MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kentonv | 2025-06-08 15:25:35+00:00
I agree that most code reviewers are pretty bad at spotting subtle bugs in code that looks good superficially.

I have a lot of experience reviewing code -- more than I ever really wanted. It has... turned me cynical and bitter, to the point that I never believe anything is right, no matter who wrote it or how nice it looks, because I've seen so many ways things can go wrong. So I tend to review every line, simulate it in my head, and catch things. I kind of hate it, because it takes so long for me to be comfortable approving anything, and my reviewees hate it too, so they tend to avoid sending things to me.

I think I agree that if I'd written the code by hand, it would be less likely to have bugs. Maybe. I'm not sure, because I've been known to author some pretty dumb bugs of my own. But yes, total Kenton brain cycles spent on each line would be higher, certainly.

On the other hand, though, I probably would not have been the one to write this library. I just have too much on my plate (including all those reviews). So it probably would have been passed off to a more junior engineer, and I would have reviewed their work. Would I have been more or less critical? Hard to say.

But one thing I definitely disagree with is the idea that humans would have produced bug-free code. I've seen way too many bugs in my time to take that seriously. Hate to say it but most of the bugs I saw Claude produce are mistakes I'd totally expect an average human engineer could make.

Aside, since I know some people are thinking it: At this time, I do not believe LLM use will "replace" any human engineers at Cloudflare. Our hiring of humans is not determined by how much stuff we have to do, because we basically have infinite stuff we want to do. The limiting factor is what we have budget for. If each human becomes more productive due to LLM use, and this leads to faster revenue growth, this likely allows us to hire more people, not fewer. (Disclaimer: As with all of my comments, this is my own opinion / observation, not an official company position.)
by mlhpdx | 2025-06-08 15:26:10+00:00
Yes, but it won’t be easy. Heavy investment has gone into HTTP and we have great tooling and support for it as a result. That has a lot of benefits and I’m glad for it. But there is a cost.

HTTP is a blunt hammer and computing sometimes needs a scalpel. Lighter, more efficient protocols are important, as QUIC and WireGuard have proven.
by JCattheATM | 2025-06-08 15:27:25+00:00
> Is this trolling?

Certainly not, although I wonder if this question is to any extent projection.

> But you have provided zero exact dependencies or details. All you said was "depends".

Which was sufficient to make the point I wanted to make.

> This is sophistry. Fancy words attempting to sound smart with zero content.

It's not, so much as you not understanding a point, wanting to give it the second degree and when I didn't initially support the point to a level you personally found satisfactory, because there was no reasonable need for me to do so, dismissing the point entirely.

You're not someone I see the potential to have a productive discussion with, so I'll let this be my last reply.

Have a great day.
by JCattheATM | 2025-06-08 15:28:32+00:00
> But if you talk to a Dane or a Swiss person about politics, they will laugh and tell you that their country is full of evil and stupid idiots, too.

They're right, but it's a significantly smaller percentage than the US, small enough to not do nearly as much damage as the US counter-part population does.

That Dane or Swiss person will also readily agree how shocking the average education level of the average American is.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-08 15:28:35+00:00
I don't see what that has to do with Hypercard. If anything, Hypercard (or modern HTML) is living proof that you can create and share a secure software runtime with the world.

If developers "didn't deserve rights" for what they did with that, then I don't see how we should let Apple off the hook for PRISM compliance and backdoored Push Notifications.
by heavyset_go | 2025-06-08 15:28:46+00:00
The Tor daemon exposes DNS resolvers if you enable them in torrc.

You'd of course be trusting Tor nodes for your DNS at that point, as I believe the network pulls records from exit nodes' resolvers, but you sidestep the quandary of deciding who you trust to directly make requests to.

You can also have multiple resolvers in the same daemon that use their own circuits, reducing the chances of receiving forged DNS records from potentially malicious exit nodes.

Similarly, DoH and DoT work over Tor.

You don't have to use it at a system level, just point your DNS clients at the daemon.
by rwmj | 2025-06-08 15:30:43+00:00
You can already do this without using binfmt ...

#if 0 gcc "$0" -o "$@".out && exec ./"$@".out #endif #include <stdio.h> int main () { printf ("hello, world\n"); return 0; }

Usage:

$ chmod +x print.c $ ./print.c hello, world

(Could be better to use a temporary file though.)

There's a similar cute trick for compiled OCaml scripts that we use with nbdkit: https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-cc-plugin.3.html#Using-this-pl...
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-06-08 15:31:10+00:00
LLMs are not based on brute force algorithms. They are based on finding the best string of tokens (for text based LLMs) that would correspond to a prompt.

To illustrate that you can see how DeepSeek "thinks". There are lots of "Given the instructions, if we", "Alternatively, we can ", "Also, if ", "wait", "but" etc...
by Zigurd | 2025-06-08 15:31:11+00:00
Tesla's SEC filings claim they have $37 billion in liquid assets. There's no excuse for under resourcing autonomy development at Tesla. Not much to do about that now. They had to have gotten serious about it three years ago or longer.

Elon can only blame himself. He believes he can will anything into existence. Some investors seem to share that belief. I'd say they're going to learn differently, but this is not the first failure of this type. Elon blurted out a goal without a plan in place.
Show HN: CurveFit Pro – Advanced nonlinear curve fitting in the browser
by Standards1 | 2025-06-08 15:31:11+00:00
We are pleased to announce a new version of our curve fitting web app with a whole new backend, front end, and all of the bells and whistles. If you see anything left out, or that could be improved, please let us know!! We'd love to hear any feedback from this amazing community.
by secstate | 2025-06-08 15:32:07+00:00
Having recently dug an old iPad out of the electronics bin at the transfer station this is acutely felt. I actually found an android tablet at the same time. I appreciate the desire to thwart theft, but lord! Wipe the android tablet, log in with Google, good to go. iPad can only be ground up and added to the asphalt to help slow down the aging of road surfaces. Again, I get the anti-theft angle, but this is so far beyond that. You are literally leasing the hardware from the manufacturer until such time as they decree you should be done with it. Never mind the thought exercise of what Apple could do if they wanted to if you were found to have CSAM and the state asked them to remove your access. No thank you.
by paradox242 | 2025-06-08 15:32:19+00:00
The value of LLMs is that they do things for you, so yeah the incentive is to have them take over more and more of the process. I can also see a future not far into the horizon where those who grew up with nothing but AI are much less discerning and capable and so the AI becomes more and more a crutch, as human capability withers from extended disuse.
by unshavedyak | 2025-06-08 15:33:13+00:00
Yea, i kinda hate Nix - but it's fundamentally changed how i view OSs and the minimum features i want from them.

Though I really want another language than Nixlang, but i've been stuck on Nix for years despite not liking it because the concrete builds are just so good. If Nix actually had a language i liked i'd probably go full immutable user config too and fully embrace nix. It's just so, so good.

I'd switch in a heartbeat if someone iterated on Nix for some of my complaints, though. But i'm not switching away from the concrete system builds.. it's just amazing.
by wslh | 2025-06-08 15:33:42+00:00
I'd like to add a practical observation, even assuming much more capable AI in the future: not all failures are due to model limitations, sometimes it's about external [world] changes.

For instance, I used Next.js to build a simple login page with Google auth. It worked great, even though I only had basic knowledge of Node.js and a bit of React.

Then I tried adding a database layer using Prisma to persist users. That's where things broke. The integration didn't work, seemingly due to recent versions in Prisma or subtle breaking updates. I found similar issues discussed on GitHub and Reddit, but solving them required shifting into full manual debugging mode.

My takeaway: even with improved models, fast-moving frameworks and toolchains can break workflows in ways that LLMs/ML (at least today) can't reason through or fix reliably. It's not always about missing domain knowledge, it's that the moving parts aren't in sync with the model yet.
by daveguy | 2025-06-08 15:35:15+00:00
You construct a theory of mind of the author of a work whether you recognize you are doing it or not. There are certain things everyone assumes about code based on the fact that we expect someone who writes code to have simple common sense. Which, of course, LLMs do not.

When you are talking to a person and interpreting what they mean, you have an inherent theory of mind whether you are consciously thinking "how does this person think" or not. It's how we communicate with other people efficiently and it's one of the many things missing with LLM roulette. It's not that you generate a new "theory of mind" with every interaction. It's not something you have to consciously do (although you can, like breathing).
by alexpotato | 2025-06-08 15:35:55+00:00
In my experience as a DevOps/SRE, I feel like every time someone tries to have a system to manage dependencies etc, its goes one of two ways (I'll use Python as an example):

OPTION 1

"We'll have one big shared mono repo"

Pros:

- it's all in one place

- it's "batteries included"

- everyone uses the same one (so things like vulnerability issues are easy to fix)

Cons:

- someone always wants a special version

- hard to do tiered rollouts so changes tend to be big bang

- "But what about if we want to build a small docker version?"

OPTION 2

"Everyone gets their own conda/venv!"

Pros:

- Everyone gets exactly what they want

- Don't use packages they don't need

- Easy to upgrade in phases/tiers etc

Cons:

- "Wait, we have HOW MANY different conda environments??"

- Libraries from different groups may not be tested with the same Python libraries

- Vulnerability management is a nightmare b/c you don't even know were all of the different conda envs are.

The above is why I'm always skeptical of "This new way will fix it all!".

In short, "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs" gets more and more true the later I go in my career.
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 15:38:01+00:00
An EMP large enough to be an international incident is a nuclear explosion. The effective range of one pumped by a conventional explosive is very small.

For undirected EMPs, consider that a lightning strike is in the region of about 5 gigajoules, and the difficulty of pumping that much energy through a coil.

My expectation is that a CHAMP warhead (not missile, warhead) would have a EMP range of something under 300m (probably less), even then vs. unshielded electronics (compare the effect on your body of being in a car that's struck by lightning vs. being on a 100m away on an open field that's struck by lightning), and only even that much by having a high gain (highly directional) antenna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...

That said:

> but with the low wattages many non-military communication devices use today you would also be blasting horrible noise to all of them beyond the local area and disrupting communications across potentially multiple neutral countries.

This doesn't need an EMP, it's "just" jamming, and Russia (amongst others) already does this: https://gpsjam.org/?lat=50.32113&lon=41.41602&z=3.0&date=202...
by mrweasel | 2025-06-08 15:38:28+00:00
We worked with an internal design team, but basically just one UX specialist who has zero comprehension of how HTML, CSS or and web related technologies worked. At one point we where meet with "I don't like that the site blinks!" ... What do you mean by "blinks", we built it, it doesn't blink. Turns out she didn't like that that switching pages would cause the browser to load the next page and in turn there would be an ever so brief moment where the browser would show a blank page while loading the next page. This was in the initial ASP.NET and Ajax days, to the end result was "wrap the whole damn thing in an update panel".

For those who doesn't know the ASP.NET update panel was basically HTMX before HTMX. The browser would do a background request and replace the content of the update panel with the html returned by the background request. Normally you'd just use if for a form submit, e.g. like a comment box. The user puts in their comment, the backend return all the comments, including the new one and the browser replace the current list of comments with the new one. We essentially put the entire site in to the update panel.
by Zigurd | 2025-06-08 15:38:36+00:00
Why should autonomous vehicles be treated differently?

For one thing, we don't feel the same about robots killing humans as we do about humans killing humans, which happens about 40,000 times a year in the US on our roads. I don't know why that is but that's how humans think.

Now ask me if I would like human piloted accident data to be as transparent as what people are demanding of AV operators.
by Mister_Snuggles | 2025-06-08 15:38:45+00:00
I can see a future where Chrome will use the system resolver for everything except Google's advertising domains, and those name resolutions will be impossible to block because they're going to a Google IP that may also serve services you want. Maybe Chrome would get called out for this change and they'd back it off.

But I doubt that a smart TV that does this would get called out, and even if they were the response would likely be "Oh, that model is three months old and we don't do firmware updates, sorry."
by spenczar5 | 2025-06-08 15:39:47+00:00
Of course, these are awful for a human. But I wonder if they're actually helpful for the LLM when it's reading code. It means each line of behavior is written in two ways: human language and code. Maybe that rosetta stone helps it confidently proceed in understanding, at the cost of tokens.

All speculation, but I'd be curious to see it evaluated - does the LLM do better edits on egregiously commented code?
by bigyabai | 2025-06-08 15:40:03+00:00
Nobody understands or believes Apple's stance either. All they'll do is give us whitepapers on how things should work, which we know has been fabricated at least once in the case of Push Notification backdoors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

This isn't a no-true-scotsman attitude. This is a rational reaction to security theater when nobody can prove that Apple is doing what they claim to be doing.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-06-08 15:40:05+00:00
Nodes don't need to store data, and they can be PXE booted if they have a little RAM, so they only need redundant devices for their system partitions if you want to boot them locally (how often will they really be rebooted, though?). A hard drive plus a flash / USB drive would be plenty.

Consumer NASes have been around for 20 years, now, though, so I think most people would just mount or map their storage.
by mrkurt | 2025-06-08 15:40:26+00:00
If we try really hard, I think we can make an exhaustive list of what viral fads on the internet are not. You made a small start.

none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, interest, substance, endurance, prestige, relevance, credibility, allure, staying-power, refinement, or depth.
by k310 | 2025-06-08 15:41:11+00:00
I have been following HyperCard clones for years. It would take me some time to gather what I found, but the short answer is to download a Mac OS 9 emulator (it works) and load up HyperCard 2.4.1 and have fun.

Emulators page with links to versions for MacOS and Windows.

https://mendelson.org/emulators.html

Hypercard 2.4.1 is available at the Macintosh Repository

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2632-hypercard-2-4

I had bought it long ago and used it in my work to make simulations with graphical output (via XCMDS) and to output EPS files for tech pubs. I think that the in-house use of HyperCard was vastly under-reported.

I'll update in a reply if and when I find the best standalone HC clones in my search.

Naturally, the full-blown emulator and HC are not for kids, unless you install it for your kids. I let my daughter have some fun with the original HyperCard, and I keep a MacCube with MacOS9 for sentimental reasons, though it's boxed right now.

Sightly off-topic, Processing offers highly graphical coding.

https://processing.org/

And gcompris offers lots of educational apps that one might have written in HyperCard.

https://www.gcompris.net/index-en.html
by austin-cheney | 2025-06-08 15:41:17+00:00
No. You must have a sponsor that pays for the clearance. The government officially claims that a secret clearance costs around $3000 and a top secret costs around $15000. That does not include the actual investigation of sending people into the field to perform interviews. The actual costs can be well into 6 figures. You don't want to pay for that.

If you have critical skills then a large contractor like Raytheon or McDonnelL Douglas will gladly pay for it. The cost of the clearance is absolutely worth it to fill a position that drives a project forward.
by sfpotter | 2025-06-08 15:42:21+00:00
What you're saying isn't wrong, per se, but...

There are polynomials that aren't orthogonal that are suitable for numerics: both the Bernstein basis and the monomial basis are used very often and neither are orthogonal. (Well, you could pick a weight function that makes them orthogonal, but...!)

The fact of their orthogonality is crucial, but when you work with Chebyshev polynomials, it is very unlikely you are doing an orthogonal (L2) projection! Instead, you would normally use Chebyshev interpolation: 1) interpolate at either the Type-I or Type-II Chebyshev nodes, 2) use the DCT to compute the Chebyshev series coefficients. The fact that you can do this is related to the weight function, but it isn't an L2 procedure. Like I mentioned in my other post, the Chebyshev weight function is maybe more of an artifact of the Chebyshev polynomials' intimate relation to the Fourier series.

I am also not totally sure what polynomial chaos has to do with any of this. PC is a term of art in uncertainty quantification, and this is all just basic numerical analysis. If you have a series in orthgonal polynomials, if you want to call it something fancy, you might call it a Fourier series, but usually there is no fancy term...
by ETH_start | 2025-06-08 15:43:07+00:00
It doesn’t matter what Democrats think about unions. This wasn’t a union summit or a summit on party values—it was about EVs. Tesla is the world leader in EVs and the top American EV manufacturer. Excluding them because they don’t support unionization — an issue tied to massive political support for Democrats through campaign contributions and institutional backing—is indefensible. It undermines the purpose of the summit through rank politicization and partisanship.

As for the claim that Tesla has racial discrimination issues—that’s a distortion. Nearly every major company gets hit with discrimination lawsuits because civil rights law has been weaponized to make that outcome nearly inevitable:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-...
by jchw | 2025-06-08 15:43:45+00:00
All of the languages are turing complete; the fact that you can make them do the same things with relatively simple transforms isn't actually surprising, it is in fact a natural consequence. Of course, you can do the same thing with nearly any stack unwinding primitive as long as it's general enough like panic/recover.

Language decisions scoped try/catch are not incidental details.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-06-08 15:44:02+00:00
I'm not a CUDA programmer, but AIUI:

- you will want to install the latest version of CUDA Toolkit (12.9.1)

- each version of CUDA Toolkit requires the card driver to be above a certain version (e.g. toolkit depends on driver version 576 or above)

- older cards often have recent drivers, e.g. the current version of CUDA Toolkit will work with a GTX 1080, as it has a recent (576.x) driver
by leonardc9316766 | 2025-06-08 15:44:50+00:00
Too many SaaS tools only react after a client is angry, churned, or left a damaging review. I built Client Rescue AI to flip that: it predicts emotional risk before it turns into fallout.

It scans written messages (support logs, survey feedback, chat history, etc.), scores them for emotional risk, and sends smart alerts + suggested rescue messages you can actually use to intervene.

It’s plug-and-play, doesn’t need training, and works with even small datasets. Kind of like a therapist + strategist for your client relationships, embedded into your CRM.

Curious if this resonates with founders here—especially those who’ve been blindsided by a client departure or a 1-star review you wish you saw coming earlier.

Feedback welcome. Open to integrations or ideas from this crowd too.
by kentonv | 2025-06-08 15:45:08+00:00
I included the prompts because I personally found it extremely illuminating to see what the LLM was able to produce based on those prompts, and I figured other people would be interested to. Seems I was right.

But to be clear, I had no idea how to write good prompts. I basically just wrote like I would write to a human. That seemed to work.
by nostrademons | 2025-06-08 15:45:20+00:00
FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths also tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and astronomy, rather than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL and NASA. The Bay Area tech scene is anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley, though most Stanford alums would probably say it's just Stanford.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-06-08 15:45:40+00:00
I love h&cf but it’s important for people who are curious about it to know that it is definitely an overdramatized AMC piece akin to mad men. It’s basically mad men but PCs lol.

It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the charts (whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man it can definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally lol
by whytevuhuni | 2025-06-08 15:46:15+00:00
Not quite, you also need to keep pointer non-nullness, alignment and aliasing safety in Rust, which is very pervasive in Rust (all shared/mutable references) but very rare in C (the 'restricted' keyword).

In Rust, it's not just using an invalid reference that causes UB, but their very creation, even if temporary. For example, since references have to always be aligned, the compiler can assume the pointer they were created from was also aligned, and so suddenly some ending bits from the pointer are ignored (since they must've been zero).

And usually the point of unsafe is to make safe wrappers, so unafe Rust makes or interacts with safe shared/mutable references pretty often.
by yegle | 2025-06-08 15:46:26+00:00
I don't understand any of the arguments.

Why mentioning DNS-over-TLS if you are against DNS-over-HTTPS? They have all the same "downside".

What's wrong with one less peeper (your ISP)? You _have_ to use a DNS server unless you use something fancy like dnsmasq to round-robin between multiple DNS servers (but your ISP can still see everything)

Besides, you can run your own DoH server with ease, you don't have to use Cloudflare's.