MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-07-16 19:06:02+00:00
> "It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along."

A passage from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" springs immediately to mind.

"... 'Beware of first-hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'

Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men ..."

Or perhaps what Terry Pratchett wrote about the river Ankh may apply: "Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed." One has to wonder if people are thinking "Any idea that has passed through so many layers of minds has to be thoroughly refined indeed."
by wk_end | 2025-07-16 19:06:05+00:00
C# is a lovely language but it's not that similar to TypeScript. The big distinction (for me) is that it's nominally-typed and much more rigid. Unless things have changed a lot since I last touched it (admittedly a while ago):

You can't synthesize ad hoc union types (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-type...)

There's no notion of literal types (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-type...)

There's no type narrowing (which gets you a kind of sum type) (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/narrowing.htm...)

Most of the type maniuplation features (keyof, indexed access types, conditional types, template literal types...) are missing (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/types-from-ty...)
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-07-16 19:06:28+00:00
- toe-walking, walking on the balls of the feet

- in-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned inwards

- out-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned out.

I thought that toe walking was called out two decades ago when I was in university - I remember it being mentioned in a psych class. Otherwise, that kind of includes everyone who doesn't walk with feet straight, doesn't it?
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-07-16 19:08:23+00:00
Wow, a lot of stuff in here surprises me. C definitely can/does have spooky at a distance. Just share a pointer to a resource with something else and enjoy the spooky modifications. Changes are local as long as you program that way, but sometimes it can be a bit not-obvious that this is happening.

regarding redefining functions, what could the author mean? using global function pointers that get redefined? otherwise redefining a function wouldn't effect other modules that are compiled into separate object files. confusing.

C is simple in that it does not have a lot of features to learn, but because of e.g. undefined behavior, I find its very hard to call it a simple language. When a simple bug can cause your entire function to be UB'd out of existence, C doesn't feel very simple.

In haskell, side effects actually _happen_ when the pile of function applications evaluate to IO data type values, but, you can think about it very locally; that's what makes it so great. You could get those nice properties with a simpler model (i.e. don't make the langague lazy, but still have explicit effects), but, yeah.

The main thing that makes Haskell not simple IMO is that it just has such a vast set of things to learn. Normal language feature stuff (types, typeclasses/etc, functions, libraries), but then you also have a ton of other special haskell suff: more advanced type system tomfoolery, various language extensions, some of which are deprecated now, or perhaps just there are better things to use nowadays (like type families vs functional dependencies), hierarchies of unfamiliar math terms that are essentially required to actually do anything, etc, and then laziness/call-by-name/non-strict eval, which is its own set of problems (space leaks!). And yes, unfamiliar syntax is another stumbling block.

IME, Rust is actually more difficult than Haskell in a lot of ways. I imagine that once you learn all of the things you need to learn it is different. The way I've heard to make it "easier" is to just clone/copy data any time you have a need for it, but, what's the point of using Rust, then?

I wonder if the author considered OCaml or its kin, I haven't kept track of whats all available, but I've heard that better tooling is available and better/more familiar syntax. OCaml is a good language and a good gateway into many other areas.

There are some other langs that might fit, like I see nim as an example, or zig, or swift. I'd still like to do more with swift, the language is interesting.
by _mlbt | 2025-07-16 19:08:41+00:00
Swift is a great C++ and Rust alternative that doesn’t get enough attention outside of Apple platforms. It’s a performant, statically typed, compiled language that feels almost like a scripting language to write code in. It’s memory safe, cross platform, has a fantastic standard library, and has excellent concurrency capabilities. Even the non-Xcode tooling is maturing rapidly.

The big weak spot really is lack of community outside of Apple platforms.
by kadushka | 2025-07-16 19:08:55+00:00
A parent should provide their kids with opportunities to try new things. Sometimes this might require gently making a kid do something at least a few times until it's clear it's not something they are good at or interested in. Also deciding when to try something is important - kids might need to try it at different ages. And of course convincing and reassuring a kid might be necessary to try something they are afraid to do. Until the age of 12 or so, it's important to make it fun, at least initially.

It's debatable whether a parent always needs to "lead by example": for example, I've never played hockey, but I introduced my son to it, and he played for a while (until injuries made us reconsider and he stopped). For mental well-being, make sure to not display your worst emotions in front of your kids - they will definitely notice, and will probably carry it for the rest of their lives.
by switchbak | 2025-07-16 19:09:16+00:00
I think folks just get used to Maven-induced constraints (this applies to SBT, Bazel, others too). When you free yourself from that you realize: builds just aren't all that hard, it's often the tooling that becomes a real limitation.

Of course, sometimes the limitations are good: preventing you from doing "the wrong thing", or encouraging cacheability, etc. But as with any abstraction layer - getting a model that fits across so many disparate use cases can be very challenging.
by jms55 | 2025-07-16 19:09:57+00:00
> Metal also definitely has a healthy balance between convenience and low overhead - and more recent Metal versions are an excellent example that a high performance modern 3D API doesn't have to be hard to use, nor require thousands of lines of boilerplate to get a triangle on screen.

Metal 4 has moved a lot in the other direction, and now copies a lot of concepts from Vulkan.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/understandin...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/resource-syn...
by Neywiny | 2025-07-16 19:10:26+00:00
https://github.com/Neywiny/merge-sort

It was actually done to counter Elo based approaches so there's some references in the readme on how to prove who's better. I haven't run this code in 5 years and haven't developed on it in maybe 6, but I can probably fix any issues that come up. My co-author looks to have diverged a bit. Haven't checked out his code. https://github.com/FrankWSamuelson/merge-sort . There may also be a fork by the FDA itself, not sure. This work was done for the FDA's medical imaging device evaluation division
by seydor | 2025-07-16 19:10:37+00:00
i m not sure it's a good investment. As soon as ASI is invented, it will make the investment obsolete. Maybe i should sell my Meta stock.

I find it ridiculous to think that we will be able to exploit ASI for our benefit. It's like a bunch of ants plotting to enslave and exploit humans.

Also Elon is smarter - he s spending Saudi money instead of his own
by vel0city | 2025-07-16 19:10:51+00:00
You're acting as if people shopping around for doctors to get whatever pills they want isn't a thing. That consumers will ask their first GP about a drug, get told no, and then drop it to never ask again.

What's not speculative is consumers will find a way to buy the things they want to buy, and advertising has some amount of influence on purchasing decisions of most consumers.

Either way, can you draw this back to allowing or disallowing direct to consumer prescription drug advertising? Are you honestly suggesting the billions spent on drug advertising has no impact on drug sales?
by tines | 2025-07-16 19:11:04+00:00
> Wow, a lot of stuff in here surprises me. C definitely can/does have spooky at a distance. Just share a pointer to a resource with something else and enjoy the spooky modifications. Changes are local as long as you program that way, but sometimes it can be a bit not-obvious that this is happening.

I think the author means that the language constructs themselves have well-defined meanings, not that the semantics don't allow surprising things to happen at runtime. Small changes don't affect the meaning of the entire program. (I'm not sure I agree that this isn't the case for e.g. Haskell as well, I'm just commenting on what I think the author means.)

> IME, Rust is actually more difficult than Haskell in a lot of ways. I imagine that once you learn all of the things you need to learn it is different.

Having written code in both, Rust is quite a lot easier than Haskell for a programmer familiar with the "normal" languages like C, C++, Python, whatever. The pure functionality of Haskell is quite a big deal that ends up contorting my programs into weird poses, e.g. once you run into the need to compose Monads the complexity ramps way up.

> The way I've heard to make it "easier" is to just clone/copy data any time you have a need for it, but, what's the point of using Rust, then?

Memory safety. And the fact that this is the example of Rust complexity just goes to show what a higher level Haskell's difficulty is.
by oezi | 2025-07-16 19:11:16+00:00
My take on this (using Ruby) is https://github.com/coezbek/baker

It doesn't copy template repos, but rather creates a list of imperative steps to perform. Steps can be both manual (obtain an API key and store it here) and automatic (run 'uv init'). Markdown syntax, ruby string interpolation and bash.

It came from a deep hate for yml based configs.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 19:11:18+00:00
The reason that people still code in Java (or derivative) is because legacy code that they are working on is in Java, and nobody has either the skill or time to go through and translate it. Which means that the jobs where its used are basically just big enterprise, low tech software that just been around for a while.

The Log4shell incident is the perfect demonstrator of what kind of people are in Java world.
by awongh | 2025-07-16 19:11:25+00:00
The reason the LLMs are of any use to anyone right now (and real people are using them for real things right now- see the millions of ChatGPT users) is because the qualitative difference between text created by a real human using a guessing heuristic vs. an LLM using statistics is qualitatively the same. Even for things that some subjectively deem "creative".

The entropy of communication also makes it so that we mostly won't ever know when a person is guessing or if they think they're telling the truth. In that sense it makes less difference to the receiver of the information what the intent was- even if it came from a human, that human's guessing/ BS level is still unknown to you, the recipient.

This difference will continue to get smaller and more imperceptible. When it will stop changing or at what rate it will change is anyone's guess.
by SirMaster | 2025-07-16 19:11:28+00:00
>Weird, almost everyone else's goes down as the heart becomes stronger and more efficient during strenuous exercise, then that more efficient muscle is doing the same job the older, less efficient one did

When I was sedentary for years my resting heart rate was 52, now that I am exercising an hour a day or more on average it's more around 60 or slightly higher even after I am sitting or laying at rest for a few hours, and even on full rest days.

ChatGPT seems to think that there are some possible reasons it could be:

1. You May Be Observing Temporary Increases Due to Training Load (Acute Stress Response) When you increase your activity levels—especially if the exercise is intense or you're doing it consistently every day—your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) activity may remain elevated for longer periods. This leads to a temporary increase in resting heart rate, particularly on days following hard workouts.

Why this happens: Exercise is a stressor, and though it’s beneficial, it still requires recovery.

Your body might be in a state of acute fatigue or incomplete recovery, especially if you're training hard and not taking enough rest days.

-------

2. Your Baseline “Sedentary” Heart Rate Might Have Been Artificially Low You mentioned a resting heart rate of 52 bpm while sedentary, which is low—borderline bradycardic, in fact (clinically, under 60 bpm is considered low, though not necessarily dangerous, especially for athletes).

Here’s a key insight: low doesn’t always mean "better." When sedentary individuals have low resting heart rates, it's often due to:

Low overall metabolic demand (not much physical exertion).

Potential autonomic imbalance, where the parasympathetic ("rest and digest") system is more dominant simply because the body isn’t being taxed.

Genetic predisposition toward lower heart rate—some people just naturally run low.

So it's entirely possible that your previous 52 bpm was:

An artifact of a low metabolic state, not high cardiovascular fitness.

Reflective of a body in conservation mode, not necessarily an efficient, strong heart.

-------

3. Your Resting Heart Rate Is Reflecting a “New Normal” of Increased Baseline Activity Now that you are exercising regularly, several things happen:

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) may increase slightly due to changes in muscle mass and hormonal shifts.

Your autonomic nervous system may stay slightly more activated throughout the day.

You may be experiencing increased cardiac output demand at rest due to new muscle tissue and more oxygen-hungry body mass.

Put simply, your resting metabolic and cardiovascular “idle” is slightly revved up compared to before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your heart is less healthy. In fact, it may now be more responsive, more adaptable, and faster to respond to changes in demand (a good thing).

It makes me think at least that I am burning more calories at rest now than I was before.

I don't think I should be concerned. I have noticed all sorts of improvements from lower blood pressure to more energy and more alertness and a clearer mind etc.
by tonyarkles | 2025-07-16 19:11:33+00:00
> Windows NT has run on multiple architectures since day one with x86/PowerPC/Alpha/MIPS flavours, however x86/AMD64 has won over them.

True in theory, but in practice you're not going to take a Windows NT PPC .exe and run it anywhere today. Apple's done a decent job with Rosetta and Rosetta 2 doing CPU emulation when doing the transitions but I don't think they've ever targeted the same "You can run Windows 95 x86 .exes on Windows 11 x86-64" backwards-compatibility goal.

My experience with OSX and iOS backwards compatibility is similar to the post author's: things might break once in a while on a long timeframe but it's usually pretty easy to rebuild for a newer version. This works fine so long as the company that owns the source code actually still exists and is willing to build a new version.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 19:12:03+00:00
> Companies have to start somewhere though, lots of software exists that never was open source

I think koolba's point was not as much about the tool being open-source as it is for a tool that runs on your machine and accesses your database with write permission, not having any guarantees it does the job it promises.

I could not agree more with him. This tool was born as a side project for my personal need, so I obviously use it without hesitation. But obviously, there is nothing to ensure you the tool won't drop your DB out of nowhere, or dumps your data somewhere else.

I think going open source will allow me to build some credibility for now.

PS. I use this tool daily, but I have to admit, in prod env I have read only user.
by fwsgonzo | 2025-07-16 19:12:06+00:00
I've read so many comments, many of which I agree with and some which I don't. Either way, this comment is the only one that touches on the subject of womens careers. We are new parents and my wife is scared that she will lose her job despite protections. We are sick a lot (almost permanently so far) as childcare is a petri dish. We are also sleeping poorly almost every other day. She sometimes has meetings in the afternoon because people can't respect other peoples time off, and has to sometimes have a screaming child in the background. If she were to lose her job, we would have serious economic issues, despite both of us having good jobs. It's not great. It's becoming very clear to me that something is wrong both economically and politically when it comes to child rearing.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-16 19:12:10+00:00
It's probably because that's what we used, but nAFC has been my go-to since I first learned about it. Literally any time there's a ranking, even for dumb stuff like tier list videos on YouTube, they're too arbitrary. Ok you ranked this snack an 8/10. Based on what? And then they go back and say "actually I'm going to move that to a 7". AFC fixes all of that.
by filoeleven | 2025-07-16 19:13:20+00:00
Not sure what the state of it is now, but I saw this video of someone working on a "classifier" that recognizes when the LLM is "trying" to quote something from its training set, provides the actual data from the training, and includes citations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Hp0Jk9d4I
by Pxtl | 2025-07-16 19:13:31+00:00
Ah, I had no idea Mint Cinnamon was about "preserving suckage". I remember when Mint launched it was all about "Ubuntu but easier, like non-free stuff included" and my understanding was Cinnamon was their own DE built to follow familiar UI patterns and customizability instead of Gnome's opinionated stuff.

Didn't realize that it was also for grumps who wanted bug-compatibility in their workflow.
by ewoodrich | 2025-07-16 19:13:48+00:00
Hah that brings back memories of me smugly insisting to my freshman roommate that using Python 3 tutorials to learn programming was a complete waste of his time and he should be using 2.7 for life like the rest of us l33t hax0rs.

Tbf at that point Django was still pretty shaky with 3 and basically none of the 3rd party Django libraries supported it at all, plus I was using Google AppEngine which at the time was tightly coupled to the 2.7 runtime. But really I was just parroting the Slashdot hivemind which was 100% convinced the transition was the new Perl 6 and would kill Python, and that Python.org was dishonestly teaching newbies who didn't know better a dead language and worthless skill when they changed the default.

Fortunately for him he ignored me and most of the big Django libraries were ported like a year later at which point I had to switch anyway to get updates. Fully agreed that in 2025 it's pretty much irrelevant, and honestly despite some legitimate pain the transition was much more successful than the cynics assumed it would be at the time.
by wellpast | 2025-07-16 19:14:03+00:00
I agree 100%.

I've been around for a while, I've used many different build systems for JVM based builds (Java, Hybrid Java/Clojure, Scala) and Maven is by far the simplest most solid.

The basic reason is it's commitment to being declarative.

I understand why programmers want imperative (we're programmers) but it's just the wrong choice for a build system.

I've worked on many OSS projects. I've never pulled a Maven-based project that didn't immediately build and immediately load into my IDE. However for imperative based build systems (Gradle, Ant, now Mill) it's almost inevitable that you won't be able to get the build to work right away or pulled into your IDE in a sensible way (as IDEs cannot read imperative statemetns).

I've created many many build with Maven with many many different demands (polygot codebase, weird deployment artifacts, weird testing runtime needs, etc etc) and Maven has never let me down. Yes, in some cases I've had to write my own plugin but it was good that I had to do that; it forced me to ensure I really needed to -- the Maven plugin ecosystem is already great and covers 90+% of use cases of builds.

I've met a lot of Maven naysayers and the disdain is almost always either some weird aversion to XML (such a trivial reason to choose a worser build system) and/or because the programmer never took the time to understand the rather simple Maven runtime semantics and architecture.