MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zenbit_UX | 2025-05-07 21:43:15+00:00
I was hit pretty hard by this blog post, it felt deep and targeted at me. Not because of code but from a desire to fix the current state of the world and the knowledge that even if I tried I don’t think it would make a difference.

The same burden of moral responsibility can be applied to any systematic dysfunction. Those that know how to fix institutions, economies or governments are feeling this pretty strongly right now.

And even in the places where I’m not even sure how to fix it like the radicalization or both genders, or various ethnic groups into hating each other…

In my downtime my brain annoyingly tries to tackle these problems until I’m overwhelmed by the conclusions I’ve arrived at - many times the inevitable result is that things will continue to get _much worse_ before they get better.

Maybe I should take up crosswords.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-07 21:43:51+00:00
People who say they are productve 8 to 12 hours a day with barely pause are just liars (or slaves that get whiped at the second they stop).

Heck, when I became parent and decided for a couple of years to work at 80% I realized I was doing the same amount of work as before and as much or more than any other colleague working at 100%. I only came back at 100% because I realized businesses are willing to subsidize procrastination over efficiency and I didn't find normal to be paid less if all I was asked in return was spending 1/5 of my work time time doing nothing productive for the company.
by omneity | 2025-05-07 21:44:23+00:00
It's probably subjective to your own use, but for me Gemma3 is not particularly usable (i.e. not competitive or delivering a particular value for me to make use of it).

Qwen 2.5 14B blows Gemma 27B out of the water for my use. Qwen 2.5 3B is also very competitive. The 3 series is even more interesting with the 0.6B model actually useful for basic tasks and not just a curiosity.

Where I find Qwen relatively lackluster is its complete lack of personality.
by dathinab | 2025-05-07 21:44:40+00:00
To extend on this:

In python it's pretty common to have LSP separate from type checking separate from linting (e.g. ruff+mypy+ide_specific_lsp).

Which to be fair sucks (as it limits what the LSP can do, can lead to confusing mismatches in error/no-error and on one recent project I had issues with the default LSP run by vscode starting to fall apart and failing to propose auto imports for some trivial things for part of the project....)

But it's the stack where pyright fits in.
by kfreds | 2025-05-07 21:45:39+00:00
> This proposal seems to be taking that approach to the extreme - not even a kernel.

To be fair, there is a kernel - the Go runtime. But since there is no privilege separation it classifies as a unikernel. Performance gains should be expected compared to a system where you have to copy data to/from guest VM kernel space to guest VM user space.

> I wonder if it could run on cloud VMs?

Yes. TamaGo currently runs in KVM guests with the following VMMs: Cloud Hypervisor, Firecracker microvm, QEMU microvm.

> How tiny could the image become?

Roughly the same size as your current Go binary. TamaGo doesn't add much.
by alexwaygood | 2025-05-07 21:46:43+00:00
We'll also discover your venv if you: - Activate it manually (`source .venv/bin/activate`, etc.) - Set the `VIRTUAL_ENV` environment variable - Or use a command such as `uv run` or the equivalent from pdm/poetry/hatch to run ty (these project managers usually implicitly set the `VIRTUAL_ENV` variable to point to the project's virtual environment before executing any commands)
by whynotmaybe | 2025-05-07 21:47:45+00:00
I don't think anyone should feel bad for not knowing something.

My "general" knowledge is built on my experience.

The first comment before OP answer's was kinda condescending about the article and I felt the same way when reading it but then op's comment made me realise I was in the wrong because I forgot that my "general" knowledge is not general at all.

OP had to defend why he posted it. I wanted to tell OP that it was a good idea to post it, not for the article content, but for my teaching moment.
Ask HN: How is Julia for data analysis coming along?
by juujian | 2025-05-07 21:48:15+00:00
For a hot minute, Julia revived a lot of attention. Haven't heard anything in a while. I have my computing needs covered by R and Julia, and last time I tried Julia (two years ago? Three?) it didn't take me long to find something that would be non-trivial to do/wasn't implemented. Now I'm having some need for faster for larger datasets, and I like the idea of a typed language. What's the status?
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-07 21:49:29+00:00
After taxes (assuming single income, CA residence), $250k is $150k of spendable income. $6k on a house is $72,000 a year, leaving $78k to spend on food, utilities, etc. Assuming for some reason you spend $1000 on utilities each month (presumably you run a cryptofarm in your closest and a weed farm in your backyard), you still have $68k to spend on food. Assuming you spend an average of $20/meal/person on 3 meals/day every day of the year that's still leaves $2000 for other stuff.

Or in other words, even with profligate spending you still have money leftover. Which brings us back to this: techies apparently are good at code but very bad at basic finance.

If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley.

Berkeley is considered one of the best universities in the world. If you don't think it's a good school, the problem is you, not the schools.

If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed.

I volunteer coach to various local schools (changes every season). My alma mater is (now) considered one of the best public schools in state and occasionally makes the national list; it sends a higher % of students to the prestigious colleges (Ivy League, Berkeley, Stanfurd) than the famous local private schools (Troy and Harvard-Westlake).

But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.

This is a nonsensical strawman...which supports my first point.The choice is not to lease two luxury cars or send their kids to private school. Both choices are the wrong choice. The correct choice for someone making $250k who claims that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck is to send their kid to public school, and address any deficiencies with tutoring or extracurricular activities (both of which are more likely to benefit college admissions and academic performance than private school and cost a fraction of private school tuition).

TLDR: if you are in the top 1.5 percentile you are not, nor will you ever be considered living paycheck to paycheck. If you tell someone that, they'll smile at you politely and assume you have a severe mental defect.
by alexwaygood | 2025-05-07 21:49:30+00:00
That's a big part of it, but there are also several areas where we're trying to innovate on functionality as well as speed. I'd personally be pretty disappointed if the only thing we had to offer at the end of all this was a type checker where the only value add was speed. We've also got first-class support for intersection types, and quite a different model to other type checkers regarding when and whether redefinitions are allowed, for example. We believe there are significant areas where typing can be made more usable and easily adoptable than it is today.
by floxy | 2025-05-07 21:50:20+00:00
>getting the reverse solution (sum(?, 10))

Doing an "all modes" predicate:

sum_list(List,Sum)

...where...

sum_list([1,2,3], 6)

...is "True" as expected would probably be a pretty interesting exercise if you wanted to be able to get all of the lists. You'd probably need to do an "enumerate the rationals" type of thing, since you need to go to infinity in a couple of different directions at the same time. That is, you can't do nested loops/recursing:

for(x=-∞; x<∞; ++x) { for(y=-∞; y<∞; ++y) {

i.e.

sum_list([],0). sum_list([L|Ls],BigSum) :- sum_list(Ls, LittleSum), add(L,LittleSum,BigSum).

...with an all-modes "add/3". Since there are an infinite supply of pairs that add up to, say 10:

⋮ [12,-2] [11,-1] [10, 0] [ 9, 1] [ 8, 2] ⋮ [ 0,10] [-1,11] [-2,12] ⋮

...and you can also go to arbitrary list lengths:

[10] [1,9] [1,1,8] [1,1,1,7] ⋮ [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1] ⋮ [0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1] [1,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1] ⋮ [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0] ⋮ [-100,-99,-98,...,-12,-11,-9,-8,...,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,...,99,100]

...your life probably gets easier if you limit the domain to positive integers (without zero) since then the list length doesn't diverge. Then a declarative looking solution probably just has a all-modes equivalent to "sort" somewhere within? Certainly interesting to think about.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/publications/r...

https://prolog-lang.org/ImplementersForum/0103-modes.html

https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?predicate=permutation%2...
by blibble | 2025-05-07 21:50:43+00:00
prior to astral appearing, python's tooling has been beyond terrible, compared to say, Java's

astral have now replaced the awful pip with the fantastic uv

various awful linters with with the fantastic ruff

and now hopefully replacing the terrible type checkers (e.g. mypy) with a good one!

I hope they have the pypi backend on their list too, my kingdom for Maven Central in python!
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-05-07 21:50:50+00:00
An automated objective function is indeed core to how alphago, alphazero, and other RL + deep learning approaches work. Though it is obviously much more complex, and integrated into a larger system.

The core of these approaches are "self-play" which is where the "superhuman" qualities arise. The system plays billions of games against itself, and uses the data from those games to further refine itself. It seems that an automated "referee" (objective function) is an inescapable requirement for unsupervised self-play.

I would suggest that Stockfish and other older chess engines are not a good analogy for this discussion. Worth noting though that even Stockfish no longer uses a hand written objective function on extracted features like you describe. It instead uses a highly optimized neutral network trained on millions of positions from human games.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-07 21:51:46+00:00
> Interests: do you mostly enjoy media and activities particular to a time when you were younger, or do you have a penchant for novelty despite your age?

I have been into hip hop and rap since the mid 80s. I was a fitness instructor until 2012 right before I turned 40 and had to keep up with modern music of all types depending on the audience.

I’m not one of those that think all new music sucks since I’ve seen the evolution over three decades, I do still recognize the new generation that actually has talent - can flow with the music, have clever turns of phrases, not overproduced, etc. My 22 year old (step)son shares his music playlist with me and pick out songs out of his list and add to mine just so I can relate to him.
by goosedragons | 2025-05-07 21:51:52+00:00
Is it weird that I kind of want ePub to ePub support? I have many not Kobo compatible comics/manga from places like Humble Bundle that I need to fix. Ideally I'd like to keep metadata + reading direction and perhaps the table of contents. I suppose I could script something that unzips 'em and then processes them....
by azangru | 2025-05-07 21:52:07+00:00
> I have no clue how you discerned this from the description, but I'd like to understand more.

One way of understanding the meaning of a dubious phrase is examining its use in context. For example, one of the pages of the Astro docs begins as follows:

"Astro is the web framework for building content-driven websites like blogs, marketing, and e-commerce" [0]

Ok; so we have our prototypes — or, as Jason Miller would call them, holotypes — of the mysterious "content-driven websites". They are blogs, marketing sites, or e-commerce sites.

Another way of understanding the meaning of a confusing phrase is hearing the distinction explained by the creator of the framework. In early podcasts, when Astro was still mostly unknown, Fred Schott explained that it was not intended for building something like Figma, or Photoshop, or Facebook, or Youtube; but rather something like blogs or magazines; although primarily he was probably targeting the creators of e-commerce websites, because those were the ones that could bring in money.

[0] https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/why-astro/
by ebolyen | 2025-05-07 21:52:51+00:00
It's been a long time since I took a class like this, but I definitely had a similar experience to the author.

Ideas like fold and map where _never_ mentioned in lisp (to exaggerate, every function had to have the recursive implementation with 5 state variables and then a simpler form for the initial call), at no point did higher-order functions or closures make an appearance while rotating a list by 1 and then 2 positions.

The treatment of Prolog was somehow worse. Often the code only made any sense once you reversed what the lecturer was saying, realizing the arrow meant "X given Y" not "X implies Y", at which point, if you could imagine the variables ran "backwards" (unification was not explained) the outcome might start to seem _possible_. I expect the lecturer was as baffled by their presentation as we were.

In general, it left the rest of the class believing quite strongly that languages other than Java were impossible to use and generally a bad move. I may have been relatively bitter in the course evaluation by the end.
by Mockapapella | 2025-05-07 21:53:00+00:00
This is a good article on the "fog of war" for GPU inference. Modal has been doing a great job of aggregating and disseminating info on how to think about high quality AI inference. Learned some fun stuff -- thanks for posting it.

> the majority of organizations achieve less than 70% GPU Allocation Utilization when running at peak demand — to say nothing of aggregate utilization. This is true even of sophisticated players, like the former Banana serverless GPU platform, which operated at an aggregate utilization of around 20%.

Saw this sort of thing at my last job. Was very frustrating pointing this out to people only for them to respond with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I posted a much less tactful article (read: rant) than the one by Modal, but I think it still touches on a lot of the little things you need to consider when deploying AI models: https://thelisowe.substack.com/p/you-suck-at-deploying-ai-mo...
by const_cast | 2025-05-07 21:53:01+00:00
While the points you're making about vehicles are technically true, I think it's dishonest to frame this as the actual thought processes consumers use.

Vehicles are primarily driven by culture, not pragmatism. I live in Texas, and not the outback part of Texas, but DFW. Trucks are prolific here and it's not exactly a secret that the greatest challenge most will ever face are the potholes on 360 heading into Arlington.

The truth is that many people are happy to burn money if it reinforces their sense of masculinity and identity as a Texan.
by interstice | 2025-05-07 21:54:15+00:00
I like this! Have thought of it for both bikes and cars, I drive manual and occasionally just downchange coming up to lights or off motorways. Also used to have a zx636 and bought an LED brake light that flashed obnoxiously when triggered (F1 style), I like to think the safety it added offset how annoyed I was probably making everyone behind me.
by EasyMark | 2025-05-07 21:54:34+00:00
This is so fkn stupid. None of the energystar items I've looked at have suffered from any issues over the years and no doubt have saved me a lot of money. Now things will just be even more opaque and the environment will be made all the worse for it. I can't wait until this clown circus is out of office. Sure the midterms will overturn most of the clown show or at least put a wall around it to stop the damage.
by betterThanTexas | 2025-05-07 21:54:38+00:00
> Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz.

Yea but why use a mac at that point? I don't see anyone on the linux side of things making anything that acknowledges why people use macs in the first place; the entire ecosystem is built to reproduce the IBM PC (...in a unix/like environment). Particularly with its disastrous keybindings and perplexing UI decisions.
by tremon | 2025-05-07 21:54:47+00:00
I'm mostly a child of the 90s, and I prefer 70s music too. The music scene of the 80s and 90s was soulless (pun intended), at least when it comes to mainstream cultural presence. When I think of the music of my youth, the terms that come to mind are vapid imaging, bland instrumentation, and unimaginative lyrics. I guess you could say I was old the day I was born :)

The music did not get better with age either; that music is now old enough to enter "classics" radio stations, which means those stations now alternate between nostalgia and nausea for me. The only redeeming quality those songs seem to have is that they can get even worse, as judged by recent covers/remakes of earlier failures (really, how barren must your musical taste be choose to cover Liquido by Narcotic?)

That's not to say that nothing good came from that period; it's just that good music from that time was not successful. I had great fun in the 2000s and 2010s discovering the bands and artists that should have been big in the 90s.

I have no problems with the movies nor the cartoons of my youth though, those are still the best cinema ever produced.
by vunderba | 2025-05-07 21:54:59+00:00
Love this one so I've added it. The concept is very easy for most GenAI models to grasp, but it requires a strong overall cohesive understanding. Rather unbelievably, OpenAI 4o managed to produce a pass.

I should also add an image that is heavy with "greebles". GenAI usually lacks the fidelity for these kinds of minor details so although it adds them - they tend to fall apart at more than a cursory examination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble
by creatonez | 2025-05-07 21:55:13+00:00
This AUP is related to the optional backend services run by Mozilla. The frontends for all of these services are open source, with no usage restrictions. It doesn't affect how Firefox is licensed in terms of copyright. Additionally, the backends for some of these services (such as Firefox Sync and Mozilla Accounts) are fully open source, so you could avoid the AUP if you wanted to.
by toprerules | 2025-05-07 21:55:24+00:00
People in academia are notoriously disconnected from real software development, so I wouldn't use them as an example of what to do or not do.

You can be judicious with your time without avoiding any inconvenience to accomplishing a goal. Inconvenience is how you find motivation and learn new things. For 50c a day you're robbing yourself of valuable knowledge and bettering open ecosystems that are themselves fulfilling ends. If you don't put a value on learning or contributing back then I don't see why'd you'd want to be in this profession in the first place.
by sys_64738 | 2025-05-07 21:55:27+00:00
I remember ripping songs in AudioMaster 2 on the Amiga with a sound digitizer, and writing them to floppy as a playable stream. You could boot the A500 with the disk and play back the digitized song. I think that was the point that it dawned on me where music was headed but not the form it would take. This was around 1990.
by Symbiote | 2025-05-07 21:56:05+00:00
I've only seen "EnergyStar" in Europe on the BIOS screen of older computers. I knew it was American, but until this HN post I thought it only applied to computers.

The EU's energy labelling scheme grades appliances on a scale, and gives the estimated annual electricity usage. I'm sure it's effective, as it makes clear why the cheapest appliance might not be a good purchase.

https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/ecodesign-and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label

I'm not certain, but I think the rating would be either performed or certified by an independent laboratory, i.e. a private business, so the government bureaucracy is limited to defining the specification/tests.

(And incidentally, my dishwasher defaults to the "Eco" programme, which takes 3½ hours. I don't care as I almost always run it overnight, and it's one button press to choose a faster programme.)
by const_cast | 2025-05-07 21:56:09+00:00
What these "free market" idealists fail to recognize is that the free market only works when consumers are informed. Yes, ideally consumer should buy products that are higher quality or cheaper and that should incentivize the market to produce products of that nature. Yeah, in order to do that though consumers need some measurement of quality.

It's like advocating for the free market by saying used car dealers should be able to dial back the odometer. That's not free market economics. It's actually the opposite, these people are advocating for a less-free market.
by dathinab | 2025-05-07 21:56:13+00:00
1. complete type checking

in python eco system you have linters like ruff which do hardly any type checking and type checkers like mypy which do try to approach complete type checking, but still are absurdly full of holes

2. speed

any of the "established" type checkers either are supper slow (e.g. mypy) so you only run it like once before commit instead of "life" or do fail to properly type check so many things that if you have a requirement for "adequate static code analysis" they reliably fail that requirement (which might result in a legal liability, but even if not is supper bad for reliable code and long term maintenance)

also probably priorities are switched with 1st speed then closing holes as the later part is really hard due to how a mess python typing is (but in many code bases most code won't run into this holes so it's okay, well except if you idk. use pyalchemy as "ORM" subclassing base model (just don't terrible idea)).
by johnea | 2025-05-07 21:56:36+00:00
</sarcasm>

Sure, if they just make one with the guiding principle's of the pink, hello kitty, assault rifle, it'll be great for the kids!

</serious>

All commercial products will be designed to maximize revenue to shareholders, no other factors will ever be considered.

Any deviation for this path will lead to shareholder lawsuits alleging failure to uphold financial fiduciary responsibilities.
by Rochus | 2025-05-07 21:57:16+00:00
> But Kay was the one to popularize objects as we think of them today.

Not actually. Kay's view of OO is pretty different from what we understand of OO today; the general understanding is closer to Simula 67; see also the IEEE milestone: https://ethw.org/Milestones:Object-Oriented_Programming,_196.... Ironically Smalltalk-76 and onwards also corresponds more with the Simula 67's than Kay's view.

> Development of Smalltalk started in 1969

You mix that up with Kay's PhD. A good and reliable history about the origin and evolution of Smalltalk can be found in the excellent 2020 paper by Ingalls: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-07 21:57:26+00:00
In 1997 or 1998, I had a 486 and to play an MP3 (which of course took many minutes to download), I'd just type "xmms filename" at my zsh prompt running inside Red Hat. While it was playing, I'd carry on working in Emacs or a browser or both.
by subject4056 | 2025-05-07 21:57:32+00:00
Kanban operates on a known product with a known manufacturing process. Many software products are undefined even at time of public release, and evolve continuously. "Deciding what to build", while explicitly highlighted in the agile software manifesto, is the weak link.

Put another way, lean manufacturing improves metrics for the margianal unit of goods. No one, customer or dev, is interested in the margianal unit of software.