MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryanrasti | 2025-07-08 07:05:49+00:00
Thanks for compiling this. As a CTO running Elixir for 3 years (1 year of MVP deployed in production), my take is that while the BEAM's fundamentals are incredible, the ecosystem and DX have major trade-offs depending on the application.

The Good Parts:

1. The BEAM's fault tolerance is real and it "just works."

2. The talent pool is a huge win—the engineers we've hired have been outstanding.

3. Tools like Oban and remote iex were absolute lifesavers for us.

Where We Struggled:

1. Ecosystem: Depth over Breadth. Phoenix, Ecto, and Oban are fantastic, but we often hit walls on things that would be trivial in other ecosystems, like a good Shopify library, forcing us to build our own.

2. The Full-Stack Problem: LiveView wasn't enough for our complex UI. So we had to adopt React anyway, which put us in a polyglot stack where, all things equal, a full-stack JS framework would have been simpler.

3. Developer Experience. This might be the biggest friction point. Compared to the instant feedback of Vite/TypeScript, Elixir felt slow. Autocomplete was inconsistent, and a 15-second recompile/test cycle on our large codebase killed momentum.

4. Deployment & DevOps: Elixir's clustering forced us into a more complex deployment (managing VMs with NixOS) because we couldn't use simpler container platforms like Cloud Run (we had to migrate off of fly.io due to its managed Postgres immaturity and observed general instability).

(Also one quick correction: hot code upgrades aren't practically supported by modern Elixir tooling, so it’s tough to count as a benefit.)

I happened on this post that nails many of the areas for improvement that have also been painful for us: https://boredhacking.com/areas-of-improvement-for-elixir/

Ultimately, my take is that Elixir is a killer tool for specific problems, but for our full-stack app, it's not nearly as one-sided. I'm curious to hear if other teams have run into the same trade-offs: do you see them as fundamental issues or just a matter of ecosystem maturity? And if the latter, how are these improvements getting prioritized?
by vntok | 2025-07-08 07:05:51+00:00
That is really not how the insurance seller's business model works.

Think about it this way: on a given year, they are collecting "Sales" amount of money from their pool of customers. For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.

So it's a bit like a Ponzi scheme, whereby you can benefit as a customer if you pay year 1 and get a claim during year 1 or 2 for example, and the insurer can benefit too if many customers pay "a year in advance" (money that can be invested) before having their claims fall on years 2 or 3 (or never).
by xvedejas | 2025-07-08 07:06:01+00:00
Right now the derive macro requires `T` be `Clone`, but what we actually want to require is only that each field is clone, including those that are generic over `T`. eg `Arc<T>` is `Clone` even though `T` isn't, so the correct restriction would be to require `Arc<T>: Clone` instead of the status quo which requires `T: Clone`
by kazinator | 2025-07-08 07:06:36+00:00
If two units are combined into one, and have some shared components, both are out if there is a fault in the shared components. Even if the fault affects only one unit, both have to be powered down for the repair and are unavailable. If the repair requires the unit being hauled away, you lose use of both over the entire time (maybe they can supply a loaner).

Some TVs were big, but small TVs existed also. E.g search for 1948 Sentinel 7" TV. Actually, it took a while for wide fan-out CRT's to be developed for the really large CRT screens. Early CRT's were long and narrow, like the tubes in oscilloscopes.

If we combine two TV boxes into one, how much weight do we save? A rectangular box has 6 faces. We lose only one face from each box to combine them together, and two legs (though the combination might need slightly bigger legs). If there are some shared power supply components that cuts weight; perhaps the power transformer and whatnot do not have to be 2X heavier.

Say the result is 1.8 times as heavy as two individual units with the same picture tube size. That's still a 1.8x heavier lift you cannot split into two lifts and two trips when moving. There is a reason why moving boxes are only so and so large.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-08 07:07:11+00:00
I refuse to accept these criticisms of Jurassic Park!

That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.

I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.

But also,

"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”

What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.

You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WROrnCt8NF4

If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.

It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.

But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
by jnaina | 2025-07-08 07:08:30+00:00
Have 2 Apple ][e, Lisa, Apple NeXT Cube, Fat Mac 512K, Mac IIci, Mac LC and an Apple Xserve, as part of my Apple collection. Along with Sinclair ZX81 and an Atari 800. Many decades of collecting and maintaining them. Unfortunately kids are not interested in inheriting them after I'm gone, even as I have shared with the some of the great origin stories behind some of these machines. They don't see the value. Their logic is that they can always spin up an emulator and try the software, instead of keeping these old dinosaurs around.
by pabs3 | 2025-07-08 07:08:56+00:00
A response from the SIMD.info folks:

Yeah, the plan is to get all SIMD engines there, RVV is the hardest though (20k intrinsics). Currently we're doing IBM Z, which should be done probably within the month? It still needs some work, and progress is slow because we're just using our own funds. Plan is IBM Z (currently worked on), Loongson LSX/LASX, MIPS MSA, ARM SVE/SVE2 and finally RVV 1.0. LSX/LASX and MSA are very easy. Ideally, I'd like to open source everything, but I can't just now, as I would just hand over all the data to big players like OpenAI. Once I manage to ensure adequate funding, we're going to open source the data (SIMD.info) and probably the model itself (SIMD.ai).
by reify | 2025-07-08 07:09:29+00:00
says another shill.

Google Veo 3 fails, week 3 — fail harder with a vengeance

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/07/05/google-veo-3-fails-week-3...

check the ai video outputs:

this weeks;

https://youtu.be/NCYw9EwxAwo

last weeks;

https://youtu.be/it5u8fUMGzI

absolute rubbish
by tinco | 2025-07-08 07:09:48+00:00
That's the crux of the article. There's no good reason for this requirement, at least none that arise in the article, so the author concludes it must be a mistake.

I think it's a bit cynical that it would cost at least 4 years for this change to be admitted into the compiler. If the author is right and there is really no good reason for this rule, and I agree with the author in seeing no good reason, then it seems like something that could be changed quite quickly. The change would allow more code to compile, so nothing would break.

The only reason I could come up with for this rule is that for some other reason allowing non complying type parameters somehow makes the code generation really complex and they therefore postponed the feature.
by nomel | 2025-07-08 07:10:53+00:00
> What does AGI have to do with this?

Their requirement is no hallucinations [1], also stated as "be sure it didn't happen again" in the original comment. If you define a hallucination as something that wasn't in the training data, directly or indirectly (indirectly being something like an "obvious" abstract concept), then you've placed a profound constraint on the system, requiring determinism. That requirement fundamentally, by the non-deterministic statistics that these run on, means you cannot use an LLM, as they exist today. They're not "truth" machines - use a database instead.

Saying "I don't know", with determinism is only slightly different than saying "I know" with determinism, since it requires being fully aware of what you do know, not at a fact level, but at a conceptual/abstract level. Once you have a system that fully reasons about concepts, is self aware of its own knowledge, and can find the fundamental "truth" to answer a question with determinism, you have something indistinguishable from AGI.

Of course, there's a terrible hell that lives between those two, in the form of: "Error: Question outside of known questions." I think a better alternative to this hell would be a breakthrough that allowed "confidence" to be quantified. So, accept that hallucinations will exist, but present uncertainty to the user.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496098
by pyman | 2025-07-08 07:11:02+00:00
I see where you are coming from: "My 8-yo son can also build websites".

Writing books is a profession.

Some people write full-time and make a living from it, through book sales, speaking gigs, teaching, or other related work.

Maybe ask Tim O’Reilly what he thinks about this so-called fantasy.

Like I said, Anthropic needs to stop stealing books or face the consequences.
by audunw | 2025-07-08 07:11:05+00:00
Good point that people generally don’t fill up their cars in their home. Though I know people have really hurt them selves trying to use gasoline to ignite a bonfire and such. Gasoline fumes are extremely dangerous

Battery fires are not hotter. An EV battery fire and ICE car fire actually have fairly similar heat energy profile. ICE cars are a bit more intense. There’s a study from Sweden that set fire to similar ICE and EV cars and measures the energy. A gasoline tank will typically store a lot more raw energy than an EV battery.

They are self oxidising if the electrolyte burns away. That’s true. The anode and cathode is shorted and you get thermal runaways. That’s why it’s a bit of a challenge to fully put out a battery fire. Next gen solid electrolyte batteries fixes that to some degree.

Of course you can extinguish a battery fire with a fire extinguisher, or just water. The problem is that thermal runaway will make the battery really hot again, which will reignite anything flammable around the battery. So you need to keep it cool for a long while, generally by spraying or submerging it in water.
by hliyan | 2025-07-08 07:11:13+00:00
Concur, but from a control systems point of view. Any system that does not define upper/lower limits and does not address feedback loops, are prone to oscillations, and if the size of the system grows over time, the oscillations can become progressively more violent.

Our socioeconomic/political systems currently do not define any hard upper or lower limits on its primary driver (economic power) and does not address feedback loops (e.g. more capital availability -> larger scale -> more economies of scale -> more market share -> more capital -> more scale).
by sReinwald | 2025-07-08 07:11:36+00:00
This is such transparently bad faith rhetoric it's almost impressive. You're trying to paint me as racist for pointing out systemic racial inequities. But sure, I'll bite.

You're pretending "race" and "politics" are separate categories, as if centuries of explicitly racial policy - slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression - somehow exists outside of politics.

Black Memphis residents were systematically excluded from voting until the 1960s. Redlining prevented Black families from building wealth through homeownership. When your grandparents couldn't vote, buy homes in certain areas, or sit on zoning boards, that directly determines whether your neighborhood gets parks or pollution today.

Sometimes it helps to put concepts into a different context to understand them better, so maybe this analogy helps: When I point out that Palestinians in the West Bank can't effectively oppose settlement expansion because they're systematically excluded from political power, I'm not claiming Palestinians are racially inferior because they're "incapable of manipulating power dynamics" in their favor. I'm pointing out how systematic disenfranchisement creates predictable and unjust outcomes. And even if those barriers vanished tomorrow, Palestinians would still live with the accumulated consequences for generations.

Same principle in Memphis. Noting that unpermitted pollution affects 90% Black neighborhoods isn't claiming racial inferiority - it's documenting the predictable result of decades of deliberate exclusion from political power.

If you genuinely can't grasp how racially motivated systematic political disenfranchisement creates racial disparities, start with basic history.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-08 07:14:29+00:00
I'll just pop in here to mention another fantastic and curiously similar film that came out around the same time, but was completely overshadowed by The Matrix.

Dark City. If you liked The Matrix, this is one you might really enjoy, and while I say it's similar, I only mean in a very essential way. The plot is its own very unique story aside from that.
by danlitt | 2025-07-08 07:15:06+00:00
> If you don't agree to the creators terms, you're free to not partake.

What I am trying to get you to understand is that I am also free to petition for the laws to change.

> You're dictating that you either have to give it out entirely (to everyone? sort of?) or not at all.

I am dictating that you have to release it under terms that are fair or not at all. I'm not saying anything about giving it away. For example if somebody sold an album under the condition that they can take it away from me for any reason with no compensation, I think that's unfair, and the police should stop them from doing it. Writing something into a contract does not magically make it acceptable behaviour!

> I think it fundamentally doesn't really solve anything

You haven't actually said why, the only argument you've given is a kind of defeatist "legal changes never achieve anything". That's historically wrong. Stop Killing Games is actually not asking for very much at all, it's not like they're forcing all (any) games to release their source code. It's much more likely that if the law passed they would just come up with a sunset plan.
by ykonstant | 2025-07-08 07:15:11+00:00
>You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked.

Yes, don't fall into this trap. The other two options are still better. Everyone says, "no, no, I really want to know" and then tunes out two minutes later; then four minutes later they start doing the George Carlin lean: "Surgery! I am having my ears sewn shut!".
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-07-08 07:16:24+00:00
In my opinion, this is the reason:

> Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other.

If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is iconic enough that nobody can really use that premise again.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-08 07:16:32+00:00
There are non-IP reasons to go outside the big clouds for CI. Most places I worked over the years had dedicated hardware for at least some CI jobs because otherwise it's too hard to get repeatable performance numbers. At some point you have an outage in production caused by a new build passing tests but having much lower performance, or performance is a feature of the software being sold, and so people decide they need to track perf with repeatable load tests.
by deepsun | 2025-07-08 07:16:53+00:00
What if it's something in between, say cross-section is not O-shaped, like in a hollow wire, but C-shaped or almost closed circle? Where one side is vacuum and another a dielectric.

Thinking about it I believe it would be one of three possibilities: 1 slow the signal to the slowest side, 2 increase circuit resistance, or 3 "smear" the wave, so a short sharp signal would arrive long and dull (increased reactance?).
by reify | 2025-07-08 07:17:21+00:00
While over here on Airstrip One.

On Wednesday MPs voted overwhelmingly to proscribe Palestine Action, with 385 votes for and just 26 against.

This is the first time in our history that a direct action civil disobedience group, which does not advocate for violence, has been sought to be proscribed as terrorists.

Membership of a proscribed organisation carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Proscribed groups include Islamic State and al Qaeda.
by samuell | 2025-07-08 07:17:37+00:00
The 99% identity with chimps is extremely misleading without clear qualification.

The fact that it has been used without qualification has a lot to do with the fact that most of our genome was assumed to be junk, which we know today is not the case, per the ENCODE project for example.

Thus, the 99% number needs to stop being perpetuated.

Today we know that the alignable parts (parts that are similar enough that they can be aligned with each other) are down in the 80s percents between humans and chimps, which can be digged out from e.g. this recent big study (some numbers are in the paper, and some needs to be digged out of the supplementary material):

Yoo, D. et. al. (2025). Complete sequencing of ape genomes. Nature, 1-18. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08816-3

Then remember that a 15%-ish difference with chimps means hundreds of millions of base pairs of difference.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-08 07:18:42+00:00
To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West.

From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-08 07:19:01+00:00
The way Azure implements CC unfortunately lowers a lot of the confidentiality. It's not their fault exactly, more like a common side effect of trying to make CC easy to use. You can certainly use their CC to do secure builds but it would require an absolute expert in CC / RA to get it right. I've done design reviews of such proposals before and there's a lot of subtle details.
by higeorge13 | 2025-07-08 07:20:39+00:00
I trust they were really competent, but it's a bit depressing that these competent people will need to go through the leetcode rituals and 5-10 interviews to get a new job at Meta, Netflix, AWS or adjacent companies. That's actually the point of the original post; you are never judged by your (years of) experience or even your past companies, only by the results of a test from a random person/company.
by tomhow | 2025-07-08 07:21:47+00:00
It's always a combination of upvotes, flags, vouches, auto-penalties and manual penalties that affect the ranking. I don't know which was the particular one of the downweights that pulled it off the front page; it was already off when I first saw it. But it's a clear-cut case of a duplicate post, so there was no need for me to do anything to alter what had already happened.
by qwertox | 2025-07-08 07:22:31+00:00
LLMs are broken, too:

> "Of course. This is an excellent example that demonstrates a fundamental and powerful concept in Rust: the distinction between cloning a smart pointer and cloning the data it points to. [...]"

Then I post the compiler's output:

> "Ah, an excellent follow-up! You are absolutely right to post the compiler error. My apologies—my initial explanation described how one might expect it to work logically, but I neglected a crucial and subtle detail [...]"

Aren't you also getting very tired of this behavior?
by huimang | 2025-07-08 07:22:57+00:00
Amongst niche circles of linguists, maybe. It's easy to single out for the average person because it's popular- english is a language learned around the entire world.

Besides, I'd rather have some more word pronunications than memorizing a table of der/das/die,dem/dem/der and a word's gender on top of learning the word itself. Or changing the position of a verb depending on if I used a modal verb or not.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-08 07:23:43+00:00
Length CI runs do reduce throughput, as working around high CI latencies pushes people towards juggling more PRs at once meaning more merge conflicts to deal with, and increases the cost of a build failing transiently.

And context switching isn't free by any means.

Still, if LLM agents keep improving then the bottleneck of waiting on code review won't exist for the agents themselves, there'll just be a stream of always-green branches waiting for someone to review and merge them. CI costs will still matter though.
by close04 | 2025-07-08 07:24:38+00:00
> Think of a river - the water carves the banks, the banks channel the water. Which is the real river?

Fantastic metaphor.

I also can't help but draw a parallel (or even an overlap) with how the process works for humans. Once you put aside the intrinsic "model" (brain) differences (nature vs. nurture), humans develop their intelligence the same way: relentless exploration, and decision making to guide that exploration. We don't just funnel new info into a child's brain, they're allowed to explore threads around that, and take different paths which then guide how to process the next bit of info.

If we're looking at building anything like human intelligence, the only advanced general intelligence we know and understand to a degree, exploration will be critical.
by msgodel | 2025-07-08 07:25:18+00:00
Just a reminder for those who aren't aware: Apple typically makes you upload your government ID to publish apps. I used to be part of their developer program (although I never finished any of the apps I wrote) and was forced to upload mine. For those of you who think there's no problem with forcing everyone to go through the app store, here's just one more serious issue that creates. Now they can be subpoenaed for something that could otherwise have been done anonymously.
by dgellow | 2025-07-08 07:26:25+00:00
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?

Whenever a group publicly criticizes a behavior, you see the rhetorical question “Why are you surprised?”, and that feels dismissive and disingenuous.

Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought.

Every actor has reasons to behave. People are critical of the behavior, whatever the actor’s incentives are. Because a behavior feels more logical or rational it shouldn’t be discussed? If you would answer negatively then what’s the point of asking your question? Is it just to express your cynicism of that whole situation?