skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trump ran on saying whatever to whomever. his intentions though were obvious. He ran on cutting spending by 2 trillion. Where did people think this was going to come from? He ran on ending red tape. He ran on reducing regulation.

These days folk getting approved by the senate just have to show up. No one believes RFK when he says he's changed his mind on vax. I mean, these guys are lackeys, not stupid.

Democracy is about letting people who have no understanding, who pay minimal attention, who are easily led by media and populism, choose who should be in charge.

It is working as designed.

Do we need a better system? I'd argue yes. But all the others are worse.

If the population votes him a 3rd term, If they vote for congress who supports that- that is democracy. The people will get what they vote for.

We are literally seeing what "govt by the people" looks like. This is not democracy dying. It's democracy showing its flaws.
> This is based on a too literal interpretation of democracy.

Attempting to run a democracy in a non-literal way seems like a recipe for disaster.

That seems to imply that citizens get to cast a vote and have their voice heard...unless those in charge decide the citizens don't know what is best for them.

As a country we picked Trump. For better or worse we made that bed and we now have to lie in it.
> No, it's not.

It absolutely is. Capital is appropriative. Capital destroys the natural world for growth and imposes tyranny on the working classes. So, agree to disagree.

> The violence to force that "dream" is.

Violence? You mean protests? Or policy changes that you disagree with?
Annoying there's no sqlite option. Not enough money in it? Difficult?
He also has combustion.inc which is a thermometer for nerds.
YC is funding cruise missiles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41305736

This story was even flagged. Like wtf?
How to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta
I do understand wanting to avoid “politics” (however that gets defined) on HN but in this particular moment it feels like a real loss.

I’ve read articles about how DOGE might have misinterpreted data because of COBOL, just today I saw the announcement of all these “5 things” emails being plugged into AI… there are a lot of people on HN well positioned to comment knowledgably on this stuff but the threads get flagged very quickly.
Our Fiscal Year starts in October but one of a subsidiaries start in March which means we're often in different fiscal years. Make sure to account for that. We need to translate between real dates to fiscal dates all the time.
There's certainly an argument that anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. That argument would conclude that the government should indeed not exist, and consequently have no programs. The reality is more complicated, something like the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate, but it is hard to say that the current distribution between private and public sectors is optimal.
I paid for it for a while, but I kept running out of usage limits right in the middle of work every day. I'd end up pasting the context into ChatGPT to continue. It was so frustrating, especially because I really liked it and used it a lot.

It became such an anti-pattern that I stopped paying. Now, when people ask me which one to use, I always say I like Claude more than others, but I don’t recommend using it in a professional setting.
Many people are tired from traveling and they just want a meal before they go to sleep.
We've been searching for the bounds of art, poetry, and music, for millennia without any hope of definition or finality. Thankfully HN user milesrout figured it out. That's a load off my mind.
Thanks for the positive reply, will 100% post here when it launches fully!
> A lot of government funded research is of that kind.

A lot of everything is of that kind. Larry's folly is of that kind. Most defense spending is of that kind. Most startups are of that kind.

BTW, my brother was one of those officials, judging grants at the NSF in DC. But that was only after a career in physics at Sandia.
Like you say inflation erodes public debt and so the consequences of taking on a lot of public debt is that the government is also tempted to increase inflation.

If you print money you will increase the rate of inflation. The question is how much and when. During crisis, often lending is impacted which can lead to a decrease in the supply of available capital. Printing money in this circumstance can head off deflation and thus like you point out you have printed money without causing inflation to increase above the historical baseline rate like we did in the 2008 crisis. Crucially, you cannot rely on this strategy to reliably make up for a budget shortfall as we have seen time and time again (see bullets for two examples). The parent comment is correct that often a perpetual budget shortfall leading to an expansion of public debt can and often does lead to an inflation crisis but you are right that there is a bit more nuance.

To make an analogy: if you eat much more than the average person you will become overweight. You might object that this is factually incorrect and a silly thing to say because there are some exceptions such as if you only eat fresh vegetables, are training for a marathon, have a medical condition etc but in broad strokes this is true. However in the general case, eating too much leads to weight gain (even if it is arguably not the root cause which may be that we have engineered our food supply for financial incentives rather than compatibility with our evolutionary history :D).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#Roman_Empire
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money_of_the_Qing_dynast...
Two rapidly rising before killed threads, on this incredibly vital hackerly topic,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154904

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154114

Incredible post by Krebs. Spot on.
Thanks for sharing - I really feel Claude gets me ;-)

https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/e12e?share

> Your comments read like Warren and Brandeis met Alan Kay at a Norwegian tech conference.

I consider this high praise indeed, lol.
> license plates are random

First time I hear about this. What’s up with license plates?
> The problem with Parquet is it’s static. Not good for use cases that involve continuous writes and updates. Although I have had good results with DuckDB and Parquet files in object storage. Fast load times.

You can use glob patterns in DuckDB to query remote parquets though to get around this? Maybe break things up using a hive partitioning scheme or similar.
I've worked from home for 20 years. Is office coffee still as horrible as it was? I thought startups all upgraded to $20,000 Clover brewing systems or something?
> P.S. Item #1 may not apply depending on on some other court cases, where the Trump administration is refusing to say exactly WTF Musk's role actually is

No, they've said in court that he is a White House advisor with no decision-making role (not even at the recently-renamed US DOGE Service, which—despite the public portrayal of him as (originally co-)head of DOGE, he is not formally involved in).
Hardly. There are simply two ways to expose incompetence. You can be nice or you can be a prick. Your choice. Seeing your handle, you may find it interesting to note that my master's degree in CS was completed at the Technion. I am not looking for marketing people or buzzwords. I am looking for people mature enough to handle other people and get the job done. For example, if you tasked a security boy genius with pushing a fix and all they ended up doing was alienating the dev team, then you are scoring an own goal. I want bright AND mature. I am picky that way.
The loss of their jobs is all part of gods plan, apparently https://www.mediaite.com/politics/house-republican-tells-fir...
>“scam” means intentional deceit.

Yes. I'm pretty sure any engineer working on this knows it's not "a few years away". But it doesn't stop product teams from taking adcvantadge of the hype cycle. Hence, "use deception to deprive (someone) of money or possessions.".
Not just gaps. Blind spots too. Humans are driven by curiosity and limited by biases. You're only painting half of the picture.

> Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.

Your message is a bit late. We've had people zoned out in front of their TVs for decades.
People take ubiquitous calculating power for granted today. But back in the day, a portable or semi-portable machine able to do math in milliseconds was magical. It was as cutting-edge as ChatGPT, something that came straight from Science Fiction.
Someone analyzes your profile with the latest model for free and you're like "not impressed"
Show HN: Mayo – A lightweight, web-based audio player that works offline
Here is the backstory: I used to use YouTube Music, but then I deleted my Google account. I didn't want Spotify because I hate it for various reasons, and at the same time I wanted to show off my programming skills. So here we are.

---

On the client: solidjs + tailwindcss + minisearch. IndexedDB as the database. One web worker to download audio to OPFS. Another web worker for indexing with minisearch. On top of this a service worker to precache static assets and make the app work offline.

On the server: bun + astro + sqlite + ffmpeg. Full-text search is implemented with fts5. Astro Actions is the best RPC.

---

The submission link goes straight to demo.

Here is the GitHub link:

https://github.com/mayo-dayo/app

Open to feature requests, but no promises.
Sometimes you should listen to it if it’s in a good faith.

Because experience does matter.

Often really experienced people have hi quality intuitions they can’t explain and break down to pieces clear to everyone in the room.
> but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?
> I don't want some complicated random password.

It doesn't have to be complicated. A random passphrase can be much simpler and include significantly more entropy: four to six words plus a six-digit number. Any password generator worth a damn can generate something like this.
Apparently it is Windows-only and you can only save files on OneDrive.
Not having any tools is far more expensive because now you’re always paying for labor and parts not just parts.

As to things being more expensive that’s in part an illusion. Things where more affordable in the 1950’s when homes where 1,000sf, there was no cable bill, no cellphones, no internet, and no PC etc and that still represented a far higher standard of living than what came before.

I’m not advocating for giving up modern convince, just recognizing the slow shift from luxury to expected has real costs.
People had been stealing ideas long before computers started doing it.
The National Science Foundation funded the original research that became Google: https://www.nsf.gov/news/origins-google

That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it's entire history.

This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said "Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!" But it was.

Basic research is like VC funding, it's a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn't change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC's and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.

This really feels more and more every day like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping
Have you tried Claude 3.7 + Deepseek as the architect? Seeing as "DeepSeek R1 + claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022" is the second place option, "DeepSeek R1 + claude-3-7" would hopefully be the highest ranking choice so far?
Wasn't Doge floated before the election, with Trump embracing the idea?

Regardless, Trump has made a living as a (slimy) business man. No one should have heard his campaign speeches and taken them at face value.

He didn't even have to be lying at the time, he could have simply changed his mind. The man seems to be driven only by two motivations: his family and making deals. The first one is often seen as admirable or honorable, the second means you'll do whatever it takes to negotiate a situation where you're better off by whatever metrics matter to you (usually money and status).
there are lots of very robust programs in various languages to learn from. It would be hard to know in isolation but by contrast it is easier to learn what good code looks like. Some code will flow and be easy to read. Other code will be obtuse. Start with simpler projects that don't involve a lot of low-level calls. Work up to more complex implementations. There was never a better time to read code than now with an LLM as a tutor. If you use one of the AI-integrated editors or a code packer you can provide a lot of context to the LLM. Ask the LLM for important modules and work your way through them. Ask it for alternative implementations of a function or translated into a different language. Set up an program in a running environment and walk through using a debugger. Look at the way the code is organized in files and modules. You will inevitably encounter cruft and "bad code". Sometimes there are good reasons for that too. If you prefer books, the Architectures of Open Source Applications (AOSA) books are interesting, but there really isn't a way to avoid pulling down a repo and reading the code. Soon, you'll develop your own taste for what makes sense to you and be able to think independently about the choices the developer made.

It is a bit sad but I think with the advent of LLMs some of the stylistic quirks of programmers past will become a bit anachronistic. Still, they will present opportunities for code archeology.
That is how a large portion of the internet works, e.g. in most subreddits certain viewpoints will be instantly banned without any discussion. HN is kind of strange in that respect.
Technical people don't write code, they (along with product people) specify things exhaustively. While in theory a super AGI can do everything (therefore deprecating all of humanity) in reality I suspect that given existing patterns in orgs of layers of managers who don't like to wade into the details specifying to the nth degree there will be a need for lots of SMEs except that AI will probably be a leaky abstraction and you'll still need technical people to guide the automation efforts
I think if you believe LLMs can truly generalize and will be able to replace all labor in entire industries and 10x every year, you pretty much should believe in ASI at which point having a job is the least of your problems.

if you rule out ASI, then that means progress is going to have to slow. consider that programming has been getting more and more automated continually since 1954. so put yourself in a position where what LLMs can do is a complement to what you can do. currently you still need to understand how software works in order to operate one of these things successfully.
As long as these companies keep pretending AI is ready to replace humans, I will be biased against lies, thank you.
Note my nomenclature here is parent (doesn't block), worker (calls vfork), and child (calls execve).

If you used vfork then the worker doesn't unblock until execve has executed successfully (AFAIU). In that case if the exec succeeded then nothing will have been written whereas if it failed then the child will have written out the error code to the worker's stack before calling _exit.

The worker can then use an atomic write to communicate the ultimate result back to the parent in an asynchronous manner.
yes.
The research that goes into it helps be finally learn the concept better.
Having a few subscribers also want to spend time to write something and put it out.
paulg is more concerned with “wokeism” than he is with the federal government being stripped for parts.
Underground compressed air energy storage facility green-lit at Broken Hill
The best available evidence is that bug count correlates only with number of lines of code, and therefore an approach that reduces the number of lines of code is objectively better. Some people don't like Whitney-style code, but as far as I can see that's just intellectual cowardice.
Alternatively, we could recognize the importance of electing officials who are serious and competent - a strategy that proved reasonably effective for over 200 years.
Fine-Tuning LLMs with Your PDF Documents: A Simple Guide
Challenges in Extracting Knowledge from PDFs
Despite their ubiquity in academic and technical domains, PDFs present significant challenges for automated information retrieval due to their diverse formatting, embedded elements, and lack of standardized metadata structures. Consequently, conventional AI models that rely solely on retrieval-based approaches often struggle to generate precise, contextually relevant responses. This necessitates fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on domain-specific corpora extracted from PDFs to enhance accuracy, consistency, and knowledge retention. Continue reading on Medium!
lol dude where have you been
While reading APoSD, one of my thoughts was that it walks up to, but never gets to the point of advocating for Literate Programming, and that resolving how the author feels about that presentation would make for a better and clearer text.

Apparently, there is something of a tension at Stanford in that freshmen are being taught to keep methods/functions short, while the course on software design has as a pre-requisite CS140 which in turn requires CS 107 or EE 108B and CS107 requires CS106B, so it probably couldn't be taken until almost halfway through a four-year degree (and there is a note on the course page that preference will be given to those graduating in the near term).

That said, there is value in laying out basic principles and premises, _and_ the experiences which in turn support them. Reading through your link, it seems to line up well with my understanding of recommendations for comments in APoSD, which makes one wonder how it could be made to work as a text for an introductory course in some language which was approachable by beginners.
This. Thank you.

People stop caring about optimising or improving stuff. Even programmers are guilty of it. I haven't changed my vimrc in over 5 years
Congress passed laws allocating the spending. That by definition is consent.
Diamond & Shurman
I like Aider but I've turned off auto-commit. I just can't seem to let the AI actually commit code for me. Do you regularly let Aider commit for you? How much do you review the code written by it?
> It does not provide an entrance into technical layers like configuring the soundblaster irq in config.sys did

All that did was result in extreme frustration. My knowledge of creating game-specific boot disks to eek out 1k more memory did nothing for my ability to write software, except perhaps to appreciate having more RAM and good UX.
> This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist.

It is a decapitation strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_(military_strateg...

Ukraine is more or less a proxy war between America and Russia, which is also between John Locke's Social Contract and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, which said simply is whether rules are made in respect to reason (law) or in respect to power (order). It's also a fight over who are the final enforcers of law. Are citizens the last line of enforcers of the law or is "law" always enforced by the strong against the weak?

America has the world's largest military and a world ending nuclear arsenal, so direct conflict is unconscionable. That means what's left is high leverage asymmetric warfare. Russia corrupted America's elites (and German elites to a significant degree, too), either through money, compromising material, or the promise of power. Some of those elites are people like Peter Thiel, who are absolute power houses of the American surveillance capitalist state. Private intelligence companies were leveraged to divide the American public and then conquer it.

America is experiencing a decapitation strike. By compromising our leadership, our economy and technological flywheel is being destroyed, our ideology is being corrupted, and trust in us has been decimated. Our closest allies now see us as someone who must be weakened and defended against. We abandoned Ukraine. There is no argument that Trump's America is good faith in any way.

It's a decapitation strike.

The point is to damage us and our future, and we're letting it happen. Our military that took an oath to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic have failed their obligation. Now America at large is rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. Americans are obeying in advance.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/decapitation-strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK)
One more perspective:

I didn't spend the energy stressing over the initial wave of media hype surrounding the first published probability.

A few days of waiting for rational thought to prevail helps.
This was far more impressive to be quite honest [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
I find the lack of discussion of type systems really surprising in these sorts of discussions and books. Effective use of type systems is a killer factor for me for creating clean, safe, readable and maintainable software designs.

When used correctly, strong static type checking make certain kinds of bugs impossible, spare you from writing many kinds of tedious tests that often get in the way of refactoring, serve as documentation, and make refactoring/maintenance an order of magnitude faster and safer. Even when a type checker isn't available, avoiding dynamic behaviour is very often the safer way to go so learning how to think in that way is still beneficial.

Most of these minor topics like how big a function should be, what to name your variables, or even if you write tests before/after coding... it's like trying to come up with general rules on how to write essays, creating graphic designs, or how to cook. "It depends" on the context and juggling different priorities each time. It's the kind of thing you only learn properly through practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge), so there's only so much to gain in reading about it or discussing it after you've defined the no-brainer things to always do and always avoid.
> So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires

That's the stupid thing in the end. Gut the parks service, here's your $500 tax break on your several hundred million+ income.
Vanilla Lua traditionally doesn’t show any substantial difference to python or ruby. You’re probably talking about LuaJIT in interpreter mode (jit off).

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
I’m comfortable doing mechanical work and when my Honda Fit said I had to remove a shitload of parts just to replace a spark plug I said fuck it and traded it in.