MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tetromino_ | 2025-07-18 22:10:28+00:00
Summary: there is a long-standing bug in Webkit which causes network connection from (probably?) any tag that sets a `rel` attribute to be non-auditable and non-blockable by client code using Webkit.

Mike Cardwell stumbled on the manifestation of this bug in Evolution (which uses Webkit for rendering html mail). His proposal was for Evolution to filter html content before passing it to Webkit for rendering. Evolution devs' counterproposal was to ask Mike to write a patch to fix the Webkit bug, so not just Evolution but all other applications built on top of Webkit benefit.

Instead of writing a patch for Webkit (or at least further investigating the Webkit bug), Mike responded by writing two blogposts denouncing Evolution devs.

Evolution devs responded by locking the bug thread and threatening to ban Mike.

TL;DR drama due to cultural difference.
by kazinator | 2025-07-18 22:10:52+00:00
Asynchrony, in this context, is an abstraction which separates the preparation and submission of a request from the collection of the result.

The abstraction makes it possible to submit multiple requests and only then begin to inquire about their results.

The abstraction allows for, but does not require, a concurrent implementation.

However, the intent behind the abstraction is that there be concurrency. The motivation is to obtain certain benefits which will not be realized without concurrency.

Some asynchronous abstractions cannot be implemented without some concurrency. Suppose the manner by which the requestor is informed about the completion of a request is not a blocking request on a completion queue, but a callback.

Now, yes, a callback can be issued in the context of the requesting thread, so everything is single-threaded. But if the requesting thread holds a non-recursive mutex, that ruse will reveal itself by causing a deadlock.

In other words, we can have an asynchronous request abstraction that positively will not work single threaded;

1 caller locks a mutex

2 caller submits request

3 caller unlocks mutex

4 completion callback occurs

If step 2 generates a callback in the same thread, then step 3 is never reached.

The implementation must use some minimal concurrency so that it has a thread waiting for 3 while allowing the requestor to reach that step.
by jayd16 | 2025-07-18 22:11:09+00:00
But why is this a novel concept? The idea of starvation is well known and you don't need parallelism for it to effect you already. What does zig actually do to solve this?

Many other languages could already use async/await in a single threaded context with an extremely dumb scheduler that never switches but no one wants that.

I'm trying to understand but I need it spelled out why this is interesting.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-18 22:11:53+00:00
Remember this is the worst AI will ever be from here on out. Models are only going to get better, faster, cheaper, more accessible and more easily deployable.

I think people need to realize that just because an AI model fails at one point, or some certain architecture has common failure modes, that billions of dollars are poured into correcting those failures and improving in every economically viable domain. Two years ago AI video looked like a garbled 140p nightmare, now it's higher quality video than all but professional production studios could make.

AI agents don't get tired. They don't need to sleep. They don't require sick days, parental leave, or PTO. They don't file lawsuits, they don't share company secrets, they don't disparage, deliberately sandbag to get extra free time, whine, burn out or go AWOL. The best AI model/employee is infinitely replicatable, and can share its knowledge with other agents perfectly and clone itself arbitrarily many times, and it doesn't have a clash of egos working with copies of itself, it just optimizes and is refit to accomplish whatever task its given.

All this means is that gradually the relative advantage of humans in any economically viable domain will predictably trend towards zero. We have to figure out now what that will mean for general human welfare, freedom and happiness, because barring extremely restrictive measures on AI development or voluntary cessation by all AI companies, AGI will arrive.
by andsoitis | 2025-07-18 22:12:00+00:00
> Honestly, at this point I trust Xi to follow through on his promises more than I do Trump - and that's sad.

Some of Xi's promises:

- Taiwan...

- (a measly) 1 million jobs in Africa[1].

- Corruption Crackdown [2]

- Modernization by 2029 [3]

- Unwavering support for Jack Ma and China's private tech bigwigs [4]

- China will stand with Southeast Asian countries in face of economic shocks [5]

- Boost coordination with Kim John Un[6]

Looking at promises is one thing. However, I would rather pay attention to what is NOT being said or what is being done. Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan, Africa...

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/9/5/chinas-xis-promis...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/china-news-xi-jinping-new-wave-corr...

[3] https://www.renewablematter.eu/en/china-third-plenum-xi-prom...

[4] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Xi-promises-Jack...

[5] https://apnews.com/article/xi-malaysia-visit-southeast-asia-...

[6] https://www.nknews.org/2024/09/xi-promises-to-boost-coordina...
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 22:12:03+00:00
Ideal for whom?

It's still not ideal for downstream proprietary developers. The requirement to provide some means to relink the project is extra headache that can be avoided by using permissive dependencies, reinforcing the point of the article.

Also, in theory, I can imagine a situation where a proprierary developer strongly needs to make a change, and for some reason is strongly against open-sourcing it, and is strongly law-abiding. And thus, a proprietary rewrite is born. Sometimes, instead of a complete rewrite, that's going to be a fork of a permissive project, boosting its usage and reinforcing the point of the article.

For library authors, LGPL/MPL is often a good tradeoff, indeed. You still get all the modifications back, while also having more users then you would have with GPL. Although, as seen in this thread, enabling proprieraty dependents is actually a downside for some authors, due to their beliefs.

To me, it looks like LGPL/MPL become irrelevant in the "longer" run too.

---

I agree with you regarding the "tipping point". There's nothing we can do about this. In a similar vein, when considering a massive investment into a GPL project, they are going to conclude that they are better off invesing a similar amount into a proprietary rewrite and keeping the added value to themselves.
by fragmede | 2025-07-18 22:12:06+00:00
it's not the beginning nor is it the end. To go back to the story, you said

> If I had to guess, I’d bet my money on the people in power liking and using the hard charging stuff while loathing the touchy feely stuff.

that some people liked the hard charging stuff and were white, and that some people liked the touchy feely stuff and who just so coincidentally some of them happened to be dark skinned, in an era that was racist to the point of having anti-miscegenation laws, isn't some minor coincidence.

> the “to” doesn’t matter as long as the “from” ain’t there.

The "to" matters because after you've gotten high you're there, but where's there? it's that the one where your kids are listening to you? where your wife never left, where your boyfriend wasn't beating you? In that "to", how is life?
by hagbard_c | 2025-07-18 22:12:25+00:00
After having read this paper I'm busy working on the replication of String Theory with a plate of Spaghetti, a packet of instant Ramen noodles and a pair of Octopuses. I would have used a single octopus but those 8 arms don't cover the 12 dimensions in String Theory. Technically a single squid might suffice - it has 8 arms, 2 tentacles and 2 fins which makes 12 - but that wouldn't be fair to the dimensions which get stuck with the fins while others get to walk away with those tentacles.
by kazinator | 2025-07-18 22:13:43+00:00
The definition of asynchrony is bad. It's possible for asynchronous requests to guarantee ordering, such that if a thread makes two requests A and B in that order, asynchronously, they will happen in that order.

Asynchrony means that the requesting agent is not blocked while submitting a request in order to wait for the result of that request.

Asynchronous abstractions may provide a synchronous way wait for the asynchronously submitted result.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-07-18 22:13:46+00:00
During WW 2, the entire economy didn't have things like a cold chain, thousands of gas stations, a JIT food supply, half the country working white collar jobs, most heating relying on electricity to work, administration going mostly online, people having to commute 30 minutes away on average, electronic payment being the norm, most of the economy running on something virtual and a super dependence on the outside world for pretty much everything.

It's not about Google, it's about what critical part of our system now relies on Google to function.

Having lived in Africa, I can live in pretty minimalist conditions.

I don't think the EU is ready for them, though.
by sothatsit | 2025-07-18 22:13:47+00:00
Here is the planning prompt, which I would usually place in .claude/commands/plan.md: https://gist.github.com/Sothatsit/c9fcbcb50445ebb6f367b0a6ca...

The implement prompt doesn't seem to matter as much: https://gist.github.com/Sothatsit/bdf2cf4ed7c319e2932a5d2d8d...

Creating these was basically just a workflow of writing out a workflow myself, getting Opus to refine it, then back to me, then back to Opus until it was something I was happy with. There is probably a lot more refining you could do with it, but it works pretty well as it is right now.

I then have wrapper scripts that invoke these using claude -p in a container, but those are pretty specific to my codebase.
by okanat | 2025-07-18 22:14:40+00:00
RPi doesn't exist due to Broadcom. It exists despite Broadcom.

Using RPis can be a huge PITA, if you'd like to do something a bit more complex with the hardware. HDMI, the video decoders are all behind closed doors with blobs on top of blobs and NDAs.

RPi SoCs are some of the weirdest out there. It boots from the GPU ffs.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-07-18 22:14:40+00:00
TS was fairly scarce in those times - let alone on PCs. I wonder when the first general-purpose time-share system was available ... outside of mainframes? I know UofM's MECC had MECC Timesharing System (MTS) up on a Cyber73 in 1977 ; before that, their SUMITS had to make do with batch-processing on a FunnyVac.
by BearOso | 2025-07-18 22:15:01+00:00
And yay warns you before anything happens and prompts you to review the PKGBUILD files and any patches for this very reason. So there are at least two "are you sure?" confirmations needed before even building anything.

This is a situation where you have to go out of your way and be naive to be affected. You simply can't protect the user from everything.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-07-18 22:15:13+00:00
It's not an unfair argument to say the US is a global superpower with questionable intent.

But it's not hard to prefer Pax Americana to WW3.

Super power gonna super power. Wether it is Romans/Arabs/British/US or maybe future China.

None of them play nice and there's generally always one. I'd prefer to live in the peak power of these countries over the total chaos in between their collapse. The entire world has gotten insanely rich and healthy under US dominance I don't think wanting that to continue is an immoral desire.

History will remember the US as the empire to bring about the modern era much like the british brought about industrialization and global trade.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-18 22:15:30+00:00
> So wait, is the word they mean by asynchrony actually the word "dependency"?

No, the definition provided for asynchrony is:

>> Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.

Which is not dependence, but rather independence. Asynchronous, in their definition, is concurrent with no need for synchronization or coordination between the tasks. The contrasted example which is still concurrent but not asynchronous is the client and server one, where the order matters (start the server after the client, or terminate the server before the client starts, and it won't work correctly).
by deepsun | 2025-07-18 22:15:32+00:00
Hard disagree.

Few points I can easily remember:

1. Navigating the code, e.g easily see all the callers, navigate up/down the call tree requires static code analysis. Super handy while reading someone's else code, which is like 90% on large projects.

2. Quick refactorings. Often times I see people discuss in lengths what would/could be instead of just go and try it out quickly, seeing all the pros and cons. Many times I proven myself wrong by trying it out and seeing pitfalls I didn't see earlier.

3. Warnings: so many real bugs could've been prevented if developers had seen (or cared about) to IDE showing a warning. Many PR review suggestions are detectable by a proper IDE without wasting reviewer's time.

4. Hotkeys (what the parent comment was talking about) -- speeds up all of that, especially refactorings, freeing dev's brain for thinking of architecture and other problems.

I can go on an on. Sometimes it feels like 50%+ of AI usage for coding is to free up fingers, not knowing that they were already mostly free by using static analysis features/hotkeys.
by dbspin | 2025-07-18 22:16:11+00:00
I get 120GB a month 'fair use' on my 20 euro a month plan here in Ireland. If I exceed that, my speed is slowed down, but internet continues to work. In other words, its not something I need to think about. These kinds of plans seem to be ubiquitous everywhere in the world now - with the exception of the USA, Canada and Australia / New Zealand.
Who Hates YouTube?
by thoth001 | 2025-07-18 22:16:11+00:00
This platform just has one way in and its down.

The interface sucks. You open the app and boom there is one ad. When you open a video, boom 2 other ads. Then you scroll to see the comments, another ad. They are forcing the short format videos and when you search for anything now all you got is this thing. If i wanted to watch 30s videos I woudn't be on youtube, I would be on other platform.

Who more else agrees? Leve on the comments the things that irritates you the most on it, features that would with it add and how you would fix.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-18 22:16:42+00:00
I'm sorry this is a low brow comment but this is the dumbest thing you can do in this space:

> Unit (thread in CUDA, invocation in Vulkan/Wgpu): the smallest execution entity performing computations.

> Plane (warp in CUDA, subgroup in Vulkan/Wgpu): a group of (typically 32) units executing in lockstep and able to share data efficiently through registers.

> Cube (thread block in CUDA, workgroup in Vulkan/Wgpu): a group of units that execute on the same SM, sharing memory and able to synchronize

It's already bad enough that the vendors themselves insisted on different names but why in the bejesus would you rename these concepts and diverge from literally all existing naming conventions when you're providing middleware. Ie when using your tool I'm still going to reference NVIDIA's or AMD's docs to understand how the hardware actually works. Like do you really think otherwise - that your thing is gonna be end of the line???

FYI the word warp isn't random techno babble but is actually a very clever pun that actually fits very well conceptually:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_and_weft
by cpncrunch | 2025-07-18 22:17:11+00:00
Seems like it might be overhyped. Here is the study

https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article-abstract/do...

Full text is paywalled, and no mention in abstract of false positive rate in control group. Has this test actually been independently verified? No mention of that important fact in the press release.
by 827a | 2025-07-18 22:17:30+00:00
IMO: The people who are obsessed with Claude Code are the people who weren't really engineers to begin with. For them, any level of productivity is "extremely impressive" and "going to kill engineering jobs" because they never really understood what software engineers do, and had no sense of what the demarcations on the scale of productivity even should be.

The reason why they like Claude Code specifically over Cursor isn't because they were fans of terminal windows; on the contrary, its because CC is simpler. Cursor is complicated, and its interface communicates to the user that eventually you might be grabbing the wheel. Of course, experienced engineers want to grab the wheel; working together with the AI toward some goal. But these CC-stans don't. All that extra stuff in the UI scares them, because they wouldn't know what to do with it if they had to do something with it.

Its this particular kind of person that's also all over /r/ClaudeAI or /r/Cursor complaining about rate limits. If you've ever used these products, you'd realize very quickly: The only way you're hitting rate limits so quickly on the paid plans is if the only code that's being outputted is from the AI, nonstop, for eight hours a day, using only the most expensive and intelligent models. The only people who do this are the people who have no brain of their own to contribute to the process. Most CC/Cursor users don't hit rate limits, because they're working with the AI, like a tool, not managing it like a direct report.
by overgard | 2025-07-18 22:17:38+00:00
Ok, but who benefits from these efficiencies? Hint: not the people losing their jobs. The main people that stand to benefit from this don't even need to work.

Producing things cheaper sounds great, but just because its produced cheaper doesn't mean it is cheaper for people to buy.

And it doesn't matter if things are cheap if a massive number of people don't have incomes at all (or even a reasonable way to find an income - what exactly are white collar professionals supposed to do when their profession is automated away, if all the other professions are also being automated away?)

Sidenote btw, but I do think it's funny that the investor class doesn't think AI will come for their role..

To me the silver lining is that I don't think most of this comes to pass, because I don't think current approaches to AGI are good enough. But it sure shows some massive structural issues we will eventually face
by culi | 2025-07-18 22:17:41+00:00
It seems like this reversion is being paired with changes to 41(d)(1)(A) and 280C(c)(1)

> The domestic research or experimental expenditures . . . otherwise taken into account as a deduction or charged to capital account under this chapter shall be reduced by the amount of the credit allowed under section 41(a). Read in conjunction with Section 41(d)(1)(A), discussed above, it seems that all taxpayers claiming a research tax credit will necessarily have costs which are treated under Section 174A and thus subject to the reduction specified under amended Section 280C(c)(1).

> To our knowledge, many taxpayers have interpreted this language to mean that there is a reduction under 280C(c)(1) only to the extent the research credit exceeds the amortization allowed under Section 174, generally 10% in the year the expense is incurred under the applicable half-year convention. In that case, there would typically be little or no reduction to deductions and capitalized amounts, and correspondingly no reason to elect a reduced credit in lieu of a nonexistent or minimal reduction.

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/07/new-section-174a-re...

TL;DR: I don't think we're out of the woods yet
by trhway | 2025-07-18 22:18:00+00:00
Interesting point there:

"The other problem is with viral vector based gene therapy is you can’t have it again. You develop antibodies which prevent it from working again, and it could cause a dangerous immune response."

Just wondering - would it make sense to immune-suppress the patient for a short period of administering of the viral-based therapy.

And as they describe that most gene therapies affect only extra-nuclear DNA, and thus have no permanent effect, wouldn't mRNA work better then in such cases - naturally the tech wasn't there 10+ years ago, yet today thanks to COVID it is here.

Edit (due to posting rate limit) in response to comment below:

I was thinking about mRNA coding dystrophin like it was coding COVID protein - should be cheap and easy (well, for some definition of easy in that context) doable, and it would be like a weekly self-injection - no toxicity, etc. Of course fixing the issue once for life would be better, once such cure becomes available, yet for now it would be similar like diabetics have with insulin - hassle for sure, yet it works.
by Ekaros | 2025-07-18 22:18:05+00:00
Have not checked GoG galaxy lately, but maybe it is my stockholm syndrome. But other stores do not really feel better. That is Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox... Haven't checked EA lately, but that was also a mess flipping between Origin and EA something...

Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should be solved issue. But what do I know...
by ivape | 2025-07-18 22:18:43+00:00
You think the world does a good job educating people? I’m very serious about making that wholesale change. Many are functionally illiterate and never reach sophisticated academic levels. Many don’t even have parents at home that are qualified to supplement them. Many have teachers who absolutely will never be able to extract their potential. Many are in environments where our current education paradigms will never be able to overcome. LLMs will save a generation of kids.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-18 22:19:00+00:00
I'd count pure one-to-one parallelism as a form of concurrency that doesn't involve any yielding. But otherwise, I agree that all forms of non-parallel concurrency have to be yielding execution at some cadence, even if it's at the instruction level. (E.g., in CUDA, diverging threads in a warp will interleave execution of their instructions, in case one branch tries blocking on the other.)
by bhaney | 2025-07-18 22:19:01+00:00
What makes it so much faster? Were there a few particular big wins or is it just tons of small optimizations?

If it's faster, fully API compatible, and maintains all the same guarantees, why isn't the implementation being upstreamed to crypto/rand?

Edit: Looked at the code. It's a little read-ahead cache wrapped around crypto/rand. Good idea! I can't help but wonder if this actually does have some security implications, since rand data is going to be sitting around in process memory potentially long before it's actually requested.
by bri3d | 2025-07-18 22:19:33+00:00
This reminds me a lot of the PSP Pandora's Battery: a special factory "boot from external flash" system with exploitable vulnerabilities - on PSP, the special Pandora's Battery "JigKick" serial number 0xFFFFFFFF or the factory battery challenge/response "Baryon Sweeper" on newer consoles, followed by a rather complicated exploit in the "ipl.bin" signature checking process on the external hardware. On the Wii U, the "unstable power" battery jig followed by a simple overflow in SDBoot1.

https://www.psdevwiki.com/psp/Pandora

https://github.com/khubik2/pysweeper
by crop_rotation | 2025-07-18 22:20:16+00:00
> Why is it that so many people are completely obsessed with replacing all developers and any other white-collar job?

> They seem to be totally convinced that this will happen.

The two groups of people are not same. I for example belong to the 2nd but not the 1st. If you have used the current gen LLM coding tools you will realize they have gotten they are scary good.