MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freehorse | 2025-06-10 10:12:02+00:00
I think that a big issue here is the chat UX implementations in most IDEs. In contrast, in zed, in the text-based chat threads, one can directly edit an LLM's answer, making actually fixing bugs oneself much less complicated in terms of UX. In a classical chat interface, where you cannot edit an LLM's answer, you have to either continue the thread, start a new thread with a different prompt asking it to avoid the issue, or fix the code and provide it as context again. If you do it in a new chat, you lose the context of the previous chat (you need to provided it again). If you continue the chat with the added code, you have dirty context (which makes llms perform worse). Moreover, they most probably require you to get in and out of the chat to do things, which is not ideal UX compared to just prompting again. The fact that I can just change the generated code in the chat itself, run it in the repl, and continue from there is the best UX imo for when such problems occur. I would like if more IDEs actually accepted something similar.

Of course, my workflow is very repl based and I assume different experiences exist for other contexts. Moreover, agent workflows have probably different pros and cons. It is great timewise that they can test code and fix bugs themselves, but essentially that's a bit like automating this prompt-reprompt loop. It saves time compared to that (at the cost of a lot more $$$ in tokens overall), but if the agent fails to solve the issues, yet again we are at square zero. What helps a lot is that work is done inside the codebase at least, which is supposed to be a good thing, but personally I have not understood how to use agents efficiently tbh.
by OskarS | 2025-06-10 10:12:11+00:00
I have a sort-of controversial opinion about this: on the contrary, this is one of the reasons I really love using a mac.

As a developer, it’s super-annoying that Apple is so aggressive in deprecation stuff, it forces us to frequently spend a bunch of extra time and energy updating our stuff to make sure it’s compatible woth latest macOS.

As a user though, this means that the experience of actually using a mac feels fresh and modern, and there’s a unity in design language that isn’t available anywhere else. It doesn’t take much digging in Windows settings to find windows that feel straight out of Windows 98, because Microsoft is so terrified of breaking things. macOS just feels better because of Apple’s aggressive deprecation policies, and I very much prefer it.
by world2vec | 2025-06-10 10:12:14+00:00
I used ChatGPT Project folders extensively to deal with my landlord and the rental contract due to problems with the windows. Things went from the landlord saying "maybe they'll be fixed in 2 years if you extend your contract" to "I've called a contractor and am waiting on a quote, should be done in a couple months". I'm not well versed in UK law or how to speak/write "properly" nor have the fortitude to parse long contracts and laws, ChatGPT handled it well enough for me to get what I wanted.
by the_gipsy | 2025-06-10 10:12:33+00:00
Having police not separated from military doesn't invalidate the democracy, it just makes it easier to subvert democracy at some point.

The spanish Guardia Civil is a very good example of a police force tied too deeply with the military. In 1981 some parts of the force attempted an actual coup, with one guy entering the parliament and shooting in the air (or ceiling).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt

The continuity of the Guardia Civil after Franco's dictatorship is one of many vestiges that has not been removed due to fears of creating an instability leading to some coup and a reversal to fascism. IMHO this may have been justified the years immediately after Franco's death, but should have been addressed at some point. See the 1981 coup as for why "appeasing" the oppressors usually doesn't work out, or even works out for the oppressors.
by Y_Y | 2025-06-10 10:12:59+00:00
I'm pleased at the overall tide here. I think governments especially ought to use and contribute back to FOSS.

When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I think all office suites I've seen are junk).

I have my fingers crossed, but my chickens uncounted.
by komali2 | 2025-06-10 10:13:24+00:00
> most Americans comply when asked to show ID on a traffic stop

It's not just sovereign citizens asserting their rights to not identify themselves out of turn to a cop. You're right that cops in America are becoming increasingly authoritarian and trying to intimidate people into giving up their rights, but check out any youtube channel that's essentially just a reuploader for full cop chest cam videos, and almost every encounter with a cop has people pushing back on unlawful search and seizure.

Anyway, your examples are all not exactly good faith, since we were discussing random "show me your papers" stops, which is what ICE has started doing. Needing to prove you have a legal right to drive is relatively uncontroversial. As for showing your passport at a random DHS stop, I've refused every time (over 20 times, I'm a Texan), and everyone I know does as well, and we're certainly not sovereign citizens. "I'm an American citizen, thank you." On my way. They're completely used to it so I know we aren't outliers.

> even ID when swiping a credit card at Walmart.

I've never had to do this lol, not sure what this is about, but again irrelevant when discussing government overreach.

> Do you think all Americans are just running around bartering for corn with bullets?

Ok, this might be a rural American thing, but, yes, many people are basically doing this. Maybe this is just a Texan thing but there's whole ass grey market economies around this.

IDK man maybe we just roll in different circles, maybe it's a redneck thing, but my perception of American values is hot rodding cars so as to escape the cops, not welcoming federal agents into your city to deport your neighbor that watches your kid when you gotta run to the post office real quick, just cause of some frivolous bullshit paperwork.
by shultays | 2025-06-10 10:13:37+00:00
A week or so ago I needed to convince chatgpt that following code will indeed initialize x values in struct

struct MyStruct { int x = 5; }; ... MyStruct myStructs[100];

It was insisting very passionately that you need MyStruct myStructs[100] = {}; instead.

I even showed msvc assembly output and pointed to the place where it is looping & assigning all x values and then it started hallucinating about msvc not conforming the standards. Then I did it for gcc and it said the same. It was surreal how strongly it believed it was correct.
by jltsiren | 2025-06-10 10:13:42+00:00
AI is a special case of a special case. First you have the weird CS publication culture with conference papers and a heavy focus on selecting a (small) subset of winners. And then you have a subfield with giant conferences, a lot of money, and a lot of people doing similar things.

A typical approach to science is finding your niche and becoming a person known for that thing. You pick something you are interested in, something you are good at, something underexplored, and something close enough to what other people are doing that they can appreciate your work. Then you work on that topic for a number of years and see where you end up in. But you can't do that in AI, because the field is overcrowded.
by reverius42 | 2025-06-10 10:13:51+00:00
There are no invaders attacking myself.

There are no invaders attacking my family.

My people is all of humanity and I don't believe any race or nationality should be favored over or considered better than another. There are no (space) alien invaders attacking my people.

My territory is this Spaceship Earth, a speck of dust in a giant uncaring universe, and I share it with all known life in the universe. There is no other life known, and therefore no invaders.

I do have children. I do love my family. I did have a stable, happy childhood. My ethnicity is extremely irrelevant and I'm offended you'd ask.
by jgalecki | 2025-06-10 10:14:11+00:00
Love the 'old console' dev scenes - the ways people deal with the hardware constraints are always so interesting. Making a rhythm game there sounds like a tricky problem. I'm not sure what audio demons you had to exorcise to get it working, but I hope it was more fun than frustrating. I think Crypt of the Necrodancer also lerps enemy animations after post-beat player input, but that wasn't an option for my tiny resolution.

For more fun takes on rhythm games, check out this Roguelike Celebration talk from last year - some people in the Necrodancer community got together and added synchronous networked multiplayer (!!!) to the game. Black magic, haha, and it was a great reference when I was starting this project up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwhNSbFVKQM
by mrtksn | 2025-06-10 10:14:34+00:00
At some point the "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal" quote went popular among the leftists. At the same time the right wing were convinced that elections are rigged.

Turns out it's all BS. Unless it already deteriorated, and no it has not deteriorated in most of the world, votes do count and you live with the outcome which may include the eventual reality of vites stop counting. It's very weird, I can't form an opinion if its a psyop or just how the societies work.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-10 10:16:08+00:00
> They are doing arrests and others are trying to block them from doing arrests

The only "they" doing arrests are ICE and the LAPD. The California National Guard isn't arresting anyone to my knowledge.

> local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals

Source? For literally any of this sentence.
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-10 10:16:52+00:00
I will note, as I probably have other times (seldom totally explicitly though, to be be polite),

that the warning against identity is millennia years old. We can find peculiar that the sign of these times is not only the ignorance of ancient wisdom (in spite of the increase in resources), but also the display of identifying with lower details as opposed to higher ones.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-10 10:17:29+00:00
Following such agreements, once signed, is also voluntary. And the track record, to put it mildly, is not good. In this situation, just to name one example, hamas and the PA have both promised to arrest any terrorists they know of (because in trade they would gain the right to sue Israel), as well as respecting Israel's borders. Needless to say, their efforts are considered less than convincing.

And it's not limited to this conflict. Other examples include that in order to "join the international order", ie. the WTO, China promised to not support any companies with state support and to charge all companies normal company taxes. And while I'm not aware of definitive proof, nobody seriously believes they are doing this. The agreement also outlaws what they're (very publicly) doing with loans in the belt and road initiative, by the way.

Or other examples: the US, France, the UK and other countries specifically signed that if Russia invaded Crimea that they would do some combination of:

1) declare war on Russia (this is in all agreements)

2) support Ukraine economically

3) support Ukraine militarily

4) commit to attack Russia physically and help free Crimea "kinetically"

In trade for Ukraine denuclearizing. Whilst there are different agreements, let's just simplify and say that any particular agreement contains 3 out of those 4 provisions.

And while all countries (except of course Russia) have indeed supported Ukraine, none of them have followed through on their commitment to declare war on Russia.

I took a year of law school, because, you know, bored. And I do remember one professor (who was a sitting supreme court judge at the time, btw), described international law as "fiction, a guideline at best". The problem being that nobody, except the US and Israel, have any real intention of following through on international agreements. Of course, this was before the current iteration of the conflict, even before 2014. On one hand, his opinion has not changed ... but it's because he has since left us.
by audunw | 2025-06-10 10:18:11+00:00
When it comes to chip manufacturing, no single country has it all in-house. Neither US, nor Taiwan, nor China can make state of the art chips without machines, materials, chemicals and support from a bunch of other countries.

For personal assistant AI it seems to me that improvements in efficiency will make this a non-issue. We’re able to squeeze more and more out of smaller language models. Eventually the models that require 100s of GBs in GPUs and giant datacenters will not be able to provide enough additional capabilities to justify their cost. Most tasks will run on-device with 10s of GBs.

Don’t know if there’s hope of state of the art CPUs, GPUs and/or NPUs being designed and manufactured in Europe. It has a lot of the expertise. Imagination Technologies and ARM designs GPUs in Europe. But the scale is lacking
by vidarh | 2025-06-10 10:18:39+00:00
Years ago, someone made a fun proof of concept called Entity that'd allow you to do this with Perl, C, and one more language (I want to say Javascript). The C support involved shelling out to gcc and building an .so file that was then dlopen()'ed... It was quirky, and obviously not production-ready, and then it vanished. But it was an interesting experiment.

I agree with you to a great extent. For my Ruby development I often near live in Pry (a REPL that while nothing like Smalltalk, is at least loosely inspired by it, the same way Ruby in general has elements that are Smalltalk-ish under the hood), and often integrate Pry into the application so I can drop down into a REPL and modify the running system to debug things.

I also often make a point of implementing a "reload" method that will reload the main parts of the codebase into the running image, so I can make bigger changes "outside" and load them without losing current state.

It makes a great deal of difference.
by jgalecki | 2025-06-10 10:19:35+00:00
Roguelike Celebration is, bar none, my favorite conference. It's such an enthusiastic mixture of ideas, techniques, and games history, and the group chat (sadly not preserved in the archived youtube talks) is high energy and hilarious.

I actually gave a talk in 2023! It was about creating "proc gen" puzzles for a roguelite game. If you find a mathematical problem space where you can prove that every state is solvable, then you can just generate any set of starting conditions and let the player have at it. I don't have plans to present this year, but I'm working on some games that I hope will be worth a presentation in the future.
by jeswin | 2025-06-10 10:20:10+00:00
Go has few advantages for this kind of workload - most of the time it'll just be waiting on io. And you suffer from the language itself; many type system features that you get for free in modern langauges require workarounds in Go.

I've found that TypeScript is an excellent glue language for all kinds of AI. Python, followed by TS enjoy broad library support from vendors. I personally prefer it over Python because the type system is much more expressive and mature. Python is rapidly improving though.

> It turns out, cancelling long-running work in Node.js and Python is incredibly difficult for multiple reasons:

Evidence is lacking for this claim. Almost all tools out there support cancellations, and they're mostly either Python or JS.
by freehorse | 2025-06-10 10:20:34+00:00
I am not doubting your comment, but personally it did not cross my mind that something is wrong with the syntax or grammar before I read your comment. It is informal, brief and not getting that deep, but it was pretty much understandable for me, and it sets up an interesting point to discuss imo. It could have been more polished but it looks readable enough, and I do not think that a post like this should be flagged (not implying you specifically flagged it or not, either, but it is flagged and I assume some of the reasons for it may be this).

Moreover,

> My first language is french

well french is very close to english in many ways, much closer than many other languages, so I find it a bit unfair to judge other ESL authors by the standards of a french native speaker's experience with english.
by rollcat | 2025-06-10 10:21:19+00:00
It's surprising enough that you can still get a few things done with a 2002 PowerBook G4: <https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/>

The most painful parts are (1) it's a bit hot and loud under load; (2) you need to patch modern software like git, likely with little hope to upstream; (3) waiting hours for those "simple" things to compile - which, in the end, tells us something important about what we'd consider "simple" nowadays.

For both retro and previous-generation hardware, security is the most important concern. Patches for PowerPC kept coming until 2011 or so (that's almost 10 years after that particular machine was released). I'd expect the Intel Macs to keep getting official patches until 2030, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised to find community efforts to extend that. "Sorbet Leopard" was a thing for PPC Macs, the Hackintosh community is much stronger than back then.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-10 10:21:27+00:00
No one listens to the technical people that espouse the alternatives, partially due to the mainly-impenetrable language difference: business vs technical.

Management would rather depend on "Microsoft" than "that employee that talks a lot without saying anything useful / understandable". That's a huge bridge to cross. Even under the mad king, I think most Management would prefer to remain dependent on Microsoft and go out of their way to avoid the ire of the The Kingdom of Trumpistan than to migrate their "everything computer" to a lesser known, lesser proven entity.
by makingstuffs | 2025-06-10 10:21:29+00:00
Second this, my fiancé and I were flabbergasted at the seeming mishmash of 90’s tech and the occasional futuristic building when we were there.

The thing that blew my mind more than anything was the archaic financial tech in place. No chip and pin and instead swiping cards, cheques etc. in one instance the ticket machine in the Chicago subway requested a US zip code to use my card. I was baffled, zip code? Surely this is a typo and it wants a pin. Nope. A zip is what it wanted. When I spoke to a police officer he informed me to just put 0 and it will work. Lo and behold, it did.

It haunts me to this day.
by arnvald | 2025-06-10 10:21:35+00:00
Not to defend Mozilla (they have lots of issues), but it feels they're in an impossible position:

* their revenue comes mostly from Google, they need to diversify

* but nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services

* then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser

Realistically, what should they do to stop relying on money from their competitor and be continue their mission?
by smcin | 2025-06-10 10:22:01+00:00
Doesn't count. Egypt's New Administrative Capital is located only 45km east of Cairo.

Whereas previous epic fails on relocating capitals (/planned cities):

- Nigeria's Abuja (1991) [0] is 330 mi/530 km northeast of Lagos, 1h20 by plane or 12hr by car. Fairly successful relocation.

- Myanmar's Naypyidaw (2008) is 320 km/200 mi north of Yangon [1] Claimed 2025 population 930K, actual 780-900K.

- Indonesia's Nusantara ("will be fully finished in five phases by 2045, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Indonesia") is on Borneo, 870 mi/11400 km and one island northeast of Jakarta [2]

- also Saudi Arabia previously had King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC, planned since 2005), not a capital replacement: a planned city, intended as a logistics and manufacturing hub. Planned population: 2 million; actual 2002 population: only 7,000. [3] KAEC is referenced in the epic totally-not-sarcastic video Patrick Boyle on "Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia's Linear City" [4].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuja

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusantara_(city)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naypyidaw

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_Economic_City

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak4on5uTaTg&t=31m42s
by jgalecki | 2025-06-10 10:22:11+00:00
Each developer chooses their own engine, so we're all over the place. Godot seems like a consensus favorite, followed by Unity and Unreal. We also have devs who have made games in Construct 3 and one game that was (somehow) made in Hypercard (https://bribrikendall.itch.io/blah-blob).
by throwaway81523 | 2025-06-10 10:22:31+00:00
CREATE makes a dictionary entry for a word named by the string you supply in the input stream, whose execution semantics are to push onto the stack the address of the dictionary space following the entry that was just created. That address lives in the variable HERE. Execution semantics for a word means some code invoked when you execute the word. That code in turn is pointed to by an address living in a cell that is part of the dictionary entry.

DOES> overwrites that address so that executing the word, instead of doing the default thing, now runs some different code, namely the code that you supply after the DOES>.

This is something of a kludge because the usual implementation stores something (the default semantics) in that cell when you run CREATE, then later overwrites it when you run DOES. Since lots of Forth targets today are microcontrollers whose code storage is in flash memory, overwriting individual already-written cells in code space is not nice.

Early Forths had <BUILDS ... DOES> instead of CREATE ... DOES> . You can see how the angle brackets originally looked symmetrical but after things changed, the bracket only appeared on DOES> and that may be part of why people find it confusing.

<BUILDS didn't install any default action into the newly created word. It left it uninitialized so it would get filled in when DOES> came along. CREATE DOES> was sort of an optimization since CREATE already existed too, making <BUILDS unnecessary. So they got rid of <BUILDS during standardization back in the minicomputer era where this stuff always generated code in ram (or maybe magnetic core) rather than flash. That optimization in turn has bitten some implementers in the butt. So <BUILDS DOES> has come back into usage among some MCU implementations like FlashForth. FlashForth is pretty nice by the way.

Well I didn't mean to type that much, but I hope it helps.
by nicbou | 2025-06-10 10:23:03+00:00
I really wish there was some sort of hybrid device. I often travel by foot/bike/motorbike and space comes at a premium. I'd have a Microsoft Surface if Windows was not so unbearable.

On the other hand, I have come to love having a reading/writing/sketching device that is completely separate from my work device. I can't get roped into work and emails and notifications when I just want to read in bed. My iPad Mini is a truly distraction-free device.

I also think it would be hard to have a user experience that works great both for mobile work and sitting-at-a-desk work. I returned my Microsoft Surface because of a save dialog in a sketching app. I did not want to do file management because drawing does not feel like a computing task. On the other hand, I do want to deal with files when I'm using 3 different apps to work on a website's files.