MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fredrikholm | 2025-05-16 07:00:00+00:00
> Programmers with shallow understanding and lacking experience of Lisp (or straight bias against it) are missing out so much, it really is sad.

Most people I know of that tried Lisp and didn't like it did so by writing Lisp without structural editing, into a text file, starting a REPL, loading the entire file into the REPL and calling the main function from the REPL.

It's difficult to explain just how absurdly slow and cumbersome that is, as its the primary way developers work in other languages to the point that what you're saying sounds like hyperbole.

For those that haven't experienced that difference:

Structural editing when you have a homoiconic language that only has expressions is like combining expert level vim skills with vim macros and expert level IDE snippets/refactor shortcuts but with a fraction of the expertise as the tooling is simply less complicated.

REPL driven development is state retaining hot reload as a first class citizen, which makes regular compile cycles and the shenanigans you need to do to isolate your current code and make it run (eg. flags, rewriting main, writing tests) appear absurd in comparison.

By the time you add the features of Lisp systems on top (like condition restarts, runtime compilation, ASM inspection etc), most other languages feel like a big step back.
by russellbeattie | 2025-05-16 07:00:35+00:00
Oof. What is it about the devs who prefer static typing that they insist on bolting it onto every scripting language they can? It's nearly a compulsive disorder.

There's plenty of languages with compile time type safety, just go use one of them and leave the perfectly good dynamic ones alone.

Static typing proponents need accept that dynamic typing is a perfectly valid way to write and run code: It's way less verbose, it focuses code on logic rather than syntax (a.k.a. "scripting"), it's easier to mentally parse and generally easier to both learn and use.

Inflicting types on every piece of code written is just ridiculous.
by bvrmn | 2025-05-16 07:01:35+00:00
TLA+ has its own quirks, you could add sugar here and there, but from semantic standpoint you couldn't do much. It's "unreadable" because requires some mental model most of developers don't have. My point: you either provide "simple" tools which could do nothing for real models or they become on same level of "unreadableness" really fast.
by suninsight | 2025-05-16 07:02:12+00:00
It only seems effective, unless you start using it for actual work. The biggest issue - context. All tool use creates context. Large code bases come with large context out of the bat. LLM's seem to work, unless they are hit with a sizeable context. Anything above 10k and the quality seems to deteriorate.

Other issue is that LLM's can go off on a tangent. As context builds up, they forget what their objective was. One wrong turn, and in the rabbit hole they go never to recover.

The reason I know, is because we started solving these problems an year back. And we aren't done yet. But we did cover a lot of distance.

[Plug]: Try it out at https://nonbios.ai:

- Agentic memory → long-horizon coding

- Full Linux box → real runtime, not just toy demos

- Transparent → see & control every command

- Free beta — no invite needed. Works with throwaway email (mailinator etc.)
by cess11 | 2025-05-16 07:03:32+00:00
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."

Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.

Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
by sitharus | 2025-05-16 07:04:45+00:00
I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.

Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)

I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-16 07:04:47+00:00
I don't think you need an overseer for this, you can just have the agent self-assess at each step whether it's making material progress or if it's caught in a loop, and if it's caught in a loop to pause and emit a prompt for help from a human. This would probably require a bit of tuning, and the agents need to be setup with a blocking "ask for help" function, but it's totally doable.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-16 07:05:59+00:00
As opposed to the bank's ...? Or your other account's ..., what exactly, passwords? Phising is everywhere. How many times have you heard the elderly have their money stolen, both online and in real life? It happened to my grandma. The mailman is bringing her own pension as cash, and guess what, he has scammed my grandma for years! The food delivery guy who has been delivering lunch for my grandma, guess what he did? He scammed my grandma out of her money! We are talking about cash, right now, and no phising involved, just good old "lying".
by rwarfield | 2025-05-16 07:07:15+00:00
We have normalized the treatment of the financial and payments systems as things that exist primarily to perform law enforcement surveillance functions. It's the same dynamic that leads to debanking of small accounts - payments firms exist on thin margins and the potential fines for inadvertently servicing a bad actor are stratospheric, so it's entirely logical to play it safe by refusing to service anyone whose profile looks even the slightest bit risky.
by arnsholt | 2025-05-16 07:07:56+00:00
An example from my work: in Norwegian criminal law, the prosecutor can in some cases hand out what is called a «påtaleunnlatelse», which means something like «decision to not prosecute». This is a legal punishment in the sense that it goes on your criminal record, but no punishment beyond that is handed out. Basically, the prosecutor’s office can note down «we are convinced we can prove this was done, but have decided not to prosecute».

A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-05-16 07:08:09+00:00
German is indeed a harsh language, filled with glottal stops and harsh consonants. The publicity doesn't help either, but it's mainly the phonemes.

Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.
by olalonde | 2025-05-16 07:08:41+00:00
No, on-chain transaction fees aren't higher than the cost of a coffee. They're currently around $0.15 per transaction - cheaper than typical credit card processing fees. Plus, you could always build an off-chain transaction system with zero fees.

As for the environmental impact: individual Bitcoin transactions don’t directly increase energy usage. Miners consume electricity regardless of whether any given person transacts. And while mining is energy intensive, it doesn't have an environmental impact in itself.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-05-16 07:08:44+00:00
From Wikipedia:

>The Julian calendar was proposed in 46 BC by (and takes its name from) Julius Caesar, as a reform of the earlier Roman calendar, which was largely a lunisolar one.[2] It took effect on 1 January 45 BC, by his edict.

Not knowing the year seems unhinged somehow.
by Xevion | 2025-05-16 07:08:57+00:00
>I have actually had great success with agentic coding by sitting down with a LLM to tell it what I'm trying to build and have it be socratic with me, really trying to ask as many questions as it can think of to help tease out my requirements.

Just curious, could you expand on the precise tools or way you do this?

For example, do you use the same well-crafted prompt in Claude or Gemini and use their in-house document curation features, or do you use a file in VS Code with Copilot Chat and just say "assist me in writing the requirements for this project in my README, ask questions, perform a socratic discussion with me, build a roadmap"?

You said you had 'great success' and I've found AI to be somewhat underwhelming at times, and I've been wondering if it's because of my choice of models, my very simple prompt engineering, or if my inputs are just insufficient/too complex.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-05-16 07:09:46+00:00
I think I'm getting more emotional over the years. I'm pretty sure I'll actually cry when we lose connection to this amazing device. I'd bow profusely to anyone who has been part of keeping it active.

(The conspiracy theorist in me could argue that since not much is happening in outer space, perhaps no one would notice if they started synthesizing responses from it. If they could do it so convincingly with the moon landing, surely this would be easier? /s)
by throw310822 | 2025-05-16 07:11:58+00:00
In fact, with added spaces, works fine in English too (since English is also a Germanic language):

the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button.

And extended:

the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button's colour factory's entry gate.

EDIT: Let's not forget to mention its Java implementation, which goes full German:

DonauSteamshipCruiseOrganizationCaptainButtonsColorFactory
by blixt | 2025-05-16 07:12:19+00:00
> Enabled from the insight from our heavily-used Windsurf Editor, we got to work building a completely new data model (the shared timeline) and a training recipe that encapsulates incomplete states, long-running tasks, and multiple surfaces.

This data is very valuable if you're trying to create fully automated SWEs, while most foundation model providers have probably been scraping together second hand data to simulate long horizon engineering work. Cursor probably has way more of this data, and I wonder how Microsoft's own Copilot is doing (and how they share this data with the foundation model providers)...
by Jensson | 2025-05-16 07:13:56+00:00
If the LLM actually could generate good steps that helped make forward progress then there would be no problem at all making agents, but agents are really bad so LLM can't be good at that.

If you feel those tips are good then you are just a bad judge of tips, there is a reason self help books sell so well even though they don't really help anyone, their goal is to write a lot of tips that sound good since they are kind of vague and general but doesn't really help the reader.
by dyl000 | 2025-05-16 07:15:05+00:00
it was only a matter of time, they have too much good data to not train their own models, not to mention that claude API calls were probably killing their profitability.

open source alternative https://huggingface.co/SWE-bench/SWE-agent-LM-32B

though I haven't been able to find a mlx quant that wasn't completely broken.
by noduerme | 2025-05-16 07:15:20+00:00
Sure, it's a private service and they can do whatever they want, but why block Ukraine? I spent an inordinate amount of time and resources over years blocking Americans from the casino I ran, so I can somewhat sympathize with the point of view that one wants to avoid legal issues. But the only reason I spent the energy to do that was that I needed to be on the right side of the law, personally, if I ever found myself physically back in the US. The only reason I blocked certain other countries (like Myanmar and Iran) was on moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships. I did not, for instance, research or give two fucks about online gambling laws in Malaysia, or a dozen other countries I'd never step foot in where I had players from. I certainly wouldn't have cut off a country that was under siege and partially eaten by a nasty dictatorship. If I were running it now, I'd have probably set up filters to block anyone conceivably in Russian territory, and that would be that. If one guy can do it against an onslaught of thousands of Americans trying to fake their IP addresses daily, I'm sure a good sized company can handle blocking Russian money laundering through a tip jar.
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-16 07:16:19+00:00
> Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.

But this attack is already fully pointless with traditional finance. You can't steal someone's bank account at gun point.

Conversely, even without KYC, blockchain based currencies paint a huge target on anyone who uses a small number of wallets to store a large amount of money. Dedicated criminals and even state actors can figure out who owns the wallets by tracking transaction patterns, getting information from vendors, etc. As long as you're actually using your crypto wallets (unlike, say, Satoshi), you can quite easily be tracked. Anyone who you order a pizza from in BTC knows the address of whoever has that wallet. Sure, you can take a lot of steps to protect yourself from it, but it's hard, and one slip-up is all it takes. Opsec is not for the careless.

Also, crypto's reliance on secrets instead of legal personhood to ascertain ownership fundamentally makes it prone to stealing money in this way. Since the money doesn't belong to a legal person, but to whoever knows some secret key, that key can be stolen from whoever has it through simple violence. Even if you're extremely careful not to leak details of your accounts, use XMR for untraceable payments, etc - someone who is physically close to you could see that you're rich and decide to attack just on the chance that you may have crypto, without knowing anything specific.
by arnsholt | 2025-05-16 07:16:58+00:00
Another example, not involving compound nouns: Norwegian criminal process distinguishes two levels of suspicion. The first level «mistenkt» (suspect) is basically the investigation noting down in their log «we think this guy might have done it», but the second level «siktet» (literally aimed at, no idea how to translate to English or even if an equivalent term exists) is a formal decision made by the prosecutor’s office. And importantly, the use of «tvangsmidler» (coercive instruments, like arrest, search, seizure and so on) requires there to be a siktelse and this status also triggers legal rights for the accused like the right to a defence attorney.
by krige | 2025-05-16 07:17:02+00:00
As someone who's learned a few (natural) languages over the years, German remains the only one that just instills me with a sense of dread, or maybe some sort of internal animosity. Russian? Sure. French? Yeah. English? Obviously. Japanese? Still in the kanji mines but making progress. Spanish? Sweet.

But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.
by dyl000 | 2025-05-16 07:17:07+00:00
openAI models have an issue where they are pretty good at everything but not incredible at anything. They're too well rounded.

for coding you use anthropic or google models, I haven't found anyone who swears by openAI models for coding... Their reasoning models are either too expensive or hallucinate massively to the point of being useless... I would assume the gpt 4.1 family will be popular for SWE's

Having a smaller scope model (agentic coding only) allows for much cheaper inference and windsurf building its own moat (so far agentic IDE's haven't had a moat)
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by marcus_holmes | 2025-05-16 07:18:29+00:00
I think the point is that the ship is itself an expensive and vulnerable method of delivering drones to a target (because warfare has become all about delivering more drones to the target than the other guy can cope with).

If you deployed 100 patrol boats, each with 100 drones and no missiles, that is a cheaper, more efficient, more resilient solution that one ship with 1000 drones and a bunch of missiles.
by watwut | 2025-05-16 07:18:33+00:00
It is one word in German. It has one article, Germans talk about it as about a single word and treat it as a single word for grammar purposes. You can use it as a single noun in any sentence.

But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.
by dminik | 2025-05-16 07:18:54+00:00
It doesn't really seem worth it. https://web.ist.utl.pt/nuno.lopes/pubs/ub-pldi25.pdf

> The results show that, in the cases we evaluated, the performance gains from exploiting UB are minimal. Furthermore, in the cases where performance regresses, it can often be recovered by either small to moderate changes to the compiler or by using link-time optimizations.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-05-16 07:18:59+00:00
I must have misremembered? Last time I looked (maybe 2 years ago) I thought actual bitcoin transactions took maybe an hour to confirm and cost a couple of dollars -- am I just short more marbles than I thought I was or has something changed with how they do transactions.

The context I was looking at related to storing data in the bitcoin ledger. I think I commented here, I'll have to look back and see.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-16 07:19:23+00:00
Swedish works the same (unsurprisingly), but note that programming languages also kind of do that. If you had to use a word like that in Java you would just mash all the words together in CamelCase and it would be pretty much the same as using the long German word (and almost exactly as difficult to read) even if technically it moved from being a single word to being a long list of words. It can still be a single identifier without spaces even if you translate to a language where it can not be a single word.
by mulmen | 2025-05-16 07:19:33+00:00
I completely agree with you. NASA consistently does amazing things.

Unfortunately I just can’t leave this whole “Imperial vs Metric” thing alone so here comes a tangent.

> "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial"

US Customary*. The United States has never used the Imperial system. It didn’t even exist at the time of the revolution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_a...

Also since I’m already being pedantic Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost to a conversion error. US Customary units were provided by Lockheed software to a NASA system that expected SI units. It would not have been lost if either system was used consistently.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-16 07:19:40+00:00
> Clearly, Google believes defaults matter to their dominance in search.

Yes, I agree.

But we are talking about the impact of Google no longer distributing Chrome on people (or organisations) who go to the trouble of manually installing Chrome themselves. If they are willing to manually install something there are no end of ways for Google to ensure a browser, or the new Chrome will use Google's preferred defaults.

To put it another way, I disliked how Google drove Firefox down to it's current level or usage. It was with numerous subtle nags and breakages. They've always insisted it wasn't deliberate, and that remains plausible. If they are forced to sell Chrome, they could push their preferred extension the same way. (It would be ironic this causes them some regret in introducing Manifest V3.)
by albertzeyer | 2025-05-16 07:20:06+00:00
It seems the main complaint is about confusing shapes / dimensions. Xarray has already be mentioned, but this is a broader concept, called named dimensions, sometimes also named tensors, named axes, labeled tensors, etc, which has often been proposed before, and many implementations exists.

https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/NamedTensor

https://namedtensor.github.io/

https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/named_tensor.html

https://github.com/JuliaArrays/AxisArrays.jl

https://github.com/ofnote/tsalib

https://github.com/google-deepmind/tensor_annotations

https://github.com/google-deepmind/penzai

https://github.com/tensorflow/mesh/

https://github.com/facebookresearch/torchdim

https://xarray.dev/

https://returnn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started/dat... (that's my own development; unfortunately the doc is very much outdated on that)
by deredede | 2025-05-16 07:20:20+00:00
> that is not used anywhere in daily life

Does it matter? MM-DD-YYYY is used in America and makes DD-MM-YYYY ambiguous, but as far as I know nobody uses YYYY-DD-MM, so ISO8601 should be perfectly fine, especially if users are trained. Besides, if you're not used to it, starting with the year forces you to think, which is desirable if you want to avoid human error.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-05-16 07:20:22+00:00
I actually like Erlang, but I personally feel it has a lot of rough edges. I'd probably spend a lot of time polishing them to the point where I'd just reinvent Elixir, so I prefer Elixir for that reason alone.

The other reason I wouldn't use Erlang is that Elixir has a much more vibrant & active community. A lot of the Erlang libraries (as of a few years ago when I last looked) were quite old & there wasn't a lot of active development being doing on them. I like being able to track down answers to questions & documentation that is more current. And of course there are more likely to be off the shelf Elixir libraries available for download, too.
by noduerme | 2025-05-16 07:20:45+00:00
I tried NOLA for a few weeks in my 20s - loved it, got a job bussing tables at Brennans, moved into a house with some musicians, lost all $4k of my savings drinking and gambling, and called my sister for money to take a greyhound home. I really dig that town, and Portland blows, but I think it's one of the places I'd probably lose my shit in. Some places are just too easy to stay out all night in.. and have a kind of depressing spiral for a habitual drinker/gambler/sex addict. Vegas, Prague, and NOLA are the three that I can think of where I go to the dark places, go broke and get suicidal. Also, not ironically, my favorite places in the world. But I learned that I need to have a ticket out.
by nolist_policy | 2025-05-16 07:21:20+00:00
For one Ollama supports interleaved sliding window attention for Gemma 3 while llama.cpp doesn't.[0] iSWA reduces kv cache size to 1/6.

Ollama is written in golang so of course they can not meaningfully contribute that back to llama.cpp.

[0] https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/12637
by nicbou | 2025-05-16 07:22:23+00:00
I've experienced this for the first time with a close friend, and it really stays on your mind. There was no reason it had to be him. He didn't roll the dice wrong.

It created a sense of urgency in my own life. You have this idea that you will be the same person until you die of old age, and suddenly you realise that the current year is worth much more than another year two decades from now. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.