MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by o11c | 2025-06-07 16:24:31+00:00
You don't have to recompile, just do the following (at least on glibc):

#include <sys/types.h> // pull in initial definition of __FD_SETSIZE #undef __FD_SETSIZE #define __FD_SETSIZE 32768 // or whatever #include <sys/select.h> // won't include the internal <bits/types.h> again

This is a rare case when `-Wsystem-headers` is useful to enable (and these days system headers are usually pretty clean) - it will catch if you accidentally define `__FD_SETSIZE` before the system does.

Note that `select` is still the nicest API in a lot of ways - `poll` wastes space gratuitously, `epoll` requires lots of finicky `modify` syscalls, and `io_uring` is frankly not sane.

That said:

* if you're only dealing with a couple FDs, use `poll`.

* it's not that hard to take a day and think about epoll write buffer management. You need to consider every combination of:

epoll state is/isn't checking writability (you want to only change this lazily) on the previous/current iteration, was there nothing/something in the write buffer? prior actual write was would-block/actually-incomplete/spuriously-incomplete/complete current actual write ends up would-block/actually-incomplete/spuriously-incomplete/complete

There are many "correct" answers, but I suspect the optimal answer for epoll is something like: initially, write optimistically (and do this before the wait). If you fail to write anything at all, enable the kernel flag. For FDs that you've previously enabled the flag for, if you don't have anything to write this time, disable the flag; otherwise, don't actually write until after the wait (it is guaranteed to return immediately if the write would be allowed, after all, but you'll also get other events that happen to be ready). If you trust your event handlers to return quickly, you can defer any indicated writes until the next wait, otherwise do them before handling events.

You can see why people still use `select`.
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 16:24:54+00:00
The problem with "X works" type arguments is that, no, no it doesn't, not generally, and when it does it only does so because it gets maintained.

Software rots, period. It doesn't matter how perfect the software is because everything else changes. X hasn't been "just working" for 15 years like you claim as if it's some magic piece of software. No... it's been actively and meticulously maintained for 15 years. It's sort of like saying my Honda Accord with 500K miles just works. Yeah... sort of.

If nobody wants to maintain it, then yeah it won't work at all and that will happen pretty quickly. Because they're dependent on user land, and drivers, and graphics APIs, and those are all moving targets.

Maybe this maintenance will work out and X will live. I highly, highly doubt, but maybe.
by orbital-decay | 2025-06-07 16:25:33+00:00
They've always been terrible at animation. 10 or 20 years ago, their animations have always been the absolute worst by any contemporary standard (the art used to be too - see Battlespire for some terrible art - but they improved it). Maybe part of that was because of the engine, but I think they just never had the culture for it.

They clearly did try to improve their animations in Fallout 4 in 2013-2014, which is the timeframe the most development happened, so it's not like they're oblivious to their biggest shortcoming as a studio. So what they did in F76 and Starfield is just a regression.
by solardev | 2025-06-07 16:25:58+00:00
For those of us without a formal comp sci background, is there a way for the IDE to detect and warn about these automatically? Or any other easy telltale signs to look for?

As a self taught dev, when I encounter nested loops, I have to mentally go through them and try to see if they iterate through each item more than once. But that's not a very foolproof method.
by ijk | 2025-06-07 16:25:59+00:00
> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.

I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the development effort to make them interesting enough to explore.

In my view, you can either use procgen to make development cheaper or to make it more interesting to explore, but not both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.

But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.

Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different systems interacting; having a sword with different stats feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot more to explore.

Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden reactions that let different parts of the content work together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the game as the chair (with rocket launchers).

They've all got a lot of interesting environmental storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough for the players to care.
by bandoti | 2025-06-07 16:26:02+00:00
I’m not sure over time people will continue to accept sloppy art.

The “glitchiness” of the AI sprites can be quite unsettling because one can feel the something-quite-wrong that is difficult to place.

This is a worse state than using even rough illustrations by actual artists.

If one must use AI for this I would recommend having an artist in the pipeline who uses AI to create assets but then makes sure they are seamless.
by vaxman | 2025-06-07 16:26:26+00:00
What you need to know is that the Pentagon has ultimate authority in matters like this (regardless of the contractor’s equity structure) and it has wielded it time and time again throughout the Cold War. SpaceX cannot escape the command structure by “decommissioning” anything. If you use drugs and threaten US interests in jest, you are done. Those are hard rules. Perhaps Musk will wind up emaciated with footlong fingernails living on the top floor of a hotel in Las Vegas or Florida, but he will not still influence the assets at SpaceX in such a state, regardless of his wealth, passion, allegiance, intelligence, charisma, army of sycophants, children named after chemicals, etc. He can work out his relationship with personalities in the US government, but his arse is cooked in terms of command of dual-use orbital transit and communications systems. The people at SpaceX deserve so much better anyway.

https://youtu.be/65_FeMUuCl0 https://youtu.be/0kpNkEdB1o0
by ddoeth | 2025-06-07 16:26:33+00:00
In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.

Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.

I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1339439/plastic-waste-ma...
by refurb | 2025-06-07 16:27:50+00:00
The arguments are getting so silly I can’t even follow them now.

What does this have to do with protecting individual rights?

The government already has your data. Whether another part of the government has access versus another seems like splitting hairs?

DOGE is the US government. Whether Jane in the SSA can look up your medical records or whether Big Balls in DOGE can see it is two shades of the same color.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-07 16:27:55+00:00
One of their fathers was a successful slumlord, and the other owned an emerald mine in South Africa. Those provide a one-time advantage (which in Trump's case would have been more profitable if he had socked it away in an index fund.) How do they establish 'generational talent' for being POTUS or building rockets and cars?

It will be interesting to see if any of Elon's offspring choose to follow in his footsteps. Probably not the transgender child he disowned, or the one whose name has to be written with Unicode characters, but that leaves something like 20 others to vie for the throne.
by ufmace | 2025-06-07 16:29:32+00:00
Note that this testimony is a persuasive presentation, an effort to persuade congress to allocate additional spending for EMP protection. Mr. Wood may indeed be qualified to speak on the subject, but this aspect necessarily colors his speech. It's not like there's a shortage of cases of decently qualified people exaggerating the risks of something in order to get more funding and status for themselves and their pet programs.

What I'd really like is hard data on what is or is not actually vulnerable to these hazards and to what extent, based on hard proof rather than fear-mongering by interested parties, which this doesn't get us any further towards.
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 16:30:06+00:00
> When you say "the LLM can easily hallucinate code that will satisfy the compiler but still fail the actual intent of the user", all you are saying is that the code will have bugs. My code has bugs. So does yours. You don't get to use the fancy word "hallucination" for reasonable-looking, readable code that compiles and lints but has bugs.

There is an obvious and categorical difference between the "bugs" that an LLM produces as part of its generated code, and the "bugs" that I produce as part of the code that I write. You don't get to conflate these two classes of bugs as though they are equivalent, or even comparable. They aren't.
by nostrademons | 2025-06-07 16:30:08+00:00
It depends on the department. My salary (in a mature product) was already amortized - I suspect the same is true of all their other mature products like Search, Maps, GMail, Chrome, YouTube, etc. But I think they were deducting salaries in the more research-like areas like Gemini, Jax, Assistant, etc. So there is net still a fairly large charge related to it, even if it isn't as large as it could be.
by montroser | 2025-06-07 16:30:51+00:00
It's happening... When humanoid robots make it into our daily life, we are going to have to work out a whole new set of social norms.

I suspect the "dumbest" of these humanoids will initially be subject to bullying and abuse, like how a throng of people set ablaze that waymo car in SFO. Eventually, these humanoids displaying feelings and empathy might actually be part of a defense and broader trajectory of embrace and acceptance.
by rayiner | 2025-06-07 16:31:08+00:00
There is a platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. No taxes on tips was on the platform (#6) as was no cuts to medicare or social security (#14). Balancing the budget was not on the platform.

There are republicans who care about the debt, but the party as a whole doesn’t. The economic libertarians have been thoroughly marginalized in the modern GOP, because economic libertarianism is unpopular.

To be clear, I admire the traditional small government conservatives, though I am not one. The GOP hasn’t been that party since the 1920s. The mass immigration of the 20th century made that approach unviable. We’re a country of machine politics now and it’s only going to become more pronounced. The guy who ran on “No Taxes on Tips” to buy the Latino vote in Nevada was never going to balance the budget.
by oskarkk | 2025-06-07 16:31:44+00:00
> Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it

I agree with everything you said, but to be precise it was the DoD policy for a long time to have at least two providers. In the 90s it was Lockheed (with Atlas rocket) and Boeing (with Delta rocket). For complicated reasons they were forced to combine their rocket divisions, and they formed a joint company, ULA. But they still had these two rockets, so at least there was redundancy on the technological side, but no competition. After SpaceX entered the launch market, DoD and ULA weren't willing to allow SpaceX (not yet a part of the military-industrial complex) to compete for DoD launches, but SpaceX sued their way into these contracts. And after SpaceX became the cheapest, most reliable and fastest launch provider, the benefits of opening the market are obvious, so there's no coming back to the ULA monopoly (or any other monopoly, at least in launches).

But on the side of NASA resupply/crew programs, yeah, it was a great decision by NASA/government/congress that paid off massively, and allowed today's space boom to happen (and made SpaceX what it is today).
by archerx | 2025-06-07 16:32:00+00:00
That's why artist should incorporate gen ai into their workflows. They have the artistic eye and separate the slop from the gold better than non artistic people. Also knowing composition and etc helps getting better results from Stable Diffusion, Flux and etc.

I remember when 3D CG was new and it got so much hate for not being "real art". I heard the same drama happened when Photoshop and Illustrator hit the market, they weren't considered "real art".
by GrantMoyer | 2025-06-07 16:33:45+00:00
I think Starfield gets a lot more flak than it deserves. Yeah, compared to Fallout 4, where there's something hand placed to observe or interact with seemingly every 100 ft in any direction, the world feels barren. But I think the departure is intentional; Starfield felt much more like a spiritual successor to Daggerfall than to anything since Morrowind. Overall, I spent less time in Starfield than in older Bethesda titles, but I liked what was there, despite it being less dense, and I spent more time than I have in many other games.

Why should Bethesda have to refine the same exact formula over and over? That would just turn into what Ubisoft does with Assassins Creed, pumping out soulless entry after entry into the franchise. In other words, Starfield was Bethesda taking a risk and trying to introduce unique features rather than releasing yet another another predictable "Bethesda RPG".
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-06-07 16:33:57+00:00
I am a 100% P&T disabled veteran - I have handicapped parking and all of that.

I could sit here and list out all the medical and legally accepted reasons that the Veterans Administration, and as a result all other regulatory bodies, give me this status (epilepsy, constantly dislocating shoulders, hip arthritis, tinnitus, PTSD etc...)

However I have friends, colleagues and neighbors who are measurably less physically and mentally capable but are not considered disabled.

When I look at the job market, MOST people are not capable of doing their individual life without significant training, help, direction or supervision. People call this bad-state "adulting" and find it onerous.

Said another way, the vast majority of people do not have the cognitive ability, education (self taught or formal), or experience to set goals, take actions and self improve without significant direction from someone else. I personally consider that disabled.

So if these people are considering themselves disabled, then they are probably right - they are incapable of being independent or living within a community that takes care of them. So the only remaining community left is the abstracted transactional monetary system implemented by governments to allocate resources toward them provided they check the right boxes.

Ideally 100% of humanity would be on disability - because we can build systems measurably more capable than human labor - someone just needs to rebrand it as "UBI."
by ajkjk | 2025-06-07 16:34:21+00:00
I have remembered the phrase "Radiant AI" from the Oblivion Marketing when it came out, 2005ish I guess, when I was in high school. I'm glad it stuck with someone else as much as it did for me: the hype, the disappointment, but also the wondering what it could have been, because it sounded like a legitimately very-cool game feature except for the part where it didn't exist.
by melodyogonna | 2025-06-07 16:34:49+00:00
Yeah, Mojo's development has been pretty transparent. Chris publishes technical documents for most features and takes community feedback into account. A recent example is here: https://forum.modular.com/t/variable-bindings-proposal-discu...

Btw, Mojo's development is a masterclass in language development and community building, it's been fun watching Chris go back to fix technical debts in existing features rather than proceeding with adding new features.
by genewitch | 2025-06-07 16:35:26+00:00
I have a friend 'trapped' by government aid. They receive some benefits from being diagnosed with something as a minor and their father received a government aid that conferred to them. Its SSDI IIRC; the rules say they can't get married, can't own property, can't earn more than $X/unit of time.

The 27 years I've known them have been punctuated by my saying "what if you do this to solve your current issue" and the reply is "I'll lose my benefits"

I'm unfit to say if they need it; as in I am unsure if their life would be worse or better without.

Don't read too much into the setup, above; my memory is fuzzy unless I am directly talking to them about it, and even so they correct me like, "its not ssi it's ssdi," or whatever it is. This is to +1 with an anecdote.
by e40 | 2025-06-07 16:35:27+00:00
> Foreign workers are to my knowledge effectively always a service contract, since it's pretty complicated (if even possible) to hire FTEs across borders without subsidiaries, which are expensive to maintain.

It's impossible (yes, I'm being absolute) to hire an employee who lives in or outside the US who is not a citizen or doesn't have a green card. All employees must have an SSN and go through i9 verification, which requires in person verification of legal ability to work in the US.

The foreign developers I'm talking about are not US citizens and do not have green cards.

Their work is subject to 15 year amortization per section 174. Period.
by kazinator | 2025-06-07 16:35:57+00:00
Celluloid (nitrated cellulose with camphor) is not the only transformation of cellulose into a plastic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate dates back to the 19th century; tough enough to be used for films and eyeglass frames.

Production involves some chems: "cellulose [pulp] is reacted with acetic acid and acetic anhydride in the presence of sulfuric acid."

Acetic anhydride is restricted in some countries because it's used in making heroin.
by cebert | 2025-06-07 16:36:29+00:00
It’s unfortunate that we can’t seriously consider universal basic income in the United States. If we provided every adult citizen with $13K annually during their working years, it could offer support to those unable to find meaningful employment without forcing them to declare themselves disabled just to survive. That label can take a real toll on a person’s psyche and limit their belief in their ability to grow or find better opportunities. We also have to be realistic and realize AI is positioned to replace a significant number of jobs in the next decade. A safety net like UBI will only become more essential moving forward.
by ben_w | 2025-06-07 16:37:47+00:00
"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be limited to just developed nations — I visited Nairobi a decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".

However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p, increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because it's just so easy to just not care enough about free things to make sure they end up in landfill (or recycling): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...
by bigyabai | 2025-06-07 16:37:53+00:00
Respectfully, I still disagree. Art is not commoditized, even if you can appear to use a replacement product. People called out the issues with your pixel art immediately when you uploaded it, clearly AI art isn't actually an art commodity. And of course, look at the world of "vibe coding" - it hasn't even remotely commoditized software development. It's really hard to write good code, and the same goes for making good art.

Again, I sympathize with your pragmatism here. Having AI-generated placeholder assets beats programmer art, but you're just blatantly wrong if you expect "exponential improvement" apropos of your own observations.

The answer to your original question is likely that HN perceives AI capabilities to be a bathtub curve and not an exponential climb.
by overfeed | 2025-06-07 16:38:26+00:00
> One of the things we learned very quickly was that having generated source code in the same repository as actual source code was not sustainable

My rule of the thumb is to have both in same repo, but treat generated code like binary data. This was informed by when I was burned by a tooling regression that broke the generated code and the investigation was complicated by having to correlate commits across different repositories
by e40 | 2025-06-07 16:39:11+00:00
There are definitely gray areas to the law, but in my decades of experience dealing with lawyers, they won't steer you to do something very far over the line. I think the companies that do step far over the line, to game the system, are doing so knowing full well they are breaking the law, but they believe they are unlikely to be caught. And they're very likely right. You could separate CEO's/CFO's in to two camps: stay legal and do what you need to do to make the almighty $$. In the 80's the phrase "greed is good" was born, but the last 2 decades have really upped the ante on this.
by dialup_sounds | 2025-06-07 16:39:11+00:00
Wiring a chatbot to dialogue is less interesting to me than the possibility of AI directing scenes and orchestrating reactivity across multiple characters. A reasoning model can ensure that the world responds to the player in a reasonable and narratively interesting way, without having to script everything or make individual characters particularly intelligent.

We're used to thinking of game AI as a property of the entity it's attached to (the NPC, the enemy, the opposing player) but an LLM can sit above that, more like a dungeon master.