MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cowboylowrez | 2025-11-02 16:51:02+00:00
yeah but you're sort of attributing dishonesty to someones post when I don't think it merits it.

>There's a big difference between listening to other perspectives and inventing other perspectives.

while there's a big difference, the difference doesn't invalidate thinking through issues and searching for the actual conflicting views. "Devil's advocate" is a common enough term, whats the big deal? Is it the word "devil"? Do you think someone is calling you Satan?
by jandrese | 2025-11-02 16:51:39+00:00
Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts. My biggest hope is that this policy creates a marketplace with actual competition that comes up with more cost efficient mounting solutions that make it practical worldwide.

Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space. While adding solar on them doesn't solve the last issue, it does help mitigate the heat island effect and solar panels are no less ugly than asphalt. Plus it is power creation right next to where it is being consumed for minimal transfer losses. It's also much nicer for the vehicles parked there to be in the shade.
by obeavs | 2025-11-02 16:51:52+00:00
Sure. Would contextualize by saying that infrastructure is a financial product: climate/industrial projects are sited in the physical world and have a hard upfront cost to produce a long term stream of cash flows, which, from a finance perspective, makes it look a lot like debt (e.g. I pay par value in order to achieve [x] cash flows with [y] risk).

When you drive past a solar project on the side of the road, you see the solar technology producing energy. But in order for a bank to fund $100M to construct the project, it has to be "developed" as if it were a long-term financial product across 15 or so major agreements (power offtake, lease agreement, property tax negotiations, etc). The fragmentation of tools and context among all the various counterparties involved to pull this sort of thing together into a creditworthy package for funding is enormously inefficient and as a result, processes which should be parallelize-able can't be parallelized, creating large amounts of risk into the project development process.

While all kinds of asset class-specific tools exist for solar or real estate or whatever, most of them are extremely limited in function because almost of those things abstract down into a narrative that you're communicating to a given party at any given time (including your own investment committee), and a vast swath of factual information represented by deterministic financial calculations and hundreds if not thousands of pages of legal documentation.

We build technology to centralize/coordinate/version control these workflows in order to unlock an order of magnitude more efficiency across that entire process in its totality. But instead of selling software, we sell those development + financing outcomes (which is where _all_ of the value is in this space), because we're actually able to scale that work far more effectively than anyone else right now.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-11-02 16:52:06+00:00
It still feels to me like OpenAI has zero moat. There are like 5 paid competitors + open source models.

I switch between gemini and ChatGpt whenever I feel one fails to fully grasp what I want, I do coding in claude.

How are they supposed to become the 1 trillion dollar company they want to be, with strong competition and open source disruptions every few months?
by don-bright | 2025-11-02 16:52:16+00:00
so it appears the entire text has been Translated with non-breaking space unicode x00a0 instead of normal spaces x0020, so the web layout is considering all paragraph text as a super-long single word ('the\00a0quick\00a0\brown\00a0fox' instead of 'the quick brown fox') - the non-breaking space character appears identically to breaking-space when rendered but underlying coding breaks the concept of "break at end of word" because there is no end as 00a0 literally means "non-breaking"). per Copilot spending a half hour explaining this to me, apparently this can be fixed by opening web browser developer view, and copy/pasting this code into the console.

function replaceInTextNodes(node) { if (node.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) { node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue .replace(/\u00A0/g, ' '); } else { node.childNodes.forEach(replaceInTextNodes); } }

replaceInTextNodes(document.body);
by foldr | 2025-11-02 16:52:22+00:00
Intellectually yes, but it's surprising how hard a lot of 18 years olds fail at basic adulting. I've been indirectly involved with apprenticeship schemes here in the UK that place 18 year olds at various companies as software engineers. There's no problem finding 18 year olds who are smart and can code, but the challenge lies in getting them to consistently show up to work five days a week. It's doable, but it requires a lot more mentoring and support than you might intuitively expect. Standard corporate work environments just aren't very flexible on this.

Now, maybe this particular scheme is targeting a small number of exceptional individuals who won't have a problem with this stuff. But it would be a big mistake to assume that a typical smart 18 year old is ready for a typical corporate job.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-11-02 16:52:44+00:00
This is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral.

I'm not sure how much these people would actually learn in college, but the idea is that some exposure to the humanities and the arts and to people who have different aspirations and life experiences would give them some interest in considering the consequences and moral worth of their actions.

Maybe that doesn't actually happen and these people will always be amoral. But that's the hope.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-02 16:52:58+00:00
There’s no Rust fans here, only GC skeptics. GC skeptics existed long before anyone dreamed of Rust and will survive Rust as well.

It’s a pretty reasonable objection too (though I personally don’t agree). C has always been chosen when performance is paramount. For people who prioritise performance it must feel a bit weird to leave performance on the table in this way.

And Jesus Christ, give it a rest with this “Rust fans must be thinking” stuff. It sounds deranged.
by ivanbakel | 2025-11-02 16:53:26+00:00
Probably because it’s unclear what this pedantry about synecdoche contributes to the discussion. Many people (including journalists at the state broadcaster) happily refer to the whole tower as Big Ben, so that is functionally one of its names.

Is the fact that the name originates from a bell, and that the official name for the tower is different, interesting? Maybe. Is it worth “correcting”? No, for the same reason it’s not worth policing people’s use of “Google” to mean “Alphabet”.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-02 16:53:44+00:00
> But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works

How it works now in Trump 2.

Obama, notably, had a better approach, with a faster rate of deportation of illegal migrants, and he did so without absurd threatening intimidating cruelty, or ordering arbitrary kidnappings off the street by violent anonymised paramilitary thugs. There was a really quite high level of voluntary compliance with that system.

The only reason this is all happening is that Stephen Miller wants to beat Obama's number: it consumes him that during Trump 1 they didn't get close to the performance of ICE under Obama 2. And he wants it to be showy, threatening, arbitrary, militarised and for it to overpoweringly favour white people.

It's legitimately crazy to normalise it by framing it in normal terms like you are doing. There is nothing normal about this, nothing essential, procedure-based or unavoidable. It's an attempt to build a white police state.
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by julian-klode | 2025-11-02 16:54:34+00:00
> though I hope existing well tested rust libraries are used rather than NIHing them and introducing new bugs

I think that's much more likely to introduce bugs.

Think of it that way, a lot of the Rust libraries are rewriting existing copyleft libraries in permissive licenses, so they cannot look at the original code, dooming them to repeat the mistakes that were made in the original code and having to fix them all over again on their own (as both go from "oh this is simple" to "oh another corner case").

I just want to translate code 1:1 to Rust, reusing my existing knowledge, design decisions, and tests. It should behave _exactly_ the same as before, just memory safe.
by Jcowell | 2025-11-02 16:54:35+00:00
It would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is:

1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go. 2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered 3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory. 4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-02 16:54:49+00:00
Yes, the point of dependent types is that they give you the ability to do some sort of almost arbitrary (though not strictly Turing-complete) "computation" as part of type checking, which essentially dispenses with the phase separation between "compiling" and "running" code - or at least makes compile-time computation unusually powerful. So if you want to replicate the properties of dependent typing in these existing languages you'll need to leverage their existing facilities for compile-time metaprogramming.

> A proper dependently-typed language can prevent runtime out-of-bound errors even if neither the indices nor the bounds are known at type check time.

Yes, but the way this is done is by threading a proof "this index is within bounds" throughout the code. At runtime (e.g. within 'extracted' code, if you're using common dependently-typed systems), this simply amounts to relying on a kind of capability or ghost 'token' that attests to the validity of that code. You "manufacture" the capability as part of an explicit runtime check when needed (e.g. if the "index" or "bounds" come from user input) and simply rely on it as part of the code.
by Asooka | 2025-11-02 16:55:40+00:00
They could have at least put the types on the left. Types on the right are a good fit for mathematics, where everything is single-letter symbols, so your eyes do not have to go across the line to see the entire definition, but in programming function definitions often span an entire line on screen, so the most important information should be the first thing shown! Also most programmers do not have formal education in mathematics, so the whole "function : domain -> image" syntax is foreign to them. We really should strive to democratise programming for everyone, rather than make it isolated to a small clique of "properly" educated white men who all went to the same university.

The type of a variable and the return type of a function are the most important pieces of information regarding those, so they ought to be on the left. It also fits the data flow going right to left (i.e. how the '=' operator works). C's type declarations can get pretty gnarly, so there is definitely room for improvement there. I would say Java (and C#) got it as close to perfect as possible.

If you want to replace C/C++ you should make your language look as inviting as possible to users of the old one. I truly think this strange fetish for putting types on the right is what gives C programmers the ick when they see Rust for the first time and is hampering its adoption.
by beardyw | 2025-11-02 16:55:50+00:00
,> So I’d like to get feedback as I play. Are my moves good, what are my chances of winning, did I miss a trick somewhere, etc.

My approach is to play against a strong computer opponent in chess.com. I also have Lichess open at the analysis page with stockfish open. Each time I move I update Lichess with my opponents previous move to see what options I had and if my move was one of the good ones. Then I record my move and play again back in chess.com. Works for me.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-11-02 16:55:57+00:00
Good thing college is not about memorizing random subjects and you can choose whatever major you want that 90% of your courses are dedicated to! I’m not saying college is necessary for everybody but when you say that it’s an insult to people who have put in four years of work into learning something they’re passionate about. One can also grow in more ways than one “intelligence” through the college experience. I was a highly intelligent 18 year old but was severely lacking in my emotional maturity and self confidence which I learned a great deal through college.
by zkmon | 2025-11-02 16:56:25+00:00
I think you are talking about client's navigational state. The original title of this post was "app state ...". Still it is not clear about state of what.

Navigational state need not be confused with app state. Also talking about "state" as in "state machine" etc used to sound pretty academic with obscure meaning of the word "state". When someone says "state machine" they are basically saying "I'm a PhD and you are not". There are simpler and more crisp ways to convey things rather than via obscurity.
by woodson | 2025-11-02 16:56:50+00:00
Some countries like Austria have a school type that combines high school with vocational training [1]. It's five years instead of the regular four-year high school there, but you start with 5h/weeks of C programming and write your own linked list implementation at the end of year one. They have similar schools for other vocations, not just software engineering (everything from construction to chemical engineering and accounting). At the end you graduate with a high school diploma that later also enables you to go to college, if you so choose, but gives you enough skills to get hired by industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höhere_Technische_Lehranstalt
by galangalalgol | 2025-11-02 16:56:59+00:00
Fil-C doesn't stop the data race problems the borrow checker would catch does it?

Has anyone tried pointing an agentic ai at recreating a c utility by looking only at the man page and using differential fuzzing? It isn't a port, so no licensing issues, and the code would use unsafe, and presumably be more idiomatic. I have no idea if it would ever complete, or just get stuck in an endless loop. Or even if it did succeed, how many joules it would use.
by foldr | 2025-11-02 16:57:40+00:00
I'm not personally a fan of Java, but if I was implementing a compiler, I'd pick a language with GC. There's pretty much no downside to a GC in that context, and it gives you more flexibility when working with graph data structures.

If 'building a programming language' means writing an interpreter or VM, then I can see the attraction of Rust for that case. But writing interpreters and VMs is like 0.0001% of the programming that gets done in the world.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-02 16:57:42+00:00
Prove this assertion. I argue there is plenty of GDP to shave off to pay for this, as well as wealth available. It is a choice not to.

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)

(Decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use)
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-02 16:57:56+00:00
An issue, also in crypto, is that people will get their "identifiers" stolen. How do you prevent stealing, or recover stolen identifiers, without compromising anonymity?

Another issue is that people will hire (or enslave) others to effectively lend their identifiers, and it's very hard to distinguish between someone "lending" their identifier vs using it for themselves.

I've been thinking about hierarchical management. Roughly, your identifier is managed by your town, which has its own identifier managed by your state, which has its own identifier managed by your government, which has its own identifier managed by a bloc of governments, which has its own identifier managed by an international organization. When you interact with a foreign website and it requests your identity, you forward the request to your town with your personal identifier, your town forwards the request to your state with the town's identifier, and so on. Town "management" means that towns generate, assign, and revoke stolen personal identifiers, and authenticate requests; state "management" means that states generate, assign, and revoke town identifiers, and authenticate requests (not knowing who in the town sent the request); etc.

The idea is to prevent a much more powerful organization, like a state, from persecuting a much less powerful one, like an individual. In the hierarchical system, your town can persecute you: they can refuse to give you an identifier, give yours to someone else, track what sites you visit, etc. But then, especially if you can convince other town members (which ideally happens if you're unjustly persecuted), it's easier for you to confront the town and convince them to change, than it is to confront and convince a large government. Likewise, states can persecute entire towns, but an entire town is better at resisting than an individual, especially if that town allies with other towns. And governments can persecute entire states, and blocs can persecute entire governments, and the international organization can persecute entire blocs, but not the layer below.

In practice, the hierarchy probably needs many more layers; today's "towns" are sometimes big cities, states are much larger than towns, governments and much more powerful than states, etc. so there must be layers in-between for the layer below to effectively challenge the layer above. Assigning layers may be particularly hard because it requires balance, to enable most justified persecutions, e.g. a bloc punishing a government for not taking care of its scam centers, while preventing most unjustified persecutions. And there will inevitably be towns, states, governments, etc. where the majority of citizens are "unjust", and the layer above can only punish them entirely. So yes, hierarchical management still has many flaws, but is there a better alternative?
by Dwedit | 2025-11-02 16:58:18+00:00
Is there really a difference between writing a DOS program and writing a FreeDOS program? You just need a period-accurate compiler that can target DOS. Maybe OpenWatcom, maybe DJGPP.

With HXDOS, you can also write a Win32 console-mode program and run it on DOS. 7-zip is an example of a program compatible with HXDOS.
by mrktf | 2025-11-02 17:00:01+00:00
Digging deeper there are mechanisms for long time on internal X side (see https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/specs/Xserv... ) - granted never seen it practically implemented.

And going to rabbit hole there are even proof of concept security implementation named Xnamespace for Xorg fork (needs polishing and much more patches but looks doable. see wip documentation: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/X11Libre/xserver/d2b60a3d6... )
by sameerds | 2025-11-02 17:00:14+00:00
Everyone seems to be missing the point. Using an LLM to perform book keeping like this is akin to a business in the dot-com era hiring a programmer to help them go online. But since it's an LLM, the next step would be different. The LLM might initially do all the actions itself, but eventually it should train optimised pathways just for this purpose. It would become an app that isn't actually written out in code. Or alternatively, the LLM might actually dump its optimized logic into a program that it runs as a tool.
by skopje | 2025-11-02 17:00:22+00:00
Its funny when you have programmed long enough to see the same language/app names recycled. Two examples that come to mind: Dart, which was an RTL validation scripting language in the 80's/90's used by CPU designers, and Elm, which was a mail program in Unix/Aix/SunOS in the 80's/90's. Even weirder, when googling for the "old" Dart, it referred to RTL as right-to-left, and not register transfer level.
by levodelellis | 2025-11-02 17:00:38+00:00
I do write code that uses multi-threading every day and usually I write a few lockless functions every month for the in-house library I use. I was considering writing an article on atomics after all the mistakes and bad code I've seen.

A problem with writing an article is that if I don't show real code, people might think I'm exaggerating; if I do show real code, it'd look like I'm calling someone a bad programmer
by btbuildem | 2025-11-02 17:01:03+00:00
I've recently put together a setup that seemed reasonable for my limited budget. Mind you, most of the components were second-hand, open box deals, or deep discount of the moment.

This comfortably fits FP8 quantized 30B models that seem to be "top of the line for hobbyists" grade across the board.

- Ryzen 9 9950X

- MSI MPG X670E Carbon

- 96GB RAM

- 2x RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM each)

- 1600W PSU
by jacquesm | 2025-11-02 17:01:11+00:00
I've had a bunch of interaction with John over the years, mostly around 'SpeakFreely', which he generously allowed us to use for the audio component of the webcam software.

It took a while before I had mentally linked the 'Autodesk' founder to the person I was interacting with and I think he had a quiet chuckle or two when I finally found out. What is so interesting to me is that instead of clinging to power at Autodesk he managed to let go of it and enjoy his (way too short) time afterwards.

We never met, unfortunately.
by skrebbel | 2025-11-02 17:02:04+00:00
I agree that this is weird, but in dang's defense, "non-violent communication" is a commonplace term, and has its roots in the nonviolent peace movement. Like there's entire books written about it etc. It's a terrible word choice, I agree wholeheartedly, but given how widespread a concept it is at this point I don't think you can blame people who use it for that. It's like, "WhatsApp" is a terrible app name but I don't cringe when my mum says its name.

It's actually a pretty useful tool. I wish it was called "compassionate communication" or something like that though.

Oh wow seems like the guy who invented it hates the term too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Alter...