skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Picture this: you’re halfway through coding a feature when you hit a wall. Naturally, you turn to the documentation for help. But instead of a quick solution, you’re met with a doc site that feels like it hasn't been updated since the age of dial-up. There’s no search bar and what should’ve taken five minutes ends up burning half your day (or a good hour of going back and forth).

Meanwhile, I’ve tried using LLMs to speed up the process, but even they don’t always have the latest updates. So there I am, shuffling through doc pages like a madman trying to piece together a solution.

After dealing with this mess for way too long, I did what any of us would do—complained about it first, then built something to fix it. That’s how DocTao was born. It scrapes the most up-to-date docs from the source, keeps them all in one place, and has an AI chat feature that helps you interact with the docs more efficiently, provides citations so you can fact-check and integrate what you've found into your code. No more guessing games, no more outdated responses—just the info you need, when you need it.

It’s multilingual, so it can handle any documentation in different languages seamlessly.
And it's free to use. If you're concerned about security, I’ve set up a test account you can log into:

Email: test@gmail.com
Password: alphatest

It might have some documents uploaded by others, and the onboarding is already done, but it’ll give you a sense of how it works.

The best part? It’s free. You can try it out at demo.doctao.io and see if it makes your life a bit easier. And because I built this for developers like you, I’m looking for feedback. What works? What’s missing? What would make this tool better?

Now, here’s where I need your help. DocTao is live, free, and ready for you to try at demo.doctao.io. I'm not here to just push another tool—I really want your feedback. What's working? What’s frustrating? What feature would you love to see next? Trust me, every opinion counts. You guys are the reason I even built this thing, so it only makes sense that you help shape its future.

Let me know what you think!
Found this on YouTube. This seems disturbing.
"Many" feels like it is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.

Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette...)
Not sure that would be a bad thing.
D.O.A without adoption from the major model labs (including the "opener" ones like AI2 and lets say Together/Eleuther). i dont like the open source old guard feeling like they have any say in defining things when they dont have skin in the game. (and yes, this is coming from a fan of their current work defending the "open source" term in traditional dev tools). a good way to ensure decline to irrelevance is to do a lot of busywork without ensuring a credible quorum of the major players at the table.

please dont let me discourage tho, i think this could be important work but if and only if this gets endorsement from >1 large model lab producing any interesting work
Press Conference: Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 [video]
How Waffle House helps Southerners and FEMA judge a storm's severity
Competition usually leads to higher wealth creation and GDP, not less.

If you use real life examples and history as a benchmark
> No, but assuming you are on Facebook's board / in upper management you can conspire with the rest of the board to get rid of Zuckerberg (possibly permanently) and share the company amongst yourself.

Yes, if you want to oust him and take over as CEO, then boards of directors have that power. But that's more about his job security. When he leaves, he leaves with just as much stock as he ever had, and in the case of some termination clauses in contracts for that stuff, he walks away with more than he walked in with.

With the government out of the picture, this doesn't much change. If the board of directors tries to confiscate shares or some equivalent (I dunno, withholding dividends? Does Facebook even pay dividends?), then their stock price tanks immediately. Somewhere down near $0. Their financing falls apart shortly after that, and pretty soon the company goes under. The punishment for some group stealing Facebook isn't government goons stepping in and bashing skulls, it's in the complicated structures that make it worthless just about as soon as it's stolen.

I think your Chinese example is quite the opposite of this. The government of China basically has to step in and allow ARM China to pull such a stunt, or it's impossible.
I'm now curious which of Gates, Musk and Bezos families were wealthier when they started their respective careers...

I suspect Bezos, then Gates, then Musk, but it could be any order.
I am very erratic on agreement with DHH's screeds, but this one hits the mark.

Among all the more visible issues with this whole situation, he calls out a few things that I think need more awareness:

1. Matt decries Private Equity as leeches and freeloaders on free software, open source, and their community.

2. Automattic invested in WPE in the early days. In fact, Silver Lake, the PE firm that owns WPE, bought Automattic's share! Automattic sold to PE.

3. The WP Foundation has three members, two of whom show any sign of activity: Matt himself, and another person that Matt personally appointed who is... drum roll... the Managing Partner of a Private Equity firm.

Somewhat ironic for someone who shit talks their competitors and Private Equity so vocally.
Software Developers in Oakland Are Putting People over Profit
> I don't know that I've seen a lot of details, but I didn't realize the rates were supposed to be less than benchmark rates.

I know someone who got a mortgage rate way, WAY below prevailing rates (like around 1%, gotten back when normies like us got rates around ~3%), because 1. he is a very high net worth individual and 2. he owns a business that does a lot of business with the bank. So, he gets extra special treatment because he's rich and the bank appreciates his business and expects the relationship to lead to even more business.

It's not a huge stretch to imagine that Jeff Bezos's bank would happily loan him money at some token 0.01% interest rate or some similar sweet deal.
Are there cases where float could return a NaN or infinity, where you instead prefer the integer result? That seems a little odd to me.
So what you're saying is that you "fervently" think your boss should shut up because he is giving his legal opponent fuel for their case against his extortion and other charges? And that he's making you write things that you don't understand or particularly agree with?

I promise you, your integrity (or at least your license to practice law) are worth more than Matt's sinking ship. I hope you can move on to do something meaningful with you practice
> If I give the lambdas really good names

That's a really funny way to say it.
Represent the UK Cyber Team – Nationwide Search for Elite Cyber Talent
> A more accurate statement is that English is a language where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than phonetics.

I hate that the past tense of "stay" is "stayed", but "say" is "said" and "pay" is "paid", which is often misspelled as "payed", which IS a word, but is unrelated to transferring money from one person to another.

Then you got all the ways "-ough" is pronounced. Thorough, enough, cough, through, thought, dough, drought..."-ough" is now looking like a completely nonsense letter sequence.
Command Line Tools I Like (2022)
You're over-crediting Carmack and under-crediting current game devs. 3-5 frames might be current end-to-end latency, but that's not what Carmack is talking about. He's just talking about the game loop latency. Even at ~4 frames of end-to-end latency, he'd be talking about an easily avoided 20% regression. That's still huge.
even then the edges do not suddenly curve. its just all round a bad analogy.
> I was creating inconsistencies that younger developers nitpick

Obligatory:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

Continued because I'd never read the full passage:
"... adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
This can be done in a good way and in bad ways. With most code you will be calling builtin procedures/functions. You also don't look under the hood for those usually. But for the code of your coworker it seems to irritate you. This could mean many things. Just to name a few: (1) The names are not giving a good idea what those functions do. (2) The level of abstraction is not the same inside the calling function, so that you feel the need to check the implementation detail of those small functions. (3) You don't trust the implementation of those smaller functions. (4) The separated out functions could be not worth separating out and being given names, because what the code in them does is clear enough without them being separated out. (n) or some other reason.

The issue does not have to be that those things are split out into separate small functions. The issue might be something else.
I don't know, but it seems like, as a language grows, the type of people working on improvements changes. In the beginning, the contributions come from people trying to solve application problems. In the end, the committees and contributors seem to be less connected to reality and more internal and isolated. They make changes that seem conceptually sound but aren't grounded in what the users of the language actually care about.
Poison pills are much more effective at fending off takeovers. I think the public benefit form mainly helps with workforce and customer alignment to dampen disruptions from transformative and invasive applications.

Peter Gassner converted Veeva (pharmaceuticals software) to public benefit a few years ago. Veeva is probably 10X smaller and mostly captured by big pharma customers who don't want to compete on software infrastructure and want one place to stay in (FDA) compliance. So in that case the stakeholders have a pretty clear and distinct voice and mission.

In the absence of dominant stakeholders, it's unclear who would govern OpenAI as a public benefit corporation. At a minimum, it's a moral hazard and an invitation to bureaucracy and politics.

I'd be interested in OpenAI developing super clear and transparent customer feedback channels. That could improve AI, give incentive for people to participate in model improvement (instead of reflexively protecting their data), and be a forcing function against governance gaming. Amazon/Bezos has strong experience in managing by metrics, so it's a shame OpenAI has committed itself to Azure/Microsoft.

Another alternative is the M-form, where subsidiaries are coordinated but live or die based on their own performance rather than cross-subsidies (recently in Google becoming Alphabet). But the history there isn't particularly good for innovation, and even profit lags except in industries with stable markets (Berkshire-style).
Yes, I did mention that the UX of the type errors could be improved and probably should, but once you start getting into conditional types, and nested types (which may not be fully expanded when you see the error), it gets hairy.
Looks pretty cool, congrats so far! Do you allow downloading the fine tuned model for local inference?
The classic No True Punksman fallacy.
The definition is good because currently many call their open model weights as open "source". But I suspect most companies will still call their models open source even when they're not.
Computational thinking is more important than software per se.

Computational thinking is the mathematical thinking.
> Scale's great

Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.
It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.
FWIW I've been semi-actively designing a language of that sort, which I call Fawlty, since about February of this year. I was planning to start writing about it in July but then all the PSF drama stuff happened and I didn't want people to assume incorrectly that the idea was motivated by my disappointment with the community.

In fact, I'd been thinking about doing it since probably November of the previous year - and it's motivated by long-held beliefs that

Python's design falls short of the Zen;

several of the most common beginner pitfalls could and should be avoided by syntax changes and by a different approach to parsing the code; and

the standard library is full of ancient APIs that look terrible because they're motivated by C and Java designs that used to be the best we had but seem highly unidiomatic now.

It was somewhere in November or December last year that I first wrote those thoughts down more concretely (with details about what those pitfalls are etc.).

Given that pace of progress, however, I've more or less given up on ever expecting myself to publish something usable - by myself, at least. I've decided for now that it will be more practical to add blog posts about my ideas to the queue, and possibly see about my own implementation later.
Excellent points, violently agree, my question was poorly worded. The purpose of units tests is to verify the contracted API is actually being provided by the implementation details. A clearer question might have been "what are unit tests for if not to exercise the implementation details, verifying they adhere to the API?" Unit tests validate implementation details, integration tests validate APIs.

To me, a good unit test beats the stuffing out of the unit. It's as much a part of the unit as the public functions, so should take full advantage of internal details (keeping test fragility in mind); of course that implies the unit test needs ongoing maintenance just as much as the public functions. If you're passing a small set of inputs and checking the outputs, well that's a smoke test, not a unit test.

To answer your last question, I want the alarm bells to ring whenever the implementation details don't hold up. That's whether the function code changed, a code or state dependency changed, or the testing process itself changed. If at all feasible all the unit tests run every time the the complete suite is run, in full meat-grinder mode. "Complete suite" is hand-wavy; e.g. it might be the suite for a major library, but not the end-to-end application.
This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given their egregious charges (free) for things people used to/still spend money on, such as:

- An office software suite

- Global maps and GPS, City Guides

- Video entertainment

- Mobile and Desktop OS

- Web Browsers

Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations
> Or until you decide to say "screw it" and live in a shack on a mountain near a stream until society smartens up.

Gotta be pretty rich to do that these days.
For critical security-related code, I'd argue that's not a good property at all for module namespacing! Quite the opposite. Even with a human in the loop.

(and I was a professional Perl programmer for the first 5 years of my career, so I'm not asserting this out of lack of familiarity with CPAN!)

That all said: I don't even think what you're saying about CPAN is terribly similar to the situation being discussed here, since Go's x/crypto/ssh (and all other x/ packages) are officially part of the Go Project and are maintained by the Go core maintainers. See https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x. Third-party Go developers cannot add new packages to this namespace at all.
also see https://gradientflow.com/open-source-principles-in-foundatio...
The Merchants of Venice – In Code
What benefits does this bring me vs just using OpenAI's official tools?
What does it even mean to fend off hostile takeovers when Microsoft owns 49% of the company and the remaining 51% is split between a small number of investors (Musk, Thiel, Infosys, AWS, and a half dozen VC funds). All it would take would be one of those other early investors to join up with Microsoft and they would have a majority ownership stake.
And there is also the sequel by Michael Stonebraker and Andrew Pavlo - https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-sigmodrec20...
It will change exception class if logging function will fail... I wouldn't call this "good chance", those kinds of things are pretty unlikely in my experience.
Very limited editions, with sone items having just one edition. This won’t make much money.

Looks like a cool art project.
Words "creeping into English" is like what the entire language is all about.

If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.

>I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House"

It's literally already the same word, we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence.
1. That python 3 statement was not drawn up by "the Python maintainers". It was drawn up by downstream library owners.

2. To the extent you object to changes in the core language, the python maintainers do have a backwards compatibility statement and prominent timelines for deprecation. You may disagree with these, but they are public.

3. At the time it was written, the python 3 statement proposed dropping support for a version of python with known security problems and no plans for security updates. It seems like your argument is with the python 2 to python 3 transition, which feels like a conversation we've had here before.
Read Moneyland, get mad.
Cutlery (fr), silverware (de)

I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.
Feeling a bit down today, so just asking: when can we realistically expect to see the (positive) effects of this Nobel in daily life, and what would they be ? (I understand it's helping biotech a lot, but helping them do... what exactly ?)
I was afraid that this is something similar to infamous PEP 572 (also known as make-python-c), but it actually is a great change - it will remove errors and will make code more readable (contrary what PEP 572 did).
Meh. Window sitting at places like this until they evaporate is doing the Lord's work.
Looks good! I will try when you add email parsing feature :) It is a pain to input details manually but I like having all my information in once place when I travel: confirmation numbers, hotel addresses, phone numbers, etc.

On plus side, as someone suggested LLMs like ChatGPT should be a very good fit for email parsing and easy to integrate (e.g. ChatGPT API asking to output JSON).
Yes, because the size of the average assets of a person relative to the size of the market is negligible.

This amount of assets cannot meaningfully move the market equilibrium, so the person will realistically sell all of it for 100% of what it's worth, with say a 2% margin of error.

The higher up you go in wealth, the less it is the case. But it's not black and white, just a scale.
You’re right that there’s regularly cases where the problem really objectively is “not my job” and a cold redirect is more efficient.

However, personally I found that it is incredibly useful to use these sort of things as opportunities. The main opportunity is learning: I’ll learn something about BSOD, and about our specific IT setup, maybe some troubleshooting or windows stuff, and all this knowledge builds into strong mental models and often comes in useful even if it’s years from now.

It’s also an opportunity to build relationship (with the asker, with the IT person). It’s a tiny interaction but it makes a difference, you are now seen as “helpful” (and if you didn’t know the person at all, you got from 0 to 1 which is huge).

It’s also an opportunity to help (sometimes): as a SWE I have a breadth of knowledge, maybe I can help the IT person to have a better config to avoid BSODs, maybe I can help the asker with their specific setup that the IT person is confused about…

There’s no question that a warm handoff can be a waste, absolutely. But do it a hundred times and you get so much back
DeepMind, not Google organically.
> favoring the dialect predominantly spoken in Prussia

Was it though? Historically Low German was spoken in Brandenburg (and the rest of pre 1800s Kingdom of Prussia). Standard German is a High German language closely related to the dialects in Saxony/Thuringia etc. (thanks to Luther) and predates Prussia's status as a major German power by a few centuries or so.

Paradoxically in the 1600s and 1700s Prussia invested a lot of effort into replacing in replacing its local dialects with Standard German (which by modern standards was effectively an entirely foreign language to most people living there. I think technically even Dutch/Flemish might be closer to Standard German than Eastern Low German was).

Austrians, Bavarians etc. didn't really need to do the same since it was already much easier for them to 'learn' Standard German if they needed to (and of course its association with Protestantism played a role initially)

It's a bit like if Scotland replaced Scots with Shakespearean English, then proceeded to takeover the rest of Britain and moved its capital to Edinburgh.
The JSR 354 API can provide access to exchange rate services via the ExchangeRateProvider interface. The reference implementation (Moneta) includes a few implementations of ExchangeRateProviders that connect to online services to look up exchange rates.
Still loads of Python 2 scripts floating around at my employer and my prior 2 employers (6 years total)
Again, python does not use semantic versioning. 3.12 and 3.13 are different major versions. The deprecation policy is documented and public. https://peps.python.org/pep-0387/.
… also commented here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846883
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

TCP/IP?
> “...it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions”

Am I reading this correctly and they have 3.2 kilometers of dissertations? What an interesting unit of paper archive size, though it makes sense.
An apostrophe almost landed me in jail.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mu7ami_how-an-apostrophe-almo...
Not that bad?

int main() {
int a = -1;
[&] {
a = 42;
printf("I'm an uncallable inline block");
}();

printf(" ");

[&] {
printf("of code\n");
}();

[&] {
printf("Passing state: %d\n", a);
}();

return 0;
}