MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by refurb | 2025-05-07 09:17:14+00:00
Labcorp is one of several labs and most hospitals have their own labs and only send out specialized tests.

It is true - you can’t test every patient for everything. There is an estimated 1B primary care visits in the US each year. Assume every patient get 5 tests at $50 a test and you just spent a quarter of a trillion just on tests.
by kristianp | 2025-05-07 09:18:34+00:00
They talk about the imessage vulnerability (1), but is it really an example of bloat to accidentally allow pdfs to be parsed with an extension of .gif? I guess it's an example of an unnecessary functionality, but Apple would sell a lot less iPhones if they didn't add all these UI gimmicks.

(1) https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
by ozim | 2025-05-07 09:18:44+00:00
... simplest solution is often not to use a library at all and write the thing yourself, or even better, realize that you don't need the feature you would have used that library for ... the resulting code is of a manageable size..

I don't see the nuance there, that is my take of the comment, those are pretty much strongest statements and points about using libraries are minimal.

That is why I added mine strongly pointing that real world systems are not going to be "managable size" unless they are really small or a single person is working on the.
by navane | 2025-05-07 09:19:05+00:00
I agree with you now, but I also remember everyone, all kinds of experts, saying Putin is just postering. I think it's important to remember that.

It is important to note when things are not normal. Putin actually invading Ukraine was a very unexpected move.

Unfortunately, we as people are very good at rationalizing after the fact "oh of course this was coming", shrugging our shoulders and just moving on as if nothing happened. "It is what it is, this too shall pass".
by codingbot3000 | 2025-05-07 09:19:27+00:00
Sad to hear this.

There seems to be, at least in more enlightened companies, a slight momentum away from the current "classic" org structure of having separate Product and Tech departments staff dysfunctional Scrum teams. Going towards smaller delivery teams and managers who cover product as well as people leadership. The Basecamp folks have been doing this for a while, apparently.

This might open another chance for you to use all your skills.

(Of course, you cannot find this in any MBA program afaik, they all seem to teach the CPO/CTO Enterprise Slow-Motion Scrum blueprint, so if the tide will turn, it will take a while...)

I also find the "classic" org structure quite limiting. I've found that experienced "builders" can take on more senior functions such as people management and product management. No matter if their original speciality was dev, UX, or QA. Today I consider the simple-minded hierarchical structures most companies build, as well as their dysfunctional team structures, a colossal waste of talent and energy.

Good luck to you!
by Zanni | 2025-05-07 09:20:02+00:00
This is an unfortunate stance for science-fiction authors to take. I understand the frustration with generative AI displacing artists and authors work being harvested as training material, but ChatGPT was used here just as a sort of text-processing tool, not to displace any artists or authors, not to make judgements.

Nick Mamatas, an author I admire, condemning ChatGPT as "the Bad Facts and Dumb Idea Lake-Draining Machine of Stolen Books" is particularly disappointing. (In general, the issue of water usage by LLMs seems particularly overwrought.)
by lmm | 2025-05-07 09:20:47+00:00
> I just almost never have problems with this sort accidental conversion in practice.

95% of C++ programmers claim this, but C++ programs continue to be full of bugs, and they're usually exactly this kind of dumb bug.

> will be noticed by literally just running the code once.

Maybe. If what you're doing is "tricky mathematical algorithms", how would you even know if you were making these mistakes and not noticing them?

> the cost of visual noise of wrapper types, already higher just at the writing stage, then continues to be a cost every time you read the code. It's just not worth it for the very minor benefit it brings.

I find wrapper types are not a cost but a benefit for readability. They make it so much easier to see what's going on. Often you can read a function's prototype and immediately know what it does.

> Certainly, lifetime bugs are massively overshadowed by logic and algorithmic bugs.

Everyone claims this, but the best available research shows exactly the opposite, at least when it comes to security bugs (which in most domains - perhaps not yours - are vastly more costly): the most common bugs are still the really dumb ones, null pointer dereferences, array out of bounds, and double frees.
by namaria | 2025-05-07 09:21:29+00:00
To be fair, I find ChatGPT useful for Elixir, which is pretty niche. The great error messages (if a bit verbose) and the atomic nature of functions in a functional language goes with the grain of LLMs I think.

Still, at most I get it to help me with snippets. I wouldn't want it to just generate lots of code, for one it's pretty easy to write Elixir...
by Frieren | 2025-05-07 09:22:13+00:00
> every developer, company, team, sub-team, etc has their own "library" of random functions, utilities, classes, etc

You are right. But my conclusion is different.

If it is a stable and people have been there for a while then developers know that code as well as the rest. So, when something fails they know how to fix it.

Bringing generic libraries may create long callstacks of very generic code (usually templates) that is very difficult to debug while adding a lot of functionality that is never used.

Bringing a new library into the code base need to be a though decision.
by syeare | 2025-05-07 09:24:03+00:00
Spotted my kin!

What is it that makes slashed zeroes so nuch more appealing than the other kinds of "zeroes"? Slashed zeroes are definitely much better than those nasty dotted inverse donut zeroes

How does a dot in a zero even make any kinda logical sense? It's like a piece of dough floating in midair in the center of a donut

Dotted zeroes [insert copypasta] bad

I don't even know why I'm so obsessed with the slash in zeroes
by ETH_start | 2025-05-07 09:26:33+00:00
Economic development is too complex to be micromanaged from the top down. It also suffers from the kind of trade barriers this plan advocates.

Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes

A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.

The study is quite rigorous too:

https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
by exe34 | 2025-05-07 09:26:38+00:00
> it’s it similar to humans. when restricted in terms of what they can or cannot say, they become more conservative and cannot really express all sorts of ideas.

This reminds me of the time when I was a child, and my parents decreed that all communications would henceforth happen in English. I became selectively mute. I responded yes/no, and had nothing further to add and ventured no further information. The decree lasted about a week.
by RhysU | 2025-05-07 09:26:44+00:00
> True, but even “least bad” is not correct unless the public is well informed [as in not being fed misinformation]...

You opened by saying that democracy is not ideal unless the populace's information diet is carefully controlled.

By whom and in what way? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What happens when they deem misinformation rampant or the public not well-informed?

> I think you might be projecting...

I am indeed projecting. I find those specific words only in use among unreasonably self-sure people who aren't terrified by the implications/risks of concentrating power to answer those consequent questions.

> The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.

But my projecting isn't unjustified. Quoted above, you also began by stating the 2020s electorate was duped with misinformation. Had they only known better, understood their own best interests as seen through the eyes of the self-assuredly enlightened, listened to the nascent Ministry of Truth, etc.
by anticodon | 2025-05-07 09:27:10+00:00
> Putin had already attacked multiple countries before. Georgia, Chechnya

As always, westerners leave in an information bubble. Chechnya was always a part of Russia. It was a civil war. Ukraine was always a part of Russia until 1991, btw, there was never a separate country called "Ukraine" before 1991 - you can easily find that even in Western history books, although I'm sure they'll be rewritten in some way soon, if not already.

Georgia launched attack in 2008, it is easily confirmed by:

1. News from that time (there was a several days delay between Georgia attack and when Medvedev decided to respond, during that time Putin called a press conference and said: "Georgia has started an attack and is bombing civilians, but Western press is silent about it". You can still find recordings of that press conference on video hosting sites, I believe.

2. There was an independent EU investigation that also confirmed that Georgia started the attack in 2008.

3. Last year Georgian government itself confirmed that they were attacking first.

It never cease to amaze me in what distorted information reality people live.

BTW, it's for the best, because it was the reason why West could coerce Georgia into starting a war in 2008. All the population, including the top politics lived in an alternative reality, so they basically said to Georgia: "Russia is weak and corrupt, they have no army, no weapons, they have only shovels, and even their shovels are rusty. So you'll easily get what you want without any resistance."

Actually, more or less the same repeated in 2022. Just read HN comments from 2022: "Russians are surrendering by tens of thousands a day, they don't want to fight with warm and welcoming and kind Ukrainian soldiers", "Ukraine burns thousands of Russian tanks and armored vehicles a day: here's a photo proof", etc, etc.

So this distortion of reality works the other way round, when West bases its actions on it. There are lies from top to bottom, and then everyone makes all kinds of decisions based on those lies.
by fakedang | 2025-05-07 09:28:13+00:00
If India's going imperial, why would Pakistan bother with hosting terrorist elements to provoke a hostile "belligerent" (according to you) neighbour, and letting them attack a civilian zone?

Indian leadership hasn't been going on TV prior to the Pahalgam attack and putting out bellicose statements like Hindus and Muslims can't live together - Pakistan did. Also India isn't stupid to invade a nuclear armed country with a first-use policy.

The above incursions are the usual dance we see with India and Pakistan (and China), that we see every few years. Except this time, Pakistan triggered it by attacking civilians, just like 26/11, while even Indian support of Pakistani terrorists such as the Balochistan Liberation Army has never led to a large-scale slaughter of civilians in Pakistan.

Pakistan messed up big time, they'll chalk up the L, it will be a few tense words for some time, and then things will get back to where they were before.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-07 09:28:41+00:00
This is neat.

But, please focus on 3 or 4 languages. Do those well.

Asian languages ( apparently Cantonese isn’t on the list ) are very hard to machine translate.

As is this is just Chat GPT + AWS Translate + AWS Text To Speech. Along with Firebase for user management and a very nice UX front end.

To turn this into a product I’d select maybe 3 languages, French , Spanish, German and hire advisors for all 3. Work on creating a few stories edited by your advisors and add basic gamification/quizzes.

I like the idea though
by coldtea | 2025-05-07 09:30:10+00:00
Yes.

Like we didn't "yearn to capture" moments all the time, the way we do now, even in the 80s and 90s.

Even though regular and compact and even disposable cameras were available, few walked around with one or used within the year. At best somebody would take a camera on holiday or some major life event, which is like 1/100 of current use.
by codedokode | 2025-05-07 09:30:22+00:00
The functions are so verbose and inconvenient that even Rust developers themselves do not use them. For example, in this code [1] they used a wrapping addition instead of "checked_add" because it is faster to write.

For comparison, Swift uses "+" for checked addition and as a result, majority of developers use checked addition by default. And in Rust due to its poor design choices most developers use wrapping addition even where a checked addition should be used.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/vec/mod.rs.html#2010
by FullGarden_S | 2025-05-07 09:31:02+00:00
>He's quite insistent that Pakistan wasn't involved in the topical attacks.

Yes, just like how Pakistan was insistent about their involvement in sheltering Bin Laden. I don't understand why you expect any representative of a nation to confess explicitly to their crimes themselves but things like that just don't happen. Confession to their indirect involvement is the leading clue to majority of their actions and further investigation that will never be disclosed to public can only dig the truth.

>And indeed that the attacks may not have happened at all

that is very funny. That attack did happen and the attackers did send a message mentioning the name "Modi" to one of the survivors they spared. The tourists were stripped first to verify if they're circumcised and were shot immediately thereafter. I won't share further details but I ensure you, it really did happen and feel free to discard this as misinformation or dig further into it yourself.
by nottorp | 2025-05-07 09:31:36+00:00
This is about software.

Companies patent software just to have legal ammunition to fight other companies that patent software.

# of patents in software is not a measure of innovation but of how litigious the business environment is.

> Helicopter money by supplying large amounts of funds

How about "helicopter money" for any EU cloud provider that develops tools to migrate data out of the big US providers?

After all, no matter which US cloud provider you choose, you're locked in even wrt to other US cloud providers.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-05-07 09:32:39+00:00
I'd guess the benefit is that it's quicker/easier to experiment with the prompt? Claude has prompt caching, I'm not sure how efficient that is but they offer a discount on requests that make use of it. So it might be that that's efficient enough that it's worth the tradeoff for them?

Also I don't think much of this prompt is used in the API, and a bunch of it is enabling specific UI features like Artifacts. So if they re-use the same model for the API (I'm guessing they do but I don't know) then I guess they're limited in terms of fine tuning.
by vidarh | 2025-05-07 09:32:44+00:00
> No. The practice of writing code has clearly shown that early returns lead to better structured code. It's not even disputable anymore.

What is "better structured" is subjective. So, yes, it is very much disputable, however much you'd like it to not be. I happen to agree that it leads to better structured code, but I'm not arrogant enough to presume this to be an objective view, because the difference is very minor and is also largerly affected by coding style.

> Then he should have looked at functional languages, rather than missing the point of them completely.

Having looked plenty at functional language, the complexity of compilation of functional languages that are fast enough to be practical is vastly higher, and compilation complexity was a major aspect of his philosophy of what made a good language.

I'm all for making cautious tradeoffs to make developer experience nicer, but if you think he missed the point of them, you don't understand his philosophy on simplicity.

Again, it's fine to disagree with him about it, but a core part of the philosophy behind Oberon was to whittle the language down to what could demonstrably be implemented in a very simple but efficient way.

So again, when you call it "half-assed" while again and again demonstrating that you're ignoring the very extensive amount of thinking that went into the choices made, it makes it clear my initial assessment was right.

> OK. What are the superstar Oberon projects that are used by a large number of people? Can you name ANY? I don't know any, and I know unfortunately a lot about Oberon and its cult members.

Strawman. I've not suggested there are any "superstar Oberon projects that are used by a large number of people", so this has zero relevance to any of the things I've argued. You've either entirely missed the point of the sentence you quoted, or have run out of arguments.

> I am familiar with ETH research, and I actually employ an ETH professor, and an alumnus. I don't think I've seen any mentions of Oberon in their highest rated recent ETH research.

Which again has zero relevance to the sentence you quoted, which was in response to your ludicrous suggestion that 'It was basically: "my way or you're expelled because I'm the emeritus professor here"' in response to my statement about admiring Wirths approach to language design, after you went on about early returns - a feature Wirth introduced into Oberon-07 which he designed after retiring.

The projects I referenced happened in the 90's, while he was still at ETHZ. If you are familiar with the ETH research during the era, you'd be aware of a long range of PhD dissertations and technical reports that provided alternative feature sets for Oberon, as per what I argued above to show that the design of standard Oberon was concious choices to keep it minimal rather than some lack of effort. Wirth was an examiner for Franz' 1994 dissertation on JIT'ing Oberon code, for example.

You keep moving goalposts, and bringing up strawmen, because your initial claim that it was "half-assed" is entirely unsupportable.
by senko | 2025-05-07 09:34:07+00:00
Tight editor integration means better diffs (right in your editor), easier context manager, and other convenience features that CLI-only tools can't have.

This doesn't mean that aider, claude code, etc. aren't very good tools, but it does make sense to distinguish between built-in tools vs external ones. A similar non-AI example is debugging or linting: IDE integration makes it much easier than using a separate tool.
by elAhmo | 2025-05-07 09:34:37+00:00
I honestly had to stop and think "wait a minute, was't 2.5 Pro out a few months ago? how come it is in preview now?"

Google releasing a new model (as it has a blog post, announcement, can be chosen in the API) called 2.5 Pro Preview, while having a 2.5 Pro already out for months is ridiculous. I thought it was just OpenAI that is unable to use its dozens of billions of dollars to come up with a normal naming scheme - yet here we are with another trillion dollar company being unable to settle on a versioning scheme that is not confusing.
by sylware | 2025-05-07 09:35:40+00:00
Maybe the guys here know:

Is there a little 3D/GFX/game engine (plain and simple C written) strapped to a javascript interpreter (like quickjs) without being in apple or gogol gigantic and ultra complex web engines?

Basically, a set of javascript APIs with a runtime for wayland/vulkan3D, freetype2, and input devices.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-07 09:35:43+00:00
Because it is counting since CFront 2.0, the first official release with industry use in UNIX systems.

So that would be Rust 1.0, released in 2015, not 2006, putting it down to a decade.

And the point still stands when looking at any long enough ecosystem still in use, with strong backwards compatibility, not only the language, the whole ecosystem, eventually editions alone won't make it, and just like those languages, Rust will gain its own warts.
by Sinosteelpipe | 2025-05-07 09:38:15+00:00
On May 6, Dan Jørgensen, the head of the European Union's energy affairs, announced a plan to end the EU's import of Russian energy at the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

According to the plan, the EU has set 2027 as the deadline. By then, all 27 member states (from landlocked countries to coastal countries) must gradually stop purchasing the remaining Russian energy, especially liquefied natural gas transported by tankers.
by imtringued | 2025-05-07 09:39:12+00:00
>Return an AllocationError. Rust unfortunately picked the wrong default here for the sake of convenience, along with the default of assuming a global allocator. It's now trying to add in explicit allocators and allocation failure handling

Going from panic to panic free in Rust is as simple as choosing 'function' vs 'try_function'. The actual mistakes in Rust were the ones where the non-try version should have produced a panic by default. Adding Box::try_new next to Box::new is easy.

There are only two major applications of panic free code in Rust: critical sections inside mutexes and unsafe code (because panic safety is harder to write than panic free code). In almost every other case it is far more fruitful to use fuzzing and model checking to explicitly look for panics.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-05-07 09:39:19+00:00
I really don't understand the obsession with AWS-like EU clouds.

The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm.

Take Microsoft Office as an example.

For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.

Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.

Another example is S3.

For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.

Back to EU clouds.

Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.
by tharant | 2025-05-07 09:41:44+00:00
> A use-case that can be carefully considered requires more knowledge about the use-case than the LLM

I would tend to agree with that assertion…

> it requires you to understand the specific model's training and happy paths

But I strongly disagree with that assertion; I know nothing of commercial models’ training corpus, methodology, or even their system prompts; I only know how to use them as a tool for various use-cases.

> it requires more time to make it output the thing you want than just doing it yourself.

And I strongly disagree with that one too. As long as the thing you want it to output is rooted in relatively mainstream or well-known concepts, it’s objectively much faster than you/we are; maybe it’s more expensive but it’s also crazy fast—which is the point of all tools—and the precision/accuracy of most speedy tools can be often deferred until a later step in the process.

> If you don't know enough about the subject or the model, you will get confident garbage

Once you step outside their comfort zone (their training), well, yah… they do all tend to be unduly confident in their responses—I’d argue however that it is a trait they learned from us; we really like to be confident even when we’re wrong and that trait is borne out dramatically across the internet sources on which a lot of these models were trained.