skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pragmatic, but good, advice that I would recommend anybody to follow in their daily pracrise.

However I'd defend the notion that on the bad end of things you can have such a thing as (objectively?) hard to read code. With "hard to read" I do not mean "nobody can figure it out with time", what I mean is, that figuring it out takes 99% of programmers longer than the equivalent in another language or style. As you rightly point out, it is important to realize that this is a statistical realization and not an universal law of nature, so it really matters on which cohort of people you look at and recommendations stemming from such observations should be taken with a grain of salt.

Yet, underneath all of that isn't there such a thing as truly objectively hard to read style? Brainfuck for example is an objectively hard to read language – they put that even into the name of the language. Does that mean there is not a single person who can read it fluently? Probably not, but that doesn't invalidate the point. A double black diamond ski track is objectively harder to ski, exactly because there are less people that are able to ski it.

If you see programming as working with language and symbols to achieve some behavior, it is clear that there are patterns who match more with the known (familiar) of most people. If you ask non-programmers or non-mathematicians how to describe some action in any way they like they will probably use their daily language. That means code that looks somewhat similar to how a regular person would write it down is surely on the "very familiar"-end of things. Now I did argue that maximum familiarity to regular people is not in itself a desireable goal, we need to make a tradeoff between familiarity and suitability to express program structures and operations. The latter is not how regular people think at all, so using them as an absolute guide isn't a good idea. However thinking about how to write things that they are both expressive in terms of programming behavior and easy to reason about is a desireable goal. There just isn't a single right way of doing that and sometimes good enough is just that.
Report on the Construction of Situations (1957)
If AI-generated proofs become incomprehensible to humans, do they still count as -math- in the traditional sense?
Container tabs and specifically Temporary Containers are the two things I always miss on non-Firefox browsers
For me the problem is mainly when trying to sleep, specifically, at Burning Man, where it can be very difficult. I used foam earplugs for years, but they leave something to be desired.

The AirPods Max…get them on my ears correctly, and I’m in a forest. It’s uncanny. It was the most profound alteration to my experience there in years.
Intel Appoints Lip-Bu Tan as Chief Executive Officer
It's pretty depressing how society went from "that would never happen" to general apathy.
Understanding why something is true - that's the beauty of it
I happened to use uv recently for a pet project, and I totally agree with you. It's really really good. I couldn't believe its dependency resolution and pulling can be so fast. Imho, it's the python package manager (I don't know the most suitable name to categorize it) done right, everything just works, the correct way.
Imagine if a competent CEO had been at the wheel. Instead of spending quite literally billions on who knows what (certainly not a significantly better, more competitive Firefox), Mozilla could have instead transitioned to an endowed foundation model and built a sustainable, long-term future that could weather a scenario like today’s DOJ case which was not impossible to foresee (US v. Microsoft was in 2001 after all).
Burger chains have at least gotten a start on differentiating their pricing - by raising prices dramatically across the board, and telling anyone who’s frugal or just broke that they can only get discounts (to bring prices slightly lower than today’s pricing, but still a lot more than before) if they use the app. Upper-class people don’t bother with it and pay full price, frugal people take the time to figure out the cheapest way to use one of the current “offers” to assemble a meal.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the yellow lightning bolt stayed yellow in the PuTTY icon (among other uses) because the symbol was likely just borrowed from safety warnings. Yellow has been preferred for a long time since it's considered a high-vis color and would typically stand out on industrial machinery housing where you might want to clearly warn someone of shock hazard with a pictograph so the warning transcends language. The lightning bolt stayed yellow as a result of "that's how we've always done it, I guess" thinking
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect from an Uber for (somethign)?

Garbage company, garbage culture, garbage business model.
Interestingly although all of C's other types are in fact just the machine integers wearing funny hats (e.g. char is just either a signed or unsigned byte depending on platform, float is just the 32-bit unsigned integers as binary fractions) the pointers are not actually just integers.

They could be, but it's much worse from a performance perspective if you just have these raw machine addresses rather than the pointers in the C language so actual C compilers haven't done that for many years. ISO/IEC TS 6010 describes the best current attempt to come up with coherent semantics for these pointers, or here's a Rustier perspective https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2020/12/14/provenance.html [today Rust specifically says its pointers have provenance and what that means, like that TS for the C language]

Now, if you read Ralf's post and want to argue about that I'm afraid there are already lots of HN discussions and your point has probably already been made so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419740 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42878450
I dabble with python occasionally and I'm always fighting with tools and tool combinations that don't really combine well. The last time I settled on using conda to get some isolation of python versions and then pipenv for getting some sane package management with a lock file. Not pretty but it kind of worked. Except I had a hard time convincing vs code and pycharm of the correct environment with that combination (couldn't resolve libraries I installed). I got it working eventually but it wasn't a great experience.

It sounds like uv should replace the combination. Of course there is the risk of this being another case of the python community ritually moving the problem every few years without properly solving it. But it sounds like uv is mostly doing the right thing; which is making global package installation the exception rather than the default. Most stuff you install should be for the project only unless you tell it otherwise.

Will give this a try next time I need to do some python stuff.
I’m personally not interested in a mishmash laptop-tablet thing. You end up with a thing that is either good at one and not the other or a thing that is bad at both.
I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14.

This text makes me relive it!
>there is a difference between truth and falsehood

Of course, but that's distinct from propaganda vs non-propaganda. A foreign actor can secretly pay for a marketing campaign that spreads the truth. A scientist can make an honest mistake and spread a falsehood.

>we can tell the difference with reasonable accuracy.

Depends on the claim. Suppose I tell you that exactly one year from now, at your current location, it will be raining. Is that true or false?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fix:

to direct one's attention or efforts : FOCUS

also : DECIDE, SETTLE —usually used with on

had fixed on the first Saturday in June

All eyes fixed on her as she entered the room.
We already have proofs by exhaustion that could only ever be verified using computers. Some people would argue they are not "elegant" but I don't think anyone would argue they are not math.
Exactly. The purpose of it is to help you, that is its one and only utility. It has one job, and it refuses to do it.
It's because they "nerfed" Cursor by not sending the whole files anymore to Claude, but if you use RooCode, the performance is awesome and above average developer. If you have the money to pay for the queries, try it :)
Videos had Japanese men, but the event was in China - Video generator must have just went with "generic asian warrior"
Portability-wise this was perhaps the case ~20 years ago but today I am not aware of any platform that doesn't have a decent C++ compiler so I don't think what you're saying is generally true.

I also don't agree on the second point - I don't see what makes the CMake "harder to implement" than make/mk. It's already implemented and all you need is a compiler, which we have plenty of.
I sell a physical product from the USA worldwide.

VAT and all other relevant taxes are entirely handled by the person importing it, before the product is released from customs. I don't even think about it.

Perhaps SAAS people just should physically send a "activation code" in the mail? Then the person importing it can just handle it.
In a way people don't do math just for its utility, they do it because it's beautiful, challenging, and deeply fulfilling
> I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes

I reckon majority of operations do not strictly need distributed nature of Kubernetes and for many SMBs, which comfortably fit into one or two rack units plus maybe a storage shelf, that's even counterproductive.

However, Kubernetes, being resource virtualization platform, offers some very nice isolation and admin access control capabilities. I guess that's the power of kubernetes for most orgs.
>That's not a tariff that's a tax.

A tarrif is a tax. Doesn't have to be on physical products or be applied at the customs office.

>If you start taxing foreign entities different from local you are violating all sorts of treaties and depending on how the laws are written it could be unconstitutional discrimination (once you start talking about foreign ownership etc.)

Nothing that couldn't be overcome. Those treaties didn't exist at one point, and wont exist on another point.
I didn't mean to mock you. I thought you were serious.
> pro Jewish interests

They're pro-Israel, not pro-Jewish-people-in-Germany.

The AfD leadership is full of people who used to be openly neo-Nazi. The party blames immigrants, foreigners and ethnic minorities for virtually every problem in Germany. This is the kind of movement that instinctively sends a chill down most Jewish people's spines. Xenophobic, racist, crude political movements have historically been bad for Jews.
Well, this AI operates now at staff+ level
Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? That's an interesting question actually. When I was a kid, calculators were not as widespread and I could easily multiply 4-digit numbers in my brain. Nowadays I'd be happy to multiply 2-digit numbers without mistakes. But I carry my smartphone with me, so there's just no need to do so...

So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
- written by H4XX0Rgang69
It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.
Exploring the Foundations of Reality: Nested, Hierarchical Axioms
Claude seems to be somewhat OK with 1500 LOC in one file. It may miss something, mess something up, sure, that is why you should chunk it up.
UBI cannot work in a free-ish market. Suppliers of basic needs (housing, water, energy, food) will crank their prices to include UBI.
It doesn't have ADHD, it's more likely because they create too much small chunks in the recent versons of Cursor. So Cursor is looking at the project with a very small magnifying glass, and forgets what is the big picture (in addition to the context length issue).
Sounds like something you would find on Stack Overflow
I'm not sure if I got your issue, but I can do platform-dependent `index` `pytorch` installation using the following snippet in `pyproject.toml` and `uv sync` just handles it accordingly.

[tool.uv.sources]
torch = [{ index = "pytorch-cu124", marker = "sys_platform == 'win32'" }]
> it isn't safe to use on code you haven't written yourself

Neither is cargo (nor npm, nor any other package manager, for that matter).

I'm not sure what value being that paranoid is buying you in the long run.
>Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions,

Asimov's "three laws of robotics" beg to differ.
> but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level

Would strongly disagree here. They are something else entirely.

They have the ability to provide an answer to any question but where its accuracy decreases significantly depending on the popularity of the task.

So if I am writing a CRUD app in Python/React it is expert level. But when I throw some Scala or Rust it is 100x worse than any junior would ever be. Because no normal person would confidently rewrite large amounts of code with nonsense that doesn't even compile.

And I don't see how LLMs get significantly better without a corresponding improvement in input data.
One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards.

Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life - no refreshed new looks or skins or dark modes (well, it's always in dark mode) or rewrites in Svelte or whatever. That's basically because the power user is essentially the only user that matters. They know all the arcane key bindings and weird abbreviations, and Bloomberg knows better than to mess with it.

I hated it at first but grew to love the stability of it.
Some IDEs like Intellij Idea have structured search&replace feature. I think there are dedicated projects for this task, so you can search&replace things using AST and not just text.

May be it would make sense to ask AI to use those tools instead of doing edits directly?
Working with Cursor will make you more productive when/if you know how to code, how to navigate complex code, how to review and understand code, how to document it, all without LLMs. In that case you feel like having half a dozen junior devs or even a senior dev under your command. It will make you fly. I have tackled dozens of projects with it that I wouldn't have had the time and resources for. And it created absolutely solid solutions. Love this new world of possibilities.
I understand, it isn't that bad though: a web app of mine with dozens of dependencies and all templates and static assets is 35MB with SBCL and core compression (that includes the compiler and debugger, useful to connect to a running app and exploring its state (or even hot reloading code)). I suppose that's in the ballpark of a growing Go application. LispWorks has a tree shaker that builds a hello world in 5MB.
>That's so bad of an idea that I was sure no one would think I meant that.

Not everyone who reads these HN threads is a cryptographer. It didn't raise serious red flags for me when you mentioned that. I figured it should be OK as long as you make the size of the key twice as large. Is that wrong?
Do. I was sceptical at first - exactly because of the points you make: I mostly do ML, so for getting PyTorch and Cuda etc. to play nice conda was basically my go-to.

We use poetry at work, but getting it to play nice with PyTorch is always a bit of an art.
I tried to get into Pixi, but have been a little annoyed as it seems to have inherited conda's issues when mixing conda and PyPi.

uv so far has been relatively smooth sailing, and they even have an entire section on using it with PyTorch: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/pytorch/
"Nobody" is an exaggeration since there are a few people like you. Most people want Mozilla to focus on making a good browser.

If Mozilla had used the Google billions on improving Firefox instead of fart sniffing, Firefox would be a better browser now and its market share would be above 2.62%.

The misspending was (implicitly) part of the deal: the Google money would stop if Firefox started to seriously threaten Chrome's dominance.
Would love to mix this up with FluxCD
Could this not be done algorithmically though? One can go reasonably far with static code parsing.
Pretty much everything Microsoft did in the 90s with GUIs was just playing catch up with Apple.

My first job in 1990, we had a load of PCs running DOS, and one Mac with a GUI and which also played sound and could read laserdisks (as I recall). Changing the error sound to "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" never got old.

Windows 95 just about got to feature parity with the Mac 5 years later. It was really nice, but not exactly massively innovative.
Taiwan Stock Market Hit by Largest Foreign Investor Sell-Off in History
Oh what a middle finger that seemed to be. I had similar experience in the beginning with ChatGPT (1-2 years back?), until I started paying for a subscription. Now even if it's a 'bad idea' when I ask it to write some code (for my personal use - not work/employment/company) and I insist upon the 'ill-advised' code structure it does it.

I was listening to Steve Gibson on SecurityNow speaking about memory-safe programming languages, and the push for the idea, and I was thinking two things:
1) (most) people don't write code (themselves) any more (or we are going to this direction) thus out of the 10k lines of code, someone may manually miss some error/bug (although a second and third LLM doing code review may catch it
2) we can now ask an LLM to rewrite 10k lines of code from X-language to Y-language and it will be cheaper than hiring 10 developers to do it.
It says that the last commit is from 2 years ago. Is it because it is completed, or because it really is no longer under development?
> If every product in your space does something the same way, there’s probably a good reason. If one company does something different, ask yourself: Is this intentional, or just a mistake?

To add to this, often you can come up with a lower friction UI idea for your specific use case (e.g. that requires less clicks) if you think hard about it, but if you stray too far from what people are used to seeing and interacting with it creates its own kind of friction, and you'll get feedback like "I found this unintuitive" or "it took me a moment to figure out how to use it". So you need to balance using familiar patterns vs new ideas.

E.g. maybe you think you can improve on the Amazon checkout experience for your own site, but by doing something different, you're tossing out the familiarity bonus you get for free. Similarly, by preferring checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and text fields, over custom widgets, you get so much for free like user familiarity in reading the current state, and knowing how to change the state.

"Unintuitive" can often mean "I'm not used to this pattern" even if it might be a good pattern once people get used to it.
They were competently directing that money into their bank accounts.
That's funny. I automated a lot of my tech-writing job in the '90s with expansive macros written in WordBasic. What a great product.
uv belongs to a startup. They will surely introduce some wacky monetisation scheme sooner or later.

I wouldn't get too used to it.
The problem with spreadsheets vs regular tables is that spreadsheets allow for a lot of customisation (which is kind of the point of a spreadsheet vs a table).

As a programming interface, that makes spreadsheets deceptively powerful. But as a UI were you need to have control over how the user interacts, that makes spreadsheets incredibly painful to integrate.

Source: myself. I worked on a project around 20 years ago which integrated a spreadsheet into its UI and the number of ways people would break the application each month was mind boggling.
I've read the petition. I'm not convinced. However, this must be the single most harmful petition I've ever read (IMO).

I believe that Google money is a huge net positive for Firefox: free money for basically nothing asked in return.

Additionally I think that the biggest problem of Firefox have been Mozilla for 10-15 years and there is no sign of improving, only getting worse and worse. I wish Firefox could ditch Mozilla (and probably keep Google money flow if possible).
It's in the usual location at the top of the page: "By Ralph Furman".
I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project.

No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.
Show HN: Real-Time AI Coding Help for Interviews, Without Getting Caught
Live coding interviews can be brutal, so I built a tool that discreetly assists you by analyzing problems, generating solutions, and debugging your code—all in real time. It stays invisible on screen shares and works via global shortcuts, letting you focus on solving problems under pressure.
Comparison of esProc SPL and DuckDB in Multi-Data Source Capabilities
Becoming the single point of failure for every societal function is the goal of VC. It's working brilliantly thus far.
Huddles in Slack don't work on Firefox on Linux: https://github.com/aws/amazon-chime-sdk-js/issues/2044. Works fine in Chrome.

This is the only reason I keep the Slack "desktop app" around.
As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc.

Keyhole Inc. specialized in geospatial data visualization applications. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History

Many companies operated in the gap, one in public was ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections, etc. Other such suites existed at that time.

Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that went very widely public.
Maybe early return isn’t allowed in that language, but it sure would make that a heck of a lot easier to read.
And controls were demarcated as controls, not disguised as plan text or a decoration. You could tell if a function was activated by looking at the outline of the button; if the "bevel" shadowing went inward, the button was depressed and the function was on.

"Flat" design is simply derelict design. Fortunately there has been some backlash and we might be returning to legitimate GUIs.
Can we be sure that this screenshot is authentic?