skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed about mixing a refactor with the incremental feature add makes PRs confusing.

"and write tickets for it, so it can be seen and brought up for discussion, prioritized against other tasks"

I have been doing this for almost a decade now and I have at no point ever seen even a top-ticket tech debt item get prioritized. Ever. It's always too much effort for little payoff (in the eyes of the business).

I explicitly tell juniors that when I cut this kind of ticket, I do it because it is right, not because I think it will ever get worked unless I myself (or someone similarly insane) directly disobey marching orders to work on it.

And even when someone does disobey orders and refactor, it's often a pet peeve that isn't one of the more major ones. So that's fine but nobody ever one-man-armies against the real problems.

And to illustrate what I mean by "the real problems", let me explain. I like to talk about tech debt as high interest or low interest.

Low interest tech debt is the shitty python script I wrote the other day that took 1-2 hours of manual monkey work we'd have to do in Presto sql and that only 1-2 people even knew how to do, and makes it so literally anyone at the company can do it perfectly right in a minute or two. It's a shitty script, but it knows it's shitty, and tries to have no pretenses about it and make it as simple as possible to debug and make incremental changes to it. So yes, if I spent more than an hour or two on it, I would not have done it like this at all. And yea it'll probably be a little annoying to change the next time someone has to do it. But it saves a lot of time, didn't cost much, and it's not going to change how we design the system at all.

That last bit hints at what I mean by "high internet tech debt". High interest tech debt is how it takes 8 hours of babysitting to deploy a schema change. It causes blip outages in every region as you deploy it. It's so painful it perverts our schema design to minimize how often we have to migrate the database. And it's all because, shortly after the Big Bang, right in between photons existing and the first hydrogen nucleus existing, someone had a cool idea for a simple trick about how they could eat their cake and have it too with how our databases work. And we have paid for it ever since. And they built on top of the primitives this offers so deeply that we'd have to change a ton of shit to make it work. The best time to fix this was 5 years ago, the second best time is now, and I guarantee you we will never ever do it. We'll replace the whole thing with something else because it's shiny and will be worse for years before we actually just pay down this tech debt
Because they are afraid to do performance reviews and fire people.

So they layoff and try again, sometimes hiring the same people back.
I like Typinator, which lets me automate (and customise) frequently typed text: https://ergonis.com/typinator
nix-darwin and home-manager are a great way to manage installed apps and configurations on a Mac. I have slowly been moving everything into my configs.
what can be done to stop all this? We need some sort of OS level layer to validate these things. If we put a local LLM which checks the bytecode of things which are getting installed/running for security = will that solve all this? My heart goes out to those who must have lost their money due to this.
When in 18xx FDA or its precursor was being formed, its goal was to confine various "bioelectrical woo" present in medicine and biology at that time. And back then there was Rife's microscope, for example, which was able to accurately image living cells.
Yet no-one tried to account for the cumulative damage/adverse effects done by FDA approved treatments in comparison with a potential or actual damage done by such "woo".
In my case, code that runs is more convincing than code that doesn't.

Also it's useful to ask questions that you already know the answer to, in order to understand its limits and how it fails. In that case, "better" means more accurate and appropriate.
I've been using Coolify for my project and it's been fantastic! Managed to set up my Next.js frontend, Supabase backend, and FastAPI for AI communication all in one place. It's super intuitive and saved me tons of setup time. Highly recommend for anyone looking for a solid self-hosting solution!
A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
Having read this blog in the past, I imagine the author was sarcastic on this one.
I mean it feels like 2-factor authentication where both factors are one and the same.

If someone had the willpower to ignore distractions already, they would do so with or without gadgets like this one. And ultimately if they crave those distractions again they're just going to stop using this tool after those 15 minutes or whatever time.

Similar tools have existed for a long time, and while sure there's an opportunity to capture a small market in the same way diet pills sell to a few people, it's nothing novel or even effective at solving the real problem.

This is just yet another gimmick that tries to tackle the symptoms of the underlying issue that we actually like the distractions and need those dopamine hits.
I wonder whether this 30-min per day of wearing the headset, had more of meditation effect rather than actual electric interference. Would love to see placebo effect study with a mock headset.
Say no to git. The emperor actually is naked. We don't need to pretend anymore
The entire site is a dumpster fire. The writing is horrible, everything is poorly organized, and the site is "navigable" via shitty javascript crap.

It's a shame that the information is so badly presented.
For my area in Los Angeles, it wasn't viable because everyone (or someone you know) has a car. a friend ride is much cheaper than an Uber.

I only download the Uber app when I need to get to the airport and am leaving for weeks at a time. Any other time, I take myself, ask a friend, or even consider what remnants we have of public transportation (e.g. instead of taking a horribly expensive uber in/out of LAX, take a shuttle to some smaller area and then hitch a ride. can easily save 4x the cost for a $5 bus ride and maybe 30-45 extra minutes)
Things 3, really polished todo/personal task manager app. I also use on iOS and Apple Watch.
Blackhole, sound routing e.g recording os audio when screen recording.
This post starts with a false dichotomy: You're either making a toy browser for fun, or you're trying to make the next Chrome. There are many points in-between on that spectrum. (Look how long Microsoft IE existed, despite being highly inferior.)
Headline is misleading.

They laid off non-AI roles, to redirect funding to AI.
Better question for the survey: "do you own any fantasy swords?"
> When telephone systems were invented, lots of telephone companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere.

They did and cities ended up looking like this http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--91pqSjxr...

There is not enough space to dedicate to electrical and internet wiring with a competition model like this. The physical space is a natural monopoly. What should be done is to treat the wiring as a utility but allow for unlimited competition on the actual service, which is how the UK operates their internet service iirc
Ask HN: What does experience of data structures and algorithms mean?
I was looking at a job posting for an SRE at a well known search engine and cloud provider and one of the prerequisites was.

2 years of experience with data structures/algorithms and software development in one or more programming languages.

I am in devops so I don't do any real heavy coding, I've certainly never worked on my own data structures or algorithms, but to be honest I don't think many of the devs I work with have either. The data structures in my company code base are pretty core code that only a handful of devs have touched and in general very little time is ever spent on them I doubt it adds up to 2 years collectively, and algorithms would be even more niche.
I don't really get the requirement, to me it's the sort of thing you need for research grade computer science, not sre or even really most software engineering.
If they mean experience of using them rather than building / designing then it seems hard to do any kind of meaningful amount of coding without touching them so the whole statement seems kind of redundant.

Does anyone know what this is actually meant to mean?
I put my HN replies feed in Thunderbird and treat it as just another inbox. It rules.
And there will always be a customer that writes to support asking what size hammer should be used to test that parameter.
US car companies get more from the USG and California than Chinese car companies get from the CCCP. If Europe can't compete with Chinese and US subsidies on passenger cars, they're in for some real pain in that industry.
I honestly think (I've been thinking about that for a few years now) that eventually a OS will be nothing more than a browser.
That’s exactly it. An iceberg can’t stay "vertical" for the exact same reason that a pencil can’t stay vertical. Even if perfectly balanced, the equilibrium is unstable.
No cash accepted here, pal. You are the product, not a customer, of gotcha capitalism so we can resell your metadata. And fuck the unbanked and don't even think about tipping our underpaid employees because that's what socialism us merchants arranged in the form of benefits you pay for with taxes are for. - Cash-hostile businesses
so, you do not believe prices are inflating?
Microsoft is reworking Recall after researchers point out its security problems
what is MIC ?
Craft - it's a nice note taking app with great sync. I use it on my Mac and iPhone daily.

Fork - one of the better git GUIs.

Rectangle - open source app to manage window layouts
Xylitol is roughly as sweet as sugar, unlike others.
I think part of the problem with "autistic" is that, although there is an official diagnostic protocol for it, it's far from clear whether that cleaves reality at the joints, as the philosophers say. It's also still mostly an open question if and how autism in women might present differently from in men.
One basic measure (one part of a solution) would be to split Comfy into two parts: the part that does all the work (running plugins, generating images) should have access to nothing but read-only access to the files it needs, the GPU, and a socket to communicate with the other part.
Well, for one, the keylogger is detected by antivirus programs.

I keep coming across various projects whose executables trigger antivirus programs, and I think that when those triggers happen, "it's fine, don't worry" claims need to be treated with more skepticism.

At the same time, antivirus vendors need to stop being so lazy and using strings and such that are clearly part of an open source program/library for their signatures.
Follow-up on the results of his barrel adventure https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48222707
> Predicting tokens well requires reasoning and planning.

Reason and planning regarding token prediction

It cannot reason about the context of its output. It only infers the most likely token to follow up.
Productivity hack: Delayed mail in Gmail
Oh, I'm sorry, I mixed it up. Firefox no longer supports bookmarks with descriptions, which I would also like to have. Firefox on desktop has tags, but the mobile version doesn't.
Gambling can be a completely rational thing to do. If you are old, poor and tired, your odds to become a millionaire from work are exactly zero. But if you buy a lottery ticket, you buy yourself a week of hope, adrenaline, and a non-zero chance for a life of your dreams.
Strange that they use an example with a 192.168 address and say that it’s connecting to a cybercriminal’s server
5,000 repositories? Wow, NYT has a lot more software projects than I would have guessed. I've worked at some medium sized software companies (if FAANG is considered "big") that didn't have near that many repos.
From the article:

> There is a strong anti-correlation between these interests (that of course does not mean there is no one who is good at both.)
Rectangle, MonitorControl
Well, Docker is great for this as long as you're not one of the unlucky few whose machine is bricked because of Docker. So, mostly yes, I suppose.
Spectacle for window management. Clipy for clipboard history. Flux for managing color temp.
Breathing into Your Mouse Can Fix the Buttons Due to Static Electricity
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) [video]
And there is a subtle distinction between charging more for using a credit card (not a bank debt card) and a discount for cash that people argue about with respect to a particular card's merchant agreement.
All China has to do is build more US and Mexico factories for tariff avoidance. China's already in the US with Volvo and will be in Mexico in a year or two with BYD and others. They won't be boxed in and any suggestion they will be comes from someone who doesn't even understand USMCA and other mainline trade agreements.
If your into the tiling window manager experience, I would highly recommend looking into yabai + skhd + Sketchybar

- https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
- https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd
- https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar

Some honorable mentions:
Hammerspoon - Unlock insane levels of configuration/automation (https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon)
Raycast - Spotlight search replacement (https://www.raycast.com/)
LuLu Firewall - An amazing FOSS firewall (https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu)
NASM is good, but yes, GAS in Intel mode wants you to be very wordy. I believe MASM is the most annoying one for Intel syntax, though.
This is a bit of a stretch from what I said - 1% drop after the entire population has gambled through 10x their net worth is not meaningful. I also pointed out other speculative activities which we encourage, presumably because they compensate by growing the economy. Insurance might preserve or increase equality, but it also might extract so much rent that the overall utility is lower. There is simply no cut and dry explanation - for some parameter choices things work the way you say, and for some they don't
I'm doing awful, personally. But I guess my industry is an exception among exceptions. Still feels bad.
I think you could (almost) build a consistent picture: Economic output is doing well, a lot of people are working, but the rich are taking all the gains and the workers are just barely surviving.

The problem is, if that's the case, who's buying all the output? It's not just going into warehouses. So people must be able to buy all this stuff.

An alternate view would be that people have been buying all this stuff, mostly on credit, and are realizing that they're maxed out on credit, especially if interest rates rise.

But ultimately, the "sentiment" view matters. It may not matter as much as the actual output numbers, but it matters, because people are not purely "homo economicus". They make decisions on how they feel about how things are going, and if they think things are going badly, they buy less, and eventually that influences the actual figures.
I am not sure about this but maybe one possible reason is that when you have more than one major version that is largely used, you must maintain two versions. For example, fix bugs for both major versions.
Everyone can paint their name, that is a 0 skill exercise. And I wasn't saying everyone needs to be a Monet, more that these are high ceiling skills you are talking about and there is a lot more variety than is given credit.
That gets really philosophical here. What is a single run actually?

Because each token is generated one by one, with all the previous tokens as input.

If we remove one token from the context in the past does it make it a new "run"?

What if we have a summarization memory system, where in order to keep the context size small after certain length it will start to summarize/compress the beginning until the context size is good.

Then the whole input and context is constantly changing/evolving.

You could have 100s of different randomly selected instances generating a new token one by one to the (last input + token generated by another instance) as input.
I think this is one of the use cases for a sandboxed WASM plugin system.
I didn’t set up any advanced structural editing in neovim and I don’t recall any such features existing in DrRacket’s editor.

The only reason, as I understand it, for using Emacs is this much vaunted ability to evaluate expressions in the editor that are run by a running interpreter process.

It was cool to experience but hardly earth shattering or a decent reason to learn the forest of chords, modes, and metas of Emacs…

And as far as I could tell, it was just about sending some text to the interpreter via a pipe. It doesn’t seem like something that should require a brand new editor or a complex, custom configuration of an existing one to accomplish.
Not in pro-studios. Most are stuck in Protools forever due to lack of interoperability with other software.

You can run anything you want, until you need to send a session to another studio and they only use Protools.
CopyClip https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copyclip-clipboard-history/id5... allows you to retain and access your clipboard history.

I would be lost without it. It's gotten me out of so many jams.

Just have to be careful about not needlessly keeping around sensitive data.
What Is Shader Linking?
No, you can't diagnose most people. Yes, the diagnosis generally requires there to be disabilities related to it. Otherwise it doesn't meet the criteria.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40621790.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to warn you at least once before. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> They’ve done things like getting frogs to develop extra limbs, and getting them to develop an eye in their gut, or an eye in their tail that they can actually see out of.

I have two contradictory reactions to this. 1. "Isn't science amazing!" 2. "Poor froggy, how horrible."
> used by nearly every human on earth

Roughly 60% of earth's population used the internet in 2023. So not quite nearly every human.
Indeed. I've had very productive compost piles that were very easy. I didn't even use a bin; I just piled on organic stuff (from the yard, or from the kitchen, or whatever) in a convenient spot that wasn't in the way of anything..

I spent almost as little time on it as possible. Every now and then, if I felt like it, I'd give it a bit of a toss with a shovel or a pitchfork. If it had been very hot and dry, I'd water it a bit. It wasn't fast, but by the time I wanted compost for the garden in the spring there was always plenty of it for me to use.

As I understand it, this method is called cold composting. The idea is to provide an environment that worms and insects like to hang out and do their stuff in, which is easy enough to imagine and simple to accomplish satisfactorily with minimum effort. They just want a place that is damp, full of food, and not too hot (they leave if it gets too hot).

This is in contrast to hot composting, which is a more intense method -- both in the effort that goes into it, and the speed of production.

Hot composting has huge advantages in speed and the materials that can be composted (PLA plastic can disappear in a hot compost pile that is working), but I don't feel like I want to spend that much effort on it and the lazy method gets results that I like.
Whoa. Does this mean we will be able to run zk code on ESP32s and stuff? That's crazy.
In a similar vein, I recently came across Peter Laurie's Beneath the City Streets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_City_Streets) in a second hand bookshop. Despite belonging to a very different time, it's still a very interesting read.
Military industrial complex, if I had to guess
Thanks! I thought they were the same
> the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs

They're indifferent to the truth of their inputs, too. That's also a problem.
Nvidia provides a toolkit to do this [1], getting a GPU into a container is as easy as running `podman run --device nvidia.com/gpu=all`. The process is similar for Docker, but rootless Docker requires some extra steps IIRC.

[1] https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-to...
> Second order logic sort of assumes that we can simply know what finite means. First order logic doesn't allow you to wave your hands like that.

OK, this I do not understand. How does 2ndOL "sort of assume that we can simply know what finite means"? That seems like an extraordinarily imprecise characterization of 2ndOL. 2ndOL is a formal system just like 1stOL. Neither one lets you "wave your hands" about anything AFAICT.
Not all the survivors of the eruption were wealthy or went on to find success in their new communities

The guy lists 2 semi-wealthy survivors, then says the above. He also says:

I took Roman names unique to Pompeii or Herculaneum – such as Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius – and searched for people with those names who lived in surrounding communities in the period after the eruption. and found 200 survivors in 12 cities

So he's only searching on unique names, which is an (understandable) bias, and only found 200 out of thousands of people, while saying there are way too few bodies.

There's literally zero evidence to support the fact that the rich bugged out, and only the poor died. In fact, there's evidence to the contrary, with multiple poor people found, and lots of those that didn't do well, their wealth unknown prior to te event.

Frankly how would the rich even do that? Lots of houses, rich and poor, left with belongings. How would the rich prevent escape?

Walking away was likely sufficient.
There's also "HARD DRIVE - Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire".
By James Wallace and Jim Erickson 1992 published by John Wiley and sons, 458 pages.
Gosh.-
Number of dopamine molecules secreted by a person during his lifetime?
Follow up "Threads" with "When the wind blows".
Alien-looking species seen for first time ever in ocean's darkest depths
Not necessarily true. Economies of scale is a thing.
And yet, if more people you know report being victims of crime, and the official statistics point to a decrease, the people upthread are happy to declare a decrease.
Literally just had this idea 2 days ago - each TS agentic project feels like doing this stdlib work over and over again, but with a slightly differently architecture each time.

One question for our use case - what if a standard function requires bi-directional communication (as opposed to a single call to `generateText`)?

For one standard function, our envisioned interaction loop is:
Agent --> SSE to browser --> browser processes --> browser sends results back to server --> server sends to Agent --> Agent returns result
That’s cool I saw that, bookmarklets are awesome. Have made a few in my time
I feel if this was true, it would be provable by experimentation. If it's true but not provable, it also doesn't seem to have any impact.
I had an AI agent choose and buy a bday gift for my friend
This might have to be my next project then cheers
From my outsider perspective, it's a field that moves very fast, there seem to be new tools being released every week so:

1) As the developer if you focus on hardening, you might be too late to release.

2) People downloading shiny new libs/files/programs constantly.

3) Influx of people not that versed in the basics of computer security playing around with local LLM models, image generators, etc.
Show HN: I made a multimodal AI game where you torment an AI with pixel art
I'm experimenting with AI beings who inhabit interactive environments and came up with this little demo where you play as as a trickster god, who can conjure pixel art objects to annoy a grumpy little AI dude.

It's open source btw! https://github.com/opensouls/milton-is-trapped