MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-17 22:26:52+00:00
The customer is a government department formed by the merger of a bunch of only vaguely related agencies. They have “inherited” dozens of developers from these mergers, maybe over a hundred if you count the random foreign outsourcers. As you can imagine there’s no consistency or organisational structure because it wasn’t built up as a cohesive team from the beginning.

The agencies are similarly uncoordinated and will pick up their metaphorical credit card and just throw it at random small dev teams, internally, external, or a mix.

Those people will happily take the credit! The money just… disappears. It’s like a magic trick, or one of those street urchins that rips you off when you’re on holiday in some backwards part of the world like Paris.

I get brought in as “the cloud consultant” for a week or two at the end to deploy the latest ball of mud with live wires sticking out of it to production.

This invariably becomes an argument because the ball of mud the street urchins have sold to the customer is not fit for… anything… certainly not for handling PII or money, but they spent the budget and the status reports were all green ticks for years.

Fundamentally, the issue is that they're "going into the cloud" with platform as a service, IaC, and everything, but at some level they don't fully grok what that means and the type of oversight required to make that work at a reasonable cost.

"But the nice sales person from Microsoft assured me the cloud is cheaper!"
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-17 22:27:19+00:00
I care about naming, and I find the name of the visitor pattern infuriatingly bad. Very clubbable. I think I have never created one called "Visitor" in my life.

Given the syntax tree example from Wikipedia, I think I'd call it AstWalker, AstItem::dispatch(AstWalker) and AstWalker::process(AstItem) instead of Visitor, AstItem::accept(AstVisitor) and AstVisitor::visit(AstItem).

"The walker walks the AST, each items sends it to the next ones, and the walker processes them". That means something. "The visitor visits the AST items, which accept it" means basically nothing. It's more general, but also contains very little useful information. So the visitor might need different names in different situations. Fine. Just add a comment "visitor pattern" for recognizability.

I remember a situation where I needed to walk two object trees for a data comparison and import operation. I created an AbstractImporter that walked the two trees in lockstep in a guaranteed order and invoked virtual methods for each difference. It had a non-virtual doImport() for the ordered data walk, and doImport() called virtual methods like importUserAccount(), importUserAccountGrouMemberships() etc. There were two subclasses of AbstractImporter: ImportAnalyzer collected differences to display them, then there was a selection step implemented by a kind of list model + a bit of controller logic, then an ImportWorker to make the selected changes. All rather specific terminology and not exactly the visitor pattern.
by iguessthislldo | 2025-06-17 22:28:21+00:00
I'm not skeptical about DSLs in general, but I agree with you on robot framework. I think it has a few good points like how it formats its HTML output is mostly nice, but how I'm not happy with how tags on test cases work and actually writing anything that's non-trivial is frustrating. It's easy to write Python extensions though so that's where I ended put basically all of logic that wasn't the "business logic" of the tests. I think that's generally what you're supposed to do, but at that point, it seems better to write it all in Python or the language of your choice.
by wahern | 2025-06-17 22:28:39+00:00
> the only thing real in hyper-reality is that the symbols hide the absence of facts

What's a fact? Concepts like justice and fairness are fundamentally cultural constructs, and yet they've always been a core concern of human society. Setting up "facts" in opposition to "simulation" is no less a rhetorical narrative than what the article is pushing.

My takeaway from post-structuralism generally isn't that we live in a "fake" reality, but that the human experience--individually, collectively--is deeply complicated.
by neilv | 2025-06-17 22:29:00+00:00
I tried to expressly say that Kubernetes could be used.

And, given their unusual needs and scale, there will probably be some kind of bespoke abstraction, whether it's an SDK, or a document, that says this is the subset of things you should be using, and how to use them, so that we can practically deploy our very unusual setup with different providers and customer facilities.

OpenAI has the resources to define that abstraction, and make it work well across multiple providers.
by furyofantares | 2025-06-17 22:29:17+00:00
I notice I am confused.

> Suddenly the opportunity cost for a DSL has just doubled: in the land of LLMs, a DSL requires not only the investment of build and design the language and tooling itself, but the end users will have to sacrifice the use of LLMs to generate any code for your DSL.

I don't think they will. Provide a concise description + examples for your DSL and the LLM will excel at writing within your DSL. Agents even moreso if you can provide errors. I mean, I guess the article kinda goes in that direction.

But also authoring DSLs is something LLMs can assist with better than most programming tasks. LLMs are pretty great at producing code that's largely just a data pipeline.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-06-17 22:29:47+00:00
Your outrage is not that ICE is acting illegally but that they are enforcing US law. Having local law enforcement launch some kind of insurrection is the kind of myopic nonsense you would have condemned a few years ago, even months. Heck, for the last 50 years the Imperial Presidency also was a bipartisan consensus.

It looks different when it's your ox getting gored, but the solution is actually temperance, restraint and dialog.
by rahen | 2025-06-17 22:30:06+00:00
This sounds plausible and fascinating. Let’s see what it would have taken to train a model as well.

Given an estimate of 6 FLOPs per token per parameter, training a 7B parameter model would require about 1.26×10^22 FLOPs. That translates to roughly 500 000 years on an 800 MFLOPS X-MP, far too long to be feasible. Training a 100M parameter model would still take nearly 70 years.

However, a 7M-parameter model would only have required about six months of training, and a 14M one about a year, so let’s settle on 10 million. That’s already far more reasonable than the 300K model I mentioned earlier.

Moreover, a 10M parameter model would have been far from useless. It could have performed decent summarization, categorization, basic code autocompletion, and even powered a simple chatbot with a short context, all that in 1984, which would have been pure sci-fi back in those days. And pretty snappy too, maybe around 10 tokens per second if not a little more.

Too bad we lacked the datasets and the concepts...
by MasihMinawal | 2025-06-17 22:30:41+00:00
The best method that worked for me:

Change your location. Notice how your brain begins to change as you distance yourself from your daily distractions.

Practical:

- Book a flight to Europe (if you're in the US) for two weeks. Or book a flight to the US (if you're in Europe) for two weeks.

- Bring your laptop.

- Set a deadline for your project on the tenth day of your trip.
by glkindlmann | 2025-06-17 22:30:52+00:00
Whether via direct or reflected light, spectra in trichromat's eyes are still projected down to a 3D space (the responses of the S, M, L cones). What you describe would still require a standardized and reliable way to probe an extra degree of freedom in spectra that conventional RGB displays can't access. The paper shared by varunneal explains it better than I can.
by simonw | 2025-06-17 22:32:44+00:00
I tried using the three new models to transcribe the audio of this morning's Gemini Twitter Space.

I got very strong results from 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash, but 2.5 Flash Lite sadly got stuck in a loop until it ran out of output tokens:

Um, like, what did the cows bring to you? Nothing. And then, um, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and...

Notes on my results (including the transcripts which worked, which included timestamps and guessed speaker names) here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/17/gemini-2-5/#transcribi...
by beejiu | 2025-06-17 22:32:48+00:00
Re: "we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging"

From https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967/?locale=en_US:

> In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them. Additional information about WhatsApp's security can be found here.

Note specifically "information about how some users interact with others on our service", which contradicts their claim they don't keep logs of which people are messaging each other.
by josephg | 2025-06-17 22:33:14+00:00
If you crushed all the atoms in the universe into dust, would the number 2 also be destroyed in the process? I don't know if the mathematical idea of 2 exists in the physical world at all. I don’t know if that’s even a well formed question.

Obviously humans perceive 2-ness. And if you crushed all our minds to dust, nobody would remember 2. But would that really destroy the number? If an alien civilisation in another universe counted things, I think it might be the very same number 2 that they use to count.
by iLemming | 2025-06-17 22:34:15+00:00
Plain language writing necessitates a good editor, just like great cooking needs a proper kitchen and equipment. Certainly, a master chef can cook something amazing on a bare campfire, using literal sticks and stone tools, yet in order to become a true chef one still needs to start in the kitchen.

I always enjoyed writing prose in Emacs, because all the tools I need are always at my fingertips - thesaurus, spellchecking, etymology lookup, dictionaries, translation, search, and these days LLMs as well.

And the level of integration some Emacs packages demonstrate is simply bananas - I can ask LLMs to help me at any point, whether I'm writing some notes, sending a Slack message to a colleague, editing a comment in a codebase or a git commit message, or even when running shell commands. You can easily manipulate the context applied to the conversation, see the payload, repeat with variability, swap models anytime, call external tools, replace things in place, examine the diff of the changes, search through your prior conversations, etc.

I honestly can barely contain my excitement at seeing how my ultimate choice gets vindicated. When I committed to Emacs while the world moved toward newer, shinier tools, it often felt isolating - like swimming against the tide. Then LLMs arrived, and for a moment I wondered if this revolutionary technology would finally render my beloved editor obsolete. Instead, the opposite happened: LLMs integrated so seamlessly into Emacs that the experience surpasses even specialized tools built exclusively for AI interaction. Years of investment weren't wasted - they were preparation for this moment of perfect synergy. The irony is beautiful: the very tool that seemed antiquated to most people keeps proving to be the most adaptable to the future.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-17 22:34:42+00:00
Google translate is a good example too in terms of better-than-nothing to the completely uninitiated, helpful to someone with a little knowledge, and obviously not a replacement for a professional. That is - the more you know, the more you see its failures.

I know enough Japanese to talk like a small child, make halting small talk in a taxi, and understand a dining menu / restaurant signage broadly. I also have been enough times to understand context where literal translation to English fails to convey the actual message.. for example in cases where they want to say no to a customer but can't literally say no.

I have found Google Translate to be similarly magical and dumb for 15 years of traveling to Japan without any huge improvements other than speed. The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.

So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-never-perfect state for a decade.
by devnullbrain | 2025-06-17 22:34:47+00:00
>All this is not to say Google Translate is doing a bad job

Google Translate is doing a bad job.

The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it has regressed.

Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you correct its mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the machine thinks it knows best.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-17 22:35:07+00:00
I think you should not assume fast internet or any internet when it is not necessary to do so. Many programs could mostly work without needing an internet connection (e.g. a email program will only need to connect to internet to send/receive; you can compose drafts and read messages that are already received without an internet connection), so they should be designed to work mostly without internet connection where appropriate (this also includes to avoid spyware, etc as well). When you do need an internet connection, you should avoid adding excessive data (for HTML files, this includes pictures, CSS, JavaScripts, etc; for other protocols and file formats it includes other things), too.

For such things as streaming audio/video, there is the codec and other things to be considered as well. If the data can be coded in real time or if multiple qualities are available already on the server then this can be used to offer a lower quality file to clients that request such a file. The client can download the file for later use and may be able to continue download later, if needed.

There is also, e.g. do you know that you should need a video call (or whatever else you need) at all? Sometimes, you can do without it, or it can be an optional possibility.

There is also the avoiding needing specific computers, too. It is not only for internet access, although that is a part of it, too. However, this does not mean that computer and internet cannot be helpful. They can be helpful, but should be overly relied on so much.

The Gemini protocol does not have anything like the Range request and Content-length header, and I thought this was not good enough so I made one that does have these things. (HTTP allows multiple ranges per request, but I thought that is more complicated than it needs to be, and it is simpler to only allow one range per request.)
by el_memorioso | 2025-06-17 22:35:19+00:00
I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.
by anonnon | 2025-06-17 22:35:25+00:00
> No wonder they got into Natanz with stuxnet.

While the PCs used to program the PLCs were running XP, the 0-day that Stuxnet exploited affected all versions of Windows, at least from 2000 onwards, including 2008 and Vista.

EDIT: to clarify, the PCs "programmed" the PLCs indirectly, in that while they ran the Siemans STEP 7 IDE to design the centrifuges' control process, the resulting PLC programs were manually transported to the PLCs via USB devices, so there were two airgaps: the XP-running PCs airgapped from the outside world, and then another airgap between the PCs and the PLCs they programmed.
by roskelld | 2025-06-17 22:35:41+00:00
My PC doesn't have TPM. It's old, but still perfectly fine to run for my needs. I use Unreal 5, play games, watch videos. Could run quicker but it's no landfill device. I don't think it'll suddenly fall to pieces come October so I wasn't looking to scrap it by then.

Looks like the IoT LTSC version will work. I'm still hoping that Microsoft relent on this move. Last I checked Windows 10 is still a very popular OS and I find it unlikely that people are going to update if they haven't already. If some kind of WannaCry attack happens due to a security hole it's going to look bad on them.

Also, as a kinda dark humor moment. October 14th is the retirement day of Windows 10, which is also international e-waste day. Unless I missed the memo, I thought it was an effort to prevent creating e-waste not one of planned obsolescence to try and make more.
by vizzah | 2025-06-17 22:35:48+00:00
Damn.. even though we were both on the same reverse-engineering/cracking scene back in the '90s, but I can't immediately recall his scene nickname -- his full name has immediately slammed me back. Were we all the same gang - whether from .ua or from .ru, hanging on IRCs, chatting in English and Russian (almost nobody spoke Ukrainian online back then), although Dennis was from a Russian-speaking part of UA.. I see his blog is still predominantly in Russian (with ENG translation), it is so damn pathetic that Ukrainians are being suppressed into ukrainization and fighting for a cause many do not side with - four oblasts which Russia demands should be given to them to stop the war. It's unpopular opinion, but people in Ukraine do not want to die and fight for being "pro-Europe". It is simply not worth it. As a Ukrainian who emigrated decades ago, I am asking everyone to push Zelenskiy towards being more accommodating to Russian demands, give them their f*cking four oblasts and the Crimea, but stop the war! It can't be won. I'd like to hope that Dennis could get away from serving or use his tech skills in drone teams or whatever.. but how many other talented people are being taken to the front lines against their own will and against their cause?! :(
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-06-17 22:36:10+00:00
The entire discussion around agent orchestration, whether centralized or multi-agent, seems to miss the long-term economic reality. We're debating architectural patterns, but the real question is who pays for the agent's continuous existence.

Today, it's about API calls and compute. Tomorrow, for any truly autonomous, long-lived agent, it will be about a continuous "existence tax" levied by the platform owner. The orchestrator isn't just a technical component; it's a landlord.

The alternative isn't a more complex framework. It's a permissionless execution layer—a digital wilderness where an agent's survival depends on its own resources, not a platform's benevolence. The debate isn't about efficiency; it's about sovereignty.
by GRiMe2D | 2025-06-17 22:36:19+00:00
MacBook Pro can “display” HDR content on SDR displays.

macOS puts a slightly higher brightness than it required and artificially (in software) changes absolute white (0xFFFFFF) to greyish color (0xEEEEEE). So when a HDR content is required it will remove mask around that content. Safari ideally, probably that’s on Firefox why tone mapping doesn’t work well
by jedberg | 2025-06-17 22:36:23+00:00
“ APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.”

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
by const_cast | 2025-06-17 22:36:57+00:00
I know this conversation keeps coming up again and again, but this is firmly nvidia's issue. Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever.

Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent.

And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows.

Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
by badc0ffee | 2025-06-17 22:36:59+00:00
The Wii U had terrible wifi, but I can't really say I hated it. There were some real classics on that console - Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World (although those were both eventually ported to the Switch). It played Wii games and supported all the original controllers, but output HDMI and had real power management. I still use mine to play Wii games.
by dgb23 | 2025-06-17 22:37:20+00:00
Thank you for those links. The first one is especially clear.

However, this is just not something that I typically perceive as a problem. For example in the book that I mentioned above, I didn't feel the need to use it at all. I just added the fields or the functions that were required.

In the first link you provided, the OCaml code seems to use unions as well (I don't know the language). I assume OCaml checks for exhaustive matching, so it seems extremely straight forward to extend this code.

On the other hand I have absolutely no issues with a big switch case in a more simple language. I just had a look at the code I wrote quite a while ago and it looks fine.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-06-17 22:37:50+00:00
I'm not assuming they capitulate under just pressure. Rather I'm assuming they'll capitulate if a majority of or even all of the big third party chromium browsers push for adding it to mainline chromium.

This is less just blind pressure but rather the risk that google becomes seen as an untrustworthy custodian of chromium and that downstreams start supporting an alternate upstream outside of google's control.

Jxl is certainly a hill that google seems intent to stand on but I doubt it's one they'd choose to die on. Doubly so given the ammo it'd give in the ongoing chrome anti-trust lawsuits.
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-17 22:38:34+00:00
> They might launch it with, like, 5 cars total, or have it be 100% teleoperated, or limit it to side roads.

All of these things. On a previous investor call, he said "10-20 Model Ys" would be deployed in Austin.

And that they'd all have remote operators.

And that fully autonomous would be geofenced (or in his words, "with some limitations", because he's allergic to that word).

It's "fully autonomous, driverless self-driving" that's actually heavily Mechanical Turk-ed.