MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by koverstreet | 2025-07-04 23:36:40+00:00
No, you have to understand that filesystems are massive (decade+) projects, and one of the key things you have to do with anything that big that has to work that perfectly is a very gradual rollout, starting with the more risk tolerant users and gradually increasing to a wider and wider set of users.

We're very far along in that process now, but it's still marked as experimental because it is not quite ready for widespread deployment by just anyone. 6.16 is getting damn close, though.

That means a lot of our users now are people getting it from distro kernels, who often have never compiled a kernel before - nevertheless, they can and do report bugs.

And no matter where you are in the rollout, when you get bug reports you have to fix them and get the fixes out to users in a timely manner so that they can keep running, keep testing and reporting bugs.

It's a big loss if a user has to wait 3 months for a bugfix - they'll get frustrated and leave, and a big part of what I do is building a community that knows how the system works, how to help debug, and how to report those bugs.

A very common refrain I get is "it's experimental <expletive deleted>, why does it matter?" - and, well, the answer is getting fixes out in a timely manner matters just as much if not more if we want to get this thing done in a timely manner.
by jdprgm | 2025-07-04 23:37:34+00:00
The 4090 was released coming up on 3 years and is currently going for about 25% over launch msrp USED. Buying gpu's is literally an appreciating asset. It is complete insanity and an infuriating situation for an average consumer.

I honestly don't know why nvidia didn't just suspend their consumer line entirely. It's clearly no longer a significant revenue source and they have thoroughly destroyed consumer goodwill over the past 5 years.
by flextheruler | 2025-07-04 23:37:55+00:00
You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion?

You don't sound like a great lead to me, but I suppose you could be working with absolutely incompetent individuals, or perhaps your soft skills need work.

My apologies but I see only two possibilities for others not to take the time to follow your example given such strong evidence. They either actively dislike you or are totally incompetent. I find the former more often true than the latter.
by muzani | 2025-07-04 23:38:44+00:00
It's the same elsewhere. Some places are actually using it as a way to get rid of people 'resistant to change'. It also remains to be seen what technical skills we need 5 years from now. I did memory management and pointers 15 years ago and I can still do them now.

What I'd suggest is adapt to it, find ways to push back. Obviously things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" is a bad idea. I've seen claude "monkey patching" a system so that it returns true to the tests.

This issue is going to pop up in the future. Experiment with it on the company's dime even if you've checked out emotionally. You are still doing your job - improving code quality and making sure things run.

The new approach seems to be doing TDD. One, as an engineer, you'll know when AI is bullshitting you with mocks. Even when mocks are BS, you can still test the thing they're meant to represent. 2) AI spits more code than anyone can review. The red, green, refactor approach is one way to keep them on the rails.
by oilkillsbirds | 2025-07-04 23:39:01+00:00
Nobody’s going to read this, but this article and sentiment is utter anti-corporate bullshit, and the vastly congruent responses show that none of you have watched the historical development of GPGPU, or do any serious work on GPUs, or keep up with the open work of nvidia researchers.

The spoiled gamer mentality is getting old for those of us that actually work daily in GPGPU across industries, develop with RTX kit, do AI research, etc.

Yes they’ve had some marketing and technical flubs as any giant publically traded company will have, but their balance of research-driven development alongside corporate profit necessities is unmatched.
by alganet | 2025-07-04 23:39:35+00:00
Yes. I think this also supports my case.

For me, it was obvious to use `parse_ini_file` because it greatly improved performance (I didn't had to parse it by hand) and familiarity (PHP users already know ini).

On the other hand, there is no reason for toml to have chosen ini. Almost no other language had efficient ini parsers at the time, or any culture related to ini files whatsoever. It sounds like a strange choice outside the PHP context.
by benreesman | 2025-07-04 23:40:01+00:00
The thing is, company culture is a real thing. And some cultures are invasive/contagious like kudzu both internally to the company and into adjacent companies that they get comped against. The people get to thinking a certain way, they move around between adjacent companies at far higher rates than to more distant parts of their field, the executives start sitting on one another's boards, before you know it a whole segment is enshittified, and customers feel like captives in an exploitation machine instead of parties to a mutually beneficial transaction in which trade increases the wealth of all.

And you can build mythologies around falsehoods to further reinforce it: "I have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value." No buddy, you have some very specific restrictions on your ability to sell the company to your cousin (ha!) for a handful of glass beads. You have a legal obligation to bin your wafers the way it says on your own box, but that doesn't seem to bother you.

These days I get a machine like the excellent ASUS Proart P16 (grab one of those before they're all gone if you can) with a little 4060 or 4070 in it that can boot up Pytorch and make sure the model will run forwards and backwards at a contrived size, and then go rent a GB200 or whatever from Latitude or someone (seriously check out Latitude, they're great), or maybe one of those wildly competitive L40 series fly machines (fly whips the llama's ass like nothing since Winamp, check them out too). The GMTek EVO-X1 is a pretty capable little ROCm inference machine for under 1000, its big brother is nipping at the heels of a DGX Spark under 2k. There is good stuff out there but its all from non-incumbent angles.

I don't game anymore but if I did I would be paying a lot of attention to ARC, I've heard great things.

Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs for more than Latitude charges for 5Ghz EPYC. Fuck NVIDIA gaming retail rat race, its an electrical as well as moral hazard in 2025.

It's a shame we all have to be tricky to get what used to be a halfway fair deal 5-10 years ago (and 20 years ago they passed a HUGE part of the scaling bonanza down to the consumer), but its possible to compute well in 2025.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-04 23:40:12+00:00
Are you the one at Ableton responsible for it ignoring the renaming of parameter names during the setState part of a Live program? Some of us are already jumping through ridiculous hoops to cover for your… mindset. There's stuff coming up that used to work and doesn't now, like in Live 12. From your response I would guess this is a trend that will hold.

We should not be having to code special 'host is Ableton Live' cases in JUCE just to get your host to work like the others.

Can you please not fire any people who are still holding your operation together?
by kgeist | 2025-07-04 23:40:13+00:00
We recently started using LLMs at our company, and the first job I had was to transcribe 20k customer calls and extract the following info:

1) what products we're usually compared to

2) what problems users have with our software

3) what use cases users mention most often

What used to take weeks of research took just a couple of hours. It helped us form a new strategy and brought real business value.

I see LLMs as just a natural language processing engine, and they're great at that. Some people overhype it, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that it's been genuinely useful for our cases. Not sure what's up with all those "LLM bad" articles. If it doesn't work for you, just move on. Why should anyone have to prove anything to anyone? It's just a tool.
by jdwithit | 2025-07-04 23:40:29+00:00
My (girlfriend at the time, later wife) gave me a "it's me or WoW" ultimatum at the peak of my raiding obsession. I picked her. We had moved across the country for grad school and had no friends and I was using the game as a crutch rather than like, actually meeting people. I joined a softball team with some people from her program and made a bunch of lifelong friends.

More power to everyone who can play MMO's in a way that doesn't resemble a crippling drug addiction. I've learned that I cannot, lol. And my point isn't to disparage gaming friendships or relationships, it just was not ultimately for me.
by delhanty | 2025-07-04 23:40:56+00:00
As someone who has been mitigating and managing chronic pain for 25 years, with respect IMO your expectation is unrealistic.

There isn't a "solution" - you're looking at a life-long mitigation and management strategy that will not be "brief".

The time commitment typically goes up as one ages. I could spend 40 hours a week on nutrition, exercise and relaxation if I was trying to optimize for chronic pain reduction.

But then nothing else would get done.
by mmajzoobi | 2025-07-04 23:40:56+00:00
I am planning to launch a product I have been working on for the past several years on Kickstarter.

The hardware and software is in a great shape and I have already manufactured a small batch.

I would like to get some community feedback before launching on Kickstarter to better understand what to improve and potentially add to the upcoming campaign.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
by matiasmolinas | 2025-07-04 23:41:01+00:00
We've been experimenting with a different approach to AI agent frameworks. Instead of SDKs and compiled code, what if everything—the agents, their tools, their memory—was just Markdown files?

LLMunix is our prototype testing this idea. It's a "Markdown OS" where an LLM acts as the kernel, interpreting markdown-defined agents and tools at runtime. The interesting part: We added virtual tool support to Gemini CLI (via GEMINI.md manifests). Tools are defined like this: #### ask_local_llm `sh` ```sh MODEL=$(echo "$GEMINI_TOOL_ARGS" | jq -r .model) PROMPT=$(echo "$GEMINI_TOOL_ARGS" | jq -r .prompt) curl -s "http://localhost:11434/api/generate" -d "{\"model\":\"$MODEL\",\"prompt\":\"$PROMPT\"}" json {"name": "ask_local_llm", "description": "Query local LLM via Ollama", "parameters": {...}} When the agent needs a capability it doesn't have, it writes a new .md file defining that tool, then immediately uses it. We've seen it create research agents, analysis tools, and data processors on demand. **Technical bits:** - Virtual tools run sandboxed shell scripts - Arguments passed via environment variables - Tools discovered at runtime by parsing Markdown - No compilation, no deployment - just save the file **What we learned:** 1. Agents are surprisingly good at writing their own tools when they understand the format 2. Multi-LLM workflows become trivial (delegate to local llama3.2 for code review, gpt-4 for strategy) 3. Non-programmers can understand and modify agent behavior 4. Version control for AI behavior is just git The code is at: https://github.com/EvolvingAgentsLabs/llmunix Our Gemini CLI fork with virtual tools: https://github.com/EvolvingAgentsLabs/gemini-cli Curious what HN thinks about Markdown as a "programming language" for AI agents. Is making agent development accessible to non-developers worth the tradeoffs? What domains beyond coding could benefit from this approach?
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-07-04 23:41:15+00:00
> Because I kept the “metadata” away from the chunks themselves, and because I used a binary “buddy” layout for sub-page-sized allocations, I could detect some of the most common mistakes.

> First I thought “We’re not having any of that” and made phkmalloc abort(2) on any wrong usage. Next time I rebooted my laptop fsck(8) aborted, and left me in single user mode until I could fix things with a floppy disk.

I love everything about this anecdote.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-07-04 23:42:23+00:00
It's been a long time since then, but IIRC it was like... there's a compiler for every conceivable CPU ever made, and then there's a layer on top of that for... groupings? and then there's the compiler that bundles all that crap together into something that can run across all the CPUs of the same architecture. And then another layer for something that I can just go "make this for all computers".

Bear in mind I was adamant about not using some fancy I-dont-know-whats-happening IDE with their fancy "projects" and "run buttons". Those are just more confusing. I wanted to WRITE CODE, and then COMPILE THAT CODE, and then RUN THE RESULTING EXECUTABLE. With commands.

I found a Reddit post I made [1] when I was trying to learn C++. Maybe it sheds more light on what I was confused about?

- [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskProgramming/comments/uc2p5q/i_kn...

edit: I'm famously (among friends) bad at the beginner stage. I get angry at things that are obviously more confusing than they need to be. Current thing is CloudFlare tunnels. Just like why does it need to be this hard? I have server. I have domain. Just dammit let me slap a pipe between them.
by Obscurity4340 | 2025-07-04 23:42:29+00:00
What tradition is that though, like when you omit the fish content?

Ive had good salad dressings like this where they actually list worschestchire sauce and then in the parenthetical ingredients to that it doesnt have any anchovy or fish given and also not in the usualy summation of various allergenic food categories. I just worry its hidden in the Natural Flavor bullcrap
by Ancapistani | 2025-07-04 23:43:02+00:00
I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I see it as you having two primary options.

You should stay there, learn the new tech, and see what happens.

If it works better than you expected, then your mind will be changed and you’ll be well positioned for the new economy.

If it turns out how you expect, now you have experience working with this tooling to inform your positions at your next company.

Either way, a few months in that environment will help your career.
by specialist | 2025-07-04 23:43:11+00:00
Nah.

There's always pointless fads and food fights. Just tough it out. (Until a better gig comes along.)

I wish I could advise my young self "this too shall pass". The savvy play is to be a "team player". All those dumb hills I choose to die on... For dumb crap which eventually self-mooted all by themselves.

There was a comment (or a story?) some time back about how to survive as a software developer when projects are managed by Pointy Haired Bosses (PHBs). From memory:

Always be positive, optimistic.

Never say no or hedge or doubt.

Proactively manage upwards with enthusiastic status reports.

Instead of owning up to failures (due to fantasy estimates, ridiculous deadlines, scope creep, misc chaos, etc), list in detail all the great things and awesome progress you and your fantastic team have miraculously accomplished.

Like "reproducible builds which reduced failures by 1000% FTW, saving 30 hours per week" and "implemented boss' recommended pub/sub heptagonal meta architecture event sourced distributed pseudo sharded hybrid cloud something something, attaining sustained P95 latency of sub 3 picoseconds for 2 days"

Sadly, I was never able to keep up the act for more than 12 months. I'm just too contrarian, sarcastic, jaded. (I used to tell myself that I was "results oriented". I now see I was just an asshole. Everyone lies, needs to suspend disbelief, have a reason to crawl out of bed every morning. Who am I to piddle in their Cheerios?)

I'd like to think that if someone had clubbed young(est) me with the clue stick, I could have adapted.

YMMV. Happy Hunting.
by glasscannon | 2025-07-04 23:44:14+00:00
agumonkey I love this - maybe it's about time a wellness/health "HN" was started. We're living in a time of chronic health dysfunction and lack of clarity. DM (and/or anyone else) if you'd like to jam

For my recovery my reading/listening was focused on people like Dr Schubiner, Alan Gordon and some folks in Aus like Lorimer Moseley.

I'm engaging more in linking research studies in now as I experienced a lot of people (often not practitioners) making claims without links to evidence (likely to keep things simple), which made my logical brain skeptical orignally and slowed my entry to this field
by kbolino | 2025-07-04 23:44:23+00:00
A lot of this is going to come down to taste so de gustibus and all that, but this feels like building on a foundation of sand. If the artifacts can be removed (or at least mitigated), then by all means let's keep going with cool new stuff as long as it doesn't detract from other aspects of a game. But if they can't be fixed, then either these techniques ought to be relegated to special uses (like cutscenes or the background, kinda like the pre-rendered backdrops of FF7) or abandoned/rethought as pretty but impractical.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-07-04 23:46:05+00:00
I mean that it's not a difference of accuracy, it's a difference of domain. A calculator & a slide rule have the same domain, an abacus and Mayan Quipu have the same domain. The calculator & abacus are faster than the slide rule & Quipu. Similarly a typewriter has the same accuracy as handwriting a document (worse if a pencil is used since typewriter's can't easily correct mistakes), but typing took over book writing because it was faster, not because it was more accurate.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-04 23:46:19+00:00
Yeah, but it's not worth. Apparently the "gold" list on ProtonDB is games that allegedly work with tweaks. So like, drop in this random DLL and it might fix the game. I'm not gonna spend time on that.

Last one I ever tried was https://www.protondb.com/app/813780 with comments like "works perfectly, except multiplayer is completely broken" and the workaround has changed 3 times so far, also it lags no matter what. Gave up after stealing 4 different DLLs from Windows. It doesn't even have anticheat, it's just cause of some obscure math library.
by don_neufeld | 2025-07-04 23:46:29+00:00
I was there.

My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.

One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.

EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.

Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.

Crazy times.

[addendum] Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)

The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.

I was right.
by KerrAvon | 2025-07-04 23:46:42+00:00
uh

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116823/how-ai-i...

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hallucinating-law-legal-mistak...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...

There are more of these stories every week. Are you using AI in a way that doesn’t allow you to be entrapped by this sort of thing?
by rvz | 2025-07-04 23:47:34+00:00
If you really didn't want your employees moonlighting, maybe you should just pay them more so that they don't have to work 5+ jobs at the same time? (Of course they won't) and require them to be in the office.

But this is the archetype of engineer that companies really want: Exceptional at passing technical interviews, willing to work 24/7 to make it happen, but as cheap as possible but all made up for promising 'equity'.

This is an actual "10x engineer" that exists, but somehow it has upset some VCs because he was moonlighting at multiple companies as a hack.

The best part is, remote YC startups were targeted and they are all talking about banning Soham secretly on bookface.

It is now clear that some are "allowed" to hack the system of others to their advantage but you are "not allowed" to do it against YC.
by jdwithit | 2025-07-04 23:48:29+00:00
I was a freshman in high school when UO came out. I distinctly remember getting accepted into the beta test and frantically checking the mailbox every day until the CD finally showed up. I had played Gemstone III (a text MUD on AOL) and Sierra's The Realm so I wasn't totally new to the concept, but the vision and scale of UO had my excited out of my mind.

I did have fun with it but ultimately I think I was too young and innocent to appreciate the game. Every time I felt like I was getting my feet under me, someone would murder me and steal all my shit. I think at one point I even got my own house... until someone murdered me and stole the key, leaving me penniless. It was a very griefer friendly game, and if you weren't one of the griefers, look out.

Eventually I got involved in the UO emulation scene and became the maintainer of a popular emulator for a year or two, and ran a private server with some Canadian tech bro (not that we had that term in the 90s) who had a bunch of money and hardware to spare. That was some of the most fun I've ever had in gaming.
by hx8 | 2025-07-04 23:49:03+00:00
I think you are underestimating the negative impacts that overhype cause. It's distorting the market, causing over investment, preemptively slashing departments, and creating an expectation that will never be meet. These articles are important for cooling expectations. When people sell LLMs, they usually aren't talking about summarizing customer support calls, they are trying to sell the idea of firing customer support staff.
by peripitea | 2025-07-04 23:50:16+00:00
EverQuest was my first real brush with agency. I was still a teenager but I loved researching strategies and game mechanics to figure out how my guild and I could play more effectively, and it paid off. We were never world first, but we got closer than we should have for the small server we were on. The feeling that the work I was doing was contributing to the success of an entire organization of people, and that this group of adults was happy to defer to me as long as my work ethic and ideas were good, was so much more powerful and motivating than anything I'd experienced in school. I don't think I felt that empowered again for another ~decade, well into my "real" career.