MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by barrkel | 2025-07-20 08:22:31+00:00
The heart of this is what you think tax is.

If you just think it's the government stealing your stuff, then it seems very unfair to have your stuff taxed after you die.

But what tax is, under another lens, is a way to divert the capacity of a state to social ends. Everything from the military to the police to prisons and the justice system is what enables you to live in peace and accumulate stuff in the first place. Those are social goods.

So how do you fund this spending? How do you incentivize other people to protect your house? Well, the solution of tax is they take a little bit of your stuff over time, in a predictable way, according to rules that are pre-agreed and can be changed with consensus.
by pwdisswordfishz | 2025-07-20 08:22:46+00:00
The point about inter-procedural borrow checking is fair -- and in fact not a matter of "sufficiently smart" borrow checker, but a rather fundamental type system limitation. But the flaw here is pretty manageable -- sometimes you can get away with calling .split_at_mut(...), sometimes you can borrow the field directly instead of going through a wrapper method, sometimes you have to be mindful to provide a split_at_mut equivalent yourself. Last I checked there was some work being done on "partial borrows", which could solve this.

Most of the other criticisms are pretty disappointing, though.

> The following example is a famous illustration of how it can't properly reason across branches, either:

Except that function body would have been better rewritten as map.entry(key).or_default() -- which passes the borrow checker just fine and is more performant as it avoids multiple lookups. I suspect many other examples would benefit from being re-written into higher-level primitives that can be easier to borrow-check in this manner.

> But what's the point of the rules in this case, though? Here, the ownership rules does not prevent use after free, or double free, or data races, or any other bug. It's perfectly clear to a human that this code is fine and doesn't have any actual ownership issues.

What if Id represents a file descriptor that ought to be closed when the value ceases to exist? Or some other type of handle? This is an ownership problem: these are not limited to memory safety issues. For very good API stability reasons, without an explicit #[derive(Clone,Copy)] the compiler is not free to assume the type represents pure information that can be copied at will, but can only treat it as one potentially containing owned resources, that just happens not to include any at this time.

> References to temporary values, e.g. values created in a closure, are forbidden even though it's obvious to a human that the solution is simply to extend the lifetime of the value to its use outside the closure.

Which is to say, to what? The type signature does not say whether a closure will be called immediately or in another thread after two hours. And in which stack frame should the value be stored, the soon-to-be-exiting closure's?
by mattmanser | 2025-07-20 08:23:18+00:00
I once redid a project from VB.Net to C# and pretty much did that.

People misjudge many tasks as 'hard' when they are in fact easy but tedious.

The problem is you need a high degree of accuracy, which you don't get with LLMs.

The best you can do is set the LLM on a loop and try and Brute force it, which is the current vibe 'coding' trick.

I sound pessimistic but I'm actually shocked at how effective it is.
by thegeekpirate | 2025-07-20 08:23:47+00:00
USDA 80/20 ground beef has 7.7g per 113g [0], 90/10 has 5g [1], Beyond Meat has 2g [2], and Impossible has 6g [3].

Impossible also has a "Lite" version (which doesn't seem to exist near me) with 1g [4], although apparently it doesn't taste very good.

[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514744/nutrients

[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514743/nutrients

[2] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-CA/products/the-beyond-burger/...

[3] https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189392...

[4] https://impossiblefoods.com/beef/plant-based-impossible-beef...
by alternatex | 2025-07-20 08:24:15+00:00
I think the argument is that growing up with something doesn't necessarily make you good at it. I think it rings especially true with higher level abstractions. The upcoming generation is bad with tech because tech has become more abstract, more of a product and less something to tinker with and learn about. Tech just works now and requires little in assistance from the user, so little is learned.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-20 08:24:24+00:00
It happens all the time, actually. It's what happened to Gamestop. A few people really wanted the stock and the price just shot up. The worst was the Reddit IPO. The price just kept going up and the Reddit team sold stock at high prices instead of serving the community. It's just greed.

People should not be allowed to sell except at the government-mandated price. Of course, a few million may starve, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make in order to serve the community.

Hopefully, we can make this Great Leap Forward in consumer rights, and prevent Late Stage Capitalism from having a Mask-Off Moment in AI slop enshittification. If you disagree, I'm begging you to read a book. Tell me you're enabling corporate interests to cause trauma without telling me you're enabling corporate interests to cause trauma.
by myblake | 2025-07-20 08:26:58+00:00
> There's no pride, no joy, just productivity.

This is exactly what bothers me about the present moment. Not that the pride of craftsmanship is everything, but dialing it down to zero with extreme pressure to stay that way is a bit sad.

But we’ve clearly gone through this with other mediums before, perhaps someday people will appreciate hand written code the way we appreciate hand carved wood. Or perhaps we were all wasting time in this weird middle ground in the march of progress. I guess we’ll find out in 5-15 years.
by jltsiren | 2025-07-20 08:27:10+00:00
There are different kinds of parliamentary systems. In some, the prime minister is a big important leader, almost like a president in a presidential system. In others, they are just another interchangeable cog in the machine.

Here in Finland, it's rare that a prime minister manages to serve the full four-year term. Usually there are enough controversies and scandals that they eventually have to resign. But the government coalition just keeps going on, implementing the same policies as before, as the leader is ultimately not that important.
by slacktivism123 | 2025-07-20 08:27:54+00:00
Is this the future of collaborative coding?

When

https://github.com/antiwork/flexile/pull/427#issuecomment-30...

results in

https://github.com/antiwork/flexile/pull/427#issuecomment-30...

More incredible examples where a LLM flags contributors' pull requests because their comments contain minor grammar errors:

https://github.com/antiwork/flexile/pulls?q="our+contributin...
Show HN: I just published my practical guide to building a database server
by zetter | 2025-07-20 08:28:22+00:00
Hi all, I've just published my first book on Leanpub. The book is a guide to building your own database server that is similar to PostgreSQL or MySQL. You'll find out about how to build a typed programming language, execute SQL and learn how the internals of real databases work.

The page links to the 'community edition' which lets you see a free preview of the first few chapters.
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-07-20 08:28:26+00:00
We have decades of experience with computers being deterministic machines that will return a correct output given a correct input and program.

I can’t multiply large numbers in my head, but if I plug 273*8113 into a calculator, I can expect it to give me the same, correct answer every time.

Now suddenly it’s „Well yes, it can make mistakes, but so can humans! Sometimes it’ll be right, but also sometimes it’ll make up a random answer, kinda like humans!”, which I suppose is true, but it’s also nonsense - the very reason I was using technology (in that case, a calculator) to do my work is because I wanted to avoid mistakes that a human (me) would make without it. If a piece of tech can’t be reliably expected to perform a task better than a person can on their own, then what’s really the point?
by jbreckmckye | 2025-07-20 08:28:45+00:00
I'll tell you about one of them.

It was a kiosk app running on mobile tablets. It could have been a small native app, but the team, who were all pure Pythonists, tried that and decided it was too hard. So someone said React would be easy; after all it's just gluing together components, right?

The React app was built in ~3 months but the deadlines had created technical debt. When the team had problems modelling all the state, and the Redux store became an incomprehensible mess, someone said, "The problem is React. HTMX will finally make things simple".

They spent ~9 months on their HTMX rewrite and got even less far than the React version. It had numerous bugs; the UX had various regressions; it couldn't properly interact with some custom hardware; the state was now in the DB and apparently was not looking much nicer than it was in Redux, and eventually management pulled the plug.

I didn't work on it directly so I don't know how much HTMX itself stymied the project. From my interactions with the team, I think the real problem was the attitude of the developers. They decided they "hated React" when in truth they were bad at thinking about UI, particularly UI state, and unwilling to learn.

And HTMX gave succour to the fantasy they could continue not to. In fact that's how the initiative was sold to management, a way to turn non-UI devs into UI programmers.
by kybernetikos | 2025-07-20 08:29:13+00:00
I think probably the distinction we're making here is just one of scale and acceptance. I don't see your distinctions as fundamental:

1. If 9 of the ten friends consent and one doesn't they can still be forced to follow the rule the nine friends decided on.

2. Although it's a smaller scale, there absolutely is a 'social fabric' that can be harmed in a group of ten friends.

3. I don't think laws necessitate the use of lethal force, but yes, groups of people e.g. in sports or school do sometimes use violence to enforce group decisions on their members.

In some early societies, there was a basic assumption that broadly speaking the head of a household should have the right to manage their affairs as they wished. Laws were there to mediate between households (rather than individuals) and the big benefit they give to justify the loss of freedom is the control and management of blood feuds, which otherwise can be devastatingly destructive.
by MichaelRo | 2025-07-20 08:30:30+00:00
How about stuffing the books in a freezer? Apparently this can kill both bugs and their eggs, although I'm not sure it works on the particular kind of bugs in these books:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsItBullshit/comments/orpifq/isitbu...

Also there exist "ultra low" freezers which can bring temperature waay lower than the regular -20 Celsius. Like -80 or something. I doubt any bug or egg can survive such environment, although the books should suffer no harm.
by pygy_ | 2025-07-20 08:30:41+00:00
I've had a similar problem with WebGPU and WGSL. LLMs create buffers with the wrong flags (and other API usage errors), doesn't clean up resources, mix up GLSL and WGSL, write semi-less WGSL (in template strings) if you ask them to write semi-less [0] JS...

It's a big mess.

0. https://github.com/isaacs/semicolons/blob/main/semicolons.js
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 08:32:02+00:00
> How do people get (and stay, and get ever more) rich if not by accumulating wealth?

"Accumulating wealth" and "not spending the money" are two entirely different things. If you have a million dollars and use it to build and operate a factory and then the factory makes things you can sell for two million dollars, your wealth has increased by a million dollars, but in the meantime you've spent the entire million dollars you started with on building and operating a factory. And the next thing you're going to do is spend the two million dollars in order to make four.
by jacquesm | 2025-07-20 08:32:30+00:00
There are such things are Chromatic keyboards (for instance, the Chromatone synth had one), and there was the Janko piano keyboard and there are people that have made keyboards without the spaces in at the B/C and E/F at the back of the keyboard by alternating the white and the black keys such that those spaces just disappear.

The advantages are:

- you need less reach for the same chords

- transposition becomes trivial

The disadvantages are:

- your muscle memory will be invalidated

- the number of instruments set up like that is really small

- no accomplished pianist will want to switch

But if you really wanted to you could adapt an existing instrument to use a different keyboard and it isn't even all that complicated (medium complexity wood working project).
by JasonSage | 2025-07-20 08:32:57+00:00
As best I can tell, the author understands that the async write-ahead fails to be a guarantee where the sync one does… then turns their async write into two async writes… but there’s still no guarantee comparable to the synchronous version.

So I fail to see how the two async writes are any guarantee at all. It sounds like they just happen to provide better consistency than the one async write because it forces an arbitrary amount of time to pass.
I've been fighting with burnout for 18 years
by ianberdin | 2025-07-20 08:34:34+00:00
I’ve been programming for 18 years and have run into all sorts of problems. But probably the most important and hardest one—the biggest bottleneck for me, and I think for many others—is that the body has its limits. It’s called burnout.

Burnout is a very broad term that only vaguely describes what actually happened and why you can’t—or just don’t want to—work. This subject has tormented me for a long time: it keeps me from working a lot, from working productively, from getting results, and from building a startup.

Over that time I’ve gotten tons of advice—from loved ones, doctors, ChatGPT, Gemini, articles and comments on the internet, and so on. I’ve tried a bunch of things: – a pomodoro timer; – nasal strips; – working strictly during set hours; – lots of walking and exercise; – B-vitamins, co-enzyme Q10, L-theanine, creatine, L-arginine, 5-HTP; – antidepressants; – going to bed at 9–10 p.m.; – completely changing my diet, cutting out sugar, or, conversely, upping my sugar intake.

So many variables… I can’t say I’ve found a solution: every time it’s different. I’m sick and tired of it.

Recently, thanks to AI—more precisely, an LLM—I discovered an interesting tool. One evening, while out walking, I pulled up Gemini and started complaining: once again I’m tired, unproductive, burned out. As usual it spat out a huge wall of advice. I was so fed up! I said, “Fuck, I’m already sick of these tips. I’ve tried everything, I don’t want any more. Can you stop advising? Just ask questions. Better yet—ask like a CBT therapist so I can dig down to the cause myself.”

And then the magic happened. It really did stop advising and started asking at most one or two questions. That’s when the work began, the insights started flowing. Some questions and answers brought tears to my eyes. It was incredible.

In the end I uncovered causes I’d never even considered. Turned out I have a fear of deploying. I’m afraid everything will break. That fear led to procrastination: I began preparing endlessly, laying down safety nets so the fall wouldn’t hurt. I’d get so caught up in prep that I kept adding more features; finishing became harder, and deploying even scarier. I slid into anxiety: deploying felt terrifying, deadlines slipped. To catch up, I’d work and think even more. My cognitive resources would hit zero—and that was it.

The root wasn’t that I go to bed late; it was fear. Once I realized that, I just decided to back up everything, take snapshots, and deploy to a test server instead of straight to prod, like I used to. After all, I’m a solo bootstrap founder.

No one else could have helped me dig this deep. It took me several hours answering Gemini’s questions, day after day. The things I uncovered are fucking awesome. No one has ever helped me like that.

LLMs don’t just help us write code—they help us discover our own problems. I’m absolutely thrilled and had to share.
by devn0ll | 2025-07-20 08:35:07+00:00
When it starts curing disease for real, like one or two sessions: done.

Because then I know: they have been using it for real human benefit without trying to get humans hooked on re-occurring costs.

When it starts solving actual human problems like climate or start filling in our gaps of knowledge in science. When it starts lifting humans up to higher grounds instead of replacing them to make a buck.
by dwattttt | 2025-07-20 08:35:44+00:00
It doesn't sound like they're making multiple implementations that can write? If they were, they could make a trait for a Writable fs.

But from their description it sounded like exactly two concrete implementations, one read-only, one read-write. If you want to share code or implementations, there's lots of ways still. For example, if the read-write filesystem implementation is a superset of the read-only, put a read-only struct inside the read-write.
by softwareiseasy | 2025-07-20 08:35:45+00:00
Yeah this is completely valid and I’d already anticipated this, the challenge is how to get things encrypted whilst allow fast search. The system is actually already close to “zero-knowledge” and everything is encrypted at rest and transport but the vector search -> mcp server is the weak link there. The system is setup that you can’t actually create oauth keys if I’m not logged in as the server owner so that’s is secure, but there’s nothing that stops me from being able to change that, so we need to work out one final step, then it just wasn’t realistic for the mvp. However, a zero-knowledge system is the goal
by camgunz | 2025-07-20 08:36:37+00:00
The "X is like Y but Z" game w languages is pretty fun, and kind of illuminating as to what one thing you pick.

Go is like C but with concurrency/strings/GC/a good stdlib

Go is like C++ but simpler/fast compilation/no generics/a good stdlib

Go is like Python but statically typed/multithreaded/fast/single executable

Go is like Java but native/no OO

---

One thing Go haters rarely reckon with is that Go is the only popular modern language (ie from this millennium). Everything else is way older. Well, I would actually say that this is probably the cause of Go hate--if it weren't popular no one would care.
by danielbln | 2025-07-20 08:37:38+00:00
Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-20 08:38:02+00:00
An exercise in consider the source, and pay attention to the methodology and data set.

It turns out that the much-regurgitated analysis was done by a firm whose business is in taking a cut from people applying for "golden passports" and the data was taken in large part from the locations that people listed on their LinkedIn profiles for where they work, not where they reside.

Original report: https://taxjustice.net/reports/the-millionaire-exodus-myth/

An example of further comment that this generated outwith the major U.K. newspapers is https://youtube.com/watch?v=N-Gvl6zhRkg&t=473 which not only repeats the observation that "millionnaire" is not a precise term when it is usually a million dollars (which is indeed what the critiqued analysis used) rather than a million pounds, but adds that it also does not adequately account for such things as the the normal and long-standing process, driven by geography rather than by public tax policy, of people who retire, sell up, and move to Spain, the south of France, Italy, and so forth.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 08:39:00+00:00
You think COVID was a relevant experiment for that? Sure, if you close every physical gathering place then people spend more time on computers, but what does that have to do with a UBI?

Meanwhile the reason that people become nurses instead of social media managers is that nurses are paid more than social media managers and simultaneously attract people who want to feel like they're doing something meaningful instead of something useless, both of which would continue to be the case.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-20 08:39:08+00:00
Amazing looking APU! Wow Magnus!

Really nice to hear Strix Halo (follow up Medusa Halo) isn't cancelled; a consumer part also upgraded to 384b-memory APU. But also very much in the works, still far from set in stone, and 2027 basically for sure.

Also very very neat revisiting of what Medusa Point is! A capable APU die with a modest sized GPU (8 CU) and 4+4+2 Zen5/Zen5c/low power. Then an optional second chiplet with 12-cores. Makes sense, because if you want good video you get a discreet GPU anyways!
by cluckindan | 2025-07-20 08:39:35+00:00
Sure, the language has a mechanism for overriding the equality operator for classes, just like Java has .equals(), but the code is overriding the builtin algorithm. The case of comparing mixed type arrays is not a usual case and seems contrived. In JS, you could do the same by extending Array and using that, or implementing a custom .equals() for your objects. I suppose Python is a bit more functional in that respect.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-07-20 08:40:39+00:00
Typically on the U.K., if a service is rowdy and feels unsafe the guard will hide in their cabin and never emerge to do a ticket check.

In other words a no difference in personal safety between a driver only or driver and guard operation.

I’m not aware of any evidence of reduced safety in any category after introducing DOO, and if there as I suspect unions would be screaming from the hills. The only measurable impact I’ve seen is on accessibility (which doesnt mean that’s not a consideration)
by renewiltord | 2025-07-20 08:40:40+00:00
Another essential need is video games and Internet, without which most people cannot survive. Today's people also need access to the AI companion Ani part of the Grok 4 character suite built by x.ai. But we can solve the latter problem by just providing everyone with a $100k/year budget to spend on companionship. Mental health is health. Other platitudes available on demand. If you like, I can also use LLM to say such platitudes in the drawn out style of OP comment so that everyone can gather around and participate in game of Woe The Capitalist. Great enjoyment.
by throw1235435 | 2025-07-20 08:41:28+00:00
That's the real question IMO. Especially when everything that isn't deflationary with AI for the most part is getting much more expensive due to inflation globally. Save money on software, buy more blue collar goods.

If its an easy skill to learn, with little consequences if you get it wrong especially for small scale apps why pay for it? Don't know why seniors (of which I'm one) think they are immune to this.
by fooker | 2025-07-20 08:41:52+00:00
You are two years behind in your assessment, and technology moves pretty fast especially when you're trying to catch up.

You could buy phones with SMIC 7nm chips as early as mid 2024, that means yields were good enough around mid 2023.

This indicates they'd be on track to do 5nm this year, which is what the news articles indicate. The impressive part is that this is catching up with ASML+TSMC combined. There's no other company or government in the world that has achieved this vertical in the last few decades. China is willing to sink Manhattan project level resources into this, for good reason.