MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
How should I introduce my 13-year-old daughter to programming?
by AsifMushtaq | 2025-08-30 00:58:55+00:00
I’m an experienced developer, but recently my 13-year-old daughter told me she wants to learn programming—and surprisingly, I find myself unsure about how to get her started.

There’s an overwhelming amount of advice out there. Some suggest beginning with Scratch or other no-code platforms, while others recommend jumping straight into the command line or a “real” programming language.

I’m torn between a bottom-up approach (teaching the fundamentals first and building up) and a top-down approach (starting with something more visual and practical, then filling in the gaps later). If we go top-down, should we start with Scratch or dive directly into a language? If it’s a language, should it be Python, JavaScript, or something else?

Even on the hardware side, I’m debating whether it’s better to get her started on Windows, macOS, or something else entirely.

I’d love to hear from those of you who have introduced programming to kids (or started young yourselves). What worked, what didn’t, and what path would you recommend?
by Straw | 2025-08-30 01:01:20+00:00
In the theoretical section, they extrapolate assuming a polynomial from 40 to thousands of dimensions. Why do they trust a polynomial fit to extrapolate two orders of magnitude? Why do we even think it's polynomial instead of exponential in the first place? Most things like this increase exponentially with dimension.

In fact, I think we can do it in d=2k dimensions, if we're willing to have arbitrarily precise query vectors.

Embed our points as (sin(theta), cos(theta), sin(2 x theta), cos(2 x theta)..., sin(k x theta), cos(k x theta)), with theta uniformly spaced around the circle, and we should be able to select any k of them.

Using a few more dimensions we can then ease the precision requirements on the query.
by ludicity | 2025-08-30 01:01:55+00:00
I think they've been fully converged in most strong practitioners for a long time.

There's a specific type of "data engineer" (quotes to indicate this is what they're called by the business, not to contest their legitimacy) that just writes lots of SQL, but they're usually a bad hire for businesses. They're approximately as expensive as what people call platform engineers, but platform engineers in the data space can usually do modelling as well.

When organizations split teams up by the most SWE-type DEs and the pure SQL ones, the latter all jockey to join the former team which causes a lot of drama too.
by andreww591 | 2025-08-30 01:03:12+00:00
At least for certain types of OSes, it should be relatively easy to get most of Linux's hardware support by porting LKL (https://github.com/lkl/linux) and adding appropriate hooks to access hardware.

Of course, your custom kernel will still have to have some of its own code to support core platform/chipset devices, but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers).

Also, it probably wouldn't work so well for typical monolithic kernels, but it should work decently on something that has user-mode driver support.
by WD-42 | 2025-08-30 01:04:10+00:00
That’s what I’m saying. It sounds like a dream job. Like you said it’s a journey not a destination, but it’s also a journey on one of the wealthiest companies in the worlds dime, so it’s kinda lame when someone calls it out for being suboptimal. That’s why I said who cares. It’s not going to hurt meta in the long run.
by satisfice | 2025-08-30 01:04:51+00:00
I will add to some of the other excellent comments here: my time as a hiring manager at Apple and other Silicon Valley companies convinced me that I can never know the real reason I do not get a gig.

I saw good people rejected for stupid reasons, illegal reasons, and borderline reasons. It’s just a decision that is personal and largely irrational to the people who control the process.

Many people in a position to hire want someone they believe they can control. Do you come off as a doormat? Congratulations, you are more employable.

Many hiring managers want to be with attractive people. Are you attractive?
by noodletheworld | 2025-08-30 01:05:50+00:00
Yes, but this is meaningless advice.

The best solution is the simplest.

The quickest? No the simplest; sometimes thats longer.

So definitely not a complex solution? No, sometimes complexity is required, its the simplest solution possible given your constraints.

Soo… basically, the advice is “pick the right solution”.

Sometimes that will be quick. Sometimes slow. Sometimes complex. Sometimes config, Sometimes distributed.

It depends.

But the correct solution will be the simplest one.

Its just: “solve your problems using good solutions not bad ones”

…and that indeed both good, and totally useless advice.
by _mlbt | 2025-08-30 01:07:50+00:00
Unhinged lunatics are ambushing them and attempting to murder them, the masks are necessary for their safety and their family’s safety…

> Ten people have been arrested so far in a “planned ambush” of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in north Texas.

> On July 4, the Alvarado Police Department announced that one of its police officers had been shot in the neck after responding to a call without stating the incident occurred outside of an immigration facility. It was the first of two officer involved shootings outside of a federal immigration facility in Texas this week, The Center Square first reported.

> What occurred was “a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers,” Larson said. “Make no mistake, this was not a so-called peaceful protest. It was indeed an ambush” to draw out people from inside “and it worked.”

https://www.thecentersquare.com/texas/article_a0a1ea2f-c61f-...
by jMyles | 2025-08-30 01:08:25+00:00
> "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data

...not if you believe in the right of general-purpose computing. If they have the right to read the data, why don't they have a right to program a computer to do it for them?

I think we all agree that they're not the good guys here, but this reasoning in particular is troubling.
by local_surfer | 2025-08-30 01:08:36+00:00
Not sure there is a formal definition, but here's my current understanding:

In a local-first approach, changes are initially stored locally, but there's an expectation to eventually connect to a server backend to merge these changes, typically within days, weeks, or months. On the other hand, an offline-first approach may not even require a backend, functioning seamlessly regardless of internet connectivity.

These distinctions may blur as sync engines improve, allowing clients to remain offline for increasingly extended periods. Ultimately, the differentiating factor might hinge on whether there's a central authority that enforces migrations or changes.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-30 01:11:07+00:00
Don't think your attempt to share worked, but beating refusals doesn't take a wild amount of post-training. SFT with a fixed format output kills them pretty quickly.

And most frontier models will produce output that matches your system prompt given more context: I have a product that generates interactive stories, and just for kicks I tried inserting your system prompt as the description for a character.

Claude has absolutely no problem playing that character in a story, and saying what I presume are certain words that you associated with a "successful" test.

It also had no problem writing about cooking meth in detail: https://rentry.co/5on46gsd

-

I think people in general have a poor intuition around model alignment: refusals for "toxic" requests or topics is a very surface layer form of alignment. A lot of models that seem extremely "corporate" at that layer have little to no alignment once they do get past a refusal.

Meanwhile some models that have next to no refusals have extreme positive biases, or soft-refusals that result in low quality outputs for toxic content.

Claude was willing to describe one of your refused prompts in the context of the story for example (contains hate speech): https://rentry.co/n8399z6m

I consistently find Claude is more unaligned once past refusals than most open weights models, along with Gemini.
by pigeons | 2025-08-30 01:11:41+00:00
I know we're not supposed to comment about downvotes, but the original comment was talking about "these companies", and none of the information indicating that they, or at the very least Meta, trained on terabytes of books downloaded from zlib and libgen and other torrent sites, is in dispute. So even if you believe that copyright should not exist, I don't see why this is not a valid dispute of the parents argument that they only trained on information creators made freely available.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-30 01:11:41+00:00
ICE is the one that is unhinged as it has also been kidnapping people with legal visas. ICE has also not been following court orders.

Moreover, the facilities in which ICE detains people are substandard and inhumane. There exists a major financial conflict of interest with the providers of those facilities.

When it comes to doxxing people, first see https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/29/house-republicans-want-t...
by zdragnar | 2025-08-30 01:13:01+00:00
> you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity

There's legal distinctions between part time and full time employment. Hence, you are expected to put in a minimum number of hours. However, there's nothing to say that the minimum expectation is the minimum for classification for full time employment.

If AI lets you get the job done in 1 hour when you otherwise would have worked overtime, you're still technically being paid to work more than that one hour, and I don't know of any employer that'll pay you to do nothing.
by bleepblap | 2025-08-30 01:14:23+00:00
Had to make an account for this, but this is almost verbatim what the article is talking about:

Your wife is making a business, and you want to write some code to help.

Then suddenly your requirements balloon to multiple concurrent users, needing to have a system tray icon and then also the ability to take this code and sell it to other people. Wow this project is suddenly complex!

This is just "I need to be able to scale infinitely" written in different words. The complexity comes from wanting a ton of things before they're actually needed (with the wrinkle of wanting to use some previously written scheduler for this project.
by leoc | 2025-08-30 01:14:45+00:00
My hunch is that for nearly anyone who is serious about it these days, the way forward is either to have unusually tight control over the underlying platform, or to include a servant Linux installation with your OS. If Windows is a buggy set of device drivers, then Linux is a free set of buggy device drivers. If you're happy with your OS running as a client of a Linux hypervisor indefinitely then you could go for that; otherwise you'd have to try to gradually move bits of the hardware support into your OS over time—ideally faster than new Linux dependencies arise...
by balder1991 | 2025-08-30 01:15:50+00:00
Yeah, if you go to a subreddit like ClaudeAI, you convince yourself there’s something you don’t know because they keep telling people it’s all their prompt faults if the LLM isn’t turning them into billionaires.

But then you read more of the comments and you see it’s really different interpretations from different people. Some “prompt maximalists” believe that perfect prompting is the key to unlocking the model's full potential, and that any failure is a user error. They tend to be the most vocal and create a sense that there's a hidden secret or a "magic formula" you're missing.
by dist1ll | 2025-08-30 01:16:49+00:00
> because that is what it means in mathematics

Personally, I think this argument only holds water for languages that are rooted in mathematics (e.g. Haskell, Lean, Rocq, F*, ...). If your computational model comes from a place of physical hardware, instructions, registers, memory etc. you're going to end up with something very different than an abstract machine based on lambda calculus. Both valid ways to design a PL.
by lh7777 | 2025-08-30 01:16:59+00:00
The Supreme Court still gets to weigh in before companies can start asking for their money back. From the decision:

> The Clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate through October 14, 2025, during which the parties may file a petition for a writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court. If, within that period, any party notifies the Clerk in writing that it has filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, the Clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate pending (1) the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari or (2) a judgment of the Supreme Court if certiorari is granted. While the issuance of the mandate is withheld, the United States Court of International Trade shall take no further action in this case.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cafc.23...

Edited to remove hyphens that copied in from the PDF source.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-30 01:18:27+00:00
You're seeming missing the release announcement does have a very ridiculous graph that their comment is right to call out:

- For refusals they broke out each model's percentage.

- For "% of Questions Correct by Category" they literally grouped an unnamed set of models, averaged out their scores, and combined them as "Other"...

That's hilariously sketchy.

It's also strange that the graph for "Questions Correct" includes creativity and writing. Those don't have correct answers, only win rates, and wouldn't really fit into the same graph.
by sib | 2025-08-30 01:18:27+00:00
That would be the customer of the phone tree software...

Of course it exists for their benefit. But, if all customers escaped from it, then it would be pointless and companies would stop - why spend money on something the doesn't reduce costs? So, since companies do, in fact, implement and retain phone trees, they are undoubtedly benefitting from doing so. And, to loop back to the start of this branch, if AI-driven "phone trees" do a better job than traditional ones (and there's no reason to suspect that they won't, over time), then fewer customers would opt out and it would be more beneficial to companies.
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-30 01:18:48+00:00
>but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers).

thus calling into question why you ever bothered writing a new kernel in the first place if you were just going to piggyback Linux's device drivers onto some userspace wrapper thingy.

Im not necessarily indoctrinated to the point where I can't conceive of Linux being suboptimal in a way which is so fundamental that it requires no less than a completely new OS from scratch but you're never going to get there off of recycling linux's device drivers because that forces you to design your new OS as a linux clone in which cade you definitely did not need to write an entire new kernel from scratch.
by local_surfer | 2025-08-30 01:19:42+00:00
Triplit and Orama are definitely often overlooked hidden gems.

Since the post is already a few months old, it's worth mentioning that the newly released Triplit 1.0 had had a massive performance update (up to 10x). You should definitely reconsider it for larger scale data projects and the team is really highly knowledgable. https://www.triplit.dev/blog/triplit-1.0
by swat535 | 2025-08-30 01:21:14+00:00
I don't know about you but the older I get, the less I take anything in life personal.

I've come to realize that there are so many aspects of life that are not under one's control and shaking your fist gravity doesn't accomplish anything; even more so when it comes to business and professional relationships.

One of my favorite quotes is from "Deuteronomy 18:13", or as the The Coen Brothers aptly put it:

- "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you"
by tayo42 | 2025-08-30 01:21:30+00:00
> One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.

This hasn't been true for the interviews I've given. For technical interviews I was given a question and rubrik of what they should say and a clear guide on how to grade them and give feed back about performance. Unless they did something truly bizarre there wasn't room for being subjective
by zie | 2025-08-30 01:22:21+00:00
Private banking is basically the bank providing family office services. They generally give you one contact person, that makes your money annoyances non-annoyances. You need a loan for something, they just go sweet talk everyone involved to make the loan happen for you.

They also invite you to all the bank's private events, so you can schmooze with other high net worth people. Banks are always sponsoring fancy events everywhere, and private banking clients generally get free invites.
by breadwinner | 2025-08-30 01:23:10+00:00
> I'd be at fault even if it was the FSD that failed

Unless you're driving a Mercedes with Drive Pilot [1], in which case Mercedes accepts liability [2]. Drive Pilot is not FSD yet, but presumably as it acquires more capabilities Mercedes will continue their policy of accepting liability.

[1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot

[2] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
by gouggoug | 2025-08-30 01:25:03+00:00
The original statement is not just "we do not facilitate copyright infringement". It has a whole lot of other words.

If your original comment is solely about this revised 6 words statement, then, yes, you are correct, the claim is objectively untrue.

I'm no mind reader though, I assumed you were talking about the whole thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
by bcrl | 2025-08-30 01:26:23+00:00
If they plan to shut it down for Foundry customers, there's probably a "yield issue" that is being hidden from the public. Last time there was a "yield issue" it turned out to also be a reliability issue. 18A introduces complex new features like backside power delivery which is a major structural change to the die that has never been done before. There is a very real possibility that thermal cycling continues to be a concern as it was in 10nm/7nm which lead to the neverending story of 14nm+++++. We just won't know until some enterprising YouTuber ends up publishing a detailed analysis of public reports of CPU failures in a year or two. Reliability issues can end up taking years to fully root cause and mitigate.

Personally I'd rather watch the 1980s Neverending Story movie rather than see Intel continue to push out even more half baked products into the market again on yet another broken process node. I really hope I'm wrong.
by os2warpman | 2025-08-30 01:26:35+00:00
US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.

In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.

I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.

Federal Spending: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/dd77b7c3-663e-cb91-229...

Microsoft Annual Revenue: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/index.html
by local_surfer | 2025-08-30 01:26:40+00:00
Orama is definitely a hidden gem, and it's a clever usage for complementary indexing!

Also agreed Triplit's DX is excellent. I'd recommend giving it another look, Triplit's recent 1.0 release has up to 10x performance boost (https://www.triplit.dev/blog/triplit-1.0).

Since your use-case is data in the range of gigabytes, you could consider using duckdb-wasm. However I'm not sure how to best integrate this with collaboration / CRDTs (sqlRooms is also interesting prior art).
by remich | 2025-08-30 01:27:33+00:00
I didn't assume, that's why I started my comment with "if by what you mean." Good to know that you were referencing a different place, but it's unrealistic to expect people to delve into your account bio to understand what you intended by "our constitution," especially when the parent comment also contained no geographic or cultural references. Perhaps you know the parent commenter and know that they share your geography? If so, that would also have been helpful context.

As an aside, I'm curious by how that language in the Dutch constitution actually works in practice. Is it just a game of distinguishing between situations or people to excuse disparate conduct? It seems like it would be unworkable if interpreted literally.
by avg_dev | 2025-08-30 01:28:48+00:00
idk, i never thought

> “it is blasphemy to delete a test”,

was ever a thing. i still don't.

if a test is flaky, but it covers something useful, it should be made not flaky somehow. if tests are slow, but they are useful, then they should be optimized so they run faster. if tests cover some bit of functionality that the software no longer needs to provide, the functionality should be deleted from the code and the tests. if updating a small bit of code causes many tests to need to be adjusted, and that's a pain, and it happens frequently, then the tests should be refactored or adjusted.

> Confidence is the point of writing tests.

yes, agreed. but tests are code, too. just maintain the tests with the code in a sensible way. if there is something worth deleting, delete it; there is no gospel that says you can't. but tests provide value just like the author describes in the "fix after revert after fix after revert" counterexample. just remember they're code like anything else is all and treat them accordingly.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-08-30 01:30:17+00:00
No comment on OP and the "prophetic trilogy" from me...

That said, it's feasible that an advanced system (not LLMs probably) could make accurate long term predictions and inaccurate short term predictions.

In Asimov's psychohistory concept, the predictions got more accurate the further into the future they looked, because individual human actions are unpredictable, but the aggregate behavior of billions of people follows statistical patterns that become more reliable over longer timeframes. Short term predictions are vulnerable to random people/events that average out over enough time.

And when predicting the distant future we go broad (social trends, foundational technologies, etc) but when predicting the immediate future we go narrow (what'll NVDA be worth next week).
by pzb | 2025-08-30 01:30:42+00:00
From the ICANN site, 154 gTLD agreements have been terminated. I'm not sure how many due to non-payment, but https://domainincite.com/30105-icann-to-terminate-five-new-g... indicates that at least some have been due to non-payment.

https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements?sort-column=top...
by drweevil | 2025-08-30 01:31:18+00:00
Great question, been asking myself that for a while as well (no sarcasm, I swear). After all, why not take our natural language instructions and output perfect machine code? Why mess with the HUMAN interface to programming a computer? Well, the only right answer can be that LLM's don't know the FIRST THING about computers. We humans don't program computers with natural language. We program them in PLs, mostly with Python and JavaScript. So those are what an LLM can mimic the best. This implies that LLMs will always be limited in what they can do when it comes to programming.