MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucumo | 2025-05-21 13:07:53+00:00
Ironically, you're trying to apply a German mindset to the entire European market. That doesn't really work either.

In the sense that Mittelstand is more than just SMEs, I don't think it ever really existed here. There's no cultural fascination with being a middle business or having a family-owned business. A similar word ("middenstand") was used a lot, but it referred to shops only. In American TLA-speak: SMEs with a D2C model. The term "middenstand" died a slow death in the last 25 years. It's rarely used nowadays.

Good riddance too. The whole term reaks of limited social mobility. In Dutch "stand" has a much stronger feudal vibe than "klasse".
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-21 13:07:59+00:00
Nobody is talking about replacing all cars overnight.

You don't have to ban existing cars, they will phase themselves out. Give every X years and ban the sales of any non-hybrids for all but a few niche applications. Then in X+Y years ban all combustion engines other than niche applications.

But ultimately, we need to be serious about this, and half the population and the governments of most western countries are not serious. Many people still believe that climate change is a hoax, and ridiculous ideas like hydrogen cars and ammonia burning ships are still getting funding.
by alxlaz | 2025-05-21 13:09:39+00:00
> [German engineers and tech workers a]re not the kind to release half-baked products and patch issues later

What the article doesn't point out is that this is deeply ingrained not just among companies but among customers, too, and it's one of the many culture shocks I've seen my colleagues who move between US and EU markets experience.

If a European customer (adjusting for geographical variation, Europe is pretty big and diverse) runs into some weird issue and they call tech support, there's a very good chance that you've already lost them. It doesn't matter if tech support was super helpful, remedied things right away, and the customer support experience was top notch. The perception is that if they had tech support to un-break it, someone not only cut corners, but didn't even cut them very well, and now they wasted their time, too.

This isn't "just a cultural thing", it's ingrained because of how customers themselves do business, too (which makes it especially difficult to deal with in a B2B setting). The whole chain of commercial relations and norms is structured in such a way that depending on a "move fast and break things" platform is a very, very bad idea.

This is one of the most frequent things I had to explain in review meetings, and it went both ways:

- People who moved from US to EU markets didn't understand why customers had nothing but good words to say about customer support and then didn't renew contracts citing quality issues

- People who moved from EU to US markets going nuts over product release timelines getting aggressively slashed not so much because the feature sheet was too thin but because they thought there was no way to get those features tested enough
by canxerian | 2025-05-21 13:09:41+00:00
I'm naturally an outcome-focused person. Couple that with thinking long-term, I feel it's my best defence against falling prey to fads, hype and general distraction.

I keep on top of the desired result - my mediums are code, images and 3D renders. I'm critical of my own work, let alone AI, so I'll never use Cursor et al. The act of copy pasting is a proxy for quality control.

That said, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are plenty for me right now. I downloaded the ChatGPT OS X first, so that gets used the most. Gemini gives better results, but I often forget that's a choice.
by triceratops | 2025-05-21 13:09:54+00:00
> dislike arbitrary cost increases

Please see my comment again. Under a revenue-neutral carbon tax everyone gets money back. But they don't realize it. Costs only go up for people who emit more carbon than average.

Exhibit A: Canada's recent repudiation of their carbon tax because nobody knew they were getting rebates. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-tax-rebate-rebrand-1...

> Talk to some outside of your activist bubble

That's quite condescending btw. Is it "activism" to try to avert a calamity that will increase the cost of living by a lot more 20 years from now? I think it's good fiscal sense. Long-term thinking and planning. Y'know adult shit.

> Humans are, on average, selfish beings

And easily swayed by stupid arguments. Exhibit B: Canada's recent repudiation of the carbon tax because fossil fuel industry propaganda convinced everyone that the tax was the cause of price increases. Now prices will stay the same (because the market will bear them) but no one will get any rebate money.
by jerf | 2025-05-21 13:10:01+00:00
After starting my career in dynamically-typed systems for about the first 15 years, I'm pretty solidly in the camp of statically-typed systems.

However, I think it's really easy for a statically-typed-systems user to get a bit too enamored with static types even so, and start trying to stuff too much stuff in there. Anyone who thinks that the job of static types is to make all conceivable errors impossible is invited to go learn Haskell and then spend some time trying to write a non-trivial program, like, say, a GUI that also interacts with the network somehow, using an effects system to its maximum capability to perfectly carefully constrain every single function.

It is academically impure to do things like the author mentions and have a search object that will fail if you call a certain method without having constructed it a certain way. No question. And no question, this impurity can result in bugs in real code in the real world.

On the other hand, if one takes the time to create the absolutely perfect crate for Rust that absolutely perfectly expresses all possible combinations of options and methods that such a package could have, you could conceivably end up with a package with literally 10 times or more the number of types, that requires more steps to create a search than the simpler one, that is in fact so complicated that it turns the simple task of "please look for string x in string y" into something that a new programmer can't even understand anymore, and even a senior programmer might have to fight through some docs and ultimately just copy/paste an example and hope for the best...

... and the designer must ask the question, is that actually better? In practice, and not in theory?

Bugs are not created equal.

The academic worldview implicitly accepts the premise that an infinite amount of work is worth doing to eliminate the smallest possibility of the smallest bug with the smallest consequences.

A coder who lives in the real world needs to examine that premise carefully and decide if it matches their current situation, and if as is quite likely it does not, take appropriate actions. Static type systems offer a fantastic cost/benefit tradeoff in many real-world situations, but there is a point of diminishing returns.
by whatshisface | 2025-05-21 13:10:27+00:00
That doesn't sound right. If P(X) is the vector {0.5,0,0.5} and P(Y) is {0.5,0.5,0}, P(X)P(Y) is {0.25,0,0} and that's both not normalized and clearly not the distribution for max(X,Y). Did you get that from an LLM?
by pjmlp | 2025-05-21 13:11:51+00:00
With Microsoft having either Windows NT with proper UNIX support, or real UNIX with Xenix, there would be no need for Linux, regardless of it being free beer.

Whatever computer people would be getting at the local shopping mall computer store already had UNIX support.

Lets also not forget that UNIX and C won over the competing on timesharing OSes, exactly because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it in first place, there was no Linux on those days, and had AT&T not sued BSD, hardly anyone would have paid attention to Linux, yet another what-if.
by salawat | 2025-05-21 13:11:53+00:00
My issue stems from the attitudes of the people we're doing it for. I started out doing it for humanity. To bring the bicycle for the mind to everyone.

Then one day I woke up and realized the ones paying me were also the ones using it to run over or do circles around everyone else not equipped with a bicycle yet; and were colluding to make crippled bicycles that'd never liberate the masses as much as they themselves had been previously liberated; bicycles designed to monitor, or to undermine their owner, or more disgustingly, their "licensee".

So I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not going to continue making deliberately crippled, overly complex, legally encumbered bicycles for the mind, purely intended as subjects for ARR extraction.
by Philpax | 2025-05-21 13:12:02+00:00
People who become proficient in Rust generally enjoy the syntax, so they want to carry it across. (As someone proficient in Rust who has pondered their ideal scripting language, I would have done the same.)

To your more general question: it depends. AngelScript [0] looks very much like C++, while others, like Lua, don't. It's really up to the designer's discretion.

[0]: https://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/, but https://angelscript.hazelight.se/ has better examples of what it actually looks like in use
by andsoitis | 2025-05-21 13:12:03+00:00
> disappointment with technological and scientific stagnation

Science is stagnating? What's the data or anecdotal evidence?

> Thiel thinks big. Bigger than most scholars working today.

What science or technology has Thiel brought forth because of his big thinking? He co-founded PayPal (2004) and Palantir (2005) and I suppose you could frame those two ideas/companies as expansive, but it is also 20 years ago and there are scientists and technologists who have invented things since then much much bigger in impact and scope, in my opinion.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-05-21 13:12:11+00:00
I've run the same frustration road.

And at least the last time I used it in anger (which was, granted, perhaps double digit years ago), the docs started out with and loudly proclaimed "here's how you write your own tasks!" Wait, what? I want to have a build system do at least the 80% case with minimal/zero work; why am I jumping right in to my bespoke needs?

Not sure if this was just bad doc, or the tool actually didn't do the 80% very well then or what, but it's stuck with me.
by rjmunro | 2025-05-21 13:12:58+00:00
Here in the UK it's not as simple as that. In order for your bid to be accepted there are a lot of hoops you go through to try to prove yourself.

Unfortunately these make it very hard for people to get contracts with the government, so most government contracts get awarded to a small number of contractors who can maintain the expertise needed to comply with the rules. Often they end up charging more than other companies and doing a worse job.
by avidphantasm | 2025-05-21 13:12:59+00:00
Exactly. The power of MMT is that it credibly explains what taxes actually are (not a source of government funding, but control rods for inflation and a constant source of domestic demand for the currency that helps maintain monetary sovereignty) and how to make sure spending is productive and not inflationary (e.g. through the currency issuer being the employer of last resort, etc.). You might not like it, but if you want to have a vaguely capitalistic system that has long term stability, you need to employ mechanisms like this.
by criddell | 2025-05-21 13:13:11+00:00
Justin Sandercoe (Justin Guitar on YouTube) did a series[1] where he bought the cheapest electric guitar on Amazon (£60 I think) and then had a guitar tech friend of his do a complete setup. Many times through the series both Justin and the tech remarked at how good the £60 guitar is.

The problem with buying an inexpensive guitar is mostly psychological. Do you really want to pay for a $200 setup on a $100 guitar? People don't and so they end up learning on a guitar that could be so much better for a small investment.

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine fame is well known for doing amazing things with budget tools[2].

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SHE_xooyU

[2]:https://www.instagram.com/p/CN3h__xjFTJ/
by srean | 2025-05-21 13:13:18+00:00
You are using PMFs. I meant and wrote distribution function aka cumulative distribution function. They are closed under products.

> Did you get it from LLM

LOL. There must be a fun and guilty story lurking inside the accusation.

On a more serious note, I would love it if LLMs could do such simplifications and estimations on their own.
by codyvoda | 2025-05-21 13:13:42+00:00
why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype? why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe? have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies?

redbull does not give you wings. it’s disconcerting to see the lack of nuance in these discussions around these new tools (and yeah sorry this isn’t really aimed at you, but the zeitgeist, apologies)
by Denatonium | 2025-05-21 13:13:43+00:00
This has already been tried. During the 1930s to 1950s, amphetamine was available over-the-counter under the trade name Benzedrine, but it was made prescription-only following rampant abuse. By then, it had garnered a significant reputation, and the folk proto-punk band "The Fugs" sang about it in their song "New Amphetamine Shriek".

The real issue with increasing legal access to speed is that you're never fully aware of the impairment that amphetamines cause, because they make the user feel cognitively-enhanced, regardless of reality. In contrast, with alcohol and cannabis, the user is generally well-aware that they are not safe to drive or operate heavy machinery.

I have known SO many people on prescribed amphetamines who either wrecked their cars or narrowly avoided doing so. When I was on it, I narrowly avoided rear-ending multiple different cars before it finally occurred to me that I probably shouldn't be driving. Until that happened, I felt like my driving was being made better by the amphetamine, and for repetitive aspects of driving it probably was. For reaction time and spatial awareness, amphetamine was impairing.

Think of the profound-seeming drivel-filled essay written by a college student cranking out an essay last-minute while high on Adderall and now imagine these people all over the place, driving large pickup trucks with similar misplaced confidence in their cognitive abilities.
by Frost1x | 2025-05-21 13:13:57+00:00
Some of that seems somewhat strategic. With a junior you might do the same if you’re time pressured, or you might sidebar them in real life or they may come to you and you give more helpful advice.

Any senior dev at these organizations should know to some degree how LLMs work and in my opinion would to some degree, as a self protection mechanism, default to ambiguous vague comments like this. Some of the mentality is “if I have to look at it and solve it why don’t I go ahead and do it anyways vs having you do it” effort choices they’d do regardless of what is producing the PR. I think other parts of it is “why would I train my replacement, there’s no advantage for me here.”
by HideousKojima | 2025-05-21 13:14:43+00:00
> I know it has a builtin that does the same as Option<T> with its nullable types, like int?, which can either be an int or null

int? in C# is syntactic sugar for the type Nullable<int>. The big issue though is that Nullable<T> only works for value types, not reference types like string (or any classes). C# added "nullable reference types" a few versions ago, but that is just static analyzers in the compiler and IDEs, it doesn't actually enforce anything at runtime. And all of the methods, etc. that are available for value types with Nullable<T> don't work with nullable reference types.

C# has union types as a planned feature, which will also add an Option<T> type that will make it possible to handle nullability for both value and reference types using the same type, and make it so it's actually enforced at runtime.
by throwaway032023 | 2025-05-21 13:15:10+00:00
“that's declined so precipitously”

That sounds hyperbolic and unserious.

https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-3-32-40c1086...

Flutter is doing well on Desktop. Is it going to be the same experience as writing c# on windows or swift on OSX? No. Will it work? Yes.

Note the ffi/jni gen announcement. This has been in works for a long time. FFI has been stable for awhile. The generators are new.
by jerf | 2025-05-21 13:15:13+00:00
The more threads you have doing something, the higher the probability you have at least one thread doing something that you don't want to have interrupted just because some other thread, somewhere, failed.

The lock case mentioned by littlestymaar is an important "program correctness" consideration, but also consider something like a instant message or chat server like Slack. You don't want the entire server with thousands of connections to crash just because one thread somewhere crashed. It's expensive to reconnect the system after that.

Also, the more threads you are running, the higher the odds get that one of them will panic somewhere, somehow. The numbers start adding up.

Each of these two effects conspire to make the other one worse as you scale up.
by Vinnl | 2025-05-21 13:16:10+00:00
> - They claim federation is impossible… yet matrix has it.

I believe the claim was that it's hard to adapt to changing markets and be federated [1]. Comparing Signal's market share to Matrix's is obviously not a direct cause-and-effect, but Matrix hasn't yet proven that you can get mass adoption that way.

> - They claim openness but are actively hostile to linux distributions and f-droid.

I'm too lazy to find the specific GitHub comment, but IIRC there was a specific list of features they'd need to actively support F-Droid. It is now available in the Guardian Project's F-Droid repository though [2].

[1] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

[2] https://guardianproject.info/apps/org.thoughtcrime.securesms...
by jermaustin1 | 2025-05-21 13:16:24+00:00
I'm actually surprised reading some of those LINQ queries, first few pages, none of them (IMO) should be using query syntax. Hell, I hate query syntax to begin with, and use the extensions any opportunity I'm allowed.

But I would also say that the companies using query syntax are also vastly underrepresented on GitHub public repositories.

> It's likely a lot more common in fields where there are databases than where there are not.

I think beyond that, it's probably more common with developers that came from doing SQL queries but "needed" type safety.

I've worked with developers that didn't even know the extension methods existed. They went from SqlCommand to LINQ to EF or LINQ to SQL.

The only time I think query syntax is better than the extension methods is when dealing with table joins.
by weeb | 2025-05-21 13:16:36+00:00
Yes! transforming the top level frame sounds like the way to go.

I ran jwno with example-config and pressed RAlt and RAlt+K a few times, each time trying one of the onscreen shortcut keys (b, c, d, etc). Log at the bottom of this comment. At the end of the process I was left in a state where pressing Space triggered a context menu in my title bar, and I couldn't type space in the app (e.g. in Notepad or Terminal) which I think is due to one of the Alts ending up being held down? It persisted after leaving Jwno

Log: https://ctxt.io/2/AAB4W5O7Fg
by Aurornis | 2025-05-21 13:17:20+00:00
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.

This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.

Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-21 13:18:27+00:00
I'd argue if you care about your customers, vibe coding will be a no-go. Most of us aren't against it not on principle, but because it's just too risky or too inefficient to bring real value in most applications.

If someday it produces messy but actually reliable code my opinion will change, but at this point, it's just too early (not saying it will ever work, but one can hope)
by jajko | 2025-05-21 13:18:33+00:00
Its not what we is trying to do (at least in official carefully formulated and team-vetted PR statements), but how he is doing it. None of his official big claims were ever realized - wall in Mexico anybody? End of Ukraine war in 24h instead of continuous asslicking of puttin'?

Wanting to improve something and then doing active steps towards damage and destruction because he is a) brainwashed in 80s in Moscow aka russian agent Krasnov; b) arrogant corrupt fool doing insider shorts all the time and taking bribes officially left and right; c) as mentioned above Dunning-Kruger effect example par excellence in the wild.
by jclardy | 2025-05-21 13:18:50+00:00
Google is making money hosting these videos, and users are freely uploading them. A competitor would have to scrape/download them, store them, process them all at their own cost, along with having much less metadata available (Which videos are most viewed, which segments, what do people repeat, what do people skip, what do people watch after this video, which video generates the most ad revenue, etc.)
by thesuitonym | 2025-05-21 13:19:24+00:00
True of ping and traceroute, but sort is not a network utility, so editing it to specifically handle IPv6 addresses is kind of a weird idea. Not necessarily a bad idea, but it makes sense that nobody has done it.

Probably better in this case would be to have a small program that expands IPv6 addresses that you could then pipe into sort. That would be more in-keeping with the Unix Way™.
by Xunjin | 2025-05-21 13:19:48+00:00
Lying about the performance, in my opinion, should lead to legal action, this is straight lying to investors and general consumers.

Not a long time ago, most of us were pretty against techs like FSR and others, but right now, I see it leads to better performance with little image impact. In the near future, being optimistic, these “fake hallucinated frames” could be improved to provide better experience to less powerful GPU.

Again, I'm assuming the best case for us, the average user, not talking about e-sport players as described by PirateSoftware[0]

0. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OOw14llfXVQ
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-21 13:20:45+00:00
Agreed. There are almost certainly more people who know what "BGP" is than know what "Border Gateway Protocol" is.

But it still would have been a favor to the original commenter to write "BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)". If you write just "BGP" you annoy the reader who doesn't know what it is; they'll think it's your fault. But if you write "BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)", they still won't know what it is but they won't be irritated at you anymore.
by roxolotl | 2025-05-21 13:20:53+00:00
The question though is what is the time horizon of “eventually”. Very different decisions should be made if it’s 1 year, 2 years, 4 years, 8 years etc. To me it seems as if everyone is making decisions which are only reasonable if the time horizon is 1 year. Maybe they are correct and we’re on the cusp. Maybe they aren’t.

Good decision making would weigh the odds of 1 vs 8 vs 16 years. This isn’t good decision making.
by apwell23 | 2025-05-21 13:22:43+00:00
they are "game changers" if you are a mediocre software dev thats churning out crud widgets .

any decent software developer uses and creates abstractions instead of generating reams of code using AI.

From what i've seen at work AI is "game changer" for coding in worst sense. reams and reams of duplicated code that looks slightly different from other generated code doing similar things. Before AI ppl used to stop and create some library now they just generate shit because its so easy. AI is death of software engineering.