MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kannanvijayan | 2025-04-08 04:21:48+00:00
LLMs are reasonably competent at surfacing the behaviour of simple programs when the behaviour of those programs is a relatively straightforward structural extension of enough of its training set that it's managed to correlate together.

It's very clear that LLMs lack understanding when you use them for anything remotely sophisticated. I say this as someone who leverages them extensively on a daily basis - mostly for development. They're very powerful tools and I'm grateful for their existence and the force multiplier they represent.

Try to get one to act as a storyteller and the limitations in understanding glare out. You try to goad some creativity and character out of it and it spits out generally insipid recombinations of obvious tropes.

In programming, I use AI strictly as a auto-complete extension. Even in that limited context, the latest models make trivial mistakes in certain circumstances that reveal their lack of understanding. The ones that stand out are the circumstances where the local change to make is very obvious and simple, but the context of the code is something that the ML hasn't seen before.

In those cases, I see them slapping together code that's semantically wrong in the local context, but pattern matches well against the outer context.

It's very clear that the ML doesn't even have a SIMPLE understanding of the language semantics, despite having been trained on presumably multiple billions of lines of code from all sorts of different programming languages.

If you train a human against half a dozen programming languages, you can readily expect by the end of that training that they will, all by themselves, simply through mastering the individual languages, have constructed their own internal generalized models of programming languages as a whole, and would become aware of some semantic generalities. And if I had asked that human to make that same small completion for me, they would have gotten it right. They would have understood that the language semantics are a stronger implicit context compared to the surrounding syntax.

MLs just don't do that. They're very impressive tools, and they are a strong step forward toward some machine model of understanding (sophisticated pattern matching is likely a fundamental prerequisite for understanding), but ascribing understanding to them at this point is jumping the gun. They're not there yet.
by goatlover | 2025-04-08 04:21:49+00:00
"The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.” - Judge Xinis

“The United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” wrote Judge Stephanie D. Thacker, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. “The government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”
by fouc | 2025-04-08 04:23:20+00:00
GPT-1 to GPT-2: June 2018 to February 2019 = 8 months.

GPT-2 to GPT-3: February 2019 to June 2020 = 16 months.

GPT-3 to GPT-4: June 2020 to March 2023 = 33 months.

Looks like time to get to the next level is doubling. So we can expect GPT-5 sometime June 2028.

Feels like people are being premature about claiming AI winter or that it is somehow a scandal that we don't already have GPT-5.

It's going to take time. We need some more patience in this industry.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-04-08 04:25:40+00:00
In my experience there is also a fifth possibility: If client is unaware of the bug, would “fixing it” lead to them filing a ticket because the application now behaves differently than expected?

I’ve also encountered several “load bearing bugs” where subsequent integrations/workflows were designed to accommodate the bug. Sometimes this was because the bug was known but couldn’t be fixed at the time, or the developers assumed the program was working correctly and accommodated the bug thinking it was expected behavior.

Therefore fixing the original bug would raise questions about what else needs to be updated as well.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-08 04:26:26+00:00
Let's be clear here; Companies fix bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

What this article refers to are "some bugs". And while corporate inertia can play a part, bugs get ignored for all kinds of reasons. It's very hard to be generalistic about this.

For example, some bugs aren't fixed because they are very hard to duplicate. When a bug only happens rarely it's hard to debug it, and harder to know that the fix is working.

Others are related to external environmental factors. Thing like AV behaving badly, or interacting with the machine in weird ways.

Sometimes the bug report is so vague, and lacking in detail, that frankly it's useless. I can't count the number of "what have I done wrong" questions which seem to think I'm psychic.

Some bugs are hard. Very hard. Folks have a crack at it, but after some time give up, and move onto other things. Often in these cases the "fix" can be worse than the bug, having various side effects and so on.

In some cases bugs are left in, because to fix them would be to break other things. For example bugs in say the C standard library, if fixed, might break programs that depend on, or work-around, that bug.

This is the tip of the iceberg, there are almost as many reasons as there are bugs outstanding.

And yes, there are very corporate reasons regarding resource allocation that prioritizes some bugs over others, or new features over bugs.
by throwaway_ab | 2025-04-08 04:27:55+00:00
A flagged post mentions this is racist and typical anti immigration rhetoric.

That's not true, there are only two types of North Korean people you'll meet, either those that have defected and escaped North Korea or those that are agents of the state of North Korea.

There are very few defectors in existence and once they escape they're given full South Korean citizenship. This article is not about those people.

The vast majority of North Koreans outside North Korea are not defectors, instead they are controlled state assets. There are no North Korean people outside the country that are free citizens. Every single North Korean authorised to leave the country is working directly for their government often to raise money for the regime, to steal IP, to infiltrate for some nefarious purpose.

Having one of these North Korean active assets in your company is extremely dangerous, your business is now at risk of leaks, theft, or worst something being modified like added vulnerabilities that could be exploited later in cyber attacks.

So no, this article is not racist at all and really has nothing to do with the recent political situation.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-08 04:28:24+00:00
The comparison to inline styles is understandable but misses Tailwind's real value. Inline styles failed because they were arbitrary, inconsistent, and impossible to scale. Tailwind, by contrast, offers a constrained, standardized set of utilities that enforce consistency, simplify maintenance, and reduce CSS complexity. For example, instead of arbitrary inline styles like `style="padding:7px; margin-left:3px; font-size:14px;"`, Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-sm`, ensuring uniformity across your app.
by trchek | 2025-04-08 04:28:52+00:00
Thanks I appreciate it, re safety violations, yeah some of it was those laws were just badly applied across the board, and it was hard to find a place without some degree of violating the letter of the law, so I think they just got flippant.

Re “source of sanity” I’ve caught myself doing the same with extra work, but sometimes it backfires when the little fun tool you wrote solves the purpose so well that it becomes the company standard and then the politics comes in, I don’t mean the “oh we need this feature super badly that breaks a bunch of other things can you do it for us” that’s just having a successful project. I mean when it starts figuring into political finger pointing and you’re forced to be involved in it all since you are the creator of a tool tangentially involved in some inter office politics. I’ve not figured out how to avoid that yet.
by rc5150 | 2025-04-08 04:29:12+00:00
Whoa! Didn't picture myself seeing a dev who worked on Abzu in the wild here on HN--I very much enjoyed that game, my thanks and high fives to your team for your work!

I'm having a kid-in-the-tunnel-meeting-Mean-Joe-Green-in-the-commercial moment, I just started my own game development journey about a week ago so it's neat getting to run across a full-on developer!

To stay on topic, I often thought how cool Abzu would have been with multiplayer but it's a good lesson to me that some features that might be desirable might also be a hindrance to some degree.

Okay, enough fanboying!
by jes5199 | 2025-04-08 04:29:14+00:00
I’m in the same boat, I really like the idea of it but the actual use of it eludes me. It’s like there’s a cultural gap, even when they’re talking about the practical applications of the system it’s incomprehensible; I eventually came to the conclusion that they are doing a lot of work to deal with situations that I have never even heard of people being in
by motorest | 2025-04-08 04:29:55+00:00
> But why does the EU even want a manufacturing sector, don’t you all realize that no sane person wants those jobs?

Why do you equate responding to Trump's tariffs with "want a manufacturing sector"? Trump is pushing the US to isolate itself from the world, not the EU. A few years ago the likes of Volkswagen were investing in auto factories in Morocco.
by freetime2 | 2025-04-08 04:30:31+00:00
I get that this is harmless fun - and I am legitimately happy that people got out and had some fun making up flyers and hanging out with other people. When I saw all those people hanging out in the park on a glorious Spring day, I admit I felt a twinge of jealousy as I sit here alone at my desk.

But I've got to say... I find it a bit distasteful how Americans increasingly seem to be more united by their dislikes than their interests.

Recently there was a frontpage HN news post about "stoop coffee" [1] - and that felt like a much more chill and constructive approach to doing nothing with other people.

[1] https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simpl...
by rayiner | 2025-04-08 04:31:08+00:00
It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of the immigration judge’s determination that Garcia was a member of MS13, because that determination was affirmed by the BIA and Garcia did not appeal. Garcia’s lawyers concede that Garcia is an illegal immigrant and the government could have deported him anywhere except El Salvador: “The government could have chosen to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia to any other country on earth…”
by jdyer9 | 2025-04-08 04:32:03+00:00
Imagine that your reputation didn't matter, getting sued was out of the question, and there was no criminal liability: your job, backed by the government, is to be employed by as many tech firms for as long as you can, you'd probably work pretty hard on coming up with a reasonable but very good resume and work hard on how to interview well. Now, you're a professional interviewer and might conduct 10x-100x more interviews than your average dev, and have a network of people helping you optimize your cheating.

Given that background, I personally find it unsurprising that they're having success and AI tools are just making it that much easier
by darubramha | 2025-04-08 04:32:47+00:00
The sandbox is a lightweight Alpine-based container, it runs as a non-root user for security, it has minimal dependencies installed (curl, bash, coreutils)

The container has restricted outbound access—only HTTP/S requests are allowed. It runs inside an isolated network namespace with no access to the host network or other infrastructure components. There's no inbound access, and the container can't receive unsolicited requests from the outside world.

The sandbox container can only communicate with other containers in the same network, the main application container and sandbox container are on the same network, allowing them to communicate.
by findingMeaning | 2025-04-08 04:33:53+00:00
Don't worry. There are people with privilege who would never understand the mean. They fly high due to their circumstances and are just lucky.

Us, we have go strive for living. That's the unfairness in life. It would have been so much easier if lucky ones would acknowledge their luck than attribute for hard work and what not.

Everyone discounts luck while it is the biggest factor. Only action you can do is increase the surface area of your luck.

Try to find meaning beyond career. There are multiple ways to get lucky. Find your own luck. After all we are in an era where people get wealth screaming on top of their lungs to the internet.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-08 04:34:11+00:00
I wonder how effective the propaganda apparatus in inside North Korea really. And also… I wonder if there’s a bit of a gap of stuff that is, like, not something that a westerner would be aware of.

Like if the person says “the carrot harvest was terrible last year and the uniforms are very itchy, it’s like he’s correctly but annoyingly prioritizing other things” they might be a spy.

I mean that is a silly example but you get the idea hopefully.
by superkuh | 2025-04-08 04:34:34+00:00
>Apparently, it is unfair that the United States has to buy rare earth metals from other countries because they are not naturally found domestically.

This off-topic aside at the end being false doesn't really matter to the rest of the claims of the article. But...

For the most part rare earths are found in the USA and there are inactive mines which could be resumed. But once you remove the host material from the ground, and the rare earths from it, it becomes "concentrated" low level radioactive waste that is so expensive to dispose of that it is no longer economically viable to mine the rare earths from it.

ref: https://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm-rare-earths-mining-wast... (2024)

ref: Critical Minerals and TENORM: How Do Permitting Reform and Executive Branch Actions Address Radioactivity? (2023) https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/Remplex%20S... (pdf, EPA)
by wavemode | 2025-04-08 04:37:10+00:00
I didn't parse the title as "Why (Companies Don't Fix Bugs)", rather I parsed it more like "Why Companies (Don't Fix Bugs)"

The article isn't arguing that "companies don't fix bugs" universally, rather it is explaining, in cases when they don't fix bugs, why they did not do so.

Sort of like if you saw an article about job searching titled "Why Employers Don't Respond"
by mbgerring | 2025-04-08 04:37:56+00:00
Something I learned over the last year as I got into running is that many avid runners don't even like running.

I wouldn't say that I "like" running, either. I got into running because I was experiencing a mental health crisis, and I needed something besides drugs and alcohol to deal with feelings that were otherwise impossible for me to cope with.

Suddenly, as a guy who has shouted "what are you running from?" at Bay to Breakers celebrants, what had been a joke became a dark and profound awareness. It turns out, I was asking myself that question. Running, paradoxically, helped give me the emotional resilience to face what I was running from head on.

There are very few things in this world that cost you nothing, are equally available to everyone, and can automatically, reliably and immediately improve your subjective experience.

This is a brilliant joke, and I love it. But the flip side is that almost everyone I know that ever got into running has Been Through Some Shit, is aware that running is annoying, not very fun, and kind of cringe, and Does Not Care, because whatever it is, running helps.

All of which is to say — you can think of run clubs as support groups, for everyone who has found themselves with a good reason to run, to be seen by other people who Know. For many runners I know, it's impossible to hate them anymore than they used to hate themselves. So, bring on the jokes.
by cootsnuck | 2025-04-08 04:38:39+00:00
So whenever I have gotten a job in tech, I've had to complete a background check if I get the job offer. How exactly are these fake profiles passing basic background checks?

They would have to be impersonating real people if pretending to be Americans. Unless these companies aren't doing the most basic background checks beyond just looking at resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Pretty weird and seems not too difficult to prevent...
by motorest | 2025-04-08 04:40:09+00:00
> When using a European server from Europe I expect < 10ms ping.

I'm living in reality, where a globally available application needs to serve people all over the globe from Cloudflare's >300 data centers. This means a worker running in the same data center hosting your D1 databases might get ~10ms requests, but workers running on all other >300 data centers have to pay for the round trip to the primary data center whenever there is a cache miss.

The question you need to ask yourself is how come you failed to notice that. Do you have a good grasp on what you are doing?
by superkuh | 2025-04-08 04:42:25+00:00
It is the second paragraph from the end.

>But people like Musk and Trump are rich beyond belief and do not have to worry about such working-class issues. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the ongoing trade war started by President Trump is expected to hurt his base, working-class Americans, the most. Apparently, it is unfair that the United States has to buy rare earth metals from other countries because they are not naturally found domestically.

Again, sorry for going off-topic here. Rushed infrastructure changes in complex software systems are almost univerally a terrible idea. Especially with such a dodgey and non-status quo way of forcing the implementation.
by 9rx | 2025-04-08 04:43:12+00:00
> Would clearly be a better name

It appears that it wanted to be services.WeatherService, which if reduced to service.Weather isn't looking so bad, but core ended up being introduced because the unnecessary interface already overloaded the namespace. The code doesn't accidentally highlight - it is crying out.

> always makes me feel like my types are dangling out in space

That's the idea, though, isn't it? Each package is its own distinct thing, intended to be useful and usable across many projects. There shouldn't be any kind of deep interconnectedness in most cases – and where there needs to be, you will typically place the related packages in a subfolder to communicate that relationship. I can't think offhand of any package manager that maintains anything other than a flat list of dependencies, and that's essentially what you are building here too.

I do think you have a point that many other ecosystems have a mindset where you are only building a single application with no attempt to find reusability beyond the immediate codebase. In large part because those languages/ecosystems require a bunch of extra, often complex, steps to make packages exportable. It can be a bit of mental shift to consider an application as a set of discrete, reusable parts if you come from those places.
by qwertox | 2025-04-08 04:45:38+00:00
I've been taught to respect the elders. But now I've seen that there are enough of them which aren't honest, good people, but only know how to present themselves in a positive light, while looking down on the ones they live with.

I now stand neutral against them: they may be good, they may not be. There's nothing in their age which makes them deserve more respect than the one younger people deserve.
by rayiner | 2025-04-08 04:45:53+00:00
> He hasn't been charged with any crime though.

The law doesn’t require being charged with or convicted of a crime for deportation. Garcia is deportable simply for being an illegal alien. The connection to MS13 is simply about prioritizing who gets deported first. Thus it makes sense that it doesn’t require a criminal conviction.

> That he has a family of citizens should keep him in the country. It's cruelty to split up families with deportation.

That’s not the law, and would create a tremendous moral hazard if it were the law. It’s cruel to Americans to import Latin America’s gang problems. We got the Italian mafia along with mass Italian immigration, and it took decades to clean it up. The Italian mob was doing hits in nice midtown manhattan restaurants until the 1980s until we developed RICO theories to put everyone in prison.
by m463 | 2025-04-08 04:46:55+00:00
I guess it depends on your use case.

I start up a clean emacs for many tasks, many times a day.

I usually run one or more instances of emacs, each with a group of buffers, sometimes 20 or 30.

I don't daemonize emacs because that would mix all kinds of per-task buffers together. It would be like people who run everything on one desktop. Maybe some people have very simple computer use. I run multiple virtual desktops, each for a different type of task.

startup time is still a little slow, but I just deal with it. I also byte-compile as much as possible. I even have an after-save-hook to byte-compile any changed .el startup file.

I don't know, maybe daemonizing might work for the folks who routinely have 99+ tabs open in their browser.
by davideg | 2025-04-08 04:47:58+00:00
The article gets into this where real Americans do job interviews and if they get a job they can keep 30% of the salary and have to pass off the remaining 70%:

> In the IT worker scheme, once someone involved gets an interview, North Koreans use remote-desktop tools to help coach people through the Q&A with a recruiter.

> Aidan Raney, founder of Farnsworth Intelligence, posed as an American willing to help North Koreans to investigate the issue for a client who almost hired a fake engineer. During the course of two video calls with three or four people who all said their names were “Ben,” Raney learned the details. “The Bens” would handle all the upfront work for him—creating a fake LinkedIn profile to verify his new identity for U.S. recruiters, formulating a bio, and sending it out to dozens of job postings with a new Gmail address they set up.

> The Bens even modified Raney’s headshot to a black-and-white photo so it wouldn’t resemble his usual picture, Raney told Fortune. If Raney got a job, he would show up for meetings, like a morning stand-up or scrum, and go about his day while a North Korean engineer handled the workload. Raney would be allowed to keep 30% of the salary but had to transfer 70% to the Bens using crypto, Paypal, or Payoneer.

> “What they were trying to do was use my identity to bypass background checks, and so they wanted this fake persona they created to be extremely close to the real-life version,” said Raney.

> The Bens got Raney an interview, and while it was ongoing, they used a remote-desktop application to set up a notepad on Raney’s screen so they could write out responses to the questions from the interviewer, Raney explained. And it worked: Raney got a verbal offer for a job with a private government contractor that paid $80,000 a year.

> He then had to immediately turn around and tell the company he couldn’t accept the offer and apologize for claiming their time.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-08 04:48:46+00:00
With a lot of the products I support, I suspect the real reason is that they had originally hired outsourced programmers, or got rid of most of their in house programmers over the years, and literally have no ability to fix simple issues in a cost effective way. It's why they always try to push you to the next version of the program that is a ground up rewrite instead of continuing to support the existing version.