skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does it really make sense to use Quicken (?) with a dialup modem that called into my bank once a day to update my balances like I did in 1996

Well, the modern hot garbage Intuit forces people to use takes 5-15 seconds to save a transaction, 3-5 seconds to mark a transaction as cleared by the bank, it sometimes completely errors out with no useful message and no recourse other than "try again", has random UI glitches such as matched transactions not being removed from the list of transactions to match once matched (wtf?), and is an abject failure at actually matching those transactions without hitting "Find matches", because for whatever reason the software can't seem to figure out that the $2182.77 transaction from the bank matches the only $2182.77 transaction in the ledger. That one really gets my goat, because seriously, WTF guys?

Not to mention the random failure of the interface to show correct totals at random inopportune moments.

Oh, and it costs 5x as much on an annual basis.

I sure would take that 1996 version with some updated aesthetics and a switch to web-based transaction downloading versus the godawful steaming pile of shit we have now- every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Hands down.

This idea that we've made progress is absolutely laughable. Every single interaction is now slower to start, has built-in latency at every step of the process, and is fragile as hell to boot because the interface is running on the framework-du-jour in javascript.

Baby Jesus weeps for the workflows forced upon people nowadays.

I mean seriously, have none of you 20-somethings never used a true native (non-Electron) application before?
Here you go: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switch...
Some people will put it as as small server somewhere, then this battery is like a backup power for servers but built-in. Framework even sells a small case for this sort of usage. If I had skin in that game, I would do this. For developping end-user software, just ssh in and program away!
I've been playing with building out an OpenGL app using C++23 on bleeding edge CMake and Clang and it really is a breath of fresh air... I do run into bugs in both but it is really nice. Most of the bugs are related to import std though which is expected... Oh and clangd(LSP) still having very spotty support for modules.

The tooling is way better than it was 6 months ago though asin I can actually compile code in a non Visual Studio project using import std.

I will be extremely happy the day I no longer need to see a preprocessor directive outside of library code.
We're entering a dark period in US accessibility
> As I take a break from Google

I take it you believe you could go back? I think your time in Google might be at an end, forever.

Unless your exit path was to an alphabet backed entity, you're more valuable to them as a non retained worker right now: they're downsizing.

By the time this ship changes course back to expansion you'd be either too expensive or behind an age/skills curve. Hungrier people will eat your lunch surely?
Don't want any meddling bureaucrats questioning orders when it comes time to build the concentration camps.
If you last worked on Pre templates C++ and now need to work on a template heavy codebase you are effectively writing in a different language. I don't think it will be a few weeks of catching up.
I remember when the Jacksonpollock.org first came online there was a bit of drama around the fact that Miltos Manetas had taken Stamen’s original Flash file (well known within the flash community at the time but not so much outside) and re-hosted it without credit or permission. They sorted it out and Stamen were credited in the end but it opened my eyes to how much of contemporary art it’s actually marketing. (With reference here to Manetas not Pollock)
This will be epically bad if the Australian “robodebt” saga is any indicator. Robodebt was a government software solution that would automate previously manual assessments for overpayment and issuance of debt notices to welfare recipients. It’s exactly the kind of scheme that the new US government would be keen to implement. Claw back welfare overpayments and do it while reducing the size of the public service. What’s not to love?
Well, it didn’t work out so well for the government that implemented it and some of the lessons that came out of it should serve as a warning to any government seeking to go down the same path.

Note: given Australia is less than a tenth the population of the US, add a zero to all the numbers in the article to get a proportionate sense of scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Still OT but a nice segue that jogs my memories of the first PCs that I had available. A friend's Dad bought him a Compaq Deskpro that looked a lot like a portable sewing machine with QuickBASIC and my parents bought me a 128k Mac and QuickBASIC for the Mac. We jointly developed software using QuickBASIC that ran under Apple's System5? OS and various DOSes in PC land (DRDOS, OS/2, DOS2-5, Windows 286 and 3.1, etc).

I think that if you initiated your plan to send those tablets, etc that you should consider sending late 90's model tablets (there weren't many tablet style computers until the 90's I think) with period correct software since a lot of the personal computers, OSes and programming languages available for the 80's rigs required use of multiple disks due to memory and hard drive space constraints.

Far too many times I would be in the middle of an operation and be met with a prompt to load a specific disk from the set of disks for the software that I was using so that the software could perform some operation that wouldn't fit in memory on the disks that had already been read. If you passed them around to kids today they might quickly lose interest in the process. You could of course use those old school PCs to help teach them something of computer architecture and operations so that they can more easily grasp the functionality than if they were handed modern rigs with huge hard drives and zero disk space issues so that things run so quickly there is no time to teach about Disk I/O, clock speeds, etc.

Anyway, thanks for this.
I can't tell if you're serious or joking. If it's the former, could you elaborate on how that works? E.g. are you using a public LLM, or a self-hosted model?
What is your conclusion? Will it be a benign benefit, bringing us closer to post-scarcity, or will we be doomed to a dystopian existence? Can you elaborate on how you see it?
There's a page in the glass bead game where Hermann Hesse writes something about culture obsessed with what boxers think about politics and what scientists think about soap opera. (My words, it's a dim memory)

1943. I think thats Prescient. Why we think Rogan or Musk would know, why "true" has any validity beyond opinion is beyond me.

I dislike the word "traitor" but when people in positions of power construct fantasies of the lived world between them which explode into the commons, I think they're traitors to everything I hold dear. They're destroying society for shits and giggles, or money. At least revolutionaries thought they'd build a better world, I can't even imagine what world these two think they're building.
I'm sure the fine-tuned LLM is cool and useful and you put a lot of work in to it.

I hope for your sake that I'm not typical, but I was put majorly off by the experience, and never even saw the LLM in action. Requiring an email, email verification and credit card info and an auth before showing any examples is unfortunate. It presents as a scam. I'm sure it's not a scam, but you're introducing this in a world already full of scams. You're skipping a lot of necessary trust, confidence and excitement building before onboarding. But, I understand your excitement in just having built it and wanting to eagerly show it off.
Abbreviating create as 'creat' is a bit stupid but it is the kind of quirk that makes me feel at home. The opposite can be found here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/weekend-scripter-us... . That is a world where well... I have switched jobs once specifically to get out of that world....
God, how I miss the centrists.
Obligatory:
https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsmemes/comments/gtzprh/noethe...
Because security is hard and there are people constantly working on finding new issues.

It's a bit like asking why the army needs tanks when horses worked well the previous war
This is so cool! It'd be even more fun if it had sound effects.
LLM's have used up all publicly available training materials, did Elon just found a new source of text/materials to train his AI on?
Always disappointed me the accessibility guidelines like security were bolted on not baked in. Considering how early in the life of Web they emerged, it's passing strange how unregarded they are.

ALT tags on images are about it.
To be fair std::ranges seems like the biggest mistake the committee allowed into the language recently.

Effectively other than for rewriting older iterators based algorithms to using new ranges iterators I just don't use std::ranges... Likely the compiler cannot optimise it as well (yet) and all the edge cases are not workes out yet. I also find it to be quite difficult to reason about vs older iterator based algorithm's.

for each would take a lambda and call the lambda for each iterator pair, if the compiler can optimise it it becomes a loop, if it can't it becomes a function call in a loop which probably isn't much worse... If for some reason the lambda needs to allocate per iteration it's going to be a performance nightmare.

Would it really be much harder to take that lambda, move it to a templated function that takes an iterator and call it the old fashioned way?
This may come as a surprise to you, but the vast majority of users absolutely hate it when their software changes.

They don't want all new interfaces with all new buttons and options and menus.

People get used to their workflows and they like them. They use their software to do something. The software itself is not the goal (gaming excepted).

I'm not suggesting that things should never be gussied up, or streamlined or made more efficient from a UX perspective, but so many software shops change just to change and "stay fresh".
You..clearly know nothing about power grids, because utilities are deploying batteries precisely because they increase reliability an ease maintenance. And microgrids exist all over the US - a bunch are in Alaska and other very rural areas. Those communities have started adding battery storage systems to account for sudden load changes their generators can't handle, generator failure or maintenance, and so on.

Without them the grid is like a bunch of dominoes where a failure can cascade unless grid operators, or automated systems, react fast enough. Battery systems are like power firewalls; if the main grid goes down, the battery keeps right on chugging.

If circuit protection devices or an equipment failure happens on a main transmission line, the utility has hours to fix it, and meanwhile everyone has power. Ditto for maintenance. Need to replace that big huge switch that feeds part of the county? No problem, just...shut it off. Long as you're done before the battery bank runs out, everything's fine.

Right now you can end up with situations where a power plant will "trip" and go offline, such as when a large amount of load is disconnected due to a transmission line failure or substation failure. The grid frequency goes up if the power plants on the grid can't throttle back fast enough, and instead, to keep the grid from going over-frequency, the plant goes offline entirely.

If a lot of areas are on battery - those systems can be commanded to start charging to stop the plants from speeding up. If the grid goes dead, it's not nearly as big a deal, because the grid operators have more time to do things like sequence the re-connection of all those areas.

I'd imagine that with a bunch of battery systems distributed around a grid, they could potentially be able help black-start a plant if needed.

Battery systems also reduce the need for a transmission line upgrade; when demand is higher than the line's capacity, the battery system steps in. When demand is below the line capacity, the battery system charges.
I'm building Provisor: situational awareness for event organizers. See your team on the map; and position & collaborate in real-time. Like ATAK, but much simpler to use.

https://www.provisor.app
> Why LLM has incentive to provide answer that sounds suitable regardless of quality, is there a feedback loop?

Yes, that is how LLM's work. They are trained with feedback loops to answer plausibly.
TFA is presenting one dimension (junior to staff), but actually appears to be talking about three dimensions:

1. Title - which comes with different activities and quality standards to some degree. (I don't fully agree with the definitions, but to be fair, they're quite different from company to company.)

2. Familiarity with the code base you're working on.

3. Familiarity with the tech stack currently used.

I think the strongest correlation between these and LLM usefulness is (1) and (3).

For (1), they can be useful for churning out something quickly (if quality is not a big issue, e.g. experimentation), which I personally rarely do, because good tooling makes it easy enough to build an MVP in a stack you're familiar with. If I'm not familiar with a stack I have to learn, I use this kind of thing as an opportunity to do just that quite often. And in many cases, I look for ways to experiment without writing any code. I can see how it's controversial.

I personally find them most useful for learning a new stack (3) - armed with a search engine (and ideally someone with experience I can talk to) in addition. This seems comparatively uncontroversial.

For (2), understanding a large code base quicky, I'm pretty bearish. There won't be a lot of SO posts and the like about a company's internal code base, so the results are very mixed in my experience. I'd call this part highly controversial, and the kind of thing where those who don't know the code base find it to be magic, those who do know it find the results terrible.
Synopsis from the project's "instructor guide:

>This is not a computer science course, nor even an information science course—though naturally it could be used in such programs.

>Our aim is not to teach students the mechanics of how large language models work, nor even the best ways of using them in various technical capacities.

>We view this as a course in the humanities, because it is a course about what it means to be human in a world where LLMs are becoming ubiquitous, and it is a course about how to live and thrive in such a world.
Well, .NET only exists in first place because of Sun's lawsuit, Ext-VOS was designed with J++ in mind.

Thus having high compatibility with how Java used to be was a big factor designing C# 1.00
Show HN: Open-sourced template with Nestjs and PostgreSQL and TypeORM
Nest.js truly lives up to its reputation as the Spring Boot for front-end developers. It can quickly launch a backend project, and for commonly used features such as Swagger and message queues, there are ready-to-use modules for direct integration.

If you're interested in Nest.js or planning to develop a website, I recommend the following open-source Nest.js template. It integrates TypeORM, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Swagger, which can quickly meet your development needs.

https://github.com/Penggeor/nestjs-template
wow, that's an amazingly impossible standard no software lives up to.

Or much technology at all. If you use anything that is 1000 years old, it's probably been maintained or cared for a lot during those 1000 years
A simple decision rule in (personal) aviation is three strikes.

e.g., (1) nervous passenger; (2) clouds coming in; (3) running late -> abort.

It produces very conservative decisions, and overcomes the drive to just try.

But the interesting part is that you then realize how often you are at two strikes. That in itself makes you more careful.

Two strikes I would call "noticeable". I wouldn't wait for near-miss events. Then there's a measure of how on-edge we're running.

So at work, I just put a red dot on the calendar if it's a day with something urgent and visible to outsiders, or if we're having problems we don't see our way out of. It keeps us from tolerating long stretches of stress before taking a step back, and we usually also do attribution: if x is causing n>4 red days per month, it gets attention.

Obviously, varies with context: high-achieving team would be mostly always red internally, but rarely externally.
Granted, fortunately lots of that book is now obsolete and mostly just good for laughs about the bad old times. And most of the predictions it had about future innovation never turned out that way either.
Actual Finance (similar open source software) does this via SimpleFIN Bridge. It even supported connecting a credit card option that rocket money doesn't.
I desperately want to deny "dress for success" ever mattterd to me but I'd very much be lying. I've worn suits to fit in, I've worn jackets to project an image, I've dressed down to make a political point. Now, just wear clothes which are comfortable and appropriate to circumstances which admits circumstances can change.

Formal wear has consumed itself. We need sumptuary laws back.
> In the fall of 1915, the foundations of physics began to crack. Einstein’s new theory of gravity seemed to imply that it should be possible to create and destroy energy, a result that threatened to upend two centuries of thinking in physics.

Not just seem to imply, but they do imply[0]. Does that mean that we can build a machine that generates energy and negentropy forever (e.g. an artificial Sun), thus, we can outlive the heat-death of the rest of the Universe? Yes, absolutely. But there are other existential threats, like the collapse of false-vacuum. In the end, it is not known if we have limited or unlimited time here, but Noether's theorem doesn't answer that.

[0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=general+relativity+and+conse...
Isn't this time to write the center cannot hold things fall apart
Correct, same with windsurf, you can ask it to first generate unit tests, then the code, and it will run the test, analyze the results, comment where and why it made mistakes, improve its own code, and repeat the tests until it works.

What I’ve also found very useful in windsurf is to have it analyze existing code bases, you can ask it to generate markdown documentation for specific functionality, including mermaid diagrams.

Also helps to have it first generate design documents, improve the designs until satisfactory, and then have it generate the tests and code accordingly.
I stumbled over that 19% in the article. Maybe in practice you wouldn't want to convert a GIF to lossless webp, but original video to lossy webp? And then the lossy webp would be slighly smaller than the GIF with far superior quality?
Yeah, I have plenty of criticisms of Go, but this is something that it got right.

For those who aren't familiar with the issue, in Java you can assign an array of a subclass to a variable declared as an array of the superclass, which leads to issues if you actually try to mutate it. Imagine if Cat and Dog both inherit from Animal, assigning a Dog[] to an Animal[] is totally valid, but then setting one of the elements to a Cat will throw an an exception.
also can folow me on twitter leeleepenkman :) hope you enjoy it ! this project made me a lot of money
UB is a feature of the standard, not the implementation. Many of those behaviors can be defined. Modern C++ conveniently allows you to replace many of the bits that have UB, per standard, with your own bits with defined behavior with zero overhead. This was not always the case. You aren’t dependent on the compiler implementor. The ability to consistently do this transparently became practical around C++17 IMO. The C++ standard library is in many regards obsolete and many orgs treat it that way.

I never suggested that C++ was “a form of high level assembly”. I’ve written enough assembly and C to know better; you lose a bit of precision with C++. But now I can define (or not) the behavior I want in a way that is largely transparent. This has been a brilliant change to the language.

If you have a foundational library that makes different and/or explicit guarantees than std, it is pretty easy to police that in a code base with automation. Everyone doing high-performance and/or high-assurance systems is dragging in few if any dependencies, so this is practical. The kinds of things that C++ is really good at for new code are the kinds of things where this is what you would do regardless.

Developers don’t even have to be hardware experts, they just have to not use std for most things. That is a pretty low barrier. And std is a mess with the albatross of legacy support. Reimagined C++20 native “standard” libraries are much, much cleaner and safer (and faster).

Legacy C++ code bases aren’t going to be rewritten in a new language. New C++ code bases can take advantage of alternative foundations that ignore std and many do. Most things should not be written in C++, but for some things C++ is unmatched currently and safer in practice than is often suggested with basic hygiene.
Privatize the profit, socialise the losses.

The one privatisation I believe the UK got right was British Telecom.

We now have a strongly regulated infrastructure side called OpenReach - the price they can charge for last mile connectivity is limited, and as such we have a load of different ISP's which either compete on tech and service (AAISP, Zen) or cost (PlusNet et al).

And then a proliferation of alternative last mile providers has also occurred - I now have the option of 900/100 FTTP from OpenReach based suppliers, 1130/104 DOCSIS from Virgin Media and 900/900 FTTP from CityFibre based suppliers.

I'm paying £40 a month for the latter.
There is no deficit. Their neocortexes haven't died, and they are not insane.

Just like the "intelligent" physicist concocts a theory, and then proves himself completely wrong with an experiment, an "intelligent" man concocts a social conspiracy theory, but nothing proves him wrong: instead, he pronounces those who "don't get it" hopelesly stupid, too socially dumb to participate in a society.
Wow.
And your way to keep up the intelligent discourse is calling a critical voice “mentally ill” after using a straw man argument (claiming I think everyone is “against me”, which I never expressed)?
What about you do some critical thinking assessing your own entitlement?
That's an excruciatingly blinkered opinion.

Ignoring the fact that our own level of "innovation" as you call it is built on centuries of brutal exploitation of land and resources and people.

And the "sea level rise" you mention is a consequence of that "innovation", and our enlightened culture keeps building houses next to the sea using energy sources that contribute to the rising sea-level.

Very little of what you buy these days is what it costs (a) to manufacture it and (b) to dispose of it. Where are those costs bourne? Slaves for (a) and the future and other-peoples-back-yards for (b).

So, I would say that their culture is sustainable, and doesn't have even one percent of our own self-inflicted, self-destructive, intractable problems.
Don’t believe the job postings. Every job opening gets literally 1000 applications within the first few hours. It’s almost impossible to stand out from the noise.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook is not about hate against the UNIX philosophy but about frustrations with inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in UNIX implementations. I have often seen people confusing the idea of UNIX philosophy and various UNIX implementation details (not the implementation of its philosophy but of mundane concepts like printing or the use of /usr), and then using these implementation details as strawman arguments against the philosophy.
Unfortunately many of those critics are as up to date as when the book was originally published.