MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spease | 2025-07-19 14:39:24+00:00
> I had my journey of using Rust to implement a WinAPI-based app in which I did lots of unsafe (from Rust's point of view) operations. I spent more time on fighting with Rust's protections than on the actual implementation. The result code wasn't safe and looked horrible - totally opposite of what Rust code should look like. And yes, I followed "the Rust way" of doing things.

I hate to just directly question your last statement, but “tons of unsafe” is a red flag that the way things are being done. You should need it for direct interactions with a C API, or for the lowest level of interacting with bare metal memory registers, or for lowest level high performance code that’s verging on or actually using assembly.

I can see how doing windows API stuff would cause a lot of the FFI usage of unsafe, but that should be handled by the winapi or a windows api crate that converts things to idiomatic rust and the rest of the codebase would be dealing with logic.

Entirely possible you hit an edge case here where you were writing glue code which exclusively talked to hand-optimized SSE algorithms or something, but that is exceedingly rare compared to someone just starting out who’s experienced with C trying to do things the C way and fighting through unsafe rather than looking for and finding higher-level patterns that are idiomatic.

> I've gone through hundreds of source codes in Kernel, and most of them wouldn't pass code review in my company - cutting-corners everywhere, multipurpose functions, lack of documentation; those are issues which can't be fixed by just changing a language.

Except they are mitigated to such a degree that it again makes me doubt you were coding idiomatically.

Rust tends to force you to exhaustively handle code paths, so it will require a lot of explicit opting out to cut corners.

Type-safety tends to help a lot in making multipurpose functions self-verifying. Function chains come up a lot more in Rust and type inference works so well because of this.

Documentation is a lot easier when you can just have people use “cargo doc” and add a bit of markdown and some doctests that will get exercised by CI.

> Sure it will protect developers from missing "free()" here and there, but it's gonna bite from another side.

RAII is the smallest difference in DX in Rust compared to working in C. For me the biggest differences were tooling, and type-safety making it a lot easier to catch bugs at compile-time, and enforce design assumptions I had about the architecture.

I don’t necessarily expect it to be easier to write Rust code, but I do expect it will catch more issues up-front rather than at runtime or in the field, so you will end up doing more code-compile iterations (seconds to minutes) and fewer code-customer iterations (hours to days or weeks).

Though when it comes to C++, there is less surface area of the language to learn to get to the modern “safe” constructs and the constructs enforce their own proper usage rather than expecting the developer to, so I expect an intermediate developer to be writing better code until a C++ developer gets to an expert level.
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 14:39:28+00:00
> Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience...

In my experience you do that more in Word then in Latex (the I added some paragraphs here and wtf is that picture two pages later doing now problem).

The issue is to some degree quite fundamental to the underlying challenges of laying out formatted text with embedded things, affecting both word and LaTex.

through that is assuming you now how to properly use Word / LaTex if you don't you can cause yourself a huge amount of work ;)
by hobs | 2025-07-19 14:39:40+00:00
Generally the reason we think of Eugenicists as "bad guys" is because they've been characterized by being happy to sterilize or kill people to prevent their "subhuman genes" from being passed down to the next generations.

This is different, another step in the erasure of genes that harm humans. This is not a genocide.

It seems like your argument boils down to we should continue to have horrible suffering and early death because diversity of DNA is good and we shouldn't edit out potentially helpful mutations (that also cause horrible suffering) - if we can beat malaria, why would we need sickle cell?
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-07-19 14:40:13+00:00
Guys, that's nothing. My new AI system is not LLM-based but neuro-symbolic and yet it just scored 100% on the IMO 2026 problems that haven't even been written yet, it is that good.

What? This is a claim with all the trust-worthiness of OpenAI's claim. I mean I can claim anything I want at this point and it would still be just as trust-worthy as OpenAI's claim, with exactly zero details about anything else than "we did it, promise".
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-07-19 14:40:36+00:00
> Exactly. Because the EU law makers are incompetent and they lack technical understanding and the ability to write laws which clearly define what is and what isn't okay.

I am sorry but I too agree with OP's statement. The EU is full of technocrats who have no idea about tech and they get easily swayed by lobbies selling them on a dream that is completely untethered to the reality we live in.

> The next person initiating a EU procedure to correct the current error with the popups will have the burden of doing everything perfectly right, all at once, thought through front to back, or face the wrath of the all-knowing internet.

You are talking as if someone is actually looking at the problem. is that so? Because if there was such a feedback loop that you seem to think exists in order to correct this issue, then where is it?

> In my mind, the main issue is not that the EU made a mistake. The main issue is that it is not getting corrected in time and we will probably have to suffer another ten years or so until the error gets removed.

So we should not hold people accountable when they make mistakes and waste everyone's time then?

There is plenty of evidence to show that the EU as a whole is incompetent when it comes to tech.

Case and point the Chat control law that is being pushed despite every single expert warning of the dire consequences in terms of privacy, and setting a dangerous precedent. Yet, they keep pushing it because it is seen as a political win.

If the EU knew something about tech they would know that placing back-doors in all communication applications is non starter.
by yurishimo | 2025-07-19 14:41:55+00:00
This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort?

Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime.

I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out.

As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
by pqtyw | 2025-07-19 14:42:09+00:00
> I'm talking about the export of puritanism

Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing.

> The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world

Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more restrictive.

Germany also has a history of banning violent video games and its again much worse than the US e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/ki12if/steam_now_reg...

Post "Online Safety Act" UK is not that much better either.

US is very tame and less "puritanical" by your definition than those countries. The core difference being that the government can't really regulate it directly so credit card companies might be acting as some sort of a proxy.

Or are you implying that US somehow turned Germany and Australia more "puritanical" than itself and there would be no domestic support for censorship there otherwise?
by sheiyei | 2025-07-19 14:42:28+00:00
I'm pretty quick to never-again a company which advertises in a way that makes me sick. A certain electronics store chain that operates here in the Nordics, which someone is bound to recognise, is on my ban list for psychedelic surrealist shock advertising.

Not that I see much ads any more anyway, what with Ublock Origin, Blokada 5 and Youtube ReVanced.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-19 14:45:13+00:00
> we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are god

These activities are in no way evidence for people thinking (too?) highly of themselves or "as gods". Just a completely made up accusation.

I also don't see why the scary labels are relevant necessarily. To be afraid of whether this qualifies as eugenics or if you qualify as an eugenicist is sitting backwards on the horse completely. But maybe I just misinterpreted your catious wording and there's no being afraid here - in other comments you outright state you consider this eugenics, for example.

> [As] Humanity[, we need to] accept our fates.

No, we really don't. Though if you and people of the same opinion just accept fate, you also accept this research and similar continuing on, so maybe this is not even a point of debate in practice.
by K0balt | 2025-07-19 14:45:38+00:00
The other part of this that many people miss is that since electric drive isn’t air-breathing, there is no propulsion related altitude limitation… so a light, relatively inexpensive aircraft can now fly in the high altitude region, potentially doubling range.for instance, an airplane that can do a solid 160kts cruise at sea level, which is a good but not unusual capability for a modern airframe, would be making 390 kts at 50000 feet.

If we assume a 120kwh battery (about what could be shoehorned into a 2 seat plane using existing tech a bit optimistically) :

Since electric power has the (in aviation, magical) capability to deliver 100 percent power at any altitude, a reasonable 1500 fpm climb gets you to 50000 feet in just over a half hour. You use 56 kWh to get there. Then you cruise at 40kw for an hour. That puts you at about 550 nautical miles from your takeoff point (assuming zero wind) from 50000 feet you can glide 120nm, so your range is around 700 miles with a half hour reserve, spanning about 3 hours for an effective speed of around 230kts. For every extra hour of endurance / 30% improvement in battery capacity, you pick up an extra 390 / 624km of range.

In a practical sense, with actual operational factors, with a 30 percent improvement in battery capacity you’ve got a 2 seat plane with a practical operational range of about 1100 miles that gets there at 275mph, with a half hour reserve, with the same energy it takes a car to go 600 miles, but in 1/3 the time.

It’s actually opening the door to a whole new golden age of practical small aviation.

(Edited because I got bamboozled by ChatGPT and I didn’t notice until a number seemed out of bounds… ghatGPT is apparently not a great copilot.
by mehulashah | 2025-07-19 14:47:10+00:00
The AI scaling that went on for the last five years is going to be very different from the scaling that will happen in the next ten years. These models have latent capabilities that we are racing to unearth. IMO is but one example.

There’s so much to do at inference time. This result could not have been achieved without the substrate of general models. Its not like Go or protein folding. You need the collective public global knowledge of society to build on. And yes, there’s enough left for ten years of exploration.

More importantly, the stakes are high. There may be zero day attacks, biological weapons, and more that could be discovered. The race is on.
by mxmlnkn | 2025-07-19 14:47:47+00:00
Yes, that section is fitting and interesting. It is the production-side view. I think I was more motivated by the comments envisioning an abundance of cheap gold, which seems not in any way near or even possible, even with this approach as cool and baffling as it is.

I don't think that it is of much use as waste disposal because again, it can only remove 10%, i.e., an insignificant amount. If it were even mined because of this, then more mercury waste would be produced than before, but increased mining would probably be many decades or centuries in the future, as long as there is still waste to reuse.

So, how long would the current midterm stockpile of 1400 t for 198Hg for the next 10 years last? At 5 t per 1 GW per year, i.e., 5 t per 8.76 TWh, and a current global electricity generation of ~30 PWh, replacing all energy production with fusion would be able to transmute 3400 t 198Hg per year, over twice the stockpile. Of course, there would be a myriad of other bottlenecks long before that, but consuming all the existing stockpile seems feasible in human time spans.

I am honestly impressed by the amount of transmutation that is possible with fusion. And it is a lucky coincidence that the half-life is only dozens of hours for the middle product. I never thought of that process or would have guessed grams of production instead of tons, probably because of the association with existing particle accelerators. It is quite amazing, but also presumably still decades off into the future.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-19 14:48:35+00:00
I think your argument is “we’re screwing with nature in big ways and we have a demonstrated history of being so confidently wrong. This is dangerous.” Which I think is a deeply important discussion to be able to comfortably have without the layers of disclaimers.

I think a lot of these biotechs that raise alarms are pretty safe, and the problem is that we’re really bad at explaining in lay terms how it all works, and people naturally assume the worst.

I think it’s also an issue of practicality (and this is where it flirts with being eugenics). What’s the alternative? To tell people not to reproduce if they have known disease prone genes? To make them not reproduce? To tell them they don’t get universal healthcare if they do?

I think mucking about with our building blocks is the least bad option we have.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-19 14:48:59+00:00
This is not the same, the airline can set whatever price they want, AI or not, but I see the prices and then can decide whether I want to buy or not.

Maybe more relevant would be oversize/overweight baggage fees. Where there is some fine print about baggage policy and you may find yourself paying expensive fees at the gate because you didn't realize the weight limit included your handbag or that the allowed dimensions are nonstandard.

A hotel charging $500 for smoking that didn't happen is worse than all of that, it is just fraud. Personal ticket prices is just business, controversial, but they are not trying to trick you. The fine print is bad, but at least, you can avoid the fees by being careful. Here, you have no choice but to pay and maybe hope to get your money back by filing a complain.
by NewJazz | 2025-07-19 14:49:10+00:00
The hotel chain probably had no input into the decision to add this. Hyatt is just a franchise for many hotels. Call up /email the chain's corporate folks and tell them about the charge and that you'll not stay in their chain of hotels unless they can guarantee the devices are banned from the franchise. If you really spend that much on hotels every year your demand would at least raise some eyebrows.
by esjeon | 2025-07-19 14:49:19+00:00
I know a publisher who translates books (English to Korean). He works alone these days. Using GPT, he can produce a decent-quality first draft within a day or two. His later steps are also vastly accelerated because GPT reliably catches typos and grammar errors. It doesn't take more than a month to translate and print a book from scratch. Marvelous.

But I still don't like that the same model struggles w/ my projects...
by scarecrowbob | 2025-07-19 14:50:11+00:00
"Gen AI is a great tool, if you approach it with the right mindset."

People keep writing this sentence as if they aren't talking to the most tool-ed up group of humans in history.

I have no problems learning tools, from chorded key shortcuts to awk/sed/grep to configuring all three of my text editors (vim, sublime, and my IDE) to work for their various tasks.

Hell, I have preferred ligature fonts for different languages.

Sometimes tools aren't great and make your life harder, and it's not because folks aren't willing to learn the tool.
by joules77 | 2025-07-19 14:50:22+00:00
"media time" or the amount of time Americans consume media is not rising (6-7 hours a day). So no great new user growth + no great screen time growth. But the Ad industry revenues are growing at 15-20%.

With a population of ~300 Million the US ad industry generates 400 Billion in revenue. Avg Bounty of >1000 bucks a year per person.

The only way to pull that off is to keep injecting more and more ads everywhere and make everything more tempting to watch.

The biggest threat to these companies is if time spent consuming media drops.
by csomar | 2025-07-19 14:51:04+00:00
The issue is that trust is very hard to build and very easy to lose. Even in today's age where regular humans have a memory span shorter than that of an LLM, OpenAI keeps abusing the public's trust. As a result, I take their word on AI/LLMs about as seriously as I'd take my grocery store clerk's opinion on quantum physics.
by DudeOpotomus | 2025-07-19 14:51:49+00:00
No, it's just stupidity and myopia. Like those screens that replaced glass beverage cases in liquor stores a few years ago. Not one customer liked them. Not one customer wanted them and the results were beyond terrible. People literally stopped buying. But people actually invested millions into that company and other people actually bought their products and thought "gee this is great". Imagine how disconnected you have to be from your customers to make such an investment and/or installation for a few bucks? Stupid is as stupid does...
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 14:51:59+00:00
There has got to be a way to penalize companies for attempting this kind of thing. Even just removing the charge without discussion isn't enough, as some people will be traveling on a corporate card they don't necessarily monitor closely, will confuse the charge for something else etc.

Otherwise, I'd love to be able to preemptively and without any prior communication charge (way in excess of the room rate, of course!) hotels for broken appliances, poor cleanliness etc., and put the burden of proof that everything was fine on them.
by okanat | 2025-07-19 14:52:13+00:00
You don't need to be able to build them. Just sign them or sign the keys that sign the third party blobs/binaries.

Then your motherboard firmware will be able to load your GPU and other third party blobs to UEFI memory. Similarly OSes like Linux and Windows enforce the same chain of trust (they don't have to but otherwise it is not really secure, just like a website can lie to you about encrypted storage) so you need your drivers/OS loaded firmware to be signed as well.

What Android does and what UEFI does are not really related. It is like comparing how SSH does authentication vs how HTTP with TLS does. Former is a SSH-specific open-ended implementation detail, latter is standardized by IETF.

Similarly UEFI standardizes how a motherboard manufacturer can write a compatible firmware and Secure Boot (capital letters) is a sub specification of UEFI. It is not the only secure boot implementation scheme.

With Android device manufacturers have complete control over the early boot firmware and the OS. As long as they boot the OS to run apps, how they do it is up to them. Only things like Google's SafetyNet will put certain requirements on them. No standard like UEFI exists in Android phone world or anywhere else except PCs / Servers.
by 9rx | 2025-07-19 14:52:18+00:00
> Large companies are all decentralized. The ceo will set broad direction but they always leave details to the lower levels.

Typically, central planning does not imply micromanagement. The "broad direction" you speak of is the central planning.

> Companies are reorganizing for efficiency all the time.

But, of course, companies wouldn't exist if markets were perfectly efficient. The sole reason for companies is to exploit the efficiencies of central planning. But, of course, just as if markets were perfectly efficient there would be no companies, if central planning was perfectly efficient there would only be one company, so... Like always, there are tradeoffs that we have to find balance in.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-19 14:54:29+00:00
I don't think it's too misleading, because in the absence of any other information, they are the same.

What you could then add to this system is a certification scheme to permit implicit consent of all the data handling (including who you hand it off to and what they are allowed to do with it, as well as whether they have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy) is audited to be compliant with some more stringent requirements. It could even be self-certification along the lines of CE marking. But that requires strict enforcement, and the national regulators so far have been a bunch of wet blankets.

That actually would encourage organisations to find ways to get the information they want without violating the privacy of their users and anyone else who strays into their digital properties.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-19 14:55:07+00:00
Math expressions are like regex to me nowadays. I ask the llm coding assistant to write it and it’s very very good at it. I’ll probably forget the syntax soon but no big deal.

“MathML for {very rough textual form of the equation}” seems to give a 100% hit rate for me. Even when i want some formatting change i can ask the llm and that pretty much always has a solution (mathml can render symbols and subscripts in numerous ways but the syntax is deep). It’ll even add the css needed to change it up in some way if asked.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-19 14:55:12+00:00
Thanks for not being reactionary. You are in the minority so I figured I would disclaim.

> What’s the alternative?

Acceptance. These parents can still reproduce. A female child will most likely be healthy, like the mother. And the male child will not always be born with a mitochondrial disease. People do not realize that father's can also pass mitochondrial genetics to their children. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6639/)

In trying to remove all risk from our lives we are making it inherently risky in other, usually unknown, ways.

All the spiritual practices talk about acceptance, so just pick one.

But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
by MarkMarine | 2025-07-19 14:55:36+00:00
I’m the a moon’s distance away from a being a pro athlete or pushing any adventure sports field I participate in, but I do things for fun that some people think are insanely dangerous. I’ve toned it back now that I have kids (which changed my thinking) but for a long time I would have been quite happy with that exit from life. Doing something I loved, never put through indignity of advanced age, dying quickly and without suffering.

God speed Felix