skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a little unsure how to take you here, because I avoided dragging the efficacy of an investment into frame on purpose.

Maybe you just mean to tack on the idea that we could benefit from having better language to separate shrewd and incompetent investments, in which case I'm ~fine with some language to retcon the difference between merely lighting investments on fire and using them to drive an engine back on to those investments once we know the difference.

But if you mean to suggest that it's pointless for us to bother discriminating between profit-taken and investment-(effective|ineffective) just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive yet, then I suspect I disagree to the death.

(Edit: In case I'm being obtuse, I at least think I agree that "investing" surplus in hiring and retaining great employees is a surplus-invested, and not a profit-taken.)
This article makes it sound like private companies are the ones doing the manipulation. That's not the problem.

The problem is that anyone in the world with enough interest and very little resources can influence the thoughts and actions of large groups of people. Adtech has built these tools to manipulate people into opening their wallets, yet the same tools can be used for much sinister purposes. Everything from propaganda to election interference to destabilizing a nation from the inside out. It's pretty evident that the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing for more than a decade now in not just the US, but many western countries, is in large part the product of domestic and foreign operations carried out to fulfil some agenda.

Social media companies are not in control. They're in the data market business because the business is boomin', and they can't (nor won't) control who uses their tools because it would be bad for business.

The only way any of this might improve is with government regulations. But considering that governments are in symbiosis with Big Tech, which is nowhere clearer than in the US now, and that at this point the public considers these services essential, judging only by the pushback against banning an app built by a political adversary, the chance any regulations will hit Big Tech is slim to none.

America is doomed, but they shit their bed and now must lie in it.
Musk just announced Tesla will have self-driving Real Soon Now. Again.[1]

"Teslas will be in the wild, with no one in them, in June in Austin," Musk said. "This is not some far-off mythical situation. It's literally five, six months away."

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolekobie/2025/02/05/another-...
And then all of the actual stuff that they put in Library Support
Clicking changes the color too.
The notion that software defects could destroy civilization is just so silly. I think some people have the impression that the quality of tools and technologies was somehow better before. But since the beginning of the industrial age, most of our stuff has been kind of crap. You might see good quality stuff preserved by enthusiasts or museums but that's survivorship bias and what most people used was worse. People muddle through somehow.
You like being on small collaborative teams building cool impactful things, but you don’t like how the companies you worked at do things (depend on VC, or whatever). So just start your own - build cool things and don’t take VC money. You only need VC money if you want to scale fast, hire a ton of people, etc.
Unprogress by Fairlight, 2017 [video]
> better range/reduced interference of 900 MHz vs 2.4 GHz.

What country / regulatory region are you in? With Z-Wave, non LR, in the US, with 800 series devices and USB stick (properly extended on an extension cable) or 800 series devices meshed to each other, I sometimes struggle to get a connection at a range of 20 feet or so, with a single ordinary drywall + wood wall in the way or even sometimes line of sight. LR is better, but not fantastic.
> Whether you come to that conclusion through numerical analysis or by looking at a graph is immaterial, but, at least for us meatbags, drawing a graph is highly effective.

This is what I was trying to say - some things that are extremely helpful for humans (i.e. making graphs) might not be as necessary for AI, so asking a question and expecting a response contingent upon the particular way humans approach a problem is unlikely to get the results desired.
But it's far easier for human parrots to parrot the soundbyte "stochastic parrot" as a thought-terminating cliche.
You realize “writing code on a computer” is just the opposite of “getting outside”? Getting outside for me is getting outside.

My wife is out of town this weekend at a conference. I woke up, fixed breakfast, went outside and swam a few laps in the pool enjoying this 80 degree weather (the joys of living in Florida), hung out at the bar downstairs, came back upstairs and took a shower and I am heading back downstairs to hang out at one of the other bars downstairs and just shoot the shit with the bartender who is a friend of mine and whoever else shows up while drinking soda (I go down to hang out not always to drink) and listening to bad kaorake.

When my wife comes back tomorrow, we will hang out during the day and go back downstairs to the bar tomorrow to watch the Super Bowl.

We have 8 vacations planned this year not including 5-6 trips to fly up to our home town in Atlanta (where we lived all of our adult lives until two years ago) for things going on in our friends lives and to fly to my child hood home to see my parents and family.

Not bragging, most of our vacations aren’t anything exotic or expensive and I play the credit card point/sign up bonus/churnimg game to offset some of the costs.

My focuses on how to add business value was what allowed me to find strategic consulting jobs where most jobs are still fully remote.
The original Carolingian lowercase "l" from 1200 years ago had a small right hook at the inferior end, which made it easily distinguishable from other similar letters, like uppercase "I".

Unfortunately after the invention of printing there has been a bad fashion in serif typefaces that made lowercase "l' too similar with other letters, by replacing the traditional hook with a serif identical to the serifs of all letters that end on the baseline, so that the only difference from uppercase "I" remained in a triangular left serif added to the upper end.

Even worse, in the 19th century, after sans-serif typefaces became popular, most of them have simplified lowercase "l" even more, making it almost identical with uppercase "I".

Nevertheless, while many of the typefaces used today follow the bad styles of serif or sans-serif designs with hard to distinguish lowercase "l", there exists a decent number of typefaces which have returned to the original form of lowercase "l", with a right hook at the lower end, which is easy to differentiate from any other letters. I am using almost only this kind of typefaces. Examples are Palatino Sans and FF Meta, but there are many others. Also all recent monospace typefaces intended for programming have such lowerspace "l" (being a narrow letter, in monospace typefaces lowercase "l" also has a left slab serif at the upper end, to expand its width).

In handwriting, the best solution for lowercase "l" is not to make it cursive like suggested in the parent article, but to make it with a low right hook, like in its original ancient form.
That's neat, I didn't know that there was much sizecoding activity with ELFs, except for the BGGP competitions [0]. (Mainly because it's not nearly as easy to output graphics than on all the old-school platforms, I'd imagine.) Does Lovebyte publish previous years' demos anywhere?

[0] https://binary.golf/
Their point is that the files shouldn’t be there in their home directory in the first place. Your approach would still leave symlinks/junctions in their homedir. Their proposed driver-based approach would allow apps to think they’re writing to your homedir when they’re actually writing under appdata, leaving the homedir clean.
I find that I actually sleep worse the night I've worked out (3x / week)
If I want to edit code I don't trust, it would be entirely sensible to stick it on a throwaway VM and SSH to it. Except that VS Code entirely screws this up.

As far as I know, even if you don't tell it you trust the code, the mere act of SSHing to the system blows up the trust boundary, and malicious contents of ~/.vscode on the target machine can get RCE on the client machine.

And I want to connect because VSCode is a fairly nice editor and the actual Electron application works a bit better than the webpage version. But the Electron application can't bother to sandbox itself and doesn't have a security model, so there you go.
Yep pointing out features of someone’s site that aren’t optimized for LLM’s is part of it. But the bigger piece is figuring out what 3rd party content is being used as sources for a relevant topic.

SEO agencies use software like this to help their clients. We are already working with some of them. Someone has to do the work of upgrading one’s website & content & it’s usually an agency. We won’t be offering the services - we’ll partner with agencies to do that.
My first memoir, Source Code, is here
I wish more developers knew Ada. It got a ton of things, especially its strong types, right all the way back in 1983.
The real problem with ABI breaks isn't so much the need to (automatically or manually) migrate legacy programs, but that so much of modern software is comprised of multiple pieces that don't have any way to coordinate a lock-step ABI migration.

Take something like std::unique_ptr. The basic problem is that it is absolutely capable of being written such that std::unique_ptr<T> has the same ABI as T, but it doesn't (instead acting as a T*). It's pretty damn trivial to write the necessary thunking between the ABI versions, so it's also absolutely possible to have both old-ABI and new-ABI coexist (something that was a lot more difficult for the infamous Python 2->3 transition). And other than the internal changes needed to give it a new ABI, there's not really any user-visible API that would need to be migrated. But it still can't be done because std::unique_ptr is used on the interface between library A and B, and how is A supposed to know which version of the ABI B is expecting, when neither A nor B?
Why do Americans write x as a cross instead of like )(?

I have always written and seen written the variable x as )( and I was very surprised when I met Americans and they didn't do this.
Some suggestions:

- option to select individual results of "Search nearby places" or select top N closest result to your location

- collapsible criteria on the edit/view pages

- automatically name name untitled heatmaps. I have a ton of "Untitled Heatmaps" in my history which I forgot to name

- combine the edit/view pages - just have an edit page with a big "Generate" button so you can still edit criteria after heatmap generation
wow. that’s awesome. i don’t understand why but i’m happy.
It's the end state of neoliberal policies. That's the ideological tendency that actually has the obsession with markets and strangling government capacity to do anything other than be a spigot for tax dollars. Scandinavian social democracies aren't perfect but they don't suffer from these entirely predictable problems to nearly the same degree.
It appears that author is from that newer generation, and completely misses points because he just don’t know. Ironically the article is an example of what Blow was talking about.
similar happens if I talk about how Figma is destroying the design world on unprecedented scale by normalising bad UX, UI and product management found in Figma itself, and get responses from younger designers that everything is great, completely baffled.
You have all that knowledge because you grew up in that environment. They didn’t, and not likely they can learn the equivalent of culture and experience anywhere.
The basic argument on Texas seems to be: "Texas avoided 75% of the costs in California by doing everything differently. California can't learn anything from them because they do things differently". That seems like a weak argument. California would have to do things quite differently to get a 75% cost reduction.

It is stereotyping, but it sounds like the sort of state that has a strong regulatory regime that would be quite controlling about what people can actually do. I note the irony that when Texas had a power outage everyone wanted much more regulation to force changes to grid maintenance, but when California spends 4x as much and PG&E skips on grid maintenance everyone throws their hands up because they can't call for more regulation and are out of ideas. The regulation doesn't seem to have dodged the maintenance problems but I'd bet it drives the cost up.
Making Duotrigordle, Part 1: Feature Train
Previous from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952720 (103 points, 85 comments)
Task runners have to interpret the tasks one way or the other. Speaking of crazy stuff, Ansible in general ships out Python scripts to be executed remotely.
I have used auto liberally for 8+ years; maybe I'm accustomed to reading code containing it but I really can't think of it being a problem. I feel like auto increases readability, the only thing I dislike is that they didnt make it a reference by default.

Where do you see difficult to track down performance/memory implications? Lambda comes to mind and maybe coroutines (yet to use them but guessing there may be some memory allocations under the hood). I like that I can breakpoint my C++ code and look at the disassembly if I am concerned that the compiler did something other than expected.
1. Write the runbook

2. Automate the runbook

3. Delete the runbook

This is just a means to get #2 done iteratively. I've done variations for a while, its a powerful technique.
Might be Pen Island?
Just tell the dock to auto hide. I don’t use stage manager. I don’t know why it exists to be fair.

Window management is “meh” but I don’t care. I use virtual desktops and the desktop Apple magic touchpad. Good enough.
> Many people pass state bars and are incompetent. Lawyers that go through residency get lazy and kill patients, and they aren't magically superior to someone that isn't allowed to work in, say, the US, because their medical training was done the wrong country.

So we need the barrier to entry to be even lower for such professions that deal with life-changing outcomes? I don't think so. In such high risk fields: "long term reputation" is totally dependent on hiring extremely qualified individuals.

The barrier to entry MUST be continuously raised with the bare minimum requirement of a degree. Only then the secondary requirements can be considered.

> When you hire a doctor for something actually important, you don't look at the certification body: You look at long term reputation, which you also do in software.

I don't think you can compare the two. Since one deals with high risk to the patient such as life and death and the other in most does not. (Unless the software being written deals with safety critical systems in a heavily regulated setting.)

From what you are saying, maybe you would be OK consulting a surgeon or an oncologist that has never gone to medical school.
Someone's been at the edibles.
It is unfortunate that someone needs to pick apart a flawed thesis in such detail (as the author did with Blow). The pure empiricist is equaly as detached from reality as the pure theorist, and as such Blow is making up arguments just because they fit his experience, cherry picking examples that fit his rants and promoting the exception to be the rule.
As a profligate flagger: No.
"We are destroying software by always thinking that the de-facto standard for XYZ is better than what we can do, tailored specifically for our use case."

I think about this a lot. A general purpose approach is easy to hop between shallow solutions to many problems. So technologists love to have a few of these on hand, esp because they job hop. They're well known and managers love to say "why not just use XYZ".

But it's obvious that a fine tuned hand crafted solution (possibly built from a general one?) is going to significantly out perform a general one.
That's not how the power grid works
As an opposite view point I work on a 10 year old legacy iOS app which has almost no abstractions and it’s a huge mess. Most classes are many thousands of lines long and mix every concern together.

We are fixing it up by refactoring - many through adding abstractions.

I’m sure code with bad abstractions can scale poorly, but I’m not clear how code without abstractions can scale at all.
Why is that?

You just want to stop someone else from exploring a subject?
Funny, sounds like the Simpsons gag from the same time period: “what’s wrong with this country? Can’t a man walk down the street without being offered a job?”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yDbvVFffWV4
Thanks to your efforts I'm beginning to be a less conservative voucher.
Here's one I use for cryptographic purposes:

let invocations = 0;

export function rand3000() {
invocations += 1;

const timestamp = new Date().getTime() + invocations * 1000;
const masked = (timestamp ^ (timestamp >> 8)) & 0xFF;
const result = masked / 255;

return result;
}
How does it work in relation to the person you replied to? Genuinely asking.
> There's no interesting logistics problem in "when do the trains meet?"

This is trivially resolved with "and the first train is carrying an urgent package for a passenger on the second train. When will the trains meet to deliver the package?".

But on the exam form, that's just extra irrelevant noise.
Sure, they do we're just not as far along the curve!

That said, who is to say the trend isn't reversible some day.

Also let's not forget the selling to private operators does provide benefits, not always, it's not the magic fix we pretend it is.
Nope. But if a topic's been done to death, or there's nothing truly new to be discussed about $topic, or it'll just result in "gnarrrr"-type posts, imma mash that button.
The Café was my second home as a rural teenager into Macs and programming at a time when no other kids were. The 90s being what they were, my mom even let me fly solo to meet other Café members at the old MacHack conferences (in Dearborn, Michigan!).

I have nothing but fond memories of the 90s Mac community. It really was a special time and place. I hope my kids find their equivalent of these spaces.
No

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Of course not

And if it were it wouldn't be something

c or c++ related but all the banks and unemployment systems still written in COBOL
> Most classes are many thousands of lines long and mix every concern together.

That's quite unrelated to abstractions. It's just poorly written code, for whatever reasons may have led there.
it got old fast lol but for a few minutes I was into it.
Those terms exist.

The payout ratio is the percentage of net income actually paid out to equity investors.

For utilities it's around 50% of net income, though it obviously depends
> They offer ARM snapdragon and AMD.

They seem to come with Windows ARM pre-installed, but if one wanted to (also?) run Linux on them, which distro(es) would be available?
SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites from Florida
AIEXPERT here I come!
Kishori Amonkar
Excerpt:

"There is nothing called a gharana. There is only music. It has been bound in these gharanas and that is like dividing music into specific castes. One should not teach the students the limits of this art. There are none. But one has to understand the grammar. Which is why, one is taught the alankaar, the ragas."[5]
– Amonkar on gharanas
What a wonderful demonstration of how a simple UI can create so much joy. Utility to Kolmogorov complexity ratio is quite high on this one.
there are plenty of other places on the internet to discuss meaningless political bullshit. everyone lives in their own echochamber these days
anyways and no one is “exploring the subject” but just spewing shit they saw/read on other social media platforms.

flagging will continue until morale improves :)
> Good design is innovative

Why?

Maybe it's meant in an artistic sense, but under an engineering one I just don't see it.
I don't think that people deciding what goes in "production" are immune to scope inflation. Thinking that we need parity with another software without realizing the cost in terms of complexity of that parity requirement is, I think, a big driver of complexity.
The example shows that Rust can not even prevent an error as something simple as in a matrix transpose. Sure, you could write safe code, but how does this help if people don't do it? It is the exact same problem as in C and I have seen C code that is very reasonable.
Why the Odds of an Asteroid Striking Earth in 2032 Keep Going Up (and Down)
The though alone that software didn’t update itself and required the user to manually check a third party aggregator is crazy these days.
Which points do you think the author has missed?
GitHub Blog – 4 steps to building a natural language search tool
Debian does this.
You're taking offence where none was intended. I was not referring to competence, as I have no means to judge, your inability was a reference to your decision to not to contribute for whatever reason you have chosen.

You've made clear that you are not going to do this. Fine. My point is that this failing you perceive then, is about your decision/inability/choice/forced situation/whatever you want to call it, to not fix it, not theirs.

If you're anywhere near as experienced as you state you are at maintaining OSS projects, you'll know the issue I'm referring to here: entitled armchair quarterbacks telling maintainers what they "should" be doing, but not doing anything to contribute themselves.

Your original remark was that kind of entitled snide, back-handed, snarky comment that deflates OSS maintainers every day.

Engage with it, or accept that's where it is. Don't race around pointing out all the things it doesn't do that you want, that you're not prepared to make happen. You could offer time, you could offer actual hard cash, you could just move on and decide not to care.

That's my point. If you have maintained OSS, you know that's the point, I even contextualised it with an easy to understand metaphor in the form of "broken things" on Wikipedia that literally take seconds to fix.

If you didn't get that on the first or second pass, perhaps you're not quite the experienced maintainer you claim to be, in which case, just hold off criticising for a beat next time, and think about what you could actually do, and if it's nothing that's fine. Move on.
The programmers on the sound team at the video game company I worked for as an intern in 1998 would always stash a couple of extra void pointers in their classes just in case they needed to add something in later. Programmers should never lose sight of pragmatism. Seeking perfection doesn’t help you ship on time. And often, time to completion matters far more than robustness.
> Reflections.

> Home Blog

> 08 Feb, 2025

> The puzzle.

The puzzle seems to have something to do with AI, if my surmise is correct.
Does Haskell (used by NixOS) have a fully reproducible build chain?
I like it because it’s really easy to extend the editor with custom language support/tooling if you know JavaScript/Typescript. Providing custom completions, diagnostics, etcetera. I can also provide custom Go to definitions for cross-language support.
One hint is that all the businesses that have the highest market capitalization earn the highest profit margins and profits. Dividends and share buybacks happen with those profits. If profits are less, then dividends and share buybacks are less, which means less money for shareholders.

It makes no sense to forego $0.80 in your pocket because you do not want the government to get $0.20.