MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atoav | 2025-05-25 08:32:18+00:00
Sounds to me like a description of what it feels like to live in any sort of metropolis. Georg Simmel, one of the first sociologists, wrote similar observations on how city dwellers (in 1900s Berlin) would mentally adapt themselves within the context of this city in his 1903 work »The Metropolis and Mental Life«.

The anonymity and (from the POV of a country pumpkin: rudeness) is basically a form of self-protection, because a person would go mad if they had to closely interact with each human being they met. Of course this leads to its own follow-up problems of solitude within a mass of people etc.

But if you e.g. come from a close-knit rural community with strict (religious?) rules, a typical rural chit-chat and surveillance, simething like the anonymity of a city can indeed feel like a revalation, especially if you see yourself as an outcast within the rural community, e.g. because you differ from the expected norms there in some way.

I am not sure about the English translation of Simmels text as I read it in German, but as I remember it it was quite on point, not too long and made observations that are all still valid today, recommended read.
by mb2100 | 2025-05-25 08:33:19+00:00
val.town is probably the platform remaining that's most in the spirit of Glitch.

Meanwhile, I've also been working on a kind of "HTML/CSS/JS for People" guide with accompanying VSCode for Web extension, that let's you build your first website and deploy it to GitHub Pages – completely in the browser: <https://mastrojs.github.io>
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-05-25 08:33:39+00:00
Yeah I once got a job and after I got the job when they found out I'd never done dependency injection they said "we'd never have hired you if we knew that." Mind you that same manager also believed no code should ever be written if it doesn't have a test written first - real code is only ever an outcome of writing something to match what a test expects - poof - all the fun and creativity went out of programming there in an instant.

My philosophy of programming is "there's no right way to do it, do what works for you and makes you happy and if someone tell you you're doing it wrong, pay no attention - they're a bully and a fool".
by brailsafe | 2025-05-25 08:33:58+00:00
> I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs.

Additionally, because of the scarcity of information and degree of difficulty in learning those skills 15+ years ago, you could actually get paid well enough to have very good access to the housing market wherever you'd want. Now, in some places where work actually exists, if you get a job that you can sustain long term, it might cost 100% of your paycheque to land a mortgage on much more than a tiny apartment. You realistically need to shack up with another software engineer or whatever, not just anyone you fancy which itself seems quite difficult to pin down even well into one's 30s

Go to school -> take the debt, grind for potentially years to get a job if you're lucky -> find someone who also has a high paying job -> take on an amount more debt that your grandparents can't even visualize, and are yet responsible for -> kids?
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-05-25 08:34:42+00:00
>Strangely I seem to have built all of my software without dependency injection

I'm going to guess that you've most likely used dependency injection without even thinking about it. It's one of those things you naturally do because it makes sense, even if you don't know it has an actual name, frameworks, and all that other stuff that often only makes it more confusing.
by scrollaway | 2025-05-25 08:36:03+00:00
Your doubts are incorrect. There's a fairly standard way of extracting the file type out of files on linux, which relies on a mix of extensions and magic bytes. Here's where you can start to read about this:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_MIME_Applications

A lot of apps implement this (including most file managers)
by kubb | 2025-05-25 08:38:39+00:00
> nothing has to make sense

It does make sense. The companies are expected to exponentially improve LLMs, and the increasing versions are catering to the enthusiast crowd who just need a number to go up to lose their mind over how all jobs are over and AGI is coming this year.

But there's less and less room to improve LLMs and there are currently no known new scaling vectors (size and reasoning have already been largely exhausted), so the improvement from version to version is decreasing. But I assure you, the people at Anthropic worked their asses off, neglecting their families and sleep and they want to show something for their efforts.

It makes sense, just not the sense that some people want.
by teemur | 2025-05-25 08:38:43+00:00
If you can identify blocks of code you need to write that are easy to define reasonably well, easy to review/verify that it is written correctly but still burdensome to actually write, LLMs are your new best friend. I don't know about how other people think/write, but I seem to have a lot of that kind of stuff on my table. The difficult part to outsource to LLMs is how to connect these easy blocks, but luckily thats the part I find fun in coding, not so much writing the boring simple stuff.
by cladopa | 2025-05-25 08:39:05+00:00
I see that as a dystopian future. Google wants to model entire cities in real time, just like London with all the cameras everywhere, but for the profit of a private company and three letter agencies.

It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera into another.

That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone, public or private.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-25 08:41:38+00:00
You mean like on HN, a site initially for startups, where every single time there is a post about some tool with payment, there are enough comments about free beer clones?

Because why pay for the work of others, when only we matter.

As someone from southern Europe, where there was hardly any original software being sold during 1980's and 1990's, one thing I gladly do today is to pay for the tools I use in production.

Be it via donations, buying books from key people on the ecosystem, or actually getting a licence.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-25 08:42:50+00:00
Is that much different from people lost in their thoughts or focusing on their podcast ?

As you point out, distracted people already exist, and new classes of them will appear every day. The problem exists and I don't want to minimize it, but from a driver's perspective the difference sounds minimal, and doesn't affect how you'll handle the situation (someone looking aware might not actually be)
by out-of-ideas | 2025-05-25 08:43:02+00:00
can confirm the iso has the vbempk folder

- i can also confirm that the two are not the same (aka the source vbempk.zip and the archive-org's iso's vbempk folder) - i can easily see why text files might have improved wording, cannot know why the sys files are different

it'll be in a vm, but i'd still be careful with either choices
by tzury | 2025-05-25 08:47:12+00:00
I'll do it once for the sake of the rest of us.

this is April 6th -

https://x.com/paulg/status/1908894070765695144

Essay was published May 24th, that is the better part of two months.

Fact is you are most likely one of those:

https://x.com/paulg/status/1903066759302725698

Therefore, my advice to you is simple, care less about "what his writing does for me", and focus only on what is your own writing does for you.

I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.
by yetihehe | 2025-05-25 08:47:21+00:00
> Did all the people who used to do easily automatable clerical work remain in those roles?

My words were pretty precise. Current version of AI only works as the automatable part of programming, like writing boilerplate and implementing some algorithms already known.

Accountants still must know how to do by hand everything that their programs do and currently are mostly data entry clerks who connect proper invoices to proper accounts and verify that everything works properly. But one or maybe two times a month something is not right and then you are very glad you have an accountant or two at hand.

Similarly this will be with programmers - a lot of boilerplate and glue code will change into "implement X with library Y and output in format Z" prompts, but I think the most exciting (for me) things like actually solving problems will be left for us programmers.
by ttctciyf | 2025-05-25 08:47:47+00:00
Trump is rapidly shaping up as the greatest unsolved problem of the current era.

I don't think TFA has the answer though; nothing concrete is proposed.

Coping strategies like "keep the faith" and "gray rocking" may succeed (or not) at an interpersonal level, but don't transpose into anything meaningful at scale.

Politics, jurisprudence and journalism are where solutions are most needed but there's nothing on the horizon, afaics.
by chiffaa | 2025-05-25 08:48:27+00:00
> You get the list of filenames in your editor – edit them as you like, save, exit, and it renames the files. It uses whatever editor is set in your $EDITOR env var, so it doesn’t have to be vi/vim.

I'm not sure how "powerful" vidir is, but I recently found this functionality in yazi [1] and it became one of those "you think you don't need it until you try it" features

[1] https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi
by Kwpolska | 2025-05-25 08:48:35+00:00
> Add a bigger disk. Share some files to your old Windows machines. Learn how old Active Directory worked. Set up Exchange and get some mail going.

Active Directory was in Windows 2000, NT4 has a different domain technology. If you want to play with old Windows Server stuff, Windows 2000 would be a better, more coherent option, compatible with more modern software.
by SillyUsername | 2025-05-25 08:48:52+00:00
Every so often a developer challenges the status quo.

Why should we do it like this, why is the D in SOLID so important when it causes pain?

This is lack of experience showing.

DI is absolutely not needed for small projects, but once you start building out larger projects the reason quickly becomes apparent.

Containers...

- Create proxies wrapping the objects, if you don't centralise construction management it becomes difficult.

- Cross cutting concerns will be missed and need to be wired everywhere manually.

- Manage objects life cycles, not just construction

It also ensures you code to the interface. Concrete classes are bad, just watch what happens when a team mate decides they want to change your implementation to suit their own use cases, rather than a new implementation of the interface. Multiply that by 10x when in a stack.

Once you realise the DI pain is for managing this (and not just allowing you to swap implementation, as is often the the poster boy), automating areas prone to manual bugs, and enforcing good practices, the reasons for using it should hopefully be obvious. :)
by machinelearning | 2025-05-25 08:50:21+00:00
> The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader

Note that the writer's judgement only serves as an initial proxy for how well the essay reads. This implies that the reader, whoever that is, is the true judge of how well it reads. My point is that that group is ill defined.

If it were sufficient for the writer to be the only judge of how well something reads, surely PG wouldn't feel the need to have other proofread his essays. And surely it is not sufficient for someone who lacks taste to judge their own writing as good.

The way I read that statement is the same as the startup advice of "build what you would yourself want". However you still have to validate that the market exists and is big.

There is really nothing profound in that paragraph anyway, all it is saying is that a writer should edit and proofread their work. That whole paragraph could be deleted honestly. It is obvious table stakes for one to edit their work. What differentiates good from bad is a matter of taste + who is judging it.
by defrost | 2025-05-25 08:52:32+00:00
Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender process.

The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.

Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.

The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"
by albert_e | 2025-05-25 08:54:55+00:00
OT

> data provided by data-labeling services and paid contractors

someone in my circle was interested in finding out how people participate in these exercises and if there are any "service providers" that do the heavy lifting of recruiting and managing this workforce for the many AI/LLM labs globally or even regionally

they are interested in remote work opportunities that could leverage their (post-graduate level) education

appreicate any pointers here - thanks!
by yetihehe | 2025-05-25 08:55:13+00:00
I clarified in another comment[0].

> and the industry has been in a crisis mode with a shortage of entrants.

The accountants I know are well paid. Not everyone of course, there are some that are bad at their job and there are some good ones. Many are essentially working like programming freelancers. There will still be a lot of clients that can't even request AI to do some simple programs for them but are willing to do some small programming work and have some money to pay a freelancing programmer to create some small solution for them.

> Accordingly I find your original comparison of software engineering to accounting a bit concerning!

In my original post, I was telling that some programmers will indeed be replaced. The programming field will probably migrate like accounting field. It WILL be concerning for a lot of programmers, but programming as a field will be here to stay like accounting.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44086476
by rootsofallevil | 2025-05-25 08:55:21+00:00
I haven't really done any c# for 5+ years. What has changed?

I remember trying to effectively reverse-engineer a codebase (code available but nobody knew how it worked) with a lot of DI and it was fairly painful.

Maybe it was possible back then and I just didn't know how ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by lsy | 2025-05-25 08:55:28+00:00
It’s honestly a little discouraging to me that the state of “research” here is to make up sci fi scenarios, get shocked that, e.g., feeding emails into a language model results in the emails coming back out, and then write about it with such a seemingly calculated abuse of anthropomorphic language that it completely confuses the basic issues at stake with these models. I understand that the media laps this stuff up so Anthropic probably encourages it internally (or seem to be, based on their recent publications) but don’t researchers want to be accurate and precise here?
by david-gpu | 2025-05-25 08:56:21+00:00
> The real moat that nvidia has is their hardware capability, and CUDA is the disguised moat.

There is an inmense amount of work behind the cuDNN libraries that outsiders keep ignoring.

These sort of high performance kernels are co-developed in very close collaboration with the hardware architects designing the chip. Speaking of the hardware in isolation of the high performance libraries reveals a deep misunderstanding of how the system was built. This is true of any mature vendor, not just Nvidia.
Show HN: Less Speaker.txt – Stop media playback on audio output device change
by aditya24raj | 2025-05-25 08:56:41+00:00
Listening to your Favorite song in office. And suddenly it starts playing on speaker? It happens, and most of the time because your headphones got disconnected unknowingly.

Introducing "Less Speaker.txt". It is a chrome extension which stops playback from Spotify and YouTube, whenever your audio output device changes.

Install from Chrome Web Store(https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/less-speakertxt/fee...)
by calmbell | 2025-05-25 08:56:59+00:00
Don't buy a dob to do untracked astrophotography. It will be hard, and you will be disappointed with the results. I would pick between visual observation and astrophotography. They are almost separate hobbies that require separate kits. Get the Apertura AD8 for visual or a smart telescope like the Seestar S50 or S30 for astrophotography. The dob would provide great views of the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and decent views of some deep sky objects. The smart telescopes provide decent images of the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and great images of many deep-sky objects with image stacking build into the software. The smart telescopes are automated, and the dob requires learning the sky for manual tracking.
by leononame | 2025-05-25 08:57:00+00:00
The quote reminds me of Tucholsky, a German journalist known for this style. An example that comes to mind was his review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's like meat extract: you can't eat it, but many soups will be made with it".

I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."

Good writing goes a long way
by netcan | 2025-05-25 09:00:37+00:00
> My understanding is that partition was driven by the British, starting with the 1905 partition of Bengal.

So... this is why I said "blindspot."

There have even been socio-political theories claiming that British rule created the Indian caste system. The modern (and understandable) bias is to find imperialism, colonialism, monarchy and whatnot culpable. To absolve nationalism, self determination and democracy.

Circa 2000, the idea that Rwandan tribal divisions were actually created by colonial era racism. Both this and the colonial origin of caste dynamics were widely accepted on very little evidence and took mountains of very strong evidence to debunk... recently decided by genetics.

Sykes-Picot and the demarcation of Africa are other "lines on maps" that yielded conflict. But... "The Great Sorting Out" occurred regardless of great powers drawing lines. Nation states have borders, and there is no "correct line" that could have been drawn to make them neat. Identities that became nations were all jumbled up.

No great power drew lines in Yugoslavia, Cyprus or Turkey-Greece. Conflict and expulsion occurred regardless.

"Lines on maps" started in europe, and these were an attempt to mitigate occurrences like 1994 Rwanda in the 1800s. The idea was borders that represented a feasible "nation."

"Nation states" is a new concept. It had precursors, but the world was not divided into nation states until recently... by nationalism. Napoleon created French nationalism by creating it. Deleting all the local dialects and identities (including his own). Generating a standardized French language and identity. He did this through totalitarianism.

The Osmans tried to do something similar. An Ottoman nation with distinct hats and whatnot. It failed because they did not manage to achieve "totalitarian" control over culture. The USSR, also inspired by Napoleon tried to create a "Soviet Nation." Here the problem was that the middle ages were over, even in Russia. Napoleon had widespread ignorance and illiteracy to work with.

The idea that colonial era sins created postcolonial strife is national-liberal cope, IMO. Individual examples can be argued... but, these tend to be weak, hyper-local theories. The alternative is that nationalism is the cause of nationalist strife.

Most of the old world "nations" were mixed, and civic nationalism almost never emerged cleanly from this substrate.

Take Northern Ireland and Lebanon as examples. These countries cannot have "left and right wing" political dynamic, except as a euphemism for sect. In Lebanon, the political equivalent of "Democrat and Republican" is Sunni, Shite, Christian, etc. In NI, it's protestants and catholics. Alternatively (irish) nationalist and (british) unionists. They technically also adhere to left-right, but this is another euphemism.

A different line would have yielded a different conflict, different migration patterns and suchlike... but not sect-blind civic nationalism.
by metalman | 2025-05-25 09:01:58+00:00
This is not comparable to your two examples which are passive, the new device requires active partisipation will be additionaly distracting in that there will be all of the "gotchas" of modern UI design demanding "engagement". Face it, this is an attempt to have everything a person sees and hears projected by a corporate entity....."real time threat awareness" and instant sales opotunintues, just look at anything and find out "how much™", .....offer price determined by pulse, pupil dialation, previous comments,buying power and purchases. good times
by mattmanser | 2025-05-25 09:02:39+00:00
Because in statically typed languages they require a bit more scaffolding to get working.

And it is a bit magic, and then when you need something a bit odd, it suddenly becomes fiddly to get working.

An example is when you need a delayed job server to have the user context of different users depending who triggered the job

They're pretty good in 95% of cases when you understand them, but a bit confusing magic when you don't.
by smegger001 | 2025-05-25 09:02:49+00:00
because other companies have done it without it instantly triggering everyone that saw them. Snapchat has Spectacles and Facebook/RayBans have ReyBan-Meta and neither are having customers called glassholes and getting beaten for wearing head mounted cameras everywhere. honestly i think the reason is for whatever reason popular media demonized google glass as evil privacy invading spying device thus killing it in its infancy and ignored snapchat and facebook when they did the same thing.
by sverhagen | 2025-05-25 09:04:00+00:00
If the rules of the dependency injection framework are well understood, the IDE can build a model in the background and make it navigable. I can't speak for C#, but Spring is navigable in IntelliJ. It will tell you which implementation is used, or if one is missing.

In a Spring application there are a lot of (effective) singletons, the "which implementation of the variable that implements Foo is it" becomes also less of a question.

In any case, we use Spring on a daily basis, and what you describe is not a real issue for us.
by tobylane | 2025-05-25 09:04:20+00:00
My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did.

Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.