MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acedTrex | 2025-06-26 13:02:05+00:00
> So if I need a certain level of quality, I have to verify the process of producing it

Precisely this, and this is hardly a unique to software requirement. Process audits are everywhere in engineering. Previously you could infer the process of producing some code by simply reading the patch and that generally would tell you quite a bit about the author itself. Using advanced and niche concepts with imply a solid process with experience backing it. Which would then imply that certain contextual bugs are unlikely so you skip looking for them.

My premise in the blog is basically that "Well now I have go do a full review no matter what the code itself tells me about the author."
by thrance | 2025-06-26 13:02:34+00:00
Yes, 100%. That's the blind spot to all these sci-fi speculations. Hauling cities between stars along with the environment needed to sustain them might very well be impossible. But who needs that when you can send a tiny chip with simulated human (or post-human) personalities on it?

Mandatory advertising for Greg Egan: read his novel, Diaspora. Truly mind-expanding on the subject.
by MillironX | 2025-06-26 13:02:36+00:00
Server - but this is kind of a wrong question. Apptainer is for running cli applications in immutable, rootless containers. The closest tool I can think of is Fedora Toolbx [1]. Apptainer is primarily used to distributing and reusing scientific computing tools b/c it doesn't allow root, doesn't allow for changes to the rootfs in each container, automatically mounts the working directory and works well with GPUs (that last point I can't personally attest to).

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...
by mandmandam | 2025-06-26 13:02:37+00:00
A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.

And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.

I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
by chubot | 2025-06-26 13:05:25+00:00
I'm saying the behavior of bash is largely based on ksh. See

https://pages.oils.pub/spec-compat/2025-06-19/renamed-tmp/sp...

(which I created)

Even the upcoming bash 5.4 implement ksh command sub ${ echo hi; }, which is more evidence that bash is based on ksh.

They're still implementing ksh 35 years later ...
by kllrnohj | 2025-06-26 13:05:42+00:00
Access pattern is mitigated by texture swizzling which will happen regardless of how it's ultimately rendered. So even if drawn with an identity matrix you're still "paying" for it regardless just due to the underlying texture layout. GPUs can sample from linear textures, but often it comes with a significant performance penalty unless you stay on a specific, and undefined, path.
by mandmandam | 2025-06-26 13:05:52+00:00
Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?

Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?
by originalvichy | 2025-06-26 13:06:07+00:00
Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article? The reason the attack on airfields worked is precisely because they operate inland and not on the frontline. Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target. That’s why Starlink is/was so crucial. Even GPS is jammed so independent flight can be impossible with cheap components.

The thermite drones do attack forested areas on the farmlands, but the forests I talk about are tens or hundreds of kilometers wide. You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
by Balgair | 2025-06-26 13:06:07+00:00
It's always a bit revealing, with these kids of interstellar missions, how people reveal their own unseen biases.

Clearly such a mission is beyond the capabilities of our world currently. Like, obviously such a mission is something that capitalism cannot accomplish. That communism or anarchism or any -ism just cannot do. And I think that when people look at jaunts out to Alpha Centauri and think in terms of cost, they whole thing is hopeless from the get-go.

To make something like a trip out to Vega, even with just a probe one way at .1c, that's 500 years (right?). We can't fathom doing that right now as staying around to check out any answer. The ultimate 'plant trees in whose shade you'll never sit.'

Generation ships out there, even with magic hibernation tech, I just don't think we have the mental capabilities as great apes to think about this properly. The time scales, the advances in tech, the costs, just even thinking about things in this way shows to me that we're not at all ready to be serious about this.

You don't build a ship by teaching people how to hew oaks or caulk bulkheads. You build a ship by teaching people to yearn for the sea.

Space is still 'not worth it'. Until just being there in the void elicits the same feelings you get when reading about the bowsprits, white with sea-foam, before a quick and fast wind, look, we're not going to do this.

We have to love the trip itself first. The first stars until morning. The good ship to guide by them.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-06-26 13:06:31+00:00
Having come to have known the Japan of the 90s, I was disenchanted enough by my last trip in late 2019 that I haven't made plans to return.

The traveler zones full of English and kitsch had swollen to encompass everywhere within walking distance of the first 6-10 stops out from any major station. The apartment prices out there also remained high, despite how poor and relatively unpopulated the areas were.

And, nostalgically, it was filled with Chinese families that reminded me of the tired, loud, inadvertently rude Americans that stood out 30 years ago. I was surprised to see the formerly silent annoyance of the locals towards them and every other dayhike backpack-wearing, heavily scented foreigner simmer over into someone saying something as they exited the trains more than once. When people couldn't give them their own cars, they turned their backs and give them an obvious wide berth.

Even Kyoto was like this, and I had to travel far enough off the beaten path to find somewhere that didn't feel like either a Japanese theme park or any other international city in the world that I just ended up staying in my family's home village, where only the parents and grandparents hadn't left.
by reaperducer | 2025-06-26 13:06:34+00:00
Little help - how can I find ROM-s? I tried to download some using sites found in Google, but the emulator always says "Unknown or unsupported ROM file". How can I find usable roms?

These seem to work:

https://archive.org/details/mac_rom_archive_-_as_of_8-19-201...
by tenthirtyam | 2025-06-26 13:07:05+00:00
Indeed. It's a certainty that Mars is far far less hospitable than Earth even in the worst of the climate change outcomes. I suppose the most useful thing about colonizing Mars would be for species survival - e.g. the Giant-Asteroid-Strikes-the-Earth-but-luckily-not-Mars scenario.

In any case, a nearby planet or its orbit would seem to be the most logical place to start for any supervillain species seeking to colonize its galaxy. :-)
by phoronixrly | 2025-06-26 13:07:29+00:00
No, made this account to specifically link source articles each time a phoronix link gets posted, so that people don't have to be exposed to the low effort and thus low quality benchmarks, general blogspam, clickbait, and toxic comments that phoronix generates. Turns out people appreciate it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353663
by closewith | 2025-06-26 13:07:47+00:00
> Also, the rules the UK has for limiting paracetamol purchases to small amount per day are so fantastically stupid.

Yes, but:

> Responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits and 2600 hospitalizations, acetaminophen poisoning causes 500 deaths annually in the United States. Notably, around 50% of these poisonings are unintentional, often resulting from patients misinterpreting dosing instructions or unknowingly consuming multiple acetaminophen-containing products.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/#:~:text=Acetam...
by ColinWright | 2025-06-26 13:08:06+00:00
The original submission was to a post that explains why this is news, and not just a random project:

A brand new 68k Mac emulator quietly dropped last night!!

“Snow” can emulate the Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. It supports reading disks from bitstream and flux-floppy images, and offers full execution control and debugging features for the emulated CPU. Written using Rust, it doesn't do any ROM patching or system call interception, instead aiming for accurate hardware-level emulation.

* Download link (Mac, Windows, Linux): https://snowemu.com

* Documentation link: https://docs.snowemu.com

* Source link: https://github.com/twvd/snow

* Release announcement: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509

-- https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530

I understand why links get re-written, but I think the context is relevant and can help the random reader who is unfamiliar with the project.
by joacon | 2025-06-26 13:08:13+00:00
I have created one, called Connective:

PlayStore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.connectify... AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/connectiveapp/id6624294792

Maybe is not the best, and I'm still working to improve it and add new functionalities. The major problem now is we don't have much users, so there is few content.

Feel free to use it and if you have any questions, please let me know
by the_real_cher | 2025-06-26 13:08:15+00:00
I disagree with this defeatist view because it underestimates the power of individual and collective action in shaping online communities. While it's true that large companies and AI proponents have influence, platforms ultimately depend on active, engaged users to thrive. Individuals who speak out, organize, and demand transparency and policy enforcement can create meaningful pressure — we've seen this happen across many platforms in the past. Dismissing user input as futile not only discourages healthy dissent, it also hands control entirely to those with the most capital, which is exactly what fosters stagnation and groupthink. Change may be slow, but resignation guarantees nothing ever improves.
by alganet | 2025-06-26 13:08:50+00:00
You need to put your money where your mouth is.

If you comment about AI generated code in a thread about qemu (mission-critical project that many industries rely upon), a pomodoro app is not going to do the trick.

And no, it doesn't "show that is possible". qemu is not only more complex, it's a whole different problem space.
by dinfinity | 2025-06-26 13:08:58+00:00
> Don't forget that drones have been used in this war for years

3 years of usage is brand new. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have been designing and producing purpose-built FPV drones since the beginning (I assume things are well underway now). It's a bunch of consumer shit thrown together, which makes it kind of incredible that they work as well as they do.

An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that. And then you saying that "maybe the technology will not improve".
by joacon | 2025-06-26 13:09:11+00:00
I have created one app called Connective, kind of the same. People can create and join events near

PlayStore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.connectify... AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/connectiveapp/id6624294792

Maybe is not the best, and I'm still working to improve it and add new functionalities. The major problem now is we don't have much users, so there is few content.

Feel free to use it and if you have any questions, please let me know
by akrauss | 2025-06-26 13:10:04+00:00
One thing I'd really like to see in coding agents is this: As an architect, I want to formally define module boundaries in my software, in order to have AI agents adhere to and profit from my modular architecture.

Even with 1M context, for large projects, it makes sense to define boundaries These will typically be present in some form, but they are not available precisely to the coding agent. Imagine there was a simple YAML format where I could specify modules and where they can be found in the source tree, and the APIs of other modules it interacts with. Then it would be trivial to turn this into a context that would very often fit into 1M tokens. When an agent decides something needs to be done in the context of a specific module, it could then create a new context window containing exactly that module, effetively turning a large codebase into a small codebase, for which Gemini is extraordinarily effective.
by worldsayshi | 2025-06-26 13:10:20+00:00
This echoes my feelings as well. One idea that I feel has helped is: You don't need to take an impulse seriously if it's not helpful.

Often we amplify a thought by thinking that it is important to us. Fair enough. But is thinking that thought helpful to our behaviour or happiness?

It's hard to directly control our emotional impulses but we can tweak their impact ever so slightly by, as you said, observing them.
by bookofjoe | 2025-06-26 13:10:25+00:00
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6uDBPacS6zDipqbZ9

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/As7bjEAbNpidKx6LR/valence-se...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/73xBjgoHuiKvJ5WRk/intuitive-...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JLZnSnJptzmPtSRTc/intuitive-...

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/73xBjgoHuiKvJ5WRk/intuiti...

Full disclosure: the links above were provided by Perplexity Pro.

Caveat lector
by floatrock | 2025-06-26 13:10:28+00:00
What's the alternative? Equity is important, sure, but to swing all the way towards "only a centralized grid should be allowed in order to make sure all have the same level access" is a head-in-the-sands approach that ignores realities such as how the centralized grid out there has metastasized into a non-functional bureaucratic blame-shifting machine (at least measured by the increasing frequency of outages). A centralized grid also never actually delivers true equitable access.

One alternative is decentralization, and the article talks about that:

> The town’s local environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo teamed up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop a way to connect multiple microgrids to exchange power with one another, all without having to be hooked up to Puerto Rico’s grid. The strategy, called grid orchestration, ensures that if power is knocked out on one of the installations, the others aren’t compromised.

Is it the wealthy that are doing that? Maybe? Probably? But isn't that how any R&D technology investment starts?

It's also involving a government-funded lab to re-envision how these systems could work to achieve resiliency through coordinated decentralization. And if there's any truth to trickle-down economics, it would have to be in something that allows for a decentralized approach accessible to many, not a centralized approach that only rewards r > g accumulation. Sounds like a good use of government research funding to me.
by mishoo | 2025-06-26 13:10:52+00:00
Hey, nice to see Ymacs is still used somewhere else than on my website :)

I don't know if you've been tracking it lately, but there was a big overhaul last year [1]. The version in your second link doesn't seem to work in current Firefox. If you'd like to update and need any help, please feel free to get in touch. (also, there's still some of your code in Ymacs :) although I kinda broke filename completion...)

[1] https://lisperator.net/blog/ymacs-reloaded/
by sebmellen | 2025-06-26 13:11:22+00:00
You’re being unfairly downvoted. There is a plague of well-groomed incoherency in half of the business emails I receive today. You can often tell that the author, without wrestling with the text to figure out what they want to say, is a kind of stochastic parrot.

This is okay for platitudes, but for emails that really matter, having this messy watercolor kind of writing totally destroys the clarity of the text and confuses everyone.

To your point, I’ve asked everyone on my team to refrain from writing words (not code) with ChatGPT or other tools, because the LLM invariably leads to more complicated output than the author just badly, but authentically, trying to express themselves in the text.
by gadders | 2025-06-26 13:11:41+00:00
"Unconscionability is a doctrine in contract law that describes terms that are so extremely unjust, or overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of the party who has the superior bargaining power, that they are contrary to good conscience. Typically, an unconscionable contract is held to be unenforceable because no reasonable or informed person would otherwise agree to it. The perpetrator of the conduct is not allowed to benefit, because the consideration offered is lacking, or is so obviously inadequate, that to enforce the contract would be unfair to the party seeking to escape the contract."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
by ColinWright | 2025-06-26 13:11:47+00:00
We won't agree on this.

I understand the rationale, and as someone who moderates other communities I can totally understand why this is administered as a blanket policy. Having said that, it does sometimes result in what I think of as sub-optimal situations where information is unnecessarily lost or obscured.

In particular, adding a link to the original post, as you have done here, is likely to be of minimal value. People will click on the headline link, wonder what it's about or why it's "news", and close the window. On the other hand, clicking through first to the post means people will see the context, then those who are interested will click through to the project site(s). I've done this analysis in other contexts and found that the decision tree for engagement and user-information is in favour of linking to the post, not the project.

But as I say, I understand your position, and in the end, it's not my forum, not my community, and not my choice.
by danielbarla | 2025-06-26 13:12:32+00:00
And certain types of games have a _ton_ of ancillary applications. For flight simulation, I rely on 2-3 additional contollers, some of which I am fairly certain either won't have driver support, or at the very least will have some major issues with the GUI and configuration.

Then, there are things like head tracking which are either another dedicated peripheral which may or may not get drivers, or a set of apps which feed from a webcam and output the signal to a standard driver that games know to check for.

Finally, most 3rd party add-ons have custom installers, and I'm guessing most of them won't have a working Linux version. So, while I'm sure it's possible to run, say, a vanilla X-Plane on a non-Windows installation with no peripherals/apps/add-ons, I just see a mountain of work to get a normal, heavily custom installation working.
by graynk | 2025-06-26 13:12:44+00:00
uBlock does not work. I don't know how people check that it works for them, but for me it definitely does not. Neither does e.g. https://getindie.wiki/ - redirects don't work and I can't even get to the settings page from the menu (it does open once after install, but afterwards the button that's supposed to open it does nothing)

UPD: Somehow installing indie wiki extension second time (without deleting it, just pressing "add to orion" a second time) partially fixed it. Redirects now works, banners are broken, showing "visit $destination$ instead"
by acedTrex | 2025-06-26 13:13:12+00:00
> I think what the author misses here is that imperfect, probabilistic agents can build reliable, deterministic systems. No one would trust a garbage collection tool based on how reliable the author was, but rather if it proves it can do what it intends to do after extensive testing.

> but rather if it proves it can do what it intends to do after extensive testing.

Author here: Here I was less talking about the effectiveness of the output of a given tool and more so about the tool itself.

To take your garbage collection example, sure perhaps an agentic system at some point can spin some stuff up and beat it into submission with test harnesses, bug fixes etc.

But, imagine you used the model AS the garbage collector/tool, in that say every sweep you simply dumped the memory of the program into the model and told it to release the unneeded blocks. You would NEVER be able to trust that the model itself correctly identifies the correct memory blocks and no amount of "patching" or "fine tuning" would ever get you there.

With other historical abstractions like say jvm, if the deterministic output, in this case the assembly the jit emits is incorrect that bug is patched and the abstraction will never have that same fault again. not so with LLMs.

To me that distinction is very important when trying to point out previous developer tooling that changed the entire nature of the industry. It's not to say I do not think LLMs will have a profound impact on the way things work in the future. But I do think we are in completely uncharted territory with limited historical precedence to guide us.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-26 13:14:08+00:00
I haven't done the math but I suspect if we really cared about that risk, it'd be orders of magnitude easier to build far better asteroid detection and deflection systems. The reason we haven't is because in reality we don't care much about that risk relative to the costs of addressing it (even with the cheapest possible solutions, which are not "colonize another planet").
by sarchertech | 2025-06-26 13:14:39+00:00
There used to be subject matter experts, and business analysts. Then companies combined those roles into PMs. I think the biggest problem with that is adding the name Manager to the title and allowing them to “own” the product as opposed to the way it originally worked where it was more collaborative and if anyone owned the product it was engineering.

When I took software engineering classes in school, talking to customers and subject matter experts and figuring out what they wanted was a core part of what we covered.

All these extra layers really are just an absurdity. You hit the nail on the head with your point about de-risking. It seems companies would rather hire 10x the people and spend 10x the money for a 75% chance at producing something mediocre than taking a shot at making something great.

To some extent you can go work for startups to reduce your exposure to this kind of environment, but these days any startup with more than 5 employees thinks they need a PM.

Don’t get me started on UX designers. I’ve taken rigorous HCI classes in grad school. It’s a real academic discipline with tons of theory behind it.

What most UX designers are doing now isn’t close to that. What happened is that number of print design jobs collapsed, and everyone who had a basic understanding of design principles decided to call themselves a UX/UI designer.

So now in many companies you have entire teams of PMs and designers who have next to no engineering understanding designing features and systems before anyone who actually knows how to build the thing even hears about it.

My long term plan is to find some small niche where performance, correctness, and reliability are highly valued and build something that a modern software factory or a VC backed startup with a move fast and break things attitude can’t compete with.

My suspicion is that what I’m looking for is a very small slice of the customer base of an existing very boring piece of business software.
by Neywiny | 2025-06-26 13:14:40+00:00
No LLM needed. Kernel driver code for simple things is usually copy-paste-modify. Find something that works with an HID interrupt based device, and modify that. If you want a /sys led, copy from that. It's only if you try to push to mainline you need to worry about understanding it, but they'd probably smell LLM trash from miles away.