MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-07-04 17:08:58+00:00
I often starts that way, yes. And then you end up accreting more and more.

I usually tell people that if they don't want something on-prem, then at least pick a cheaper provider.

But as long as it's a VM and you don't build in reliance on other AWS services, at least you can move off it as you scale. The real problem comes when you start depending on a single cloud.

Not only do you lose the ability to do an easy move, but you also lose almost all negotiating leverage as your bill increases.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-04 17:09:04+00:00
I’ve witnessed more people having breakdowns in this wonderfully productive world our glorious tech leaders are creating from overwork than at any other time in my career. And they’re all using AI extensively and are smart people. It turns out laying off team after team still leaves a lot of work to do and they’re using constant threats to keep people working endless nights and weekends to up the pieces from the endless chaos they are causing. Their calculations for how productive AI makes people is completely wrong.

Tech just feels sinister right now and without any ounce of shame or self reflection.
by corimaith | 2025-07-04 17:09:14+00:00
>and for thousands of years it has been at least widely believed that devoting yourself to specialization runs counter to those goals.

Well no, civilizations like the Maori are the exception, not the norm. Rigid class roles and specialization have featured prominently in essentially every Eurasian civilization from Egypt to Han China, which held the bulk of humanity and uts developments. Nor did questions of individual happiness matter, what concerned people at the times were questions of martial duty or religious worship.
by sevensor | 2025-07-04 17:09:44+00:00
> The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water;

Composition is part of it, but it isn’t the whole story. A microwave oven is a resonant cavity. There are standing electromagnetic waves in there, in several different modes. They have peaks and nulls. That’s why many microwaves have a rotating plate. It physically moves the food relative to the standing waves.
by bytefire | 2025-07-04 17:09:53+00:00
Main problem with regular (forward-only time) debugging is a state -- memory, CPU, cache etc -- which is contributed to the bug but is completely lost. With time travel debugging that can be saved which is great but now you have a bunch of data that you need to sift through as you trace the bug. Seems like AI is the right tool to save you this drudgery and get to the root cause sooner (or let AI work on it while you do other things in parallel).

This is new. Something that couldn't have been possible without either of time travel debugging or latest AI tech (MCP, code LLMs).

It will be interesting to know what challenges came up in nudging the model to work better with time travel debug data, since this data is novel and the models today might not be well trained for making use of it.
by colinmilhaupt | 2025-07-04 17:10:07+00:00
Thanks for sharing! This aligns with a workflow I've been converging on incorporating traceability and transparency into LLM-augmented workflows[1]. One of the big benefits I've realized is sharing and committing prompts gives significantly more insight into the original problem set out to be solved by the developer, and then it additionally shows how it morphed over time or what new challenges arose. Cool project!

[1]https://colinmilhaupt.com/posts/responsible-llm-use/
by xyst | 2025-07-04 17:10:10+00:00
It was enabled by doctors but they were deceived by Purdue Pharma and Sackler family. They also deceived the (understaffed) FDA, paid off researchers to get their exact wording approved. Purdue used their wealth and influence to launch a nationwide campaign and lobbyist group advocating that mistreatment/mismanagement of patient pain will lead to litigation.

Those stupid pain face charts you see at hospitals, physician offices. Purdue marketing, nothing else.

Everybody is shitty here. This is what happens when a market has loose regulations.
by btown | 2025-07-04 17:10:25+00:00
Setting aside the choice of LLM, the constraint that the LLM must maintain a world-model-as-knowledge-graph solely by reading and re-reading its own chat history seems to be a less interesting experiment than providing it with tools that let it develop that world model explicitly?

On page 5, Figure 1, the authors create a hand-written diagram showing the relationship between objects as a graph showing the directionality of edges in 3D space. To me, this implies that you could supply your LLM with a set of tools like getObjectsInGraph, updateGraphRelatingObjectPair, findObjectsRelativeToObject, describePathBetweenObjectsByName... and allow it to maintain that diagram as a structured DAG, and continually ask the game engine questions that let it update that graph in an agentic way. My prediction would be that they'd recreate that diagram, and enable goal seeking, with high fidelity.

Asking an LLM to work without being able to "visualize" and "touch" its environment in its "mind's eye" is tying a hand behind its back. But I'm bullish that we'll find increasingly better ways of adapting 3D/4D world models into textual tools in a way that rapidly changes the possibilities of what LLMs can do.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-04 17:10:39+00:00
I don't think it's worth it to "No True Scotsman" this, but there are plenty of people who go by FIRE principles, which are generally to live below your means so you can be more financially independent later (which is exactly what OP was focusing on), without actually retiring completely. In fact, most people don't retire completely because they find they get bored as hell.
by thePhytochemist | 2025-07-04 17:11:35+00:00
Thanks for posting this, such a nice story and writeup!

Where I live in Vancouver the coyotes have been very noticeable this year. I love to hang out with them in the park and garden, and hear them howl with the cop cars at night. They are not pets though - I always keep my distance and keep aware of the possibility that they might sneak up on me.

I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog. I worry about her but there are many fences, she is smart as well as a good climber. There are many hazards in the city that don't have the positive sides that coyotes do, and I think it's important that we learn to live with them and honour what they bring to our lives. That includes rat control, which we rather need here.
by dralley | 2025-07-04 17:12:43+00:00
I donate to Kent's patreon and I'm very enthusiastic about bcachefs.

However, Kent, if you read this: please just settle down and follow the rules. Quit deliberately antagonizing Linus. The constant drama is incredibly offputting. Don't jeopardize the entire future of bcachefs over the silliest and most temporary concerns.

If you absolutely must argue about some rule or other, then make that argument without having your opening move be to blatantly violate them and then complain when people call you out.

You were the one who wanted into the kernel despite many suggestions that it was too early. That comes with tradeoffs. You need to figure out how to live with that, at least for a year or two. Stop making your self-imposed problems everyone else's problems.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-07-04 17:13:04+00:00
How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-07-04 17:13:06+00:00
I have had near-debilitating non-GI physical symptoms when it was time to leave a job in the past. I might just be bad at responding to those before it gets to be a five alarm fire.

Worth mentioning is I got the same symptoms (tendinitis) a few months prior to this, but went to PT and got them resolved. Bodies/minds are fun!
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-04 17:13:18+00:00
My perspective? I’m 51 years old and empty nester, retired spouse and we travel - a lot. Including extended stays away from home both domestically and internationally.

If you haven’t been reading, many countries in Europe aren’t that friendly to immigrants outside of the EU either and isn’t France still trying to ban Muslim women from wearing Burkinis in public pools? Don’t pretend that most countries in the EU are liberal welcoming paradises free of both race and religious discrimination.

As far as H1B visa holders, I can hold two thoughts at once. The H1B Visa system is all about suppressing wages and you can’t tell me that companies like Amazon (former AWS employee) couldn’t find qualified Americans. But at the same time not begrudge anyone that was hired under the H1B system.

My personal anecdote is that when I saw Amazon starting to Amazon and put me “on focus”, I didn’t break a sweat, didn’t cancel any vacation plans and played the game just long enough to get my next vest and get my “accept $40K+ severance and leave immediately or over work yourself and still get fired with 1/3 the severance.”

Of course I accepted the $40k and didn’t even let my manager complete their sentence about what I could do to stay.

I saw some coworkers here on H1B that busted their ass and let AWS treat them any kind of way because no matter how much they had saved, the clock started ticking once they lost their jobs.

And what is the niche of the niche that wants to work in tech in non profits or academia?
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-04 17:13:27+00:00
I’d be fine in the water near an orca in the wild as long as there aren’t any seals around. There is one alleged documented attack by non-captive orcas on humans and that guy claims he was near seals at the time.

I’d probably be nervous if I was sailing on the Atlantic Iberian coast and saw orcas, they’ve been ramming and pushing rudders and fucking around with sailboats, no thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_orca_attacks
by alganet | 2025-07-04 17:14:06+00:00
I think indie games could be a really good use case for coding AIs. Low stakes, fun-oriented, sounds like a match.

The first commit[0] seems to have a lot of code, but no `PROMPTS.md` yet.

For example, `EnergySystem.ts` is already present on this first commit, but later appears in the `PROMPTS.md` in a way that suggests it was made from scratch by the AI.

Can you elaborate a bit more on this part of the repository history?

[0]: https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/commit/...
by cb321 | 2025-07-04 17:14:24+00:00
This is not to disagree, but to agree adding some detail... :-)

Part of the Java rise was C/C++ being error prone and syntax similarity with such, but this was surely intermingled with a full scale marketing assault by Sun Microsystems who at the time had big multi-socket SMP servers they wanted to sell with Solaris/etc. and part of that was the Solaris/Java threading. Really for a decade or two prior to that the focus was on true MMU-based hardware-enforced isolation with OS kernel clean-up (more like CHERI these days) not the compiler-enforced stuff like Rust does.

I think you could have something more ergonomic than Perl/Python ever was and as practically fast as C/Rust with Nim (https://nim-lang.org/). E.g., I just copied that guy's benchmark with a Nim stdlib std/cgi and got over 275M CGI/day to localhost on a 2016 CPU doing only 2 requesters & 2 http server threads. With some nice DSL easily written if you don't like any current ones you could get the "coding overhead" down to a tiny footprint. In fairness I did zero SQLite whatever, but also he was using a computer over 4x bigger and probably a GHz faster with some IPC lift as well. So, IF you had the network bandwidth (hint - usually you don't!), you could probably support billions of hits/day off a single server.

To head off some lazy complaints, GC is just not an issue with a single threaded Nim program whose lifetime is hoped/expected to be short anyway. In many cases (just as with CLI utilities!) you could probably just let the OS reap memory, but, of course, it always "all depends" on a lot of context. Nim does reference counting anyway whereas most "fighting the GC" is actually fighting a "separate GC thread" (Java again, Go, D, etc.) trashing CPU caches or consuming DIMM bandwidth and so on. For this use, you probably would care more about a statically linked binary so you don't pay ld.so shared library set up overhead on every `exec`.
by wk_end | 2025-07-04 17:15:34+00:00
Verilog?

...just kidding (maybe).

Assuming we're talking about a pure interpreter, pretty much anything that makes it straightforward to work with bytes and/or arrays is going to work fine. I probably wouldn't recommend Haskell, just because most operations are going to involve imperatively mutating the state of the machine, so pure FP won't win you much.

The basic process of interpretation is just: "read an opcode, then dispatch on it". You'll probably have some memory address space to maintain. And that's kind of it? Most languages can do that fine. So your preference should be based on just about everything else: how comfortable are you using it, how much do you like its abilities to interface with your host platform, how much do you like type checking, and so on.
Ask HN: What codebase would you like to see rewritten, updated, or modernized?
by globnomulous | 2025-07-04 17:16:04+00:00
Inspired by this phenomenal write-up of the author's experience in rewriting tmux[1], I'd like to hear from HN: what codebases would benefit from a similar treatment? Or what codbases would you like to see get the 'star' treatment in some way or another -- an upgraded tech stack, modernization, or a rewrite in another language, or in a different idiom/pattern, that you think would be better suited to the job it does?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455787
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-07-04 17:17:02+00:00
The reason I switched to Samsung is because I had an Apple device and then a Google device reach the end of their usefulness at the two year mark. The 3 Samsung phones I've had since then have lasted to the 4 year mark and I was able to replace them on my timeline, not the device's.

The S20+ I'm typing this on is 4.5 years old and feels as functional as the day I got it, it does not feel slow at all and if the battery life has lessened I haven't noticed.
by tristan957 | 2025-07-04 17:17:07+00:00
From the abstract of the article:

> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.

I don't understand how to marry the point you're trying to make to this. Cats are an invasive species to most small animals, and should be kept from accessing them.

In addition to the havoc they wreak on local small animal populations, outdoor cats live shorter lives than their indoor counterparts.

https://www.vetinfo.com/indoor-outdoor-cat-life-expectancy.h...
by dixong | 2025-07-04 17:17:12+00:00
Seems like the majority of arguments against the articles premise are the inability to sacrifice exorbitant living standards. I left big tech in 2022 and much happier living on a tiny fraction. It's called sacrifice. I personally don't understand why people need so much money. A family of 3 can easily live on $150k even in a HCOL area.
by filleduchaos | 2025-07-04 17:17:27+00:00
I quite frankly disagree. From personal experience I don't think there's any mainstream programming language that in itself teaches you anything much about emulating systems like the Game Boy or NES - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that none of them even at least yield elegant and accurate implementations.

People write "production-grade" emulators in C because it's fast, not because it's uniquely suited to the domain as a language.
by zabzonk | 2025-07-04 17:18:06+00:00
I think you probably have to be dead (apart from the current monarch) for this, so much as I love Sir David (and wish him to carry on), I guess it has to be the late and much lamented Sir Terry.

Though if we want to honour Sir David, perhaps a break with tradition and have some cockroaches crawling in bat shit? I'm sure he would like that.

sorry i can't find david looking ecstatic, up to his groin in bat guano. not with david, but pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Pby_XgXF0EI
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-04 17:19:13+00:00
> zig team/community has been aggressively marketing this language

...I think the only thing that's aggressively marketed is that the Zig team isn't afraid of big and controversial breaking changes ;) If you can't handle that, then Zig currently isn't right for you, it's as simple as that.

> They could, for example, have versioned stdlib and then maybe all I need to is pin my stdlib version.

That really only makes sense for after 1.0, and even after that only for stdlib APIs that are out of the experimental phase.

But post 1.x some sort of migration support for breaking changes would indeed be much more useful than trying to prevent breaking changes at all cost.

> and I am reminded again why I would never choose this language.

...then why even write such a lengthy comment? Just ignore Zig and move on... it's not like there's plenty of other languages which might better fit your taste.
by mikestew | 2025-07-04 17:19:30+00:00
I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog.

I live near a trail which also serves as a wildlife corridor, including coyotes that we regularly see on our dog walks. Years ago, we had a feral cat that we would feed and care for (including neutering). He remained outside because he refused to even be brought inside, let alone live with us. This guy was huge, and looked like he had won his share of fights with the scars to prove it. If a cat would survive in the wild, it would be this guy. But even he wasn’t tough enough to hold off (what I assume were) coyotes forever, and one day he just quit coming around.

After that I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood.

(And for context, we aren't out in the boonies; this is within the city limits of Redmond, WA, where the local elementary gets locked down about once a year because mama bear and her cubs showed up off that same trail.)
by Neywiny | 2025-07-04 17:19:35+00:00
I do wish sometimes they used the bigger micro, though. We have some power supplies that technically have an Ethernet interface. But when using it, even for SCPI over TCP (forget about the virtual front panel that takes a minute to update), it lags so bad the output enable button needs a few tries to toggle. I should practice yanking the positive wire for an emergency
by thePhytochemist | 2025-07-04 17:19:42+00:00
There have been some hilarious and unfortunate disasters using introduced populations for pest control. But coyotes are not introduced. They are native to the area which means there are many checks and balances in place.

Rat control is not just a nice bonus option to reduce an irritation - we need to take it seriously in light of the Black Death. The fact of the matter is I see people having trouble with rat control in my area and we could use help to manage something that is potentially a lot more dangerous than coyotes.
by cowmoo728 | 2025-07-04 17:19:45+00:00
I've seen this exact pair of coyotes three times now. I have a few blurry photos of them. They're about the size of my dog, who is roughly 60 pounds, so they are sizable and could hunt a small dog or child. However, they're very cautious around people still, and appear well fed. The wildlife in central park is highly adapted to the presence of people and stays away, except to dig through the park trash.
by LexiMax | 2025-07-04 17:19:49+00:00
We're not talking about Python 2 here. This is a pre-1.0 language. As an occasional dabbler in the language, I implicitly understand this to mean that there will be breaking changes, and I have made peace with that.

Looking over the changes, they seem wise and well justified. Fixing my old codebases will be annoying, but I don't mind the annoyance if a better language comes out the other end.
by josephcsible | 2025-07-04 17:19:53+00:00
You are correct. Actual security needs to be inherently part of the application; you can't get it just by slapping something in front of it. And the way most WAFs work is basically just a fancier version of what https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Injection_Rejection does, which is horrifically bad on sites where people try to discuss HTML or SQL.
by apgwoz | 2025-07-04 17:20:11+00:00
> I see that bootstrapping involves some bizarre wasm hack instead of the tried and true bootstrapping approach of writing a simple first pass compiler in c (or some other language) and I am reminded again why I would never choose this language.

The hack allows the compiler to be maintained in Zig, compiled to WASM (a supported backend), and then bootstrapped with only a wasm interpreter… and one is provided in a single C file (I believe… but haven’t looked in a while).

This is a much nicer situation than most other bootstrap scenarios. All the SMLs, for instance, require you to have a whole other SML! MoscowML bootstraps with an included Caml interpreter… but it’s not sufficient to compile MLton.
by charcircuit | 2025-07-04 17:20:43+00:00
"slight benefit"? Having a working system after upgrading your kernel is not just a slight benefit. It's table stakes. Especially for something critical like a filesystem it should never break.

>negative effects on the rest of the kernel

Needing to design and support an API is not purely negative for kernel developers. It also gives a change to have a proper interface for drivers to use and follow. Take a look at the Rust for Linux which keeps running into undocumented APIs that make little sense and are just whatever <insert most popular driver> does.
by benreesman | 2025-07-04 17:20:49+00:00
Like I said, I'm broadly sympathetic to your view. I was just pointing out that you led with "things that exist to make money..." and while the point you raise is true (or often true), its kind of an unsolved problem.

On halting monopolies I would vote and canvas for you if you ran on it.

I agree about the appeal of decentralization, I just don't know how to make it happen in a world where centralized control is enforced by MQ-9 Reaper drones with sole executive discretion on "kill or capture" of anyone and decentralization is considered a national security priority.

An example would be the people who argue that inherently sovereign and anonymous money would liberate people. What it would do is get you shot for fucking with the Mint.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-07-04 17:21:03+00:00
For what it's worth, the inbuilt HTML5 validation that implementw input type=email does have a regex in the spec.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#email-state-(type=email)

/^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&'*+\/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?)*$/

But it is true that you can implement it with a FSM(which is what firefox does). Webkit uses a regex as well I think.