MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by travisby | 2025-05-14 11:52:47+00:00
Coming to the site from an aggregator (and needing to be convinced to use Ash, rather than coming there directly and already knowing I want to use ash) I found the book a little weird to be so front and center.

I would have really hoped for a small code snippet or screenshot showing how powerful the framework was. And a book a little further down from that would be nice. But "pay to learn" before "here's a quick snippet on why ash is neat" would have made me more excited for this thing I hadn't heard of before, and who's website I was visiting to learn about.

---

Seeing a book first gave me a different impression -- like one of the old snooty languages/tools from twenty years ago that was really enterprise-only.

I can tell that's not the vibe Ash is aiming for, but it's what I picked up!

(Somehow, I also couldn't find the documentation link on the first two tries. But that's also my eyes being weird and missing the sticky header where it clearly says Documentation!)
by janfoeh | 2025-05-14 11:53:11+00:00
It's a crossover between busses and taxis; they operate on demand like taxis, but only get you roughly the most direct way (they can drive detours to pick up other passengers on the way) in a roughly predetermined amount of time (a 20 minute drive usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes due to the detours) from roughly where you are to roughly where you want to go (they are only allowed to stop on a virtual grid of bus stops spaced around 250 meters apart).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-14 11:54:29+00:00
> Based on the article, it seems that with highly complex logic, safety does come at the cost of raw performance, and it can be very hard to compensate (withing the safety requirements).

In Rust. These are Rust issues, not issues with safety in general.

The issue with bound checks for exemple is entirely avoidable if you prove that all your calls are within bounds before compiling, same thing for partial initialization.

The core issue is that the strategies Rust adopts to ensure memory safety are neither a panacea nor necessarily the right solution in every case. That being said, I think it's a very nice idea to try to write a decoder in Rust and have a bounty for optimization. Rust is popular so work on producing fast and safe Rust is good.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-05-14 11:54:34+00:00
Sure I would. The conversation would go about as well as it would with any moral realist who believes he has identified the set of virtues or deontic norms which obligation would have us adhere to. I do not know if Mr. Franklin was a "serious man" as de Beauvoir described it, but these are certainly the same kinds of self-flagellatory ethics you would expect a serious man to have.

My interactions with such people usually reflect a piteous tone, as if it were a tremendous shame that I had not stopped for a second to think of the gravity of the situation. That is a necessary frame for them to hold given the preconditions which led to them becoming a serious man.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-14 11:55:05+00:00
I think we very rapidly went from a world with high child mortality rates, no access to birth control and children being at least moderately useful on the farm or doing some other work quite young to a world where having children is both a choice and very very expensive.

This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.

We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-14 11:55:32+00:00
I think there’s maybe a case for VR meeting rooms that you kinda teleport into, but anything beyond that is gonna be niche as hell and just a hindrance in every other case. A whole VR office space? Just gets in the way.

And I expect even a VR meeting space would see more use that’s worse than a normal video call but is happening because someone in charge is over the moon for it, than it’d see use in the far rarer cases where it’s really better.
by drooopy | 2025-05-14 11:55:38+00:00
Lack of affordable housing, job insecurity and the looming threat of AI and automation, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable higher education, inflation, trade/culture/cold/proxy wars, societal unrest and thanks to social media the prospect of a global trend towards the collapse of democratic institutions and a march towards authoritarianism. Sure, let me just bring a couple of new humans into the world—people I’m legally responsible for and could go to jail over if I can’t afford to feed them. Sounds like a solid plan.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-05-14 11:56:26+00:00
> But "the politicians", as always, are only doing what the people are telling them to.

Incorrect. The politicians are doing what a very small, almost numerically insignificant, portion of the people are telling them to do. Those being the ultra-wealthy. It may be that what we are seeing is that what is best for the ultra-wealthy is not what is best for society as whole.
by bArray | 2025-05-14 11:56:30+00:00
(I would suggest to review the fruitful language of your comment...)

I always owned an older smart phone, and looking at that new UI I have no idea what some of that stuff does, because it doesn't tell me and the icons have been smoothed and abstracted so much that I can barely tell what they are for.

I think the reason why the UI's are dumbing down is because they people using them are changing. We're talking about people doom scrolling for hours watching less than 60 second clips of ADHD cocaine. We're talking about people who use an LLM and TTS to explain a paragraph of text they didn't want to read.

It feels like there needs to be a split somehow, an Android front-end for those people and a boring consistent front-end for others. Failing that, I would accept a serious Linux smart phone, but it would need decent development to actually get somewhere.
by johnecheck | 2025-05-14 11:57:51+00:00
Hmm, I disagree with Ousterhout's dichotomy and conclusions.

First, my understanding of his points - a language is either a systems language like C or a scripting language like TCL or python. Systems language have "strong" types and are for data structures/algorithms, scripting languages are "typeless" and are for "gluing things together".

The main claim is that scripting languages are more concise and allow for faster development when gluing due to their 'typeless' nature.

In his example, he creates a button in Tcl.

button .b -text Hello! -font {Times 16} -command {puts hello}

He goes on to say:

With C++ and Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), it requires about 25 lines of code in three procedures. 1 Just set- ting the font requires several lines of code in MFC: CFont *fontPtr = new CFont(); fontPtr->CreateFont(16, 0, 0, 0, 700, 0, 0, 0, ANSI_CHARSET, OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS, CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS, DEFAULT_QUALITY, DEFAULT_PITCH|FF_DONTCARE, “Times New Roman”); buttonPtr->SetFont(fontPtr);

Much of this code is a consequence of the strong typ- ing[...] In Tcl, the essential characteristics of the font (typeface Times, size 16 points) can be used immediately with no declarations or conversions. Furthermore, Tcl allows the button’s behavior to be included directly in the command that cre- ates the button, while C++ and Java require it to be placed in a separately declared method.

End quote.

We've come a long way, and examples have made clear that this dichotomy is a false one. Ousterhout's view was colored by his limited experience, resulting in him misunderstanding what he actually likes about Tcl.

Let's talk about syntax. His exact Tcl code as presented could be parsed and compiled by a language that does static type analysis. It's not, because he's running it in an interpreter that only checks types at runtime. But the point is that whether code is compiled or interpreted is an implementation detail that has very little to do with the syntax. He likes his syntax because his syntax is obviously better than C++, nothing more.

And types: he claims that 'typeless' languages allow for faster development because of fewer restrictions. This is, ofc, nonsense. The amount of restrictions you have is a function of your problem, not your language. If it feels like dynamic typing is letting you develop faster, that's because you're putting off encountering those restrictions til later.

It's better to guarantee we encounter all type errors before the program even runs. But since you can do static type analysis for any language, why don't all languages do that?

Because it's hard. Type theory is complicated. Not all type systems are decidable, we need to pick one that is for practical reasons. Ones that are may require annotations or complex algorithms/semantics restrictions like Hindley-Milner.

As a PL designer, it's a whole lot easier to just give up and only check types at runtime. And that makes a whole lot of sense if your priority is just embedding a usable language ASAP. But let's not pretend that it's because it's actually better.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-05-14 11:58:00+00:00
The good news is that idiomatically written good clean Rust code doesn't need to rely on such borrow signatures very often. That's more when you're leaving the norm and doing something "clever."

I know it throws people off, and the compiler error can be confusing, but actual explicit lifetimes as part of a signature are less common than you'd expect.

To me it's a code smell to see a lot of them.
by jerome-jh | 2025-05-14 11:58:00+00:00
Assuming the recruiting manager is non technical, he should have referred to the team in need when he received the "specification" email, something like "what should I do with this candidate?". A 5min chat with engineers would have clarified the situation and 5min to send an answer to the candidate. Same for the feedback request.

Seems like he did none of it, and in this company people do not talk and everyone is left guessing what is work consists in, which resonates strangely with the take home assignment directives. What an horrible workplace it would be.
by tudorg | 2025-05-14 11:58:03+00:00
Several components are open source as their own projects (see below) which will allow you to reproduce most of the features on top of regular Postgres. But the storage part is not open source. We are considering a simpler implementation of it that would be realistic to self-host and still do copy-on-write branching.

These are the open source components:

* pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch

* pgroll for schema changes

* Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
by bayindirh | 2025-05-14 11:58:16+00:00
> By the time results start appearing, my brain is already fast at work processing the output to qualify whether the information the LLMs return is accurate, whether it's a good leaping off point, whether I can keep drilling deeper, expand my prompt scope, etc.

Seems unnecessarily tiring. Instead I use a SEO spam and ad-free search engine. It's called Kagi. It allows me to further refine my search via lenses and site prioritization. Also, it has zero hallucination chance, because it's a deterministic search engine.

> It feels like I'm plugged into the Matrix rather than getting SEO'd garbage. I know the results have issues, but that doesn't matter - I can quickly draw together the pieces and navigate around it. Compared to Google, it feels like piloting a star ship.

Same for Kagi, without selling my data or trawling information obtained without consent or disregard of ethics, and many other things.

Note: I don't use any of the Kagi's AI features, incl. proofreading.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-14 11:58:47+00:00
It's a way to frame the problem that will work well for some people, and I don't see any real downsides to it.

I might note the role of 24x7 News and the attention economy in temporal inflation - "We Are Doomed, Because _______" stories are great for audience- and profit-building, but they keep dialing up peoples' expectations of temporal inflation.

And "temporal inflation" is easily dumbed down to "their future looks sh*tty, to them" - which feels like it could get through, to at least a few of those who are skillfully and willfully oblivious to the causes of the problem. Hopefully. Maybe.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-05-14 11:58:50+00:00
> If this is allowed to sit, then any small/medium tech company could promise the world to their customers, then just "sell" the company to a family member without the "liabilities" and there would be no recourse.

Yes, this is very likely the outcome. It will just be another perk in the consequence-free world of corporate governance.
by joshprice | 2025-05-14 11:59:08+00:00
"Magic" in software can be good or bad. I've tried to explain the apparent "dark magic" at the end of this article.

https://alembic.com.au/blog/essence-of-ash-framework

Would love any feedback as to whether this helps allay your fear and dread!

Spark is the DSL library that takes a DSL definition as Elixir structs and builds the DSL for you which in turn takes the written DSL and converts to a standard and simple data structure. So there are fewer macros than you might expect. Ash extensions just introspect that generated data structure with ordinary Elixir code.

The main macro in Ash core itself is the `expr` macro which enables portable declarative predicates which can be used in data layers like AshPostgres for filtering in SQL queries. If your data layer is simple like ETS or a CSV then it runs as Elixir code.
by nsonha | 2025-05-14 11:59:11+00:00
I don't really have this problem of long chat that everyone seems to have. Usually I can accomplish what I need to do after less than 10 turns. If I don't, then I naturally just want to restart the conversation adding whatever discovery from last time, at that point I just accept the current state (or discard all) and create a new chat, perhaps phrase it differently. Naturally I just feel that is easier not because I encounter any regression in my task.

It helps that the task is usually self-contained, but I guess as an engineer, it's kinda in your instinct to always divide and conquer any task.
by odyssey7 | 2025-05-14 11:59:35+00:00
I would say they don’t need to be perfect, but mere stability seems to be a thing of the past.

The millennial generation has seen repeated waves of economic crises and layoffs and the invention of a gig economy.

Mere stability is lacking. At least the people in mud huts know they can afford their mud hut next year.

Maybe people don’t want to be economically corralled into a large city a thousand miles from home and then to have their children in that city where they moved for career advancement, particularly as the social contract between employees and employers grows increasingly vacuous.
by blagie | 2025-05-14 11:59:37+00:00
No, the population has not "levelled out" in Korea.

These dynamics have a pretty long timeline. To give an extreme example, if you, for example, have a city with 10M old people who can't have kids anymore, you can reliably predict the population will be 0 once they pass.

The demographic pyramid of South Korea is scary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...

Learn how to read these plots and what they mean.

There are almost no young people.

There are almost no kids in South Korea.

Unless there is mass immigration, the population of South Korea will implode.

Even if people began breeding like rabbits today, there is nothing that can be done; when the 0-20 year old population is of working age, there will be a massive number of old people, and almost no one of working age.
by repelsteeltje | 2025-05-14 11:59:40+00:00
It depends on where you're coming from. Your code base, that is.

If it's already outstanding, you spend a lot of time revalidating what you already know and it's often a noisy process with many false positives.

If it's in a horrible state, however, the regulation often leaves a lot of wiggle room where you do some work to achieve, say, PCI compliance and then spend a lot of time arguing why this and that don't apply in your specific case.

So admitted, the is probably some improvement in the latter case but it's hardly proportional.

So IMHO, it doesn't help those of good will & expertise and does too little for the negligent. It adds noise and in the end quality still depends on factors other than compliance and certification.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-05-14 11:59:44+00:00
>Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations.

which has a different culture than the West.

Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages. Now they are moving out, arranged marriages maybe are dropping, but they don't have the culture to make non-arranged marriages (all the above is of course just assumption)

Now in many Western cultures there is not any sort of arranged marriage etiquette, you live on your own and you invite people over for sex, a person who lives at home is categorized as a loser. I can certainly see why living at home in one of these cultures would end up not providing the necessary ingredients for marriage to be on the roadmap.

Aside from all this I suppose access to birth control takes away the whole got in trouble, need to get married aspect of the past.
by Jedd | 2025-05-14 11:59:59+00:00
Is this a new theory?

I'm sure this has been a fairly commonly perceived trope amongst late-X and millenials for several years now.

Presumably accelerated during 2016-2020, and once again ramping up quickly, for our stateside friends - but I haven't heard of any part of the planet being burdened by an over-abundance of optimism about the (affordability of the) future.
by bluGill | 2025-05-14 12:00:01+00:00
This pays for at most a week of work. I doubt it is worth anyones time to do unless they would do it for free anyway. Between the risk that someone else does it first and gets the reward and that if you are trying to make a living you need to spend time finding the next thing it just isn't much.

if you can fund someone for at least 6 months of work it becomes reasonable to work for these.

Edit: Looks like many people are not understanding how overhead works. Your take home pay over a year is just over $100,000 since you end up so much unpaid time looking for the next gig.
by easywood | 2025-05-14 12:00:16+00:00
"On a farm, a child is an investment. In a city, it's a liability".

In the past few decades, we have globally seen a massive shift towards living in a city. Even in times of war and pestilence, people needed extra hands on the farm. But when living in a city, children are just an extra burden on your time and budget. I feel articles like this are over-analyzing the issue.
by lnsru | 2025-05-14 12:00:50+00:00
In shrinking economy like current Germany’s economy the future does not look bright. White collar jobs are moved to Malaysia, Poland and Serbia at extreme rate. And will never come back. I recently worked at the companies moving whole departments to the mentioned countries. I am sure, living from salary to salary in a rented apartment does not provide much optimism about future. Especially when one can barely afford rent of bigger apartment. Having a child in a city adds a pile of extra cost: bigger apartment plus few hundred for kindergarten. Children are simply for very rich families.
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by nisa | 2025-05-14 12:03:04+00:00
I'm in my 40ies and in Germany and basically from my friends and surroundings I've realized the only people that have children are academics / people with established careers where both partners earn very well and have stable jobs or people on welfare where at least all necessities are covered. What's missing is people in-between, people with limited contracts, people without money in the family and people working a job that hardly pays more than what you would get with welfare.

If you look at birth rates in eastern europe after the fall of the soviet union and the establishment of neoliberal economics everwhere and the development of eastern europe economies as workbenches for western corporations with low wages the birth rates fell and are only slowly recovering now.

Before that - while circumstances where surely not better in a lot of ways - essentials like housing, childcare (kindergarden and so on) where provided and you could be assured to be fine no matter what is going on in your job.

Now you are only fine if you either on welfare and have nothing to loose anyway or earn so much that you can afford everything and risk having children. If you are in between (like most of the population around 20-40 here) it's perceived as a risky gamble.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-14 12:03:17+00:00
> Our Rust-based rav1d decoder is currently about 5% slower than the C-based dav1d decoder (the exact amount differs a bit depending on the benchmark, input, and platform). This is enough of a difference to be a problem for potential adopters

I'm really surprised that a 5% performance degradation would lead people to choose C over Rust, especially for something like a video codec. I wonder if they really care or if this is one of those "we don't want to use Rust because of silly reasons and here's are reasonable-sounding but actually irrelevant technical justification"...
by silvestrov | 2025-05-14 12:03:17+00:00
I would add another item:

Today you need to be "the perfect mother". Just "being a parent" isn't good enough anymore for the middleclass.

Today's grandparents spend their time and money on themselves instead of helping out.

So not only do you need to be perfect as a parent, there is also less support from the people who have done this once before.

If does not help much to consult the internet as you will mostly get told the world is about to fall apart if your kid gets as much as a skin rash.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-14 12:03:35+00:00
This is not what has happened in South Korea though. They've hit the top of the curve and pretty much every projection agrees that it's drastically downhill from here, the main disagreement is over how quickly. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this [0], they estimate that by 2060 the population of South Korea will have shrunk by 30% and will be heavily skewed towards the elderly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
by echo-lot | 2025-05-14 12:03:40+00:00
Its pretty related to the other article that was posted here yesterday (?) about the american dream. I dont think its the perception of the future, because people in the cold war / WWII surely didnt believe the future is going to be bright. Just read about the youth protests in America during 1940-1945.

Its the hyperinflation of "as standard" seen things one needs to be ready to have a family. Just in this thread many say its housing. Well guess what my grandma had 5 kids living with her parents. Its our culture that infected us with the idea we need a 100 sqm apartment and two cars etc. Put on top of that the need for our kids to be special, it should get at least get a masters degree , a high paying job etc. I dont think this idea was so cemented in generations before, because mobility was lower and therefore it was e.g. ok for a child to become a mechanic.