skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YAML is readable? No way as there are too many ways to do the same thing and nested structures are unclear to the non trained eye (what is a list? What is nested?), let alone indentation in large files is an issue especially with the default 2 space unreadable standard so many people adhere to.

YAML simple? It's sepc is larger than XML... Parsing of numbers and strings is ambiguous, leading zeros are not strings but octal (implicit conversion...). List as keys? Oh ffs, and you said readable. And do not get me started about "Yes" being a boolean, reminds me of the MS Access localizations which had other decimal values for true and [local variant of true] (1 vs -1).

Writable? Even worse. I think I have never been able to write a YAML file without errors. But that might just be me, XML is fine though while unreadable.
> Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.

Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.
Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot?

IMHO it kinda is. It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11
> But with all the development in AI, I wonder, is it still the best choice? Most AI tools have JS or Python integration but the Rails ecosystem seems a bit behind.

The language you use has nothing to do with your ability to participate in "AI". Use what you know. 99% of working with this technology is making a JSON HTTP call to a chat completion endpoint. If your ecosystem supports HTTP and strings, you should be good to go.
They are more careful. They drive more slowly. They are more afraid. They are safer drives considering outcomes. The problem here is that people say "better driver" can be evaluated in various ways, safety only one of them. Many people think, for example, that if you get there faster, you are better driver. Or if you can show quick thinking by sudden movements.

> Not a lot of 65yo people working 80hr weeks, slogging out 50-100mi commutes or plowing into moose while blinded by the 6am sun on their way back from 3rd shift.

People who drive in that state are one of two things: irresponsible or poor with no other choice.

Driving regularly while tired and sleep deprived is a big factor in accidents ... and that many people are somehow seeing it as heroship rather then being irresponsible is a cultural issue.
How does a country move out of poverty without engineering and education? If Botswana had a moon program or its own rocket program, I could see the argument, but launching a small sat. Doesn't seem that wrong.
Khara(the Evangelion company) quit 3ds Max and transitioned to Blender around that timeframe, in collaboration with Blender developers. This seemed to coincide with Epic funding(anime people aren't rich people, broadly speaking, so I guess capitalisms happen in parallel and elsewhere).

0: https://web.archive.org/web/20190814061013/https://japanese....
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's hard to do something actionable based on abstract critique.
LLMs process information in a strictly sequential manner. It's their core capability and what makes them feel so anthropomorphic.
That's not really the reason. The print industry still runs exclusively on Adobe.
see my comment above. It's you and those who view the world in the same way who have the automatic fixation with race, not someone just showing human interaction.
As a first step I'd prefer to see both of them dramatically more means tested. There's no reason that someone with millions of dollars of assets should be receiving thousands of dollars a month from the state. I think this position is politically tenable with the looming cuts that will happen automatically over the next decade
I’m seriously considering getting out of IT because of it
Chest freezers are one of the most efficient storage methods for food.
The only unusual part about my toolkit is the delinker. Since it outputs relocatable object files, you can then make use of them with conventional tooling.

I've mostly used a linker to build new programs with the parts I've exported. Some of my users use objdiff to compare the output of their decompilation efforts against recreated object files. Others use objcopy or homemade tools to further modify the object files (mostly tweaking the symbol table) prior to reuse. One can generate assembly listings with objdump, although Ghidra already gives you that.

Ironically, the hardest part about using my delinker I think (besides figuring out errors when things go wrong) is just realizing and imagining what you can do with it. It's rather counter-intuitive at first because this goes against anything one might learn in CS 101, but once you get it then you can do all kinds of heretical things with it.

To take this to the next level, beyond adding support for more ISAs and object file exporters, I'd need to generate debugging symbols in order to make debugging the pilfered code a less painful experience. There are plenty of ways delinking can go wrong if the Ghidra database is incorrect or incomplete and troubleshooting undefined behavior from outer space can get tedious.

But in the context of a post-collapse scenario, what one would be really after is some kind of linker that can stitch together a working program from just about any random bunch of object files, regardless of ABI and ISA. My experiments on cross-delinking remained rather tame (same ISA, similar ABI) because gluing all that mess by hand gets really complicated really fast.
Because money (a clever concept people invented) is more important than people.
A big soup of untyped json blobs and python, all working highly asynchronously in complicated ways.

Is this variable available in my agent’s state?

Depends! Is it an agent that started an hour ago before you made that other change? Is it in the manager state or not? Did the previous agent run correctly or not? Did something else go wrong?
This is the difference between declarative and imperative design. Frameworks like mithril or React are declarative whereas the DOM is imperative.
Ah well that explains things, I have a one-page Europass CV.
Ask HN: Seeking technical cofounder for marketplace startup (equity-only)
Hi HN,

I’m the founder of B-Roll, a marketplace that connects individuals and businesses with local photographers for quick, affordable photo sessions (15, 30, or 60 mins). We’ve built and launched a beta with real customers and photographers, and we’re now looking for a technical cofounder to help us level up.

The stack is Flutter (mobile/web) with Firebase + Supabase. We worked with an outside dev team to launch the MVP, but we’re looking for someone technical to take the reins.

We’ve already run paid and free sessions, onboarded supply, and validated interest.

This is an equity-only role for now — but it’s a real opportunity to help build something from the ground up that’s solving a real pain point for both photographers and everyday people.

If this sounds interesting, I’d love to chat. You can reach me at eric@b-rollapp.com or reply here.

Thanks! — Eric
Mostly because he doesn't get why some of us reach out for C++, despite its warts.

As I wrote at the time on Lambda The Ultimate back in 2012,

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4554#comment-71504
One thing nobody said, a lot of what Americans buy is ultra-processed and designed to have a very long shelf life. It's going to last longer than most European foods to start with.
Well, not really. There is a multitude of factors in those, and I'd say some examples are just plain wrong.

Postgres won out because it was better than the others considering the money you pay and the features you (in the end) don't need or couldn't afford with the others. If it just were down to learning, MySQL/MariaDB would have won. Back in the days, everyone knew MySQL, nobody knew Postgres.

With CUDA, it also isn't what people know, it rather is the existing heap of software that only runs properly, quickly, efficiently in CUDA. People buying Nvidia cards and CUDA-based software don't care about CUDA and don't know any CUDA, they are usually higher level, but the availability of software is what drives the popularity there.
> outside the US consumer banking must be horrible or non-existent if its that bad the USA

When I read about US consumer banking ("cashing" cheques like its 1975, all kinds of ATM fees, credit scores and having to use weird "you are not really sending money real time but because the app you are sending the payment instruction through is legit you can sort of be assured the money will be paid eventually") and then look at the European payments landscape...I feel happy.
I used to work in the field and Cinema4D seemed to be the go to tool for just about every solo freelancer in the business. Yet I basically never saw it at any studio I ever ran across.
Blender's UI has improved tremendously over the years, but I wouldn't call it one of the cleanest UI in software. It still has, for better or worse, quite idiosyncratic UI patterns (e.g. the panel juggling) and the underlying logic of e.g. objects, meshes, textures, materials, world, camera and renderer lining up is not very discoverable.

I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.
Barley has gluten but in low levels compared to wheat. Its why barley bread doesn't rise that much.
Kudos to the scientists for working out how to work with this element.

But I have to say, as a speaker of a post-colonial English dialect with strong British English roots...

...calling the element berkelium is either very innocent Berkley pride, or they knew what they were doing...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berk
Americans will find any reason to be upset and play the victim card.

Our food is trash. Accept it. Move on. Quit being such a victim. You're making all of us look bad.
That would be a "puffer" or light, fluffy cake.
As a native Spanish speaker it took me a moment to understand why "yes" was being translated as "forks" until it clicked and it's not an error.

In Spanish "Ye" is how we call the letter Y and "La ye" is a word used, at least in the version of Spanish spoken where I come from, to refer to the place where a road forks. Hence the fork in the road is "La ye" and the plural would be "Las yes" or the forks. In this context forks is referring to where the road forks not to the eating utensil (which would be "tenedores").
Still working on the print design side... I work with lots of designers who use other tools for photo editing and illustration. As do I. For vector art and for finalizing work for pre-press, though, everyone is really still stuck with Adobe. Their closed standards dominate the industry. If you don't deliver work in PDF or AI format... then what? You don't deliver 8 meter wide billboards as PNG files. And trying to edit PDFs saved from other software is really difficult. Trying to import AI files to other software often loses layers, path groups, blendings and effects. The truth is, for anyone art directing print work, your designers and illustrators may be allowed to use whatever suits them, but at the end of the day everything that goes out has to go in Adobe's formats.
Unfortunately, MCP is not HATEOAS. It doesn't need to be, because it's not web-like. I wish it were.

HATEOAS is great for web-like structures because in each response it not only includes the content, but also all actions the client can take (usually via links). This is critical for architectures without built-in structure — unlike Gopher which has menus and FTP and Telnet which have stateful connections — because otherwise a client arriving at some random place has no indication on what to do next. MCP tackles this by providing a stateful connection (similar to FTP) and is now moving toward static entry points similar to Gopher menus.

I specifically wrote about why pure HATEOAS should come back instead of MCP: https://www.ondr.sh/blog/ai-web
While CSV isn't exactly grammared or standardised like XML I think if it as more schema:d than JSON. There might be data corruption or consistency issues, but there is implicitly a schema: every line is exactly n fields, and the first line might contain field names.

When a JSON API turns out to have optional fields it usually shows through trial and error, and unlike CSV it's typically not considered a bug you can expect the API owner to fix. In CSV 'missing data' is an empty string rather than nulls or their cousins because missing fields aren't allowed, which is nice.

I also like that I can write my own ad hoc CSV encoder in most programming languages that can do string concatenation, and probably also a suitable decoder. It helps a lot in some ETL tasks and debugging. Decent CSV also maps straight to RDBMS tables, if the database for some reason fails at immediate import (e.g. too strict expectations) into a newly created table it's almost trivial to write an importer that does it.
You inspired me to check what .NET does in that situation.

It throws an OverflowException: ("Negating the minimum value of a twos complement number is invalid.")
I do not remember all the details, but I think it was during the transition from MQTT 3.1 to 5.0. We only use 3.1 and the 5.0 code was not yet finished, emqtt had a hard coded a dependency with an old lib, which we wanted to upgrade. There were no hex package, it was pulled from github. And then the repo on github disappeared (or maybe moved?)

I will have a look at this new package, it looks promising
Kinda naive question. All you need is a way to convince the LLM to output json according to your schema, then call the function. So what is the use of MCP servers? Why complicate things by adding another layer?
stealing this, thank you
> Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?

I don't suppose anyone takes it all that seriously in the case of the seasons, but it is a textbook example of a dominant group imposing their frame of reference on less dominant group
Newly shared Signal messages show Trump advisers discussed Yemen attack plans
I saw "fkt" as a more common abbreviation for "Funktion", that'd be only one extra character
No, we really did not have a history like that remotely. It's a bit alarming to see a historical fact states so completely incorrectly.

We had a hugely restrictive immigration policy, (have a look at the rate of growth over time) followed by multiple wars that meaningfully reduced the population... We were winning the Malthusian game, just by having lots of resources per person available.

The policies you have probably heard called "white Australia" were more accurately understood as immigration restriction policy. If you read anything published at the time, there was only slightly less animosity for white english migration as the rest of the world. This was the era of communism and workers rights, and the workers absolutely understood that their labour was being devalued.
its also hard to read for a german.
coding in english is the only viable thing after learning everything in english
> Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement.

The problem is not refusing to fund replacements. The problem is refusing to fund maintenance.

A lot of managers in old school business were sold on IT as a tool. And tools? You buy them, use them and replace only when they break. Maintenance is minimal and you sure don't evolve them.

That's how you get couple decade old software chugging along, being so key to operations everything you want to add has to be aware of it and its warts which will then infect what touches it. And replacement projects cannot work because usually they mean changing how things are done.

But 20 years of rot are a symbiosis between users and tools:

- some tool does not allow a workflow, so users manage and find a workaround

- there is a workaround so next version of the software landscape cannot break it

- people want to do some new thing which is not in the software, changing it could break the previous workaround. So either people don't do the new thing or adapt and create other workarounds

Multiple rounds of this and you have a fossilized organization and IT where nothing can be easily changed. The business cannot adapt. The software cannot be modified to allow adaptation because it could break the business. Now a new competitor emerges, the business is losing and that's when everyone starts blaming everyone for the problems. But in reality? The cause is 20 years ago when some management decided to add IT as a cost center.

My solution to this problem? Create your own competitor and kill the old business.
I'm surprised to hear someone say Scala is niche. To me it is to Java what Rust is to C. Subjective, I guess.
I wish I could recall the details better but this was 20+ years ago now. In college I had an internship working at Bose, doing QA on firmware in a new multi CD changer addon to their flagship stereo. We were provided discs of music tracks with various characteristics. And had to listen to them over and over and over and over and over and over, running through test cases provided by QA management as we did. But also doing random ad-hoc testing once we finished the required tests on a given build.

At one point I found a bug where if you hit a sequence of buttons on the remote at a very specific time--I want to say it was "next track" twice right as a new track started--the whole device would crash and reboot. This was a show stopper; people would hit the roof if their $500 stereo crashed from hitting "next". Similar to the article, the engineering lead on the product cleared his schedule to reproduce, find, and fix the issue. He did explain what was going on at the time, but the specifics are lost to me.

Overall the work was incredibly boring. I heard the same few tracks so many times I literally started to hear them in my dreams. So it was cool to find a novel, highest severity bug by coloring outside the lines of the testcases. I felt great for finding the problem! I think the lead lost 20% of his hair in the course of fixing it, lol.

I haven't had QA as a job title in a long time but that job did teach me some important lessons about how to test outside the happy path, and how to write a reproducible and helpful bug report for the dev team. Shoutout to all the extremely underpaid and unappreciated QA folks out there. It sucks that the discipline doesn't get more respect.
It seems obvious in hindsight that everyone, non-native speakers included, prefer to read syntax in English. But was it as obvious 30 years ago?

I mean sure, hurdur Microsoft dumb, it's a classic joke. But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?

It just gets my goat when people make fun of innovators with the benefit of hindsight.
They totally do. I know, because I was raised to save money by buying cheaper and could afford more expense. I got feedback about it and side comments about it. (None of that is ugly or dirty, just not expensive.) Being programmer, it does not matter much, but if I wanted to do management or something more human oriented, I would need to buy more expensive to not be outcast.

People who care, do know it. And they make decisions.
Something open source that you control. I run OpenWRT on everything.
> People have complained for years that their UI is too complicated

Isn't this a feature?
Someone modernized Turbo Vision: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848882
> LLMs process information in a strictly sequential manner.

"LLMs" as a class do not. Most LLMs, because most LLMs are autoregressive models, but diffusion LLMs exist and are not sequential in the way that autoregressive models are.

> It's their core capability

Being sequential is not a capability at all, much less a core one defining Large Language Models.

> and what makes them feel so anthropomorphic.

I disagree with this, too; I think what makes LLMs "feel so anthropomorphic" is the fact that most humans are very focused on language in perceiving other humans as human, and LLMs' output (as their name suggests) models human use of language, directly targeting a key feature used to identify something as human-like.
Friendship with MySQL ended. Convex is my new best friend
After nearly two decades of smooth sailing with the DB goat that is MySQL, we're breaking up. To be fair, it's not an apples to apples comparison here.

Because Convex is so much more. I'm not a shill but I do find myself becoming a #cvx bro.

With it, I get:

- A well-designed suite of systems, architected by a team of former Dropboxers who probably know their shit more than I do

- DB, Storage, API, HTTP Actions, Auth, EVERYTHING REAL-TIME, and as close as one can get to end-to-end type safety

- Tight integration to AI enabled IDEs with a cracked .mdc and MCP server with evals too

They also have a tight community on Discord.

I've got to projects that have converted me. I am resolved, this is the way:

1. A large, multi-tenant, agentic x human-in-the-loop agency management platform for a social media company (client)

2. A simple AI enabled, boring AF agency management tool for my wife's email marketing agency (forced to)

It took me a minute to adjust my mental models, but now I'm cooking. Velocity is increasing and I'm having a shit ton of fun (again) on otherwise boring stuff.

I considered other options like Supabase, which is a solid option. I landed on Convex because of their deep expertise in sync-engines and my belief that they're going to be the ones to finally make sync great again for the rest of us.

</rant>

Prove me wrong?
That's very interesting. I have a friend who runs a small studio (4-5 motion designers) and turns out work for dozens of TV and streaming shows, (as well as major sports events and awards shows). They only use Cinema4D. But I think it's more comfortable for people who come from 2D motion graphics (AfterEffects). Also, I think once you're locked into Octane rendering servers you would not want to change.
The palaeontologists on the floor above mine have posters everywhere about using blender to study dinosaur locomotion. I think they do 3d scans of fossil bones and the. Try to recreate musculature. Blender is everywhere.
What advantages does excel give you over CSV?
> Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink

Maybe. But what I think would help more is a broader focus on lifelong learning. Both on the job on company [dt]ime, and outside of work.

In many places you can take evening classes for languages, or hobby-classes like embroidery or goldsmithing. Even programming. But there are very few places where you can take maths classes after hours.

There's also, imo, way too much focus on degrees and not enough focus on competences. Some time ago I tried to register for some postgrad level classes, without any intention of using them for a certificate or whatever, but I was rejected for not having the right degree.
What's the dominant group here?
Blender is based in the Netherlands. They are using their local frame of reference, that's all. It's like complaining that someone refers to the time as 4 o'clock in a meeting because you joined from another time zone. Would you complain when I say that today's date is the 27th of March, because some people use the lunar calendar?

It's a textbook example of getting offended on behalf of other people, who aren't even complaining in the first place.
>>Nah, just revoke their licenses and make it much harder to get one to begin with

I 1000% agree with you, but unfortunately in some countries like the US that kind of argument leads to nowhere, because people think driving is a human right and also the entire country is built around having a car so you are actually truly screwed if you don't have one.

>> Autonomous driving removes the economic necessity of having one. Just get a proper car that can drive you to work.

Sure, except it doesn't exist and I honestly doubt it ever(in the next 50-100 years) will. If you need autonomous driving that takes you to your destination that already exists though - it's called a taxi.