MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fithisux | 2025-11-26 14:45:54+00:00
Personally I use R for the occasional script or some tidyverse quick processing.

But the language has many rough edges

1. non standard eval is very weird, rlang fixes these shortcomings 2. unintuitive names or functions not belonging to packages, base has a mix of functions 3. S3 mixes with naming, no problem personally with S3 and S7 is even better, but mixing S3 names with ordinary names is unintuitive, keep snake case 4. data.frames are unintuitive, tidyverse fixes this 5. f(a=) seriously? or working with unintuitive functions in body for discrete ranges of function arguments? 6. no imports per file in packages, I can live with this .. still ... 7. AST functions are unintuitive

R has some excellent parts:

non-standard evaluation, AST in the base language, lazy evaluation

but it is being killed by the bad parts

I think all the external fixes and sanity in names should go into base

but it will take a lot of time if it ever happens due to legacy.

Julia fixes many of these not as elegantly as R but it's pragmatic approach is too attractive.
by nyrikki | 2025-11-26 14:45:59+00:00
> Contrast this with equivalent code that is full of logistics, where I’m using only basic Python language features and no special data wrangling package

While I am not a python cheerleader, but a user because the reality is that it is a pretty good glue language, the above is a bit of a problem.

Duckdb, pandas, numpy etc.. is what makes python nice.

About a decade ago I worked at a major BI software company and ran into another silly problem when trying to evangelize R, wikis kbs and search engines don’t like single letter search terms.

So it didn’t matter how much better R was at the time, people found learning it more difficult than it should have been.
by dejobaan | 2025-11-26 14:46:03+00:00
I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
by catapart | 2025-11-26 14:46:03+00:00
lol! I thought this was going to link to some kind of innovative mobility scooter or something. I was still going to say "oh, good; when someone uses the good parts of AI to build something different which is actually useful, I'll be all ears!", because that's all you would really have been advocating for if that was your example.

But - even funnier - the thing is an urbanist tech-bro toy? My days of diminishing the segway's value are certainly coming to a middle.
by javier123454321 | 2025-11-26 14:46:11+00:00
I mean, yeah at the end we're all individuals living qualitatively different lives. However, you can get a very close approximation by say dropping your kids off at their grandparents. Even during babysitting, you get nothing close to the experience of having to constantly reprioritize towards another that depends on you and giving them the tools to become independent adults capable of doing it themselves and going into the world, at least by default you don't. I feel like caveating that the human experience will be different and there are a thousand ways to add nuance to the conversation but the generalization definitely holds.
by davidmurdoch | 2025-11-26 14:46:57+00:00
This just happened to me this week.

I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant.

AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow.

Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of changing the code to address to policy. It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).
by Sanzig | 2025-11-26 14:47:05+00:00
I don't think they array between different DSN sites (getting the baselines sorted out would be a nightmare), but the DSN can array up to four of the 34 meter beam waveguide antennas co-located at any individual site.

The three sites were originally built with a single 70 meter dish each, which are all still operating today. However, when they expanded the sites, they opted to install at least four 34 meter BWG dishes at each site rather than adding a single 70 meter to each. Four of the 34s arrayed together gives the same gain as a 70, but you have the advantage of being able to split them up to communicate with separate spacecraft that don't need the gain of all four antennas. It gives DSN a lot more operational flexibility.
by knollimar | 2025-11-26 14:47:35+00:00
There's a buge difference between possible and likely.

Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
Show HN: Apache Iceberg FDW for Postgres
by kiwicopple | 2025-11-26 14:48:34+00:00
This is a Postgres Foreign Data Wrapper for Postgres, which you can use to query Apache Iceberg. A FDW allows you to access and query data stored in external data sources as if they were native Postgres tables.

It is compatible with the Iceberg REST catalog and S3 Tables (AWS S3's latest offering). Currently it supports SELECT and INSERT operations.

You can map an entire Iceberg namespace into your Postgres database like this:

import foreign schema "warehouse" from server iceberg_server into "my_iceberg_warehouse";

And then query them using a standard SELECT query from your Postgres database:

select * from warehouse.my_table where id = 42;

You can also create tables from within your Postgres database which will then be created inside Iceberg using the `create_table_if_not_exists` option:

create foreign table new_table ( id bigint, name text ) server iceberg_server options ( table 'warehouse.new_table', rowid_column 'id', create_table_if_not_exists 'true' );

The FDW extension used PGRX + the iceberg-rust libraries. The iceberg ecosystem is still very nascent, but we're excited about some architectural patterns it enables. We'll be adding a few resources to the ecosystem, including some libraries that make it easier to use. You can install this FDW on any self-hosted Postgres database and it's available today on the supabase platform.
by empath75 | 2025-11-26 14:48:35+00:00
Over the course of my career, probably 2/3rds of the roles I have had (as in my day to day work, not necessarily the title) just no longer exist, because people like me eliminated them. I personally was the last person that had a few of those jobs because I mostly automated them and got promoted and they didn't hire a replacement. It's not that they hired less people though, they just hired more people, paid them more money, and they focused on more valuable work.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-26 14:48:45+00:00
No doubt LLMs and tooling will continue to improve, and best use cases for them better understood, but what Ilya seems to be referring to is the massive disconnect between the headline-grabbing benchmarks such as "AI performs at PhD level on math", etc, and the real-world stupidity of these models such as his example of a coding agent toggling between generating bug #1 vs bug #2, which in fact largely explains why the current economic and visible impact is much less than if the "AI is PhD level" benchmark narrative was actually true.

Calling LLMs "AI" makes them sound much more futuristic and capable than they actually are, and being such a meaningless term invites extrapolation to equally meaningless terms like AGI and visions of human-level capability.

Let's call LLMs what they are - language models - tools for language-based task automation.

Of course we eventually will do this. Fuzzy meaningless names like AI/AGI will always be reserved for the cutting edge technology du jour, and older tech that is realized in hindsight to be much more limited will revert to being called by more specific names such as "expert system", "language model", etc.
by SoftlyWished | 2025-11-26 14:49:18+00:00
Title: Ask HN: Are emotional video surprises better than text messages?

Body: I wrote a short piece about why video wishes often feel more personal than a simple text. Curious what this community thinks — does a short video carry more emotional weight?

Here’s the blog post: https://www.softlywished.com

Also been experimenting with very simple text-to-video tools that let people turn their thoughts into a small surprise video (SoftlyWished). Would love to hear your perspective on emotional connection in digital communication.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-26 14:49:58+00:00
Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second.

If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.
by catapart | 2025-11-26 14:50:31+00:00
Being honest, I don't know what a 4GL is. But the rest of them absolutely DID claim to help me do things I was already doing. And, actually, NFTs and the Metaverse even specifically claimed to be able to help with coding in various different flavors. It was mostly superficial bullshit, but... that's kind of the whole tech for those two things.

In any case, Segways promised to be a revolution to how people travel - something I was already doing and something that the marketing was predicated on. 3DTVs - a "better" way to watch TV, which I had already been doing. NFTs - (among other things) a financially superior way to bank, which I had already been doing. Metaverse - a more meaningful way to interact with my team on the internet, which I had already been doing.
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-26 14:50:31+00:00
There are district heating and cooling in cities where it makes sense, both Minneapolis and St Paul, plus the University of Minnesota all have district heating and district cooling systems. The Minneapolis and U of M systems are operated by Cordia Energy and the St Paul system is operated by Evergreen Energy.

This is the coldest large metro area in the lower 48 states, so it’s economical to do district heating and cooling here.
by Razengan | 2025-11-26 14:50:37+00:00
> I _need_ to feel comfortable _right now_. It doesn't matter what I do to the world so long as I'm comfortable _right now._

I think that can be offset if you have a strong motivation, a clear goal to look forward to in a reasonable amount of time, to help you endure through the discomfort:

Before I had enough financial independence to be able to travel at will, I was often stuck in a shit ass city, where the most fun to be had was video games and fantasizing about my next vacation coming up in a month or 2, and that helped me a lot in coping with my circumstances.

Too few people are allowed or can afford even this luxury of a pleasant future, a promise of a life different/better than their current.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-26 14:50:50+00:00
At your link there is a link to the list of instructions that guarantee constant execution time, independent of the operands.

The list includes CMOV.

However, the instructions from the list are guaranteed to have constant execution time, even on any future CPUs, only if the operating system sets a certain CPU control bit.

So on recent and future Intel/AMD CPUs, one may need to verify that the correct choice has been made between secure execution mode and fastest execution mode.
by surgical_fire | 2025-11-26 14:50:58+00:00
You speak as if the EU is somehow divorced from the national governments, and is imposing its will to the helpless states that compose it.

The commissioners that propose laws are appointed by each national government. The national governments of each member state is all in on this.

NATO is not a political institution. It is a defense treaty (this one completely outside the realm of democracy).
by contravariant | 2025-11-26 14:51:01+00:00
I'm confused, of course if you await immediately it's not going to have a chance to do anything else _before_ returning.

If you do the following it works as expected

async def child(): print("child start") await asyncio.sleep(0) print("child end") async def parent(): print("parent before") task = child() print("parent after") await task

The real difference is that the coroutine is not going to do _anything_ until it is awaited, but I don't think the asyncio task is really different in a meaningful way. It's just a wrapper with an actual task manager so you can run things 'concurrently'.

Python does have two different coroutines, but they're generators and async functions. You can go from one to the other,
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-11-26 14:51:05+00:00
> but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.

IDEA is so painfully slow that while I have it paid by my company I cannot force myself to work in it for extended periods of time. And I say it being fully aware of Emacs's speed problems. Also, the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA, as well as in VSCode.
by aestetix | 2025-11-26 14:51:19+00:00
I was not moving goalposts. I was saying that the way we interpret the words has changed over time, and therefore we are taking words that meant one thing in 1957 and reinterpreting them to fit assumptions for today. Thus the semantic drift creates a shift.

To address the other point, I think we're missing a question of scope. Is the EU a legitimate governing body for negotiating trade deals and employment regulations between countries? Absolutely. I question however whether in recent years EU has begun to either scope-drift or expand their scope beyond what might be considered reasonable.

I think this is a natural tendency within human nature, especially when a governing body is given some power. Over time new opportunities arise which allow the body to gain more power, and then they reinterpret founding documents to include some of the new powers they want. I think it is pretty clear this is happening with the EU. Look at the rise of nationalist parties in Germany and France, etc.
by acuozzo | 2025-11-26 14:51:42+00:00
? Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been

I guess it depends on what you define as "tech", but the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had an explosion of tiny hardware and software startups. Some even threatened Intel with x86 clones.

It wasn't until the late '90s that NVIDIA was the clear GPU winner, for instance. It had serious competition from 3DFX, ATI, and a bunch of other smaller companies.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-26 14:52:43+00:00
> I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not.

You don’t have to let the LLM write code for you. They’re very useful as a smart search engine for your code base, a smart refactoring tool, a suggestion generator, and many other ways.

I rarely have LLMs write code for me from scratch that I have to review, but I do give them specific instructions to do what I want to the codebase. They can do it much faster than I can search around the codebase and type out myself.

There are so many ways to make LLMs useful without having them do all the work while you sit back and judge. I think some people are determined to get no value out of the LLM because they feel compelled to be anti-hype, so they’re missing out on all the different little ways they can be used to help. Even just using it as a smarter search engine (in the modes where they can search and find the right sections of right articles or even GitHub issues for you) has been very helpful. But you have to actually learn how to use them.

> If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.

Okay, good luck with your hut in the forest. The rest of us will move on using these tools how we see fit, which for many of us doesn’t actually include this idea where the LLM is the author of the code and you just ask nicely and reject edits until it produces the exact code you want. The tools are useful in many ways and you don’t have to stop writing your own code. In fact, anyone who believes they can have the LLM do all the coding is in for a bad surprise when they realize that specific hype is a lie.
by chistev | 2025-11-26 14:52:55+00:00
Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.

Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
by drudolph914 | 2025-11-26 14:52:59+00:00
I think when the author says

> “We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft”

my interpretation of what the author means by devaluation is the general trend that we’re seeing in LLMs

The theory that I hear from investors is as LLMs generally improve, there will exist a day where a LLMs default code output, coupled with continued hardware speeds, will become _good enough_ for the majority of companies - even if the code looks like crap and is 100x slower than it needs to be

This doesn’t mean there won’t be a few companies that still need SWEs to drop down and do engineering, but tbh, the majority of companies today just need a basic web app - and we’ve commoditized web app dev tools to oblivion. I’d even go as far to argue that what most programmers do today isn’t engineering, it’s gluing together an ecosystem of tooling and or API’s.

Real engineering seems to happen outside of work on open source projects, at the mav 7 on specialized teams, or at niche deeply technical startups

EDIT: I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I’m just making the observation that there is a trend towards devaluing this work in the economy for the majority of people, and I generally empathize with people who just want stability and to raise a family within reasonable means
by hylaride | 2025-11-26 14:53:21+00:00
It happens in fashion going both ways for a variety of reasons, though with fast fashion it's all so intermingled.

Many rock bands with working class roots "bring up" styles (like the newsboy cap), but also lower classes try and "look" upwards which can give us the nouveau riche clichés. Celebrities trying to hid their identity in public started to wear large sunglasses and suddenly everybody would start to wear them.

It's the primary reason why brands have become so important - fabric quality can vary, but jeans are otherwise just jeans; slap Gucci or Prada on it and suddenly you're signalling conspicuous consumption.
by diath | 2025-11-26 14:54:12+00:00
Arc Raiders has 160k Steam reviews (which is a lot) and 90% of them are positive. It also has an estimated >4M owners despite a high price tag and is currently the #4 most played game on Steam globally. The AI nay-sayers are a vocal minority - and likely just terminally online Twitter people that do not even play the game, the rest of the players are too busy enjoying the game regardless of whether it's made with AI or not.
by sillyfluke | 2025-11-26 14:54:16+00:00
That's not saying much, everything is relative. If the man in Belarus decided to step down and have "free and fair" elections tommorrow it would be the farthest it has been to Russia in quite some time. But you wouldn't rush to put a tech hub there.

Has Serbian infrastructure been tested by a sustained Russian cyberattack like some other Easter European countries? That's what would matter at the end of the day.
by empath75 | 2025-11-26 14:54:29+00:00
The biggest change in my career was when I got promoted to be a linux sysadmin at a large tech company that was moving to AWS. It was my first sysadmin job and I barely knew what I was doing, but I knew some bash and python. I had a chance to learn how to manage stuff in data centers by logging into servers with ssh and running perl scripts, or I could learn cloudformation because that was what management wanted. Everybody else on my team thought AWS was a fad and refused to touch it, unless absolutely forced to. I wrote a ton of terrible cloudformation and chef cookbooks and got promoted twice times and my salary went from $50,000 a year to $150,000 a year in 3 years after I took a job elsewhere. AFAIK, most of the people on that team got laid off when that whole team was eliminated a few years after I left.
by stephenr | 2025-11-26 14:54:30+00:00
So what's your point?

If you don't think there's anything wrong with it, why would you care if someone else says "hey change this".

Do the same thing you'd do if someone says "hey you should use mongodb it's web scale": tell them you disagree and won't be doing that.

If you don't think there's anything wrong with it, how can you be "shamed" into doing something you disagree with?
by triceratops | 2025-11-26 14:54:46+00:00
Kaiser's structure is complicated. Its health plan arm, which offers insurance, is non-profit. So is its hospital foundation, which owns and operates hospitals. Its medical offices are for-profit and owned by doctors.

I don't see a big profit motive for Kaiser because it's a non-profit. And because the same company owns the insurance provider and hospitals, they're incentivized to keep overall costs down. As long as they can't arbitrarily throw people off their plans, this means investing in preventive care and doing it cheap.

Traditional insurance providers don't care about that. They actually like it when hospitals raise prices because it allows them to charge higher premiums. Since they can only take up to 10% in premiums (or some other number, but it's a fixed %) as profits, higher costs and higher premiums are good for their bottom line.

Kaiser is how single-payer healthcare would look if it wasn't run by the government.

> reform the healthcare system so that its goal is focused more on healing people than stuffing pockets with cash and so companies that only care about money are forced out of it entirely.

What does that actually mean? What concrete steps would you take to accomplish this? Without specifics this is wooly, idealistic nonsense.

Again to take Kaiser's example: their doctors are salaried (at least the ones that work in hospitals). They have no incentive to overbill you or make you take unnecessary tests. The doctors make the same money no matter what procedures they do on you. And Kaiser owns the insurance company that's paying those bills. They also have no incentive to skip necessary tests. If they miss a problem it'll cost Kaiser more money later to treat you. Do you have a better way to "focus [only] on healing people" than that?