MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shermantanktop | 2025-05-30 20:21:08+00:00
At work I’m watching a skilled, proven VP take a huge gamble that is out of his control even though he doesn’t seem to realize it - his confidence clearly blinds him and causes him to acknowledge the risk but claim everything is 100% according to plan. Even while many senior people are quitting due to this gamble, some of whom were less effective, but some are virtually irreplaceable.

I’ve worked with this guy for a long time and he’s a risk taker but nothing like this.

What seems to have triggered this is his fascination with LLMs. I have a feeling this is happening to a lot of execs in tech right now.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-30 20:21:17+00:00
> ... drastically restrict the syscall API surface available to the sandboxee, which quickly reduces its value ...

Depends I guess as Android has had quite a bit of success with seccomp-bpf & Android-specific flavour of SELinux [0]

> Until we have a properly hardened and memory safe OS ... faster than running MicroVMs on a Linux host.

Andy Tanenbaum might say, Micro Kernels would do just as well.

[0] https://youtu.be/WxbOq8IGEiE
by speakspokespok | 2025-05-30 20:21:47+00:00
This is a very handy tool.

For those of us who sometimes have to do presentations but don’t want to (learn) do full blown slidedecks I have a feature request:

If you could add googlesheets to mermaid.js table or googlesheets straight to png of a markdown table that would be so nice. As I recall Mermaid.js renders to png.

Easy way to build tables, I can just insert the image of the table.
by quantadev | 2025-05-30 20:22:31+00:00
Experienced senior developers can spot and fix the slop instantly, while still getting a 30x productivity gain, while entry level or junior devs basically only have one "Filter" by which they determine code quality which is: "Does the code seem to work?".

Unfortunately "Slop" will appear to work enough of the time to fool a Junior.

Also the reason Junior devs get "slop" is because their prompts are "slop". They don't know all the right terminologies for things, nor do they even have the writing/language skills necessary for good prompting.

EDIT: Due to everyone checking my math I corrected this to 30x, as what's provable, from past experience.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-05-30 20:22:46+00:00
Definitely concerning, although I'm having trouble finding anything in the codebase to support this.

This paper even seems to contradict aspects of the project's no tracking stance. If someone told me this paper was for a different (but similar) project, I'd believe it after looking at the two side by side.

Would definitely want this to be addressed before I'd consider using it.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-30 20:23:54+00:00
> With the 12th gen (and that performance/efficiency core concept), they disabled it after a few months in those core and it was never seen again.

The 12th gen CPUs with performance cores didn't even advertise AVX512 support or have it enabled out of the box. They didn't include AVX512 on the efficiency cores for space reasons, so the entire CPU was considered to not have AVX512.

It was only through a quirk of some BIOS options that you could disable the efficiency cores and enable AVX512 on the remaining CPU. You had to give up the E-cores as a tradeoff.
by dataflow | 2025-05-30 20:24:01+00:00
There's "data race" in "C++ ISO standard" sense, and then there's "data race" in the general CS literature (as well as all the other terms). Two threads writing a value to the same memory location (even atomically) is usually a data race in the CS/algorithm sense (due to the lack of synchronization), but not the C++ sense. I'm not really interested in pedantic terminology here, just trying get a higher level point across about what you can & can't assume with a clean TSAN (and how not to clean your TSAN errors). Feel free to mentally rewrite my comment with whatever preferred terminology you feel would get my points across.
by meheleventyone | 2025-05-30 20:25:04+00:00
I can have a lot of empathy for someone who had explicit promises broken but apart from this sounding like a completely made up story it has no bearing on his skin color or sex. People are taken advantage of all the time and promises, even contracts are broken all the time. Your 'son' has taken the route of victimization rather than taking the high road. Getting screwed over is one thing, turning that in to bigotry is quite another. Like even if you were screwed over BY bigots its not a reason to become one.
by merb | 2025-05-30 20:25:45+00:00
What you now basically did is an antipattern. Because your example gets quite messy if the outer state gets updated and the component should render the new value. I mean even react itself acknowledges the problem.

https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect#updatin...

It’s basically that useEffect gets overused because the state hook is such a bad api.
by akdev1l | 2025-05-30 20:27:44+00:00
Yes. The delay you’re complaining about happens because you are looking at general hypervisors which also come with virtualized hardware and need to mimic a bunch of stuff so that most software will work as usual.

For example: your VM starts up with the CPU in 16 bit mode because that’s just how things work in x86 and then it waits for the guest OS to set the CPU into 64 bit mode.

This is completely unnecessary if you just want to run x86-64 code in a virtualized environment and you control the guest kernel and can just assume things are in 64bit mode because it’s not the 70s or whatever

The guest OS would also need to probe few ports to get a bootable disk. If you control the kernel then you can just not do that and boot directly.

There’s a ton of stuff that isn’t needed
by jbellis | 2025-05-30 20:29:29+00:00
modern dimensions, yes

mixed workloads, also yes, especially in an "online" environment rather than the "batch mode" that ann-benchmarks does today

but most importantly, multicore -- ann-benchmarks is limited to a single core docker image which is absolutely ludicrous and I suspect is a significant reason that python-based systems do much better in their benchmark than you would expect from trying to deploy them under concurrent loads
by xn | 2025-05-30 20:29:55+00:00
huh. I guess this is a prototype for features that will have be submitted to the upstream version. There was a feature in development for something like `git add -G <regex>`, maybe a decade ago, that never got completed.

As for licensing, I'm happy to change the license. I have no strong feelings on the subject, and don't know what restrictions GPLv2 imposes on a port to another language.
by we6251 | 2025-05-30 20:30:00+00:00
Also a huge proponent of Antithesis and their current work, but there definitely were some notable precedents at or around that time e.g. MODIST from 2009 (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/nsdi09/tech/full_papers/...), which similarly tried to build a "model checker for distributed systems".

As another interesting historical side note, I have wondered about the similarities between Antithesis and "Corensic", a startup spun out of UW around a similar time period (circa 2009). Apparently, they "built a hypervisor that could on-demand turn a guest operating system into deterministic mode" (see "Deterministic Multiprocessing" at https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~oskin/). My impression is that their product was not a significant commercial success, and the company was acquired by F5 Networks in 2012 (https://comotion.uw.edu/startups/corensic/).

Overall, I don't over-index on novelty, and think it is generally good for ideas to be recycled/revived/re-explored, with updated, modern perspectives. I believe that most rigorous systems designers/engineers likely converge to similar ideas (model checking, value of determinism, etc.) after dealing with these types of complex systems for long enough. But, it is nevertheless interesting to trace the historical developments.
by neomantra | 2025-05-30 20:31:27+00:00
Haptics is such a primal modality -- I've really enjoyed working with it. I used to evangelize it and present SFW demos to people around the world. You really do need to touch it to understand. Making the devices and experiences is really fun. It's easier than ever with modern Maker setups.

Like many things, there can be stigma e.g what Masters&Johnson faced, but if you are serious you can get past it pretty easily. We've done serious psychophysical studies and tried to make tools that helped people medically and emotionally.

But it's also OK to be playful too. More than anything about intimacy, this specific project was a quirky response to the "MCP All The Things" zeitgeist at the time.

Like writing science fiction, by working with these things early in any way, you earn an appreciation for the problems. After a week of MCP, it became abundantly clear about the Security and Observability problems. User configuration was rough too. I spent the next weeks working on sandboxing tech, MCP observability tech, and other ideas. None of that got to a good-enough-to-publish level, but my understanding/capability was increased.

Other issues are how you model consent of personal devices and maintain that with LLMs or other users. How do you define what the boundaries and shared capabilities are? Do you incorporate reputation? How do you distribute or federate that? How do you maintain anonymity but keep it useful? How do ephemeral agents get access to that data? [I don't explore any of that in this project.] These are general problems with MCP/A2A servers that will need to be solved. It's not just about buttplugs, but a slew of data and services, if we allow these AIs to become part of our daily life.
by gamegoblin | 2025-05-30 20:31:28+00:00
Where would you make make the cut that takes advantage of object store parallelism?

That is, at what layer of the stack do you start migrating some stuff to the new strongly consistent system on the live service?

You can't really do it on a per-bucket basis, since existing buckets already have data in the old system.

You can't do it at the key-prefix level for the same reason.

Can't do both systems in parallel and try the new one and fall back to the old one if the key isn't in it, because opens up violations of the consistency rules you're trying to add.

Seems trickier than one might think.
by watersb | 2025-05-30 20:31:47+00:00
There was a discussion recently about macOS Serious changing the default implementation of rsync to OpenRsync.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43605003

I posted a comment regarding Mike Bombich's "Carbon Copy Cloner", which at least started as a GUI wrapper around an rsync that's been patched to handle Mac extended attributes and related features that date from the Classic MacOS era.

Carbon Copy Cloner is commercial software, but Bombich released his patches to rsync as open source.

My comment has some links to historical context of his work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43606281

Maybe of interest here.
by eptcyka | 2025-05-30 20:31:49+00:00
I really do not follow what you are trying to convey here.

If there are vulns, and you are using software from nixpkgs, there are tools to get yourself notified about vulnerable packages.

If you want to run vulnerable software on-demand, you can just boot the machine/vm up when needed? If you want to patch stuff yourself, nix makes it trivial to apply your own patches to already packaged software.
by Animats | 2025-05-30 20:32:18+00:00
Articles like this make one think of John Henry vs. the steam drill. John Henry beat the steam drill, once, and died. Soon, there was a better steam drill.

"Vibe coding" is only a few months old. ChatGPT was released less than three years ago. The singularity is just getting started.

History of computer chess:

- 1957 - early programs that played chess very badly. Excessive optimism

- 1967 - programs that play amateur chess

- 1976 - first tournament win

- 1980s - top programs not much stronger, but now running on PCs.

- 1996 - first win against grandmaster

- 2005 - last lose by top program against grandmaster

- 2025 - all the good programs can trounce any human.

LLMs are probably at the 1996 level now.
by thatguysaguy | 2025-05-30 20:33:38+00:00
> Do you think the students in that poll had really thought about the credibility of their university when voting?

That's fair, and I'm not sure of course. I guess a more interesting question would be what if there was another option based on what I described. I do know that this is a conversation that we explicitly had in my department many times. It's was an open secret that cheating was rampant, and a degree from that CS department isn't very prestigious. Those two things aren't unrelated.

To your point about a single class giving all A's not damaging it, you're right of course. My point is that this is a classic tragedy of the commons. One plane flight, extra datacenter etc. isn't moving the needle on climate change, but all put together it does.

> If that were the case, the people protesting student Lian forgiveness should be at tge forefront of demanding increased coverage for Medicare and better social security systems in general

I agree, but my response is simple: I don't think either major party in the US has a principled stance on economic issues. There is wild fluctuation in behavior on an issue-to-issue basis. The fact that most students/political parties/people in the universe don't have a coherent set of princples shouldn't stop us from trying to have them!
by bornfreddy | 2025-05-30 20:33:43+00:00
Sure, explain. Write? Not sure about that. The main question is what kind of code they are supposed to write. Have you actually used a linked list in a company setting? I know the difference, but can't say I've used it... ever, in a company setting. I guess if I worked for Redis or similar this would be base requirement, but for 98% of software development jobs I don't see where this could be useful.

My experience is the opposite - developers eager to squeeze every last drop, using some exotic data structure [*] or sorting algorithm which takes way too long to implement and makes code review a nightmare. For a feature that doesn't need it.

[*] not saying that linked list is exotic, it is just rarely needed in $DAYJOB in my experience.
by bubblyworld | 2025-05-30 20:34:16+00:00
Look, I have a masters in mathematical logic (but bailed from my PhD, to my discredit). I know what I'm talking about. You are the one who started all this bickering about what counts as a theorem prover - personally I don't really care what you call it!

As for the stuff about CH, yes, there's nothing we disagree about there. And on non-recursive theories and logics without a sound/complete/effective proof theory, sure, a halting oracle isn't enough.

Do I really have to spell out every edge-case?
by iknownothow | 2025-05-30 20:34:16+00:00
Don't take this the wrong way, your opinion is also vibes.

Let's ground that a bit.

Have a look at ARC AGI 1 challenge/benchmark. Solve a problem or two yourself. Know that ARC AGI 1 is practically solved by a few LLMs as of Q1 2025.

Then have a look at the ARC AGI 2 challenge. Solve a problem or two yourself. Note that as of today, it is unsolved by LLMs.

Then observe that the "difficulty" of ARC AGI 1 and 2 for a human are relatively the same but challenge 2 is much harder for LLMs than 1.

ARC AGI 2 is going to be solved *within* 12 months (my bet is on 6 months). If it's not, I'll never post about AI on HN again.

There's only one problem to solve, i.e. "how to make LLMs truly see like humans do". Right now, any vision based features that the models exhibit comes from maximizing the use of engineering (i.e. applying CNNs on image slices, chunks, maybe zooming and applying ocr, vector search etc), it isn't vision like ours and isn't a native feature for these models.

Once that's solved, then LLMs or new Algo will be able to use a computer perfectly by feeding it screen capture. End of white collar jobs 2-5 years after (as we know it).

Edit - added "(as we know it)". And fixed missing word.
by therealpygon | 2025-05-30 20:35:46+00:00
For a given technological implementation or speciality, sure, without consistent breakthroughs to extend the runaway you have to run out of room. But I fail to see how all of Artificial Intelligence of the future relies solely on LLM (as some are suggesting even here), a view that seems equal part ignorance and naivety. But, I guess that’s to be expected when most people can’t seem to differentiate between “LLM” and “AI”.

It’ would kinda be like suggesting that the entire field of transportation technology failed entirely because this stone wheel had limitations and no one could make a better stone wheel. Nonsensical.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-30 20:36:15+00:00
> Make a dumb thing, take your hands off the wheel, have fun

This is why we need licensing for software developers:

When you're building a service that has actual users, with actual data, and tangible consequences when it fails, "take your hands off the wheel, have fun" is fundamentally dangerous.

Or, to put it differently: It's totally fine for some kids to build a treehouse. They might even get hurt. But, when it comes to dams and bridges, there is a reason why the people who design those need to get a license.
by neuralRiot | 2025-05-30 20:36:24+00:00
Of course, if you’ll go to the semantic approach then anything edible would be “food”, foods are no simply “good” or “bad”, they’re “better than…” “worst than…”

As a side observation and not particularly referring to your reply, I see that people tend to put food or nutrition if you want, almost in the same scope of politics and religion, many people I know who I consider very open-minded will get very on the defensive whenever I tell them that the best thing to do is to reduce the intake of proteins of animal origin and increase plant consumption. That goes to show that years of propaganda have worked very well.
by kiitos | 2025-05-30 20:36:26+00:00
> Two threads writing a value to the same memory location (even atomically) is usually a data race in the CS/algorithm sense (due to the lack of synchronization), but not the C++ sense

You seem to conflate the concepts of "data race" and "race condition", which are not the same thing.

Two threads writing to the same memory location without synchronization (without using atomic operations, without going thru a synchronization point like a mutex, etc.) is a data race, and almost certainly also a race condition. If access to that memory location is synchronized, whether thru atomics or otherwise, then there's no data race, but there can still be a race condition.

This isn't a pedantic distinction, it's actually pretty important.
Show HN: Today, I Built a Daily Task Tracker App Using Python
by DeepTechTaiye | 2025-05-30 20:36:37+00:00
It allows you to:

Add daily tasks View your task list Mark tasks as completed Delete tasks Persist them across sessions using a simple file-based system

It was fun facing challenges like "NameError" and learning how to manage user inputs, file I/O, and error handling effectively. Each bug gave me deeper insight into how Python functions and scopes work.

I feel more confident writing clean and functional code.

Tomorrow (Day 7), we begin the web development phase! I’ll be building a website for my twin brother’s fashion brand — Kay Couture

Follow my journey as I grow in tech, one day at a time! #100DaysOfCode #Python #TechJourney #DeveloperInProgress #Day6 #HackerNewsChallenge #KayCouture #WebDevIncoming
by hinkley | 2025-05-30 20:36:51+00:00
See also “pain is information”.

When it’s pissing you off stop. Take a beat and think about whether you can go around instead of through. Or whether it’s worth going through once in a manner that makes it easier next time. Walk around the lake, or build a boat. Walk around the wood, or build an path and turn it into a road by increments.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-05-30 20:37:03+00:00
Bad/dumb developers don't get much of a boost in my experience working with a plethora of shitty contractors. Good developers aren't getting a 30x boost I don't think, but they are getting more out of the tooling than bad developers.

The bottleneck is still finding good developers, even with the current generation of AI tooling in play.
by valianteffort | 2025-05-30 20:37:20+00:00
Very grateful to have had good self-learning, education, then mentoring before LLM's existed. And although they are such a boon to productivity I worry what they will do to my ability to think on my own long term.

Like reaching for your phone out of habit the moment you are bored, I don't want to need an LLM any time I am faced with a problem. I want to exercise my own brain. I feel as though my ability to reason without them has already began to degrade, my mind fogs more these days. I try to curb it by having conversations rather than just asking for solutions.

I don't care that the tool isn't going anywhere, but just like relying on calculators won't make you better at arithmetic, I don't think relying on LLM's will make you a better engineer.
by leeroihe | 2025-05-30 20:37:31+00:00
I used to be a big proponent of AI tools and llms, even built products around them. But to be honest, with all of the big AI ceos promising that they're going to "replace all white collar jobs" I can't see that they want what's best for the country or the american people. It's legitimately despicable and ghoulish that they just expect everyone to "adapt" to the downstream affects of their knowledge-machine lock-in.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-30 20:37:42+00:00
Stallman wrote about this:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

I'm not saying this person cares about the free software movement, or has any requirement to help it thrive, but if you do, and you license software like this, you're an idiot.

It doesn't stop "bad people" (whomever you think that is) using the software, they just disregard the license.

It does stop "good people" - people who want to comply with your license - from using your software. Because you're not a lawyer, and your license is so sloppily drafted, so loosely written, that your prohibitions could apply to almost anyone; it would take a lot of effort on their part to be sure. Your software can't be included in distros, because they can't enforce your bespoke conditions. Basically, all decent people should avoid your software for their own good.

Honestly, just look at how awful his license is: https://www.sql-workbench.eu/manual/license.html#license-res... - now note that it has not defined what "government" means or "any of its organisations" means or "directly related" means or "download" or "use" means. So let's say I'm a contractor for a third party road crew and I fill in potholes identified by the parish council, am I working for an organisation "directly related" to a "government" on the shitlist? And if I am, I could copy the software easily if given to me on a CD or USB stick (because the surrounding Apache license allows it), but I'm prohibited from "downloading" it. I'm not prohibited from "uploading" it, or having someone "upload" it to me. This guy is just a crank, he's not a lawyer, and he really didn't think this through.