MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matltc | 2025-06-04 11:00:38+00:00
I agree that the purchasing power of wages ought to be considered in this context. It is certainly true that one's wages must increase at a faster rate than prices for it to be considered a net positive.

I would argue that housing prices are artificially inflated. Supply is constrained by regulations like zoning and rent controls, which causes scarcity and hence higher prices for existing housing.

I would argue that, like other technological advances, the advent of AI will lead to greater productivity, and thus more abundant resources, given that the supply of labor does not shrink.

Agree that housing is definitely an issue, but not one without a solution.
by treszkai | 2025-06-04 11:01:22+00:00
I also found woodworking recently as a software engineer and it's incredibly rewarding. Both the tactile feeling of the activity, the idea of building something that _exists_ in physical form and exists in your or a loved one's home, and the pride that you feel about a finished product and having overcome challenges and learned something.

Unlike knitting, I love its usefulness. There are so only many use cases for knitwear, but furniture, man, everyone needs furniture. And being in a home that I built by my two hands is infinite joy.

The three aspects where it falls short to knitting: - It can't be done mindlessly. It would be unsafe and you'd make costly mistakes that you can't undo by pulling on the yarn. - It's more expensive. The materials are a bit more pricy (compared to hours spent on working them), but the machines certainly are. - You are confined to space and time. Whether it's your garage or wood shop where you have machines and can make noise and dust, or it's your living room where you exclusively use hand tools – you surely can't do it in your car while waiting for the kids, or at the university, or on the public transport. Whittling small objects is the one exception.

But yes, woodworking is awesome.
by timonoko | 2025-06-04 11:01:48+00:00
Problem with Forth and Lisp is that you can freely start to improve language, so it sort of destroys the usefulness in a company of full of Salarymen and Office Droids.

Here is Grok's scheme to make Forth more readable:

Below is a Forth implementation of a simple parser that transforms (. (+ 1 2)) into 1 2 + . and executes it. This assumes the input is provided as a string or entered interactively, and the parser outputs the transformed Forth code to the input stream for execution. \ Buffer to store transformed output 20 CONSTANT BUF-SIZE CREATE BUF BUF-SIZE ALLOT VARIABLE BUF-PTR : INIT-BUF ( -- ) BUF BUF-SIZE ERASE 0 BUF-PTR ! ; : ADD-TO-BUF ( c -- ) BUF-PTR @ BUF-SIZE < IF BUF BUF-PTR @ + C! 1 BUF-PTR +! ELSE ." Buffer overflow" ABORT THEN ; : PARSE-EXPR ( addr u -- ) INIT-BUF BEGIN DUP 0> WHILE OVER C@ CASE '(' OF DROP 1 /STRING ENDCASE \ Skip ( ')' OF DROP 1 /STRING ENDCASE \ Skip ) '.' OF BL ADD-TO-BUF '.' ADD-TO-BUF BL ADD-TO-BUF DROP 1 /STRING ENDCASE '+' OF BL ADD-TO-BUF '+' ADD-TO-BUF BL ADD-TO-BUF DROP 1 /STRING ENDCASE BL OF BL ADD-TO-BUF DROP 1 /STRING ENDCASE \ Handle spaces ELSE DUP ADD-TO-BUF \ Copy number characters DROP 1 /STRING ENDCASE REPEAT 2DROP ; : EVAL-EXPR ( addr u -- ) PARSE-EXPR BUF BUF-PTR @ EVALUATE ; \ Execute the transformed string \ Example usage : TEST ( -- ) S" (. (+ 1 2))" EVAL-EXPR ; TEST
by dunkeltaenzer | 2025-06-04 11:02:00+00:00
So if Google just puts Meta stuff into appropriate sandboxes, because they have proven since their funding, that respecting laws is above them (and courts have proven that they are clownshows), everything is solved and user data doesn't get leaked and abused left and right. The technology has always been there on Android. It has just been more profitable for Google, to allow abuse to maximize profits
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-04 11:02:01+00:00
Became one. The "story" is fairly simple:

I always worked for companies that were intensely product-focused. My mentors were always "shippers." The last 27 years of my career, was at one of the world's leading optical companies. They were a true customer- and product-oriented company, and I learned a lot from them.

However, the flip side of this, is that I learned a relatively conservative approach, eschewing some level of creativity.

Like I said, the ideal pairing is an ADD idealist, with a “by the book” realist.

For me, there's a real, personal joy, in "finishing." It makes all the "boring" stuff worth it.
by vdupras | 2025-06-04 11:02:32+00:00
Articles like this makes this uneasy though resurface: something is wrong with this path. It's not really about AI itself, but about the efficiency of the path.

AI proponents tell us that this tool enable them to be purely creative by expressing their ideas without having any of the churn associated with the implementation.

But rather than telling us that we "need" AI, doesn't it tell us that modern tools are mis-designed? Wouldn't it be possible to imagine a set of tools that is better designed and allow us to express creative ideas more purely, with less churn and, most importantly, without the uneasy "fuzziness" associated with AI?
by DocTomoe | 2025-06-04 11:03:05+00:00
Ultimately, we will have to end capitalism as we know it and establish some form of UBI - for the mere reason that the bigwigs have no-one to sell things to when everyone is out of a job and there is no money. Which would give rise to a secondary economy, which is not ai-replaceable: actual artistic expression, pottery, woodworking, ... - what people like to do, not what people are forced to do out of economic necessities.

It's that, or French Revolution 2.0 and Ludditism, and everyone becomes a slave again. I hope that we have learned from the mistakes of the past.
by Zobat | 2025-06-04 11:03:26+00:00
How small can you get if you accept that some users might have to disambiguate when they're too close to a border? Should top out at four choices, users with no geo data has to choose between all. Feels like we can make the assumption that borders are quite sparsely populated for the most part, of course excluding cities built on borders but those are exceptions and users there might be more accepting of having to choose.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 11:04:19+00:00
I'm not arguing that stack frames are as good as manually written error traces can be - they're clearly not. I am simply amazed that people include "generate error traces" as a form of "handling" an error.

The argument for explicit error values is often something like "it encourages people to actually handle their errors, rather than ignoring them". And on the face of it, this has some merit: we've all seen code that assumes an HTTP request can't fail, and now a small timeout crashes the entire backup procedure or whatever.

But if "handle the error" simply means "decorate it with a trace and return it", then exceptions already do this, then you're really admitting that there is no fundamental difference from a exception, because this is exactly what exceptions do, all on their own. Sure, they produce less useful traces, but that's usually a tiny difference. After all, the argument wasn't "you'll get better stack traces than exceptions give you", it was "people will be more careful to handle errors".

This is also relevant, because if the goal is to get better error traces, that can also be done with exceptions, with just some small improvements to syntax and semantics (e.g. add syntax for decorating a call site with user supplied context that will get included in any exception bubbled from it; add support in an exception to only print non-library stack frames, add support in the language to declare certain variables as "important" and have them auto-included in stack traces - many ideas).
by teruakohatu | 2025-06-04 11:04:55+00:00
> Like giving GPT a multiple-choice test on gibberish—it will pick something, and say it with its chest.

If I gave a classroom of under grad students a multiple choice test where no answers were correct, I can almost guarantee almost all the tests would be filled out.

Should GPT and other LLMs refuse to take a test?

In my experience it will answer with the closest answer, even if none of the options are even remotely correct.
by Merovius | 2025-06-04 11:05:07+00:00
> But is know that the current way of Go (that is a insignificant improvement over the C way) sucks and ANY of the other ways are truly better […]

This is a bold statement for something so subjective. I'll note that the proposal to leave the status quo as-is is probably one of the most favorably voted Go proposals of all time: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/32825

Go language design is not a popularity contest or democracy (if nothing else because it is not clear who would get a vote). But you won't find any other proposal with thousands of emoji votes, 90% of which are in favor.

I get the criticism and I agree with it to a degree. But boldly stating that criticism as objective and universal is uninformed.
by rephus | 2025-06-04 11:05:42+00:00
Lightdash | Senior Full Stack Engineer | REMOTE (Europe-based) | full-time | https://www.lightdash.com/ | £80K – £130K +options

We are Lightdash, an open source BI and analytics dashboard. We have recently closed our series A and are actively hiring for senior full-stack engineers with experience in Typescript+React+Node+SQL. Bonus points for experience in data-related companies/projects, or being a founding engineer at a startup.

We are a remote-first company, with our team members currently distributed all over Europe.

We are hiring for two roles: product engineer and customer engineer. The requirements are basically the same, but the latter requires a bit more customer interaction. You can find all the details and apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lightdash

Important considerations:

- cover letter is very important, and please do not use chatgpt to write it (we have automated checkers in place)

- please mention on the referral field that you come from HN!

- this is a fulltime, permanent position, so we’re not considering contractors/consultants.

- we are also not considering people outside of european timezones.
by jononor | 2025-06-04 11:07:18+00:00
The school shooter type seems to want to be present locally, to go out with a bang, and to do it somewhere they are connected to. They are not aiming for maximal scalability nor chance to get away.

Of course, other threat actors might, like a Unabomber type or groups designed to destabilize society (perhaps foreign sponsored) by doing repeated actions etc.
by sdl | 2025-06-04 11:08:31+00:00
And in Reinforcement Learning:

POET (Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer): https://www.uber.com/en-DE/blog/poet-open-ended-deep-learnin...

SCoE (Scenario co-evolution): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3321707.3321831
by nchmy | 2025-06-04 11:09:18+00:00
Yes, I should have properly cited and linked to it. It's "Project Kamp" and, again, appears to have been a hipster commune more than anything.

https://www.onearmy.earth/project/project-kamp

Why was there no mention of this in the (already-completely untransparent) article? They apparently own a huge piece of land in Portugal - why all the whining about having no space or money? Plant some vegetables on your 10 hectares and sell them,at the very least.
by westnordost | 2025-06-04 11:09:33+00:00
The bitmap approach you describe allows for immediate (i.e. O(1) ) lookup of region by coordinate, which is pretty neat. Space-efficiency-wise, a bitmap (+ index that maps color to country) might not be the most efficient data structure, though, as there are more than 256 countries, so you already need 16 bits for each pixel instead of 8. Then, you have the additional complexity of if you actually want the bitmap to be viewable by humans, you need to make sure that the colors for neighbouring countries at least are sufficiently distinct.

Anyway, a Kotlin library I wrote uses a similar technique to make requests for the majority of locations immediate, while also handling the edge cases - i.e. when querying a location near a border.

https://github.com/westnordost/countryboundaries (also available in Rust)

What it does is to slice up the input geometry (e.g. a GeoJson) into many small cells in a raster. So, when querying for a location, one doesn't need to do point-in-polygon checks for potentially huge polygons, but just for those little slices that are in the cell one is querying for. And of course, if a country completely covers a cell, we don't even need to do any point-in-polygon check anymore. All this slicing is done in a preprocessing step, so the actual library consumes a serialized data structure that is already in this sliced-up format.

I needed it to be fast because in my app I display a lot of POIs on the map for which there is logic that is dependent on in which country/state the POI is located.
by Yoric | 2025-06-04 11:11:00+00:00
Indeed, you can absolutely handle some cases with combinations of `errors.Is` and `fmt.Errorf` instead of implementing your own error.

The main problem is that, if you recall, `errors.Is` also appeared 8 years after Go 1.0, with the consequences I've mentioned above. Most of the Go code I've seen (including big parts of the standard library) doesn't document how one could handle a specific error. Which feeds back to my original claim that "errors are primarily meant to be logged and that you have to get out of your way to develop errors that can actually be handled".

On a more personal touch, as a language designer, I'm not a big fan of taking an entirely different path depending on the kind of information I want to attach to an error. Again, I can live with it. I even understand why it's designed like this. But it irks the minimalist in me :)

> You're speaking from a position of ignorance of the language and its conventions.

This is entirely possible.

I've only released a few applications and libraries in Go, after all. None of my reviewers (or linters) have seen anything wrong with how I handled errors, so I guess so do they? Which suggests that everybody writing Go in my org is in the same position of ignorance. Which... I guess brings me back to the previous points about error-fu being considered black magic by many Go developers?

One of the general difficulties with Go is that it's actually a much more subtle language than it appears (or is marketed as). That's not a problem per se. In fact, that's one of the reasons for which I consider that the design of Go is generally intellectually pleasing. But I find a strong disconnect between two forms of minimalism: the designer's zen minimalism of Go and the bruteforce minimalism of pretty much all the Go code I've seen around, including much of the stdlib, official tutorials and of course unofficial tutorials.
by photonthug | 2025-06-04 11:13:57+00:00
This is really cool but at first it was not that clear whether the project is serious or made in a recent decade.

Clicking around eventually took me here [1] with some cleaner prose, a publish date, etc although it’s more blog than reference. HN will probably like it since we love to hate the modern state of self hosting email

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-04 11:15:17+00:00
There's entire books about this, and how insulin resistance / insulin "overdoses" are implicated in most metabolic disorders and obesity (above and beyond CI/CO energetics) and how Alzheimers is kind of just type 3 diabetes.

Try Outlive (very good) and Obesity Code (not bad so far - I'm 3 chapters in).
by blagie | 2025-06-04 11:15:38+00:00
I agree with almost everything, except that it's a problem if someone donates.

Some of the donation game is a competition (for example, applying for grants, or foundation funding), where the dynamic you described dominates. Much of it is not. In many cases, a rich person just cuts a check out of their leisure budget. That's why I compared this to buying a supercar. The rich person learns something, and has something fun to do more constructive than, well, many of the things rich people do.

Money is a social construct; it's just a way of keeping score, and organizing people. At the end, what matters is what you do, and what resources you use. The better question isn't what else the /money/ could be used for, but what else the actual inputs --- the /people, space, and tools/ --- could be used for.

If those same people are making military weapons, optimizing ad clicks, or running cons, that's a negative use of resources.

It's very possible a rich person decides they just want to:

- give a bunch of people space to follow their passion (same as an arts grant);

- view this as a part of personal development (same as giving tuition to a college);

- a research grant (interesting open information will come out, which is perhaps a few steps away from being useful;

- promotion of recycling; or

- just funding this on the off-chance something big comes of it.

It's all good.
by lnsru | 2025-06-04 11:15:53+00:00
I stand for every decision I made even if they were not perfect from current perspective. I can compare starting conditions of other kids from same school and I must admit, I am doing amazingly well. I am pretty sure I don’t want it to do all over. The future is more exciting. It became clear, I can’t pull all alone patient monitoring startup and I need to do something simpler during the time I have. I rolled the dice and let’s see decade later if it worked out. It’s so exciting!
by pessimizer | 2025-06-04 11:18:07+00:00
Nobody claims that crypto doesn't have a use case. They claim that it has failed at its use case. You can't use it to buy things easily or safely. Buying a bunch of crypto on the internet and looking at a graph every day hoping the line goes up isn't useful.

Its use case is still fraud and crime: when laundering money or fencing stolen goods, you expect the process to be difficult, dangerous and to have to pay a large fee. Crypto is a clear improvement on older criminal methods. It's not an improvement on credit cards.
by nchmy | 2025-06-04 11:18:40+00:00
If you'll re-read my comment, you'll see that the lack of financial sustainability was only one of many significant criticisms.

The strongest is simply that the machines/educational materials they produce are simply not practical, useful, or accessible. It's, as many other comments have said, performative.

Conversely, there's plenty of great and little-known organizations around the world who HAVE built productive, sustainable organizations around small-scale recycling - by designing their own devices.

Moreover, as many other comments have pointed out, there's never been any accountability (again, not just in a financial sense. Though, the figures are also quite murky, such that you're citing numbers that are far too low). There's no plan other than "give us more money and THEN we'll put in some effort to come up with and share a new plan". These are not serious people.

Theyre seemingly decent and nice enough, but do not merit further support - let alone celebration. There's plenty of others in the world who are far more deserving of help, but don't have the cool marketing platform that PP does.
by treszkai | 2025-06-04 11:19:51+00:00
Even assuming good intent, that was extremely silly from them to donate their money away when they don't have anything to begin with. This either assumes that the community is wiser at doing their work (doesn't sound to be the case), or that they were betting that it'll work out one way or another (most likely through another donation) – not realizing that such a donation is exactly what guarantees their organization's future.
by teamonkey | 2025-06-04 11:20:11+00:00
If you have two stars moving directly and perfectly towards each other, and there are no other influences, then yes, they will collide.

In reality there will be always some sideways motion for each star relative to each other, especially in this kind of situation with a lot going on. The gravity of the bodies pull on each other as they approach, accelerating them towards each other, but their momentum is strong, and so gravity pulls them into an elliptical orbit (or hyperbola) and not into each other. There only needs to be a tiny relative sideways motion for this to happen.

In other words, gravity will not cause two stars passing very close to each other to collide, as one might expect. The stars really would to be aimed perfectly at each other to collide, which would be extremely unlikely with both stars feeling the faint pull of many distant neighbours.

I think I was being overly cautious when I suggested a direct collision was likely to happen. It's more accurate to say that an accidental confluence of the many complex gravitational forces and sheer number of stars could maybe allow collisions to happen somewhere in that system.
by Xmd5a | 2025-06-04 11:20:27+00:00
This is exactly what I'm doing. Some papers I'm studying:

TextGrad: Automatic "Differentiation" via Text: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07496

LLM-AutoDiff: Auto-Differentiate Any LLM Workflow : https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16673

Trace is the Next AutoDiff: Generative Optimization with Rich Feedback, Execution Traces, and LLMs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16218

GReaTer: Gradients over Reasoning Makes Smaller Language Models Strong Prompt Optimizers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09722

PromptWizard: Task-Aware Prompt Optimization Framework: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18369
by squishington | 2025-06-04 11:22:02+00:00
I agree regarding housing. What I'm sceptical about is whether these potential productivity gains benefit those who work to survive or those who live (or at least derive a substantial income) from passive gains from assets. Have we not increased productivity since the year 2000? In those 25 years things have not got better for workers. My parents come up into the middle class from abject poverty in the 50s (think wards of the state and foster homes). Free education and a much less competitive job market, and low house prices and rents, enabled them to get up in the economic hierarchy. If they were born in the 90s like I was, there would be no chance of that.