MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antisol | 2025-06-07 08:49:04+00:00
> The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad

Yeah, sure, most bad software "just works", and there's nothing contradictory about this statement at all.

> High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL

Of these 4 examples, I have literally never had any problems with 75% of them since at least 2008 - maybe 1999 - they all "just work". And I've never tried to do the other one, it may or may not.

You can argue about how old == bad as much as you like. Meanwhile I'll be getting work done using the bad old tech, rather than trying to debug the new broken thing.

> So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor?

Well if you needed to reboot, i.e restarting X didn't solve it, then that sounds like it's not an X problem at all. Maybe something in the USB stack.

> So what... So what... So what...

So what if the new thing people are trying to force on us doesn't support features we've enjoyed using for decades and use every day to get work done? So what if I've been using network transparency just fine for over a quarter century? So what if the new protocol doesn't support really basic things like screen savers properly? So what if it's suddenly a problem if an application has multiple windows, or wants to record the screen, or automate desktop usage, or reparent some other program, or have a not-rectangular window?
by zemil | 2025-06-07 08:49:28+00:00
Problem:

Tech founders obsess over optimizing code, startups, and KPIs but rarely their own finite time. Humans default to wasting weeks because we’re bad at intuiting 4,000 weeks (avg. lifespan).

Solution:

Life Calendar turns your lifespan into a 52x90 grid (1 square = 1 week). It’s a Trello/Spreadsheet for mortality - a visual, data-driven tool to:

- Prioritize ruthlessly (e.g., "Only 100 squares left with my parents")

- Eliminate procrastination loops (see "spent 12 squares scrolling TikTok")

- Align daily actions with long-term goals (engineers love systems; this is a system for time).

Why Now?

With rising burnout and FOMO, tech workers crave tools to quantify time not just track tasks. (See success of "Your Life in Weeks" WaitButWhy, viewed 10M+ times.)
by Jensson | 2025-06-07 08:50:22+00:00
They naysayers just says that even when people are motivated to solve a problem the problem might still not get solved. And there are unsolved problems still with LLM, the AI hypemen say AGI is all but a given in a few years time, but if that relies on some undiscovered breakthrough that is very unlikely since such breakthroughs are very rare.
by alkonaut | 2025-06-07 08:50:23+00:00
I think this is really simple: telemetry should be opt in, anonymous, and _in_ the interest of the user in the long term by the improvement of the software. Because it’s _not_ possible to get this information any other way through user studies etc.

If it’s hard to disable, contains any PII or sensitive info (urls, file names) then it’s not OK.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-06-07 08:50:28+00:00
NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission.

China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.
by Retro_Dev | 2025-06-07 08:50:31+00:00
Ahh perhaps I need to clarify:

I don't love the noise of Zig, but I love the ability to clearly express my intent and the detail of my code in Zig. As for arithmetic, I agree that it is a bit too verbose at the moment. Hopefully some variant of https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3806 will fix this.

I fully agree with your TL;DR there, but would emphasize that gaining the same optimizations is easier in Zig due to how builtins and unreachable are built into the language, rather than needing gcc and llvm intrinsics like __builtin_unreachable() - https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.5.0/gcc/Other-Builtins....

It's my dream that LLVM will improve to the point that we don't need further annotation to enable positive optimization transformations. At that point though, is there really a purpose to using a low level language?
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 08:51:16+00:00
> If the LLM hallucinates, then the code it produces is wrong. That wrong code isn't obviously or programmatically determinable as wrong, the agent has no way to figure out that it's wrong, it's not as if the LLM produces at the same time tests that identify that hallucinated code as being wrong. The only way that this wrong code can be identified as wrong is by the human user "looking closely" and figuring out that it is wrong

The LLM can easily hallucinate code that will satisfy the agent and the compiler but will still fail the actual intent of the user.

> I review LLM code line-by-line. Lots of code that compiles clean is nonetheless horrible.

Indeed most code that LLMs generate compiles clean and is nevertheless horrible! I'm happy that you recognize this truth, but the fact that you review that LLM-generated code line-by-line makes you an extraordinary exception vs. the normal user, who generates LLM code and absolutely does not review it line-by-line.

> But none of [the LLM generated code] includes hallucinated API calls.

Hallucinated API calls are just one of many many possible kinds of hallucinated code that an LLM can generate, by no means does "hallucinated code" describe only "hallucinated API calls" -- !
by diggan | 2025-06-07 08:51:21+00:00
If you can 100% reproduce the same generated code from the same prompts, even 5 years later, given the same versions and everything then I'd say "Sure, go ahead and don't saved the generated code, we can always regenerate it". As someone who spent some time in frontend development, we've been doing it like that for a long time with (MB+) generated code, keeping it in scm just isn't feasible long-term.

But given this is about LLMs, which people tend to run with temperature>0, this is unlikely to be true, so then I'd really urge anyone to actually store the results (somewhere, maybe not in scm specifically) as otherwise you won't have any idea about what the code was in the future.
by keybored | 2025-06-07 08:51:40+00:00
> I don’t like to accuse, and the article is fine overall, but this stinks:

Now consider your reasonable instinct to not accuse other people coupled with the possibility setting AI lose with “write a positive article about AI where you have some paragraphs about the current limitations based on this link. write like you are just following the evidence.” Meanwhile we are supposed to sit here and weigh every word.

This reminds to write a prompt for a blogpost. How AI could be used for making personal-looking tech-guy who meditates and runs websites. (Do we have the technology? Yes we do)
by Defletter | 2025-06-07 08:52:44+00:00
This kind of purist ideology is fine in a perfect world, but the reality is that peaceful co-existence requires intolerance of intolerance. And let's be honest here, you do agree with limiting speech: you just mentioned speech being used as "harassment" and "assault". Would you mind explaining how speech could be harassment and assault and who would decide that? And I'm presuming that you're okay with libel and slander being decided in a Court of Law and enforceable through other institutions of State?

We're not really discussing here whether limiting speech is okay, we're both already doing it. No, it's about where we draw the line. It's just where I put the line also protects vulnerable people from extremely dangerous rhetoric that kills people.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-07 08:54:34+00:00
> Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.

Of course, reality is that whether justice is forthcoming is dictated by economic interests, not law, and certainly not your idea of law. In other words, whether you criticize China's treatment of Uighur, or point out how gigantic the scale of pollution the CCP is responsible for, or which economic disaster they caused this week, will get you in hot water more than committing a (scammer) crime will. Whether you criticize India's rich, Thailand's or Saudi Arabia's royalty and actually get some attention (which, as has been demonstrated, will make them get diplomatically immune embassy staff kill you. Perhaps that's not legal, but they cannot legally be punished for that, not even financially). And if you either insult or otherwise pose a problem to western copyright interests (e.g. make a tutorial about LibreELEC) you'll get the hammer put down on you:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/libreelec

Of course, it will remain trivial to sabotage judicial proceedings if you're outside of the jurisdiction of that court (and because second/third world courts simply side with scammers against victims), the stated reason of the argument is NOT something you can do in practice, and whether the law is on your side? It is already on your side if you go after scammers! It is impossible to use local laws to go after scammers. What protects scammers, as everybody knows, is less anonymity than it is third world states and attitudes, especially their total lack of respect for international treaties they signed, combined with the reach FANGs, incumbent Telco's and Banks give to scammers. Given that one of FANGs, TikTok (in practice even if not in theory) runs from within the third world even that option is fast disappearing. This law does nothing about that.

Even within the west, there's an expression from the legal profession: "you cannot get blood from a stone". It is meant to illustrate the problem that scams and most fraud are committed by people who are "on the margin" and have no money or options (almost all fraud is committed by tenants). On the margin means that while they aren't poor, even a 1000 euro judgement would make them destitute for 6 months or more. You will not get a judge to convict these people. It doesn't matter how much you legally are in the right, the justice system will refuse to destroy their lives, make them homeless, instead they will correctly point out that will achieve nothing, and leave you hanging. This is another thing you can't change. (yes, with the current attitudes if the criminal is an immigrant you may get them removed. But you still won't get your money back)

And to follow your accusatory style: is this what you want to achieve? Support scammers to advance the interests of extreme rich third-world autocrats? Because that's what you're doing.
by messe | 2025-06-07 08:54:56+00:00
With regard to the casting example, you could always wrap the cast in a function:

fn signExtendCast(comptime T: type, x: anytype) T { const ST = std.meta.Int(.signed, @bitSizeOf(T)); const SX = std.meta.Int(.signed, @bitSizeOf(@TypeOf(x))); return @bitCast(@as(ST, @as(SX, @bitCast(x)))); } export fn addi8(addr: u16, offset: u8) u16 { return addr +% signExtendCast(u16, offset); }

This compiles to the same assembly, is reusable, and makes the intent clear.
by Jensson | 2025-06-07 08:55:26+00:00
But if you need a submarine that can swim as agiley as a fish then we still aren't there yet, fish are far superior to submarines in many ways. So submarines might be faster than fish, but there are so many maneuvers that fish can do that the submarine can't. Its the same with here with thinking.

So just like computers are better at humans at multiplying numbers, there are still many things we need human intelligence for even in todays era of LLM.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-07 08:55:38+00:00
Yeah indeed. Having access to all those 'low-level tweaks' without having to deal with non-standard language extensions which are different in each C compiler (if supported at all) is definitely a good reason to use Zig.

One thing I was wondering, since most of Zig's builtins seem to map directly to LLVM features, if and how this will affect the future 'LLVM divorce'.
by database64128 | 2025-06-07 08:55:50+00:00
Raising the soft limit to the hard limit is also recommended by the author of systemd: https://0pointer.net/blog/file-descriptor-limits.html

I doubt the kernel would actually allocate the resource space upfront. Like SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF, it's probably only allocated when it's actually needed.
by crote | 2025-06-07 08:56:53+00:00
That only matters when the constants are nontrivial and N has a potential to get big.

Not every app is a B2C product intending to grow to billions of users. If the costs start out as near-zero and are going to grow to still be negligible at 100% market share, who cares that it's _technically_ suboptimal? Sure, you could spend expensive developer-hours trying to find a better way of doing it, but YAGNI.
by pyman | 2025-06-07 08:57:13+00:00
The founder was named UK Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024 by Ernst & Young, a company that also has a strong focus on AI research (some of my students work there). They do proper research before giving out an award.

Going back to your question:

You're quoting articles from 2019. Do you realise how quickly technology and startups evolve in a single year, let alone 6?

We can't assume nothing has changed since then, especially when there's plenty of evidence that the company grew 10x after the 2019 article was published.

Check on LinkedIn (if you have premium), the company went from 200 employees to 1000, and brought in directors from Microsoft and Amazon, people who are well known in the AI/ML space for their contributions to AI and virtual assistant development.

The biggest mistake the company made, without question, was the lack of transparency around sales figures. That's on the CEO and CFO, who committed fraud.

But now it feels like we're shifting the blame toward the AI engineers, the people who worked hard to build the internal tools the company was promoting. From what I've seen, those engineers built some great apps. If the CFO and the accountants were cooking the books, that's not their fault.

We should support the engineers and hold the founders and accountants responsible, instead of letting a blogger spread misinformation and claim that former directors from Amazon and Microsoft knew nothing about AI and faked the tech, which is clearly fake news.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-06-07 08:57:29+00:00
Having had this conversation with Linux users 100x, I've come to the conclusion that some people are just cursed. Me, I use Windows and have never run into the kind of boondoggles that they swear were common occurrences for them: Drivers breaking on update, BSODs, two-hour-long-forced-updates, etc. etc. It just... never happens. Maybe I'm the one that's blessed.
by Flimm | 2025-06-07 08:58:06+00:00
This is the official website for FAIR: http://fair.pm/ . It currently redirects to https://github.com/fairpm . Here's a description:

> The FAIR Package Manager is a decentralized alternative to the central WordPress.org plugin and theme ecosystem, designed to return control to WordPress hosts and developers. It operates as a drop-in WordPress plugin, seamlessly replacing existing centralized services with a federated, open-source infrastructure.

> There are two core pillars of the FAIR system:

> - API Replacement: It replaces communication with WordPress.org APIs (such as update checks and event feeds) using local or FAIR-governed alternatives. Some features—like browser version checks—are handled entirely within the plugin using embedded logic (e.g., browserslist).

> - Decentralized Package Management: FAIR introduces a new package distribution model for themes and plugins. It supports opt-in packages that use the FAIR protocol and enables hosts to configure their own mirrors for plugin/theme data using AspirePress or their own domains. While stable plugins currently use mirrors of WordPress.org, future versions will fully support FAIR-native packages.

You can try the FAIR plugin at this link: https://github.com/fairpm/fair-plugin/releases
by Scarblac | 2025-06-07 08:58:13+00:00
But it doesn't help much, as the surrogate only lives in your system.

So now some information comes in from outside the system that something happened with a plane, and you still have to find which surrogate id that plane has in your system.

You may decide two things happened to two different planes whereas another system consider it the same plane both times, and vice versa.
by lloeki | 2025-06-07 08:58:25+00:00
That's basically what I remember: the leading reason is that a steel furnace needs a lot of heat to build up a lot of pressure and push carbon in, and higher chimneys help provide that.

Others like Japan found another way to achieve the necessary temp/pressure, but it hardly scaled as it needed to during the industrial revolution.

TBH the "let's avoid smoke" aspect sounds like a retcon, the mythical London smog is a testament of that.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-07 08:58:57+00:00
Yes, that's a good solution for this 'extreme' example. But in other cases I think the compiler should make better use of the available information to reduce 'redundant casting' when narrowing (like the fact that the result of `a & 15` is guaranteed to fit into an u4 etc...). But I know that the Zig team is aware of those issues, so I'm hopeful that this stuff will improve :)
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 08:58:59+00:00
> `return fmt.Errorf("annotation: %w", err)` is just a log-friendlier version of `return err`

This claim isn't true. The annotation-wrapping isn't just about making the returned error 'log-friendlier', it's annotating the error with context-specific information that's useful beyond "log" contexts. More concretely, that kind of annotation is critical if you expect to be able to introspect runtime errors in any way at all -- it's not a "log-friendlier" version of `return err`, it's an important and necessary change vs. `return err` which is in no way perfunctory or whatever.
by mrob | 2025-06-07 09:00:15+00:00
I can think of one example of true pixel art that intentionally deviates from a strict pixel grid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(1991_video...

Look at the vegetation in the background. However, this is also a good example of the difference between real art and AI slop. There's human intention here, and I can guess a plausible scenario of how it happened.

I suspect the checkerboard pattern in the foreground came first. It has the practical utility of showing off the game's primary selling point, which is Sonic's high speed. You need a high-contrast pattern that's not too distracting and doesn't use too much memory. A checkerboard is an obvious choice. And once you've made that decision, it influences the aesthetics of everything else.

Checkerboards were a very popular texture in early 3D rendering. Any computer artist working in 1990 would be familiar with this, and would at least subconsciously think of 3D graphics. This is likely the reason for the stylized leaves on the trees, which look like low-polygon 3D models. In 1991 it felt futuristic. I believe the blocky look of the background vegetation is intended to convey this same "computer graphics" feeling. Drawing polygons is impossible, but drawing attention to the pixels gives the same impression of something futuristic.

This is the kind of non-obvious artistic decision that I don't believe current AI is capable of. A human intentionally reduced the graphics quality, and that actually made it look more futuristic. It's the kind of thing you see all the time in good art. Close examination reveals detail that deepens your appreciation for it. AI slop only imitates the surface polish of good art without including this deeper meaning. The closer you examine it the worse it looks.
by lostlogin | 2025-06-07 09:00:32+00:00
I think that 3T scanners are effectively transmitting on one of their frequencies in my region.

We image hydrogen which has a precessional frequency of 42*3MHz at 3T (though most ‘3T’ MR scanners seem to be more like 2.8-2.9T).

So they must use something at around that frequency. All I know for sure is that we got asked to stop blasting that RF out. Sometimes it is convenient to open the scan door while imaging.
by Retro_Dev | 2025-06-07 09:00:37+00:00
Good question! The TL;DR as I understand it is that it won't matter too much. For example, the self-hosted x86_64 backend (which is coincidentally becoming default for debugging on linux right now - https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24072) has full support for most (all?) builtins. I don't think that we need to worry about that.

It's an interesting question about how Zig will handle additional builtins and data representations. The current way I understand it is that there's an additional opt-in translation layer that converts unsupported/complicated IR to IR which the backend can handle. This is referred to as the compiler's "Legalize" stage. It should help to reduce this issue, and perhaps even make backends like https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator possible :)
by KronisLV | 2025-06-07 09:01:05+00:00
Migrating to SSG is definitely one of the options!

I do wonder what other CMSes people do enjoy, though. My blog runs on Grav, a flat file CMS that still allows me to easily keep the content in Git, while also having some dynamic content and search (and optionally an admin UI): https://getgrav.org/
by masklinn | 2025-06-07 09:05:55+00:00
> If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.

- any sort of housing window and display protection, I have at least half a dozen within easy reach not including actual computer displays

- transparent food packaging is important to both identify the product and ascertain its state (especially at the store e.g. berries)

- viewing liquid levels at a glance is extremely useful
by SebastianKra | 2025-06-07 09:06:12+00:00
Keyboard-accessibility isn't the only advantage of formatting characters. The most frustrating, throw-my-device-at-the-wall issue with 90% of WYSIWYG text editors, is the insane handling of invisible input states.

- If you begin writing a bold word, but want to delete the first character, the style is reset.

- If you’re writing a list and you want to exit out of it, every editor has a different weird convention of doing that.

- I can’t even begin to describe the amount of broken behavior that is entering code in MS Teams (does Microsoft use Slack internally?)

There are some innovative ideas to solve this, like Bike [^1], but nobody goes to the effort of implementing them. So the easiest, most compatible and most intuitive solution are formatting characters like in Markdown.

[^1]: https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/bike-rich-text/
by dist-epoch | 2025-06-07 09:06:49+00:00
When people say LLMs can't do X, I like to try it.

Q: Complete 3 by generating new knowledge: 1. today is warm 2. cats likes warm temperatures 3.

A: Therefore, a cat is likely to be enjoying the weather today.

Q: does the operation to create new knowledge you did have a specific name?

A: ... Deductive Reasoning

Q: does the operation also have a Latin name?

A: ... So, to be precise, you used a syllogismus (syllogism) that takes the form of Modus Ponens to make a deductio (deduction).

https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts/1LbEGRnzTyk-2IDdn53t...

People then say "of course it could do that, it just pattern matched a Logic text book. I meant in a real example, not an artificially constructed one like this one. In a complex scenario LLMs obviously can't do Modus Ponens.