MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-08-16 15:04:09+00:00
> The PATH (and other environment-vars) in Linux are shell-specific.

PATH works the same way in Bash, sh, zsh etc. etc. Various shells do offer some additional ways to manipulate environment variables, but you can rely on things like export.

If you meant "specific to a shell process", then yes:

> You regularly read instructions (I saw this in Go's official instructions yesterday) indicating to use the EXPORT command. This only works until you reboot

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1158091 . The export command is essential. But of course settings that persist between sessions, between reboots etc. will be stored in a file. How else could it work? The point is that you aren't forced to use a GUI and you can examine the file as plain text and comprehend it.

> you have to hand-edit a sudo-protected file (bashrc, .profile etc), and there's a learning curve to it.

It's only root-owned (what I guess you mean by "sudo-protected") if it's system-wide. Per-user settings only require that user's rights, exactly as one would expect. That's not different from having to be an admin user on Windows to change system environment variables. Most of these config files are actually auto-run scripts, and understanding the system is an important part of familiarizing yourself with Linux as a developer. Trust me, Bash is much more pleasant to program in than Windows Batch files.

> I don't remember the details, but I've screwed it up multiple times.

If you want a wrapper for the process, it's not hard to make one if you can't already find one. It's strange to me how many developers don't seem to have any interest in building or customizing their own toolchain.
by moltar | 2025-08-16 15:04:11+00:00
But you need to realize that both professions aren’t valued the same everywhere.

In my childhood in the Soviet Union “plumber” was what parents scared their kids with “if you don’t study, you’ll become a plumber”. And that profession was extremely undesirable and didn’t pay well.

Also in many SEA countries both professions aren’t paid well.

I think in North America it’s different because it’s highly regulated and barrier for entry is high.
by reactordev | 2025-08-16 15:04:57+00:00
I wish the smartcar didn’t suck so bad. We need alternatives to this “turn them upside down and shake the coins from them” approach to cars. We kind of screwed ourselves here in US because you have to drive places, you can’t walk. Even big cities aren’t that walkable (with the exception of a dozen neighborhoods sprinkled about a half dozen cities).
by tremon | 2025-08-16 15:05:11+00:00
1) As soon as reporting requirements get serious, you build a data warehouse. Because odds are, the client will want to combine data from multiple systems in their reports anyway. If not today, then they will tomorrow.

2) such reports never need all the data, it's mostly about top N volume queries or month-over-month performance data. When a reporting application does query all the data, it's because it's building its own data warehouse so the query usually happens only once per day, at a specific time, which means the load is entirely predictable.
by andai | 2025-08-16 15:05:34+00:00
They've made it pretty clear with the GPT-5 launch that they don't understand their product or their users. They managed to simultaneously piss off technical and non-technical people.

It doesn't seem like they ever really wanted to be a consumer company. Even in the GPT-5 launch they kept going on about how surprised they are that ChatGPT got any users.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-16 15:05:55+00:00
> As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests.

> See the current LLM craze

Excellent point. Watching the corporations engage in AI washing of massive scale copyright infringement was extremely disgusting.

I don't even fault them for doing it, technology should not be held back due to intellectual property nonsense. It's the "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that's offensive.

> did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this?

Plenty of industries were. Samuel Slater, the so called father of the american industrial revolution, memorized british designs before immigrating to the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

I used to have a small collection of examples just like this. If I remember correctly, some drug companies chose specific European countries due to their stance on intellectual property.

Infringement is only inconvenient when others do it to them, never when they do it to others. Every monopolist was once an infringer. They always climb the ladder and try to kick it out so the next guy can't touch them.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-16 15:06:23+00:00
> it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world.

It's amazing how widespread this belief is among the HN crowd, despite being a shameless ad hominem with zero evidence. I think there are a lot of us who assume the reasonable hypothesis is "LLMs are a compelling new computing paradigm, but researchers and Big Tech are overselling generative AI due to a combination of bad incentives and sincere ideological/scientific blindness. 2025 artificial neural networks are not meaningfully intelligent." There has not been sufficient evidence to overturn this hypothesis and an enormous pile of evidence supporting it.

I do not necessarily believe humans are smarter than orcas, it is too difficult to say. But orcas are undoubtedly smarter than any AI system. There are billions of non-human "intelligent agents" on planet Earth to compare AI against, and instead we are comparing AI to humans based on trivia and trickery. This is the basic problem with AI, and it always has had this problem: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1045339.1045340 The field has always been flagrantly unscientific, and it might get us nifty computers, but we are no closer to "intelligent" computing than we were when Drew McDermott wrote that article. E.g. MuZero has zero intelligence compared to a cockroach; instead of seriously considering this claim AI folks will just sneer "are you even dan in Go?" Spiders are not smarter than beavers even if their webs seem more careful and intricate than beavers' dams... that said it is not even clear to me that our neural networks are capable of spider intelligence! "Your system was trained on 10,000,00 outdoor spiderwebs between branches and bushes and rocks and has super-spider performance in those domains... now let's bring it into my messy attic."
by dylan604 | 2025-08-16 15:07:36+00:00
This was the whole point of the grease monkey scene starting back in the 50s. You take the car from the dealer, and then start adding, tweaking to get every last bit of power from it. Take a set of twin single barrel carbs off to be replaced with a single four barrel. Add a better set of manifolds. Add better __________. Once computers were introduced for air/fuel mixing, fuel injection, and any of the other things it can do, there have been shops that specialize in tuning them to max out performance. Just watch any show on your favorite streaming platform about building/enhancing cars.
by dondraper36 | 2025-08-16 15:07:40+00:00
There's another reason for that. Deep in my heart, I would love to be part of a team that works on truly data-intensive applications (as Martin Kleppmann would call them) where all the complexity is justified.

For example, I am more of the "All you need is Postgres" kind of software engineer. But reading all those fancy blog posts on how some team at Discord works with 1 trillion messages with Cassandra and ScyllaDB makes me envious.

Also, it seems that to be hired by such employers you need to prove that you already have such experience, which is a bit of a catch-22 situation.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-08-16 15:07:51+00:00
If I was your interviewer, I would: respect your answers a lot, not be able to check off anything on my rubric, try to explain this in the debrief, get told we have to stick to the rubric to counter bias, and then watch while they pass on you for someone who decided to play architecture jenga instead. I would potentially even consider emailing you to apologize later, then not do it because I'd probably get in trouble for exposing us to liability or something because apologizing can be construed as admission of guilt.
by pmontra | 2025-08-16 15:07:54+00:00
> Volkswagen says that while selecting the performance upgrade increases net power by 27bhp and the maximum torque from 265Nm to 310Nm, it does not affect range.

Energy from thin air or "you won't push that pedal hard enough to use those extra HPs," except maybe a couple of demo runs, "so you're paying a subscription to please your ego but not to go any faster"?
by XorNot | 2025-08-16 15:08:26+00:00
You pump water off the top of the pipe, reducing mass and pressure at the bottom and thus allowing for desalination. It's a classic distance x force trade off: it's easier to use a static membrane, and a low pressure pump then build a high pressure pump at the surface.

Nothing in this system is 100% efficient, so how you organize your components can make a huge difference.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-16 15:09:44+00:00
This presupposes that we should have to hand over ID to see "adult" materials, which is by itself an idiotic and deformed notion that should be killed dead before it gains more ground. Porn is not the same as buying a goddam gun or a bunch of liquor in a store, and I don't see why people should have to digitally identify themselves because they want to look at MILF porn or whatever..
by foobarbaz33 | 2025-08-16 15:09:53+00:00
Same but from a C vs Go perspective. Didn't like GC or bundling dependencies into the final binary. But at the end of the day it's still small compared to most other languages deployment artifacts. Despite being a GC language, GO still puts you in the driver seat for how memory is allocated (ie avoid GC in the first place). And goroutines are really nice to use, without introducing colored functions like most other languages do. To top it all off Go keeps the C tradition that error handling should be a first class part of the algorithm, not something hidden off to the side.

So I'm reaching for Go for pretty much everything now days.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-16 15:10:34+00:00
The democrats were elected to undo the damage caused in Trump's first term. And they let the damage start and happen on their watch, because.. according to you, for the sake of political benefit while ordinary people suffered and are still suffering from losing and not getting jobs. They will probably do the same again if they're elected, intentionally keep things broken for political gains. It's sad to see people support and encourage such behavior.
by byproxy | 2025-08-16 15:10:49+00:00
TFA is non a scientific journal, but summarizing/editorializing results from scientific journals. They don't cite their sources for that particular claim, but it appears to be from this^1 journal, which itself is an overview of other research. The "10-20%" number comes from this^2 2003 review of existing research on creatine that states 70% of the existing research at that time showed statistically significant results and give some example numbers of performance gains with regards to resistance training in the 5-15% range. However, I believe that's just an example from one study out of the many reviewed and I don't have access to more than the abstract. Not that I'd have the scientific/statistical knowledge to properly interpret the meta-analysis, anyway, but ..point being that "10-20%" number from the article can be misleading (surprise, surprise).

1: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-...

2: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022465203458
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-16 15:11:52+00:00
> Interesting. FYI ADHD people feel none of that. If anything, the opposite: on stimulants ADHD people feel relaxed and normal, bringing them down from hyperactivity and allowing them to focus on their life.

That is common myth. It's a matter of dosage over time. If one takes 120mg of Adderall in one go, then I can assure you they will not be calm nor relaxed. The relaxed feeling comes with a build of tolerance over time and with the lowest therapeutic dosage possible.

I won't deny that people with ADHD might perceive more benefits from stimulants than those without ADHD. I person with poor vision probably would perceive more benefit from eyeglass than I do with 20/20 vision. The glasses work the same for both of us, I just don't benefit from the effects. Also, stimulants do not work for about 10%-30% of people with ADHD, and if the reactions were truly that different, then there would be no controversy about testing for ADHD. It'd be as simple as just examining the effects of a pill.

In the beginning, I felt euphoric from stimulants and I am ADHD as they come. On the rare occasion, I still might get hit with a glimpse of it. Though that is typically after I take a break from medication for some time.

Back when I was in college, I cannot tell you how many people I knew with legitimate ADHD that used to rail Adderall and Adderall XR pills (yes, the XR are just as easy to abuse).

Check out this subreddit if you care. Search for the term "ADHD" and you will see how the medication affects a portion of the ADHD population:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StopSpeeding/
by whodidntante | 2025-08-16 15:12:03+00:00
And this is the point. You need to narrow the scope to make something like this useful. Writing a paper on "Good transportation design" is kind of meaningless. Do you mean cars, trucks, boats, planes, spacecraft, scooters, fighters, tanks ? Do you mean roadways that can accommodate some subset ?

If you mean "transactional websites", and assuming you mean something like product catalogs and being able to purchase, that narrows it down quite a lot.

Or does it ?

For the majority of use cases, Craigs list, ebay, Amazon are the best fit.

Next in number of use cases are Wix/Square/etc where you design your UI.

Then comes all in one systems with UI/ORM based on Python/Ruby/etc where you need to design your own DB schema and UI, but the "design" is already done for you.

The next step is custom designed systems like the one the article talks about, where complete off the shelf is not suitable

And then there are the highly scalable systems

The article is perfectly fine if we are discussing custom designed but not necessarily the highest in scalability.
by monknomo | 2025-08-16 15:12:15+00:00
building on what you're saying, it isn't as though we are paying physical labor well, and adding more people to the pool isn't going to make the pay better.

About the most optimistic is that demand for goods and services will decrease because something like 80% of consumer spending is coming from folks that earn over $200k, and those are the folks ai is targeting. Who pays for the ai after this is still a mystery to me
by XorNot | 2025-08-16 15:12:26+00:00
Not in a static system, but the ocean isn't static - there are currents.

Until the membrane fouled, if you sank a system like this to the bottom, fresh water would naturally spill out at the surface while brine built up around it.

If the brine doesn't flow away (brine is weird like this) then eventually the system hits equilibrium and stops. But if ocean currents (powered by the sun, tectonics etc.) keep removing brine at the bottom...then it can in fact run indefinitely because there is an energy input.
by golly_ned | 2025-08-16 15:12:53+00:00
You'd have to commit yourself to believing a massive amount of implausible things in order to address the remote possibility that AI consciousness is plausible.

If there weren't a long history of science-fiction going back to the ancients about humans creating intelligent human-like things, we wouldn't be taking this possibility seriously. Couching language in uncertainty and addressing possibility still implies such a possibility is worth addressing.

It's not right to assume that the negative reactions are due to offense (over, say, the uniqueness of humanity) rather than from recognizing that the idea of AI consciousness is absurdly improbable, and that otherwise intelligent people are fooling themselves into believing a fiction to explain a this technology's emergent behavior we can't currently fully explain.

It's a kind of religion taking itself too seriously -- model welfare, long-termism, the existential threat of AI -- it's enormously flattering to AI technologists to believe humanity's existence or non-existence, and the existence or non-existence of trillions of future persons, rests almost entirely on the work this small group of people do over the course of their lifetimes.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-16 15:12:55+00:00
They are getting the better engine. It’s right there in the car.

The thing that is confusing people is it was introduced backwards, I’d imagine intentionally. As stated, it reads as if the engine is being crippled. If you fired up the engine, it would not have the max performance without tweaking the timings, but it would still work. So paying more for the higher model is paying for the software tweaks.

It’s not much different from buying a couple of sticks of RAM and then overclocking them to get extra performance. The RAM works as advertised without any tweaks.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-16 15:13:23+00:00
Indeed it is -- it's perhaps the central way developers offend their customers, let alone misunderstand them.

One problem is it is met from the other side by customers who think they understand software but don't actually have the training to visualise the consequences of design choices in real life.

Good software does require cross-domain knowledge that goes beyond "what existing apps in the market do".

I have in the last few years implemented a bit of software where a requirement had been set by a previous failed contractor and I had to say, look, I appreciate this requirement is written down and signed off, but my mother worked in your field for decades, I know what kind of workload she had, what made it exhausting, and I absolutely know that she would have been so freaking furious at the busywork this implementation will create: it should never have got this far.

So I had to step outside the specification, write the better functionality to prove my point, and I don't think realistically I was ever compensated for it, except metaphysically: fewer people out there are viscerally imagining inflicting harm on me as a psychological release.
by dare944 | 2025-08-16 15:13:39+00:00
Manufacturers have been shipping cars with detuned engines forever, and tuners have been tweaking them to unlock the hidden power for just as long. Back in the beginning of the century I owned a 2000 Audi S4 twin-turbo. The torque curve on it looked like a perfect plateau between 2,500 and 5,300 rpm. I replaced the entire ECU with a chipped duplicate (a five minute swap) and instantly gained 50 horsepower. Of course, Audi limited the torque for a variety of reasons, including reliability and the fact that otherwise the car would have encroached on their higher-end RS4 line.

Similarly, the car I have as a track toy, a 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo, was famously limited by Porsche to avoid competing with their flagship 911 Turbo. Tuners figured this out and came up with all sorts of modifications, from mild to wild, to extract more performance.

Back in the 2000s I didn't have a problem with insurance. Probably not the same today.
by westurner | 2025-08-16 15:14:19+00:00
awesome-safety-critical lists a number of Handbooks, but not yet this one. https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ :

> NASA-GB-8719.13 - 2004-03-31 - NASA Software Safety Guidebook

>> NASA’s Software Safety Guidebook (pdf file). The handbook complement to the Software Safety Standard.

> NASA-HDBK-8709.24 - 2015-11-23 - NASA Safety Culture Handbook
by oftenwrong | 2025-08-16 15:15:14+00:00
I would say that is a reasonable constraint. As you know, version ranges, and other "dynamic" versions in Maven are inherently incompatible with reproducible builds because they are resolved non-deterministically during the build. The most common approach when reproducibility is required is to resolve dynamic dependency versions in source, which is a strategy shared by tools that use lockfiles.

I agree that Maven would be better with lockfile support. However, as with any proposed evolution of Maven, I can imagine it would be quite hairy to implement in a way that is compatible with other mechanisms.

On the other listead caveats, I would add:

- Output line endings are controllable via line.separator, which Maven honors. Input line endings are an important consideration for reproducibility, but also not truly a problem of Maven's reproducibility.

- JDK version can be enforced with Maven Enforcer and/or toolchains.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-16 15:16:15+00:00
The primary job of a politician and political committee is to win elections and accept facts on the ground. Yes the indoctrination went too far that I found at BigTech when they had “allies” and making sure that I wouldn’t be offended by “micro aggressions”.

> In your situation it’s pretty clear humans are capable of forming committee's relevant to the topic

You mean the same humans who are fighting to allow biological men in women’s sports?

The midsize company in the same vertical I work for now (cloud consulting) focuses almost purely on how much money we made, this is how it affects your bonus and this is what you can do to increase our profits - no ally ship, no “celebrating diversity” (for people who haven’t been keeping up, I’m black), no “you must label your profile with your preferred pronouns” nonsense. I go to work to collect a check. It’s not a social mission. I don’t go to talk about systemic racism, police brutality, etc.

But they do have Juneteenth as a company holiday, offer classes and reimbursements for our LatAm employees to become better English speakers because it’s a requirement to be promoted to the higher level positions that are customer facing and offer English speakers the chance to take Spanish classes (I’m currently around an A2 proficiency).

DEI is harming people because of the silly “right speech” like not saying “pow wow” or “war room” turns people off and has them voting for politicians that don’t serve your interest and actively harm you.

How the heck did Democrats go so far that even Hispanics Americans are increasingly voting Republican?
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-16 15:17:24+00:00
You would think, but you've never seen drama like single-speedrunner games. They know they're unfulfilled and kings of a molehill, and as soon as there's the slightest competition - a single other "run" from someone who bothers with a little practice - there's a blowup. Super-niche-ing is not the solution you think it is.
by neom | 2025-08-16 15:18:15+00:00
My perspective ("context as primary primitive") was about context as the foundational prerequisite of intelligent performance. I'm discussing a scenario with the minimum conditions for any intelligent action, whether small scale or large scale. At risk of talking past each other due to nuance methinks and I'm a bit lazy to think it through properly but... I think there is something in saw vs sawmill? Like a scale thing? Either way I wasn't trying to be profound or anything, I was just saying I think context abilities is likely the first prerequisite for any minimally intelligent thing (maybe I shouldn't have used the word system in my original comment).