MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RickJWagner | 2025-07-13 13:27:04+00:00
The article clearly states she dropped out of high school. ( Although she later went back to get a GED. )

Of the three steps to avoid poverty, she clearly followed one ( the full time job ).

Virtue signalling does not help people. Making clear the guidelines to building a good life IS useful.

I think the article voices many concerns about poverty. Here’s one example: “ The first year out of prison is critical for ex-inmates. They’re often leaving prison with little money, uncertain housing, fractured relationships with family, and no job, not to mention the psychological toll of incarceration. “They’ve got to construct a whole life for themselves: Where am I going to live? How am I going to have money in my pocket to eat, clothe myself, get across town?” says Ann Jacobs, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”
by daremon | 2025-07-13 13:27:19+00:00
I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek).

In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.

I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.

That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.

At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.

To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.

P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.

P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-13 13:29:00+00:00
That is part of the issue, as AA isn't an official program at all, in that it is a nonprofit group, but it is used as a kind of stopgap/interim solution to paper over the lack of research-backed government-funded alcohol treatment programs. However, court-mandated alcohol treatment programs don't exist in many areas, so AA is a quasi-offical program that creates a very scammy web of self-interested grifters posing as helpers, some of whom actually do help in some ways while enriching themselves and exerting undue influence over others' lives. The catty-corner halfway house cottage industry is full of usually Christian-presenting faith-based and faith-adjacent flophouses for addicts, recovering and otherwise, which is a kind of revolving door of desperate people being fleeced of all of the nothing they have, up to and including their dignity, leaving only shame.

In the 50s, LSD was being used in many clinical counseling settings. Time magazine was writing about it positively. LSD wasn't scheduled in the US until 1968.

> In one study in the late 1950s, Humphry Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous who had failed to quit drinking.[25] After one year, around 50% of the study group had not had a drink—a success rate that has never been duplicated by any other means.[26][27][28] Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, participated in medically supervised experiments on the effects of LSD on alcoholism and believed LSD could be used to cure alcoholics.[29]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD
by tcfhgj | 2025-07-13 13:30:00+00:00
Iirc I had a situation a while back, in which I used async await with tokio with a non Send or Sync type and it compiled when I didn't use spawn[1] (implying multithreading) but a simple loop with sequential processing.

Only when I wanted to enable parallelism using spawn, I got a compilation error.

[1]: https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/task/fn.spawn.html
by messe | 2025-07-13 13:30:16+00:00
> You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive

It sounds like you're trying to build the Cyberpunk equivalent of the shared semi-hard-SF Orion's Arm universe / world building project?

- https://www.orionsarm.com/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm
by gus_massa | 2025-07-13 13:31:11+00:00
In the math department, we had a Moodle the students in the first year of my university in Argentina.

When we started like 15 years ago, the emails of the students and TA were evenly split in 30% Gmail, 30% Yahoo!, 30% Hotmail and 10% others (very aproxímate numbers).

Now the students have like 80% Gmail, 10% Live/Outlook/Hotmail and 10% others/Yahoo. Some of the TA are much older, so perhaps "only" 50% use Gmail.

The difference is huge. I blame the mandatory gmail account for the cell phone.

Anyway, we had weird problems with Live/Outlook/Hotmail and Yahoo because they classified some of our emails as spam. Gmail usually works better.

Anyway^2, everyone is using WhatsApp, so it doesn't matter.
by josephg | 2025-07-13 13:31:19+00:00
Yep.

Also worth reading: Reinventing Organisations by Laloux.

Incredible book - absolute book of the year for me. They talk about the history of organisations and how organisations can be run differently & better. And they research companies who are trying this stuff out today, and talk about what they do. The modern CEO idea is pretty silly on the face of it. We take the - ideally - smartest person at a company, divorce them from grounded reality, then burden them with all the hardest decisions your company has to face. All while disempowering the people on the ground who do all the actual work. In many ways it’s a pretty stupid way to run a company. There’s plenty of other options.

Just the other week the economist did an interview with the CEO of Supercell, a Nordic video game company. They have the same idea - the ceo in many ways doesn’t run the company, which frees him up to do actually useful work. And it lets the team leads take initiative and lead. Much better model in my opinion.
by anton-c | 2025-07-13 13:31:49+00:00
This is all true. It doesn't really apply to my personal driving situation where I can't recall the last time I personally was on a road with a speed limit above 40. I drive less than half the days a week. Thats part of maintaining control for me. I can't set plane schedules. I can drive when there's less drivers and on slow roads.

Also, there are numerous situations you're leaving out where just stopping(or just slowing down) does solve the safety issue. Far more than a suicidal driver choosing me as their target.
by audunw | 2025-07-13 13:32:09+00:00
Your preference to have them be compile time generic shouldn’t come at the cost of those that would want runtime virtualisation.

As the article concludes, you get the best of both worlds here, where the result is effectively compile time generic if you only use one io implementation in your program. In theory it’d also partially compile time generic if you exclusively use one io for one set of libraries/functions and a different io for another set of libraries/functions.

I see this as the objectively correct design based on the existing design decisions in Zig. It follows from the allocator interface decision.
by phillipcarter | 2025-07-13 13:33:12+00:00
> The main barrier is cost

I very much disagree. For the larger, more sophisticated stuff that runs our world, it is not cost that prohibits wide and deep automation. It's deeply sophisticated and constrained requirements, highly complex existing behaviors that may or may not be able to change, systems of people who don't always hold the information needed, usually wildly out of date internal docs that describe the system or even how to develop for it, and so on.

Agents are nowhere near capable of replacing this, and even if they were, they'd change it differently in ways that are often undesirable or illegal. I get that there's this fascination with "imagine if it were good enough to..." but it's not, and the systems AI must exist in are both vast and highly difficult to navigate.
by joelmgallant | 2025-07-13 13:33:13+00:00
In a similar situation here: it's "unfortunate" in one sense but "extremely fortunate" in another sense.

It's unfortunate if you consider your primary craft to be writing code, as those skills can atrophy. It's obviously important to review and understand all material produced by these tools.

It's fortunate if your primary organizational role is "fix problems, communicate technically, and make new things" because of the sheer power of these tools when applied properly.

I've sunk many hours into attempting to "claude-ify" a complex set of applications and services and (IMO) that's a very useful activity.

Why? So that I can use ai-tooling more effectively? Yes. Why also? So that services are more decoupled, more testable, more aligned with good development principles.

It's difficult to inject these workflows in a useful way across multiple levels (code/devops/org) but when it works it's worth it.

My key takeaway was something along the lines of: "if an agent can't understand and work with your codebase, you've got an onboarding problem" (we do).

Disclaimer: mostly standard web tech across Java/Scala/React - aggressively complex k8s layer
by Jensson | 2025-07-13 13:34:31+00:00
If any of those 16 developers were at the by some allegedly 20x productivity with AI models it would have been positive on average, but none were even close to that.

So I feel its fairly safe to say that models aren't even close to 10x productivity gain for average developers, so developer jobs are not really in jeopardy so far. If it was easy to be more productive with AI models then this study would have found that, the only productivity gain this study could have missed would be if it was really hard or if the gain was really small, and both of those means it wont replace most developers.
by Aeolun | 2025-07-13 13:34:31+00:00
I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway).

I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-07-13 13:34:33+00:00
Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?

Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.
by afavour | 2025-07-13 13:34:35+00:00
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.

By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market.

If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
by stefan_ | 2025-07-13 13:35:05+00:00
This is desktop market share, their "stronghold":

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_how_...

That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.
by kenoath69 | 2025-07-13 13:37:03+00:00
(ok mild spoilers ahead) Really why! I enjoyed them both and I read Deepness in the Sky first. It was a bit of a shock about FTL for me but I kind of granted narrative license so he could explore the range of consequences there, like with FTLness being distributed over a field of sorts. But yeah the dogs were dope, their packs, the interaction of the technological bootstrapping with them. Yadda yadda. I can't say I am familiar with his philosophy either
by arscan | 2025-07-13 13:37:22+00:00
This setup is also compatible with GitHub CodeSpaces, which I think is an exceptionally nice development experience if you are on something like a Chromebook, and gives you isolation from your local network. Also lets you share your app running in dev-mode with anyone for feedback, without having to poke holes in your network or whatever. Also also, you can use the Cline extension in this environment if you still want the cursor-style copilotey experience.
by hansvm | 2025-07-13 13:37:53+00:00
One flaw I've seen in "Parse, Don't Validate" as it pertains to real codebases is that you end up with a combinatorial prolieration of types.

E.g., requiring that a string be base64, have a certain fixed length, and be provided by the user.

E.g., requiring that a file have the correct MIME type, not be too large, and contain no EXIF metadata.

If you really always need all n of those things then life isn't terrible (you can parse your data into some type representing the composition of all of them), but you often only need 1, 2, or 3 and simultaneously don't want to duplicate too much code or runtime work, leading to a combinatorial explosion of intermediate types and parsing code.

As one possible solution, I put together a POC in Zig [0] with one idea, where you abuse comptime to add arbitrary tagging to types, treating a type as valid if it has the subset of tags you care about. I'm very curious what other people do to appropriately model that sort of thing though.

[0] https://github.com/hmusgrave/pdv
by jesuslop | 2025-07-13 13:37:58+00:00
Declarative representations are also very groovy, I loved the HarmTrace guys [1] view of harmonic analysis as parsing by a grammar so the AST reflects the harmony of the piece (for instance secondary dominants are similar to subordinate clauses in normal language). It is incomplete modeling sure, yet it generates a infinite variety from a finite set of generators, that make sense tonally (hand picked, not machine-inferred).

[1] https://github.com/haas/harmtrace
by meowface | 2025-07-13 13:38:57+00:00
>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing

>Google's illegal monopoly

>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor

As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.

The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".

The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-13 13:39:14+00:00
I think the main point is in something like Go, the approach is non-viral. If you are 99 levels deep in synchronous code and need to call something with context, well, you can just create one. With C#, if you need to refactor all 99 levels above (or use bad practices which is of course what everyone does).

Also, in general cancellation is something that you want to optionally have with any asynchronous function so I don't think there really exists an ideal approach that doesn't include it. In my opinion the approach taken by Zig looks pretty good.
by Jensson | 2025-07-13 13:39:21+00:00
AI just produces very bad but working versions every time I try. Worse performance, more technical debt that I need to refactor, more code overall with less functionality that I need to trim away.

It gets a flawed but working version quicker, but it takes much longer to get to anything I can release.

AI mostly helps me discover new thing about a public API, or show one general solution to a problem, but then I mostly have to solve everything myself anyway to get anything good.
by Aeolun | 2025-07-13 13:40:09+00:00
> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.

Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.

I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.

People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 13:41:02+00:00
> Today, I happily pay for software (including free and open-source software!) that puts users first, including Proton, Standard Notes, Kagi, and others.

Uhh two of those are primarily services with dedicated clients not just software.

I totally agree with the article otherwise. I don't want to donate to the foundation to support Firefox. They'll just use it for side projects and it does nothing to reduce their dependency on Google. Just let me pay for a version of firefox that has a nice contributor badge, and doesn't have Google as a search engine installed. It doesn't have to be something that's worth the money.

Also they could make the sync service paid. And reduce the free version. I'd gladly pay for it. They've said they'll never make us pay for it but I don't understand why not. It's a service that costs money on an ongoing basis.

IMO they should also go back to a more community driven approach. Not treat themselves as a mega corp with an overpaid CEO. But more like a startup. Because really, size-wise they're only startup sized. The only reason they pretend to be a big tech is because they have so much Google money to throw strong. A project like KDE (Which I sponsor monthly) provides a lot more software without all this overhead, and works much better along with the community. This is how I would love to see Mozilla.

But maybe ladybird will be what I'm looking for.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-13 13:41:48+00:00
So I see the logic, but at the same time, I'm wondering why it's important for Firefox to gain a lot of users on... any platform, really? Like it's broadly good for more people to use Firefox, but also, is that Mozilla's actual mission? Because I would personally say that Mozilla is not out to make "the most popular browser," they're out to make "the best browser." Ideally the best would be the most popular but there's a lot in the way of that that doesn't necessarily mean anything negative about Mozilla or Firefox.
by gcanyon | 2025-07-13 13:42:09+00:00
The "GPT-3 moment" framing is a bit hype-y I think? GPT-3 eliminated the need for task-specific fine-tuning, but from the article RL wouldn't replace LLM-style pretraining. So this is more of an incremental advance than the paradigm shift GPT-3 represented. That said, if it unlocks RL generalization that would be huge.

The core claim that massive-scale RL will unlock generalization doesn't seem that surprising since we've seen the scaling hypothesis play out across ML. But "replication training" on software is interesting: learning by copying existing programs potentially unlocks a ton of complex training data with objective evaluation criteria.

To me, the big unanswered question is whether skills learned from replicating software would generalize to other reasoning tasks. That's a significant "if" - great if it works, pointless if it doesn't.
by swader999 | 2025-07-13 13:42:42+00:00
I mistakenly started Claude in my root dev folder in dangerously skip mode the other day. Asked it to fix my playwright tests. All hell broke loose and I couldn't stop it. Lol. Eventually got it shut down and all was fine. Scared me though. There's a hook you can easily implement for RM -rf, see indydevdan on YouTube, he has a nice repo of it.

I would like to run everything in container and fire up two or three CC at once. It might be best actually. Right now I'm doing local dev with many services in one container and Claude sometimes doesn't use the container properly. I probably waste a lot of cycles with CC relearning my setup often as it struggles through it.
by Bender | 2025-07-13 13:43:37+00:00
Reasonable efforts in this case would be to send the RTA header. That's it. Done and dusted. If the client is able to browse your site that would mean that either parental controls are not enabled or they are enabled and your site was approve-listed in the client. This of course depends on changing the laws anywhere that require using a third party data-leakage site to verify ID.
by saturneria | 2025-07-13 13:43:59+00:00
I don't even disagree with the spirit of what is being attempted here but it is ultimately pointless.

You aren't going to stop teenagers from watching porn if you have the internet.

All this would do is change the websites that teenagers are using.

It strikes me as just political grandstanding since the people putting forth this idea must know it is completely pointless.

Not to mention, a website is vastly different than a physical store.
by inetknght | 2025-07-13 13:44:02+00:00
> gRPC is widely deployed at many companies that do offer bug bounties

Ahh yeah, bug bounties. The things that are notoriously underpaid if paid at all. The things that require many hours/days/weeks of work for a "maybe" payoff.

I'm sorry but I don't like the risk of spending so much time for free or significantly discounted. My time is worth more than that.

If these companies really want to lean on shit software, then that's their business. But I neither support nor condone it.

> gRPC library does not even have a dependency on `libprotobuf`

I see this espoused a lot. Have you tried building gRPC? It requires protobuf to build...

> You just went from the claim "they have no fuzzers or static analysis" to "fuzzers don't cover X"

And it's amazing that both claims are true. You linked some page where some fuzzers were run. Nice! Those fuzzers aren't enabled in default tests. So `make test` doesn't run them. Moreover `make test` didn't find any issues and would take a while so I commented it out.

> I would be really interested to see a comparable RPC stack

This has been a call since forever. But "RPC" is very loosely defined.

Realistically, almost anything that can serialize to/from a file without relying on knowing the file size can be adapted to socket-based RPC. There's thousands of libraries which can do that.

> that is close or more well-tested than gRPC

I'd rather have an "RPC" whose design is both well-documented and clearly readable. That's definitely not gRPC. HTTP is fairly well-documented and many implementations are clearly readable. Message queues are too. Even databases are generally better documented and usable for RPC. Did you know that POSIX has a specification for RPC?

Good documentation and clearly readable means "well tested" comes with much lower costs.