MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theodpHN | 2025-07-20 16:52:04+00:00
Worked at a large insurance company in the late 90s where leadership touted a big benefit of converting to PeopleSoft Financials as part of their Y2K remediation was the elimination of their dependency on the archaic COBOL language, blissfully unaware that their new PeopleSoft applications were using Micro Focus COBOL under the covers. Oops! https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/post/take-note-significa...
by stef25 | 2025-07-20 16:52:10+00:00
> We'd rather live a full life doing what we want vs the inverse

Except these people have families that care about them, you could even say kids need a parent in their life.

The day Honnold falls to his death the world will applaud all his achievements but his kid probably wish his dad never climbed at all.

The day I became a father is the day I stopped riding a motorbike.
by 9dev | 2025-07-20 16:53:06+00:00
Is it? Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth. Even if it isn’t us, there will be a last generation that enjoys growth as the motor of wealth. At some point, resources will deplete and the standard of living will decrease as a consequence. This is logically inevitable. Everyone just pretends this can go on and on without stopping, but that’s wrong.
by nerevarthelame | 2025-07-20 16:53:07+00:00
The whole article is not based on that incident. For example:

>The former U.S. Marine hosts the crowd-sourced FSD Community Tracker, the single most sophisticated and reliable form of empirical data collection and analysis on Tesla’s self-driving technology that is publicly available. Car executives like Volkswagen Autonomous Mobility CEO Christian Senger speak highly of it as a benchmark, and even Musk—who has his own internal data on disengagements that he refuses to share—singled it out as proof the company is making progress.

>Currently, its data shows even the latest FSD version from Tesla results in a critical disengagement roughly every 340 miles between both city and highway at present. Called 13.2.9, it rolled out in May just weeks before the Austin service launched. “You sometimes hear Elon saying, ‘we’re having a hard time finding disengagements.’ That is such BS,” Martinez adds.
by tzs | 2025-07-20 16:53:18+00:00
Most of the time when a human does it is because they were either operating the car while they were tired or ill which interfered with their ability to pay attention or they were doing human stuff that distracted them such as dealing with kids, talking to others in the car or by phone, daydreaming, looking at something interesting on the side of the road, panicking because they just noticed a big spider on the ceiling above them, and so on.

A self-driving car should not get tired. It shouldn't be doing any robotic equivalent of those things that distract humans.

This is why almost hitting things is a bigger deal for self-driving cars. Humans are expected to almost hit things, because we do a lot more than drive cars and we are easily distracted.

A self-driving car is a specialized system designed for that one task. If it almost hits something it is either a sign that there is a flaw in how the system works, the real world testing was not good enough, or it has hit an extremely rare edge case
by brabel | 2025-07-20 16:53:24+00:00
Everyone criticizing AI for not "understanding" anything... yet, as you found, and many others have also shown before, explain something to them and they bloody well look like they do understand it. I am still in awe at what LLMs can do, TBH. Over the last few months, the main problem with them: of confidently making shit up, seems to be getting much less of a problem... it's still not solved, but if things keep improving I wouldn't be surprised they will have controls that ensure they stop doing that, and when that happens people will be able to trust what they say/write much more... and perhaps that will be a turning point when complaints like in this post will be hard to take seriously.
by bitwize | 2025-07-20 16:53:45+00:00
> It's my understanding that LLMs change the code to meet a goal, and if you prompt them with vague instructions such as "make tests pass" or "fix tests", LLMs in general apply the minimum necessary and sufficient changes to any code that allows their goal to be met.

"I'm Mr. Meeseeks! Look at meeee!"
by sneak | 2025-07-20 16:53:48+00:00
You are missing the point.

I was well aware of it. I don’t want a Microsoft account. I don’t do business with Microsoft.

Microsoft demanded that I agree to a new contract, the Microsoft Terms of Service, to which I do not and will not agree, to continue to use the game I already paid for.

This is called a bait-and-switch. I paid money, got the product, used the product, then they altered the deal, Vader style. Sign this new contract or you lose your game.

It’s bullshit any which way you slice it.

Arguably it’s Mojang’s fault for selling to such a shitty acquirer and betraying their customers, not that we need any more reasons to understand what a total piece of trash Notch is.
by torginus | 2025-07-20 16:54:01+00:00
Not really hyperbole - I can't iamgine how one would build a fully borrow-checked app, that doesn't use these escape hatches (either directly or through a library). The only thing you could do maybe is to pass down everything that could possible be mutable as parameters everywhere, but that would not exactly be a nice way to program.

And what's wrong with RefCell (and friends)? It's extra complexity, memory footprint, and runtime cost. Also you gave up on the ability of the compiler to check you program's correctness. Granted it's not much, but neither is std::shared_ptr or Swift's automatic reference counting. Once you go from zero overhead to some overhead, there's a ton of quality of life features you can offer to the programmer.

If Rust's borrow checker was smart enough to allow multiple mutable borrows of the same variable, provided some conditions are met (like if you're borrowing struct S, you could borrow it's fields), it would eliminate the need for much of RefCell hacks, as well as solve the gripes in the article.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-20 16:54:16+00:00
The main risk of “an eye for an eye, and a life for a life” is the risk of wrong punishments that cannot be reversed.

On the other hand, when someone has caused an irreparable damage, by causing death or permanent invalidity, or by destroying something that cannot be recreated, e.g. an ancient historical artifact, or an entire animal species, then being punished in a limited way, e.g. with a fine or some time in prison, does not seem equivalent with the punished deed.

I believe that punishment by prison is extremely stupid and inefficient. In many places prisons are more like criminal academies than something that may educate the inmates to no longer do what they have been punished for. No wonder that in the ancient societies this kind of punishment was unknown.

In many ancient societies the main method of punishment was a fine, but in order to be a true deterrent the value of the fine was always a multiple of the damage that had been caused. In more lenient societies a thief or someone who had caused property or body damage would have payed a sum equivalent with the double of the damage value, but in more severe societies the fine was quadruple and in some societies the fines were even ten times greater than the estimated value of the damage.

Such a multiple-valued fine seems a much better punishment than any kind of prison, for any kind of damage that can be repaired.

For the other damages, like death or permanent invalidity, the appropriate punishment would seem to be the obligation to periodically pay some amount for the rest of the life of the punished person, instead of paying a one-time fine.

In the ancient societies, the cases when a punished person was unwilling or unable to pay the fine were solved simply, by converting that person into a slave. Such cases would be more difficult to solve in a modern society, but spending time in a prison cannot be considered as an improvement over slavery.
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-20 16:54:21+00:00
Most of the ancients used fines or weregild instead of "life for life".

First, it was a way to stop a potentially endless cycle of retaliatory violence, especially where a central government was weak or nonexistent (Islamic deserts, Corsica, the Vikings, Indian tribes).

Second, the logic behind blood money was in some contexts quite compelling. Look up Ex parte Crow Dog, an American legal case from the 1880s. Even the family of the murder victim was against the perp hanging, because they had nothing to gain from a corpse. They lost a valuable person and its ability to work and protect his relatives, and they wanted this ability compensated. A winter on the Plains is dangerous and it made no sense to weaken the tribe further by killing yet another strong, adult man. It made sense to make him compensate and protect the victim's family.

Big centralized settled states can afford to waste lives, in war or by judicial punishment. Other, pre-state units, cannot.
by imtringued | 2025-07-20 16:54:26+00:00
This is correct. Capitalism requires perpetual growth because capitalist logic does not apply in saturated markets with excess capital.

Anyone who believes in capitalism must by necessity believe thatcapital produces part capital and part consumer goods and that the rate of capital production must exceed the rate of capital depreciation. But in the face of stagnating population growth this logic must by necessity result in excess capital, threatening investor profit, to which they respond with drastic anti consumer measures.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-07-20 16:55:10+00:00
Sorry, that was a typo in my comment (now edited). "Now" was meant to be "more" i.e. "perhaps [io_uring] has more control [than sync APIs]?"

Byte range is support is interesting but also present in the Linux sync API:

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sync_file_range.2.html

I meant more like, perhaps it's possible to concurrently queue fsync for different writes in a way that isn't possible with the sync API. From your link, it appears not (unless they're isolated at non-overlapping byte ranges, but that's no different from what you can do with sync API + threads):

> Note that, while I/O is initiated in the order in which it appears in the submission queue, completions are unordered. For example, an application which places a write I/O followed by an fsync in the submission queue cannot expect the fsync to apply to the write. The two operations execute in parallel, so the fsync may complete before the write is issued to the storage.

So if two writes are for an overlapping byte range, and you wanted to write + fsync the first one then write + fsync the second then you'd need to queue those four operations in application space, ensuring only one is submitted to io_uring at a time.
by toast0 | 2025-07-20 16:55:18+00:00
This approach is all backwards anyway. You don't need to detect obstacles per se, you need to detect safe conditions to proceed.

Clear roadway is safe. Following behind a detected vehicle is conditionally safe.

Cow in the road? Not clear road way, not a detected vehicle. Does not match any safe conditions, so do not proceed.

This approach is why you see so many reports of Waymos stopped somewhere that's outside traffic rules. But it's so much better to stop safely in situations where it's not really needed than to not stop in situations where it is needed.
by ecshafer | 2025-07-20 16:55:34+00:00
Java was not an attempt to get mainstream programmers to LISP or Smalltalk, it was to get them halfway there from C++. It was just to make application software a little nicer and less manual memory management.

I also dont think we should blame Java the language for the OOP insanity that also infect C++, Delphi, etc. it was an industry wide insanity that thought they could replace pesky programmers with a single god architect.
by phkahler | 2025-07-20 16:55:36+00:00
I think by asset stripping the parent is including other plays. Private equity buys a company, sells the real-estate to their friends and leases it back to the company on a long term lease. Then after other shenanigans they IPO and dump the company back on the public. It's better than in the old days because they don't fire everyone and sell the assets. They may even make some positive changes, but the company now has to pay rent.
by Grimblewald | 2025-07-20 16:56:18+00:00
He wasnt running those companies so much as they were running him. These groups had dedicated soft protocls for handling elon's bullshit and disasterous influence. He's always just been the money guy. His ideas have always been shit, and the ideas he shared that were good invariably were ones he was handed and was repeating (often handling related questions rather poorly).

just look at his consistent and extreme lack of comprehension of fairly basic engineering. The man is a talentless hack, who paid his way into fame and the appearance of success. His contribution to paypal was his money. When paypal and x (at the time elons online bank) merged, paypal's code etc. Weren't really infleunced by elon or even x. X was crazy unsafe and unreliable, and so merging really only brought together intelligent havenots with a decent product with an unintelligent nepobabies wealth.

he didnt invent tesla either. He just bought into the company and bought the right to call himself a founder and marketed that angle aggresivley.

elon is an idiot, and always has been. Idiots need symbols though, so other idiots idolize him, propping him up.
by buran77 | 2025-07-20 16:56:48+00:00
> an expert at overturning conventional wisdom

Did you just invent a field so you can win an argument? Does it mean you revolutionized the field of inventing fields to win an argument?

What about his less successful ventures like the Boring Company or Solar City?

The world is full of one or two hit wonders thinking they have some insight on everything.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-20 16:56:49+00:00
I live in northern Europe now. The only time I ever felt unsafe on a bus, was once when a raving junkie walked up and down the bus with a scissor in his hand, trying to "sniff out the snitch". Turns out the bus I took, was the bus that also went to a halfway home.

But that's about it. I've taken thousands of rides, and have felt safe.

Sure, there are some annoying aspects - like teens blasting music, drunk people going out on the weekends, but most of the time it is pretty good.

Then again, taking the bus isn't looked down on in Europe - and carries no shame , so to speak. That goes for the metro, too.
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 16:57:23+00:00
No? Public roads are fine. They've been fine for as long as they've existed. So the right option is to just make tech that works with them, and works like cars and roads have always been interacted with. By turning vision in to wheel inputs.

With what we can do with x amount of technology in given volume improving, increasing cost and making motoring just more unreliable (and to only work in cities) would be a strategy short sighted as running in a forest with your eyes closed. And sounds like Solar Roadways lol
by soundblaster | 2025-07-20 16:57:28+00:00
This is fun, but the hard part really is when you want to migrate from the prototype to something embedded. You won't deploy a development board for mass (your friends) production, or yes. I think there's a gap there that few people teach. How to design a PCB, and hook up an enclousure, doesn't need to be a 3D printed thing
by gmuslera | 2025-07-20 16:57:32+00:00
Hollywood, or if you want, mass media, concluded that too, long ago. Killing individuals or multitudes, gore, and a lot of other permanently damaging activities are permitted or even glorified, while a lot of less damaging or even consenting ones are banned. Kids even grow with weapons as toys, culture see that as natural or even beneficial.

And while by far most that consumed that content didn't ended as i.e. mass murderers, some did. But somewhat is expected that the would be consumers of banned content will be less capable to distinguish between reality and fiction.
by interestica | 2025-07-20 16:57:47+00:00
> Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation

If done well, this should fix the most critical gap in public transit. You can move massive amounts of people via trains and buses -- but that doesn't get them from transit to home (unless you're lucky enough to live near an access point).

The robotaxis should be solely used for that 'last mile' -- reduce the need for transit parking (which is insane for commuter lots).
by HankB99 | 2025-07-20 16:58:04+00:00
Coincidentally the 2.5 admins podcast just published an episode on ZFS basics: Why ZFS https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-256/

ZFS relates to backups. In my case (among the many things I like about ZFS) is that it preserves hard links which I used to reduce the space requirements for my primary `rsync` backup but which `rsync` blew up copying to my remote backup. (Yes, there's a switch to preserve hard links but it is not sufficiently performant for this application.)

(Episode #256 which is a number that resonates with many of us. ;) )
by codys | 2025-07-20 16:58:14+00:00
> > you lose the durability guarantee that makes databases useful. ... the data might still be sitting in kernel buffers, not yet written to stable storage.

> No! That's because you stopped using fsync. It's nothing to do with your code being async.

From that section, it sounds like OP was tossing data into the io_uring submition queue and calling it "done" at that point (ie: not waiting for the io_uring completion queue to have the completion indicated). So yes, fsync is needed, but they weren't even waiting for the kernel to start the write before indicating success.

I think to some extent things have been confused because io_uring has a completion concept, but OP also has a separate completion concept in their dual wal design (where the second WAL they call the "completion" WAL).

But I'm not sure if OP really took away the right understanding from their issues with ignoring io_uring completions, as they then create a 5 step procedure that adds one check for an io_uring completion, but still omits another.

> 1. Write intent record (async)

> 2. Perform operation in memory

> 3. Write completion record (async)

> 4. Wait for the completion record to be written to the WAL

> 5. Return success to client

Note the lack of waiting for the io_uring completion of the intent record (and yes, there's still not any reference to fsync or alternates, which is also wrong). There is no ordering guarantee between independent io_urings (OP states they're using separate io_uring instances for each WAL), and even in the same io_uring there is limited ordering around completions (IOSQE_IO_LINK exists, but doesn't allow traversing submission boundaries, so won't work here because OP submits the work a separate times. They'd need to use IOSQE_IO_DRAIN which seems like it would effectively serialize their writes. which is why It seems like OP would need to actually wait for completion of the intent write).
by VivaTechnics | 2025-07-20 16:58:19+00:00
This table loosely maps programming languages to human languages based on personality. C is the Latin of code—ancient and foundational. Python is the smooth, approachable Spanish. Rust channels French with elegance and strictness, while C++ is the global English: powerful but complex. Perl speaks Yiddish—quirky and expressive—while Bash grunts like Russian. From Swift’s sleek Italian to Assembly’s sacred Sanskrit, each pairing captures the essence of how these languages feel. A fun cultural lens on the world of code.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-20 16:58:25+00:00
Problem with GitHub is that the VCS is in the name, so they would have to re-brand themselves (which might end up in losing loads of users) before they start supporting an alternative VCS.

I agree anyways, replacing Git is or would be a very difficult task in many cases.

That said, let us say I have a team of 3 people and we are starting a new project. We can definitely choose something other than Git, like Darcs (or later Pijul). If we use a project management software that only supports git, however, then that would be a very limiting factor. We probably would just continue using git, or use another project management software or I have no idea. I have used Git most of the time ever since I started using VCSs.
by Arainach | 2025-07-20 16:58:28+00:00
>every single post I read don't mention them

Because the models are so much worse that people aren't using them.

Philosophical battles don't pay the bills and for most of us they aren't fun.

There have been periods of my life where I stubbornly persisted using something inferior for various reasons - maybe I was passionate about it, maybe I wanted it to exist and was willing to spend my time debugging and offer feedback - but there a finite number of hours in my life and often I'd much rather pay for something that works well than throw my heart, soul, time, and blood pressure at something that will only give me pain.
by xp84 | 2025-07-20 16:58:36+00:00
Let me be clear, I didn’t mean I disagree with the rest of your comment in general or to disprove you somehow with my comment. Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).

It’s interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances though. I don’t think anyone wants to replace their washer every 5 years for fashion, but it’s nearly required. You’re right with clothes though, fashion is geared to promote discarding. I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
by fragmede | 2025-07-20 16:58:42+00:00
Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products.

The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in three years, or I buy a product and it's trash and unsuitable for its purpose, the company still already has my money. I have to care enough about the purchase to spend time and effort into writing a review online about the product, and the brand, which will go into the circular filing cabinet. For a $20 thermometer, I'm not even going to bother.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-20 16:58:53+00:00
I find for these kinds of systems, if I pre-seed Claude Code with a read of the language manual (even the BNF etc) and a TLDR of what it is, results are far better. Just part of the initial prompt: read this summary page, read this grammar, and look at this example code.

I have had it writing LambdaMOO code, with my own custom extensions (https://github.com/rdaum/moor) and it's ... not bad considering.
by skydhash | 2025-07-20 16:59:09+00:00
> I was a hardcore vim user 10 years ago, but now I just use PyCharm to work. I'm paid to solve problems, not to futz around with vim configs.

The reason I don't like those arguments is that they merge two orthogonal stuff: Solving problems and optimizing your tooling. You can optimize PyCharm just as much you can fiddle with Vim's config. And people are solving with problems with Vim just as you do with an IDE. It's just a matter of preference.

In my day job, I have two IDEs, VSCode, and Emacs open. I prefer Emacs to edit and git usage, but there's a few things that only the IDEs can do (as in I don't bother setting emacs to do the same), and VSCode is there because people get dizzy with the way I switch buffers in Emacs.