MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quuxplusone | 2025-05-07 14:54:52+00:00
Looks to me like union-based type-punning in C is indeed "better than C++" (in C++ it's just plain undefined behavior). In C, it looks like the behavior is defined unless you hit a trap representation.

https://port70.net/~nsz/c/c11/n1570.html#6.2.6.1p5

> Certain object representations need not represent a value of the object type. If the stored value of an object has such a representation and is read by an lvalue expression that does not have character type, the behavior is undefined. [...] Such a representation is called a trap representation.

https://port70.net/~nsz/c/c11/n1570.html#6.5.2.3p3

> A postfix expression followed by the `.` operator and an identifier designates a member of a structure or union object. The value is that of the named member. [Footnote: If the member used to read the contents of a union object is not the same as the member last used to store a value in the object, the appropriate part of the object representation of the value is reinterpreted as an object representation in the new type as described in 6.2.6 (a process sometimes called ''type punning''). This might be a trap representation.]

I'm fuzzy on exactly what a "trap representation" might be in real life. I have the impression that a signaling NaN isn't. I suspect that a visibly invalid pointer value on a CHERI-like or ARM64e-like platform might be. Anyway, my impression is that sane platforms don't have trap representations, so indeed, you have to go out of your way to contrive a situation where C's paper standard would not define type-punning (whether union-based or pointer-cast-based) to have the "common-sense" physical behavior.

Again this is different from C++, where both union-based type-punning and pointer-cast-based type-punning have UB, full stop:

https://eel.is/c++draft/expr.prop#basic.lval-11

> An object of dynamic type Tobj is _type-accessible_ through a glvalue of type Tref if Tref is similar to Tobj, a type that is the signed or unsigned type corresponding to Tobj, or a char, unsigned char, or `std::byte` type.

> If a program attempts to access the stored value of an object through a glvalue through which it is not type-accessible, the behavior is undefined.
by UncleMeat | 2025-05-07 14:54:53+00:00
I am certain that there are some students using LLMs to learn more effectively. This does not appear to be the norm. Instead, my spouse gets a large portion of the class turning in essays that are very obviously just the prompt sent to ChatGPT and then the entire response copy-pasted. I'm sure that there are some rich kids whose parents paid somebody to do all their homework for them. But that's not something we should be seeking to do more.

"Tell me about your thought process being the argument in this essay" is met with blank stares, despite them insisting up and down that there is no way that they cheated.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-07 14:55:03+00:00
> We want AI to do good things because they are good people

"Good" is at least as much of a difficult question to define as "truth", and genAI completely skipped all analysis of truth in favor of statistical plausibility. Meanwhile there's no difficulty in "punishment": the operating company can be held liable, through its officers, and ultimately if it proves too anti-social we simply turn off the datacentre.
by lemontheme | 2025-05-07 14:55:18+00:00
As @adriangalilea recently aptly wrote in Helix's 2nd-longest discussion thread (#4037):

> For the nth time, it's about enabling inline suggestions and letting anything, either LSP or Extensions use it, then you don't have to guess what the coolest LLM is, you just have a generic useful interface for LLM's or anything else to use.

An argument I would agree with is that it's unreasonable to expect Helix's maintainers to volunteer their time toward building and maintaining functionality they don't personally care about.
by Reason077 | 2025-05-07 14:55:27+00:00
Different issue. The App Store controversy was because VLC was, back in 2011, licensed under the GPL. One of the VLC developers complained to Apple that the GPL license was incompatible with the App Store distribution model, so it was pulled.

The engine parts of VLC were subsequently relicensed under LGPL-2.1, and the rest of the app under MPL.

VLC has been back on the App Store since 2013.
by sollewitt | 2025-05-07 14:55:29+00:00
There is a similar effect in parts of SFUSD where some of the schools with more poor students are bucking trends: https://sfparents.org/sfkidscantwait/

(SFUSD overall has something like a 10% poverty rate and a 3% marginally housed population, so I think the comparison is fair)

In our school, we saw a lot of outdated teaching materials - we got our kids hooked on Alphablocks - a BBC funded children’s education program that teaches phonics, because it seemed like there were no explicit classes in phonics. The debate over phonics is settled, they work - I understand the situation here is improving.

The math curriculum has improved too, they are adopting techniques from Japan, but I suspect the limiting factor there is teachers’ math discomfort.

In the end it’s been the parents holding the school system and elected officials accountable that has spurred change. I bet behind the great numbers in Mississippi is a sea of under-appreciated moms.
by db48x | 2025-05-07 14:56:14+00:00
I disagree. The advertising and hype pushing people to use C++ is insane. There are hundreds of magazines that exist solely to absorb the advertising budget of Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Intel). Hundreds of conferences every year. You could be writing code in ML at your startup with no complaints and demonstrable success but as soon as your company gets big enough to send your CEO to an industry conference you’ll be switching to C++. The in–flight magazine will extol the benefits of MSVC, speakers like Matt Godbolt will preach Correct by Construction in C++, etc, etc. By the time he gets back he’s been brainwashed into thinking that C++ is the next best thing.
by sefrost | 2025-05-07 14:56:19+00:00
Maybe the reason your comment has been downvoted is because people on HN aren’t aware of the intersection between UK employment law, specifically independent contractors substitution rules, delivery apps and modern slavery.

An easy to follow starting point here for people interested:

https://archive.ph/2024.03.15-193026/https://inews.co.uk/new...
by simion314 | 2025-05-07 14:56:21+00:00
My example, my coworkers use VS code, so I review their code and my IDE is highlighting a few bugs in a function, bugs like $x is not defined , so I ask if thir IDE does not show any warning for that code, and yes, VS Code had ZERO warnings. The dev copy pasted some code but forgot this $x variable in, either he needed to copy it or remove it.

So I am sure someone will say that after you install VS code you should install X and Y plugins or some npm packages that you trigger later in the build to catch this errors. With Intellij I get them without screwing around with VS code plugins or vim plugins, and I also feel good that I pay some developers to work on a tool I use then use Microsoft product that would instantly fuck me over when Intellij would be killed by this unfair competition. Or did I read recently Microsoft already started with their bullshit related to the extensions and AI ?
by psunavy03 | 2025-05-07 14:56:21+00:00
That's also why cats "play" with their prey. They're not being sadistic; they're tiring it out so they can safely make a killing bite, so they can safely eat it. When your food can bite back, it behooves you to kill it first, so it can't hurt you. Which matters when your ancestors (and potentially you if you're feral) were both predator and prey.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-07 14:57:05+00:00
shrink the zed window by one pixel horizontally and one pixel vertically. there's a video on that issue page which shows resizing making the font go in and out of focus, and that tells me that there's something dividing the window height and width by 2 and starting the font rendering there. if you divide by 2 and you get .5, you'll see the blurriness. if you make the window 1 pixel wider you won't get x.5 anymore, you'll get a whole number.

try it and see. i bet that helps/fixes at least some of you suffering from this.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-05-07 14:57:22+00:00
I do very similar things manually already. I engine break and apply very light rear break pressure to trigger my break lights, and let off the rear break and reapply it for the “flashing” effect. Once at a complete stop and in neutral I flash my break lights off/on until the car behind me is at a complete stop.

The benefit of this is tool is that it reduces cognitive load while also working in emergency situations where I’m more focused on operating the motorcycle than signaling to others.
by nightpool | 2025-05-07 14:57:25+00:00
> What this practically means, is open to interpretation.

Is it? It seems very straightforward to me—just use a DLL. The LGPL even says explicitly that it's fine as long as you use a shared library.

The situation gets trickier for Android or Xbox games I guess. I'm curious how Unity complies with the LGPL provisions there. But for any normal desktop platform this should be trivial to comply with.

EDIT: ah, upthread they mention this is only a provision for the LGPLv3. I would expect that the LGPLv3 is pretty rarely used for this reason.
by Telemakhos | 2025-05-07 14:57:39+00:00
Upgraded, but still no joy.

> Sadly, Clippy failed to successfully load the model. This could be an issue with Clippy itself, the selected model, or your system. You can report this error at github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/issues. The error was:

> Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError
by Palmik | 2025-05-07 14:57:45+00:00
I have been using Zed as my main editor for the past ~5 months and I have been very happy with it. It's actually fast and snappy. I hope they become sustainable.

VS Code forks (Cursor and Windsurf) were extremely slow and buggy for me (much more so than VS Code, despite using only the most vanilla extensions).
by lazide | 2025-05-07 14:59:24+00:00
Calling a container on the CLI is a pain in the ass.

People generally don’t put stuff that works in whatever environment you’re in on the CLI already into contains. Stuff that doesn’t, of course they do.

Having a convenient shell script wrapper to make that not a pain in the ass, while letting all the environment management stuff still work correctly in a container is convenient.

Writing said wrapper each time, however is a pain in the ass.

Generating one, makes it not such a pain in the ass to use.

So then you get convenient CLI usage of something that needs a container to not be a pain in the ass to install/use.
by throwanem | 2025-05-07 14:59:28+00:00
Have I been less than clear? Those are core examples of exactly the trashy behavior I expect from the Mississippi social class and scene of which my other interlocutor and their family were part, during their time in my home state.

(My hometown, actually, I bet. Oxford, right? Biggest net exporter of nonmalodorous feces in the state, bar none. The university draws 'em like flies on...well, never mind. Bet you never put a finger in a bullet hole on the Lyceum's frontage, the way I did.)

Where my other interlocutor and I really differ is that they expect to get a pass for having been "one of the good ones," and I issue no such passes. It isn't that I consider anyone who grew up that rich beneath my consideration, only that I'm less inclined to be patient and gentle with those who can afford about as much such treatment as they like and yet still expect it free of charge from me.
by cube2222 | 2025-05-07 14:59:38+00:00
The way context management in Zed works is really well-done imo. I haven't found a different place which does it this way.

Basically, by default:

- You have the chat

- Inline edits you do use the chat as context

And that is extremely powerful. You can easily dump stuff into the chat, and talk about the design, and then implement it via surgical inline edits (quickly).

That said, I wasn't able to switch to Zed fully from Goland, so I was switching between the two, and recently used Claude Code to generate a plugin for Goland that does chat and inline edits similarly to how the old Zed AI assistant did it (not this newly launched one) - with a raw markdown editable chat, and inline edits using that as context.
by r00sty | 2025-05-07 14:59:46+00:00
This is good info. Too many products have hyperbolic promises but ultimately fail operationally in the real world because they are simply lacking.

It is important that this be repeated ad nauseum with AI since it seems there are so many "true believers" who are willing to distort that material reality of AI products.

At this point, I am not convinced that it can ever "get better". These problems seem inherent and fundamental with the technology and while they could possibly be mitigated to an acceptable level, we really should not do that because we can just use traditional algorithms then that are far easier on compute and the environment. And far more reliable. There really isn't any advantage or benefit.
by sgt | 2025-05-07 15:01:12+00:00
Most, if not all, modern motorcycles already come with ABS braking. For many motorcycles it's also adjustable, for example switching off ABS in the rear while retaining it in the front, for those riding offroad and dirt.

Many bikes also come with cornering ABS, meaning that if the motorcycle is at an angle, the ABS comes in gradually.

Overall ABS is pretty much a "solved" problem right now, on motorcycles 2012+ at the very least. Earlier ABS wasn't that great. I had a BMW F800GS in 2010 and the ABS was horrible on bumpy roads. You basically had no braking if it kicked in.
by toast0 | 2025-05-07 15:01:28+00:00
I imagine the 2nd year 3rd graders aren't tested since the tests are only administered at certain grades.

But... if repeating 3rd grade leads to better test results in 4th grade, it may lead to better educational outcomes? You'd hope that the state would also be looking into the rate of repeating and how to do interventions to reduce that rate.

Personally, I've never been a fan of test scores as presented as an indicator of school quality. I'd like to see something like a delta of a test at the beginning of the year and the end of the year; of the kids that were in this school for a full school year, how much 'academic progress' did they make? Conceivably, you could match up children's scores from 4th and 8th grade and do it that way, for students that stayed in one school system for 4 years, but I've never seen that done.

Testing is expensive, so I understand why it's not done; but it might also be nice for teachers to have an early in the year test result for their students so they can lesson plan around what the class may have missed. I know there's ways to do that outside standardized tests, too.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-07 15:01:29+00:00
If you drive a manual in a hilly area, or a city with poorly-coordinated traffic lights, it can be an extremely frequent event.

Not that trying to shed tailgaters or trigger-happy brake lights are foolproof. A couple decades ago, my car was totaled by a rear-end collision. I was stopped and stuck in the traffic at a red light. The at-fault driver popped over a little hill with her nose stuck in a map - failing to notice me, the other vehicles, or the red light, in time.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-07 15:01:59+00:00
My priorities are indeed different. Apologies for the inflammatory language. My remark WRT constructive proofs is more an observation I've made that most proofs which deal with non-finite values seem to be non-constructive. Not necessarily as a hard and fast rule, the two just don't seem to roll well together. Could be sampling bias, but poking and prodding with mathematician friends more or less confirmed it. Not well read enough to have more interesting things to say on it.
by jmull | 2025-05-07 15:02:24+00:00
I don't know much about the way unity apps are distributed, but I'd be a little surprised if they are only intended to be distributed in a way that satisfies LGPL.

I would have thought, e.g., that apps distributed only through stores to platforms that require apps to be signed could not contain LGPL components, since you would not be able to modify the LGPL components. (Maybe it would be OK if the software was available for download freely and side loading wasn't too difficult??? IDK.)

Legal specifics aside (IANAL after all), my general point is that despite being more flexible than full GPL, LGPL is still pretty restrictive. Proprietary software generally may need to keep things simple or be careful (probably including consulting an attorney with the relevant expertise) to ensure they are compliant.

In that light, I can see why Unity would disallow LGPL software. It's not that it couldn't be done properly, but that it's probably not feasible to do a proper legal review of every asset added to the sure (not for Unity and not for the asset providers).
by AlwaysRock | 2025-05-07 15:02:33+00:00
I guess it's all up to interpretation, but having a brand in one space doesn't necessarily translate to a brand in another. OpenAI doesnt/didnt have a code editor. Now it does/it will.

I'm fairly into llms but it took me awhile to try cursor because the cost of changing editors is very high. I'd probably eventually try a OpenAI editor but only if I saw it was actually getting adoption and good feedback from others.

I'd also argue that while this llm powered editor space is pretty new, the editor space in general is much older.
by adolph | 2025-05-07 15:02:39+00:00
It may go on to be as important as the FPU [0]. Amazingly enough you can still get one for a Classic II [1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_unit

1. https://www.tindie.com/products/jurassicomp/68882-fpu-card-f...
by ben_w | 2025-05-07 15:02:41+00:00
Can Pakistan can ship nukes to Iran fast enough for the Iranian economy to supply in return a militarily useful quantity of anti-air and anti-missile defence systems? On a timescale of "shooting currently happening"? If not, that's a problem for the rest of the decade, whereas an escalating situation on this border could've already evaporated a few cities between me having read the headline 20 minutes ago and pressing the [reply] button now.
by smeg_it | 2025-05-07 15:02:55+00:00
Interesting! I'm not an expert but an aging amateur and *nix/foss enthusiast. I see some parallels to what I've thought before that may, or may not be erroneous. First, it seems to point toward the original *nix philosophy of do one thing.

From a user/fanboy/paranoid point of view, I don't like systemd. I've good development arguments for it's improved coding for usb device drivers. Still, when I have to reboot, because my system is frozen. It's more complex to use than say runit. Lastly, I'm nervous, that if a company took it over, it's the one piece that might help destroy most distros. Please no hate. This is only my personal point of view, as an amateur e.g. there are people on both sides that have a much better understanding of this.

Seems to favor the microkernel? I've been hoping we one day get daily driver micro-kernel distro. I asked about this but didn't get a lot of answers, except for those that mentioned projects that aren't there yet e.g. I would love to try Redox, but from my understanding, after 10yrs it's still not there yet.

It also brings me to a point that has confused me for years. As, an amateur how to I decide what is better for what level of virtualization from program images like appimage/flatpacks, containers, to VMs. So far, I've hated snaps/flatpacks because, they make a mess of other basic admin commands, and because there seems to be missing functionality. and/or configuration. It may be better now; I haven't tried in a while. Personally, I've enjoyed portage systems in the past, and they are so fast now (to compile). A lot of forums, forget that there are home enthusiast and basically talk about it from an enterprise perspective. Is there a good article or book that might explain when to choose what. Much of what I've read are just "how to" or "how it works". I guess, I would prefer someone who acknowledges we need something for the hardware to run on and when it makes more since to use a regular install vs an image (appimage/flatpack/snap).

Anyway, thanks so much for the article. I do believe you are right, a lot of companies just put out fires because none want to invest in the future. I mean even the CEO usually only is there a few years, historically comparatively; so why would they care? Also, I think H1-B is a security risk in and of itself because, at least in TX, most IT is Indian H1-B. I mean they want a better life, and don't have as many family ties here. If they were to "fall into" a large sum...they could live like Kings in India, or elsewhere.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-07 15:03:07+00:00
IMO this is completely "based". Delivering customer values and making money off of it is own thing, and software companies collectively being a social club and an place for R&D is another - technically a complete tangent to it. It doesn't always matter how sausages came to be on the served plate. It might be the Costco special that CEO got last week and dumped into the pot. It's none of your business to make sure that doesn't happen. The customer knows. It's consensual. Well maybe not. But none of your business. Literally.

The field of software engineering might be doomed if everyone worked like this user and replaced programmers with machines, or not, but those are sort of above his paygrade. AI destroying the symbiotic relationship between IT companies and its internal social clubs is a societal issue, more macro-scale issues than internal regulation mechanisms of free market economies are expected to solve.

I guess my point is, I don't know this guy or his company is real or not, but it passes my BS detector and I know for the fact that a real medium sized company CEOs are like this. This is technically what everyone should aspire to be. If you think that's morally wrong and completely utterly wrong, congratulations for your first job.
by keybored | 2025-05-07 15:03:47+00:00
People could just donate more. Just make a campaign that you can Stick it to Trump and Help Your Country and you would get an influx of plasma.

As long as the demand is not steep. Since you can do it only a dozen or so times each year according to recommendations. (American Red Cross recommends every 28 days; private donors are not beholden to that)
by ryandrake | 2025-05-07 15:04:07+00:00
> In my experience every developer, company, team, sub-team, etc has their own "library" of random functions, utilities, classes, etc that just end up being included into new projects sooner or later

Same here. And a lot of those homegrown functions, utilities and classes are actually already available, and better implemented, in the C++ Standard Library. Every C++ place I've worked had its own homegrown String class, and it was always, ALWAYS worse in all ways than std::string. Maddening. And you could never make a good business case to switch over to sanity. The homegrown functions had tendrils everywhere and many homegrown classes relied on each other, so your refactor would end up touching every file in the source tree. Nobody is going to approve that risky project. Once you start down the path of rolling your own standard library stuff, the cancer spreads through your whole codebase and becomes permanent.