MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cjs_ac | 2025-08-05 10:41:51+00:00
The real work in software engineering is deciding how to represent all the details of the problem and its solution - the rest is just typing. The ability to understand abstract systems in this way is very rare. For most people, computers are magical objects that they don't understand. You can't ask people what problems they have that you could solve with a computer because they have very little idea of what computers are capable of: you can't talk about a concept of an app, you have to build it and put it in front of them before they can contribute to a conversation about it.

The days when a successful startup could be founded by a person who makes the thing and a person who sells the thing are over, because all the obvious ideas have been done. You need a third founder: the person with deep domain knowledge who knows what problems exist and which ones are worth solving.

I think the PULL framework in the post is an unnecessary formalism. My advice for finding ideas is to get out of the ecosystem of companies in the Big Tech or Silicon Valley traditions and go and work for tiny little companies where all the office staff work in the same room and your job is to modernise a C++ application that has a hard dependency on Microsoft Office 2003 and runs on a VM running Windows XP (which was the first programming job I got when I left teaching in 2021). Those businesses are full of problems that are easily solved with computers, but no one who knows how to solve those problems has discovered those problems yet.
by nilslindemann | 2025-08-05 10:42:52+00:00
Your simple example (`2 |> Math.sqrt`) looks great, but when the code gets more complex, then the advantage of the pipe syntax is less obvious. For example,

foo(1, bar(2, baz(3)), 3)

becomes something like

1 (2, (3 |> baz) > bar), 3 |> foo

or

(3 |> baz) |> (2, % |> bar) |> (1, %, 3 |> foo)

That looks like just another way to write a thing in JavaScript, and it is not easier to read. What is the advantage?
by throwanem | 2025-08-05 10:42:59+00:00
Quoting from the article's third paragraph:

> But if you had the displeasure of viewing my website between the hours of 2AM (20 minutes after I went to sleep) and 8AM (when I woke up) EST on Aug 3, then you would have seen chaos. Every single username was transformed to a heinous slur, many unsavory fish had made it into the fishtank, and many beautiful fish were gone.

At some point, asking for more starts to seem like rubbernecking at a car crash, you know?
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-05 10:43:18+00:00
That Mellon tip is one part of today's supply. The other is

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44783815

So the question of the day is: how does all this relate to "Reindustrialization as the forlorn hope of a Narcissistic Culture"?

(That basically grew up from John Adams' "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy … in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music.")

9rx didn't have foreign talent in his list of ingredients, but I'd argue they w/don't do anything to improve the pipeline either. If you "psychoanalyze" the Chinese devs at OpenAI, -- or the nonItalian uh Caucasoids at Anthropic-- their role in "Innovation" is the same as Jews' in... 1965? Jeeves for the politicians, mathematicians & fine artists.. don't you as a HNer remark upon the choice of "poetry" over "prose"!
by dancek | 2025-08-05 10:43:24+00:00
I wrote a quick and dirty bash script that launches a tmux dashboard for a legacy linux server. The team has been happy with it. It does seem like an evolutionary dead end to be honest, but it was very quick to set up.

Note that the dashboard is read-only and mostly just shows journalctl for different units (we use systemd for process management). And we assume it's only used by a single user at once and everything is stopped on detach.

Here's a simplified sample of setting up a 3x2 layout with some placeholder content:

#!/bin/sh set -e SESSION=example WINDOW=dashboard tmux new-session -d -s $SESSION -n $WINDOW "journalctl -fk" tmux set-option -t $SESSION -g mouse on tmux split-window -h -t $SESSION:$WINDOW "journalctl -fu nginx" tmux split-window -h -t $SESSION:$WINDOW "journalctl -fu postgresql" tmux select-layout -E tmux split-window -v -t $SESSION:$WINDOW "echo '<Ctrl-b d> to detach' && read" tmux select-pane -t $SESSION:$WINDOW.0 tmux split-window -v -t $SESSION:$WINDOW "watch uptime" tmux select-pane -t $SESSION:$WINDOW.2 tmux split-window -v -t $SESSION:$WINDOW "watch df -h" tmux attach-session -t $SESSION # after detaching, close session tmux kill-session -t $SESSION 2>/dev/null || true
by antonymoose | 2025-08-05 10:43:58+00:00
While I agree it’s a problem, unless you get litigious or the backing of a national congressional body, you might as well not care. You won’t win this fight.

Circa 2008 I worked for a startup that would scrape Google Books and a variety of other sources for public domain content to then print via Amazon’s Print-on-Demand services. Google, of course, didn’t like this and introduced a Captcha not very long after we started scraping.

So we hired a team of underemployed / unemployed English majors during the height of the recession, paid them $10 per hour to type in Captchas all day long and we downloaded their full corpus anyways.

If Google can’t win, you won’t either.
by awalGarg | 2025-08-05 10:44:57+00:00
Sounds like a reasonable theory but do you have an actual example? The one you gave:

> For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages.

does not apply to Indian languages because most of them have daily-use-words with the /æ/ sound.
by i_am_proteus | 2025-08-05 10:46:12+00:00
I give university courses in United States. Many of us have certainly down-weighted homework substantially.

However, when some colleagues tried homework as 0% for introductory courses, most students omitted the homework, then failed the exams. Modern students seem to require explicit incentive to work, otherwise the usual: scrolling upon flat screen devices, hedonism, and so forth.

In this case, who has failed: the student, or the professor?
by xorcist | 2025-08-05 10:46:34+00:00
"Essentially the same thing" as a shell pipe, except each function run sequentially in full, keeping output in a variable. So nothing like a shell pipe.

For short constructions '$out = sort(fn($in)' is really easier to read. For longer you can break them up in multiple lines.

$_ = fn_a($in) $_ = fb_b($_) $out = fn_c($_)

Is it really "cognitive overhead" to have the temporary variable explicit? Being explicit can be a virtue. Readability matters in a programming language. If nothing else I think Python taught us that.

I am skeptical to these types of sugar. Often what you really want is an iterator. The ability to hide that need carries clear risk.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-05 10:46:42+00:00
> it doesn't have the capacity to be upset

AIs are affected by things you say to them while those things are in their context window. Your context window for bad news is about a day.

Why are you certain that you -- a physical system amounting to a set of complex electric and chemical signals -- have this capacity for "genuine emotion", while another physical system, that outwardly behaves much the same as you, does not?

If I made a replica of your body accurate down to the atomic scale, and told that body something upsetting, it would outwardly behave as though it were experiencing an emotion. Are you claiming that it would not in fact be experiencing an emotion?
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-05 10:46:44+00:00
> Will it change dramatically in 20 years? Possibly, but that's enough time to give people a chance to adapt.

Yeah, but for that, politicians need to prepare as well, and they don't. All that many of today's politicians care about is about getting reelected or at the very least lining their pockets. In Germany, we call this "nach uns die Sintflut" [1], roughly translated to "after us, the floods may come".

Here in Germany, we at least have set up programs to phase out coal over decades, but that was for a few hundred thousand workers - not even close to the scale that's looming over us with AI.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nach_uns_die_Sintflut
by jacquesm | 2025-08-05 10:48:06+00:00
Not all materials are parts. For instance, if you run a soup factory you don't order 'soup parts' but bulk ingredients in the same proportions that you end up selling, but there are many other things that you need to worry about in the process of preparation and there are things that don't even make it into the end product at all that you still need during the manufacturing step (for instance, cleaning products, various chemicals). So 'basically parts lists' is a bit of a shortcut.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-05 10:48:23+00:00
> The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s.

The youngest delegate to the Constitutional convention was Johnathan Dayton of New Jersey, who was 26, and there were three more under 30. There were more over 60 than than under 30.

The people that are frequently cited as being "Founding Fathers" in their "early 20s" (or "between 19 or 21, because we're not sure exactly when he was born", in Hamilton's case) are people who were that age in 1776 and ended up playing an important role. But the Constitution was drafted more than a decade later -- there was a war, plus time under the first system of government under the Articles of Confederation in between.

> Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.,

No, that was not a "doctrine of the founding fathers", it was a belief of Thomas Jefferson expressed later in a letter to, as I recall, John Adams, specifically (the upper limit of the period at which he held any law or constitution needed to expire was actually 19 years, based on actuarial data and a set of assumptions he had about what was necessary and acceptable in terms of avoiding the living being ruled over by the dead.)

You can tell it was not a widely held "doctrine of the founding fathers" (or, more to the point, of the Framers, who are the ones actually relevant to the Constitution, though the two groups have considerable overlap) because instead of expiring by its own terms in 19 years or less, the Constitution was permanent, with a very difficult method of amendment, and that method of amendment was specifically barred from changing certain parts.

There weren't really very many widely shared "doctrines" of the Founders or the Framers. They weren't a hive mind or a cult or even a group as ideologically aligned as the coalition that makes up either of the US's current major political parties. The idea of shared doctrines or a single unifying vision behind the Constitution are mythologies created after, and requiring deliberate disregard of, the facts.
by MandieD | 2025-08-05 10:48:33+00:00
Oooooh, you're one of today's 10,000, and I get to be the person who tells you about Agrivoltaics - combining farming/ranching and solar panels.

You don't completely cover the land in solar panels - you work with the idea that the sun (and resulting shadows from the panels) moves throughout the day, so space them out a bit, and mount them high enough to stay out of the way of the agricultural activity.

I first saw this going on in southern Germany. The cattle were all in the shaded areas, eating the grass that was growing better than in neighboring uncovered fields - this year was really dry here until a few weeks ago.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-08-05 10:48:51+00:00
> X is such a write-only language, my hair curls up just from looking at it.

That would be a powerful language feature, but alas

X.isWriteOnly() for X in aLanguagesIdonotUse

is merely akin to

X.hasTooManyRules() for X in aHumanLanguagesIdonotSpeak
by marius-ciclistu | 2025-08-05 10:49:20+00:00
I defined the equivalent constant engine torque as the torque with which a car's engine with one gear ratio can accelerate over the same distance in the same time, providing a single value as a characteristic for that engine on all its rpm range. It's measured in Nm and is the clearest characteristic of an engine (if it is mentioned alone without other information/characteristics).
by bartlomein | 2025-08-05 10:49:30+00:00
Location: New Jersey, USA Remote: Yes

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by misja111 | 2025-08-05 10:50:07+00:00
The author is overlooking the need for enterprise server software that needs to be safe, stable, extendable to large systems and easily maintainable above anything else.

None of his three languages fits that bill. Python is not (type) safe enough. Typescript is meant for running in browser. And Rust, although it has a good type system, is meant primarily for system software. Compared to garbage collected languages such as Java, it loses on maintainability and extendibility because you don't want to be bothered with stuff like data ownership or ints with specific bit lengths in large systems that need to deal only with business logic.
by zbentley | 2025-08-05 10:50:13+00:00
This has been happening for years, long pre-dating LLMs or the current AI hype. There are a huge number of companies in the medical transcription space.

Some are software companies that ingest data to the cloud as you say. Some are remote/phone transcription services, which pass voice data to humans to transcribe it. Those humans then store it in the cloud when it is returned to a doctor's office. Some are EMR-integrated transcription services which are either cloud-based with the rest of the EMR or, for on-premise EMRs, ship data to/from the cloud for transcription.
by ben_w | 2025-08-05 10:50:28+00:00
> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.

Capitalism? Yes.

"Free market capitalism"? No.

While regulated capitalism is very effective at aligning everyone's interests, a free market operates without the intervention of government or any other external authority, and rapidly decays into a market for lemons[0] — or worse, arbitrarily negative contractual obligations, which is how serfdom functioned.

Even when the governments start off by only intervening to prevent those two issues, with minimum quality requirements and prohibitions against unfair contracts, they often find themselves having to also intervene directly in the markets, everything from the US ban on trading onion futures[1] to printing and destroying currency to keep inflation in a particular range designed to encourage the spending of money rather than its hoarding on the one hand without also preventing people from saving on the other, and even to intervene in the employment market because 100% employment drives a spiral of wage inflation that the system as a whole would not be able to cope with etc. etc.

Same deal as the Laffer curve: zero regulation is bad, micromanagement is bad, people argue about where the peak in the middle is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
by tempfile | 2025-08-05 10:51:14+00:00
I don't know how to make this any clearer. You - website owner - your consent does not matter. You are publishing information on the internet. I do not think you have a right to decide who is allowed to read it or not, or how they use what they read. You have exactly two legal rights: the right not to be DoS'd/hacked, and the right not to have your copyright infringed. Neither of those rights have anything to do with what you "consent" to. It is a bad thing to connect consent - the arbitrary, capricious whim of a website operator - to access of a public resource. Consent is for people, for your body, for your relationships. It is not a magic spell to give you arbitrary control over people.
by andrepd | 2025-08-05 10:51:35+00:00
Well, agreed, but nobody said anything about 60min exams x) In fact I don't remember ever having an exam at uni that was less than 2h.

I agree that open-book exams, or at least a closed-book portion followed by an open-book portion, is important to actually gauge the student's abilities rather than his/her capability to cram.
by gwd | 2025-08-05 10:54:10+00:00
It started out as a side project just for myself to study Mandarin in 2019.

There's an open beta of the system ported to Biblical Greek here:

https://www.laleolanguage.com

I've got several active users without really having done any advertising; working on revamping the UI and redesigning the website before I do a big push and start advertising. Most of the people using the site have learned Biblical Greek entirely through the system.

There are experimental ports to Korean and Japanese as well, but those (along with the Mandarin port) aren't public yet. The primary missing pieces are:

1. Content -- the system relies on having large amounts of high-quality content. Finding it, tagging it, and dealing with copyright will take some time

2. On-ramp: It works best to help people at the intermediate level to advance. But if you start at an intermediate level, it doesn't know what you know.

Another thread I'm pursuing is exposing the algorithm via API to other language learning apps:

https://api-dev.laleolanguage.com/v1/docs

All of that needs a better funnel. I'll probably post some stuff here once I've got everything in a better state.

(If anyone reading this is interested in the API, please contact me at contact@laleolanguage.com .)
by karel-3d | 2025-08-05 10:54:19+00:00
Trying to actually write one before, it's incredibly frustrating experience, as you still need to have some weird native glue code in in Swift/Obj-C. And everything is under-documented, as it the true Apple Experience. (I forgot the details. I can find the code on github, maybe.)

If you ask yourself why there are so little Safari extensions, this is why.

edit: I look at the code now... I needed to wrestle with BOTH cocoapods and npm, at which point I gave up
by defrost | 2025-08-05 10:54:49+00:00
To lift that up from anecdata and to provide a link for the GP that you might enjoy:

Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels (2022) https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...

Confirmed multiple times since in several parts of rural Australia.
by watwut | 2025-08-05 10:54:57+00:00
> Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.

I am 100% certain quite a lot of people cheat because they procrastinated and don't have time to learn. Or because they indeed were lazy to learn. Or because they cant learn, because they course is too hard for them.

Or because video games and youtube are more fun.
by pydry | 2025-08-05 10:55:20+00:00
i can count maybe 3 times in the last 15 years ive used git bisect and it didnt even catch the bug in at least one of those cases.

It's one of those things that sounds super cool and advanced and i thought id be using all the time when i first learned about it but in practice 99/100 times to see when and where to bug was introduced it it's quicker and easier to just track it down manually in the code.
by yakattak | 2025-08-05 10:56:18+00:00
As expected we’re getting closer and closer to the Trough of Disillusionment. That’s not a bad thing, because it leads to the Plateau of Productivity.[1]

Anecdotally for myself I’m finding that LLMs are great when I can give it a hyper specific target like a function to write. This isn’t because it can’t write an entire script. It can. It’s because the more I let it run wild, it feels like my understanding of the code gets exponentially worse.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
by koolba | 2025-08-05 10:56:59+00:00
> I have burned hours upon hours on rebase conflicts over the years.

Hate to say, "You're using it wrong", but if you haven't repeated conflicts rebasing, then your commits are probably just not small enough.

A merge does not magically eliminate any of the conflicts either, you just do them all at once rather than point by point. And the smaller the changeset, the less likely you will have any conflict at all.

Small changes, sorted lists (so parallel additions rarely conflict), allowing trailing commas (again to allow for parallel addition), splitting dependency updates from structural changes (to allow wholesale removing them if they were done separately), ... there's plenty of little changes to how you put together work that make this workflow easier.
by Sharlin | 2025-08-05 10:57:02+00:00
The reason Rust has a separate `sort_by_cached_key` is, of course, that it doesn’t make sense to cache cheap projections which are the 95% use case.

The implementation is somewhat more sophisticated than just the naive transform:

> The current implementation is based on instruction-parallel-network sort by Lukas Bergdoll, which combines the fast average case of randomized quicksort with the fast worst case of heapsort, while achieving linear time on fully sorted and reversed inputs. And O(k * log(n)) where k is the number of distinct elements in the input. It leverages superscalar out-of-order execution capabilities commonly found in CPUs, to efficiently perform the operation.

> In the worst case, the algorithm allocates temporary storage in a Vec<(K, usize)> the length of the slice.
by sofixa | 2025-08-05 10:57:17+00:00
> Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!

Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.

And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.

Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.

Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.
by fmbb | 2025-08-05 10:57:27+00:00
I have started to gravitate toward ”write everything 100 times” or at least ten.

I’m thoroughly convinced DRY is the most ill-applied of all programming dogmas. At every place of work I have been I have run into bugs introduced by changes in one of the cases someone decided to ”dry up” several times. I have never seen bugs being caused by code not being DRY, and I cannot believe someone theoretically in the future maybe forgetting to include a bug fix in some case is worth the hassle.

In very few cases you are solving an actually generic problem. These are usually low hanging fruit already solved in a standard library or are available as an open source package in your eco system of choice. Your business logic is not general.