MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IgorPartola | 2025-07-24 20:58:00+00:00
This exactly. You never know what it will do. Will it simply check that you have Python and virtualenv and install everything into a single directory? Or will it hijack your system by adding trusted remote software repositories? Will it create new users? Open network ports? Install an old version of Java it needs? Replace system binaries for “better” ones? Install Docker?

Operating systems already have standard ways of distributing software to end users. Use it! Sure maybe it takes you a little extra time to do a one off task of adding the ability to build Debian packages, RPM, etc. but at least your software will coexist nicely with everything else. Or if your software is such a prima-donna that it needs its own OS image, package it in a Docker container. But really, just stop trying to reinvent the wheel (literally).
by blamestross | 2025-07-24 20:58:27+00:00
The biggest implications of LLM and programming is this:

LLMs are autoencoders for sequences. If an LLM can write the code, the entropy value of that code is low. We know that already, most human communication is low entropy, but the LLMs being good at it implies there is a more efficient structure we could be using. All the embeddings are artifacts of structure, but the entire ANN model obfuscates structures it encodes.

Clearly there are better programming languages, closer fit to our actual intents, than the existing ones. The LLM will never show them to us, we need to go make/find them ourselves.
by tomtom1337 | 2025-07-24 20:58:29+00:00
Why would it be difficult to monitor the slowness? Wouldn’t a million function calls to the from_F_to_K function be very noticeable when profiling?

On your case about swapping between image representations: let’s say you’re doing a FFT to transform between real and reciprocal representations of an image - you probably have to do that transformation in order to do the the work you need doing on reciprocal space. There’s no getting around it. Or am I misunderstanding?

Please don’t take my response as criticism, I’m genuinely interested here, and enjoying the discussion.
by adamstep | 2025-07-24 20:58:29+00:00
Hyperview creator here. Yes, it sounds like the difference is that your project is directly rendering platform-native UI widgets, while Hyperview is built on top of React Native for the cross-platform layer.

Curious how you will handling the differences between platforms. For example, Android prefers top tab bars, while on iOS the convention is to put tab bars below the content.
by drdec | 2025-07-24 20:58:32+00:00
> Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.

I don't think Al Franken would agree with this
by lxgr | 2025-07-24 20:58:39+00:00
> There's no extra storage because it's already storing checksums.

At the database level (i.e. not just the WAL)? Are you sure?

> What I'm saying is that a fletcher is strictly worse than a CRC here.

I can't speak to the performance differences, but the only thing SQLite really needs the checksum to do is to expose partial writes, both due to reordered sector writes and partial intra-sector writes. (The former could also be solved by just using an epoch counter, but the latter would require some tricky write formats, and a checksum nicely addresses both).

In both cases, there's really nothing to recover: CRC won't catch an entire missing sector, and almost no partially written sectors (i.e. unless the failure somehow happens in the very last bytes of it, so that the ratio of "flipped" bits is low enough).
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-24 20:58:57+00:00
> I'm more interested in benchmarks compared to Windows or MacOS. I doubt any Linux distro even comes close

Ars ran an article last month comparing SteamOS to Windows 11, with SteamOS coming out ahead: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...

I don't think there's been any macOS comparisons done as there's no equivalent to proton to run windows games, outside of vanilla wine, as whisky is now no longer maintained
by gspencley | 2025-07-24 20:58:59+00:00
Possibly but I would expect her to use computers a lot less if that were the case. She is an Apple user - probably for the best since she doesn't want configurability and values consistency and predictability and everything being interoperable. But she upgrades regularly and, until her eye sight started to physically hinder her ability to read emails and perform tasks on a computer, she used them quite a bit for if it were a matter of "I just don't need this thing."

To add context: she was a public school educator. Began as a teacher, was actually my school Principal in grade one. So she had a need for computers in her professional life and continued to use them in her personal despite tons of evidence that she has no idea how lol
by ahepp | 2025-07-24 20:59:03+00:00
> But if taking the geometric mean of all those benchmarks, CachyOS performance overall was similar to that of Fedora / EndeavourOS / Ubuntu while Clear Linux maintained a ~6.5% advantage overall compared to those other Linux distributions.

from https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf

And that's without really digging deep into significance testing.
by WD-42 | 2025-07-24 20:59:05+00:00
I wouldn't be so certain. Here are some recent benchmarks on newer CPUs: https://www.phoronix.com/review/lunarlake-windows11-ubuntu25...

> Across dozens of benchmarks run on Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux 25.04 from these two Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V within the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura was around 23% faster on Ubuntu 25.04 than the stock Windows 11 Pro installation. The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop with the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 was 8% faster on Ubuntu 25.04 than Linux. The Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 "Strix Point" though with 8-cores plus SMT, AVX-512, and other features was much faster overall on both operating systems than the Intel Lunar Lake SoC.
by dhosek | 2025-07-24 21:00:03+00:00
In my creative writing practice, I retype a piece at least once in the process of revision¹ which forces me to consider every word along the way. I’ve heard of people doing this with other peoples’ writing, something I’ve never had the patience for, but I can imagine that again, the process of getting words (or code) from the page through the eyes→brain→fingers to the keyboard does require some mental consideration of what you’re doing.

⸻

1. This has its roots in my high school writing practice where I wrote using a manual typewriter (sitting on the floor of my bedroom in my parents’ basement) and the only way to revise my copy was to retype a clean version of it.
by jrm4 | 2025-07-24 21:00:06+00:00
As an old-timer, going through this thread, I must say that there's just not enough hate for the whole Windows/Mac OS inclination to not want to let users be experimental.

Everyone here is sort of caught up in this weird middle ground, where you're expecting an environment that is both safe and experimental -- but the two dominant Oses do EVERYTHING THEY CAN to kill the latter, which, funny enough, can also make the former worse.

Do not forget, for years you have been in a world in which Apple and Microsoft do not want you to have any real power.
by munchler | 2025-07-24 21:00:15+00:00
What a great writing prompt! Would love to read read the rest of this as a short story. Any takers?

Edit: Wow, that’s the fastest any of my HN posts have ever been buried. Still, as an old guy, I have to say it’s pretty awesome to be living in a future where polar satellites can keep someone in touch with the rest of civilization.
by dajonker | 2025-07-24 21:00:30+00:00
A lot of us programmer folk are indefinitely in search of that one thing that will finally let us write the perfect, bug-free, high performance software. We take these concepts to the extreme and convince ourselves that it will absolutely work as long as we strictly do it the Right Way and only the Right Way. Then we try to convince to our fellow programmers that the Right Way will solve all of our problems and that it is the Only Way. It will be great, it will be grand, it will be amazing.
by philipkglass | 2025-07-24 21:00:37+00:00
Treason is narrowly defined and convictions are very rare under US law:

https://theweek.com/articles/869173/brief-history-treason-un...

The history of actual treason, in the sense of federal criminal prosecutions for the concept defined in the Constitution and adopted almost immediately as a federal offense, is remarkably short. Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, there have been only 40 federal treason cases, and far fewer convictions. (John Adams secured the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in part because the constitutional definition of treason was too narrow.) Even the most famous "traitors" in American history were not technically guilty of treason. Benedict Arnold might plausibly have argued that it was those on the side he betrayed who were guilty of treason; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were actually convicted of conspiracy to engage in espionage.
by tshaddox | 2025-07-24 21:00:52+00:00
> One common thread is that there's virtually no time between when you realize you're going to need your sidearm and when you need it.

I would be surprised if this is true for the majority of situations. I'm sure there are situations where you have very little time, but also many situations where the additional time it would take to chamber a round is negligible.
by cthalupa | 2025-07-24 21:00:55+00:00
This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is an advocate for it, and has been for a while.

Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.

I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.
by xp84 | 2025-07-24 21:01:05+00:00
I wish I could put 10 votes on this instead of just one. It just bothers me how success can be defined as something absurdly impossible like that.

We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are so enormous that further profit increases would require either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got money from ads, then they started leeching additional money streams from cable providers, now most have added their own subscription service that they also want you to pay for, on top of watching ads.)

ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell personal information about your browsing behavior for extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media conglomerate.
by asadotzler | 2025-07-24 21:02:01+00:00
>programming needs to be redesigned from the ground up as LLM first.

Yes, because non-deterministic systems are great softwares. I mean, who want's repeatable execution on the control program for their nuclear submarine or their hospital lighting controls. Why would anyone want a computer capable of actual math running on the President's nuclear "football" when we can have the outputs of hallucinating tools running there.
by hu3 | 2025-07-24 21:02:22+00:00
That code would never pass a human pull request review. It doesn't even pass AI code review with a simple "review this code" prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/68829f14-c004-8001-ac20-4dc1796c76...

"2. Shared buffer causes race/data reuse You're writing to buf, getting buf.Bytes(), and sending it to the channel. But buf.Bytes() returns a slice backed by the same memory, which you then Reset(). This causes line in processData to read the reset or reused buffer."

I mean, you're basically passing a pointer to another thread to processData() and then promptly trying to do stuff with the same pointer.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-24 21:03:08+00:00
It is displaying output consistent with consciousness. Doesn't mean it is conscious. But the textual output is indistinguishable. My statements HAVE not changed, and remain true.

>You, now: "I can tell you didn't write that. AI did it!"

It's more of a parody of what he's saying. He's making claims yet he can't even prove if what he wrote is AI.
by nyrikki | 2025-07-24 21:04:45+00:00
Python is a good glue language, which helps with cleaning and interfacing with other languages that are more effective in specific contexts.

The fact that it isn't dogmatic in it's opinions is a feature for the use case.

It isn't great at many things but it can do most things well enough.

It's popularity as a teaching language lagged way behind it's adoption for real world needs BTW.
by iambateman | 2025-07-24 21:05:03+00:00
Sure, AI may break the American economic system – which would be negative both for me, you, and the entire world. I would not relish that and I think we should ask our brightest young thinkers to imagine a world in which the productivity gains from AI don't simply accrue to capital holders.

Getting back to Cal's point, I think there's a lot of legitimate questions and uncertainties about what knowledge work will look like over the next decade. You say that technology will remove jobs...and I think you're right directionally, but I can't tell you the timeline for that, nor it's effects.

While I love being a software engineer, what that actually looks like on a daily basis has materially changed _a lot_ every few years. Sitting for a day debugging why my SCSS won't render is not the core value I bring to this world as a human.
by somethingsome | 2025-07-24 21:05:33+00:00
I have many functions written by many scientists in a unique software over many years, some expect a data format the others another, it's not always the same function that is called, but all the functions could have been written using a unique data format. However, they chose the data format when writing the functions based on the application at hand at that moment and the possible acceleration of their algorithms with the selected data structure.

When I tried to refactor using types, this kind of problems became obvious. And forced more conversions than intended.

So I'm really curious because, a part from rewriting everything, I don't see how to avoid this problem. It's more natural for some applications to have the data format 1 and for others the data format 2. And forcing one over the other would make the application slow.

The problem arises only in 'hybrid' pipelines when new scientist need to use some existing functions some of them in the first data format, and the others in the other.

As a simple example, you can write rotations in a software in many ways, some will use matrix multiply, some Euler angles, some quaternions, some geometric algebra. It depends on the application at hand which one works the best as it maps better with the mental model of the current application. For example geometric algebra is way better to think about a problem, but sometimes Euler angles are output from a physical sensor. So some scientists will use the first, and the others the second. (of course, those kind of conversions are quite trivial and we don't care that much, but suppose each conversion is very expensive for one reason or another)

I didn't find it a criticism :)
by dhosek | 2025-07-24 21:05:54+00:00
Another thing that comes to mind is reading Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art by Nicholson Baker (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1984881396/donhosek). Baker talks about tracing other artists’ work as part of his practice and cites an art teacher who initially recommended this, but then chose not to retract the advice when Baker wanted to mention her by name in his book, but Baker himself found that this practice of tracing did, in fact, help him become better at drawing freehand.
by bsder | 2025-07-24 21:07:28+00:00
It's not like C++ users don't say the exact same thing about String, though.

The problem is that String really isn't a language primitive.

Different people and programs always have a different notion of what a String should do (Should it be mutable? Should it always be valid UTF-8? Which operations should be O(1), O(n) or O(n log n)? etc.)
Show HN: Uplogr – Social Changelog App
by Zshawqi | 2025-07-24 21:07:30+00:00
Uplogr is a social changelog platform that helps indie builders and product teams share updates, track progress, and build in public. Users can share updates, maintain a public changelog, and stay consistent with build streaks. Pro features like feedback collection, polls, shareable questionnaires and a knowledge base make it easy to engage your audience and grow with your community.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-07-24 21:08:08+00:00
Yep, Dov Frohman's contribution to tech is well known and very appreciated.

Edit: Look, to whoever is out there on a downvote spree, I don't care if I get downvoted, man, but wild you'd just downvote people talking about a guy whose won multiple IEEE awards, has patents to his name, and has left his mark on EE, and isn't even the focus of the discussion at hand.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-24 21:08:55+00:00
I hate /fit/ and the bodybuilding forums so much. Stupid memes like this, SS, GOMAD, and related exist and continue to be parroted because of them. No, using a segway to move in between weight machines will not preserve your gains.

The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal. I applaud folks like Chloe Ting (a "cardio bunny" aesthetic youtuber who specialize in Calistenics) who roast these guys by challenging them (bodybuilder roid bros) to keep up with her on her exercise routines. Watching these dudes collapse again and again because they have pathetic endurance and don't do meaningful cardio reminds is delicious to say the least.

If you get your diet advice from Zyzz, Rich Piana, or the rest of the memeloards of fitness, you deserve what's coming to you. Don't skip leg day.
by ianburrell | 2025-07-24 21:09:11+00:00
Nukes produce lots of gamma and x-rays. On Earth, those are absorbed to produce the fireball. In LEO, some are absorbed by upper atmosphere to make EMP. In space, they are radiation.

Except for military satellites like GPS, most satellites aren't hardened to deal with that much radiation. My guess is that the range would be thousands of miles.
by nijuashi | 2025-07-24 21:09:29+00:00
When we go to grad school, we’re taught how to write a research paper. Each field has a more or less standard format, where different types of data go in specific sections. So if an LLM is trained on enough papers in that field, it can learn to plug in the information you provide according to those conventions.

In that sense, you’d give the LLM the purpose of the paper, the field you’re writing in, and the relevant data from your lab notebook. Personally, I never enjoyed writing manuscripts — most of the time goes into citing every claim and formatting everything correctly, which often feels more like clerical work than communicating discovery.

I don’t mind if LLMs help write these papers. I don’t think learning to mimic this stylistic form necessarily adds to the process of discovery. Scientists should absolutely be rigorous and clear, but I’d welcome offloading the unnecessary tedium of stylized writing to automation.
by barbazoo | 2025-07-24 21:09:33+00:00
The problem is people not cars or bikes because we rarely take into account how what we do affects other people. Riding my bike, I try to always consider the delta in speed between me and other folks. Sure I can speed along the walkway if there's no one else but as soon as there are or could be people around, I better slow down. Not only for safety but also to reduce stress on whoever is slower. Maybe we're too focussed on ourselves, maybe our community has broken down, maybe we don't consider each other real fellow humans.
by SirMaster | 2025-07-24 21:09:46+00:00
I never really found the eating more when exercising more that compelling personally. I mainly meal prep and eat the same amount whether or not I work out and how hard I work out.

I feel like saying that someone is going to eat more because they are start exercising a lot is a separate topic. But I would think that someone who has the willpower to start exercising drastically more also has the willpower to control what they physically put in their mouth. I have personally found that stopping putting things in my mouth to eat is easier than getting myself to exercise as much as I would like to, so I don't think it's a guarantee that someone choosing to exercise more will automatically eat more.
by hedora | 2025-07-24 21:10:51+00:00
I rebooted my terminal and I can’t tell for sure if it sees any satellites. It looks like it doesn't.

It says it didn’t, and it says the “which way is down” thing hasn’t converged. Occasionally, the signal to noise ratio light in the app goes gray which means < 3.

It also rebooted itself.

Before the first reboot, 30% of pings went through. It’s almost like the azimuth or some other timely but cached data was corrupted.
by bgnn | 2025-07-24 21:11:10+00:00
This applies for any manufacturing industry to be honest. US shipbuilding capability is so limited compared to China. It's only surviving because of military spending, but not in a healthy way. US made ships are of lower quality and cost much more, compared to European countries. It's the same for cars, busses, airplanes. Whole US policy is blocking the entry of busses manufactured outside NAFTA. US government is keeping Boeing alive by sending POTUS to marketing trips etc etc.
by baq | 2025-07-24 21:11:12+00:00
> Starlink is pretty darn robust.

not saying it isn't. I was the evangelist of it in 2022 and seen the pentagon salivating at what they've seen and rightly so.

what it isn't is indestructible, though - and we don't know the capability of nukes designed specifcally to cause the Kessler syndrome in LEO for a few years. if I was China I'd have a project for this commissioned by Jan 2023.
by manoDev | 2025-07-24 21:11:20+00:00
> In any nontrivial codebase, this inevitably leads to bugs when, for example, a string representing a user ID gets used as an account ID

Inevitably is a strong word. I can't recall the last time I've seen such bug in the wild.

> or when a critical function accepts three integer arguments and someone mixes up the correct order when calling it.

Positional arguments suck and we should rely on named/keyword arguments?

I understand the line of reasoning here, but the examples are bad. Those aren't good reasons to introduce new types. If you follow this advice, you'll end up with an insufferable codebase where 80% LoC is type casting.

Types are like database schemas. You should spend a lot of time thinking about semantics, not simply introduce new types because you want to avoid (hypothetical) programmer errors.

"It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures."