MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by znpy | 2025-06-19 18:44:36+00:00
> * Globally distributed

Non-requirement?

> * Tailnet as the default network stack

That would probably be the first thing I look to rip out if I ever was to use that.

Kubernetes assuming the underlying host only has a single NIC has been a plague for the industry, setting it back ~20 years and penalizing everyone that's not running on the cloud. Thank god there are multiple CNI implementation.

Only recently with Multus (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/demystifying-multus) some sense seem to be coming back into that part of the infrastructure.

> * Multi-tenant from the ground up

How would this be any different from kubernetes?

> * Bittorrent as the default storage stack

Might be interesting, unless you also mean seeding public container images. Egress traffic is crazy expensive.
by mtalantikite | 2025-06-19 18:45:09+00:00
Well, no one is forcing you to buy incandescents, but I certainly would be happy to buy them if they're available.

However, I think I'm probably out of luck -- LEDs are cheaper and they likely don't break as much in shipping. So even if I personally find LEDs to be worse than incandescents -- they don't render reds properly, so even something simple like skin tones don't have the depth they once did, plus they give me migraines -- I likely won't be finding them on shelves anywhere near me ever again.
by TOGoS | 2025-06-19 18:45:16+00:00
> why is having more than one account an "exception" at all? That's not an error or fail condition

It is if the caller is expecting there to be exactly one account.

This is why I generally like to return a set of things from any function that might possibly return zero or more than one things. Fewer special cases that way.

But if the API of the function is to return one, then you either give one at random, which is probably not right, or throw an exception. And with the latter, the person programming the caller will be nudged towards using the other API, which is probably what they should have done anyway, and then, as you say, the returns-one-account function should probably just not exist at all.
by stickfigure | 2025-06-19 18:46:14+00:00
> They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is".

Have you ever read Scott Alexander's blog (Slate Star Codex, now Astral Codex X)? It's full of doubt and self-questioning. The guy even keeps a public list of his mistakes:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes

I'll admit my only touchpoint to the "rationalist community" is this blog, but I sure don't get "full of themselves" from that. Quite the contrary.
by dkarl | 2025-06-19 18:46:28+00:00
People outside of engineering can't give engineers immediate credit for long-term decisions. They don't have the competency to know what to reward.

I'd go further and say that even within engineering, people outside of a team can't give immediate rewards for work whose long-term value is internal to the team, for the same reason: they don't know if the work you're doing is actually valuable or is just superficially similar to the kind of work that often does have long-term value.

If you're confident enough in your long-term decisions, and how you spend slack time, then you should be fine with being rewarded for delivery, since you expect your long-term work to pay off in future delivery and future rewards.
by tptacek | 2025-06-19 18:46:31+00:00
No, it isn't. It attempts and mostly fails to address one ultra-exotic attack, at absolutely enormous expense, principally because the Internet standards community is so path-dependent they can't take a bad cryptosystem designed in the mid-1990s back to the drawing board. You can't just name call your way to getting this protocol adopted; people have been trying to do that for years, and the net result is that North American adoption fell.

The companies you're deriding as unserious about security in general spend drastically more on security than the companies that have adopted it. No part of your argument holds up.
by goku12 | 2025-06-19 18:46:43+00:00
> What changed that made this a plausible way to proceed? Some fundamental breakthrough or just Musk's deep pockets?

I don't think anything changed fundamentally. Honestly, the design methodology for any engineering project would evolve organically to be similar to NASA's methodology as its complexity grows. Despite how it looks, Falcon 9 is actually a very conservative design that doesn't depart much from this philosophy. They did everything possible to keep the complexity low and reliability high. Merlin is a simple open cycle engine utilizing pintle injectors. The propellant combination was well known. The vehicle materials and structures were similar to traditional designs. Pneumatic systems were favored in place of pyro systems to improve reusability. Even the vertical landing technology (VTOL) was demonstrated in the 1990s (although Falcon is the first one to land vertically after reentry). The designers were industry veterans utilizing NASA's help. And they took a long time to perfect the basic technologies and had already nailed the basic platform design by the time they started experimenting rapidly with high production rates and landing. Switching to agile mode wasn't a big problem at that stage.

Starship on the other hand, was very unconventional from the word go. Stainless steel structures, methane as fuel, full-flow staged combustion cycle engines with near-limit chamber pressures, cartwheel separation maneuver (which they ultimately abandoned in favor of hot staging, with a lot of ongoing issues), use of sea-level engines in space (on the second stage), the belly-down reentry and the final belly-flop maneuver by the starship, etc. There are more than a dozen things in there that nobody has tried before. It just seems like they have too many things on their plate. Musk's deep pockets did play a big role here. But I'm going to avoid speculating on it.
by researchai | 2025-06-19 18:47:23+00:00
Here's what a real AI agent should be able to do:

- Understand goals, not just fixed instructions

Example: instead of telling your agent: “Open Google Calendar, create a new event, invite Mark, set it for 3 PM,” you say: “Set up a meeting with Mark tomorrow before 3 PM, but only if he has questions about the report I sent him.” This requires Generative AI combined with planning algorithms.

- Decide what to do next

Example: a user asks your chatbot a question it doesn’t know the answer to and instead of immediately escalating to support, the agent decides: Should I ask a follow-up question? Search internal docs? Try the web? Or escalate now? This step needs decision-making capabilities via reinforcement learning.

- Handle unexpected scenarios

Example: an agent tries to schedule a meeting but one person’s calendar is blocked. Instead of failing, it checks for nearby open slots, suggests rescheduling, or asks if another participant can attend on their behalf. True agents need reasoning or probabilistic thinking to deal with uncertainty. This might involve Bayesian networks, graph-based logic, or LLMs.

- Learn and adapt based on context

Example: you create a sales assistant agent that helps write outreach emails. At first, it uses a generic template. But over time, it notices that short, casual messages get better response rates, so it starts writing shorter emails, adjusting tone, and even choosing subject lines that worked best before. This is where machine learning, especially deep learning, comes in.
by mulmen | 2025-06-19 18:47:26+00:00
One of the most contentious disagreements between myself and my current manager is that I say we should trust our peers to do good work and enable them with that fundamental assumption in mind.

IMHO if you assume the people around you are incompetent or malicious then that’s exactly what you’ll find.

Further, if the people around you are actually incompetent or malicious then awareness of that fact won’t change the outcome anyway.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-06-19 18:47:45+00:00
> We're witnessing a fundamental shift where the interface to computing is changing from formal syntax to natural language.

People have said this every year since the 1950's.

No, it is not happening. LLMs won't help.

Writing code is easy, it's understanding the problem domain is hard. LLMs won't help you understand the problem domain in a formal manner. (In fact they might make it even more difficult.)
by anarticle | 2025-06-19 18:49:07+00:00
This is all well and good, but it all hinges on your manager not being an insane maniac. All of those systems are great with the right manager, but if your manager is a KPI chaser / VP position seeker you are cooked.

I have had managers that were essentially like a sergeant, serving engineers as a phalanx against the business so we can go fast.

I have also had a manager who was so obsessed on showing off how much better of a dev he was than everyone else on the team, that he was largely hated and all talent on that team moved away if they could. I moved, and had a much better time in data science.

I largely agree that killer onboarding, and a clear path to deploy are big wins for normalizing your dev culture to new hires. The measurement tech is always a double edged sword.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-19 18:49:58+00:00
> if "any asshole" can build orgs like that, why don't they?

The biggest reason, is that most first-line and middle managers suck. They can't create and maintain a productive environment.

The cure is/was to pay heaps of money. People will put up with almost any kind of hell, for good pay.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-06-19 18:49:59+00:00
They already tried the soft approach. It didn't work. The administration just fired the entire Vaccine Advisory Board. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/vaccine-advice-van... What bothers me is this: You are literally saying the opposite of what's actually happening. The entire NIH has been politicized. Kennedy does not believe in germ theory, or vaccines. It is well documented. This is a reaction to that.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-19 18:51:35+00:00
> I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary

Specifically (AFAIK) a reference to Asimov’s description[1] of the idea:

> [W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

[1] https://skepticalinquirer.org/1989/10/the-relativity-of-wron...
by throwaway5752 | 2025-06-19 18:52:05+00:00
I've come to think that it is a case of "the distinctions between types of computer programs are a human construct" problem.

I agree with you on a human level. Operators and controllers remind me of COM and CORBA, in a sense. They are hightly abstract things, that are intrinsically so flexible that they allow judgement (and misjudgement) in design.

For simple implementations, I'd want k8s-lite, that was more opinionated and less flexible. Something which doesn't allow for as much shooting ones' self in the foot. For very complex implementations, though, I've felt existing abstractions to be limiting. There is a reason why a single cluster is sometimes the basis for cell boundaries in cellular architectures.

I sometimes wonder if one single system - kubernetes 2.0 or anything else - can encompass the full complexity of the problem space while being tractable to work with by human architects and programmers.
by nonameiguess | 2025-06-19 18:52:18+00:00
I'm not sure I totally agree with measuring value by avoiding landmines or anything at all related to project management, but it definitely bugs me to see everything reduced to business impact. There are plenty of things in life that matter to individuals, to humanity, to the entire world at large, that have nothing to do with selling products for money. When I think of the engineers I revere the most, I don't think of titans of post-2001 Silicon Valley so much as John von Neumann, Robert Oppenheimer, Nikola Tesla, Leonardo DaVinci, whoever the hell built the Roman aqueducts and Egyptian pyramids, Babylonians and Mesoamericans who figured out how to predict eclipses.

Did these people have a business impact? I guess Tesla made Westinghouse a lot of money at one point, but that seems far from the most distinguishing thing that made him great at what he did. If anything, he was mediocre at business.

Even if we want to look at current titans of the computing industry, I admire the work done by orgs like Nvidia or humans like Geoff Hinton, but they also just got lucky that what they were doing for completely different reasons ended up benefiting so tremendously from the galaxy-scale data harvesting that has been going on due to the Internet becoming primarily ad-monetized, which they didn't know was going to happen. How many equally great engineers toiled in obscurity on dead ends but did equally great work? Doug Lenat was just as great an AI engineer, if not better, than Geoff Hinton. History just went one way and not the other, due to factors completely outside of the control of either of them.
by tptacek | 2025-06-19 18:52:21+00:00
I invite anybody who thinks this is a mic drop to pull down the Tranco research list of most popular/important domains on the Internet --- it's just a text file of zones, one per line --- and write the trivial bash `for` loop to `dig +short ds` each of those zones and count how many have DNSSEC.

For starters you could try `dig +short ds google.com`. It'll give you a flavor of what to expect.
by fr4nkr | 2025-06-19 18:52:23+00:00
I understand the analogy, it's just ridiculous. You are conflating entirely unrelated things based on your personal feelings about them with no regard to historical or technical context.

Hardware support issues are certainly understandable, but blaming "opinionated nerds" for them is asinine. It cannot be understated how difficult it is to deal with certain OEMs.
by not_your_vase | 2025-06-19 18:52:55+00:00
On the Full Disclosure mailing list there is a (I believe) German guy who regularly posts Windows vulnerabilities - he has been doing this for years (decades?). He always posts some PoC for exploitation, the timeline of his communication with MS, and a timeline of the bug, which usually shows that Windows is and has been full of (sometimes trivial) security bugs, and MS does nothing against that.

I don't want to name the guy here, but if you look through the FD archives you can find some gems.

Anyway, that comes to my mind each time I read some news about MS pretending to be so very security-first company.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-19 18:53:04+00:00
I'm not kypro, but what counts as "strong belief" depends a lot on the context.

For example, I won't cross the street without 99.99% confidence that I will survive. I cross streets so many times that a lower threshold like 99% would look like insanely risky dart-into-traffic behaviour.

If an asteroid is heading for earth, then even a 25% probability of apocalyptic collision is enough that I would call it very high, and spend almost all my focus attempting to prevent that outcome. But I wouldn't empty my retirement account for the sake of hedonism because there's still a 75% chance I make it through and need to plan my retirement.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-06-19 18:53:17+00:00
In general, the functional use-case traditionally covered by basic heuristics is viable for a reasoning LLM. These are useful for search. media processing, and language translation.

LLM is not AI, and never was... and while the definition has been twisted in marketing BS it does not mean either argument is 100% correct or in err.

LLM is now simply a cult, and a rather old one dating back to the 1960s Lisp machines.

Have a great day =3
by narag | 2025-06-19 18:53:31+00:00
Some good points, bad logic. The fact that you can't effectively measure something doesn't mean that something doesn't exist.

Individual productivity exists.

Maybe it's easier to measure groups' productivity? Probably.

"Business impact"? I don't think so, that later concept seems much more arbitrary. But feel free to look for the keys under the lamplight. If you choose that metrics, you're not going to retain many extra productive people anyway.

The old problem: judging the work of an expert is very difficult if you lack comparable expertise. I can give you advice, but I can't make you smart to accept it. How could you tell if I'm a genius or an overconfident asshole?
by fxj | 2025-06-19 18:53:32+00:00
Münchner here. It is a very touristy city. Dirty? not so much in comparison to other german cities like Cologne or Berlin. Uninviting and boring depends what you want to do. Nightlife in comparison to Berlin is poor. All the techno clubs are there. Octoberfest is a melting pot for the whole world. Americans and Australiens have a hard time digesting the amounts of beer.
by goku12 | 2025-06-19 18:53:40+00:00
I agree that they were well funded. But the designs were complete genius. They were exceptionally clever with the use of rudimentary technologies they had at the time. One of my favorites is how they used an Archimedes spiral in celestial attitude determination. It isn't too farfetched to say that they used scraps to build the program - they just MacGyvered through every challenge they faced.
by spimmy | 2025-06-19 18:53:56+00:00
because there is, by definition, an extremely limited supply of the "best engineers in the world". if you can afford to pay top-10% salaries, and attract and retain top-10% engineers, more power to you.

maybe not literally "any asshole" can do it -- but it certainly asks more of your leaders to craft sociotechnical systems oriented towards learning and enablement. and i don't think that's a bad thing.
by znpy | 2025-06-19 18:54:00+00:00
I'd like to add my points of view:

1. Helm: make it official, ditch the text templating. The helm workflow is okay, but templating text is cumbersome and error-prone. What we should be doing instead is patching objects. I don't know how, but I should be setting fields, not making sure my values contain text that are correctly indented (how many spaces? 8? 12? 16?)

2. Can we get a rootless kubernetes already, as a first-class citizen? This opens a whole world of possibilities. I'd love to have a physical machine at home where I'm dedicating only an unprivileged user to it. It would have limitations, but I'd be okay with it. Maybe some setuid-binaries could be used to handle some limited privileged things.
by ljm | 2025-06-19 18:54:08+00:00
I saw a post like this some time earlier this year and my first reaction is the same…

Normal? Seriously?

The article attempts to address this in an incredibly clumsy way by saying, well, everyone is normal in some way! It totally misses the mark and basically pays lip service to the issue after it set the stage, switching over to bigger picture diversity.

Benefit of the doubt, the intention is to say ‘average’. The people in the middle of the bell curve.

‘Normal’ suggests that, outside of that range, you are abnormal if you are terrible and abnormal if you’re talented above or below the median.

There’s a non-zero overlap between abnormal and neurodivergent, both ways.

Given the number of occurrences of ‘10x engineer’ they should have gone with that and not ‘normal’.
by leakycap | 2025-06-19 18:54:31+00:00
Yes, some MacBook models are affected.

The MacBook Air displays with the notch do not have PWM and do not seem to bother people. The 14/16" Pro models seem to be quite bad for most people (I had to return my new 14" model, it was rough).

The first PWM MacBook I bought was the 16" MacBook Pro from 2019 (the last Intel model). I'd had a 2018 MBP 15" and couldn't figure out why I just couldn't stand looking at the new 16". I thought I had a bad display but ended up learning about PWM.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-06-19 18:54:53+00:00
These two things are NOT THE SAME. Firing the ACIP and replacing it with people who do not believe in Vaccines is not the same thing as whatever you think Biden did. Destroying our entire Life Sciences research establishment is not the same thing is whatever you think Biden did. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/vaccine-advice-van...
by ryanmcbride | 2025-06-19 18:56:00+00:00
The prisons. I mean more specifically the state or federal government ultimately but the prisons more practically.

The 13th amendment specifically carves out an exception to allow prisoners to be enslaved. They aren't just using political rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause

You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-19 18:56:03+00:00
What you're missing is the audience.

This talk is different from his others because it's directed at aspiring startup founders. It's about how we conceptualize the place of an LLM in a new business. It's designed to provide a series of analogies any one of which which may or may not help a given startup founder to break out of the tired, binary talking points they've absorbed from the internet ("AI all the things" vs "AI is terrible") in favor of a more nuanced perspective of the role of AI in their plans. It's soft and squishy rhetoric because it's not about engineering, it's about business and strategy.

I honestly left impressed that Karpathy has the dynamic range necessary to speak to both engineers and business people, but it also makes sense that a lot of engineers would come out of this very confused at what he's on about.
by gaadd33 | 2025-06-19 18:56:34+00:00
If you can reliably generate 200% a year after fees/taxes/etc, you could just get a bunch of credit cards and use broker margin on top of that. It wouldn't surprise me if you could easily start with 200k at that point. Sure the first year would be rough, like grad student living but you would quickly be in the six figures.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-19 18:56:36+00:00
I like Boost's approach[1] of using a separate namespace for these implementation-specific things, rather than visibility modifiers.

Then the internals are accessible if you need it for a temporary workaround or such, but it's also very obvious when you are accessing stuff you really shouldn't. And implementers are still free to rearrange the internals as they see fit.

[1]: Not saying Boost invented it, just where I saw it first.
by kemotep | 2025-06-19 18:56:58+00:00
It only took about 7 years between XP’s EOL and EternalBlue based attacks like Wannacry and NotPetya.

A well configured firewall between your computer and the internet, uBlock Origin in the browser, and not downloading untrusted files off the internet can do a long way to help. Not stopping everything but at least shielding you from the worst.

I think the bigger issue is like on iPhones and Androids. Your software and apps stop supporting your OS long before the hardware or OS fails you.