MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by larfus | 2025-07-11 00:21:38+00:00
Disagree. The current make-up of the EU barely represents historical bonds with so many nations in it. Though a populist leader using such history as leverage is not unbelievable, official Austrian reasoning behind refusal was much more pragmatic, human rights and migrants. Turkey is a regional player punching above their weight (potentially upsetting power balance less-so economically but definitely diplomatically and militarily) and is not exactly in line with EU ideals, culturally and politically, due to years of unstability and turmoil.

That being put aside, despite flaunting acceptance and democracy as their foremost goal, EU leaders surely knew not compromising on Turkey's accession would stray them farther of the EU in every way possible. And if that helps with a potentially bigger migrant crisis, so much the better.
by pron | 2025-07-11 00:21:50+00:00
Here's the thing, though. When working with a human programmer, I'm not interested in their code and I certainly don't want to see it, let alone carefully review it (at least not in the early stages, when the design is likely to change 3 or 4 times and the code rewritten); I assume their code will eventually be fine. What I want from a programmer is the insight about the more subtle details of the problem that can only be gained by coding. I want them to tell me what details I missed when I described an approach. In other words, I'm interested in their description of the problems they run into. I want their follow-up questions. Do coding assistants ask good questions yet?
by WillAdams | 2025-07-11 00:21:56+00:00
The best advice I ever got re: power tools from an old shop teacher was that before throwing the switch and powering up a machine, to count to 10 on one's fingers under one's breath while reviewing every aspect of the planned operation, and all the forces involved, reminding oneself that one wants to be able to repeat the count in the same way after the switch is turned off.

That said, I think it's best to maintain a healthy respect for, and even to a reasonable degree to be afraid of the machines and the forces which they can exert.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-11 00:22:00+00:00
We're trying to compare to the 80's where tech was getting cheaper. Instead of 2010 where tech was nearly given away and then squeezed out of us.

We're already at the mac Mini prices. It's a matter of if the eventual baseline will be macbook air or a fully kitted out mac pro. There will be "cheap"options, but they won't be from this metaphorical Apple.
by nerevarthelame | 2025-07-11 00:22:11+00:00
Choosing not to answer - regardless of whether or not that was a rule mandated by the CEO (an unsourced and unlikely claim given the corporate structure of most large organizations) - is far different than insisting on an answer from whatever the CEO last decided to tweet.

One is returning "null." The other is not.

One says, "Figure that one out yourself." The other says, "Here is the truth."
by kragen | 2025-07-11 00:22:34+00:00
Not with magnesium ingots or dry magnesium, no; but, because the water–magnesium reaction is exothermic, spontaneous, and gas-producing, I'm pretty sure there's a range of ratios where wet magnesium does constitute an explosive if it's finely divided, at least a low explosive like gunpowder, so such an accident could happen.

It seems unlikely to happen by accident because at stoichiometry you need more water than magnesium, and I don't think spontaneous explosion is a real risk with magnesium. The International Magnesium Association's safe handling guide https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.intlmag.org/resource/resmgr/safety... does mention that magnesium swarf can spontaneously combust in the presence of water, but I think swarf is too coarse to explode. It recommends keeping wet magnesium swarf under water to prevent it from heating up enough to spontaneously ignite.

But presumably you'd be shipping the magnesium in the form of plates, ingots, or rolls rather than powder, swarf, or loose foil.
by time0ut | 2025-07-11 00:22:39+00:00
An approach that has worked for me is to hash partition the table and have each worker look for work in one partition at a time. There are a number of strategies depending on how you manage workers. This allows you to only consider 1/Nth of the dead tuples, where N is the number of partitions, when looking for work. It does come at the cost of strict ordering, but there are many use cases where strict ordering is not required. The largest scale implementation of this strategy that I have done had 128 partitions with a worker per partition pumping through ~100 million tasks per day.

I also found LISTEN/NOTIFY to not work well at this scale and used a polling based approach with a back off when no work was found.

Quite an interesting problem and a bit challenging to get right at scale.
by Xmd5a | 2025-07-11 00:23:17+00:00
Orwell tried to anticipate the reception of his own book by projecting it into fiction as Immanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, but it ultimately became fully integrated into our society, which leans more toward Brave New World. Ironically, Goldstein’s book is ideologically closer to Brave New World than to 1984.

Another interesting example of a meta-reflexive dystopia is the British series Utopia. Its plot revolves around a fictional comic book of the same name, which is believed to predict a conspiracy to cause population reduction through forced vaccination following an engineered pandemic. There is something fascinating about these narratives; intentionally or not, they seem to call fiction into reality. It’s as if Orwell genuinely tried to create a transcendent critique to out-compete the very system whose rise he was witnessing. Ultimately, he may have failed, not because the system is inherently stronger, but because our thoughts are never entirely our own to begin with.

Edit: what I'm talking about is no stranger to what is called "predictive programming", and whichever meaning you attach to this phrase, I believe the poster I'm replying to is sensing its effects.

The question then becomes: to what extent are we merely engaging in hindsight bias or reacting to engineered shifts in attention? Furthermore, is it possible to analyze these mass manipulation techniques, even just for one's own clarity, without the guarantee that your own line of thinking won't become a mental trap?

After all, if I were one of "them" – subtly pulling the strings in an open society where consent is manufactured rather than coerced, where events are influenced rather than dictated – the social stigma against "conspiracy theorists" would be a far more efficient and durable tool than any of the impossibly risky plots those theorists imagine. In fact, it would be the only tool I would dare to use.

So perhaps the safest way to run a conspiracy is to first astroturf a community of conspiracy theorists.

Yet even this thinking keeps us trapped, circling the idea of 'them.' The crucial idea I must utter is this: it's not about their existence or non-existence. It is that at the genesis of these roles, there is an infinitely nested psychological bedrock. Isn't thi common ground from which the mind of the conspirator, who seeks to impose a hidden order, and the mind of the theorist, who seeks to reveal one, both arise ?
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-11 00:23:23+00:00
I agree that's the theory I was taught, but what does this look like in reality? It seems that complaining makes people complacent and useless. When has complaining about the US government ever led to change? Shit just keeps getting worse.

Either the right is a useless fig leaf for lack of any substantial rights, or I live amongst terrible people.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-11 00:23:54+00:00
> But we can *VERIFY* that measures were taken. In fact, easily! We can look at the references at the very top of the bug report!

>> Title: move/copying multiple imap messages to local folder bypasses offline store and redownloads messages. Need to preflight the move/copy.

>> Status: RESOLVED FIXED

This might be a more compelling observation if the bug was related to data loss. This just says "if you have a local copy of something, read from that instead of reading from the remote server".

It addresses the specific observation made in the thread that you can encounter the data loss bug even if you already have local copies of the messages, because Thunderbird ignores those, redownloads from the server, fails, and then deletes everything. Now, if you have local copies, Thunderbird won't try to redownload them from the server and the fact that the data loss bug isn't fixed won't matter to you.

You could apply this same approach to the entire bug, by guarding the "delete all of the user's emails" action instead of the "move emails that already exist locally" action. But they don't.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-11 00:24:15+00:00
I can write frickin' bash scripts that handle JSON APIs with curl, jq, here quotes and all that.

A lot of people just do whatever comes to mind first and don't think about it so they don't get stuck with analysis paralysis.

curl -fail

Handling failure might be the real hardest programming problem ahead of naming and caches and such. It boggles my mind the hate people have for Exceptions which at least make you "try" quite literally if you don't want the system to barrel past failures, some seem nostalgic for errno and others will fight mightily with Either<A,B> or Optional<X> or other monads and wind up just barreling past failures in the end anyway. A 500 is a 500.
by jamesfinlayson | 2025-07-11 00:25:39+00:00
I believe plenty of people already do hoard pre-1982 pennies for this exact reason.

And the laws only apply within the country (although bulk exportation is generally illegal). In Australia in the 1920s and 1930s there was a bit of illegal exporting of silver coins to South-East Asia due to the high silver content.
by tptacek | 2025-07-11 00:26:27+00:00
If that actually becomes material, they'll offer to buy shares in the next round. That's the point at which this whole conversation becomes interesting; right now, it's complexity for its own sake.

I know the feeling! I left a company some years back in a complicated way, and my instinct was to drill in as well. It seems like a big deal! It really isn't, though.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-11 00:26:40+00:00
> It seems that complaining makes people complacent and useless.

Um, what? Does not complaining make people less complacent?

> When has complaining about the US government ever led to change?

"Complaining but voting for the same people" has not led to change, I'll give you that.

> Either the right is a useless fig leaf for lack of any substantial rights, or I live amongst terrible people.

The right is essential to having informed people. Informed people are essential for any useful change. It's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one - if people don't care enough, free speech by itself doesn't cause any change.
by Mr_Minderbinder | 2025-07-11 00:28:14+00:00
> See e.g. [1] why this matters.

Quote the relevant section, Slack requires a log-in.

> Additionally the PNG spec does not specify if the alpha is linear.

Section 12.1 of the PNG spec seems to specify exactly that: “gamma does not apply to alpha samples; alpha is always represented linearly.”
by gcau | 2025-07-11 00:29:11+00:00
It's a legitimate distinction, "they were in control" and "they weren't in control". If the pilots are on a collision course with a mountain, but are happily sitting there thinking they're going the other way, there's nothing wrong with the plane, and the pilots are in control of the plane. In contrast to a horizontal stabilizer failure, where the pilots aren't in control, and instead say their goodbyes for the cockpit voice recording.
by snerbles | 2025-07-11 00:30:18+00:00
Sounds more like a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - defined as a set of practices that automate the process of building, testing and deploying software. Or rather, fonts in this case.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speeds up delivery of web content by being closer to users. Most video/image services use CDNs to efficiently serve up content to users around the world. For example, someone watching Netflix in California will connect to a different server than someone watching the same show in London.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-11 00:32:06+00:00
Because the benchmarks are likely gamed. Also Grok had an extremely negative news cycle right before this, so the average bloke is skeptical that the smartest AI in the world thinks the last name Steinberg means someone is a shadowy, evil, cabal-type figure. Even though they aren't totally related, most people aren't deep enough in the weeds to know this
by daedrdev | 2025-07-11 00:32:09+00:00
It's only a google search away

Hey you person, that snake called Erdogan [removed] your mother's grave and your sister who is stranded on the road! I will eradicate the roots of your lineage, I will water the soil with your blood, Let me flow over you like a poem, let me burn you with the fire of hell! You will die, of course, but first you taste the pain, you son of a [removed], you [removed]
by anonnon | 2025-07-11 00:32:17+00:00
> 'justastring' at: 6 put: $S; yourself

Evaluating this yields an error in both Squeak and Pharo. What Smalltalk are you using? I'm going to guess Cuis, in which case your example holds, but is misleading. Consider:

a:='justastring'. b:='justastring'. a at: 6 put: $S. a, ' = ', b. 'justaString = justaString' .

Notice, modifying "a" also modified "b," because of the shared literal frame entry. This is why you were traditionally admonished to avoid directly modifying string literals. (Which wasn't an issue given the design of the string classes, and the general poor manners of destructively modifying a string argument of unknown origin.)
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-11 00:33:33+00:00
Cutting thick cardboard with scissors is a good way to hurt yourself.

You need some strength and a sharp blade to cut cardboard with scissors, for a child, it can mean going full force. And the more strength you use, the less control you have, increasing the chance of hurting yourself. That's also the reason why dull knives are considered dangerous. Scissors are for paper, not cardboard.

This tool looks much more controllable, which means it is safer, even before considering the intrinsic safety of the mechanism, more precise, and more fun to use.
by comeondude | 2025-07-11 00:33:38+00:00
Makes sense. I know what I built is nowhere near actual software development. Still I was able to quickly learn how things work through GPT.

Since I’ve literally been working on this project for two days, here’s a somewhat related answer to your question: I’ve been using chat gpt to build art for TCG. Initially I was resistant and upset at AI companies were hoovering up people’s work wholesale for training data (which is why I think now is an excellent time to have serious conversation about UBI, but I digress).

But I finally realized that I could develop my own distinctive 3D visual style by feeding GPT my drawings and having it iterate in interesting directions. It’s fun to refine the style, by having GPT simulate actual camera lens and lighting set up.

But yes I’ve used AI to make numerous stylistic tweaks to my site, including building out a tagging system that allows me to customize the look of individual pages when I write a post)

Hope I’ll be able to learn how to build an actual complex app one day, or games.
by freetime2 | 2025-07-11 00:34:37+00:00
Here is the the methodology of the study:

> To directly measure the real-world impact of AI tools on software development, we recruited 16 experienced developers from large open-source repositories (averaging 22k+ stars and 1M+ lines of code) that they’ve contributed to for multiple years. Developers provide lists of real issues (246 total) that would be valuable to the repository—bug fixes, features, and refactors that would normally be part of their regular work. Then, we randomly assign each issue to either allow or disallow use of AI while working on the issue. When AI is allowed, developers can use any tools they choose (primarily Cursor Pro with Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet—frontier models at the time of the study); when disallowed, they work without generative AI assistance. Developers complete these tasks (which average two hours each) while recording their screens, then self-report the total implementation time they needed. We pay developers $150/hr as compensation for their participation in the study.

So it's a small sample size of 16 developers. And it sounds like different tasks were (randomly) assigned to the no-AI and with-AI groups - so the control group doesn't have the same tasks as the experimental group. I think this could lead to some pretty noisy data.

Interestingly - small sample size isn't in the list of objections that the auther includes under "Addressing Every Objection You Thought Of, And Some You Didn’t".

I do think it's an interesting study. But would want to see if the results could be reproduced before reading into it too much.
by MindSpunk | 2025-07-11 00:35:05+00:00
> A sufficiently advanced compiler

Much like how Intel Itanium would've taken over the world with the VLIW revolution if only we had one of these 'sufficiently advanced compilers'. It's a very vague statement that doesn't really mesh with reality. Decades of research in compilers have yet to yield one.

I think you're right, and it's up to the programming language to provide optimization friendly primitives that fit into the mold of what we can prove as in-bounds.

Speculative execution will never be free because those bounds checks will take up space in the execution pipeline that could've been used for other instructions.
by moron4hire | 2025-07-11 00:35:19+00:00
This feels like a parallel to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Recently, my company has been investigating AI tools for coding. I know this sounds very late to the game, but we're a DoD consultancy and one not traditional associated with software development. So, for most of the people in the company, they are very impressed with the AI's output.

I, on the other hand, am a fairly recent addition to the company. I was specifically hired to be a "wildcard" in their usual operations. Which is too say, maybe 10 of us in a company of 3000 know what we're doing regarding software (but that's being generous because I don't really have visibility into half of the company). So, that means 99.7% of the company doesn't have the experience necessary to tell what good software development looks like.

The stuff the people using the AI are putting out is... better than what the MilOps analysts pressed into writing Python-scripts-with-delusions-of-grandeur were doing before, but by no means what I'd call quality software. I have pretty deep experience in both back end and front end. It's a step above "code written by smart people completely inexperienced in writing software that has to be maintained over a lifetime", but many steps below, "software that can successfully be maintained over a lifetime".
by thousand_nights | 2025-07-11 00:36:39+00:00
because the preachers preach how amazing it is on their greenfield 'i built a todo list app in 5 minutes from scratch' and then you use it on an established codebase with a bigger context than the llm could ever possibly consume and spend 5x more time debugging the slop than it would've taken you to do the task yourself, and you become jaded

stop underestimating the amount of internalized knowledge people can have about projects in the real world, it's so annoying.

an llm can't ever possibly get close to it. there's some guy in a team in another building who knows why a certain weird piece of critical business logic was put there 6 years ago, the llm will never know this and won't understand this even if it consumed the whole repository because it would have to work there for years to understand how the business works
by joshvm | 2025-07-11 00:36:46+00:00
Box format degeneracy has been a footgun for computer vision developers since forever. You can define a rectangle as two corner coordinates, a coordinate + width + height. Since "one coordinate" can be a corner or the center, there are normally 6 variations and every single one exists somewhere. This also causes havoc for validation because it's easy to forget and wonder why your metrics are all practically zero because you didn't specify the right one.

There's a neat table here: https://dragoneye.ai/blog/a-guide-to-bounding-box-formats

Picking yxyx was certainly a decision.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-11 00:36:53+00:00
This entire thread seems like generative AI. Nobody normal thinks Mozilla is doing fine, or behaving rationally. Nobody thinks they've made any good decisions for a long time, but they see that the decisions they've made coincidentally benefit the source of 90% of their revenue, one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.

This article is actually very complimentary. They haven't managed to totally destroy the browser itself yet. Some people working there must still love it.

Wild that this thread got sunk with almost as many comments as upvotes. It's almost like we think that flooding an article with comments gets it pushed off the front page.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-11 00:37:02+00:00
There are a few things you want about dates. 1932-04-12 sorts lexically, 04/12/1932 doesn't. So long as you don't use a timezone or always use the same timezone (especially Z) you get this nice property with ISO 8601 which makes it better than the alternatives. Once you include timezones you get into all sorts of problems such as dates (as opposed to date times) only having a partial ordering as the day here in New York starts an hour earlier than Chicago. In an extreme case the Pearl Harbor attack was launched the day after it was executed.

At some point you need real time aware libraries and whatever language you use they've been through several iterations of them (Javascript Date, moment, dayjs, ...) because they got it wrong the first time and probably the second time to.

With ISO 8601 it is easy to get the yyyy, yyyy-mm, hh and other things you might work with primitive tools (awk). Getting the day of the week or the time involved is not hard which gets you to the chronological rosetta stone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

which is a multiplier and and offset away from Unixtime except for all those leap seconds and whatnot. With Unix timestamps comparison is easy and differences are easy and even knowing it is Thorsday is easy; they don't sort as strings but GNU sort has a -n option, only trouble is it is a bunch of twisty little numbers that look alike.
by budududuroiu | 2025-07-11 00:37:38+00:00
My theory is that, outside of programming skill, amazement by AI tools is inversely proportional to typing/navigating speed.

I already know what I need to write, I just need to get it into the editor. I wouldn’t trade the precision I have with vim macros flying across multiple files for an AI workflow.

I do think AI is a good rubber ducky sometimes tho, but I despise letting it take over editing files.