skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit tangential but one of my favorite early amzn stories is when a small group from Ingram (at the time, the other major US book distributor) came to visit us in person (they were not very far away ... by design).

It was clear that they were utterly gobsmacked that a team of 3 or 4 people could have done what we have done in the time that we had done it. They had apparently contemplated getting into online retail directly, but saw two big problems: (a) legal and moral pushback from publishers who relied on Ingram just being a distributor (b) the technological challenge. I think at the time their IT staff numbered about 20 or so. They just couldn't believe what they were seeing.

Good times (there weren't very many of those for me in the first 14 months) :)
My biggest question is: why haven’t you guys advertised yourselves more? I’ve heard of liberem and the pinephone but never knew you guys had a phone? With half-decent hardware and actual water proofing?? I swear if I had the disposable cash I’d have bought one (and I hope to anyway soon).

Ok, here’s a more typical question: I’ve heard your phone uses halium, what exactly is it? Some kind of hardware abstraction layer? Some people online appear to dislike it. (And googling unfortunately gives very few links that aren’t super technical.)
Is it the rate which the case gets resolved in your favour or is it that it’s not worth the time and effort? If it’s the latter, some LLM flavoured automation might help.
Maybe come up with a problem that isn’t so simple you can just ask it to ChatGPT. Create some context that would be difficult/tedious to convey.
They are beholden to their shareholders and perhaps there was pressure from major institutional investors to do this.
Yeah my mind also immediately jumped to fingerprinting. Somewhat required for anti-fraud to some extent, but also obviously used for more than that.
you want Wisp's Honor Beats then https://youtu.be/gfkWin8Gu7c
So, the f-string in Python is "spelled" that way because another leading character was the only ASCII syntax left for such a thing. It's odd that PRQL and now potentially C++ might copy it. In the PRQL case it was a new thing so they could have chosen anything, double quotes (like shell interpolation) or even backticks, that seem to make more sense.

Also the f- prefix was supposed to be short for format and pronounced that way. But "eff" caught on and now devs the world over are calling them "eff strings" ... funny. :-D
Yeah it's not there yet. It's definitely overhyped. The main reason is that it can't do any kind of complex task yet. The evidence is all of the examples that people showcase. If you are going to showcase the abilities of AI, and it is as easy as entering a prompt, you would think we would see all kinds of crazy examples like "create a github clone", or "make full online store app". Maybe not in one prompt, but certainly one prompt for every domain, like one for front end, one for back end, one for the DB setup, and in a few steps you have a fully working website, SaaS, or what have you, but instead we're seeing snake games, bouncing balls, interview questions and small problems. \

It's impressive in its own right, but the value of AI coding is entirely in its ability to solve interesting problems, not to mention that it needs to also be reliable otherwise you still need expertise to fix the mistakes.
This might not be what you intended, but the impression I’m getting is that you’re dismissing my objections by saying “the world isn’t perfect so I won’t even try”. That’s a cop-out. Probably most of the thing you do don’t have an unqualifiedly better way of doing it.

This is a case where the solution you’re coming up with, which has never been the normal solution on the web but people definitely try it from time to time (perhaps because it is how you’d implement such a thing in almost every non-web GUI toolkit), causes certain very specific problems which render it unsuitable for general web content, particularly making life harder for quite a lot of desktop users (where Space/Shift+Space for scrolling is very common).

This is not a case of “well akshully” correctness, where the difference is immaterial. It’s a specific, concrete thing where it’s good to learn the behaviour of the platform, so that you work with it rather than against it, and not cause unnecessary difficulties to normal users.
Came here to post the same thing. C++11 was a major and practical step up from previous versions. I haven't seen anything in future standards that looked like it a tool I'd use day-to-day building actual production software. Much of the subsequent versions added things probably interesting to compiler and language academics. "Default constructible and assignable stateless lambdas?" Really?
Don't respond to trolls.
> The proof is in the fact that it flies, not what it is constructed from.

And LLMs do not.

> "But it looks like reasoning to me"

My condolences. You should go see a doctor about your inability to count the number of 'R's in a word.
I Use AI: Early 2025
I have been asking people questions about git a lot. It's useful to figure out whether or not they care about the craft.
This sounds like something that works until it doesn't, and then you have this massive codebase you're responsible for that doesn't work, and you don't understand why or know whether it can even be fixed.
I have pro, in US, not seeing yet
You should frame this and put it on a wall somewhere.
But you are making exactly my point. I'm asking if Democrats are just plutocrats instead of oligarchs because of how their billionaires behave. Soros has taken a particular interest in district attorneys look at all the crime that has been unleashed due to his DAs. Pamela Price was a real shining example of justice all thanks to Soros. You have a few Soros DAs that wouldn't prosecute carjackings until they were victims of such crimes; it would be comical if it wasn't so tragic.
> people seem to have no trouble with casually glossing over the ethics and morality of what they work on

Sinclair's law still applies: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Which I thought was interesting to see at the end of:
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/i-was-wrong-about-the-ethics-cr...

(Sinclair's law likely applies to ACM and to other technical societies that accept money from big tech.)

> Gotta do what boss tells me to do

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
I recently completed a take-home assignment with the following instructions:

<instructions>

This project is designed to evaluate your ability to:

- Deconstruct complex problems into actionable steps.
- Quickly explore and adopt new frameworks.
- Implement a small but impactful proof of concept (PoC).
- Demonstrate coding craftsmanship through clean, well-architected code.

We estimate this project will take approximately 5–7 hours. If you find that it requires more time, let us know so we can adjust the scope.

Feel free to use any tools, libraries, frameworks, or LLMs during this exercise. Also, you’re welcome to reach out to us at any time with questions or for clarification.

</instructions>

I used LLM-as-a-junior-dev to generate 95+% of the code and documentation.
I'm just an average programmer, but tried to set a bar that if I was on the other
side of the table, I'd hire anyone who demonstrated the quality of output submitted.

- The 5-7 hour estimate was exceeded (however, I was the first one through this exercise).
- IMHO the quality of the submission could NOT have been met in lesser time.
- They had 3 tasks/projects:
- a data science project,
- a CLI based project and
- a web app
- They wanted each to be done in a different language.
- I submitted my solution <38 hours of receipt of the assignment.
- In any other world, the intensity of this exercise would cause a panic-attack/burn-out.
- I slept well (2 nights of sleep), took care of family responsibilities and felt good enough to attack the next work-day.

I've been on both sides of the table of many interviews.

This was by far the most fun and one to replicate every chance I get.

[EDITS]: Formatting and typos.
> If you care then you'll fact check before publishing.

Doing a proper fact check is as much work as doing the entire research by hand, and therefore, this system is useless to anyone who cares about the result being correct.

> I don't see why this changes.

And because of the above this system should not exist.
When politics meets programming.
But also seems to be technically 18 individual scoops on that machine. Though 240k tonnes in 1 day as capacity…
It's both, but mostly the latter. Purely from a time-management standpoint, doing the menial clerical work of compiling all the information requiring to properly respond to a dispute -- like some kind of courtroom lawyer assistant preparing for a boring case -- is just alien to how I want to spend my time as an entrepreneur. I'd rather just click "Accept", move past it, and focus my efforts on GROWING the business -- not engaging in these trivial disputes.

FYI -- I directly asked Stripe support, is there any downside to having a default policy of "Accepting" all disputes? Does my "accept-to-challenge" ratio have any impact on my account standing, risk profile, likelihood of getting banned, etc? They said, nope! Just focus your efforts on keeping your dispute rate ITSELF low. The resolution rate is irrelevant.
I am sorry to hear that, and I hope your insurance covers it.

---

Seriously tho, "wysiwyg with natural-language edit commands" seems like the sort of thing that I'd expect to have a sharp cliff, like RAD tools are known for but perhaps even sharper.
Digital Coffee Journal
Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a project called BrewLog—a simple, digital coffee journal designed to help coffee enthusiasts track their tastings, take notes, and log brewing methods.

As a coffee nerd myself, I’ve always found it tricky to keep consistent notes on what worked (and what didn’t) with different beans, grind sizes, and brew methods. I’ve been using a physical coffee journal (just a regular notebook), but it quickly got messy and hard to organize. So, I started looking around for a digital coffee journal that could solve this problem. To my surprise, I could only find one or two options—and they were really outdated, lacking the features I wanted.

That’s when I decided to build BrewLog.

What BrewLog Does:
• Track your brews: Log details like origin, roast, grind size, brew time, and tasting notes.
• Discover patterns: See what techniques lead to your favorite cups.
• Perfect your process: Learn from your own data to improve over time.
• Coffee Map: Visualize where you’ve had coffee from around the world.
• Community Recommendations: See other users’ tasting notes to discover new coffees to try.

I’m currently preparing for launch, and I’ll be sending out emails soon to invite a small group of people for early access. If you’re interested in testing it out and giving me feedback, sign up here:
brewlog.coffee

I’d love your input:
• Would you find this useful?
• What features would you like to
see?
• Any design ideas you would like?

I’m genuinely looking to make this a good tool that people can use whenever they do tastings. Or to know whether this is just a bad idea. So any input (or brutal honesty) is appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Musk Says DOGE Halting Treasury Payments to US Contractors
Key point - Becoming AI Whisperers:

1. The 70/30 Rule: Let AI handle boilerplate; reserve 30% of every task for human ingenuity.

2. AI Code Autopsies: When using generated code, reverse-engineer it line by line. Make it teach you.

3. Revive the Artisan Guilds: Mentor juniors in fundamentals first — algorithms, memory management, logic. AI comes later.
According to the article, the guy owns a single supermarket, not a chain.
I suppose if you were so unfortunate as to have two interfaces name the same function with different expectations on what it does, you'd end up having to use an intermediate object to wrap around your base one, to ensure it matches the required interface, possibly adding a helper to wrap the current object for convenience at callsites.

In C#, you would instead define a method and specify the name of the interface in order to override the method it receives to be different from the base method that is experiencing the conflict.

I know this is a real issue, but I don't think this is excessively common for either language.

And the real answer for both would be to rename/prefix the names in the interfaces so that they aren't conflicting in the first place, if you have the ability to do so :-)

There are certainly always trade offs when building something.
> The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.

The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.

> If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place?

Constant exposure to virtue makes you more likely to be virtuous.

> Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?

See the obvious what? The normies are simply wrong about a lot of this.

> Morality does not exist unless free will does

This is simply false. Free will is linked to moral responsibility, not the existence of morals. How moral we are is out of our control (Thomas Nagle called this moral luck).
It is like all those different knives you get at fancy dinners. Small scoop for ice cream, big scoop for running an efficient industrial society. I'm not clear on what the medium scoop does.
https://archive.ph/vC301
Think of the dev/test/PM people who worked on this feature.

It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al.

The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.
That article from 2016 is not about the CSP project in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) but the one across the border in California (Ivanpah) that had the bird kills because it had no thermal energy storage and thus had to keep heliostats focused near the solar receiver, creating a hot spot nearby.

Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage.

Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas:
https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...
The Garmin Connect web site seems to work fine for building structured workouts. It can also sync with TrainingPeaks. Is there something else we need?

There are a lot more than two apps which read or write FIT files for purposes other than workout planning. I wrote one of them.
Tote: Rewriting Playground
The counter should be declared as static inside the function, thus limiting is scope and avoiding pollution of the global namespace.
As a european i find the scapegoating of yet another "foreign evil country" laughable after watching the Sackler family documentary.

You guys created this mess yourselves, through deregulation and extreme predatory capitalism pushing pills to everyone and their mother.

It's the chinese, it's a middle eastern man with a beard, it's a russian, it's a communist from cuba, it's the japanese, it's the italian, it's the irish, and the list goes on forever. It's definitely never the american oligarchs.
Hooks, holes in the backing plate, stamped/cast dimples, welded wire-mesh for the backing material to adhere to.
"Vibe" is just an euphemism for lazy here. And that's not 'coding' in any shape or form, it's code generation through an AI model, without even understanding it, very different thing.

It's like comparing cheap ramen to fine Italian cuisine.
I realize why this is bad. Full stop.

I wonder if it ever evoked an dive into exactly what happened to leave these customers with thinking this was the most likely avenue for success? Hopefully in at least some cases their calls with CSRs were reviewed and in the most optimistic of best cases additional training or policies were put into place to avoid the hopelessness that evokes such drastic actions.
Not sure if it's just me, but it looks like all SOTA companies are doubling down to chase the new benchmark, which beyond hype, doesn't seem to translate into real world uses. Why don't these companies just plug it into a popular git repo and say, hey our AI fixed these 100 issues! Or something real? The only people who seem to be doing something real is DeepMind.
The cost of developing software is quickly dropping thanks to these models, and the demand for software is about to go way up because of this. LLMs will just be power tools to software builders. Learn to pop up a level.
I wish I could live in a world as simple as yours.
The Furiphone FLX1 makes heavy use of this and it is amazing. I can do most things I'd want a real android phone for (which is not much, admittedly). I know of people who use it for Signal and Spotify. Great project, and right at home on a Linux phone.
I'm finding it difficult to maintain civility when your country is attacking mine.

Maybe I'll step away for a bit.
Maybe it's just me but when i code/program i typically think of how different variations of implementations would affect roi of the associated company i would be working for.

That's something that AI in the current state probably wouldn't be able to take into account.
How will that help? It’s even easier to track across websites than apps and websites can also get your ip address to track you.
The fame of the book is strong correlated to the marketing spend behind it and little else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Muskie if you want the one-scoop equivalent. Although I doubt that mined coal directly.
Have you looked at the latest JS standards?
I see many are offended, but I am genuinely asking a question.

I want to understand does this mean it's ethical for anyone to create a research AI tool that will go through arXiv and related GitHub repo and use it to solve problems, implement ideas like cursor.
Books are like wine. Given a selection of wine, connoisseurs will select wines that the average drinker won't. But their experience and expectations are very different. Adventurous/curioust/openminded folks will cross the aisle and change their expectations. The rest will stay with their easy-to-drink wines or their complex.

I tried reading "The Da Vinci Code" and it felt like a was a bad version of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". But that's me. Most of my friends would choose "The Da Vinci Code". And I imagine Eco and Brown had very different goals for their books.

I did love Harry Potter and Hunger Games though! Not great works of literature, but they're super fun!
I thought they were a fun read, but there was a widespread idea at the time that they were somehow something more than that with actual depth. The hatred is mostly a backlash against that.
A mix.

For the mechanical and hydraulic systems, it's certainly not dead though maybe underutilized or, as the mission has evolved, unnecessary. These aircraft get torn apart and rebuilt during depot maintenance every X flight hours or years. If those systems aren't working, they're fixed.

They also tear out old patches and replace them with new ones, and these days (this century, really) they don't bolt on patches which creates its own problems they use adhesives and they use modeling to try and reduce the patch size to its minimum. So you don't fly around with unnecessary patches on your airframe (here I'm assuming you're at one of the competent depots, not like NG who left a plug in a fuel line and totaled the plane, fortunately it was able to land safely).

But for electronic equipment and some stations and fixtures it may be deadweight or excessive weight.

Electronic equipment may not get a modernization effort for decades. And depending on who wins that contract (who am I kidding, if it's one of the main five primes you're fucked) it's likely the effort will fail 2-3 times before it succeeds. Imagine flying with a radio built in 1980. Everything in it except maybe the power supply and of course the antenna can fit inside a cellphone today. That's a lot of weight that could be removed, but it's not deadweight. It's still in use.

But you also find things like stations and even racks (in some of the heavies) to hold LRUs or control panels and screens that were designed back when you needed 20 LRUs to do what one can now, or a huge wiring harness that is now a keyboard, mouse, and workstation. These stations and racks don't always get cleaned out like they should and would be dead weight.
Yes and no. It is often just dead equipment. But sometimes it could still be turned on but there is no purpose for it anymore. The P-3 has been used for a -lot- of things over the years. Beyond that it is just heavy old versions of things that could easily have been lighter and required far less power. Using a 60 year old design for a replaceable part is an expensive luxury only the military can afford. If we had modernized the avionics and the main load center on that plane it probably would have save 10-15k lbs without even changing the engines or airframe.
The difference is that it takes few minutes to an hour at most so it can be run multiple times a day, using the results of previous runs to further refine the search and reasoning process to get better outcomes. Pretty much how any human research works but much faster and with potentially vastly more world-knowledge and reasoning capability than average humans. And these capabilities will rapidly improve with further RL.
Some of these reports are really hard to believe or understand. Which contracts? All? That would be insane and seems unlikely.
> Which might explain why it leaps ahead in benchmarks considerably and aligns with the claims o3 is too expensive to release publicly

It's the only tool/system (I won't call it an LLM) in their released benchmarks that has access to tools and the web. So, I'd wager the performance gains are strictly due to that.

If an LLM (o3) is too expensive to be released to the public, why would you use it in a tool that has to make hundreds of inference calls to it to answer a single question? You'd use a much cheaper model. Most likely o3-mini or o1-mini combined with o4-mini for some tasks.
I think at this point it's no longer coding, it's more "AI coder management"
Yet this doesn't account for the type of birds they are killing. I view milling a swallow different from killing some kind of large raptor or large bird. Those arent your window hitters. In fairness windmills also kill a lot of large birds. No tech is perfect.