MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by munificent | 2025-05-01 20:47:45+00:00
I think it's a combination of a few factors:

* Girls are often put under more social obligations than boys. Look around and you'll find lots of stories where girls are expected to help out with the housework while their brothers are given free reign to do what they feel like.

* I deeply believe that representation matters. Many girls probably never even considered that computers were a thing they might enjoy because they never saw other girls being into it.

* This less true today, but there has historically been a lot of pressure on girls and boys to do gendered activities, and tech was male coded. Parents would tell their daughters to play with dolls, not videogames. (And videogames are very often the pathway into programming.) Peers would make fun of girls that were interested in nerd stuff.

* For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, male nerd culture has often been outright hostile to females entering the space. Girls trying to join programming clubs, take CS classes, etc. would frequently get harassed by guys. (You can look at Gamergate as an extreme example of this.)

Meanwhile, male found it easy to think of being into computers because almost everyone you saw using a computer was a male like them. They were given ample free time, and faced few headwinds when expressing an interest in tech.
by rayiner | 2025-05-01 20:47:52+00:00
What is actually happening matters more than what anyone says. “Trade deficits are great” and “unrestricted free trade” reflects the status quo. The weighted average tariff rate in 2016 was just 1.5%. The trade deficit has grown to over $1 trillion.

Minor surgical changes aren’t going to move the needle when you have an economy addicted to debt-fueled consumption of foreign goods. Anyone who isn’t proposing major structural changes is endorsing the status quo of “trade deficits are great” and “unrestricted free trade.”
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-01 20:48:34+00:00
I TPM in a team dedicated to skunkworks prototyping for our customers. It's like the most expensive tech pre-sales you can imagine.

This is mostly good advice, with a caveat:

You want to focus on strengths when executing, but you also need people to grow, so this needs to be hot/cold - for every 8 weeks of strength playing, give people a couple of weeks of growth time, or thereabouts. You need to give people the time and space to develop in new ways for them to be effective, but also so they can sense that they're growing.

"No individual ownership", is tricky too. We live and die by each other's successes, but experience and aptitude is uneven: you can go fast if you agree on ownership of work streams with regular discussion so there's good visibility on everything within the team.

I'm planning to go do my own thing in the next year or two, and it'll be very skunk-oriented because that's what sings to me. This is not a bad starting handbook, I think.
by pradn | 2025-05-01 20:48:48+00:00
> Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.

This is precisely where the adage "premature optimization is the root of all evil" falls apart. You really do need everyone to care about performance to an obsessive, unreasonable degree to keep the entire, massive system performant. Companies with good engineering leadership understand this. The thousand cuts can come from language, libraries, feature creep, and pure ignorance or carelessness.
by fhd2 | 2025-05-01 20:49:09+00:00
I never use any web interfaces, just hooked up gptel (an Emacs package) to Claude's API and a few others I regularly use, and I just have a buffer with the entire conversation. I can modify it as needed, spawn a fresh one quickly etc. There's also features to add files and individual snippets, but I usually manage it all in a single buffer. It's a powerful text editor, so efficient text editing is a given.

I bet there are better / less arcane tools, but I think powerful and fast mechanisms for managing context are key and for me, that's really just powerful text editing features.
by ipaddr | 2025-05-01 20:49:35+00:00
I would assume it's related to the patent and when it was published some AI using person/group generated the code / book. I wonder how widespread this is becoming.

A patent provides enough details to reproduce. Bonus points if they used chatGPT which used your conversations as training data. You mentioned you have been working on it for years using chatGPT but the option not to include it in training data is a recent addition.

The backdating is interesting. Would love to hear more details on publish date(s) compared to your milestones.
by avetiszakharyan | 2025-05-01 20:49:38+00:00
Well its an oss project, free, I kind of didnt see it that way i guess, that something thats given for free is bad-tone to market in any possible way. Iguess from my standpoint its more of a, I just want to show this thing to people, because I am proud of it as a personal project, and it brings me joy to just, put it out there And since if you "just put it out there" it will sink to the bottom of the HN pit, why not get a bit more creative.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-01 20:49:40+00:00
> You do which is why it's a part of the terms of service for icloud.

404

> Copyright controls both reproduction and distribution.

Reproduction in the copyright sense isn't about blob copying. RAID 1 isn't a copyright infringement either… And neither is a Windows defragmentation (which is just the OS copying files around).

> You are being unnecessarily smug and condescending.

You are needlessly obstinate on a topic you don't understand.
by systemstops | 2025-05-01 20:49:52+00:00
"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not."

This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.

These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
by drjasonharrison | 2025-05-01 20:49:58+00:00
Given the game of telephone which would have to had occurred for that 30% figure to travel from developers up to the CEO, it's probably including things like autocomplete...

The Plan

In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance,

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it."

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."

And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.

And this, my friend, is how shit happens.

from anonymous email
by mxuribe | 2025-05-01 20:50:18+00:00
I read somewhere quite recently (sorry, don't have ref. right now) that its a bit of a large team effort (several to many engineers working together) to ensure getting the job, and then a continued team effort (again several to many engineers) to ensure continued high performance at said job...in order to be able to persist the operations. Quite clever as i understand, though brutal for participants i also imagine.
by dangus | 2025-05-01 20:50:23+00:00
But of course if you take that argument to its logical conclusion we are back on feature phones that can only talk and text.

At some point it’s not just bloat and its actual functionality that customers demand.

For example, your 2011 netbook can’t do basic HD video streaming. Your new smartphone can play high quality console ported games (e.g., Resident Evil 7 is a Mac/iOS cross platform release).

“Increased usage” is a feature not a bug.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-01 20:50:40+00:00
>Contrasted with renting it surely seems like independence, but whether the bank squeezes extra value out of you directly or through the proxy of a landlord, the end result is similar.

The difference is public policy. Owning property in the US absolutely elevates you to a higher privileged status above renters. How many homeowners were being evicted from their homes after missing a couple mortgage payments during the pandemic? Precisely zero. While thousands of renters in red states had the sheriff at their throats within 60 days. That's all you need to know about class in this country.
by nickff | 2025-05-01 20:51:11+00:00
>"If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results."

This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
by an0malous | 2025-05-01 20:51:41+00:00
When Apple was a startup they were riding the personal computing wave, when they created the iPod and iPhone they were no longer a startup. Sure, if you have a billion dollars and thousands of engineers you can create your own waves.

I don’t think that ignoring these foundational innovations or trying to work against trends is generally good advice for startups though, it’s easy to think you’re really clever and smart and different but meanwhile the team that did “Airbnb for dogs” has sold for $1B
by rayiner | 2025-05-01 20:51:44+00:00
> Prosecutors are not judge, jury, and executioner.

In practice they are. Criminal laws are written extremely broadly. And as they say, prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. Then all it takes is putting the case in front of a favorable jury: trying a republican in new york city or a democrat in rural iowa. In that way, a handful of people can undo the will of the electorate.

The framers would have easily understood this. At the time, the states were trying to kill the federal government. You think they envisioned say a Virginia prosecutor trying the federal president before a Virginia judge and jury?

> The President is not above the law.

But not every legal wrong has a legal remedy!
by sneak | 2025-05-01 20:52:00+00:00
On most roads, speeding isn’t a safety issue and shouldn’t be discouraged, as road throughput is important. Speed limits are usually set too low due to standardized inflexible policies or desire for revenue.

On some roads, however, it is a massive safety issue, and everyone is driving unsafely because the road is designed badly for its intended purpose. (So-called “stroads” are the canonical example.)
by voytec | 2025-05-01 20:52:19+00:00
OK, maybe not "just a precursor" but still "just a neurotransmitter".

I've read "The Molecule of More" and as much reasonably looking material I could find on the subject to "understand" my ADHD and fight it w/o meds. And I still feel dumb. Could you please explain how dopamine "participates directly in this functionality"?
by manquer | 2025-05-01 20:52:42+00:00
Here is one,

Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions.

Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet.

Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans.

Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average .

A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group .

[1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough
by Terr_ | 2025-05-01 20:52:47+00:00
> they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point

For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere."

Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well!

If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.
by astar1 | 2025-05-01 20:52:52+00:00
it's still no where near the same. Adani, india's richest man, has close connections to Modi and is under indictment by the US for bribery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_against_Gautam_Adan... .

He also bought one of india's last major independent traditional media outlets (NDTV) years ago. The comparison I can think of is if MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were all run like Fox news in terms of alignment with Trump. In a country where 25% the population is illiterate this is especially concerning as a significant portion of the electorate can only access their news from traditional media (TV, radio).
by werrett | 2025-05-01 20:52:57+00:00
I’m a fellow cyclist in SF and can only wholeheartedly second this. To add some extra anxiety, I’m usually riding a cargo bike, ferrying a child to or from daycare.

I still remember the first time I went through a four-way stop intersection and saw a driverless car idling, waiting for its turn. It was weird and nerve-wracking. Now… I’d much prefer that to almost any other interaction at the same spot.
by ladelfa | 2025-05-01 20:52:58+00:00
We picked BARDTracker (https://www.bardtracker.com) and so far have been generally very satisfied with that decision.

Big for us was the fact that BT had the ability to grab all the details of our Pivotal Tracker project through the Pivotal API, rather than just from the CSV export (which they also can do). It's unclear whether as of today, 1 May 2025, API access at Pivotal is still an option, but I suspect it may not be.

BARDTracker seemed also to be the closest to PT's UX. Nobody in our shop really wanted to rush to learn a new paradigm right now, so that was another important factor.

Their developers have been remarkably responsive to bug reports, feature requests and suggestions.

The only issue that we've encountered is that performance is a little slow, at least in the Web app; I have not tried their Mobile version yet. My understanding is that this is the area they are focusing on presently.

Lastly, they haven't initiated billing yet, so it was zero-cost onboarding. I hope they figure this out soon, because it's a good product that we'd be happy to pay for; their "early adopter" rate of $5/mo/user is more than reasonable and I hope they're able to make it be sustainable in whatever way PT proved not to be for Broadcom.
by _msw_ | 2025-05-01 20:53:08+00:00
> Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work

This may have been true a decade ago, but things are quite different now.

> compared to how much it has benefited from open source.

This is the nature of digital public goods. We are all going to disproportionately benefit from digital public goods relative to what can be produced as new digital public goods. No one will ever, EVER be able to "contribute proportionately" given the endless bounty of software made freely available for all to use.

> If that was the standard, so many of AWS services will spend all their reinvent time giving credits to their source OSS projects.

The observant should notice a change in this over the years. For example, the announcement for Amazon Q Code Transformation [1] acknowledged that OpenRewrite was used under the covers, even though it was an implementation detail that didn't have to be disclosed...

Of course these disclosures and good-faith intentions to engage on open-source community terms under long-established community norms don't always work out the way we hope. [2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/upgrade-your-java-applicati...

[2] https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-tools/issues/1443
by munificent | 2025-05-01 20:53:21+00:00
> He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously.

This is such a huge part of it. Our upbringing gives us our culture and the set of ideas and expectations that form our "default mode" thinking.

If your default mode assumption is that you are capable and have agency, that investing in a long-term project will reliably produce long-term value, and that risks are often worth taking, you are set up to try to build something amazing.

But if your default mode is that you are a pawn at the whims of other people, that whatever you try to build can be easily swept away by chance or bad actors, and that you've got no room to fail, then at best you'll just try to eke out a stable existence with as little risk taking as possible.
by m_dupont | 2025-05-01 20:53:22+00:00
The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all.

Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best.

He is attributing various symptoms of these tech leaders behaviour to them clinging to a bygone world, however he hasn't really articulated any of these symptoms beyond them thinking that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems.

He can't even back it up with a single quote or published piece from one of these tech moguls which displays the opinions that he characterizes them to have.

Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-05-01 20:53:23+00:00
Water is why life never left Earth. We would already be living on Mars or the moon if there was just a lake or two of water. Water got what plants crave.

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc
by DAGdug | 2025-05-01 20:53:28+00:00
Yeah, that’s fair, but is implicit since I’m arguing against the “sample size is inadequate” POV, not the “there are distributional biases in data” POV. There are a gazillion ways to adjust for these biases (ex. propensity score matching) going beyond just user-base but also including weather type, road type, location, time of day, day of week, traffic density, pedestrian density … that can be done easily with far less than the sample size waymo has. And I bet they do these adjustments.
by alexjplant | 2025-05-01 20:54:15+00:00
Is "2010" becoming real life? [1]

> Chandra discovers the reasons for HAL's malfunction: the NSC ordered HAL to conceal information about the monolith from Discovery's crew, and programmed him to complete the mission alone. This conflicted with HAL's programming, the open and accurate processing of information, causing the computer equivalent of a paranoid breakdown.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Conta...
by avetiszakharyan | 2025-05-01 20:55:53+00:00
you can combine agents in 2 ways, you can constantly swap agents during one conversation, or you can have the in separate conversations and collaborate. I was even thinking 2 agents can work on 2 separate git clones, and then do PR's to each other. I also like using code to do the image parsing and css, adn then gemini to do the coding. I tried using gemma and qwen for "real stuff" but its more of a, simple stuff only, if i really need output, id' rather spend money for now. Hopefully to change soon. as for rotuing, localforge does NOT know. you choose the agent, and it will loop inside that agent forever. Like, the way it works is that unless agent decides to talk to a user, it will forever be doing function calls and "talking to functions", as one agent. The only routing happens this way. there is main model and there is Expert model. main model knows to ask expert model (see system promp), when its stuck. so for any rouing to happen 1) system prompt needs to mention it 2) a routing to another model should be a function call. that way model knows how to ask another model for something
by jfengel | 2025-05-01 20:55:59+00:00
That's not "150 new languages". That's 7 major languages (Spanish, French, etc), for which courses already existed (mostly in English), targeting the 28 languages for which their app is available.

So it's not a complete AI-developed course. They took (say) their Spanish course for English language learners, automatically translated the English into Chinese, and now they have a new Spanish-for-Chinese-speakers class.

That is much less surprising than my default read of the headline.

It will be interesting to see how well it works. Translation tools are pretty darn good, but far from perfect. Did they run it run the content past a person who speaks Chinese and Spanish fluently? Such people surely exist, but I suspect that there aren't all that many.