MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pillars | 2025-06-04 18:40:02+00:00
I can relate to you, OP.Sorry for off topic I want to share my experience about my journey of programming. When I started programming, I was introduced to the ideas of variables, conditions, loops, functions—regular programming constructs. But I didn't understand much of what was going on, how the computer worked, or anything beyond just the syntax. I used to wonder: when I start my PC, how does it even know where to begin? I often felt insecure and anxious about all these unknowns. I was trapped in tutorial hell, thinking that just gluing pieces of code together was enough. It made sense for a while, but eventually, I wanted to quit.

After some time, I searched online about how to improve, and people recommended learning data structures and algorithms (DSA). I didn’t know how to implement data structures on my own and struggled a lot—almost like going through hell. Nothing made sense. I couldn’t even get beyond linked lists.

Then I found a Reddit post saying I might have the wrong mental model. It said that even if you know some programming, without understanding how to think about structures and systems, you're stuck. I started searching for what 'mental models' meant, but due to my lack of experience, I didn’t find anything useful.

Later, I read a discussion on Hacker News about the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). One commenter explained how the book starts with the concept of data and procedures. That really clicked for me. I had never thought of computation as just transforming input data into output data. The model of:

Input → Computation → Output

made everything fall into place. This idea carries through all levels of programming—whether it's assembly, mid-level, or high-level languages. It’s the fundamental notion. You need basic constructs to steer data through transformations into useful outputs. Computation is essentially about transforming one form of information into another.

After that realization, everything started to make sense—assembly, high-level programming, even operating systems. It was one of the best ‘aha!’ moments of my life."
by adamdecaf | 2025-06-04 18:40:11+00:00
There's quite the mix of languages involved!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- YAML 452 158 693 161655 JSON 396 1 0 155975 JavaScript 7 21 4513 123150 TypeScript 741 7913 19645 80869 XML 66 5208 1006 60935 Java 725 7380 2283 37863 Scala 272 3275 1423 25395 CSV 146 0 0 25335 Markdown 86 5019 21 9228 SVG 12 5 1749 9130 HTML 39 52 4 4073 Maven 16 61 87 1963 SCSS 47 380 85 1662 Scheme 5 121 0 864 Python 13 185 96 668 Bourne Shell 17 94 127 541 DOS Batch 2 30 0 268 CSS 1 17 0 81 Properties 9 0 24 60 Text 3 1 0 35 TOML 1 6 0 26 Dockerfile 1 8 1 19 INI 1 0 0 7 SQL 4 0 0 5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 3062 29935 31757 699807 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by sim7c00 | 2025-06-04 18:41:37+00:00
i love your views and way to express it, spot on. i feel similar in some ways. i hated ai, loved ai, hated it again and love it again. i still feel the code i unusable for my main problems, but i realize better its my arrogance that causes it. i cant formulate solutions eloquently enough and blame the AI for bad code.

AI has helped me pick up my pencil and paper again and realize my flawed knowledge, skills, and even flawed approach to AI.

Now i instructed it to never give me code :). not because the code is bad, but my attempts to extract code from it are more based in laziness than efficiency. they are easy to confuse afterall ;(....

I have tons of fun learning with AI, exploring. going on adventures into new topics. Then when i want to really do something, i try to use it for the things i know i am bad at due to laziness, not lack of knowledge. the thing i fell for first...

it helps me explore a space, then i think or am inspired for some creation, and it helps me structure and plan. when i ask it from laziness to give me the code, it helps me overcome my laziness by explaining what i need to do to be able to see why asking for the code was the wrong approach in the first place.

now, that might be different for you. but i have learned i am not some god tier hacker from the spawl, so i realized i need to learn and get better. perhaps you are at the level you can ask it for code and it just works. hats off in that case ;k (i do hope you tested well!)
by zachdive | 2025-06-04 18:42:19+00:00
yes i saw that! imho the latest foundation models have enabled a whole host of new possibilities. particularly improvements on SWE-BENCH and other software related benchmarks seem to translate fairly well to openSCAD as we're generating code. however there is still a lot of work to do, as these models struggle to reason spatially. gemini 2.5 is probably the best here rn.

the future of cad generation will undoubtedly extend far beyond simple code-gen to generating human-readable features. this is where the data will be important!
by mplanchard | 2025-06-04 18:42:59+00:00
Yeah it sucks at joins! If you can restructure your query to use an IN, or first limit the large table in a CTE and then JOIN, you may see better results. So far we haven’t found any cases where it couldn’t manage the task, but we have often had to be clever about join strategies.

Depending on your use case, an incremental materialized view can also be really effective: when new rows for one table come in, query for related rows in a secondary table and populate the combination into a MV for efficient querying.

You can also specify specific join strategies for queries, but we haven’t had as much luck with that so far.

The JOIN thing is definitely the biggest pain point, though, I’ll not debate that at all.
by gryfft | 2025-06-04 18:43:27+00:00
They skip straight past steno typers to go deep on voice writing, but that's its own rabbit hole. Plover has been linked here a few times.

Before health issues stalled her career, my wife got licensed to be a court reporter. It's a fascinating discipline and its top tier practicioners will certainly outperform AI as long as humans still have any kind of edge on computers anywhere. For business purposes, "good enough" automatic transcription is going to steamroll the market for these services, though.

Feels like a strange echo of the industrial revolution, the world suddenly flooded with mass-produced things.
by fitsumbelay | 2025-06-04 18:43:28+00:00
Piggybacking, I think the "hard part" also includes the decades of success that the tax prep lobby's had in protecting its business interests at the cost of US citizen's welfare. Although the number of states that provide free direct filing has grown from last year -- which I only remember to be substantially less than the 25 who do so today -- it's unclear what the problem is with the remaining 25 including DC where I live
by globie | 2025-06-04 18:43:41+00:00
Like many others have pointed out, Apple is obsessed with avoiding antitrust scrutiny. A fun (edit: incorrect) example: they are fine owning the device you use to connect to their own streaming service to watch their own produced TV shows, but appear to strictly avoid showing their products in those shows.

EDIT: I stand corrected! Multiple "Apple Original Series" contain Apple products, such as in Ted Lasso and (I think implied) in For All Mankind, as people pointed out below. Shows what I know about TV.

I wonder why some Apple Original Series have Apple products, and some don't. I would love to see if there's any correlation between the number of shows which feature a specific product and that product's market share in the show's region or demographic.
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-04 18:43:55+00:00
it’s wild cause the underlying tech might be sick but this enterprise gatekeeping ruins the whole arc. not every dev wants to fake a cto title just to see a pricing page.. tbh at this point just put a playground, let people touch it, break it, love it. if it’s good, it spreads. no need to run it like you're guarding the source of life.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-04 18:43:57+00:00
[1]:

gst-launch-1.0 playbin3 uri="gstwebrtc://localhost:8443?peer-id=<webrtcsink-peer-id>"

WebRTC is normally used in bidirectional use cases like video chat with text options, so I don't think it so odd that VLC doesn't outright support it. VLC does not support dialing into an Asterisk server, either.

[1] https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/rswebrtc/web...
by freedomben | 2025-06-04 18:44:19+00:00
Yes exactly. If anything, I would expect Valve to support this bill based on how repair-friendly they are. I will admit that over the years I've become a huge Valve fanboy because of their amazing contributions to Linux and making the Steam Deck an open platform, but Valve has really done a ton to make the world a better place. Yes it benefits their business too, but they definitely could have gone more evil than they did, so there's still reason to praise them.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-04 18:45:00+00:00
> You introduce them as it makes sense

So we agree that maybe dragging them right into the start by teaching assembly (because it's good at teaching those things) as the first time language isn't the best strategy?

At no point will I argue against learning it. Knowing how machines work is great, and I think going "down" the stack benefits a lot of developers ONCE they're developers and have an understanding that programming and computers are things they like and want to do.

But first you have to foster enthusiasm and nurture interest. You don't do that by declaring that you're going to teach your kids assembly... you do that by listening to your kids interests in the space and helping them achieve their goals.
by munificent | 2025-06-04 18:45:01+00:00
> a much higher skill ceiling.

As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting.

Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha...

You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.

A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.

And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
by OJFord | 2025-06-04 18:45:48+00:00
Octopodes is correct if you want a classical (Greek, as it is) word. Octopi is an assumption of correctness by analogy of people who don't know better, like 'if you have any feedback give it to my colleague and I' - it's not all posh and correct to say 'and I', it's wrong (in that sentence).
by atribecalledqst | 2025-06-04 18:45:50+00:00
My girlfriend has been getting into crocheting recently, and I've been learning a lot about it and craft stuff in general.

I've always been a computer guy... I'm bad with my hands. Could never do origami. Part of the reason I dropped out of Boy Scouts was I didn't want to learn how to make knots. I was terrible in art class, I can't draw and I honestly have trouble just visualizing things (I was not great in geometry either). It's difficult for me to be creative like that. So that's my background, lol.

I could play music (and that's a hobby I still want to pursue), but lately I've been wondering if there was a craft that was better for people like me. Like, I got these cute handmade plushies as a gift recently, and I want to do something like that.

(honestly it seems like crocheting and knitting might not be bad options, but just wondering what else is out there!)

e; one thing I've considered is making something with electronics (I know enough about circuits to be dangerous), but the thing you run into quickly is you don't really want to just give somebody a circuit board, lol. At some point, it seems like all the interesting projects move towards 3D printing which I find intimidating.
by godelski | 2025-06-04 18:46:24+00:00
> According to your model, scientists who believe in God are anti-science.

In a way, yes. But every scientist I know that also believes in God is not shy in admitting their belief is unscientific.

The reason I'm giving this a bit of a pass is because in science we need things that are falsifiable. The burden of proof should be on those believing in God. But such a belief is not falsifiable. You can't prove or disprove God. If they aren't pushy, they're okay with admitting that, and don't make a big deal out of it then I don't really care. That's just being a decent person.

But that's a very different thing than not believing in things we have strong physical evidence for, strong mathematical theories, and a long record of making counter factual predictions. The great thing about science is it makes predictions. Climate science has been making pretty good ones since the 80's. Every prediction comes with error bounds. Those are tightening but the climate today matches those predictions within error. That's falsifiable
by aerhardt | 2025-06-04 18:47:21+00:00
OK, but in my defense "hogwash" is literally defined as "nonsense" by Oxford dictionary, I didn't call a person names and only criticized the idea. It's softer than "idiotic" which while also an attribute of the idea may be taken to imply that the person is an idiot. Not my intention.

The point is nevertheless taken that it adds nothing of substance to the argument, and I will not do it again.
by epcoa | 2025-06-04 18:47:47+00:00
Other than the flourish of adding some Scala to enterprisey Java there is absolutely nothing atypical about this bog enterprisey application. It’s a JS/TS/Java app, nothing else stands out.

Listing every config language and a few lines of CI or whatever scripts shit is misleading.

I see nothing other than typical boring enterprise/big gov crap here (which is fine, and expected).
by domoregood | 2025-06-04 18:49:34+00:00
This. Also, remember that from the consumer standpoint, PayPal was the first ever trusted payment processor that didn't pass your payment account info (bank, CC#, debit card info) along to the vendor. Granted, they passed along your email+shipping address. But the vendor would have had that info anyhow if you were purchasing some physical item from them.

So there's a large swath of the consumer population that views PayPal positively and will skip a purchase if there's no PayPal option.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-06-04 18:50:15+00:00
I agree that cutting it won't solve the issue, especially without that long term plan, but at the current sky-high level of fraud, this just isn't science anymore. At what level of fraud do you suggest pulling the plug if not right now? Funding research until 90% is fake? 95%? 99%? Taxpayer money can be spent on many other life-critical areas with tangible results.
by internet_points | 2025-06-04 18:50:18+00:00
> Direct File also incorporates the Fact Graph, a declarative, XML-based knowledge graph data structure that is designed to reason about incomplete information, such as a partially completed tax return. The Fact Graph is written in the Scala programming language; it runs on the JVM on the backend and is transpiled via Scala.js to run on the client as well. Direct File's Fact Graph is not domain-specific, and it may be useful to revenue agencies and as a reference for business rules engine implementations.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-06-04 18:50:20+00:00
I'm really curious, how many people collaborate on that 1.4MLOC application? I'd think you might end up with "too many cooks in the kitchen" sort of problems because of how much power the language gives everybody.

It's a sort of silly trivial example... but I've watched multiple python codebases slowly become unmaintainable because Python has no way to enforce what can be called or overridden by instances or subclasses, and the org grew beyond its ability to enforce discipline about it in code review.

I feel like Forth would offer orders of magnitude more "temptations" for somebody who just needs to get something done, but I've never seen it done at scale.
by didibus | 2025-06-04 18:50:25+00:00
Including a coding style guide can help the code looks like what you want. Also including an explanation of the project structure, and overall design of the code base. Always specify what libraries it should make use of (or it'll bring in anything or implement stuff a library has already).

You can also make the AI review itself. Have it modify code, than ask to review the code, than ask to address review comments, and iterate until it has no more comments.

Use an agentic tool like Claude Code or Amazon Q CLI. Then ask it to run tests after code changes and to address all issues until test pass. Make sure to tell it not to change the test code.
by carlmr | 2025-06-04 18:50:27+00:00
My parents were vegetarians in the 80s, also no weight issues. I don't believe it's carbs or seed oils or any of the modern scapegoats. Since they were eating plenty of that. They even had cake.

I think it doesn't matter what you eat as long as it isn't super processed. The one thing that's changed a lot in the 90s is more and more convenience food.
by bearjaws | 2025-06-04 18:50:48+00:00
The reality is, anyone in an executive or investor position almost doesn't even have a "job" in the way a salary employee does. There isn't really a unit of measurement other than connections and deals made, both of which may not even help them directly at that exact moment. They could be making deals for other individuals.

Their job is to travel around, meet people, find new opportunities and network.

Go to Disney? Make sure to book the Grand Floridian or Four Seasons (not hardware store) and make sure to let all your contacts know you are in town.

Probably won't even go to the parks, just spend your time meeting with other ultra high wealth individuals.

Going to a conference? Make sure you have 3-5 other meet and greets planned such that you are always going from person to person.

Its a job that most people on this forum cannot even imagine.

By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess.

Not saying its hard, it is just different.
by dividuum | 2025-06-04 18:50:56+00:00
I've build a custom thumbnail/metadata extraction toolkit based on libavcodec/libavformat that runs the decoding in seccomp's strict mode and communicates the results through a linear RGB stdout stream. Works pretty well and has low overhead and complexity.

Full transcoding would be a bit more complex, but assuming decoding is done in software, I think that should also be possible.
by tptacek | 2025-06-04 18:51:17+00:00
Who you calling y'all? I'm a developer who was skeptical about AI until about 6 months ago, and then used it, and am now here to say "this shit works". That's all. I write Go, not Rust.

People have all these feelings about AI hype, and they just have nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. How well the tools work have not much at all to do with the hype level. Usually when someone says that, they mean "the tools don't really work". Not this time.
by dublinben | 2025-06-04 18:51:22+00:00
Wireless carriers are a low-margin, increasingly commoditized business. Apple is only interested in expanding into high-margin businesses like services (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV, etc.) where they can offer unique value (e.g. privacy) compared to their competitors. Apple keeps so much cash on hand because they have more money than worthwhile ways to invest it.
by runarberg | 2025-06-04 18:51:57+00:00
You also have to alter some neural pathways in your brain to follow commands. That doesn’t make it learning. Learned behavior is usually (but not always) reflected in long term changes to neural pathways outside of the language centers of the brain, and outside of the short-term memory. Ones you forget the command, and still apply the behavior, that is learning.

I think SSR schedulers are a good example of a Machine Learning algorithms that learns from it’s previous interactions. If you run the optimizer you will end up with a different weight matrix, and flashcards will be schedule differently. It has learned how well you retain these cards. But an LLM that is simply following orders has not learned anything, unless you feed the previous interaction back into the system to alter future outcomes, regardless of whether it “remembers” the original interactions. With the SSR, your review history is completely forgotten about. You could delete it, but the weight matrix keeps the optimized weights. If you delete your chat history with ChatGPT, it will not behave any differently based on the previous interaction.
by biophysboy | 2025-06-04 18:52:08+00:00
The timeline from preclinical work to a new drug application has a ~5% success rate. A major bottleneck in this is target selection, which research should in principle help with. Giving a number for how much science improves this is iffy, because a lot of research is in fact pointless, with tiny specks of gold. Overall, when comparing money spent vs. its effects (ROI, economic spillover, cost-savings, etc), its definitely worth it.
by audunw | 2025-06-04 18:52:22+00:00
The intensity of an EV is almost the same as that of an ICE car. A little bit less severe actually. There’s a study from Sweden that set an EV and ICE on fire and measures the energy/heat from the fire over time. The curves are fairly similar.

An EV battery is much less likely to catch fire from nearby car fires. A whole parking garage burned down at Sola airport in Norway, with lots of EV inside. Not a single battery pack ignited.

The challenge with EVs is thermal runaway. That can last for hours, and if you don’t cool it down the intense heat will ignite other flammable materials (plastic) in the car, or nearby cars.

It shouldn’t be too hard to make these ships EV fire proof. You just need something that can spray water on each car from beneath. That will keep thermal runway contained to a single car.
by lapcat | 2025-06-04 18:52:28+00:00
> If having to attend to an LLM in any way makes the job worse for you

I think you're downplaying the nightmare scenario, and your own previous comment already suggests a more expansive use of LLM: "so a senior engineer can send it off to work on multiple issues at once".

What I fear, and what I already see happening to an extent, is a top-down corporate mandate to use AI, indeed a mandate to maximize the use of AI in order to maximize (alleged) "productivity". Ultimately, then, senior engineers become glorified babysitters of the AI. It's not about the personal choice of the engineer, just like, as the other commenter mentioned, open vs. closed offices or remote vs. in-person are often not the choice of individual engineers but rather a top-down corporate mandate.

We've already seen a corporate backlash against remote work and a widespread top-down demand for RTO. That's real; it's happened and is happening.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 18:52:40+00:00
In my university, compilers were a third-year course. And they're anything but simple - even the most well solved part of them, parsing, used to be a research-level problem until fairly recently. To build even a simple non-optimizing compiler you have to understand a whole lot of other fundamentals, such as various data structures, that are much, much harder to understand in assembler then in any higher level language, even C.