> We are working on restoring that original stability. With this release, you’ll find that quite a few old ClojureScript libraries work again today as well as they did 14 years ago.

> ClojureScript is and never was only just for rich web applications. Even in the post React-world, a large portion of the web is (sensibly) still using jQuery. If you need robust DOM manipulation, internationalization, date/time handling, color value manipulation, mathematics, programmatic animation, browser history management, accessibility support, graphics, and much more, all without committing to a framework and without bloating your final JavaScript artifact - ClojureScript is a one stop shop.
by krackers | 2025-05-16 20:20:24+00:00
For how much they talk about "subculture perception" in the announcement, holo genuinely seemed like some sort of counterculture. Compared to the glossy iOS, Holo was dark, gritty, Tron like. Using it signaled that you were a nerd in the best of ways, someone who was fine with non-rounded corners.

Material 3 on the other hand looks like you asked someone to design a UI around the corporate memphis art style.
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-16 20:20:32+00:00
I guess I was really lucky that I started out on a bbc micro, then got my hands on a c64, then an Amiga, before finally beholding windows 3.0.

By the time I landed in the DOS world aged 8 or so, qbasic was my playground, and was easy to understand from the get-go, and Borland was where I cut my teeth writing something other than basic. One thing it took me a while to get my head around was that a 286 was not a 6502, and practically every little hack, address, anything CPU or memory architecture dependent thing I had learned was now irrelevant.

Coming from Amiga workbench to windows actually felt like a downgrade in many ways, but it was the computer available to me at the time, and retrospectively a good move, as by 3.11 it was clear the wind was blowing to PCs.

Either way, for me, growing with the machine was absolutely formative - the abstraction grew as I did, and I had started near the bottom.
by Centigonal | 2025-05-16 20:20:42+00:00
> But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed thought.

I can't relate to this at all. The reason I write, debate, or think at all is to find out what I believe and discover my voice. Having an LLM write an essay based on one of my thoughts is about as "me" as reading a thinkpiece that's tangentially related to something I care about. I write because I want to get my thoughts out onto the page, in my voice.

I find LLMs useful for a lot of things, but using an LLM to shortcut personal writing is antithetical to what I see as the purpose of personal writing.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-05-16 20:21:05+00:00
It's also entirely performative garbage. There's nothing that actually proves these are the (only) prompts being used, and if Elon Musk wants Grok to start pushing bullshit again he will do it. But this time it'll be more subtle and they'll point to this "transparency" to explain how it's not possible.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-16 20:21:32+00:00
There's no need to wait for the flush interval to flush a full batch. Just do it. You'll get backpressure when your workers are all busy. Also, set your flush interval closer to your throughput for your batch size. e.g. if you can do 100k/s, plan to flush a batch of 100 every ~2 ms. Then when you're not at peak load, you don't really pay for any extra latency for batching. As you approach peak load, you'll end up with full batches.

IIRC I got something like 70k rows/second on reddit dump data for an extended (couple hours) run using a similar approach with Scala on my i5-6600k (4 cores) with a JSON API that accepted 1 post at a time and batched internally. I think I used something like 2-4 workers, batch size 128, max flush of 5 ms. No COPY (the library I was using didn't have support for that, though I think it's not too bad to do manually with jdbc? I don't remember)
by NortySpock | 2025-05-16 20:21:34+00:00
I suggest one of Benthos' descendants, either Bento or RedPanda Connect.

Configuration driven, with a transformation DSL, and good documentation (I prefer the Bento documentation over RedPanda Connect's documentation). And Benthos explicitly refused to ack a consumed message upstream unless it had been acknowledged downstream, so it wouldn't drop messages on the floor unless you explicitly told it to.
by sippndipp | 2025-05-16 20:21:47+00:00
I understand the depression. I'm a developer (professional) and I make music (ambitious hobby). Both arts heavily in a transformational process.

I'd like to challenge a few things. I rarely have a moment where an LLM provides me a creative spark. It's more that I don't forget anything from the mediocre galaxy of thoughts.

See AI as a tool.

A tool that helps you to automate repetitive cognitive work.
by pull_my_finger | 2025-05-16 20:22:00+00:00
It doesn't "index arrays from 1", it doesn't have arrays, but tables, that can operate as "sequences". It's all documented in the docs.

>>> A table with exactly one border is called a sequence. For instance, the table {10, 20, 30, 40, 50} is a sequence, as it has only one border (5). The table {10, 20, 30, nil, 50} has two borders (3 and 5), and therefore it is not a sequence. (The nil at index 4 is called a hole.) The table {nil, 20, 30, nil, nil, 60, nil} has three borders (0, 3, and 6) and three holes (at indices 1, 4, and 5), so it is not a sequence, too. The table {} is a sequence with border 0. Note that non-natural keys do not interfere with whether a table is a sequence
by hintymad | 2025-05-16 20:23:07+00:00
> "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others

I'm quite conflicted on this assessment. On one hand, I was wondering if we would get better job market if there were not much open-sourced systems. We may have had a much slower growth, but we would see our growth last for a lot more years, which mean we may enjoy our profession until our retirement and more. On the other hand, open source did create large cakes, right? Like the "big data" market, the ML market, the distributed system market, and etc. Like the millions of data scientists who could barely use Pandas and scipy, or hundreds of thousands of ML engineers who couldn't even bother to know what semi positive definite matrix is.

Interesting times.
Launching Rizz: real-time health ring – building next-gen non-invasive CGM
by ambrosiasys | 2025-05-16 20:23:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m one of the builders behind Rizz, a new smart ring that tracks glucose*(CGM Required), stress, HRV, temperature, sleep, and activity — in real time.

It integrates with Libre glucose sensors and uses AI to predict glucose trends 60 minutes ahead, assess food impact in real-time, and flag early stress or sleep disruptions. It’s already being used in 100+ countries, including many low- and middle-income regions where traditional CGM is inaccessible.

But this is just the beginning.

Next, we’re building a non-invasive CGM — no needles, no sensors on the skin — to help 1 billion people with diabetes or pre-diabetes. Our approach is unique: we’re combining multiple proven technologies (optical, thermal, RF) with a few proprietary methods that haven’t been publicly deployed before, aiming for sub-$100/year accessibility with clinical-grade accuracy.

We’ve spent the last 8+ years building CGM systems (via Ambrosia Systems) and are now pushing into what we believe will be the next major leap in preventive health tech.

Would love to hear your thoughts, critiques, or questions about the current Rizz platform, our tech architecture, or the path to making non-invasive CGM real.

https://www.ambrosiasys.com/product/rizz

AMA — we’re here to learn.