MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amiga386 | 2025-07-24 17:37:04+00:00
BT, EE: Yes. Three, Vodafone: No. O2: Unknown.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go

> A spokesperson from BT, which owns EE, apologised and said the firm was "currently addressing an issue impacting our services".

> Vodafone and Three have confirmed to the BBC they do not have network issues.
by avinassh | 2025-07-24 17:37:17+00:00
I posted in another comment: There is a smoll demo in the post. In it, I corrupt an old frame that is not needed by the database at all. Now, one approach would be to continue the recovery and then present both states: one where the WAL is dropped, and another showing whatever we have recovered. If I had such an option, I would almost always pick the latter.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-24 17:37:29+00:00
No, it's how one very specific community of experts understands it. It is not some kind of universal law of definition that it must mean that always and everywhere. As far as what is confusing, that is a matter of perspective. I think it is confusing (to put it mildly) that the C community has chosen to use "undefined behavior" to mean "it must never happen, and anything goes if it does". That is extremely counterintuitive, and only makes sense to those who live and breathe that world. So if the standard is to be "avoiding confusion", then we better change the definition used by the C community ASAP.
by sczi | 2025-07-24 17:37:36+00:00
So far it's just a subset of what's supported by SLIME for common lisp, and I've heard the smalltalk community emphasizes interactive development tooling even more so than the lisp folks. I've seen some of the gtoolkit videos and it's really impressive what such a small group of people have built, I'll definitely study it more seriously for ideas for my python environment once I've got the basics finished. I even tried gtoolkit very briefly but got stuck just trying to show all keyboard shortcuts in a given context and add new ones, but that was years ago and a quick search says Pharo's redone it's shortcut system since then.
by jrockway | 2025-07-24 17:38:19+00:00
I am not sure sync.Mutex fixes either of these problems. Press C-\ on a random Go server that's been up for a while and you'll probably find 3000 goroutines stuck on a Lock() call that's never going to return. At least you can time out channel operations:

select { case <-ctx.Done(): return context.Cause(ctx) case msg := <-ch: ... }
by pengaru | 2025-07-24 17:38:22+00:00
I too knew someone in HFT ages ago that spoke of using java even in the hot path. He told me they disabled GC altogether in combination with not generating garbage in the hot path, with large enough machines to not OOM before markets closed for the day.

From what I saw poking at the development trading boxes they over-provisioned both cpu ghz and ram to a ridiculous level. The machines looked nearly idle at their busiest.
by shadowgovt | 2025-07-24 17:38:32+00:00
This is, in my mind, the trickiest issue with Rust right now as a language project, to wit:

- The above is true

- If I'm writing something using a systems language, it's because I care about performance details that would include things like "I want to spawn and curate threads."

- Relative to the borrow-checker, the Rust thread lifecycle static typing is much more complicated. I think it is because it's reflecting some real complexity in the underlying problem domain, but the problem stands that the description of resource allocation across threads can get very hairy very fast.
by cptskippy | 2025-07-24 17:38:42+00:00
Most of the dynamics like that are abstracted away in EVs (i.e. dumbed down) or buried in menus and not readily accessible. I think this is done in part because the majority of people don't know or care about them, and if they were readily accessible would toggle them unknowingly and be confused or upset. In the Nissan Leaf it was done intentionally to make the car feel as much like a traditional ICE as possible.

In the first gen Nissan Leaf you can toggle between two levels of regeneration by toggling "B mode" which mimics automatic transmission car's behavior in "Hill mode" or when disabling "Overdrive". In the Leaf it just increases regeneration strength when you let off the accelerator. Similarly you can adjust the acceleration curve by disengaging "Eco mode".

Turning Eco mode off and Hill mode on makes the Leaf a lot of fun to drive on winding mountain roads. Unfortunately you only get like 15 minutes of drive time...
by ofjcihen | 2025-07-24 17:39:02+00:00
So I understand how people can get emotional about this topic but really quick let’s calm down and reevaluate what I said.

My comment was in response to Simon’s reply to a user who posted an article. The title of the article they posted addresses magical thinking in AI.

Now whether that’s an opinion you share or not is not the point. Simon responded as if the user was only calling any perceived gains from AI as magical thinking which is not the case.

I’ll let you come back to that when you feel like it. Altogether, though it’s just disappointing to see someone who’s work I read often jumping to an emotional response when it’s not warranted.
by zkmon | 2025-07-24 17:39:40+00:00
Whenever I need to do some hard thinking and things are not clear, I fire up my sublime text and write down the context in the simplest terms and short lines (only few words per line). While doing this, I will be absolutely rude to myself asking extremely basic and direct questions to bring out the real context, real goals and real path. It's like answering an under-world boss. No bullshit, no pretense, no regard to any norms, no impressing someone. Then the whole thing falls into a meaningful structure. I leave it when it produces some immediate action items.
Ask HN: Why can't database files be safely synchronized, can we ever get there?
by gausswho | 2025-07-24 17:39:43+00:00
I'm currently using Syncthing for synchronizing data across my devices. It works really well for most things, but a huge exception are things that use a local database such as SQLite.

An example would be Firefox profiles, which are somewhat infamous for being corrupted due to this issue. I'd like to have the same profile across all my machines, but have learned this is practically not possible.

The maintainers of Syncthing explicitly warn against synchronizing databases as it's currently technically infeasible and can result in data loss.

My understanding is that this is an architectural problem. That synchronizing tools work at the file level, while database consistency requires an understanding of transactional boundaries.

My question is: This should be generally resolvable right? If so, how can we resolve this? Can SQLite or other databases be changed so that there is resilience and integrity expressed through the file system itself? Can SQLite data be structure such that its transactions be more safely merged? Can Syncthing recognize a database file and know to wait because it is not in a stable state for synchronizing?
by petsfed | 2025-07-24 17:39:46+00:00
>Have you ever been around homeless people?

Yes. At many stages of the descent from "I'm just crashing on your couch until I save up enough for another deposit" to "I'm sleeping in my car until I can find a job" to "I'm living in a shanty and rummaging through the trash to turn in aluminum cans for change". Both whilst living in the Bay Area, but also in Oregon and Washington.

You're complaining (rightly) about the end stage. I'm saying that nobody starts at the end stage.

Hell, I'm actively watching my brother-in-law and his baby mama descend through the mental illness and addiction process, and even though they've been evicted and are now dragging their daughter through the couch-surfing phase, they still aren't at the living-in-tents-shitting-on-the-street phase of that descent.

And a major factor, for them was that neither of them could get the kind of jobs that would allow them to both have a stable living situation and do anything but work (because of criminal history resulting from addiction). Its a cascading series of problems that when he lost his license (due to his addiction), he could only work where he could walk, or where he could realistically ride a bus. And in most of the country, if you can't find work within those two ranges, you're shit out of luck.

And to be clear, I'm not proposing we just throw up our hands and say "I guess they're just addicted and this is our life now". I'm saying that "just lock up the homeless people" is as much a solution as "well, we've got seatbelts" is for a hydroplaning car. We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless, and 2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.
by chaosmachine | 2025-07-24 17:39:54+00:00
This reminds me of Benford's law[1]

"Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
by duxup | 2025-07-24 17:39:59+00:00
I had a relative who was a public defender for a while. It was very clear it was a job they didn't want to do, just had to do to get experience and then went into private practice after that. It wasn't just the money, it was the volume of cases they had to juggle, and for folks who really cared to do their job well the caseload meant they felt they couldn't do a good job / lots of stress.
by atoav | 2025-07-24 17:39:59+00:00
I dream of a future where societes manage to price in all externalities into the objects they produce. This of course requires us to be(come) more honest about the hidden costs to society each and every objects and its usage brings with itself.

What we do with that knowledge is another question, but right now my feeling is a lot of bad actors skew the picture to make themselves look good while regular people are left to breath the dust.
by didibus | 2025-07-24 17:40:02+00:00
Personally, I think this is a disingenuous take. The thirst is for tangible data, the issue is that we've never been able to measure any form of productivity/quality in software development.

My team does two person PR reviews for example. We'd go a lot faster if we didn't or even just allowed a single reviewer. Similarly, we have no idea what the quality impact would be if we stopped, and what we gain by doing so. We are we not having a 3 reviewer rule for example, why not, two is an arbitrary number?

Unit tests... We'd surely go a lot faster if we didn't bother with them. Teams used to have some dedicated QA members and you'd rely entirely on manual testing. You can push a lot more code out. Was software in the 90s when unit tests and integ tests wasn't used buggier than today's software?

Now take AI, what is the impact of its use? It's not even obvious if it reduced the time it takes to launch a feature, my team isn't suddenly ahead of schedule on all our projects, even though we all use Agentic tools actively now. Ask any one of us and "I think it makes us faster" will be the answer. But ask us why we have a 2 person review rule and we'd similarly say: "I think it prevents bugs and improves the code quality".

The difference with AI now is that you pay for it, it's not free. Having unit tests or doing a 2 person review is just a process change. AI is something you pay for, so there's more desire to know for sure. And it also is something people would like to know if they can lower their headcount without impacting their competitive edge and ability to deliver fast and with good enough quality. Nobody wants to lower the headcount and find out the hard way.
by dbish | 2025-07-24 17:40:08+00:00
We’d love to hear feedback on this. It’s a proof of concept but I really want to 1) offer agents within an inbox (and integrate to” “dispatch” work to agents running in services like n8n or retool), and 2) offer email inboxes for agents themselves just like coworkers.

Lots of cool stuff to build here, and one day soon expand to the full office suite for ai agents.
by Kurtz79 | 2025-07-24 17:40:33+00:00
If we assume that AI coding actually increases productivity of a programmer without side effects (which of course is a controversial assumption, but not affecting the actual question):

1) If you are a salaried employee, if you are seen as less productive than your colleagues that use AI, at the very least you won't be valued as much. Either you will eventually earn less than your colleagues or be made redundant.

2) If you are a consultant, you'll be able to invoice more work in the same amount of time. Of course, so will your competitors, so that rates for a set amount work will probably decrease.

3) If you are an entrepreneur, you will be able to create a new product hiring less people (or on your own). Of course, so will your competitors, so that the expectations for viable MVPs will likley be raised.

In short, if AI coding assistants actually make a programmer more productive, you will likely have to learn to live with it in order to not be left behind.
by fragmede | 2025-07-24 17:40:52+00:00
Oh. I wasn't the one saying we should kick people out who can't afford SF, I was just taking issue with "can afford to live in SF" as some undefinable standard. If I had my druthers, we'd subsidize and encourage building housing until the city looked like Hong Kong and everybody had places to live, but I'm not in charge of things.
by chc4 | 2025-07-24 17:40:54+00:00
This is one of the things that I'm also looking on at Zig like a slow moving car crash about: they claim they are memory safe (or at least "good enough" memory safe if you use the safe optimization level, which is it's own discussion), but they don't have the equivalent to Rust's Send/Sync types. It just so happens that in practice no one was writing enough concurrent Zig code to get bitten by it a lot, I guess...except that now they're working on bringing back first-class async support to the language, which will run futures on other threads and presumably a lot of feet are going to be fired at once that lands.
by muzani | 2025-07-24 17:41:15+00:00
If you push it to the limits, it's clearer which limits are a temporary problem and which are much harder to fix.

Structures, architectures, context, these can be improved with more training, more data, more hardware.

If you mean something that mocks things up quickly, Figma has always done that and it hasn't destroyed any jobs.

But a huge part of coding has always been understanding the product and building a good feedback-product loop. The product loops will be a lot more efficient. But the glue between feedback-product has always been humans. If you somehow make a robot QA and a robot PM, these will probably be maintained by engineers. In the last few years, we've seen QA becoming very technical, and we'll probably see PMs be more technical or engineers being more product oriented. Even in my current job at a newer startup, there's no PM, only a funnel from sales to product.

I think there will be a time when we see no code. No Java, no JS, and machines will just write machine language. This might still be... 30 years ahead, especially if you look at patterns in the last 30 years.

But until then, we still need people who understands how one screen links to another, how APIs are called, how to debug them from logs. Claude Code is this future - it's amazing at this abstraction, but you can feel where it starts to fall apart.
by mdickers47 | 2025-07-24 17:41:19+00:00
I'm one of the people whose home LAN is completely exposed to TPL. There's an amount of "screwing around" where I wouldn't care. If you want to print an xkcd cartoon to my desk, fine, lol, a minor surprise in my day. If you print 1000 pages of dicks while I'm not home so that my paper and toner run out, that would be uncool. After years of caring about this problem, I came to believe that this kind of normative social contract cannot scale to include "everyone in the entire world," and that this kind of unwritten normative code is the only thing that makes any social space tolerable.
by boterock | 2025-07-24 17:41:39+00:00
I think US culture overall frowns upon non-original works. From school there's some push against working on something that is a copy of someone else's work. In the meantime China has mastered copying and made it a big part of their culture and economy.

Nowadays I'm learning game engine techniques by reading Godot code and implementing the damn same thing in my engine... Also, nowadays I like tracing pretty anime drawings... I enjoy it more and end up with something I like better than if I were to draw something original.
by 20k | 2025-07-24 17:41:52+00:00
So while I don't disagree with you at all, in terms of AI being a bubble, none of that is why the tech is being so hyped up. The current speculative hype push is being driven by two factors:

1. The promise that AI will replace most if not all developers

2. Alternatively, that AI will turn every developer into a 10-100x developer

My personal opinion is that it'll end up being one of many tools that's situationally useful, eg you're 100% right in that having it as an additional code review step is a great idea. But the amount of money being pumped into the industry isn't enough to sustain mild use cases like that and that isn't why the tech is being pushed. The trillions of dollars being dumped into improving clang tidy isn't sustainable if that's the end use case
by darksaints | 2025-07-24 17:41:54+00:00
This has been a huge frustration for me, but the wild thing is that we've built up so many tools over time that help humans only for AI coding tools to wild west it and not use them. The best AI coding tools will read docs websites, terminal error messages, write/run tests, etc. But we have so many better tools that none of them seem to use:

* profilers

* debuggers

* linters

* static analyzers

* language server protocol

* wire protocol analyzers

* decompilers

* call graph analyzers

* database structure crawlers

In the absence of models that can do perfect oneshot software engineering, we're gonna have to fall back on well-integrated tool usage, and nobody seems to do that well yet.
by Exoristos | 2025-07-24 17:41:54+00:00
How many industry leaders do you know with speech impediments? And, no, these impediments don't usually vanish over time -- I come from a large family (8 kids), and one of my youngest sisters was allowed to "grow out" of her inability to pronounce 's' and 'r' -- but it never happened, and she required speech therapy at 20. She still struggles. Parents are correct to pay attention to young-childhood milestones.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-24 17:42:36+00:00
> "Undefined behavior" is not a meaningless made up term that you can redefine at will.

Sure, I agree with that.

> The word "undefined" has a clear meaning: there is no behavior defined at all for what a given piece of code will do...

That is true, but...

> ...meaning it can literally do anything.

This is not at all true! That is a different (but closely related) matter, which is "what is to be done about undefined behavior". Which is certainly something one has to take a stance on when working to a language spec that has undefined behavior, but that does not mean that "undefined" automatically means your preferred interpretation of how to handle undefined behavior.
by troupo | 2025-07-24 17:42:38+00:00
> When you've lived with AI boosting your productivity for a year or more it's pretty easy to believe your own experience over even a well-constructed "randomised controlled trial".

Me: The person above literally pitches an unsupported belief against a study

You: it's pretty easy to believe your own experience over even a well-constructed "randomised controlled trial".

Really? Really?!!

As for "boosting your productivity", it's also what I'm talking about in the article I linked:

--- start quote ---

For every description of how LLMs work or don't work we know only some, but not all of the following:

- Do we know which projects people work on? No

- Do we know which codebases (greenfield, mature, proprietary etc.) people work on? No

- Do we know the level of expertise the people have? No. Is the expertise in the same domain, codebase, language that they apply LLMs to? We don't know.

- How much additional work did they have reviewing, fixing, deploying, finishing etc.? We don't know.

Even if you have one person describing all of the above, you will not be able to compare their experience to anyone else's because you have no idea what others answer for any of those bullet points.

--- end quote ---

So what happens when we actually control and measure those variables?

Wait, don't answer: "no, it's easier to believe yourself over a study".

See? Skeptics don't even have to "jump on anything that supports their skepticism." Even you supply them with material.
by pydry | 2025-07-24 17:43:07+00:00
Ive been doing this inadvertently for years by making tasks that were as realistic as possible - explicitly based upon the code the candidate will be working upon.

As it happens, this meant when candidates started throwing AI at the task, instead of performing that magic it usually can when you make it build a todo app or solve some done-to-death irrelevant leetcode problem it flailed and left the candidate feeling embarrassed.

I really hope AI signals the death knell of fucking stupid interview problems like leetcode. Alas many companies are instead knee jerking and "banning" AI from interview use instead (even claude, hilariously).
by coryrc | 2025-07-24 17:43:14+00:00
> ICEs have highest momentum and efficiency sweet spot somewhere in the middle of available revs

Close: they have the highest efficiency at about 90% of maximum torque for most of the RPM range. So if you want double the power, you want to be able to double the RPM; and if you want half the power, you want to be able to drop the RPMs in half. To pull this off, you either need a very quick shifting gearbox or some sort of CVT.

This is also why automatic transmissions, despite being ~80% efficient versus ~95% manual transmissions, are not much worse on mileage. Because they can quickly switch between low RPM and higher RPM (first by torque converter lockup, second by switching gears).
by hattmall | 2025-07-24 17:43:17+00:00
There is really no argument that AI creates some productivity gains. Even if it's just an improved autocomplete. Because autocomplete does create some productivity gains. Pushing farther is murkier though. When it comes to the bulk of the type of work that AI is proving useful for, one of the main questions is why is there a need for speed. It's not in a sense of fear of automating jobs, it's just that generally we are reaching the bottlenecks more quickly and potentially causing more, but different problems, than we are solving.

It's similar to the story of the development of vehicles and how even though we move much faster we spend a greater amount of time in transit. My mom used to lament how annoying it was to have to drive to the grocery store because when she was younger and not everyone had cars the store came to you. Twice a day, in the morning and the evening the "rolling store" would drive through the neighborhood and if they didn't have what you needed right then, they would bring it on the next trip. We are finally coming back full circle with things like Instacart but it's taken a solid ~60 years of largely wasted inefficient travel times.
by krapp | 2025-07-24 17:43:20+00:00
Shawn Michaels. Chris Jericho. Mick Foley. The Undertaker. Rey Mysterio. Steve Austin. Shinsuke Nakamura. Kenny Omega. Booker T. John Cena. CM Punk. All better wrestling talents and performers than Hulk Hogan. The list could probably be even longer, because Hulk Hogan was at best a passable wrestler and a terrible performer. Finger-wagging and no-selling spots isn't impressive and doesn't take skill or talent.

He also sabotaged the careers of other, better wrestlers and tried to prevent Jesse Ventura from unionizing. Fuck him. Fuck his racist ass, I hope Vince joins him in Hell soon.