MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-23 22:51:17+00:00
There is reason to believe that humans will keep trying to push the limitations of computation and computer science, and that recent advancements will greatly accelerate our ability to research and develop new paradigms.

Look at how well Deepseek performed with the limited, outdated hardware available to its researchers. And look at what demoscene practitioners have accomplished on much older hardware. Even if physical breakthroughs ceased or slowed down considerably, there is still a ton left on the table in terms of software optimization and theory advancement.

And remember just how young computer science is as a field, compared to other human practices that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We have so much to figure out, and as knowledge begets more knowledge, we will continue to figure out more things at an increasing pace, even if it requires increasingly large amounts of energy and human capital to make a discovery.

I am confident that if it is at all possible to reach human-level intelligence at least in specific categories of tasks, we're gonna figure it out. The only real question is whether access to energy and resources becomes a bigger problem in the future, given humanity's currently extraordinarily unsustainable path and the risk of nuclear conflict or sustained supply chain disruption.
by awongh | 2025-06-23 22:51:33+00:00
I would go so far as to say that it's dangerous to drive what the speed limit is supposed to be, if everyone else is driving 15-30 miles an hour faster than you.

Which also highlights one of the inherent flaws with laws and rules like speed limits. They don't ever actually mean, drive at this velocity. They always mean, drive at a safe speed and here is the number we all collectively agree on, unless we don't.
by JadoJodo | 2025-06-23 22:51:35+00:00
*You can teach ~someone~ a very technical user how to …

I get the non-techie blindspot that all of us have in some form or another. With that in mind: it took three days to give my brother a crash course in Linux + Docker for his own home server (and even then he only knew the very basics). He’s fairly proficient in tech: builds his own desktops, knows the basics of code, doesn’t shy away from digging into the why, etc.

It would be unrealistic (and frankly irresponsible) to expect someone to setup _and understand_ a Docker server setup from a 10-minute video.
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-23 22:52:10+00:00
I don't think the port itself is very old. The latest version of original pigz seems to have been released in 2023 [1], and the port seems to be of pigz from around that time[2]

[1] - https://zlib.net/pigz/

[2] - https://github.com/kjk/pigz/commits/master/
by bmitc | 2025-06-23 22:52:40+00:00
What has been holding me back on uv is my experience with Ruff. Ruff claims "Drop-in parity with Flake8, isort, and Black", but that is simply not true. At least for isort, Ruff only re-implemented what they wanted and then ask you to use Ruff to call out to the old isort tool if there's a feature or setting that's missing in the Ruff re-implementation. So what's the point? Ruff just partially re-implemented many existing different tools and added some new ones. So using Ruff actually increases the amount of tools, yet again, you're having to use because of this and it also not doing everything that Pylint does.

For moving to uv, I haven't heard a good story for what uv provides over Poetry rather than "is fast". The only unique thing that I am currently aware of is that uv can install Python itself, which gets rid of tools like Pyenv. I'm interested because of that, but "is fast" isn't enough of a reason.
by xracy | 2025-06-23 22:53:33+00:00
> It had nothing to do with safety since there was no provision for remote workers.

Citation needed for all of these claims. Please show me this information in the executive order.

> Keep in mind this was very early on before they had any reasonable amount of time to even test the vaccines.

Sorry, the Moderna vaccines were approved under their expedited schedule under the Trump administration in December of 2020.[1] You're complaining about gov't overreach by the same administration as is implementing the above policy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_the_Un...
by donflamenco | 2025-06-23 22:53:54+00:00
Thanks for the insight. I'm glad you thought the Home Depot store and your interpretation makes sense.

I don't have a good save, but starting at the 28:43 mark in this YT video there is some dialog about heading towards the Space Needle. 28:53 shows it looming large.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htTJFRQxU1U
by kragen | 2025-06-23 22:54:09+00:00
Sure, I have ~/bin and a .emacs.d that I've been working on since last millennium, and various other tools I've written that I use regularly. It's certainly a handicap to work in an environment that's unfamiliar, especially for the first day or two. And sometimes spending five minutes automating something can save you five minutes a day. Making grep output clickable like in Emacs, as demonstrated here, is a good example of that.

But, on the other hand, time spent on sharpening your tools is time not spent using them, or learning how to use them, and the sharpest tools won't cut in the hands of the dullest apprentice. And sometimes spending five hours automating something will save you five seconds a week. All the work I spent customizing window manager settings in the 90s, or improving my Perl development experience early this millennium, produced stuff I don't use now—except for the skills.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-23 22:54:21+00:00
At a lot of places (like where I am now) there is a limit for how many vacation/sick days you can accrue and you get paid cash for them if you leave without using them so it is not quite "use it or lose it"... Though my sick days can also be used as "personal time" and I don't think there is a real difference with vacation days.
by graycat | 2025-06-23 22:54:42+00:00
> "Chappell Roan"

Just now listened to some of her music, two of her pieces

Good Luck Babe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBlb...

and

Pink Pony Club

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBwb...

So, with the definition of art as the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion" what I saw in those two pieces was that they were intended for some teen girls and young women -- single, lonely, generally afraid of their circumstances, don't understand what they see of reality, eager for sex but afraid of it, lost, i.e., missing any good cultural, social, or intellectual foundation for understanding reality or facing life, ....

So in the music, the costumes and stage shows are rapidly changing, outrageous, meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e., are communication, interpretation of those women's experience, emotions, rapidly changing, outrageous ....

In simple terms, those women have circumstances that yield strong emotions that the music communicates.

"Communicates"? Why? As common, to the audience comfortingly confirms that they are not alone and instead like many others.

How could this be? In the past the women lived in a culture based on strong social, practical, economic, religious, parenting forces. Now (1) for millions of those women the culture is weak or gone and (2) the Internet permits getting confirming, reinforcing communication, interpretation of their scary circumstances from the loss of the culture.

In short, the music really is communication, interpretation of the experience and emotions of those women.

To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much the same, i.e., similar audience, but Chappell Roan is stronger, louder, more outrageous for an audience with stronger emotions.

As a young man, the teen girls I knew, right, had the anxieties from their circumstances but much more constrained and less scary than now.

The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the sets, costumes, dancing, and words and take just the background music (a lot of drum beating) and the singing. In places, the singing is pretty good, i.e., expressive, but really the singing, as art, is all nearly the same, that is, the same vocal content for the same communication, interpretation of experience and emotion.

I expect that even the current devoted audience will soon, a year or so, give up on the current Chappell Roan -- for a cruel joke, "A one trick pony.".

From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven and Brahms ... Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., Barber there is a lot of effective communication, interpretation of a wide range of experiences, emotions, that is, really good art.

For level 101, a major key is glad and a minor key, sad. Then changing keys, selected chords within keys, pitch, volume, variety of sounds from the variety of instruments, combinations, ..., give a lot more tools for expression than used by Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a lot more music, art.

Next, the tools were just means, and Bach, Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good in the artistic content, that is, again, communication, interpretation of human experience emotion.
by imchillyb | 2025-06-23 22:56:14+00:00
Exploration, especially space exploration, has only ever come with military advantages. If one could interest military agencies that the exploration was in their best interests we could see a space-revival of sorts. That would only last for as long as the military advantage lasts.

This is an unfortunate reality of our society. We've only ever spent dollars in space when it was advantageous to our Department of Defense, and the military in general.

People and companies who have succeeded in space have tied their goals to overarching military objectives. It's the best way to win the space race. Make the military understand they need to do the thing you want to do.
by JoeOfTexas | 2025-06-23 22:57:37+00:00
Doesn't AI have diminishing returns on it's pseudo creativity? Throw all the training output of LLM into a circle. If all input comes from other LLM output, the circle never grows. Humans constantly step outside the circle.

Perhaps LLM can be modified to step outside the circle, but as of today, it would be akin to monkeys typing.
by iLemming | 2025-06-23 22:58:16+00:00
I see what you're saying, sure, it's an good point about craft and creativity. The essence of any art or craft lies in the actual doing - in the painting, sculpting, writing, throwing pots, or baking bread - not in endlessly optimizing the tools or workspace. It's easy to get caught up in perfecting the setup as a form of procrastination or because it feels safer than actually creating. The real work happens when you pick up the brush, the chisel, the pen, or get your hands in the clay or dough. The tools matter far less than the practice itself.

But, at the same time, sometimes, and quite often, working on tools IS the craft itself.

Building, configuring and improving programming tools is literally programming - you're writing code, solving problems, thinking about abstractions and interfaces. Every script you write, every editor configuration you tweak, every workflow you automate exercises the same skills you use in your "real" work. Understanding how tools work (and building your own) deepens your understanding of systems, APIs, and software design.

So, in essence, working on your tooling could actually make a better programmer out of you. In fact, many great, well-known programmers do actively work and maintain their tools.
by vkou | 2025-06-23 22:59:14+00:00
I'd prefer to drink Dom Pérignon and eat off golden plates, but I don't always get what I want.

There are vast degrees of poverty of availability or unavailability of infrastructure, across both the developed and developing world.

Shipping in bottled water, for instance, isn't a solution when the cost of shipping into the area (due to poor road infrastructure, or poor weather, or conflict zones) has prohibitive - or even intermittent - problems.

People already live around sources of water. At the scale of a township, it's generally long-term cheaper to figure out how to make your sources of water potable than to introduce a permanent dependency on a distant third party supplier, and a complex logistic network for something as fundamental as drinking water.

> ...delivered to their home for a very accessible price?

> ...have to go and fetch from a village well.

If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?

And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?
by zdp7 | 2025-06-23 22:59:16+00:00
Mapping isn't a one time thing. You need to constantly be constantly updated. Bridges collapse, roads get washed out, lines get repainted and the list goes on. Even when you have it remapped regularly it can be wrong. Cedar road in Sonora California is a good example. They thankfully no longer have it connected, but they have a section of it mislabeled. If you look at the map, there's a section of Cedar road in the parking lot of Avalon Training. That's not actually Cedar road. Cedar road is actually the dirt road to the East of that. It used to be properly mapped to the dirt road. The problem with that is it quickly narrows and has major erosion. At one point there is a two foot drop off that is not safe to cross. Not sure how FSD would have handled it.
by charlie-83 | 2025-06-23 22:59:28+00:00
It's possible to give feedback without burning bridges. At my last place I had a very long exit interview where I explained all the bad management decisions that led to me leading. I made it very clear that this was my account of events and focused entirely on how the decisions had affected me rather than saying what I think they should have done. They were really interested in the feedback and not remotely defensive.

Why do this? 1. I was leaving behind a lot of people I consider friends and wanted them to have a better experience. 2. I think it gave a good last impression which they might remember.

Obviously this was my specific situation and the managers were actually normal, nice people who could fathom that they may have made mistakes which isn't always the case.
by rybosome | 2025-06-23 22:59:34+00:00
You clearly have an emotional connection to people that you feel are being harmed by AI, so I’m not going to gaslight you about that.

But I will tell you that real humans asking private, real questions of LLMs is also happening, and these two things aren’t related. Many people who don’t have the technical literacy to understand the implications are sending messages with extremely sensitive personal, medical, and financial information.

Straw-manning all of these users as tech-savvy, horny IP thieves is ridiculous. I could find your argument more persuasive if you actually considered the privacy needs of the people who had nothing to do with building or perpetuating the systems.

EDIT: to be clear I’m not sure what I think the solution should be, as I also understand the need for discovery.
by exiguus | 2025-06-23 23:00:54+00:00
Personally, I define the job of a software engineer as transform requirements into software. Software is not only code. Requirements are not only natural language. At the moment I can't manage to be faster with the AI than manually. Unless its a simple task or software. In my experience AI's are atm junior or mid-level developers. And in the last two years, they didn't get significant better.
by astrange | 2025-06-23 23:01:05+00:00
> I see what you mean about the potential for abuse - maybe Big Money would buy all the houses and run small businesses from them? But regulations or taxes could be used to dissuade them. Theoretically, anyways.

This isn't actually possible because owning a lot of houses is not a good business. That's why almost all landlords are small-time and not corporate. Houses are depreciating assets, so if you own more of them it's just more chances you'll have to pay for a roof replacement.

In particular in Japan, houses are worth less than nothing and you may have to pay to demolish yours if you sell it! (Less true than it used to be because construction quality has gotten a lot better.)
by benreesman | 2025-06-23 23:02:30+00:00
I completely agree that being comfortable with basic tools is critical to a versatile software professional because you're routinely in situations where you don't have your kit with you, for every tool on that list there is a GNU userland equivalent that's had basically the same core behavior since the 90s and I switched from DOS and Windows to Linux and GNU, and I am routinely glad that I know how to write useful `find` and `awk` and all that because I'm trying to get some box brought up.

I'm not knocking the classic tooling, it was designed by geniuses who obsessed about tools and tools that build tools (everyone from Ken Thompson to John Carmack are on the record about the importance of tooling).

It's the stock VSCode and Cursor people with an extension or two that are accepting a totally voluntary handicap. Someone in the thread called me a "shell bro", and I mean, that's just asking to get rocked if it's ever on the line against someone serious.
by swores | 2025-06-23 23:03:48+00:00
I don't think they mean "just a label" as in "not worth caring about", they just meant that the label is an indicator of quality, not the cause of quality, and as such products without the label aren't automatically bad products, they just have less evidence about their quality.

For that point, yes it is "just a label", even though the context behind the label / the label's meaning is very important.
by firstplacelast | 2025-06-23 23:04:56+00:00
While I agree with you, in high-school a buddy of mine was going on a weekend trip a couple states away and made a whole power point presentation to another friend's parents to convince them to allow their daughter to go.

He also gave a very memorable and completely inane speech to our entire school that involved him stomping on a loaf of bread while running for student council (and won). The coolness isn't so much in the tools as the way they are used.
by swat535 | 2025-06-23 23:05:09+00:00
So it turns out dismantling an entire nation's nuclear infrastructure just requires a bit of coordination with foreign intelligence and a couple of well placed airstrikes. Who knew it was that simple?

No protracted negotiations, no international coalitions, no drawn-out sanctions, just precision and decisiveness. A button pressed here, a few planes there, and the problem vanishes. Permanently, of course.

And now, with Iran's nuclear ambitions supposedly neutralized in a single blow, we can all relax. The threat is gone. No strategic aftershocks, no long term consequences, no unintended escalation. Just peace, stability, and a region completely satisfied with the outcome.

One wonders what the last 15 years were for. Bureaucratic inertia? A lack of imagination?

Progress, it seems, is just a matter of revisiting the old playbook with a bit more confidence.
by iLemming | 2025-06-23 23:05:26+00:00
> I don't see why it would be a universal truth that a good programmer is someone who invests in their tools.

I have never said that. However, since you decided to go that direction. I can bite and entertain you. Here is a list of programmers, some of them I'm sure you'd even recognize. Donald Knuth, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Steve Yegge, Gary Bernhardt, Paul Graham, Rich Hickey, Bram Moolenaar, Richard Stallman, Anders Hejlsberg, Guido van Rossum, John Carmack, Tim Pope, Drew Neil, Sindre Sorhus, TJ Holowaychuk, Guillermo Rauch, Ryan Dahl, Fabrice Bellard.

The pattern is clear: many of the best programmers are also prolific tool-builders.
by robocat | 2025-06-23 23:06:01+00:00
Individual generators monitor Voltage, Frequency, and reactive power (≈ how much current is out of phase with voltage) to make decisions about injecting more or less power into the network. This is just historically how they've always been doing it.

Due to interactions between different generators, there can be instabilities causing voltage or frequency or reactive power to deviate outside of spec. A simple example might be two generators where one surges while the other drops back, then vice versa. The measurement (by the network operator) of these effects is poor for Spain - shown by the simple example that they have large oscillations that they couldn't explain.

There's path dependent healing and correction of problems by different generators, which overall leads to network stability. However the network operator here is not actually resolving cause and effect, and does not have the insight to manage their stability properly.

In this case you can see them trying a few things to inject changes that they hope will bring stability - e.g. tying many connections hoping that adding generators together into one network will resolve to a stable outcome.

Are there countries that have a better design for their electricity network control systems?

Disclaimer: I don't design electricity networks nor electricity markets. And the above is ignoring loads (loads are mostly less problematic for control than generation).
by NBJack | 2025-06-23 23:06:19+00:00
Then count the costs. If it is worth more to you to leave such feedback and improve their world, it's always your choice.

However, you should also be either convinced that HR gives a crap, or that any potential outcomes are acceptable, including but not limited to being moved into "unregulated attrition" status, losing the ability to be hired by the same company in the future, having your words potentially turned into a lawsuit against you, etc. Unless you have actual, legal, signed documentation in place giving you such assurances, these are all on the table.
by throwdbaaway | 2025-06-23 23:06:40+00:00
As shared by Simon in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176523, a better agent will prepend the line numbers as a workaround, e.g. Claude Code:

54 def dicts_to_table_string( 55 headings: List[str], dicts: List[Dict[str, str]] 56 ) -> List[str]: 57 max_lengths = [len(h) for h in headings] 58 59 # Compute maximum length for each column 60 for d in dicts:
by mjsweet | 2025-06-23 23:07:10+00:00
Back in January 2010 I went on a blind date with a lady who’s now my wife — an astrophysicist. We talked about this instrument and how Google would shuffle petabytes of raw observations, then distilling them into datasets researchers could actually use (don't know if Google is still involved?). We’ll celebrate 15 years of marriage this January, and I have been following the progress of this telescope since 2007 or so. It's amazing how long it takes for these instruments to come online, but the benefits are significant.
by benreesman | 2025-06-23 23:07:32+00:00
If the time a programmer spends collaborating is more than the time they spend reading and writing code, they are optimizing for something other than software outcomes. And I appreciate that this is one of the lowest points for employment and advancement on the basis of demonstrated merit in the history of the business, maybe that's a smart play for people with certain priorities.

Not my cup of tea. I'm trying to become the absolute best I can be every single day at the absolute limit of my abilities and hopefully just a little bit past them as measured yesterday. I think competence as criteria is going to make a big comeback fairly soon.
by zahlman | 2025-06-23 23:07:53+00:00
> It's got tmux and fzf and rg and zoxide and clean-looking nvim. I'd recommend atuin, starship, bat, glow, duf, dogdns, viddy, gum/sesh, dust, btop

While I get your point, please consider how absurd this sounds to someone who doesn't recognize most of the names.