skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree - train your employees to properly use a $200 ChatGPT subscription rather than rely on a $700/hr consultant doing the same thing.
In my experience it reconnects faster and more reliably than web sockets. Also nothing is stopping you telling the user the connection is down/retrying etc.
I'll try and explain it simply with no technical information.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, allows you to interact with software using pre-defined agreements, or contracts.

Think of API as a set of legal contracts. I use this analogy when explaining it to lawyers.

If I give you $5, and I say give me an Apple, you will give me an Apple, as expected by the predefined contract, that I receive an Apple.

If I end up receiving Broccoli, then what we have here, is a bug. Or, in other words, the contract has been broken.

Now apply this to other domains in commerce - e.g. I give an ID of an item in a store, and I get back the name of the item, it's price, and if it's stock.
Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the private sector except the most dire circumstances.
> I ask because watching cloud providers like AWS slowly reinvent mainframes just seems like the painful way around.

When AWS was the hot new thing in town a server was coming in at 12/24 threads.

A modern AMD machine tops out at 700+ threads and 400gb QSFP interconnects. GO back to 2000 and the Dotcom boom and thats a whole mid sized company, in a 2u rack.

Finding single applications that can leverage all that horsepower is going to be a challenge... and thats before you layer in lift for redundancy.

Strip away all the bloat, all the fine examples of Conways law that organizations drag around (or inherit from other orgs) and compute is at a place where it's effectively free... With the real limits/costs being power and data (and these are driven by density).
At least leaded soldering wire is mostly contained in a large chunk, but I really don't like leaded solder paste. Which is like leaded peanut butter, and easily spread around.

All the new parts are designed based on a lead free process anyways, so you might as well get used to working with lead-free solder to begin with.
What makes them experts in their fields? They have never done anything like this. Nor are historical analogues abundant.
Preventing injection attacks in sql queries, html, etc. is a niche use case?
I think the biggest issue is that you have to put the assets somewhere and usually that meant a relationship to US currency. China has to go further with a proposal for how it is going to do a US proof global system. Telling the EU to stand up in unity will only work when the proposal makes the same kind of sense to the EU in the longterm as whatever the US is doing makes sense to the Republicans.
"September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk
Poppycock. Being able to collectively bargain against the government is more than legal, it should be encouraged.

They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for themselves against the US government. If Congress and the executive branch can't agree with labor terms with workers at the table, that's bad.

Not having unionized federal workers is way way way worse.

One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?
Certainly within the NHS, except for exceptional circumstances you start at the bottom of the band, irrepective of talent/experience - moving up throught the band purely on time-served. Depressing
"Teenage boy wish fulfillment" is well beneath any reasonable standard of criticism, and I've addressed that with about as much respect as it deserves.

There is much worthy of critique in Heinlein, especially in his depiction of women. I've spent about a quarter century off and on both reading and formulating such critiques, much more recently than I've spent meaningful time with his fiction. I've also read what he had to say for himself before he died, and what Mrs. Heinlein - she kept the name - said about him after. If we want to talk about, for example, how the themes of maternal incest and specifically feminine embodiment of weakly superhuman AGI in his later work reflect a degree of senescence and the wish for a supercompetent maternal figure to whom to surrender the burden of responsibility, or if we want to talk about how Heinlein seems to spend an enormous amount of time just generally exploring stuff from female characters' perspectives that an honest modern inquiry would recognize as fumbling badly but earnestly in the direction of something like a contemporary understanding of gender, then we could talk about that.

No one wants to, though. You can't use anything like that as a stick to beat people with, so it never gets a look in, and those as here who care nothing for anything of the subject save if it looks serviceable as a weapon claim to be the only ones in the talk who are honest. They don't know the man's work well enough to talk about the years he spent selling stories that absolutely revolve around character development, which exist solely to exemplify it! Of course these are universally dismissed as his 'juveniles' - a few letters shy of 'juvenilia' - because science fiction superfans are all children and so are science fiction superhaters, neither of whom knows how to respond in any way better than a tantrum on the rare occasion of being told bluntly it's well past time they grew up.

But they're the honest ones. Why not? So it goes. It's a conversation I know better than to try to have, especially on Hacker News; if I don't care for how it's proceeding, I've no one but myself to blame.
Bluesky has all that but just in the anti direction. I was hoping for a more absolute of not disparaging anyone based on their race, gender, or sexual preference.
I'm not afraid of losing my job as an engineer. I can babysit an agent to build software and my expertise will still matter. I'm upset because that's not fun. I chose this career because programming is fun for me. I put up with everything else and I get to code and eat.

Now I'm not sure what I like doing if the bot does my coding. Who am I? My whole identity is built around being an intelligent programmer but if intelligence is commodified and programming is obsolete then I don't know who I am anymore or what to do for fun

:(

Making a living is a concern but.. it almost feels like one of the more shallow ones. I can stack bricks for money but if AI takes the fun out of programming what am I supposed to do for fun
That's not true in most the USA. Shopkeepers privilege allows them to confine you and/or the goods, which depending on state only requires something akin to "reasonably believed you were stealing." In my state a shopkeep can confine me until police arrive on pretty flimsy evidence, which if in the country could be a very long time. It is better just to find stores that don't do it and shop there - - I stopped shopping at walmart after I was confronted by gigantic bouncers accusing me of stealing (yes in the hood Walmart is very aggressive with shopkeepers privilege, if you live in wealthy area and refuse they much more likely to just let you go).

You could try to stop them but if they are hurt in the process it could very well end in a lengthy trip to prison.
They have been available online. You can go look at them.

Yes, they would have resulted in disciplinary action for undergrads.
Why are they the worst? Genuinely curious.
Yep, the procurement process (and related) requires a lot be baked into pricing. I’d also be curious what the fully burdened rate of in-house staff is compared to consultants. I’ve seen situations in the gov (not DoD) where despite high consulting rates, the full cost of hiring was even higher per hour.

But I’m loath to defend the big firms. Generally, quality plus the ever push for expanding scope leaves a sensation of waste. The solution is just going to need more than simply tossing them out.
ctrl+f "moat"

Hmm. So why can they have a 3x markup?

What is the moat? Who will overpay by $1,000?

1. People who are required to use a product with very specific certifications.

2. People who want to use a product with a desirable backstory.

In the first instance the US military requires testing and certifications that are costly to achieve, creating a moat for military suppliers.

In the second instance, some podcast listeners are willing to significantly overpay for generic supplements due to the backstory and their trust in that podcaster.

I am curious what the market breakdown is for this device - how many do they sell for case 1? how many do they sell for case 2?

Also, if they don't sell very many, then their manufacturing capital costs, design and supply chain overheads per phone will be very high.
The underlying engine is actually completely decoupled from yaml as it's really just structured data. We chose to stick with yaml for the "interface" since that is ultimately what it's managing—Kubernetes manifests. Personally, I tend to prefer keeping the configuration true to the underlying thing being configured rather than abstracting it away with DSLs, but I realize it's not for everyone.
Secretary of Education Calls AI 'A One'
An evil timeline is the construction of frameworks in the future that are only grokkable by AI.

The standard for new frameworks won't be "does this make humans more productive using new concepts". It will be "can I get an LLM to generate code that uses this framework".
Controversial take: I'm happy they went monthly paid subscription. You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford the $1,500+ up front cost? The seven seas were the only option.

HOWEVER, 60 a month is too high for a product quality that is tanking. I was okay with it the first few years, but PS and Illustrator's performance noticeably have gone straight to shit for absolutely no benefit except for a little stupid gimmicks that offer zero productivity boosts. Indesign, they've mostly left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie. There are no more kingdoms to conquer. Simply find performance boosts, that's it. The reliability of my files and getting work done is more important than anything else. Truly. That's what Adobe USED to stand for. Pure raw UI intuitive productivity and getting shit done. Now, it's a fucking clown show that cares about their social media and evangelism.

I hear on the video side they've super dropped the ball, but I'm not much for motion graphics outside of Blender.

Stop with the bullshit "telemetry" garbage that bogs down my computer and AI scrapping of our data. Old files that used to run fine on my older computers run like shit on my new one. I know damn well there's bullshit going on in the background. That's 80% of the issue. The other 20% of problems are running of the mill stuff.

I am perfectly happy paying for functional, productive software. 60 bucks a month for that is fine as a freelance graphic designer and marketer. However creative cloud is quickly becoming dysfunctional and unproductive. That's the problem.
As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.

Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.

These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?
Shocked at anyone thinking either this is the only thing I'm concerned about as a citizen or that bigger problems make this egregious attack on consent/autonomy a non-issue or that it's not all a part of same problem and fighting back in every way possible isn't fruitful.

I narrowed the scope of this post so I could get responses pertaining to the scope that I narrowed it down to.
Following the announcement of Trumps plan for the biggest military budget EVER [trump voice] of $1T (previously in the $800B range)[1]… good thing DOGE has cut all the other waste. I am personally thankful that we’ll get to experience the age of maximum government efficiency and spending constraint

[1] https://www.defensenews.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04/0...
Because Microsoft?
Federal employees already do not have the right to strike, see 5 U.S.C. §7311.
No, although you do see that in set theory, but this is a specific idea about the type signatures and encodings.

List type:

type Stack<x> = null | {first: x, rest: Stack<x>}

The church encoding of a data structure, is to go through all of these cases separated by |, and define a handler for each one, and then define a function which accepts all those handlers and calls the appropriate one for its case:

type StackF<x> = <z>(
ifNull: (n: null) => z,
ifItem: (first: x, rest: z) => z
) => z;

The Scott encoding is actually a little more practical, and has `rest: StackF<x>` in that second handler, but that's not what we have here.

Now the point is that a unit type like `null` that only has one possible value, that first handler can actually be simplified to just `ifNull: z`. Similarly if we consider a list of nulls, we would get

type NullStackF = <z>(
ifEnd: z,
ifItem: (rest: z) => z
) => z;

And after swapping the arguments and currying, you get precisely the type of the Church numerals.

The Church encoding of a list is effectively replacing that list with its reduce function, so that's why I am saying that it's basically Array prototype.reduce on an Array<null> type. (I actually think it's reduceRight but this type is symmetric under .reverse() so who gives a darn). So it's

const zero_ = f => [].reduce(f)
const one_ = f => [null].reduce(f)
const two_ = f => [null, null].reduce(f)

in JS. But if you had just Scott-encoded the numbers instead, you would have had no problems with pred() but you need the Y combinator to actually use the numerals for something interesting:

type ScottNum = <z>(next: (rest: ScottNum) => z) => (z: z) => z;

const zero: ScottNum = _f => x => x
const one: ScottNum = f => _x => f(zero)
const two: ScottNum = f => _x => f(one)
function succ(n: ScottNum): ScottNum {
return f => _x => f(n)
}
function pred(n: ScottNum): ScottNum {
return n((x: ScottNum) => x)(zero)
}
function church<z>(n: ScottNum, f: (z: z) => z): (z: z) => z {
return z => n(m => f(church(m, f)(z)))(z)
}
I think it's present on the map, but is transparent or invisible in some way.

You can find it if you hover north-east of Waterloo.
I signed up for linkedin with my Mobile number.

I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login.

That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point
People don't want to use Gimp, which is the next most powerful photo editing software :-)
They want engagement for their new account, it's what anyone who posts on social media wants.
A counter point:

Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.

It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
People always say that, but it’s not really been completely true.

< 3.1 Bad

3.1 Good

3.11 WfW Good

NT 3.5 Okay

95 Good

NT 4.0 Good

98 Good

Me Bad

2000 Good

XP Good

Vista Bad

7 Good

8 Bad

8.1 Okay

10 Good

11 Bad

There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
Rightly so. The idea that all software should be packaged for all distros, and that you shouldn't want to use the latest version of software is clearly ludicrous. It only seems vaguely reasonable because it's what's always been done.

If Linux had evolved a more sensible system and someone came along and suggested "no actually I think each distro should have its own package format and they should all be responsible for packaging all software in the world, and they should use old versions too for stability" they would rightly be laughed out of the room.
if you put you program in a qemu/kvm VM then it just works

I was completely blown away when I first experienced it. My code running in a VM never even noticed any downtime. All the network connections are preserved and so on.
No you see only capital is allowed to bargain with the government, labor is not allowed to for "reasons" that somehow always seem to benefit capital at their expense.
Win 11 and Vista have been unfairly maligned, with some minor tweaks (and start11) both are solid performant windows releases.
Ask HN: What made your favorite manager so great?
> it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.

I have enough friends who work in University systems and government roles (both similarly heavy in red tape) to know that many of these institutions would also spend an order of magnitude doing it in house.

It’s misleading to compare to an idealistic efficient organization with no red tape, because government jobs are very heavy on red tape. That’s where most of the inefficiency gets spent, whether it’s done in house or by consultants.
I'm sorry but "Steam broke Gnome" makes no sense. This is like the person who says they installed Firefox and it broke the internet.
> Alphabet's Waymo was also having humans take over for some of the driving as well.

Not sure if this used to be the case but today Waymos can’t be controlled remotely by humans, only ‘guided’: https://www.govtech.com/transportation/waymo-robotaxis-getti... (ctrl+f “cannot be controlled”)
Seems like a variant of the cycle of geeks, mops, and sociopaths: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths.

Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.

Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and ensuring there's always cool new places for creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing.

Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.
If we're comparing prolific programmers with pragmatic programmers, I wonder if there's an analog on the management side?

I look at our leaders today - our CEOS, elected officials, presidents and their lieutenants like Elon Musk - and I see a narrow sampling of humanity chosen for high executive function but little else. Who consider humanity's greatest virtues like empathy to be liabilities. Where is the self-awareness, the doubt, even the shame that brings wisdom?

I worry that this tireless race towards maximization of efficiency and reduction of cost above all else is driving the whole world towards ensh@ttification. When we could so easily take a step back, breathe, and find outside-the-box solutions beyond the zero-sum game of the status quo. If only they would let us..
If the only moat really will be the scale of computation resources, that's great news for users, because it will be an extremely competitive market where prices will be driven down very effectively.

I suspect that model quality/vibes and integrations will play a role as well though.
In this case, "democratized" means "enshittified".

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I don't doubt that LLMs can make programmers more productive. It's happening today, and I expect it will continue to improve, but it requires knowing what code they should generate, what the actual goals are, and how it should be tested. It can generate standard solutions to standard problems with standard bugs. That's fine they're a tool.

What the inexperienced expect them to do is read their mind, and implement what they want without testing (other than did it crash the first time I used it). Unfortunately, knowing the questions to ask is at least half of the problem, which by definition the inexperienced don't know how to do. You can already see that with vibecoding prompts to "write clear comments", "don't write bugs", and "use best practices".

So why does it lead to the enshitification of the programming experience? Because regular folks will be led to believe (Startrek movie Wargames hacker style) that this is how things are done. The will accept and expect rehashed garbage UI and implementations without security or corner case checking, because that's what they always get when they press a button and wait a minute. Now, why can't YOU stupid programmer, get the same results faster? I told you I wanted a cool game that would make me lots of money fast with no bugs!

I do have hope that some people will learn to be more clear in their descriptions of things, but guess what, english isn't really the language for that.