MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-06-23 06:00:06+00:00
Consciousness is an issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, you probably do not believe some entity poofs into existence, perceives itself as independently adding 2+2, and then poofs out of existence. Yet somehow, the idea of an emergent consciousness is that if you instead get it to do 100 basic operations, or perhaps 2^100 then suddenly this becomes true? The reason one might believe this is not because it's logical or reasonable - or even supported in any way, but because people assume their own conclusion. In particular if one takes a physicalist view of the universe then consciousness must be a physical process and so it simply must emerge at some sufficient degree of complexity.

But if you don't simply assume physicalism then this logic falls flat. And the more we discover about the universe, the weirder things become. How insane would you sound not that long ago to suggest that time itself would move at different rates for different people at the same "time", just to maintain a perceived constancy of the speed of light? It's nonsense, but it's real. So I'm quite reluctant to assume my own conclusion on anything with regards to the nature of the universe. Even relatively 'simple' things like quantum entanglement are already posing very difficult issues for a physicalist view of the universe.
by amval | 2025-06-23 06:03:20+00:00
For a language that announced itself (and raised a lot of money on the premise of) claiming to be "a Python superset", this does not sound like a huge achievement.

In all fairness, their website now reads: "Mojo is a pythonic language for blazing-fast CPU+GPU execution without CUDA. Optionally use it with MAX for insanely fast AI inference."

So I suppose now is just a compiled language with superficially similar syntax and completely different semantics to Python?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-23 06:03:21+00:00
What's the alternative to not explaining here? Is it making the magic subtle/weak/uncommon enough that the answer is "you didn't notice, and this is plausible to claim"? If the magic is blatant enough and there's no explanation, the story becomes even less attached to reality than "there's a lot of magic but it's deliberately kept hidden".
by nmehner | 2025-06-23 06:04:15+00:00
Diabetes type 1 is quite well manageable if you have a CGM sensor and inject insulin regularly.

But if a person with dementia tends to peel of sensors, gets aggressive when getting injections etc. this might not work. And an unmanaged diabetes can be deadly.

Not sure how these approvals work in that case, but this groups of people might be the first that can benefit from a treatment like this.
by motorest | 2025-06-23 06:04:57+00:00
> I've failed system design interview where they repeatedly asked me to design "for scale" but all the volume and latency requirements I could get from them could be handled by a single HA pair running a monolithic server+ external managed data store.

It's nice that you estimated throughputs and provided your assessment. Odds are that's not the problem you were tasked to solve?

I mean, arguing your way out of proposing a design for scale reads as if you're at a test and you're claiming you shouldn't be asked some questions.

> They also seemed annoyed that I am asking them questions that are not part of the problem statement instead of getting down to drawing a fancy diagram.

Clarifying questions are an expected part of the process, but by it's own nature the design process is iterative and has a initial design on where to iterate over. If you do not show forward progress or present any tangible design, your own system design skills are immediately called into question as, in the very least, it shows you're succumbing to analysis paralysis.

Think about it: you're presented with a problem, and your contribution is to complain about the problem instead of actually offering a solution? What do you think is the output valued by interviewers?
by ggm | 2025-06-23 06:05:35+00:00
More funding for DNA analysis, and a reduction in holotypes as we find these apparent sub-speciations are actually just the same. I don't think there is much we can do about national pride: when individual economies decide to declare a find is culturally significant for their global view, the best science can do is help them overcome the mindset, by applying science.

That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.

I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.
by potamic | 2025-06-23 06:08:04+00:00
Null references are one of the biggest causes of issues for software everywhere. If it was so easy as just don't do nulls, everyone would be doing it by now. If your application sees some unexpected data, null or otherwise, if it is not handled, it can crash. The real cause is unhandled code paths in the application and that is not always trivial to solve.

Formal verification is a relatively unexplored idea in the industry, but it's something that seems to be used to verify protocols or algorithms rather than implementation code. If anyone is using formal verification in their systems, I would love to hear some experiences.
by weq | 2025-06-23 06:08:16+00:00
Regurgitation what amounts to ai slop these days paints a clear picture of your Company to the market. Companies that use l33tcode are filtering out pools of talent, in exchange for monocultures of echo chambers. Makes it easier swing the layoff ax when they need to posture to the market differently.

The fact that this ^^^ is run by AI shows just how irrelevant technical interviews like this are these days. Why take a closed book test for a job that you never have to work a day in your life with the book closed?

If you are an experienced dev, u can rank other devs pretty quickly with a general conversation about any technology.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-06-23 06:08:24+00:00
>Quotes aren’t an argument. Instead, write original thoughts.

Nothing you've written is an argument or original lol; it's baseless conjecture. It's certainly as original as flat earth perspectives.

Just out of curiosity what do you think I should respond to in your post above? There's nothing affirmative. There's nothing to counter, I can't even being debate anything because it doesn't say _anything_ other than wild claims that are based on pure narrative.

>I’m sure it’s difficult since your contributions to this discussion are just rehashing quotes that you Google

All of your posts are well, well, well below just rehashing quotes on Google. Try a little bit harder if you want to even being to critique other people?

Please say something substantive and supportable by evidence. Anything at all.
by brtio2 | 2025-06-23 06:08:54+00:00
What is being called hive mind, that used to be called cargo cult, is a real thing on HN, though.

There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.
by jemmyw | 2025-06-23 06:09:10+00:00
> For example, you may be shocked to know that the human brain has no pathways for reading, as opposed to spoken language.

I'm not shocked at all.

> I could take a random human right now and drop them somewhere they've never been before, and they will figure it out.

Yes, well not really. You could drop them anywhere in the human world, in their body. And even then, if you dropped me into a warehouse in China I'd have no idea what to do, I'd be culturally lost and unable to understand the language. And I'd want to go home. So yes you could drop in a human but they wouldn't then just perform work like an automonon. You couldn't drop their mind into a non human body and expect anything interesting to happen, and you certainly couldn't drop them anywhere inhospitable. Nearer to your example, you couldn't drop a football player into a maths convention and a maths professor into a football game and expect good results. The point of an AI is to be useful. I think AGI is very far away and maybe not even possible, whereas specific AIs are already abound.
by mikewarot | 2025-06-23 06:09:55+00:00
The only memory involved should be at the input and output of a pipeline stage that does an entire layer of an LLM. I'm of the opinion that we'll end up with effectively massive FPGAs with some stages of pipelining that have NO memory access internally, so that you get one token per clock cycle.

100 million tokens per second is currently worth about $130,000,000/day. (Or so ChatGPT 4.1 told me a few days ago)

I'd like to drop that by a factor of at least 1000:1
by JonChesterfield | 2025-06-23 06:10:13+00:00
The factorial test giving zero on majo suggests they aren't doing arbitrary precision integer arithmetic.

I liked mojo as a python superset. Wanted to be able to run arbitrary python through it and selectively change parts to use the new stuff.

A "pythonic language" sounds like that goal has been dropped, at which point the value prop is much less clear to me.
by shiroiuma | 2025-06-23 06:12:07+00:00
>Sounds like the German film Das Boot is a winner (the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front is also amazing. Looks like the German film industry is doing well).

It is? By what metric?

Yes, Das Boot is a fantastic movie, but it came out around 1980; that's about 45 years ago now!

The new AQotWF movie has great reviews too. It just came out within the last year I think.

That's two great movies in a 50-year period. This is not what I would call "doing well".

There might be a few more examples of good German movies, but overall I would not call the German film industry world-leading by any means.
by atomicapple | 2025-06-23 06:12:50+00:00
> its big sell is changing as little as possible from an existing language.

This is not really true. Even though Mojo is adopting Python's syntax, it is a drastically different language under the hood. Mojo is innovating in many directions (eg: mlir integration, ownership model, comptime, etc). The creators didn't feel the need to innovate on syntax in addition to all that.
by lblume | 2025-06-23 06:13:13+00:00
A slight bias in favor of the status quo might be acceptable or even desired. However current LLMs strongly favor traditional languages and are unable to comprehend even modern language features not part of their base training set.

Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently. It's not just about Typst or typesetting specifically but programming language design in general and that improvements are becoming much harder to push through.
by holografix | 2025-06-23 06:13:25+00:00
Action or agency in the face of omniscience is impossible because information never stops being added.

How can you arrive at your destination if the distance keeps increasing?

We are intelligent because at some point we discard or are incapable and unwilling to get more information.

Similar to the bird who makes a nest on a tree marked for felling, an intelligent system will make decisions and take action based on a threshold of information quantity.
by Ayesh | 2025-06-23 06:13:41+00:00
Me too.

Most of the times, the commit message is 10+ lines while the change itself is -1/+1.

We use GitHub for repo hosting and a separate issue tracker to coordinate changes. It bothers me a lot that GitHub UI doesn't render markdown for commit messages. We all write really detailed and nicely formatted commit messages, and had to work out a commit message sync so the issue tracker can display related commit messages in full Markdown glory.
by rbajp | 2025-06-23 06:14:13+00:00
Thanks for taking a look! I initially built this tool for myself and my friends to help us prep, and they're the ones who encouraged me to release it publicly. Good catch on those issues – will get those fixed soon.

The goal is absolutely the opposite of making system design interviews more miserable. Right now, preparing for these interviews is really gatekept – either you need friends in big tech willing to help you practice, or you have to pay hundreds of dollars for one-on-one sessions.

We're trying to change that, now that its possible with AI.
by sunrunner | 2025-06-23 06:14:30+00:00
> know what you are doing

Is blindly copying the same diagrams seen in various GOTO conference slides and ByteByteGo system design newsletters to make sure all the expected parts of your 'architecture' are there really knowing what you are doing, or is it just cargo culting at the level of system design?

I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. I don't disagree that you should be aware of these things, but drawing out the same system diagram as Netflix without actually having measured a real system to understand where the hotspots are is ultimately just guessing, at best following a known pattern without evidence it's required.

Plus if the question is being asked by a company that genuinely could survive on HAProxy and a couple of efficient load-balanced monoliths then it really is cargo culting, especially if you end up with something more complicated then actually required.
by danpalmer | 2025-06-23 06:14:37+00:00
Latency and volume aren't the only requirements, perhaps you failed to discover the other requirements of the system?

- In a fast system most of the latency will come from geographical distance, an HA pair can't serve the whole world with low latency.

- How do you handle new releases? You can do HA with 2 machines, or you can do safe rollouts with blue/green machines, but you can't do HA and safe rollouts with just 2 machines.

- What if you want to test a new release with 1% of traffic? 100 small machines might be preferable to 1 big machine, or 10 medium machines each running 10 instances, or whatever.

- What does the failover look like?

- You use an "external managed data store", but often the tricky bit is the data store. Externalising this may be the most practical option, but it doesn't communicate that you know how it needs to function.

Alternatively this might have just been a bad interview. Many are.
by Springtime | 2025-06-23 06:14:40+00:00
My impression has been that the capitalization is to identify the word as an image format (a stand-in for whatever actual format is used), rather than being an initialism. Canon, Nikon and Sony among other hardware and software companies use it in this way.

ZIP similarly doesn't stand for anything but is styled as such. So I suppose the pushback is more against being used as a stand-in for generic raw image formats.

Edit: just noticed your comment was greyed but I didn't downvote it fwiw.
by quitit | 2025-06-23 06:14:48+00:00
Fundamentally it comes down to what you value.

If you don't actually want to stop, then these opportunities for pause do nothing, because in that pause you reaffirm that you do want to continue the behaviour.

This ties into why addiction is so powerful, while many people know their addictions are bad, they enjoy them and don't actually want to stop. I.E. They don't value the results of cessation versus keeping the addiction.

It's entirely possible to reach for your phone, then tap an app or load a website on your computer while being semi-aware of your actions, and this is typical for people with ingrained behaviours. These people can start scrolling instagram or twitter without really thinking about it. Having a forced circuit breaker gives these people an opportunity to stop and reconsider their actions.

At the end of the day only you have full agency over yourself.
by fudged71 | 2025-06-23 06:15:13+00:00
I've been thinking about this exact same problem. It would be great to store a log of how much time/tokens were spent reasoning, what was the reasoning path, why were certain decisions made, etc.

I don't know if rationale is something better suited for the git commit log, or tagged by code function to an external "rationale" system of record.
by nmehner | 2025-06-23 06:15:14+00:00
As written above: This might be different for people with dementia or other issues that are not in a mental state to manage their diabetes.

From what I understand from the study the aim is to show that mass producing islet cells from stem cells is possible. Previously those where extracted from pancreases from dead people.

Having cells extracted from your own body has the advantage that there are a lot of they are not rejected by the immune system.

The reason the immune suppression is still needed is the cause of type 1 diabetes: It is a auto immune disease where the body attacks its own islet cells.

But this a specific immune reaction which could be easier to prevent than the generic rejection of cells from a different body. But this is not what this approach is trying to do for now.

This study just wants to show: This approach of creating islet cells work and it is worth trying to do a bigger more expensive study that can produce statistically relevant results.

"Curing" type 1 diabetis is still years off and that requires the immune issue to be solved as well.
by omikun | 2025-06-23 06:15:19+00:00
Addiction is not the problem. It is a (poor) solution to a problem. Figure what your underlying problem is and address it first. Without doing that, you are only taking away one solution with no alternative.

For me, I noticed I have no compulsion to surf after hanging out with friends where I have their attention and curiosity and they have mine. It is like an oxytocin surge that depletes overtime and needs recharging. Scrolling is like junk food in that it feels like a recharge but empties as soon as I stop.

I now call up a friend or arrange a hangout if I feel like I’m running low and it’s amazing how many friends are delighted to hear from me but then never reach out.
by otherme123 | 2025-06-23 06:17:44+00:00
I wrote mine in Latex, along a team mate witting in Word. Her onboard was way faster, but she had to fight really hard in the end for Word not messing up everything on the smallest changes.

Meanwhile, when I had a decent setup I could move a whole section from the intro to the results and the overall layout didn't suffer (floating tables, figures and code still in place, references still pointing where they should). I had code snippets with colour highlights imported from the actual source code (good luck trying that in Word). I could insert the companion papers with a single line of code per document, and they looked great. I even had a compilation flag to output the ereader version.

My take was that Word enabled my team mate to kick a lot of cans down the road (but the cans eventually came back), while for me the reverse was true: build a decent foundation, and after that it was all pure write-cite-compile.
by przadka | 2025-06-23 06:18:06+00:00
hi there, I am the author of this post.

> commits those very sins:

you are wrong, let me explain:

1. There is nothing wrong with rhetorical questions per se - I just feel that LLMs often put them between sentences that do not require connection. I would even argue that any LLM would vote against putting the questions I wrote like this because they feel out of place. But I wanted them there.

2. "The solution isn't more polish—it's more humanity" isn't the pattern I'm referring to. The slop pattern is using "This isn't just X—it's Y" for emphasis reinforcement, like "This isn't just wrong—it's baffling." Mine is a simple contrast statement.

Thanks for the comment though - I'm glad a fellow human read it carefully enough to have an opinion on it! :)
by dlcarrier | 2025-06-23 06:18:30+00:00
Copyright law only restricts commercial activity, so if you print a Nintendo character on your shirt, to wear yourself, there's no means for Nintendo to sue you over it. File sharing lawsuits are not over users downloading content, but over users seeding it, which is on by default in most file sharing clients.

If you hire someone to print it on the shirt for you, and then distribute the shirt, you would be liable for copyright infringement, not the printer, because the printer isn't supplying the artwork, you are. It's no different than placing phone calls to perform an illegal activity. The phone provider isn't guilty, but you are.

If you order a custom shirt, and provide unlicensed copyrighted artwork, but don't distribute it, then no one is in a position to get in trouble.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-06-23 06:18:56+00:00
I find the semantic distinction between null and undefined helpful. If something is undefined, my code hasn't set it. If it's null, the value has been set, but there is no data.

I've never experienced this, but if there is ever a point in my logic where undefined and null are both valid values, they probably require different handling, so just always using undefined is not a good idea.
by maksspace | 2025-06-23 06:19:31+00:00
hi guys, Im working on the project called Cloudgrip.

I think most bugs in prod are boring and fixable. So I built a tool that finds them, fixes them with AI, and shows you only what matters. No dashboards. No noise. Just PRs. The main purpose is to offload from the devs boring support bugs, and focus on the new features and complicated issues. Think of it like Cursor AI but in the cloud.

Feedback is really appreciated :)

https://cloudgrip.ai
by quantadev | 2025-06-23 06:19:44+00:00
They say "On each step...[yadda yadda] we have a completely observed state, the wave function has collapsed."

So they're trying justify calling a "state" a "collapse". That's a bad metaphor to start with, but then they try to use that metaphor to justify calling lots of other stuff "waves" that are unrelated to waves, and continue to shove that square peg thru a round hole. Hilarious.
by empressplay | 2025-06-23 06:20:11+00:00
>Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.

I assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s. But they were much more expensive than a VIC-20.

Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
by toast0 | 2025-06-23 06:20:55+00:00
> The project was formally approved on the 2nd of February in 1977 and the production run was increased to 3500. You’d think that moving from 1000 to 3500 computers was evidence of growing support for the project, but no. This 3500 number was so that when the computer failed to sell, Tandy Corporation could use them in their Radio Shack stores for inventory control — stores which numbered 3400 at the time.

This part is kind of amazing. They recognized the potential of computing, and wanted to have it for their use, but didn't think anybody else would want to do inventory management?
by easterncalculus | 2025-06-23 06:20:55+00:00
> Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.

Yeah, and LOTR is in Middle-Earth, a fantastical world that isn't Earth. The point of the term "magical realism" is that there is still "realism". It's about what happens when something impossible or absurd happens to you and you have to deal with the ramifications in the real world. No one would read The Satanic Verses, think about the themes involved and compare it to LOTR.