MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by remisharrock | 2025-04-24 10:08:52+00:00
We also created a while back codecast for my courses in c programming. I also have Linux running entirely in the browser. And the c programming language "running" fully in the browser. Everything in sync with your oral explanations.

The courses :

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/c-programming-linux

https://www.edx.org/certificates/professional-certificate/da...

I wrote a few papers to explain:

CODECAST: An Innovative Technology to Facilitate Teaching and Learning Computer Programming in a C Language Online Course

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

WebLinux: a scalable in-browser and client-side Linux and IDE

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

I also have a taskgrader to grade student's codes :

Teaching C Programming Interactively at Scale Using Taskgrader: an Open-source Autograder Tool

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

https://codecast.wp.imt.fr/
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 10:09:11+00:00
It is absolutely possible to enjoy both- I have used LLMs to generate code for ideas about alternate paths to take when I write my code- but prompt generation is not coding, and there are WAY too many people who claim to be coding when they have in fact done nothing of the sort.

> a far higher intensity

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The code that I've gotten is riddled with mistakes and fabrications. If I were to use it directly, it would significantly slow my pace. Likewise, when I use LLMs to offer alternative methods to accomplish something, I have to take the time to sit down and understand what they're proposing, how to actually make it work, and whether that route(s) would be better than my original idea. That is a significant speed reduction.

The only way I can imagine LLMs resulting in "far higher intensity" is if I was just yolo'ing the code into my program, and then doing frantic integration, correction, and bugfix work afterwards.

Sure, that's "higher intensity", but that's just working harder and not smarter.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-24 10:09:21+00:00
However, the compiler does not tell you this. We're back to the problem that it's possible to have a "working" C program that relies on UB and will therefore break at some point, but the tools will not yell at you for doing this. Whereas in Java or C# you get warnings or errors for using maybe-uninitialized variables.

Also, scanf should be deprecated. Terrible API. Never use scanf or sscanf etc. We managed to get "gets()" deprecated, time to spread that to other parts of the API.

atoi() or atof() etc. work OK, but really you need a parser.
by rgoulter | 2025-04-24 10:09:26+00:00
It's funny to see Helix mentioned, without kakoune being mentioned.

Helix is a really nifty terminal editor. It aims to be nice out-of-the-box, to have good LSP support, DAP support, and Tree-Sitter support.

Compared to vim's "action motion" keybindings, Helix goes for "motion action" (which kakoune popularised). I find this is frequently more intuitive.

Helix also has neat discoverability.. with pop-ups showing you what the available keybindings are.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-24 10:10:09+00:00
Didn't address the problem of LLMs and such making publishing original work a self defeating challenge because any of it can be emulated and expropriated by anyone in a pinch.

If not licensing training data is legal then you have no ability to say "I made this" and mean it in the eyes of other people. It's empty air because everyone can and will assume you could just ask a model.
by CPLX | 2025-04-24 10:10:59+00:00
It's not one judge: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/technology/google-antitru...

It's also not one party, it's successive Democratic and Republican administrations that prosecuted the cases.

It's also not just Federal, the most recent victory was also prosecuted by the Attorneys General of 17 separate states, also from a mix of political parties.

Google is a monopoly engaged in anti-competitive actions that have severely harmed the markets it participates in. That's a demonstrated fact at this point.

You're welcome to advocate for a redefinition of the words we're using here, or just to legalize monopoly power, which presumably is a political goal you have and would have the effect of causing judges to reach different outcomes based on this new law, but there's no value in arguing with reality.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-24 10:11:58+00:00
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.

I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-24 10:12:21+00:00
> When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.

That's why the usual approach, especially in this industry, is to not give people choice in the first place - this is achieved by renting, instead of selling.

Clothes as a Service is already a thing. A CaaS with excessively specific restriction of use? Might not be - yet. No doubt someone will try it.
by ben_w | 2025-04-24 10:12:42+00:00
Indeed.

With humans, every so often I find myself in a conversation where the other party has a wildly incorrect understanding of what I've said, and it can be impossible to get them out of that zone. Rare, but it happens. With LLMs, much as I like them for breadth of knowledge, it happens most days.

That said, with LLMs I can reset the conversation at any point, backtracking to when they were not misunderstanding me — but even that trick doesn't always work, so the net result is the LLM is still worse at understanding me than real humans are.
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-24 10:13:23+00:00
Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it.

Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself.

I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand group B. In vice versa.

I'm a musician, so I love everything about creating music. From the theory, to the mastery of the instrument, the tens of thousands of hours I've poured into it...finally being able to play something I never thought I'd be able to, just by sheer willpower and practice. Coming up with melodies that feel something to me, or I can relate to something.

On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea.

I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.

So I think there are a lot of devs these days, that have been honing their skills and love for the craft for years, that don't understand why people just want things to be generated, with no effort.
by hatmatrix | 2025-04-24 10:14:07+00:00
I've tried Vi/Vim key bindings on several occasions, but just couldn't be efficient in it. It's often touted as the "superior" form that confers benefit to those who invest time to learn it, but discussions with other coders have led me to believe this is just confirmation bias by people who prefer these key bindings.

There are people like myself who edit frequently while writing (even with in a single sentence or word), so this switching between normal and insert modes to do chunks of each operation at a time incurs a heavy cost. Yes, there is Ctrl+[ for single commands, but this is still an additional step compared to the key chord model of Emacs for instance.
by circlefavshape | 2025-04-24 10:14:42+00:00
I think you misread the comment you're replying to.

> The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel.

AFAICS you're agreeing with this, so "complete and utter nonsense" seems a bit harsh
by wchswchs | 2025-04-24 10:15:23+00:00
I've been exploring some new ideas while working on TPP, a protocol for multi-agent systems, and one of the concepts I'm really excited about is something I’m calling "Gear-Based Programming."

It’s a different take compared to traditional block-based programming—there are no explicit concepts like tasks or tools. The idea is to simplify the way we design and build intelligent agents, especially when it comes to multi-agent collaboration.

I think this could evolve into a new programming paradigm for the AI era—kind of like how object-oriented programming replaced procedural programming back in the day.

Curious to hear your thoughts. Does this idea resonate with anyone? Has anyone tried similar approaches?
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-24 10:15:54+00:00
Facebook being a monopoly is irrelevant to EU competition laws. These laws are strictly interested in fostering competitive markets and broadly cares about all sorts of anticompetitive behaviours. They are in no way interested in monopolies and I don’t think being a monopoly is a prerequisite for any of them. The closest notion will be dominant position but that’s a far weaker criteria itself irrelevant to the DMA.
by rfoo | 2025-04-24 10:16:08+00:00
This is great idea! But it's more about having LLMs to give function & variables names, instead of having LLM to deobfuscate. The (traditional) deobfuscations (e.g. unpack, de-flatten, de-virtualization etc) were done by 100% precise human made Babel plugins and is totally unrelated to a LLM.
by jrapdx3 | 2025-04-24 10:17:32+00:00
Like many others writing here, I enjoy coding (well, mostly anyway), especially the when it requires deep thought and patient experimentation to get anywhere. It's also great to preside over finally wiring together the routines (modules, libraries) that bind a project into a coherent whole.

Haven't much used AI to assist. After all, hard enough finding authentic humans capable and willing to voluntarily review/critique one's code. So far AI doesn't consistently provide that kind of help. OTOH seems almost certain over time AI systems will improve in terms of specific and comprehensive "insights" into the particular types of code one is writing.

I think an issue is that human creativity is hard to measure. Likely enough AI is even tougher to assess. Probably AI will increasingly be assigned tasks like constructing project skeletons, assuring parts can be joined together without undue strain, handling "boilerplate" and other routine chores. To be sure the landscape will look different in 50 years, I'm certain we'd be amazed were we able to see what future systems will be doing.

In any case, we shouldn't hesitate to use tools that genuinely boost our creativity. One badly needed role would be enabling development of higher reliability software. Still that's a far cry from the contributions emanating from the best of human originality, talent and motivation.
by drekipus | 2025-04-24 10:19:18+00:00
I think kakoune invented motion action keybinds, but Helix is the one popularizing it.

I love helix because it is very fast, it supports everything it needs to, and the built-in help/which key. It's what I wish vim was.

Shameless self-promotion of a discussion thread I started.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/13399
by fmstephe | 2025-04-24 10:19:26+00:00
For the problems that arena allocators solve, relatively short lived allocations which die soon, yes. A generational collector would allow for faster allocation rates (a thread local bump allocator would become easy to use).

But very long lived data structures, like caches and in memory databases still need to be marked during full heap garbage collection cycles. These are less frequent with a generational collector though.
by andybak | 2025-04-24 10:19:46+00:00
> Some people love programming

> Other people see all that as an means to an end

I think it's worth pointing out that most people are both these things at different times.

There's things I care about and want a deep understanding of but there's plenty of tasks I want to just "go away". If I had an junior coder - I'd be delegating these. Instead I use AI when I can.

There's also tasks where I want a jump start. I prefer fixing/improving code over writing from scratch so often a bad AI attempt is still valuable to me.
by baritone | 2025-04-24 10:19:47+00:00
First off- this is great, and I think there are use-cases for this. Being able to even partially isolate could be helpful.

Second, as a user, you’d want to handle the case where some or all of these have been fully compromised. Surreptitiously, super-intelligently, and partially or fully autonomously, one container or many may have access to otherwise isolated networks within homes, corporate networks, or some device in a high security area with access to a nuclear weapons, biological weapons, the electrical grid, our water supply, our food supplies, manufacturing, or even some other key vulnerability we’ve discounted, like a toy.

While providing more isolation is good, there is no amount of caution that can prevent calamity when you give everyone a Pandora’s box. It’s like giving someone a bulletproof jacket to protect them from fox tapeworm cancer or hyper-intelligent, time-traveling, timespace-manipulating super-Ebola.

That said, it’s the world we live in now, where we’re in a race to our demise. So, thanks for the bulletproof jacket.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-04-24 10:21:50+00:00
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).

Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?

If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
by ben_w | 2025-04-24 10:21:51+00:00
According to the Common Voice 15 graph on OpenAI's github repository, Albanian is the single worst performance you could have had: https://github.com/openai/whisper

But for what it's worth, I tried putting the YouTube video of Tom Scott presenting at the Royal Institute into the model, and even then the results were only "OK" rather than "good". When even a professional presenter and professional sound recording in a quiet environment has errors, the model is not really good enough to bother with.
by rfoo | 2025-04-24 10:22:32+00:00
> flawed enough starting premise

That's where we start to disagree what future looks like, then.

It's not there yet, in that the LLM-clone isn't good enough. But amusingly a not nearly good enough clone of me already made me more productive, in that I'm able to deliver more while maintaining the same level of personal satisfaction with my code.
by maratc | 2025-04-24 10:22:55+00:00
I guess you've missed my point, which is: I don't work for my phone. My phone works for me. As such, I shouldn't find myself in the situations where I have to create the optimal conditions for my phone, but rather my phone should somehow accommodate the conditions that I deem optimal for me. The idea that somehow I should provide "cool temperatures" in order to "give a much better lifespan" to my phone while it is "fast charging" ... seems completely idiotic to me. Cooling my room to 20C all year round will incur huge electricity costs, but even if the cost was zero, I don't work for my phone. The other options -- whether slow charge, or replacing the battery, or replacing the phone -- render the option of cooling my home inconvenient to the extreme.
by brickfaced | 2025-04-24 10:23:07+00:00
Complicity in what, exactly? Democracy? Personally I'm less concerned about Facebook staying neutral in 2016 and more concerned about their election sabotage in 2020:

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3616579-zuckerberg-tel...

Of course in the end things turned out for the best, but that's almost certainly not what Sheryl wanted, so I guess it's on theme for the book.
by moomin | 2025-04-24 10:25:21+00:00
We haven't created a self-sustaining human population in earth orbit yet. We need to constantly supply the space station and even when we do, the health impact of staying there is really serious. That's table stakes for a Mars mission and no improvements in rocketry will compensate for the fact we simply can't keep someone alive for that long outside of earth atmosphere.

Honestly, the number of people who think they know the ins and outs of living on Mars because they saw a Matt Damon movie is bizarre.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-24 10:26:10+00:00
NVIDIA and AMD, from my experience, have completely different cultures.

ATI started as a much more closed company. Then, they pivoted and started to open their parts. They were hamstrung at the HDCP at one point, and they decided to decouple HDCP block from video accelerators at silicon level to allow open source drivers to access video hardware without leaking/disabling HDCP support. So, they devoted to open what they have, but when you have tons of legacy IP, things doesn't go from 0 to 100 in a day. I want to remind that "game dependent driver optimization" started pre 2000s. This is how rooted these codebases are.

NVIDIA took a different approach, which was being indifferent on the surface, but their hardware became a bit more hostile at every turn towards nouveau. Then they released some specs to allow "hardware enablement" by nouveau, so closed source drivers can be installed, and the card didn't blank-screened at boot.

Then, as they fought with kernel developers, with some hard prodding by Kernel guys and some coercing by RedHat, NVIDIA accepted to completely remove "shim" shenanigans, and moved closed bits of the kernel module to card firmware by revising card architecture. It's important to keep in mind that NVIDIA's open drivers means "an open, bare bones kernel module, a full fledged and signed proprietary firmware which can be used by closed source drivers only and a closed source GLX stack", where in AMD this means "An open source kernel module, standard MESA libraries, and a closed source firmware available to all drivers".

It was in talks with nouveau guys to allow them to use the full powered firmware with clock and power management support, but I don't know where it went.

The CUDA environment is also the same. Yes it works very well, and it's a vast garden, but it's walled and protected by electrified fence and turrets. You're all in, or all out.
by rs186 | 2025-04-24 10:26:56+00:00
Knowing C/C++, I more or less guessed what's happening (uninitialized variable) early in the blog post.

It blows my mind that the languages allow you to leave variables uninitialized which has caused countless bugs (including production bugs that I have seen first hand), and you often need to rely on additional compiler flags or static analysis tools/valgrind etc to catch them. Even though newer languages often use a different solution (default zero value or must initialize a variable before use), people still go back to C/C++ all the time.
by larsga | 2025-04-24 10:28:18+00:00
You're broadly right, but they were popular for most of the period we're discussing.

In continental Europe they were popular from roughly ~1000 onwards (see Behre 1999), in England from roughly 1500 onwards. In African and South American farmhouse brewing they're still not used. So it's a pretty complicated picture.

As the comment made clear, hops are only one component of what makes beer safe, though. Storable, safe beer for travel is documented already in Ancient Egypt.
by suraci | 2025-04-24 10:28:20+00:00
"America's tariff move under Trump is a symptom of mass psychosis. But I think China's response is a huge gamble that the psychosis can be broken with careful application of pain - before that pain hurts China even more.

There is some hope that they'll revolt against Trump if things get bad enough, the way there's some hope for democracy in China, I suppose. But at the same time, I don't know that China's aggressive response is going to politically move things in that direction, because it's so easy for the nationalists to rally around the flag - regardless of the economic pain they're experiencing. China itself knows this and leverages it with its own nationalists. And this response is going to cost China dearly."
by bayindirh | 2025-04-24 10:28:58+00:00
I guess that you don't understand that how silicon and 3rd party IP works. It took Intel a completely new GPU from scratch to be able to open drivers. AMD did at least one revision to their silicon to enable that kind of openness.

Yet, HDMI forum said that they can't implement an HDMI2.1 capable driver in the open, with some nasty legal letters.

I have a couple of friends who wrote 3D engines from scratch and debugged graphics drivers for their engines for a living. It's a completely different jungle filled with completely different beasts.

I think being able to call glxinfo on an AMD card running with completely open drivers and being able to see extensions from NVIDIA, AMD, SGI, IBM and others is a big win already.
by maglite77 | 2025-04-24 10:30:00+00:00
Something I'm surprised this article didn't touch on which is driving many organizations to be conservative in "how much" AI they release for a given product: prompt-jacking and data privacy.

I, like many others in the tech world, am working with companies to build out similar features. 99% percent of the time, data protection teams and legal are looking for ways to _remove_ areas where users can supply prompts / define open-ended behavior. Why? Because there is no 100% guarantee that the LLM will not behave in a manner that will undermine your product / leak data / make your product look terrible - and that lack of a guarantee makes both the afore-mentioned offices very, very nervous (coupled with a lack of understanding of the technical aspects involved).

The example of reading emails from the article is another type of behavior that usually gets an immediate "nope", as it involves sending customer data to the LLM service - and that requires all kinds of gymnastics to a data protection agreement and GDPR considerations. It may be fine for smaller startups, but the larger companies / enterprises are not down with it for initial delivery of AI features.