MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-21 11:07:34+00:00
I switched development careers from fullstack to enterprise API management about two years ago. I specialize in software focused data transmission from personal projects so I had no problems with the interview. If you can do enough personal projects to become an expert of embedded systems design and architecture enough to speak to edge cases and measurements from various performance scenarios I am sure you won’t have any problem transitioning.
by immibis | 2025-07-21 11:08:31+00:00
Lighter can mean worse quality, but it doesn't have to. For example, a whole lot of things don't need metal enclosures, and plastic can be molded into more ergonomic shapes too. Now, whether the plastic enclosure is made tough or super thin is up to the manufacturer, and of course most of them choose the more profitable planned obsolescence route.
by topspin | 2025-07-21 11:09:09+00:00
It's tragic, and it bothers me that Jens Axboe's work is suffering due to this. Obviously, with the clarity of hindsight, this might have been avoided. Now the cost of the damage it high.

My idea: consider formal verification. A rigorous formal proof of behavior is capable of solving actual flaws and probably capable of overcoming the bad PR.

That would require a great and ongoing effort. However, given the nature of io_uring, it's likely rather amenable to formal verification, and ultimately it is probably necessary. Perhaps our new "AI" tools could greatly reduce the effort.

Anyhow, that's my brilliant thought...
by pjmlp | 2025-07-21 11:09:26+00:00
Sun did not sue Google because they already lacked the money to do so.

What Google did with Android, it is hardly any different from Microsoft with J++, only that there the courts had another outcome.

Android with a Java subset and Kotlin, is hardly any different outcome than .NET with C#.

Corporate players came in, after money was available again, after the acquisition.

"James Gosling Triangulation's Interview on Google vs. Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&t=3462s

"James Gosling on Android and Java"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT__Nrr3PNI&t=6245s

If Google actually cared about Java, they missed their opportunity to acquire Sun, own Java, do whatever they felt like doing with it for Android, and the rest of the industry, and best of all, they would never had to bother with any lawsuit.

Given how much the so called existing players contributed to save Java while Sun was going under, that is whishful thinking.
by antonvs | 2025-07-21 11:10:34+00:00
> No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability.

Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.

Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.
by xg15 | 2025-07-21 11:11:30+00:00
Well yeah, today we know the dogma was wrong and so that information is probably already in the training data.

I think what Lowe meant was that an LLM could not have come up with this "on its own", if it was only trained on papers supporting the dogma.

So it cannot produce novel insights which would be a requirement if LLMs should "solve science".
by jjani | 2025-07-21 11:12:51+00:00
I'm nitpicking, as your main point is still completely accurate; it is indeed miles ahead in sovereignty compared to the EU! But

> Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea.

I've seen from the inside the IT infra of several chaebol subsidiaries (of different groups), of Korean big tech, as well as Korean startups, and really only some of the chaebol subsidiaries made use of these local clouds. Near 0% for startups, low single digits for big tech (besides Naver themselves obviously) and even for the big corps I'd estimate <30%. Azure and AWS are plenty popular, as well as of course on-prem still having a much higher market share than in the West. Not sure if most big corps have a random unused database on Naver Cloud to satisfy some government statistic but talking about meaningful usage here.
by rasz | 2025-07-21 11:13:19+00:00
Pretty much same device as prototype visible on video in front of Malcolm Smith, except invented ~10 years prior https://thisisit.edu.pl/lucjan-lagiewka-geniusz-czy-oszust

demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ow-cgHAfNI

There was one problem, inventor Lucjan Łągiewka tried to patent it in Poland. Polish Patent office decided its a scam because nothing can work this well.
by achenet | 2025-07-21 11:15:34+00:00
much like members of the original affluent societies, hunter-gatherers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#The_...

here is also a link to a video interview of Jeff Bezos explaining that he prioritizes sleep, because at his level, quality of decisions is more important than quantity of decisions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0op3sJr2A
by hnbad | 2025-07-21 11:16:58+00:00
I don't think it's accurate to say that anyone messed up with Smith or Marx. Smith didn't anticipate modern finance capitalism and his musings apply perfectly well to earlier iterations of capitalism - though he'd probably have had a stroke if you showed him the finance economy. Marx didn't anticipate capitalism's resilience but he had very little to do with the ideologies built on his work let alone their implementations (or attempts thereof).

That said, "I have a bigger stick" wasn't all we had before the present systems. I'm not a primitivist but I think it's a thought-terminating cliché to just look at what we have now and what came immediately before and decide that the local plateau is the best we can have.

Humanity invests a ton of resources in enforcing the status quo of power dynamics - both through overt force (be it military violence or the mere threat of violence necessary to assert contracts and claims to private property) and through more subtle means (e.g. narrative framing in education, news media and entertainment). Maintaining these systems takes immense resources and effort. But in moments of crisis our cooperative human nature can shine through until order is restored and we are ushered back into learned helplessness and mutual distrust as "the authorities" take over.

The problem isn't that the systems "allow corruption". The systems are inherently bad and corrupting. We build hierarchies of absolute power and then try to come up with solutions for the problems those hierarchies cause in the first place.

The problem isn't who rules. The problem is having rulers. Quoth Bakunin: "the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labelled the 'peoples stick'. [..] not even the reddest republic - can ever give the people what they really want."
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-21 11:17:10+00:00
Of course, but identification has never been the problem. You don't need LLMs for that, you could just ask the scientists themselves and I'm sure over 90% of us would agree on the parts I mentioned being useless.

The problem is the bureaucracy. And if it asks for useless fluff, I'm happy to feed it with LLMs.
by thrance | 2025-07-21 11:17:46+00:00
To be fair, neoliberalism was imprecise. I believe the correct term is ordoliberalism[1]. Still, the EU has little interest in matters of sovereignty.

I am simply trying to explain the otherwise baffling leniency toward very hostile actors like (current) America or China: because this goes directly against its core values, one of them being to always promote free trade. This is even stated as one of its "aim and value" in [2].

I am no Eurosceptic, I think we should just acknowledge and challenge the EU's current limitations if we want to move forward.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism

[2] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
by Rochus | 2025-07-21 11:18:24+00:00
> Essentially, it's a collection of device drivers.

Plus memory management, interrupt handling, and some other stuff, everything you would expect from a single-tasking kernel.

> and nothing of it is on the Linux side

You likely mean the kernel. There is more to Linux/Unix than just the kernel. You can even have your dynamically modifiable scheduler in the userland if you want. And for the (few) people who really think full dynamic modifiability is a relevant requirement, there are also some other technologies which offer similar flexibility as Smalltalk, or somewhere between (as e.g. the Gnome Window manager with GTK operated via a scripting language, or Stump, Sawfish, Qtile, etc.). The kernel which runs below Smalltalk (or the Smalltalk interpreter, i.e. the thing which runs the Smalltalk bytecode and manages object memory) neither "change behaviour at runtime". So if we do the correct comparision, there is not much difference when it comes to runtime modifiability.
by DrScientist | 2025-07-21 11:19:28+00:00
If you are running into a problem that is bringing your site down and it's truely a problem/bug with a commercial database then you are in trouble and unlikely to see a quick fix as these products are complicated and while the problem might be existential to you, it's not to the bigger vendor.

However, it's much more likely it's a configuration issue - ie you didn't understand the product properly and have configured it incorrectly - and here support can really help.

The point I'm making above is not that you should be writing fully fledged all singing and dancing databases - but that you might be able to get away with something very simple, more reliable and faster in your specific use case.

If on the other hand your use case is complex and a good fit for something pre-existing - then sure you shouldn't be writing it yourself.
by delusional | 2025-07-21 11:19:34+00:00
I've had colleagues try this. It rarely works. Logging every if end up introducing a huge amount of overhead, both in terms of processing power, but especially in terms of storage. You almost always end up having to filter based on some sort of log level that you then turn off by default in production.

The problem with that is that you're now required to reproduce the issue after turning on the logging, and if you already have a reproducer, why not just attach a real debugger?

The overlap of "we can reproduce" but "it has to run on the production server" ends up being practically zero.
by joewalker | 2025-07-21 11:19:40+00:00
It's used for things like pop-up menus, (i.e. things that can't be done with HTML) and was recently used in some obscure parts of the UI e.g. certificate viewer (however I'm not even sure that's still XUL any more)

I think it's safer to say: It's almost all HTML these days. XUL is very much deprecated.

As we killed XBL, our XUL components because web components. https://briangrinstead.com/blog/firefox-webcomponents/
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-07-21 11:19:53+00:00
The "code freeze" thing was amusing, I've never used Replit so wondered if it was a feature to turn off code editing but the more you read it seems like he just told it that it was in code freeze or added it to the rules and expected it to not drop that context at some point.

The "rules" thing in LLM coding probably should be called "suggestions" because it never seems that stringent about them.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-21 11:20:33+00:00
My opinion is that the value to be that I’ve been getting out of these tools in both my personal and professional projects is greater than value that they (and others using the downstream effects of them) get out of having my particular codebases.

Also, many of my personal projects are open sourced with pretty permissive licensing, so I’m not all that mad someone else has the code.
by oc1 | 2025-07-21 11:20:46+00:00
The git worktrees feature has first garnered public attention since anthropic mentioned it in its claude code good practices. Until then it was just one of these obscure git features most professionals have never heard of. Now all these agents and claude code wrappers are trying to make use of git worktrees - but in all honesty - it's overcomplicating most workflows more than being of a real use for agentic coding. The bottleneck was - for most workflows - never the ai not being able to write 10 different poc of my feature simultaneously - but the human factor - needing to carefully review what ai produced and still steering ai in the right direction. git worktrees doesn't help solve any of these problems. it just adds an unnecessary layer on top.
by Out_of_Characte | 2025-07-21 11:21:12+00:00
>That’s just throwing more probabilities at the problem

Think about protein folding and enzymes. That's all solved with probabilities and likely outcomes for the structure and the effect it has. Any replicator would already need to prove the things it is allowed to create, adding the items that it is not allowed to create is probaly needed as a safety protocol anyway.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-21 11:21:21+00:00
I don't think this is an appropriate use of "just". If io_uring doesn't work with seccomp-bpf filters today, there are many situations where you just can't use it, period.

That someone with kernel IO dev experience may be able to relatively easily add such a fetaure in the future (though I would doubt that, given that it hasn't yet been implemented apparently) doesn't make it a small problem.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-21 11:21:40+00:00
Of course, I agree with the cap. In fact, I'm surprised people could submit 40 proposals - in my country, most grant calls are capped to one proposal (since long before LLMs) and the same goes for most EU-wide calls I know. Even without LLMs, I wouldn't see the point of giving someone 40x the chances of funding just because they somehow found the time to write 40 proposals.

My comment was more about the part that says

"Aside from the cap, the policy makes clear that NIH will not consider AI-generated proposals to be the original work of applicants. “NIH will continue to employ the latest technology in detection of AI-generated content to identify AI generated applications,” the agency’s notice says. If AI use is detected after an award has been granted, NIH warns, the agency may refer the matter to the Office of Research Integrity while imposing penalties."

I think it's just unrealistic to expect that scientists won't use LLMs for grant proposals. And detection doesn't even actually work without the risk of false positives (not that there are going to be actual false positives, because everyone is going to use LLMs for this so by definition you will only have true positives and false negatives, but it's still unfair if some scientists' proposals are flagged by an AI detector and others bypass it).
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-07-21 11:22:27+00:00
There's other criticism here about the writing quality (AI generated) but it's also quite out of date content-wise.

> Start with a basic prompt >Add Chain-of-Thought reasoning >Implement self-criticism >Add format constraints >Compare the quality and reliability of results

The 'techniques' are incredibly basic and Chain of thought isn't really relevant today considering there are models with COT 'baked in' i.e. the 'thinking mode' class of models.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-21 11:22:38+00:00
This is what I thought for a long time too. I think this comes from things like Windows 3.1 which was called "three point one". In my mind it was like "slightly more than three", which makes sense under the "decimal" interpretation. I didn't really notice when things changed to schemes like semantic versioning, but started to get confused when the numbers to the right of the point got bigger than 9.

Nowadays I have taught myself to say "three dot one" instead to avoid confusion and stop my brain thinking these are numbers.
by darrenf | 2025-07-21 11:23:01+00:00
Perl specifically differentiates between/supports both floating point versions and those which are integers separated by periods (TIMTOWTDI, after all). The latter is exactly what the `v`-prefix designates, and the `version` docs explicitly warn against using that form unless there are at least 3 components:

> NOTE you can technically use a v-string or strings with a leading-v and only one decimal point (v1.2 or "v1.2"), but you will confuse both yourself and others.

Yet every example of Gentoo's in TFA has only one decimal point. One might argue they seem to have confused both themselves and others.
by roenxi | 2025-07-21 11:23:23+00:00
There appears to be a certain level of background propaganda where people keep saying that such-and-such occupation is facing a shortage of workers, but the actual evidence of that in the real world - sharply jumping salaries - rarely seems to eventuate. In a lot of cases wage rises don't even match the amount of money printing going on.

And things like being "unable to fill" a role are a red herring. They are probably fishing where they have a role in case someone with very high skills very much already in the field comes along at a moderate price. In a real shortage people pay above market rate to attract canny candidates, then hire a capable individual who is slightly under-qualified and train them up.
by MIC132 | 2025-07-21 11:24:05+00:00
This is also very noticeable in Video Games. I remember the first time I played One Step From Eden, I thought I would never be able to keep up with it's frantic pace, but the more practice and understanding I had the more the game "slowed down". To a point of course, it's still a fast game but it feels orders of magnitude slower than initially.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-21 11:24:06+00:00
> I'm nitpicking

No worries. I've tended to glaze over the Korean market so I'm glad to get some more granular info

> Azure and AWS are plenty popular

I was under the assumption that Samsung Cloud is largely a white label of AWS (sort of like Open Telekom Cloud in Germany), and much of the AWS spend can be treated as Samsung SDS. Is that correct?
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-07-21 11:24:29+00:00
That being said I would love a up to date prompt engineering guide for getting the most out of the latest models in July 2025.

There doesn't seem to be too many incantations like there were before "think step by step".

The best thing I have found to use is meta prompting i.e. make a prompt designed to create prompts, and then use that resulting prompt to make specific targeted prompts.

You can then store these as custom GPTS in chatGPT or Claude projects.
by CivBase | 2025-07-21 11:24:33+00:00
I haven't watched it recently, but here are the main takeaways I remember:

Peltier coolers are neat because they're very small and quiet - as opposed to vapor compression systems solutions. However, they are an order of magnitude less energy efficient.

Also Peltier coolers still have to obey the laws of thermodynamics, which means that to cool one side of the mechanism, you must heat the other side. In order to do any substantial cooling, you need a way to dispose of that heat on the other side. This usually involves the use of radiators and fans, which negate much of the size and noise benefits.

As a result, Peltier coolers are pretty niché. Your use case would have to require only a little bit of cooling. You'd have to need a form factor that cannot accomidate a vapor cooling solution. And you'd have to be willing to make the system very energy inefficient.
by npsomaratna | 2025-07-21 11:24:44+00:00
Wasn't this for one of the questions on the second day? Where you had to submit a series of outputs, but these were trivial to generate once you cracked the problem.

I remember getting an "aha" moment, writing a program, and then submitting (scored 100% too!). Then, I met a guy who also cracked the problem and realized that he just needed to paste the test data into a spreadsheet, do some basic sorting there, and then paste the output into a text file; no coding necessary.

I felt pretty stupid afterwards.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-21 11:24:51+00:00
At present, the tools are effectively the same. Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, etc. are basically the same CLI tools. Every so often one will introduce a new feature (e.g. MCP support), but it’s not long before the others also include it. It is easy to swap between them (and Aider) and on tasks where I want a “second opinion”, I do.

Even if they make their tooling cheaper, that’s not going to lock me in. It has to be the best model or have some killer feature. Which, again, could be usurped the next day with the rate these tools are advancing.
by Majromax | 2025-07-21 11:25:01+00:00
> The solution shouldn't be then to fill them with LLMs but strip them entirely away.

You don't need language models to identify useless processes. The problem, however, is that people tend to be more comfortable with a process that exists whose product is ignored rather than no process at all.

For example, in the case of the grants here it's easier to imagine giving money to someone with a Gantt chart – even if that chart will never really represent reality – rather than someone who says 'trust us to use the money effectively.'

For an alternative view, a lot of the information supplied in such processes isn't related to the happy path, but rather it creates a paper trail for blame when things go wrong.

> I tend to think the same about everyone freaking out about LLM misuse in education.

The difference for education is that students need to practice, so the repetition is the point. The AI might ultimately be better at writing the book report, particularly compared to a student in 6th grade, but there's few other ways to train skills of reading comprehension and analysis.
by ben_w | 2025-07-21 11:25:02+00:00
> pickling, salting

Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.

Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.

> fermenting

True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)
by AngryData | 2025-07-21 11:26:13+00:00
Well that and both government and businesses don't make a lot of amateur chemistry that easy. Many chemicals have to either be bought second hand out of someone's bulk purchase for a licensed lab, extracted out of consumer products, or bought off shady amazon dealers at massive markups with uncertain purity standards. God forbid somebody finds you doing random experiments suspicious and calls the cops or something who are going to automatically assume you are being bad or dangerous or making meth.
by cturner | 2025-07-21 11:27:10+00:00
I want to ask about the bureaucracy aspect. I have never written a science grant application, but expect that some of it comes about because the applications want to ensure good governance around the proposals. Do you agree? For the fluff that genuinely has no productive value, do you have any explanation for why it is there?

Could LLM participation be blowing holes in good-governance measures that were only weakly effective, and therefore a good thing in the long-term? Could the rise in the practice drive grants arrangements to better governance?