MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oconnor663 | 2025-04-14 16:03:45+00:00
> Predictable response: "But they can only occur in unsafe regions which you can grep for" and my response to that: "so?"

The situation is both worse than this and better than this. Consider the .set_len() method on Rust's Vec. It's unsafe, because you could just .set_len(1_000_000) and then the Vec would happily let you try to read the nonexistent millionth element and segfault. However, if you could edit the standard library sources, you could add this new method to Vec without touching any unsafe code:

pub fn set_len_totally_safe_i_promise(&mut self, new_len: usize) { self.len = new_len; }

This is exactly the same as the real set_len, except it's a "fn" instead of an "unsafe fn". Now the Vec API is totally broken, and safe callers can corrupt memory. Also critically, we didn't write any unsafe code in "set_len_totally_safe_i_promise". The key detail is that this new method has access to the private self.len field of Vec that unsafe blocks in the same module rely on.

In other words, grepping for all the unsafe blocks isn't sufficient for saying that a program is UB-free. You also have to make sure that none of the safe code ever violates an invariant that the unsafe blocks rely on. Read the comments, think really hard, etc.

So...what's the point of all this? The point is that it lets us define a notion of "soundness", such that if I only write safe code, and I only use libraries that are "sound", we can guarantee that my program is UB-free. In other words, any UB in my program would necessarily point to a bug in one of my dependencies, in the stdlib, or in the compiler. (Or you know, in the hardware, or in mathematics itself.) In other other words, instead of auditing my entire gigantic (safe) program for UB, we can reduce the problem to auditing my dependencies for soundness. Crucially, this decouples the difficulty of the problem from the size of my program. This wouldn't be very interesting if "safe code" was some impoverished subset, like "unsigned integer arithmetic only". But in fact safe code can use pointers, tagged unions, pointers into tagged unions, heap allocation/freeing, and multithreading. Lots of large, complicated, useful, real-world programs are written in 100% safe code. Here the version of this story with all the caveats and footnotes: https://jacko.io/safety_and_soundness.html
by smcameron | 2025-04-14 16:03:48+00:00
There's an interesting book[1] by Douglas Hofstadter about translation in general and also about translating his most famous book[2] (which by its nature was particularly difficult to translate) into many different languages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
by tomjen3 | 2025-04-14 16:03:49+00:00
Exactly. It's a new administration who has done some, shall we say, questionable things to the economy. That is going to have an impact on people. Which means they're going to spend less money in stores, especially those who have a more uncertain income.

What is more likely? That people care about some rather obscure policies or that they care if they are able to keep their job?
by paraboul | 2025-04-14 16:04:11+00:00
> the same object can be part of multiple containers at once

I'm not sure I understand this one. Since the object contains the reference to where it belongs inside a container (e.g. object.node.next) how can it be re-used in multiple containers. Conversely, in a non-intrusive data structure, multiple containers can hold a ref to the same object through an intermediate node object
by titzer | 2025-04-14 16:04:36+00:00
This theory is absurd. They're unjustifiably generalizing from a single system--biological evolution on Earth[1]. There are literally no other places in our solar system even that are rapidly evolving to more complexity. Lots of dead rocks, hot and cold, and a bunch of boiling gas balls. Incidentally, none of these are turning into Cybertron. As it turns out, the chemistry that we know to be necessary for self-replicating things just doesn't work there. (Maybe there are other chemistries that will work, we don't know). So this specific chemistry and this specific set of conditions to kick off and indeed allow self-replication to continue are pretty damn important to understanding how it works.

A "new force of nature"? It's just so pretentious. Some interesting biases of a selection process driven by copious excess energy doesn't make for a new force of nature. Otherwise we'd be positing all kinds of absurdities that are not directly explained by particle physics are woo woo a new force of nature--fashion choices (hey, copy, select, mutate there too).

[1] And no, I don't think that the computer simulations of evolution they carry out are any additional evidence. So you made a computer program with a copy/select/mutate loop in it. Big deal. I can make a computer simulation about anything.
by ra7 | 2025-04-14 16:05:01+00:00
It’s always sad to see people lose their jobs, but it’s telling how often it’s ex-Googlers posting about layoffs. Feels like a lot of the shock is just realizing they’re just as replaceable and as much of a "cog in the machine" as everyone else. Google spent years selling the idea that it was special, but this feels like a real coming back down to earth moment for the employees.
by bsimpson | 2025-04-14 16:05:44+00:00
A potentially unique feature of Google (at least pre-pandemic/McKinsey) is that it cultivated communities of people in a particular discipline despite being spread across the world.

When I first met Adam, we were both UX Engineers. We'd all gather in NYC in the spring and in the Bay Area in the fall for internal conferences. Adam lives in Seattle. There are plenty of people who adore him who aren't geographically close enough to meet for the proverbial beer. I suspect that's also true for the connections he made outside of Google.
by malfmalf | 2025-04-14 16:05:51+00:00
There was a talk at a university, where the presenter used only words of two or less SYLABLES , but he allowed himself to use more complicated words after explaining them (but kept that to a minimum).

I can't find either the author or the talk. I think it was some 5 years ago.

At first, I thought it was Randall Munroe, but I might be remembering this: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

I've also tried with Paul Graham, who has some articles trying to convey something similar, but no luck there.

Edited to add : I think the original proponent of a similar idea was Richard Feynman : https://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2022/03/understandi...
by thatnerd | 2025-04-14 16:06:42+00:00
I think it's an upper limit of around 0.2 eV^2, so √(0.2 eV^2) = 0.45 eV.

I'd like to see an experiment that's sensitive enough to eliminate the m=0 hypothesis. Their prediction of m^2 = -0.14eV^2 is a bit disconcerting.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-14 16:07:35+00:00
That's awful and the most amazing thing you could do now is get together with those ex-coworkers or similar people and compete with Google in whatever business domain it was that made them acquire your former employer.

Because, having been through the acquisition process at Google myself, my general cynical take is: Google acquires companies to get rid of them, to stop them from competing and not to "add your uniqueness to their collective."

Keeping employees on retention bonuses is a way, in aggregate, of stopping them from going off and inventing something that eats their bottom line.

You should look into legal action. And failing that, compete with them.
by rookderby | 2025-04-14 16:07:53+00:00
TFA lists C at number 3 per the Tiobe ranking and the linked Tiobe report has Ruby at #24. I tried to find a different list for comparison as I dont think that is true for projects at large. This project [1] for instance tracks github repositories with Ruby at #8 and C at #9 which is closer to what I expected (both in the top-fifteen, neither in the top-three). At least it confirms my bias, and maybe we learn more about who is being surveyed.

[1] https://madnight.github.io/githut/
by afpx | 2025-04-14 16:08:34+00:00
Pretty cool. I often wondered if the universe was evolving similar to natural selection via a reinforcement learning process. Wave function collapses to the value that maximizes some objective function.

How would you test for it though? I've seen enough residual data from RL processes to almost see semblences of patterns that could be extracted and re-applied at a macro scale.
by rideontime | 2025-04-14 16:10:03+00:00
The article says that they've only just begun deploying it, and that it will merely be used to speed up the process of recognizing patterns.

> WDP is beginning to deploy DolphinGemma this field season with immediate potential benefits. By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort. Eventually, these patterns, augmented with synthetic sounds created by the researchers to refer to objects with which the dolphins like to play, may establish a shared vocabulary with the dolphins for interactive communication.
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-14 16:10:16+00:00
We already agree it's putting people through the wringer, I said as much. We're going to have to agree to disagree here. The Chinese government may be willing to go to the mat, but 1.3 Billion people will have something to say when their economy slows down. So will 300M Americans, but hey, that's what elections and protests are for. We all know how protests in China go.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-14 16:10:26+00:00
> Thanks. I still don't understand where the bits live that tell you which type T is for a given node.

Yup. You'd have to set that up yourself. It could be anywhere. It could be in a separate array, it could be in the previous node-data, etc.

you wouldn't put it in the Node (capital N) datastructure though, that is privileged.

Personally, I would say doing something like this is "bad idea bears" unless you are absolutely certain you need it and you should explore using, say, data payload type with a union field instead, if possible (though know that that comes with a potential memory penalty)
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-14 16:11:13+00:00
And yet none of them are having to pass laws allowing someone who is working to live in their car.

If you were a teacher, policemen, social worker, healthcare worker or even working in fast food, where would you be better off at?

And states with the highest homeless population per capita

https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/homelessness-study...
by perrygeo | 2025-04-14 16:11:14+00:00
Malthus was wrong only in that he didn't anticipate the massive store of energy we were about to unleash with coil, oil, and gas. We were able to smash through Malthus' predictions because we added more solar energy (in the form of fossilized carbon) to the system. The Haber-Bosch process cranked it up to 11.

In an alternative world where we left fossil fuels in the ground, we would have hit a population ceiling in the 1800s.

In a future world where fossil fuels are no longer accessible (either through climate policy, depletion, or market forces) this means our energy budget needs to shrink - Malthusian limits to our food production will be of concern again, assuming we make it through the climate bottleneck.
by finally4444 | 2025-04-14 16:11:17+00:00
Deebo is a fully autonomous debugging agent that integrates into LLM workflows via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). When a coding agent like Claude hits a bug it can’t confidently fix, it offloads the problem to Deebo.

Deebo’s “mother agent” spawns multiple scenario subprocesses—each exploring a different hypothesis in its own Git branch. These subprocesses use tools like git-mcp and desktopCommander to validate or falsify their fixes. Results are reported back asynchronously, and the mother agent converges on the best solution through structured reasoning loops.

To stress-test it, we picked a real-world $100 bounty from george hotz' repo, tinygrad: test_failure_53. The bug was buried deep in the Linearizer optimizer. Several devs had taken a stab at it, but the root cause wasn’t clear.

Here’s what Deebo did:

• Parsed the test and repo structure

• Hypothesized failure due to GROUPTOP optimization on uchar reductions

• Explored type promotion issues, stride edge cases, and scope conflicts

• Proposed a valid fix: disable GROUPTOP in unsafe contexts or add explicit type coercion

The test passed. The fix is still under review—but the important part is: Deebo figured this out on its own. It didn’t copy-paste code or regurgitate docs—it ran structured experiments, refined hypotheses, and converged on the solution path.

If you’re working on agents, devtools, or complex debugging workflows—we’d love feedback. AMA about the architecture, MCP integration, or what’s next.
by atotic | 2025-04-14 16:11:18+00:00
Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly.

What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years.

Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome.

It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.
by myfonj | 2025-04-14 16:11:19+00:00
I'd call it semi-buried, since it is not isolated from the atmosphere, so in a long term I suspect that almost all its mass gets re-circulated back again – still through microbes, fungi, insects, and perhaps living root systems of surrounding trees. (Last time I tried to get some data about how much carbon remains in the soil after aerobic wood/plants decomposition in agriculture I remember it was pretty much negligible. Forest have way higher limits for maximum soil carbon accumulation, but this limit is reportedly reached after about three centuries of uninterrupted growth.)
by didip | 2025-04-14 16:11:36+00:00
So… I have a number of questions:

1. How did he tell Claude to “update” based on the notebook entries?

2. Won’t he eventually ran out of context window?

3. Won’t this be expensive when using hosted solutions? For just personal hacking, why not simply use ollama + your favorite model?

4. If one were to build this locally, can Vector DB similarity search or a hybrid combined with fulltext search be used to achieve this?

I can totally imagine using pgai for the notebook logs feature and local ollama + deepseek for the inference.

The email idea mentioned by other commenters is brilliant. But I don’t think you need a new mailbox, just pull from Gmail and grep if sender and receiver is yourself (aka the self tag).

Thank you for sharing, OP’s project is something I have been thinking for a few months now.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-14 16:13:09+00:00
I mean, actually, we're in this world now (for now, esp in the US) where if you work in trades and lose your job you could turn around and get another job pretty easily. It might suck just as much as your previous job, and the pay won't be anywhere close to a SWE salary, but there's just so much work...

But if you're a tech worker, it's really not a gravy train anymore. The number of open positions has dropped, the compensation ranges perhaps as well, and the interview process is more grueling and involved.

People who worked as salaried employees at BigCorps for years making big $$ definitely should have more savings, but they're still on the whole just the same as any other worker: they pay taxes, they don't own enough capital to make them independent of the market, and they are likely some number of months/years away from not being able to pay mortgage/rent/bills/groceries. Just like any other worker.

There are no "jobs" even in tech that give any kind of permanent escape from the need to beg for employment to make ends meet.
by jart | 2025-04-14 16:13:24+00:00
You probably have WINE or something installed. We have a workaround:

sudo wget -O /usr/bin/ape https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ape-$(uname -m).elf sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ape sudo sh -c "echo ':APE:M::MZqFpD::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register" sudo sh -c "echo ':APE-jart:M::jartsr::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"

For more help/information on the various gotchas and things that can go wrong running Actually Portable Executable (APE) binaries, please see this reference Mozilla put together: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile/?tab=readme-ov-fil...
by pixl97 | 2025-04-14 16:13:55+00:00
Unfortunately we don't really have enough deep freshwater to bury them in. Below the thermocline freshwater has little oxygen and logs can last till the turn to fossils.

With saltwater it's a bit trickier because it's decently oxygenated even to depth and there is a lot of life dedicated to breaking down wood in the ocean. If you can get it to sink into the muck it lasts a lot longer though.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-14 16:14:04+00:00
>It's easy to accidentally hit the microphone button that appears for any text field in almost all smartphone apps.

This. I do it pretty often, most apps have their own icon for it, plus the keyboard itself also has an icon for it. I actually use it a lot of times to send texts intentionally, but often have to start over because it picks up background speech from nearby people or the tv and messes up what you're trying to input.
by jeromenerf | 2025-04-14 16:14:12+00:00
Planning wood, expect during kezuroukai, is annoying because knots are hard and deform the thin edge; most often still wet enough to oxydize the thin edge; finally full of abrasive silicium to abrade the thin edge.

Meanwhile, lake erie toolworks is creating powder metallurgy CPM magnacut blades for western style planes, which seemingly never gets dull because of corrosion resistance, wear resistance and hardness.
by knorker | 2025-04-14 16:14:18+00:00
I definitely think that there's a difference in kind about what Google has done and what Microsoft attempted to do.

Microsoft wanted everyone on MSN instead of the Internet. They bullied their browser to be the only one, and then kept it crippled. They tried to own the scripting language (VBScript) of the Internet.

I'm going to try right now: Oh, looks like I can visit any website I want with Chrome. Or Chromium. Or now IE also using Chromium.

Google is of course still driven by capitalism, not altruism. But when you look at their history they've in the vast majority of cases done the right thing arguably for the wrong reason.

And that's because Google's incentives have been aligned differently. Microsoft earns money from Windows and Windows related services (very broad here, where I include Office). Until Bing, every time someone used the Internet instead of native apps, Microsoft basically lost money. Definitely lost power.

Every time someone spends more time on the Internet, Google earns more money, statistically. So Google, in a complete opposite to Microsoft, has been incentivised to help people get onto the open web.

Yes, after Microsoft's surrender the Chromium market share is too big. And it's a problem. But at least thanks to Apple you cannot make a website that only works on Chrome. Especially since Chrome on iPhone uses WebKit, not Chromium, because of Apple app rules.

Another problem with Google is that some important opensource projects have a large set of maintainers be Google employees. But the alternative is that they… not contribute? Didn't we say that big companies should give back to opensource? But of course they'll work on what they need. Though there will be a large overlap.

It's kind of a first world problem that the open source (apache license) Kubernetes has "too many google employees" as contributors.

During Microsoft's domination, this was not the problem. This was not the problem at all.

What can you not do, or need to special case, with Safari+AWS?

Android, OK there Google asserts control. Not total control (see any Samsung phone), but a lot.
by thatnerd | 2025-04-14 16:14:27+00:00
You can't express mass in volts. A volt is energy per unit of charge. To get energy, you need to multiply by a charge.

One Joule of energy is what you get when you move one Coulomb of charge across a 1V potential.

One electronVolt (eV) is the energy you get from moving one electron's worth of charge across 1 volt of potential.

It's an accident of what we chose to be a Joule of energy and what we chose to be a Coulomb of charge, so there should be no expectation that this would turn out to be the mass of an electron (when divided by the square of the speed of light, which is unstated because everyone knows E = mc^2).
by psadauskas | 2025-04-14 16:14:35+00:00
I've worked at 10 startups since 2006, with equity or options each time. Only one time did it turn out to be worth anything at all (~6 months salary), and that one time wasn't even a successful "exit". It was more of an aquihire, and they paid out the options for everyone they didn't want, ie everyone not living in the Bay. The other nine times my options have been worth precisely zero, either I get let go or quit because the company is circling the drain, or fizzles out, or gets rid of a bunch of people to goose the numbers before a fire sale.

Stock options are a lottery ticket, and I value them roughly the same.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-14 16:15:01+00:00
>In the US, homicide, suicide, and drug overdose are the leading causes of pregnancy-associated death

If you kill yourself with recreational drugs or intentionally that is not pregnancy-related/associated, except by the most disingenuous peddlers who want to go on a semantic crusade about what 'related'/'associated' is in order to push their agenda.
by beardyw | 2025-04-14 16:15:28+00:00
If you leave out every adjective they read better.

"The walls of Earth’s Spaceport Alpha hummed with a low thrum – the sound of power, of humanity’s ambition made tangible. Rain lashed against the windows, blurring the cityscape into a wash of grey and amber. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of disinfectant."
by hermitShell | 2025-04-14 16:15:36+00:00
In N Stephensons “Anathem” there are “fuel trees” and a couple paragraphs describing how they are ‘cooked’ for hydrocarbon fuels. I like trees and his vision of a future where genetically modified trees are the best way to collect solar energy and then harvest and store it. Solar panels are cool but one of the themes of the book is civilization over many millennia, and I can see how he arrived at his conclusion that most tech doesn’t work as well as trees.
by grepfru_it | 2025-04-14 16:15:57+00:00
This is highly country dependent, but in America for example, if this is not presented in your employment contract then it is not something your employer needs to do.

However, if your employer is a public organization then all of this information needs to be made available to shareholders. While you may not have access to this information, it is not secret and can be shared by any of the shareholders. Due to this, there is an implicit requirement to reduce risk and “cooking the books” while allowed is generally seen as risky since shareholders may run for the hills. In a smaller, privately run company there are no shareholders to run for the hills. Just a bunch of employees who hold paper IOUs. In order to get that audit protection, the employee would need to negotiate that into their employment agreement!
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-14 16:16:02+00:00
1. Build out nuclear fission (100x current use)

2. Store spent fuel in massive wooden dry caskets. (500-1000x steel)

3a. Float caskets to Antarctica

3b. Offload via rail to South Pole

4. They stay frozen for a million years and don't rot. Problem solved.