MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by venturin | 2025-06-07 15:46:22+00:00
We just released new capabilities in Skip to make reactive services scale easily and efficiently across machines. Skip’s core is a native reactive computation graph that minimizes unnecessary recomputation—great for real-time apps—but now you can also scale horizontally using a leader/follower architecture.

We’ve open-sourced an example service (yes, it's called hackernews) you can try locally or on Kubernetes. It supports seamless scaling via kubectl scale, with zero downtime and no changes to your backend logic.

Blog post with diagrams and code here: https://skip.dev/blog/dynamic-scaling

GitHub repo: https://github.com/skiplang/skip To try it:

npx create-skip-service hackernews --example hackernews --verbose docker compose -f hackernews/compose.distributed.yml up --build

Curious to hear your thoughts or feedback!
by cardanome | 2025-06-07 15:46:44+00:00
How is depression "bigger" that ADHD? That sounds super invalidating.

Being overwhelmed with simple task is typical ADHD behavior.

Lots of people with untreated ADHD develop depression as well. It is not either/or. Not to mention that there is a overlap in symptoms as well.

A diagnosis for ADHD will make sure that there no other physical or mental things present that could explain the symptoms instead. The will try to exclude anything else that could explain your struggles. They check for stuff like depression.

On the other hand, a depression diagnosis is just given out like candy. I never understood that.

Why wouldn't you ask WHY someone is depressed in the first place? I don't mean to invalidate people that are depressed. Sometimes that is just what is going on but it still vexes me because so many neurodivergent people will get diagnosis like "depression" because health care providers refuse to look further into it.

It is such an uphill battle get diagnosed with ADHD.
by sgarland | 2025-06-07 15:46:46+00:00
> But if your natural key is the thing that changed you’d never know that airport x was renamed to airport y.

Correct, which is why you need the addition of a DATETIME to indicate when that identifier is valid.

> And when you renamed the airport, you’d need to add new entries in all the other tables that used airport name as a foreign key

No, because you wouldn't use the name in the key, you'd use a code like ICAO, though there are pseudo-ICAO codes for some aerodromes, so whether or not you want to be pedantic about naming is a personal choice. Then use FK constraints. Example:

CREATE TABLE airport_physical ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY, coordinates POINT NOT NULL, country_code_alpha2 CHARACTER(2) NOT NULL, -- ideally this would be a FK to an ISO3166-2 table opened_at DATE NOT NULL, closed_at DATE DEFAULT 'infinity' ); CREATE TABLE airport_code ( icao TEXT NOT NULL CHECK (length(icao) <= 16), -- reasonable length, but can easily be changed iata CHAR(3) DEFAULT NULL, airport_physical_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES airport_physical(id) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE RESTRICT, effective_date DATE NOT NULL, end_date DATE NOT NULL DEFAULT 'infinity', PRIMARY KEY (icao, effective_date) ); CREATE TABLE airport_name ( airport_physical_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES airport_physical(id) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE RESTRICT, name TEXT NOT NULL CHECK (length(name) <= 126), effective_date DATE NOT NULL, end_date DATE DEFAULT 'infinity', PRIMARY KEY (airport_physical_id, effective_date, name) );

This would let you model edge cases like John F. Kennedy International Airport, née Idlewild Airport, which had the ICAO "KIDL" from its opening (I mean, probably before that as well, but for the sake of argument assume you care when it was operating) on 1948-07-01 until 1964-01-01, but its name was changed to John F. Kennedy on 1963-12-24. It also allows you to model the reuse of ICAO codes, since Indianoloa Municipal Airport received the ICAO code "KIDL" following its release by JFK.

Is this easier to do than surrogate keys? Not really, no, but IMO it's easier for a human to understand when presented with temporal changes, allows for edge cases like an airport's designator or name changing while flights are enroute, and for flights (which would be the largest table), they can use `icao` and their departure/arrival datetime (which the table would need to model anyway) to effectively link to the other tables.
by hibikir | 2025-06-07 15:47:32+00:00
Bethesda had been doing procedural generation since forever though: Have you played Daggerfall? It's always been part of their studio's DNA.

Bethesda has always relied on top of the line technological innovation that makes us forgive all the jank that came with it. Whether it was a bad combat system, a level scaling mechanism that just doesn't work, uncanny graphics... this has always been there. It's the opposite of the old Nintendo Way, where the games always were less ambitious, but had so much polish that the games counted as mirrors.

We've reached a moment of much diminished returns though. 5, or even 10 year old games aren't so technologically inferior that they are uncomfortable. A very shiny things has more trouble covering for jank, and high budget games are just so expensive that neither coherent vision. nor significant innovation are likely. So the Bethesda way is just not workable anymore.

What I'd want Bethesda to do, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom meets Morrowind/Oblivion, is just really hard to wrangle logistically. Getting anything done under those kinds of constraings just takes too long.
by rbultje | 2025-06-07 15:49:24+00:00
We don't talk about this enough. International R&D is not offshoring of call-centers to India. International R&D is the IP for the next generation of global communication standards being owned by US-based or foreign corporations, because international (e.g. Canadian, European) standards experts/developers become un-affordable for US-based corporations and are forced to work for our "adversaries" instead. Crazy.
by uecker | 2025-06-07 15:49:49+00:00
In this case, the generic span type is just #define span(T) struct CONCAT(span_, T) { ssize_t N; T* data; } And the array to span macro would just create such an object form an array by storing the length of the array and the address of the first element. #define array2span(T, x) ({ auto __y = &(x); (span(T)){ array_lengthof(__y), &(__y)[0] }; })
by saghm | 2025-06-07 15:49:55+00:00
They said in their first comment that their drivers license had been stolen in the mail, which is what started all of it. I'd imagine they either went and bought their SSN from someone who had a collection of them from hacks or they used information they were able to get from places that ask for verification but show a few digits (e.g. "confirm your SSN: *-*-1234") to narrow down and then brute force different numbers at different sites until they got it.
by ufmace | 2025-06-07 15:50:07+00:00
Okay, that's very cool! I don't mean to trash this guy at all, he may well be a real expert in some fields.

However, it is a failure mode that people who are really smart and qualified about one thing can assume they are equally smart and qualified about a bunch of other fields that require their own specific expertise. Alas, it doesn't work that way.

There's nothing wrong with not knowing about some specific technical subject. It is a red flag though when someone takes it as a threat to their identity and self-worth to acknowledge that they don't know much about some particular subject, even if they do know a lot about a different subject.
by sgarland | 2025-06-07 15:50:09+00:00
MySQL stores a copy of the PK in every secondary index, so it can start adding up quite a bit. I agree that the overall size of 10 billion rows would dwarf that, but since you're presumably doing some decent indexing on a table of that size, index size matters more IMO.

For any RDBMS (I assume... I don't know a lot about SQL Server or Oracle), the binpacking for pages also impacts query speed for queries where there are many results.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-07 15:50:51+00:00
the line noise is really ~only there for dangerous stuff, where slowing down a little bit (both reading and writing) is probably a good idea.

as for the dots, if you use zig quite a bit you'll see that dot usage is incredibly consistent, and not having the dots will feel wrong, not just in an "I'm used to it sense/stockholm syndrome" but you will feel for example that C is wrong for not having them.

for example, the use of dot to signify "anonymous" for a struct literal. why doesn't C have this? the compiler must make a "contentious" choice if something is a block or a literal. by contentious i mean the compiler knows what its doing but a quick edit might easily make you do something unexpected
by gnabgib | 2025-06-07 15:51:34+00:00
Title: Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 (1964)

Past discussions: (56 points, 2019, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20072073

(272 points, 2013, 172 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287340
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-06-07 15:51:42+00:00
It just presumes a level of fixation in copyright law that I don’t think is realistic. There was a landmark lawsuit MAI v. Peak Computer in 1993, where judges determined that repairing a computer without the permission of the operating system’s author is copyright infringement, and it didn’t change the landscape at all because everyone immediately realized it’s not practical for things to work that way. There’s no realistic world where AI tools end up being extremely useful but nobody uses them because of a court ruling.
by wavemode | 2025-06-07 15:53:05+00:00
> Eeh. Comparing a garbage collected jit language to bytecode jit parsing is... quite possibly the most insane argument you could make.

Not understanding that WASM still has to be optimized and compiled to machine code, and then calling me insane over it, is certainly an approach to discourse

> And what does instruction count have to do with optimization?

Not going to bother with this one. Do some research into how compilers work, maybe.

> From searching the web to make sure; the language barrier between wasm and js is the highest performance bottleneck.

It certainly is. Not sure where I claimed it wasn't. What I'm saying is that there are also other reasons a program will run slower when compiled to WASM compared to when compiled to native.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-06-07 15:53:12+00:00
>The machine has no semantic understanding of what the data represents.

How do you define "semantic understanding" in a way that doesn't ultimately boil down to saying they don't have phenomenal consciousness? Any functional concept of semantic understanding is captured to some degree by LLMs.

Typically when we attribute understanding to some entity, we recognize some substantial abilities in the entity in relation to that which is being understood. Specifically, the subject recognizes relevant entities and their relationships, various causal dependences, and so on. This ability goes beyond rote memorization, it has a counterfactual quality in that the subject can infer facts or descriptions in different but related cases beyond the subject's explicit knowledge. But LLMs excel at this.

>feed it more tricks so that it doesn't fumble with basic questions like how many "R"s are in "strawberry"

This failure mode has nothing to do with LLMs lacking intelligence and everything to do with how tokens are represented. They do not see individual characters, but sub-word chunks. It's like expecting a human to count the pixels in an image it sees on a computer screen. While not impossible, it's unnatural to how we process images and therefore error-prone.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-07 15:53:39+00:00
the big hoopla is this: you're a newish startup. You have $300k/yr revenue and $$270k/yr expenses of which $250k is paying your programmers.

prior to this rule change, what you pay your programmers is just a deductible expense, so you owe taxes (in this very simplified example with no other expenses etc. etc.) on just $50k.

after the rule change, you can deduct only $50k of the labor cost (in this year), so now you owe tax on $250k.

there is a very good chance you do not have the cash available to make this payment.

of course, after 5 years, things all balance out and are effectively "back to normal". but you have to get through those 5 years first.
by TruffleLabs | 2025-06-07 15:54:58+00:00
This is a form of machine learning and is within the realm of artificial intelligence. In 1961 this was definitely leading edge :)

"Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

"The Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine (sometimes called the Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine or MENACE) was a mechanical computer made from 304 matchboxes designed and built by artificial intelligence researcher Donald Michie in 1961. It was designed to play human opponents in games of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) by returning a move for any given state of play and to refine its strategy through reinforcement learning. This was one of the first types of artificial intelligence."
by mjburgess | 2025-06-07 15:56:04+00:00
The goal isnt to assess the LLM capability at solving any of those problems. The point isnt how good they are at block world puzzles.

The point is to construct non-circular ways of quantifying model performance in reasoning. That the LLM has access to prior exemplars of any given problem is exactly the issue in establishing performance in reasoning, over historical synthesis.
by browningstreet | 2025-06-07 15:56:10+00:00
Per this statement from their conclusion:

> Startups are working faster than ever, and both businesses and consumers are demonstrating high willingness to pay for new products.

..I feel like the focus was more "offering (generative) AI features" than "built with AI", as in startups being AI forward for their ICPs are building businesses faster than the incumbents who are still trying to figure out how to wedge AI into their tech debt laden product landscape.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-07 15:56:24+00:00
> I fund $1000 in Claude Code Opus 4 for my top developers over the course of this month, and I really do expect to get >$1000 worth of more work output. Probably scales to $1000/dev before we hit diminishing returns.

Two unknowns: the true non-VC-subsidized cost and the effects of increasing code output and maintenance of the code asymptotically. There are also second order effects of pipelines of senior engineers drying up and costing a lot. Chances are if widespread longterm adoption, we’ll see 90% of costs going to fixing 10% or 1% of problems that are expensive and difficult to avoid with LLMs and expensive to hire humans for. Theres always a new equilibrium.
by oskarkk | 2025-06-07 15:56:39+00:00
NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.

Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-07 15:56:41+00:00
I'm not sure about the limits of the engine's complexity, but the game "shadows of doubt", a procedurally generated murder mystery game, has a giant sandbox with characters that have jobs, partners, visit restaurants, and more.

I don't think the NPCs can do more than a handful of actual actions, but the way you can find who a character met by watching the security tapes of a particular restaurant from a particular time because on of the bat's neighbours says "I saw this person here last night" when you ask about your murder victim is extremely impressive.

There is definitely a sense that you've seen everything after a while because of the limitations of procedural generation, of course, but a sandbox like that combined with scripted quests would make for some really fun gameplay outside of the main quest.
by veidr | 2025-06-07 15:57:57+00:00
Yeah, and he's clearly trying to avoid what happened to Swift[1]. Although the danger of "corporate owner priorities dictate releasing half-baked/awful changes" risk is still there, Lattner himself has more influence within Modular (obviously, as co-founder and CEO) than he did at Apple, so it may work out better this time.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416070
by mmustapic | 2025-06-07 15:58:14+00:00
“ For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
by saghm | 2025-06-07 15:58:35+00:00
> the dealer has a small advantage in black jack

Yeah, but if you try to "count cards" (i.e. actually utilize probability to play effectively) they'll throw you out. The parent comment is right that this is basically how all gambling against a business works. I'd totally be in favor of them all being illegal, but I also doubt that it would be feasible due to most people not sharing this view; it would probably go down about as well as prohibition (which ironically is also something I'm one of the few who would be relatively unaffected by given that I don't drink).
by ModernMech | 2025-06-07 15:59:07+00:00
Games have a similar lifecycle to social scenes. Now and again, an amazing game comes along that captures the imagination of gamers. Usually it's made by really creative and innovative people with a clear vision and direction. Also these people usually have taste, which is a crucial element.

Their good taste attracts a bunch of early adopters, people with a finger on the pulse and who are eager to play and appreciate the game for what it is. But this interest attracts poseurs, people who play the game but just to say they are, to feel included and a part of something cool. There are far more poseurs than otherwise, so at this stage the scene can grow exponentially. This growth attracts vultures commoditize the scene in the form of penny pinching and "enshitification" through dark patterns. Monied interests strip out everything that made the game interesting and fun (because a good, fun experience isn't profitable), and then they milk it for everything it's worth until it's a dried corpse. These are the people who are driving the bad gameplay decisions and who aren't listening to the taste makers.

Usually in games this comes in the form of a pivot to MMOs. By that measure, TES died in 2014.

IMO this also applies to Final Fantasy (RIP 2010, plenty of new FF games but nothing that recaptured the magic of 6 and 7) and Warcraft (RIP 2004, no new warcraft games since).
by bell-cot | 2025-06-07 15:59:37+00:00
In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.
by its-kostya | 2025-06-07 16:02:08+00:00
What is ironic, if we buy in to the theory that AI will write majority of the code in the next 5-10 years, what is it going to train on after? ITSELF? Seems this theoretic trajectory of "will inevitably get better" is is only true if humans are producing quality training data. The quality of code LLMs create is very well proportionate on how mature and ubiquitous the langues/projects are.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-06-07 16:02:22+00:00
I'm reminded of AI hypesters complaining that people are constantly moving the goalposts of AI. It's a similar effect and I think both have a similar reason.

When people think of AI they think of robots that can think like us. That can solve arbitrary problems, plan for the future, logically reason, etc. In an autonomous fashion.

That's always been true. So the goal posts haven't really moved, instead it's a continuous cycle of hype, understanding, disappointment, and acceptance. Every time a computer exhibits a new capability that's human-like, like recognizing faces, we wonder if this is what the start of AGI looks like, and unfortunately that's not been the case so far.
by wizardforhire | 2025-06-07 16:02:23+00:00
Reading the thread so far I feel everyone one is missing the biggest reason why plastic. Not to negate the technical uses and requirements mentioned especially yours, which are incredibly important…

And of course that reason is economic.

Plastic is essentially free, being a waste byproduct of petroleum extraction. Outside of the upfront infrastructure investment the feedstock is cost negligible. So pure profit once you're up and running. That the process is locked behind a knowledge wall, in that not just anyone is going to have the capitol and knowledge to execute, which limits the competitive landscape. So low risk high reward, which just gets investors salivating. At this point we take plastics as a given. Plastics have been so successful that the glass ceiling has been reached and now we’re all worried about the lifecycle costs.

Regarding that lifecycle: I’m pro plastic. I romantically entertain recycling despite its lack luster performance and track record. At this point in time given the severity and perniciousness with the problems of disposal I feel the only prudent course of action is putting waste plastic back in the holes we get it out of. That this isn’t done is a whole rabbit hole of legislation, economic incentives, technical hurdles, entrenched theological fallacies that persist culturally bringing us back to the ouroboros of legislation.
by simonw | 2025-06-07 16:02:39+00:00
I hope you're testing for all of the following:

- All of the widely used mobile and desktop browsers

- Inexpensive Android devices - very common, most devs don't test in them, frequently suffer from terrible frontend performance that goes overlooked

- Browsers running common ad blockers

- Screenreaders - frontend accessibility is a whole speciality in itself

- SEO concerns, making sure crawlers see the right stuff

- Slow network connections - simulate how the site behaves on devices in rural areas with bad connections
by copx | 2025-06-07 16:03:02+00:00
Something more people should know about the Rwandan genocide is that the Tutsi were not innocent victims but had previously committed genocide themselves - against the Hutu [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiza].

The hate of the Hutu was not artificially created by some "extremists" with a radio station, but was and is instead the result of the long and bloody history between these two peoples where neither side can claim to be the innocent victim.