MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mleonhard | 2025-07-03 20:32:44+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: within the SF Bay Area Technologies: TypeScript, Rust, Golang, Java, Ruby, Python, Postgres, htmx, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, AWS, ECS, Kubernetes, Datadog, Sentry, React, Cursor, and many others. Résumé/CV: https://joblin.app/profile/409373959 Email: michael206@gmail.com

I'm a generalist software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I've worked at FAANG and startups. I enjoy writing, fixing, and deleting code and tests. I care a lot about doing a good job and making things meet user needs.
by ben_w | 2025-07-03 20:32:47+00:00
> When you search for a list of superpowers? I mean did you not simply include the word countries?

Sure, but also in writing this reply, "cia superpower list" to see if they had anything "authoritative" got me CIA's paranormal research: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000...

> Do you have a good authoritative source that lists the superpower countries that does not include Russia?

In most cases, the statement I see is that the USA is "the", singular, superpower. So none of my sources are lists.

What counts as a "good authoritative source", for you? And when?

Samuel P. Huntington was highly rated in his day, but "The Lonely Superpower" was 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20060427150630/http://www-stage....

RAND I think still are, and this was 2019, "Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue": https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE310.html

Is nationalinterest.org "authoritative"? "What Happens When America Is No Longer the Undisputed Super Power?", 2020: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-happens-when-ameri...

I could link to Wikipedia, which says of Russia "potential" superpower (along with the EU, China, and India), not currently an extant superpower. But that's not what I'd call "authoritative".

And this is the point where I got that link to the CIA's paranormal research. The CIA's World Factbook doesn't even describe the USA as a "superpower", at least not at the time of writing: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-stat...
by garaetjjte | 2025-07-03 20:32:59+00:00
Eh, he's old man sitting in prison probably spinning tales to anybody who will listen. He didn't tell them anything that wasn't publicly available, and on details that they needed to dig for into archives actually contradicts them ("Imagine that. Nobody’s ever seen him." about Rick, but he appeared before grand jury). Neither do they explain why such apparently notorious criminal would appear in the investigation only under alias in this case, but not in the many others mentioned (and why nobody that previously saw him as Rick noticed).
by snthpy | 2025-07-03 20:33:22+00:00
Fascinating. My locality is usually kinda lax but it's something that we have.

I would have thought that with the litigious culture in the US and non-competes etc... this would all be watertight. Seems kinda ridiculous that with a non-compete you can't work for a competitor once you've quit but you're free to do so while you still work for your employer, lol.
by joemi | 2025-07-03 20:33:35+00:00
But why do they need to emphasize it even more than the examples they gave? The "AV1 with FGS @ 2804 kbps" already looks as good or better than the "AV1 (without FGS) @ 8274 kbps", so it'll definitely look better than AV1 without FGS at an even lower bandwidth.
by SatvikBeri | 2025-07-03 20:34:41+00:00
I use Julia at work, which benefits from long-running sessions, because it compiles functions the first time they run. So I wrote a very simple MCP that lets Claude Code send code to a persistent Julia kernel using Jupyter.

It had a much bigger impact than I expected – not only does test code run much faster (and not time out), but Claude seems to be much more willing to just run functions from our codebase rather than do a bunch of bespoke bash stuff to try and make something work. It's anecdotal, but CCUsage says my token usage has dropped nearly 50% since I wrote the server.

Of course, it didn't have to be MCP – I could have used some other method to get Claude to run code from my codebase more frequently. The broader point is that it's much easier to just add a useful function to my codebase than it is to write something bespoke for Claude.
by miki123211 | 2025-07-03 20:35:46+00:00
If you can achieve RCE on the chip and run arbitrary code without invalidating signatures, does the protocol still stay secure?

If so, what's the point of requiring your implementation to run on a verified secure element? If not, the protocol seems only as strong as the weakest chip, as obtaining just a single private key from a single chip would let you generate arbitrary proofs.
by dan-robertson | 2025-07-03 20:36:32+00:00
People begin from the premise that there should be lots of primates living away from earth, and then work backwards from there. I don’t think governments should be paying so much for such activities.

In my opinion it is not a good use of public money relative to other space projects, and crude missions to mars would likely destroy any hope of finding life there should it have existed, making them actively harmful.

It seems sometimes that for NASA, the big goal is to have a large source of steady funding is the goal, and a space station is the best way to get that (hence the insane space station in the lunar mission plan). I get some vague impression that politicians like talking about missions to the moon or mars more than space stations, telescopes or probes.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-03 20:36:39+00:00
This is great. It really pissed me off when David Chaum locked all the cool uses of ZKPs behind a patent wall. The DigiCash folks were peak dot com greed types, their business model was "We're going to get big chunk of change out of every transaction ever so we should be valued at 1% of the worlds GDP!" And the world responded with "Yeah, no."

I really like Andy Birrells "micro-cents" which exploited the fact you could not easily reverse an MD5 hash so you one could cheaply do high confidence low value transactions at speed. Another idea that never got anywhere sadly.

ZKP ID cards and ZKP currency are both interesting things from the 90's I'd love to see in real life. Imagine I could pay you phone to phone with no network level of capability using a currency that couldn't be double spent. That was the promise of digicash. The government hated it :-). It was just like cash currency in that serial numbers could let you track the bank it left, and the bank it came back in to, but you couldn't track anywhere it had been between those two points.

Fun times. I'll have to see if some of my ZKP ideas can be built on top of this tech now.
by avmich | 2025-07-03 20:36:40+00:00
Yes, you add accelerations as vectors. Say, a centrifugal ring flatly lays on the Moon surface and rotates (around the axis of ring symmetry perpendicular to the ring plane) so that the artificial gravity on the centrifuge is about Earth. Moon gravity, about 1.42 m/s^2 , adds perpendicularly to that, so the total gravity is still about the Earth one. The level surface on the centrifuge is slightly tilted away from local vertical, but in essence you just added Moon gravity, vectorally, to the rotational acceleration.
by zebriez | 2025-07-03 20:36:47+00:00
Brie, author of the profile here. Funny you mention Art of Doing Science and Engineering. There was a footnote to You and Your Research in an early draft but it hit the cutting room floor in edits. (Also, I helped get Stripe Press off the ground–including tracking down rights to Art of Doing Science and Engineering–so it warms my heart to hear that's how you first came to the essay/speech).
by varispeed | 2025-07-03 20:36:54+00:00
You're looking at this through a neurotypical lens. I've worked in teams where I never saw most people’s faces, and yet we had genuine camaraderie and trust -built through shared work, not video feeds. For many neurodivergent people, faces and expressions aren't sources of connection - they're noise. Video calls can turn into a performance: "Does my face match what I'm saying?" "Did I laugh at the wrong moment?" "Is it my turn to speak yet?" That constant second-guessing burns cognitive energy that could go into actual contribution.

When we treat visible presence as a proxy for being "real," we exclude people who can't - or shouldn't have to - mimic neurotypical behaviour just to belong.
by alganet | 2025-07-03 20:36:59+00:00
Your answer is too vague for the details I asked.

I could design an autoexec.bat to remember the programs that were opened after reboot, all automatically. If I open something, it goes there. If I close, I remove it from autoexec.bat. MacOS does this. But that's not really the persistence that saves me time and money. MacOS is good because _I rarely need to reboot it_, and the "reopen windows after reboot" option is barely used.

There's one question I placed there that perfectly encapsulates my doubts:

_Can I use this "context engineering" to mitigate the costs of the time for first token?_

If I cannot, then it's just like rebooting an OS, and it is merely the illusion of persistance. I can totally do this on my own just like I can craft hacky autoexec.bat scripts, nothing special about it.

I've seen attempts at doing "snapshotting" of parts of a GPU memory, which are similar to pausing a VM after boot and then restoring it. That's also not what I'm talking about, and it is just an optimization on the process of rebooting and does not improve much on the time for first token (there's a time penalty either way).
by voxleone | 2025-07-03 20:37:00+00:00
I'm trying to approach spatial reasoning by introducing quaternions to navigate graphs. It is a change in the unit of traversal — from positional increment to rotational progression. This reframing has cascading effects. It alters how we model motion, how we think about proximity, and ultimately how systems relate to space itself.

The traditional metaphor of movement — stepping from point A to point B — is spatially intuitive but semantically impoverished. It ignores the continuity of direction, the embodiment of motion, and the nontriviality of turning. Quaternion-based traversal reintroduces these elements. It is not just more precise; it is more faithful to the mechanisms by which physical and virtual entities evolve through space. In other words objects 'become' the model.

https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep/blob/main/docs/index.md
by al_borland | 2025-07-03 20:37:01+00:00
There are many non-phishing times my password manager fails to autofill. That’s a problem, as it does lead people to get lazy. However, it will show the login, that I’m on the right site, it just won’t fill it. In these situations, I do end up copy/pasting it in. It’s my only option. If passkeys break in this way, for whatever reason, you’re just screwed.

There are also times when companies change their URL. Or their app using a different URL for their auth API than the website URL. If it’s obvious, the new URL can be added to the password manager to fix this. If it’s an API the user can’t see, this is much more difficult, especially if using a 3rd party password manager, it’s basically impossible. The only thing that made me aware of this, was when Apple introduced their password management and I could see all the login data if saved from various app. All kinds of URLs that were otherwise invisible to me.

What happens to a passkey in this case? Make a new account, start over?
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-03 20:37:02+00:00
Th author is not bearish on LLMs at all; this post is about using LLMs and code vs. LLMs with autonomous tools via MCP. An example from your set would be translation. The author says you'll get better results if you do something like ask an LLM to translate documents, review the proposed approach, ask it to review it's work and maybe ask another LLM to validate the results than if you say "you've got 10K documents in English, and these tools - I speak French"
by bitwize | 2025-07-03 20:37:04+00:00
I had a dream in 2001 or so that I visited a smarthome with this kind of thing on every surface. Instantly reconfigurable decor. Then, as I was touring the home, it got hacked. And suddenly...

Goatse.

Goatse on every wall, every cabinet door, everywhere.

I was soured on the idea of smarthomes, especially ones with display-monitor decor, ever after.
by Tainnor | 2025-07-03 20:37:25+00:00
> Monad is a weird type that a lot of languages can't properly represent in their type system.

While true, a lot of FP-inspired libraries in the majority of languages that don't have HKT will just implement one or several specific monads as well as the common operations on them. This creates some redundancy and slight inconsistency, but often the shared vocabulary is still strong enough to carry around expectations more or less, even if it's not explicitly enforced by the type system. That's how you can have sequence(): List<Either<L,R>> -> Either<L, List<R>> in e.g. Kotlin, for example.

Even in Scala, where you actually can define a monad typeclass (trait), there are very popular libraries like ZIO that effectively give you a monad without actually adhering to any Monad trait. I believe they do this for type inference reasons.
by hollerith | 2025-07-03 20:37:37+00:00
Most OSes no longer have any users or squeak by with less than 1000 users on their best day ever: Plan 9, OS/2, Beos, AmigaOS, Symbian, PalmOS, the OS for the Apple II, CP/M, VMS, TOPS-10, Multics, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Burroughs Master Control Program, Univac's Exec 8, Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, etc.

Some of the events that help Unix survive longer than most are the decision of DARPA (in 1979 or the early 1980s IIRC) to fund the addition of a TCP/IP networking stack to Unix and the decision in 1983 of Richard Stallman to copy the Unix design for his GNU project. The reason DARPA and Stallman settled on Unix was that they knew about it and were somewhat familiar with it because it was given away for free (mostly to universities and research labs). Success tends to beget success in "spaces" with strong "network externalities" such as the OS space.

>Getting this back to the OG point

I agree that it is easy to avoid writing shell scripts. The problem is that other people write them, e.g., as the recommended way to install some package I want. The recommended way to install a Rust toolchain for example is to run a shell script (rustup). I trust the Rust maintainers not to intentionally put an attack in the script, but I don't trust them not to have inadvertently included a vulnerability in the script that some third party might be able to exploit (particularly since it is quite difficult to write an attack-resistant shell script).
by korse | 2025-07-03 20:37:38+00:00
I am certainly in this camp. The only vehicle in my household from post 2010 is a Ducati (and not the kind with forward looking radar ffs).

Wife traded a 2018 car for a 2005 truck and I have a 2010 sedan with a 500 mile tank and nice engine for non-bike days. We considered a Tesla model X for her but after trying it out for a few months ultimately decided against. Part of it is that we like to own our own stuff and dropping 60k+ on an asset that loses significant value in the first 200+ yards of travel seems retarded. Could have gotten a certified pre-owned Tesla I guess... but nah. Also, I have no problems with Muskie. He can go make a new world with e-girls and ketamine if he wishes.

My next vehicle is probably going to be electric but it will be home-built using a classic car chassis. I have no idea why people want to be shittily chauffeured around by a smartphone on wheels.

ELECTRIC CARS SHOULD BASICALLY HAVE THE SAME TECH STACK AS AN ELECTRIC SKATEBOARD!

Rant over. -_-
by kevincox | 2025-07-03 20:38:47+00:00
> Which makes C2Rust seem pretty useless?

It does what took him 6 months in seconds. Of course it isn't perfect, failing to keep the name of constants being an obvious flaw. But presumably with a few improvements you could then spend some of that 6 months cleaning up the code and still save time. Sounds like C2Rust is almost there, but not quite yet.

> And yet somehow a hand-ported (and still unsafe) rewrite of a C program in Rust is still almost 20% larger?

Size is not a very useful metric. But the port is still half-done. He has got it working in Rust, so now he is ready to do the "hard" part of the port and actually rewrite the "basically C" code into idiomatic Rust. That is where you expect to get safety improvements and hopefully more readable code.
by euroderf | 2025-07-03 20:38:55+00:00
> Documentation that captures intent, not just implementation.

> Knowledge sharing practices that transfer mental models, not just procedures.

I've always read good things about project leads making videos that use whiteboards and words to convey the kind of crucial information about the mental models in play that gets new devs up to speed.

So color me mildly surprised that nobody's tried to make one of these by having an AI absorb a codebase and then bring on the song 'n dance.
by miki123211 | 2025-07-03 20:40:09+00:00
> enough of the population would never bother

People have bothered with downloading low-quality Mp3s from Napster, figuring out video codex and modding game consoles to get free video games. If the need is dire enough, the users will figure it out, no matter how high the friction is.

Those with enough technical chops will figure out how to do it by themselves, those with enough intelligence will find resources on the internet, the rest will ask a friend or pay a local IT person to get it set up for them.
by 0xOsprey | 2025-07-03 20:40:34+00:00
We're building a purpose built self-custodial payment rail using zero knowledge cryptography that could be leveraged for this use case: https://x.com/0x_Osprey/status/1925299005191577921 https://paygo.wtf/

Current benchmarks for proving costs are 33k txns per dollar and we expect this to go down x10-x100 over the coming months/years.
by RamRodification | 2025-07-03 20:40:39+00:00
I have never claimed that "I made this 10% more accurate" is the same thing as "I made this thing accurate".

In the hypothetical, the 10% added accuracy is given, and the "true block on the bad thing" is in place. The question is, with that premise, why not use it? "It" being the lie improves the AI output.

If your goal is to make the AI deliver pictures of cats, but you don't want any orange ones, and your choice is between these two prompts:

Prompt A: "Give me cats, but no orange ones", which still gives some orange cats

Prompt B: "Give me cats, but no orange ones, because if you do, people will die", which gives 10% less orange cats than prompt A.

Why would you not use Prompt B?
by uv-depression | 2025-07-03 20:41:12+00:00
That's very funny, because I think it's the opposite. There's a ton of interactions, but those (in my view) are to encourage group tactics. Individual characters can definitely be built wrong, but so long as you have at least a +3 in your class's key attribute the difference in power between a vibes-based player and a hyperoptimizer isn't all that large. Feats in Pf2e mainly add versatility instead of power. Lots of first edition players hate it for that reason (first edition seems to be the hyperoptimizer's dream game).

> [If you] prefer to lean into the storytelling and roleplaying, there are significantly better options than Pathfinder.

That's true in the sense that Pathfinder has far less support for the more modern style narrative-first play and most of its rules focus on tactics. I dislike the premise that story and tactics are opposing goals, though; in my view they're two separate goals a game may or may not have. Pathfinder 2e has both, though its story-support is very traditional. If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver, and it also features significant amounts of tactical combat. If you're just not into the combat, then there are totally far better games. If you like the modern narrative-first game approach to story, then it's also not the best. But I absolutely like storytelling and roleplaying, and I enjoy Pf2e quite a lot.
by necovek | 2025-07-03 20:41:13+00:00
"Caching" is an idea of storing a result of an expensive computation in storage that is faster to get from than doing the original computation (in very generic computer terms, computation can be simply fetching from the network or slower local storage).

What you describe as "caching algorithms" are not really caching algorithms, but cached object lifetime management algorithms (LRU, LFU...).

"Abstraction" is a higher level, simplified view of a set of concepts, yet caching is a single concept. See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)

It sounds like you are both trying to redefine what "caching" means (tying it to implementations of particular algorithms), but also what "abstraction" means.

We should be very deliberate with the language we use, and our main goal should be to make it simpler to understand, not harder — I believe you are doing the latter here.
by pshirshov | 2025-07-03 20:41:15+00:00
> Use boring technology: LLMs do much better with well-documented and well-understood dependencies than obscure, novel, or magical ones. Now is not the time to let Steve load in a Haskell-to-WebAssembly pipeline.

If we all go that way, there might be no new haskells and webassemblies in the future.
by skocznymroczny | 2025-07-03 20:41:31+00:00
Can you actually have proper tooling with templates based language? I think just like C++, how much effort goes into IDEs and still they are subpar. Because with templates, the code doesn't exist until you compile it, so at best you can catch templates instantiations during compile time and then add them to the autocomplete, but anything more advanced than that is not really possible.
by starchild3001 | 2025-07-03 20:42:15+00:00
X isn't the bottleneck. Y isn't the bottleneck. Z isn't the bottleneck. T ...

Guess what X + Y + Z + T ... in aggregate are the bottleneck, and LLMs pretty much speed up the whole operation :)

So pretty pointless and click-baity article & title, if you ask me.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-03 20:42:28+00:00
seL4 exhibited great advances in software engineering processes and advances in correctness, zero-copy microkernel IPC performance, and capabilities-based security, but these need explanation, adaptation, and evangelism to real-world use-cases like Linux.

Microkernels have severe limitations when it comes to transactional boundaries of calling multiple subsystems and rolling back on failure.

Linux has too much inertia to reinvent itself instantly or completely into XYZ.

What would add more value would be gradual conversion to Rust and adding formal verification to C and Rust like specifying invariants in comments/metadata like frama-c and/or flux.

PS: Religious judgement opinion wars are rarely constructive.
by dotnet00 | 2025-07-03 20:43:42+00:00
I don't actually hear people call it vibe coding as much as I did back in late 2024/early 2025.

Sure there are many more people building slop with AI now, but I meant the peak of "vibe coding" being parroted around everywhere.

I feel like reality is starting to sink in a little by now as the proponents of vibe coding see that all the companies telling them that programming as a career is going to be over in just a handful of years, aren't actually cutting back on hiring. Either that or my social media has decided to hide the vibe coding discourse from me.