MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by userbinator | 2025-09-08 03:24:33+00:00
MIPS is as close to a "real RISC" CPU as one can be, and it's "everywhere you don't look", but for reasons entirely unrelated to performance --- it's the choice of SoCs which are too cheap for ARM. I suspect RISC-V is going to become more popular in that market, although it's one which is already filled with various Chinese MIPS/RISC-ish cores that are entirely unimpressive.
by theden | 2025-09-08 03:25:17+00:00
People underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths. People have different tolerances with respect to conformity, and at different stages in their lives.

It's a shame something as fundamental as computing is seen as a "boy" thing by many, often fatalistically, and I think we've been worse off for it.
by chongli | 2025-09-08 03:28:50+00:00
This might actually support Apple's side of the argument, although I do not. I don't think we need some Carfax equivalent for MacBooks.

In some ways, Apple's scheme is better than Carfax. In other ways, it's worse.

It's worse because you can't get access to the repair history of a device.

It's better because you can actually have a reasonable degree of confidence that no "driveway repairs" have taken place since Apple's scheme is not known to be broken.
by rayiner | 2025-09-08 03:30:24+00:00
> But such singular characteristics are not defining either. Both India, the USA and in fact much of the planet have issues in terms of government, participation and representation.

The Iowa Caucuses exemplifies the most important distinguishing characteristic of American democracy. India is a hierarchical society, where low-information masses select who will parent them. America, by contrast, is an egalitarian democracy. That doesn't mean maximizing the participation of the low-information masses. It means that Americans choose from amongst themselves people to represent them within a system of self-government. Americans have this ideal of self-government all the way down, from the President down to elected school boards and HOAs and church leadership.

> There are other countries that show much better what democracy could look like than what the USA is going through.

I'll grant you one thing: American democracy is worse than it was when Reagan was running against Carter, and Trump is part of the reason for that. But the way in which it's worse is that it more resembles Indian third-world slop democracy!
by Nevermark | 2025-09-08 03:35:30+00:00
This.

We need a grey flag to clearly represent "we don't accept your win yet, but we are not trying to win either, so keep trying". Just as the white flag clearly represents full surrender.

It is, unfortunately, the optimal path for maximizing the length of the war.

Nobody wins wars without prioritizing the goal of winning the war.

Other massive disadvantage: The unending financial arm twisting is pushing allies with closer ties to Russia away. I.e. India. The longer the war goes on, the more global adaptation there will be away from the systems that create US leverage. Leverage should be used strategically, within a decisive plan, not chronically and aimlessly while its targets build up immunity.
by mandevil | 2025-09-08 03:36:34+00:00
Every year or two I like to re-read my 25th Anniversary Edition of Mythical Man Month (which included No Silver Bullet). Every time I pull out something different.

I think that the willingness to rely completely on OSS libraries has fundamentally changed SWE practices from 2004 when I earned my first paycheck. We all just agreed that it's okay to use this library where you don't know who wrote it, there is no contract on it, and everyone just accepts that it will probably have massive security holes, and you hope the maintainer will still be around when those are announced. This was not true in 1986, and it mostly wasn't true in 2006, but it feels like every week we get more announcements on new CVE's that it turns out half the internet- very much including products people paid real hard currency for- were using. And we just accepted it.

And yeah, mostly the ability to CD a new deployment immediately- plus force a download of a patched version- meant we could get away with it, but it trained us all to accept lower quality standards. And I feel it in my bones, that the experience of using software is markedly worse than in 1996 or 2006, despite vastly more CPU, RAM, and disk.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
by wyager | 2025-09-08 03:36:56+00:00
> Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment?

Haskell mostly solves boilerplate in a typed way and Lisp mostly solves it in an untyped way (I know, I know, roughly speaking).

To put it bluntly, there's an intellectual difficulty barrier associated with understanding problems well enough to systematize away boilerplate and use these languages effectively.

The difficulty gap between writing a ton of boilerplate in Java and completely eliminating that boilerplate in Haskell is roughly analogous to the difficulty gap between bolting on the wheels at a car factory and programming a robot to bolt on the wheels for you. (The GHC compiler devs might be the robot manufacturers in this analogy.) The latter is obviously harder, and despite the labor savings, sometimes the economics of hiring a guy to sit there bolting on wheels still works out.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-08 03:38:04+00:00
The word for lemon, 檸檬, that I mentioned above is a recent ateji. The characters come from some southern Chinese language borrowing the word "lemon" from English. The Mandarin pronunciation follows the characters, resulting in ningmeng, something just different enough that English speakers are unlikely to notice the connection.

The Japanese word for the fruit is also borrowed from English, resulting in the much closer レモン remon. But the spelling is borrowed from Chinese (when kanji are used at all), despite the pronunciation coming from elsewhere.

> There are kanji less obscure than 論. There are some that are so common that even I know them. It is in the 6th grade jōyō kanji, but I doubt it's in the top 1000 most common characters in Japanese, maybe not even the top 2000. You could probably guess that 侖 is the phonetic

It's not an especially common character in Chinese either, though it is part of some common words like 讨论. (论 is the simplified form of 論.) But frequency of occurrence isn't the only way you can fail to be obscure. I call this one of the least obscure characters in existence because it is the name of the most prominent Confucian work, the one conventionally titled Analects in English, 論語 "discussions".

Consider that "spangled" is not a word in common use in the USA, but Americans can be expected to recognize it anyway.

> Did anyone guess "rin"?

I don't remember.

> Presumably when prewett said "When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically," they meant onyomi. (Perhaps they didn't know about kunyomi.) When they say, "but the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word," that is mostly wrong as a description of how Japanese writing uses kanji today

I read prewett very differently than you do. To me, when he says "the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word", he is referring to kunyomi. I don't think that's wrong as a description of how Japanese writing uses kanji today. But I do think it's wrong to describe that use as "much more phonetic" than the Chinese writing system. I see it as much less phonetic.
by didibus | 2025-09-08 03:38:18+00:00
I remember reading that there was an active re-framing of the computer worker. It was somewhat reflected by employers that started hiring exclusively men and of computer workers being associated with nerds and geeks, and the combination could have driven woman away.

Also I don't know that finding ads that targeted woman by simply searching Google is a rebuttal that ads were almost entirely targeted at boys. As it tell us nothing of the prevalance and quantity of each.

That said, I agree I don't think the ads were a major part of it. It's the culture, and what I heard is the culture shift happened once computer work was seen as requiring rigorous knowledge, intellectualism and was starting to pay well.

I'm not gonna advance I know the truth of these hypothesis, but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys.
by azhenley | 2025-09-08 03:38:44+00:00
I once designed an esolang for my CS students to have fun with during the last week of the semester. A few of them used it in really, really creative ways and also went on to make their own languages for fun.

The one I created for class supports supports concurrency, regular expressions, HTTP requests, and file I/O. The challenging part is that every line executes concurrently in round-robin style (one command per line). There are only 8 commands and each line can only store a single string value.

https://austinhenley.com/blog/hofstadter.html
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-08 03:39:05+00:00
>>> Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks.

> Also new languages - our team uses Ruby, and Ruby is easy to read, so I can skip learning the syntax and get the LLM to write the code.

If Ruby is "easy to read" and assuming you know a similar programming language (such as Perl or Python), how difficult is it to learn Ruby and be able to write the code yourself?

> ... but I don't need to learn Ruby to write acceptable-level code [0].

Since the team you work with uses Ruby, why do you not need to learn it?

> [0] acceptable-level as defined by the rest of the team - they're checking my PRs.

Ah. Now I get it.

Instead of learning the lingua franca and being able to verify your own work, "the rest of the team" has to make sure your PR's will not obviously fail.

Here's a thought - has it crossed your mind that team members needing to determine if your PR's are acceptable is "a bad thing", in that it may indicate a lack of trust of the changes you have been introducing?

Furthermore, does this situation qualify as "immediately productive" for the team or only yourself?

EDIT:

If you are not a software engineer by trade and instead a stakeholder wanting to formally specify desired system changes to the engineering team, an approach to consider is authoring RSpec[0] specs to define feature/integration specifications instead of PR's.

This would enable you to codify functional requirements such that their satisfaction is provable, assist the engineering team's understanding of what must be done in the context of existing behavior, identify conflicting system requirements (if any) before engineering effort is expended, provide a suite of functional regression tests, and serve as executable documentation for team members.

0 - https://rspec.info/features/6-1/rspec-rails/feature-specs/fe...
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-09-08 03:39:11+00:00
>People underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths.

I mean, if you read the OP, it basically presents a bunch of evidence against this position. (Specifically, if it were a matter of social construction, it wouldn't be so easy to find lots of computer ads featuring girls and women.)
by wyager | 2025-09-08 03:39:51+00:00
It's very minimal-boilerplate. It's done an exceptional job of eliminating procedural, tedious work, and it's done it in a way that doesn't even require macros! "Template Haskell" is Haskell's macro system and it's rarely used anymore.

These days, people mostly use things like GHC.Generics (generic programming for stuff like serialization that typically ends up being free performance-wise), newtypes and DerivingVia, the powerful and very generalized type system, and so on.

If you've ever run into a problem and thought "this seems tedious and repetitive", the probability that you could straightforwardly fix that is probably higher in Haskell than in any other language except maybe a Lisp.
by postalcoder | 2025-09-08 03:40:00+00:00
For example I have a Stop hook that scans my messages to see which files we've worked on. It'll check to see if the changes to those files have been committed and, if not, it will prevent Claude from stopping and send it a message to commit the specific files in a specific style that includes the id of the current session. The same script also cleans up all previous instances of the same message in the conversation, saving like 5k tokens per session.

I have a lot of PreToolUse hooks that injects guideline messages whenever certain tools are called or bash commands run. My hooks also prune older versions of those out of context. All of the transcripts are in ~/.claude/projects/ in jsonl format and are hot-editable.
by dang | 2025-09-08 03:40:06+00:00
Related. Others?

Tailwind CSS vs. Pico CSS (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511420 - Sept 2024 (48 comments)

Htmx, Raku and Pico CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41482679 - Sept 2024 (153 comments)

Pico CSS v2 comes with 380 manually crafted colors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39488979 - Feb 2024 (12 comments)

Pico CSS Framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29559961 - Dec 2021 (101 comments)
by dzink | 2025-09-08 03:41:57+00:00
Boys who code seem to be more territorial about their craft and code and choices and content of teams. As a female who codes, I love the craft and making innovative work. Yet waaaay too many times I’ve encountered people who get severely attached to their own approach about something and religiously force others to subdue to their ways. To the point of bullying other teammates about things that don’t really matter. I wonder if that kind of culture has alienated women more than men.
by godelski | 2025-09-08 03:43:27+00:00
Yeah, this is the big problem I see. There's some startups I see that in their pitches have some big red flag like needing to violate the laws of physics. Yet, I see these funded.

It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.
by nullc | 2025-09-08 03:43:54+00:00
Even if they put out some super high memory models and just pass the ram through at cost it would increase sales -- potentially quite dramatically and increase their total income a lot and have a good chance of transitioning to being a market leader rather than an also-ran.

AMD has lagged so long because of the software ecosystem but the climate now is that they'd only need to support a couple popular model architectures to immediately grab a lot of business. The failure to do so is inexplicable.

I expect we will eventually learn that this was about yet another instance of anti-competitive collusion.
Ask HN: Is Reddit going the way of Stack Overflow?
by NotAnOtter | 2025-09-08 03:46:51+00:00
Stack Overflow was once a haven for tech questions & explanations in the early 10's. At some point, the mod team soured and started deputizing members that started shunning and deleting comments for thinly justified reasoning. Things like asking a question that was asked 8 years ago would get your question deleted, ignoring the fact that tech reasonably could have changed in those 8 years. The site was not only generally toxic, it was difficult to actually use. Searching on google your question "stack overflow" was the main use case in the late 10's. LLM's have been the final nail in the coffin for SO, and the usage charts reflect this. Why bother carefully searching and phrasing your question to get a sassy answer 8 hours later, when Claude will give you an answer in 5 seconds with approximately the same accuracy of an internet stranger?

So - is Reddit headed the same way as SO? The mods of individual subreddits have been toxic for ages. Political subs curate hive minds, niche topics exclude members that are less informed, etc. Reddit admins, the ones that are emplyoed by the site, are also generally anti-user. Banning members without cause, poor or no explanations of what the ban is for and generally just policing with an iron fist & a rubber brain.

Reddit fills a different niche from SO, being more entertainment focused. But I feel it's the same mistaken model of moderation that will lead to the same demise in ~5 years.

Thoughts?
by brainless | 2025-09-08 03:47:05+00:00
Empowering people is a lovely thing.

Here the author has a passion/side project they have been on for a while. Upgrading the tooling is a great thing. Community may not support this since the niche is too narrow. LLM comes in and helps in the upgrade. This is exactly what we want - software to be custom - for people to solve their unique edge cases.

Yes author is technical but we are lowering the barrier and it will be lowered even more. Semi technical people will be able to solve some simpler edge cases, and so one. More power to everyone.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-09-08 03:48:21+00:00
There are many reasons to pump the brakes on city development, such as pollution, crime, sanitation... many of these have been solved since then, so it's hard to see. But back then - city life could be no fun.

Even into the 80s, New York City was perceived as having basic safety issues. I never went there, but TV shows and movies of the era mostly went for a certain feel: graffitied subway cars, car alarms, gritty night spots, and all the things that go with that.

So I think there are many more reasons than just "the poors!"

By contrast: why didn't European population centers (all the way from small cities to capitals like Paris) have quite such an extreme reversal? Was the "anti-poors" thing real, just less prevalent in Europe?
by wodenokoto | 2025-09-08 03:48:53+00:00
I have an iPad going strong-ish for over a decade now.

There’s a lot of stuff you can’t do, but it runs VLC and I can connect to iTunes and move files.

The Retina display is still gorgeous and it can connect to my AirPods (although _they_ really don’t like it)

I watch TV-series on it while on the treadmill in my gym. I’ve considered getting a new one, but it just seems like a lot of money for something that isn’t broken.
by daemonologist | 2025-09-08 03:49:36+00:00
This card does have double the VRAM of the more expensive Nvidia competitor (the A1000, which has 8 GB), but I take your point that it doesn't feel like quite enough to justify giving up the Nvidia ecosystem. The memory bandwidth is also... not great.

They also announced a 24 GB B60 and a double-GPU version of the same (saves you physical slots), but it seems like they don't have a release date yet (?).
by buzzerbetrayed | 2025-09-08 03:49:43+00:00
This is my biggest complaint with the strict "my device, my rules" people.

I want Apple to lock down my device to customization, repairs, etc..

I know I am never going to install an app through means other than the app store, even if I could. I know I'm never going to repair my device through anyone other than Apple, even if I could. I want to know that my device will be a $1,000 paperweight to anyone who steals it.

I want to pay Apple to ensure there are no "driveway repairs".

A number of years ago I accidentally ended up with a second hand iPhone with a shitty "fake" screen repair. I had no way of knowing it wasn't an Apple screen. But it fucked me over as soon as it started failing a couple months after I bought it.

I get tired of the people demanding that a company, with willing, paying customers, isn't allowed to protect their customers because they want something the company doesn't offer. Fuck right off with that shit and buy from a company that does offer that.
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-08 03:50:16+00:00
AI doesn’t need to replace a specialist in their entirety for it to tank demand for a skill. If the people that currently do the work are significantly more productive, fewer people will be necessary to the same amount of work. Then, people trying to escape obsolescence in different, more popular specialties move into the niche ones. You could easily pass the threshold of having less work than people without having replaced a single specialist.
by zdw | 2025-09-08 03:50:56+00:00
I doubt you'd get linear scaling of price/capacity - the larger capacity modules are more expensive per GB than smaller ones, and in some cases are supply constrained.

The number of chips on the bus is usually pretty low (1 or 2 of them on most GPUs), so GPUs tend to have to scale out their memory bus widths to get to higher capacity. That's expensive and takes up die space, and for the conventional case (games) isn't generally needed on low end cards.

What really needs to happen is someone needs to make some "system seller" game that is incredibly popular and requires like 48GB of memory on the GPU to build demand. But then you have a chicken/egg problem.

Example: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-128-gb-memory-g...
by JonChesterfield | 2025-09-08 03:51:22+00:00
I'm pretty sure it's a political limitation, not a technical one. Implementing it is definitely a pain - it's a mix of hardcore backwards compatibility (i.e. cruft) and a rapidly moving target - but it's also obviously just a lot of carefully chosen ascii written down in text files.

The non-nvidia hardware vendors really don't want cuda to win. AMD went for open source + collaborative in a big way, opencl then hsa. Both broadly ignored. I'm not sure what Intel are playing at with spirv - that stack doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

Cuda is alright though, in a kind of crufty obfuscation over SSA sense. Way less annoying than opencl certainly. You can run it on amdgpu hardware if you want to - https://docs.scale-lang.com/stable/ and https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA already exist. I'm hacking on scale these days.
by pwdisswordfishz | 2025-09-08 03:51:27+00:00
> A C argument declaration is made up of modifiers (register, const), a data type (char *), and a name (from).

Now explain a declaration like "char *argv[]"...

> We’ve also re-set the data type such that there is no space between char and * - the data type of both of these variables is “pointer to char”, so it makes more sense to put the space before the argument name, not in the middle the data type’s name (update: it should be pointed out that this only makes sense for a single declaration. A construct like char* a, b will create a pointer to char, a, and a regular char, b).

Ah, yes, the delusional C++ formatting style. At least it's nice that the update provides the explanation why it should be avoided.
by giardini | 2025-09-08 03:52:18+00:00
Yes. I gazed into my 8-ball at https://magic-8ball.com/ asked it "Will AI with LLMs fail?" and shook it. It responded "Most likely".

In my future I also saw lots and lots of cheap GPU chips and hardware, much gaming but fewer "developers" and a mostly flat-lined software economy for at least 8 years. Taiwan was still independent but was suffering from an economic recession.