MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imtringued | 2025-10-14 09:37:36+00:00
Translation to something ordinary humans can understand (I personally have strong distaste for the basis vector/basis element approach):

Linear transformations 101:

If the scalar function f(x)=y is linear, what can it do?

We can now either pretend that canonical forms do not exist, or we just use them anyway and make some people angry. The former way is very long and I don't have much time so angry people are a small price to pay.

There is one way to describe f and that is as f(x)=ax=y.

Now what if we have multiple inputs f(a,b)=y? We can just have two parameters. f(a,b) = c*a+d*b = y. I can already hear the boos.

Note that c*a+d*b has the same form as a dot product. A linear function with multiple inputs and multiple outputs can be described as: f(x) = a^Tx = y, where x is a vector of dimension 2 containing the original a and b, and a is a vector containing c and d. Multiplication with a row vector is a linear transformation.

Now what if we do the opposite? One input, multiple outputs? It's the same but with column vectors! f(x) = xa = y where a is a vector and y is a vector.

Now what if we do both? Multiple inputs and multiple outputs?? You just stack either your row vectors or the column vectors! Now you have a matrix as your parameter for f(x)=Ax=y!

The best part? I've already given four examples of linear transformations including the dual space. Having canonical representations makes explanations very easy.
by WJW | 2025-10-14 09:37:38+00:00
I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
by jlaternman | 2025-10-14 09:38:15+00:00
This, and also brain fog – which unless it is truly debilitating is hard to prove, hard to treat, and can feel pointless to talk about after a while. You won't necessarily hear people talk about "having Long Covid" unless their symptoms are easily measurable and debilitating in a key area of their life. 20% sounds viable to me, too.
by Netcob | 2025-10-14 09:38:36+00:00
My guess is that the reason why AI works bad for some people is the same reason why a lot of people make bad managers / product owners / team leads. Also the same reason why onboarding is atrocious in a lot of companies ("Here's your login, here's a link to the wiki that hasn't been updated since 2019, if you have any questions ask one of your very busy co-workers, they are happy to help").

You have to very good at writing tasks while being fully aware of what the one executing it knows and doesn't know. What agents can infer about a project themselves is even more limited than their context, so it's up to you to provide it. Most of them will have no or very limited "long-term" memory.

I've had good experiences with small projects using the latest models. But letting them sift through a company repo that has been worked on by multiple developers for years and has some arcane structures and sparse documentation - good luck with that. There aren't many simple instructions to be made there. The AI can still save you an hour or two of writing unit tests if they are easy to set up and really only need very few source files as context.

But just talking to some people makes it clear how difficult the concept of implicit context is. Sometimes it's like listening to a 4 year old telling you about their day. AI may actually be better at comprehending that sort of thing than I am.

One criticism I do have of AI in its current state is that it still doesn't ask questions often enough. One time I forgot to fill out the description of a task - but instead of seeing that as a mistake it just inferred what I wanted from the title and some other files and implemented it anyway. Correctly, too. In that sense it was the exact opposite of what OP was complaining about, but personally I'd rather have the AI assume that I'm fallible instead of confidently plowing ahead.
by bborud | 2025-10-14 09:39:14+00:00
I would argue that the traditional way to install applications (particularly servers) on UNIX wasn’t very compatible with the needs that arose in the 2000s.

The traditional way tends to assume that there will be only one version of something installed on a system. It also assumes that when installing a package you distribute binaries, config files, data files, libraries and whatnot across lots and lots of system directories. I grew up on traditional UNIX. I’ve spent 35+ years using perhaps 15-20 different flavors of UNIX, including some really, really obscure variants. For what I did up until around 2000, this was good enough. I liked learning about new variants. And more importantly: it was familiar to me.

It was around that time I started writing software for huge collections of servers sitting in data centers on a different continent. Out of necessity I had to make my software more robust and easier to manage. It had to coexist with lots of other stuff I had no control over.

It would have to be statically linked, everything I needed had to be in one place so you could easily install and uninstall. (Eventually in all-in-one JAR files when I started writing software in Java). And I couldn’t make too many assumptions about the environment my software was running in.

UNIX could have done with a re-thinking of how you deal with software, but that never happened. I think an important reason for this is that when you ask people to re-imagine something, it becomes more complex. We just can’t help ourselves.

Look at how we reimagined managing services with systemd. Yes, now that it has matured a bit and people are getting used to it, it isn’t terrible. But it also isn’t good. No part of it is simple. No part of it is elegant. Even the command line tools are awkward. Even the naming of the command line tools fail the most basic litmus test (long prefixes that require too many keystrokes to tab-complete says a lot about how people think about usability - or don’t).

Again, systemd isn’t bad. But it certainly isn’t great.

As for blaming Python, well, blame the people who write software for _distribution_ in Python. Python isn’t a language that lends itself to writing software for distribution and the Python community isn’t the kind of community that will fix it.

Point out that it is problematic and you will be pointed to whatever mitigation that is popular at the time (to quote Queen “I've fallen in love for the first time. And this time I know it's for real”), and people will get upset with you, downvote you and call you names.

I’m too old to spend time on this so for me it is much easier to just ban Python from my projects. I’ve tried many times, I’ve been patient, and it always ends up biting me in the ass. Something more substantial has to happen before I’ll waste another minute on it.
by mlindner | 2025-10-14 09:39:21+00:00
That's a completely unfair thing to say. It's a meme at this point even that if you elevate your arm upwards at any angle between 90 and 180 you're automatically treated as having made a nazi salute.

What matters is the context around it, as has always been the case. And the context is not that of a nazi salute.

The people who insist on it being a nazi salute are just disingenuous people pushing an angle for their own virtue signalling. It's tiresome.
by simonw | 2025-10-14 09:40:54+00:00
That "losing money on subscriptions" story is a one-off Sam Altman tweet from January 2025, when they were promoting their brand new $200 account and the first version of Sora. I wouldn't treat that as a universal truth.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813

"insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!

people use it much more than we expected"
by constantcrying | 2025-10-14 09:40:57+00:00
Here in the west it is common sense that between products made in China and in the West the main difference is that the later category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly unaffordable prices.

If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese manufacturers if wanted to.

The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.
by laborcontract | 2025-10-14 09:41:26+00:00
The reason why OP is getting terrible results is because he's using Cursor, and Cursor is designed to ruthlessly prune context to curtail costs.

Unlike the model providers, Cursor has to pay the retail price for LLM usage. They're fighting an ugly marginal price war. If you're paying more for inference than your competitors, you have to choose to either 1) deliver equal performance as other models at a loss or 2) economize by way of feeding smaller contexts to the model providers.

Cursor is not transparent on how it handles context. From my experience, it's clear that they use aggressive strategies to prune conversations to the extent that it's not uncommon that cursor has to reference the same file multiple times in the same conversation just to know what's going on.

My advice to anyone using Cursor is to just stop wasting your time. The code it generates creates so much debt. I've moved on to Codex and Claude and I couldn't be happier.
by netsharc | 2025-10-14 09:41:30+00:00
You are literally doing what you're describing, man! Do you not see that you are also engulfed in tribalism?!

You grasp on to any little shred of factoid (who cares if true or not) to put anyone you don't like as "the other tribe".. "Oh he donated $1 to Biden! Fucking leftist!". "Oh a report says his mom said he's a leftist?! I fucking knew it!".

It's sad. It's even sadder if you can't see it in yourself.
by TomasBM | 2025-10-14 09:41:50+00:00
I'm not a 'native' programmer, but even I can agree with that.

As it became easier to abstract away from pure assembly, people did just that. Some ideas stuck, some converged, and the ones with the most tenacious, adaptable and attractive communities remained.

Before I learned to code, no programming language was even remotely readable to me. But the more I learned, the more I could shed the notion that this was purely my fault, and accept that sometimes things are a certain way because someone found it interesting or useful. Applies to natural languages and mathematics, too.
by solatic | 2025-10-14 09:41:58+00:00
Geocodio offers a pay-as-you-go metered plan where users get 2,500 free geocoding lookups per day. This means we need to: Track the 2,500 free tier requests Continue tracking above that threshold for billing Let users view their usage in real-time on their dashboard Give admins the ability to query this data for support and debugging Store request details so we can replay customer requests when debugging issues

Just on the basis of what you wrote here, I'm not convinced ClickHouse is the right tool. ClickHouse very much would help with helping you crunch statistics for latencies etc., but just for billing and getting individual query data? 1) push the request to Kafka/Pub Sub/etc. 2) one consumer pushing to TigerBeetle for tracking request usage within the free tier and other billing 3) one consumer to push individual requests to object storage, which scales out infinitely-ish, allows you to get full request details for an individual request, lifecycle rules will automatically async delete old requests for you. If request statistics is important for business analysis, then instead of (boring) object storage you could look at one of the newer Iceberg-based options on top of object storage, e.g. S3 tables; as long as querying an individual request remains fast and getting statistics can be generated, say, for a nightly report. Another cheap approach could hook up another consumer to the PubSub, any request with too-high latency above a reasonable threshold, dump it into a Slack channel with a reference to the request ID so someone can look into debugging it.
by oniony | 2025-10-14 09:42:23+00:00
No worries, definitely needs rewording.

Personally I wouldn't have problem with companies funding if it's via the normal route, i.e. via the web interface, such that they are just providing funds and then the normal testing/reporting takes place. But I fear this is idealistic. I can well imagine companies wanting to send you samples directly, wanting you to remove results and even threatening legal action if they don't like the results.
by general1465 | 2025-10-14 09:42:25+00:00
> Solid take. Do modern day battleships have programmers re-writing core OS components?

They do and they don't.

For example F16 pilots in Ukraine were unable to fly combat missions because USA stopped help during March 2025. Jamming pods are making Russian radars less effective and they were not getting software updates from USA.

So programmers are not on the frontline, but they are still absolutely vital part of such an old plane like F16 is. Now consider F35 which is very reliant on the software.
by vladms | 2025-10-14 09:43:32+00:00
Some will win and some will loose without free trade as well. Or do you think without free trade everybody will be great?

For me consumerism seems much worse than free trade. Buying clothes and use it once, change the car each year or other similar behaviors seem unsustainable because nobody cares about the generated garbage or the energy/material requirements.

Sure, now in some countries we can associate free trade with consumerism, but it's not everywhere the same.
by pona-a | 2025-10-14 09:43:53+00:00
Fastmail's previous stance on implementing PGP in their clients was that it would be impossible for them to guarantee they couldn't send the user malicious JavaScript over the wire. Now that you have a local app, would you consider implementing PGP? I expect this would be very straightforward using something like OpenPGP.js, or perhaps by integrating with a GPG agent to handle the heavy lifting.

You could also reimplement some QoL features like E2E search by building a local index of seen cleartext messages, or perform spam filtering via local NLP models—though in my experience, I never saw any encrypted spam. Threading UI might use a cleartext copy, or instead of Thunderbird's "Subject: ...", it could use a random UUID while preserving cleartext "RE: " patterns.

PGP is a very simple standard and could have become the default if not for some unfortunate client UX. If a major mail client automatically imported or generated a key on first install, required the user to write down a BIP-style mnemonic for private key recovery (PGP private key containers are quite large, so this might rely on symmetrically encrypting a provider-side backup), and attached the public key to every outgoing email—enabling end-to-end encryption automatically, with trust established on first use—I’d expect that a quarter of all human email traffic could have instantly become secure, eliminating decades of complexity built to sustain the illusion of trusted parties. A provider offerring this UX within an interoperable standard could be the only push it needs.

You might object to TOFU as suboptimal, but it has been the standard in many encrypted messaging systems: Signal, for instance, uses key servers to distribute keys and relies on users to verify shared secrets out-of-channel, as does WhatsApp. If this simple manual verification UX could be integrated with Web of Trust, it could automatically vouch for the user, showing a reference path for each of your contacts. Even without that, it is better to accept a one-time risk of key exchange compromise than to face the continuous possibility of eavesdropping.
by bilekas | 2025-10-14 09:44:11+00:00
> I mean, how many more clues do you need, to admit the next election will be cancelled as soon as they lose? He literally said what he was going to do. And there has been no pushback, neither from the military nor parliamentarians.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be done if it was possible, but I am working off the current status quoa that exists now. And I wouldn't be so sure about a lack of military pushback if something like cancelling national elections was called.
by mtrovo | 2025-10-14 09:44:32+00:00
> It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources

Can you name a few items that you feel that way?

My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.
by petesergeant | 2025-10-14 09:44:32+00:00
> All I want from politicians, and by this I mean literally all I want at this point, is my politicians to be smarter than me

... why? Ted Cruz is almost certainly smarter than almost all of us, and I do not want Ted Cruz to be a politician. Boris Johnson is exceptionally gifted, and Never Again. Rishi Sunak's as sharp a guy as you're likely to meet, but as the Economist noted, rarely met a bad idea he didn't warm to. You're giving a weird halo effect to intelligence.
by rednafi | 2025-10-14 09:44:36+00:00
The appeal of experimenting with languages varies widely between academics and industrial practitioners. When you’re in the business of creating languages, exploration often takes on the character of an art project.

However, as a trench-line coder, I enjoy dabbling in languages to learn different techniques for achieving a similar set of goals without sacrificing pragmatism. In that sense, I rarely have the luxury to explore purely for exploration’s sake. So I wouldn’t describe abstraction, performance, or usability as “aesthetics,” nor would I spend time on a frivolous language that I know won’t gain much traction outside academia.

I like reading the perspectives of academics just to see how wildly different they are from those of the people I work with in the industry. This is probably a good thing.
by Innervisio | 2025-10-14 09:46:31+00:00
"only has lawsuits that happened to them" that is not entirely true. Yes, lawsuits and sanctions happens, but the Venezuelan government played an awful game that they exactly knew what would happen to them. Full corruption and power play that didn't play out well. This is a list of many of the nationalizations Chavez did. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/factbox-venezuelas-nat...
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-14 09:46:37+00:00
> By contrast, if I was working in C++ making an API and decoupled library would be such a chore that'd never bother

Are you sure? Isn't it common to build convenience libraries, not because you need to have it as a library, but as an internal documentation? To the produced binary it has exactly the same effect.

Granted maintaining a stable API/ABI is work, but that comes down to architecture and is true in every language.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-14 09:46:39+00:00
You seem critical of people posting AI slop on Facebook (so am I) but also want people to publish more AI slop software?

The AI slop software I've been making with Claude is intended for my own personal use. I haven't read most of the code and certainly wouldn't want to publish it under my own name. But it does work, it scratches my itches, fills my needs. I'm not going to publish the whole thing because that's a whole can of worms, but to hopefully satisfy your curiosity, here is the main_window.py of my tag-based file manager. It's essentially a CRUD application built with sqlite and pyside6. It doesn't do anything terribly adventurous, the most exciting it gets is keeping track of tag co-occurances so it can use naive Bayesian classifiers to recommend tags for files, order files by how likely they are to have a tag, etc.

Please enjoy. I haven't actually read this myself, only verified the behavior: https://paste.debian.net/hidden/c6a85fac

> "the app stores/package managers aren't being flooded with thousands of vibe coded apps"

The state of claude code presently is definitely good enough to churn out low effort shovelware. Insofar as that isn't evidently happening, I can only speculate about the reasons. In no order, it may be one or several of these reasons: Lots of developers feel threatened by the technology and won't give it a serious whirl. Non-developers are still stuck in the mindset of writing software being something they can't do. The general public isn't as aware of the existence of agentic coding tools as we on HN are. The appstores are being flooded with slop, as they always have been, and some of that slop is now AI slop, but doesn't advertise this fact, and the appstore algorithms generally do some work to suppress the visibility of slop anyway. Most people don't have good ideas for new software and don't have the reflex to develop new software to scratch their itches, instead they are stuck in the mentality of software consumers. Just some ideas..
by lambdaone | 2025-10-14 09:46:55+00:00
Exactly. You don't need to really know how to program to use web frameworks, and web programmers are much cheaper than systems engineers. It's a no-brainer in short-term business terms. But there's a always a price to be paid for decisions like this, and this overhead is it.

Experience of similar tradeoffs tells us it will only get worse over time, and LLM-generated web programming will make the whole process get even worse even faster.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-14 09:47:00+00:00
> I’m not sure if words ending in -archy are always pronounced with a hard c but it seems like it.

When it is etymologically derived from the greek arkhein (“to rule”) like all of your examples (but unlike, say, “starchy”, which also ends with -archy but has an unrelated etymology), yes, the “ch” sounds like “k”.

But the “-archy” in “omarchy” doesn't come from arkhein, in comes from Arch Linux, so...
by Alifatisk | 2025-10-14 09:48:07+00:00
> Microsoft also argued that its Ireland subsidiary was in charge of 365, and therefore jurisdiction fell to Ireland. The authority rejected that argument, and decided it was Microsoft US that made the decisions

Them trying to use their subsidiary as a option to get away with this proves that they knew they were at fault. It's sad that we're stuck with their ecosystem for office work, this is what happens when a company gets monopoly. They can do this because there is no true competitor

The day I find a good replacement for Win10 and the Office suite. I'm packing my bags!
by dustincoates | 2025-10-14 09:48:36+00:00
You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
by Escapade5160 | 2025-10-14 09:48:53+00:00
They did for pixel phones yes.

I've been wanting to get into OS dev for years now, I may make an attempt at it soon. When I was younger I built my own kernels for the early OnePlus phones. Maybe I can build an alternative to Android, doubtful but I like a challenge.

The hardest part to making an alternative is the app ecosystem, you almost need a complete suite of 3rd party apps built before you can get any initial adoption.