MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcassett | 2025-08-14 16:00:52+00:00
I had such a self-paced course in the '70s based on the book "Fundamentals of Logic Design" by Charles Roth, Jr. It should be noted that the book was specifically written for self-paced study, and as such acted as a sort of tutor by carefully laying out a sequence of reading short segments, answering short questions about the material, then doing more involved problems. I found this course to be very effective and motivating for me, especially given the undergraduate class sizes.
by abcd_f | 2025-08-14 16:00:55+00:00
He actually says just that!

Basically, he says that he was approached by some random person and was gifted a copy of The Hobbit. This person turned out to be an illustrator of translated edition (same as at the OP's link) and he made Bilbo look like Leonov (the guy in the video).

As a footnote, Leonov famously voiced Soviet version of Winnie The Pooh in all its glorious 3 episodes:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh_(1969_film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmGXzNMw0E
by ModernMech | 2025-08-14 16:01:07+00:00
I think it all has to do with impact. The point of the first amendment is so that the government cannot create policy to chill speech it doesn't like. That's why we all appreciate it.

A small branch library making autonomous choices about what books to store behind its walls with backing of the local community doesn't stand to chill speech across the state or nation, so the first amendment protection to free speech isn't really implicated. If some podunk town doesn't want to put books about trans kids on the shelves, that's not going to chill speech about trans people across the state or nation.

But when the governor sets policy that no libraries shall have books about trans people, then that's going to chill speech and the first amendment is implicated. Therefore it's unconstitutional, despite flowing from the same derived power source. That's my view anyway, I'm not a lawyer.
by jklein11 | 2025-08-14 16:01:10+00:00
I think you might be conflating the interest rate's that the federal reserve sets and the inflation rate.

The federal reserve rate is essentially how much the US pay's their debtors. Bank's use this as a benchmark for how much they lend to their own borrowers.

The inflation rate is a calculation done based on a basket of goods. if the price of that basket of goods goes up, inflation is up. if it goes down, inflation is down.

When the federal reserve lowers their rates, it makes it easier to get money, and therefore the price of the basket of goods goes up.

When they make their rates higher, money is harder to get, and the price of the basket of goods goes down. The only problem with this is that there is also less money for labor, which means that unemployment goes up. The Feds job is to balance these two things.
by troad | 2025-08-14 16:01:11+00:00
It's not 'calm' that differs, it's 'common'. Calm like palm, in all major accents.

Traditionally, calm and com- have different vowels in English, but most North American accents merge com- into calm. All other major English accents retain the distinction.

If you're American, try saying 'com' while rounding your lips. Or just listen to a recording of 'common' in an online dictionary from Britain or Australia. (Or lot, pot, spot, etc.)

TLDR (simplified):

US/Ca: (lot = palm) ≠ start

UK/Au: lot ≠ (palm = start)
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-14 16:01:16+00:00
Is this really that diffferent from the "average" programmer, especially a more junior one?

> LLMs get endlessly confused: they assume the code they wrote actually works; when test fail, they are left guessing as to whether to fix the code or the tests; and when it gets frustrating, they just delete the whole lot and start over.

I see this constantly with mediocre developers. Flailing, trying different things, copy-pasting from StackOverflow without understanding, ultimately deciding the compiler must have a bug, or cosmic rays are flipping bits.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-08-14 16:01:27+00:00
Other people have already responded to the obvious falseness of your premise, but I feel compelled to reply to one additional part.

> you will ... be miles ahead of others in terms of productivity

This productivity competition framework is utterly contemptible. Workers themselves have never seen any benefit at any point within my lifetime from being more productive. It just lets their employers extract more and employ fewer of them. Hustle culture is gross and socially destructive. Please stop the madness.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-14 16:01:28+00:00
All the other things he mentioned didn't rely on breakthroughs, LLMs really do seem to have reached a plateau and need a breakthrough to push along to the next step.

Thing is breakthroughs are always X years away (50 for fusion power for example).

The only example he gave that actually was kind of a big deal was mobile phones where capacitive touchscreens really did catapult the technology forward. But it is not like celphones weren't already super useful, profitable and getting better over time before capacitive touchscreens were introduced.

Maybe broadband to the internet also qualifies.
by blindriver | 2025-08-14 16:01:29+00:00
If you don't keep a stiff upper lip and be emotionally and mentally resilient about this, then someone who is exactly like you but has the resilience to keep going on will take your job.

This is the worst job market I've seen since the dot com bust. It's much worse than the Financial Crisis. There are tens of thousands of out of work programmers, and in the next few years more and more new grads are joining the mix. You have to understand who your competition is. There is also the existential crisis of AI taking our jobs as well hanging over us. It's pretty rough out there. That said, during the dotcom bust is when we first saw offshoring to India and people were worried to death that all the jobs were going to go to India and for the most part they didn't, there was still a competitive advantage to continue hiring in the US for the next 20 years.

The only way to get a job right now is either through connections from a friend or coworker that thinks you're great, or by hustling and applying to thousands of jobs, or by forming your own company.

Everything you know about finding a job, increase things by 100x. If last time you sent out 20 resumes and got a job, this time send out 2000 resumes. I'm not joking.

It's going to be tough, but if you're resilient, you will find a job. If you're worried about money, move your spending down to as close to 0 as possible. Move in with friends or family, eat ramen, and keep applying. You can do it!
by Levitz | 2025-08-14 16:01:34+00:00
What's the secular reading of "You shall have no other gods before me" ? What?

I can understand that Christmas has mutated into a family reunion, a time for gathering with loved ones etc, even Santa Claus, name and all, has turned into the figure that brings presents, but even if I can understand "You shall not murder" as a secular rule, the ten commandments as a whole are really hard to take as such no?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-14 16:01:57+00:00
In this world where business's make bold faced lies,I'm not even sure I fully believe this. It could be a half truth like "we aren't going bankrupt... But we're gonna look at being acquired by private equity in the next few months".

But this is a film/camera company so I guess I have no skin in this game anyway. Just giving a bit of scrutiny based on other experiences like this.
by gddbvxmm | 2025-08-14 16:02:12+00:00
This week, Google Cloud paid out their highest bug bounty yet ($150k) for a vulnerability that could have been prevented with ASI [0]. Good to see that Google is pushing forward with ASI despite the performance impact, because it would benefit the security of all hosting companies that use Linux/KVM, not just the cloud providers of big tech.

[0] https://cyberscoop.com/cloud-security-l1tf-reloaded-public-c...
by setheron | 2025-08-14 16:02:13+00:00
Same that's why I wrote the blog :)

Even the 'scopedImport' builtin isn't documented.

I agree. Kind of feels there's a lot to learn but also Nix is a complete departure from how we traditionally built software.

So if you think about all the implicit knowledge you carry with you when you move to other tooling, it's probably comparable.
by Myrmornis | 2025-08-14 16:02:19+00:00
I understand you'd like to believe that. But it looks like you're simply wrong. For example, here is the translation produced by Google Chrome of the Chinese version of the page on Bezout's Theorem.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9D%E7%A5%96%E5%AE%9A%E7...

It reads "Bézout's theorem is a theorem in algebraic geometry that describes the number of intersections of two algebraic curves . The theorem states that the number of intersections of two coprime curves X and Y is equal to the product of their degrees."

which is perfectly good English. The problem is that that is the entire page! It is thus woefully inadequate in comparison to the English page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zout%27s_theorem
by mccoyb | 2025-08-14 16:02:21+00:00
This is a low information density blog post. I’ve really liked Zed’s blog posts in the past (especially about the editor internals!) so I hope this doesn’t come the wrong way, but this seems to be a loose restatement of what many people are empirically finding out by using LLM agents.

Perhaps good for someone just getting their feet wet with these computational objects, but not resolving or explaining things in a clear way, or highlighting trends in research and engineering that might point towards ways forward.

You also have a technical writing no no where you cite a rather precise and specific study with a paraphrase to support your claims … analogous to saying “Godel’s incompleteness theorem means _something something_ about the nature of consciousness”.

A phrase like: “Unfortunately, for now, they cannot (beyond a certain complexity) actually understand what is going on” referencing a precise study … is ambiguous and shoddy technical writing — what exactly does the author mean here? It’s vague.

I think it is even worse here because _the original study_ provides task-specific notions of complexity (a critique of the original study! Won’t different representations lead to different complexity scaling behavior? Of course! That’s what software engineering is all about: I need to think at different levels to control my exposure to complexity)
by aseipp | 2025-08-14 16:02:39+00:00
> Hardware performance is more important than software performance if the algorithm is likely to be implemented in hardware

I don't think that's necessarily a given at all, but I grant that's mostly a matter of opinion I guess.

> Given that the purpose of the competition was to replace SHA2 if/when it is weakened

I think the dirty secret hiding there is that I see very few actual expectations SHA2 will ever be broken. Assuming it can be and picking a different secure construction, of course, is a good idea. But even the designers of BLAKE have admitted such and so did NIST.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 16:03:17+00:00
> You just made it all up, completely, based on what you want history to be.

I'm sorry, I'm not yet 500 years old, I have only knowledge based on school and it being portrayed in public media. Do you have sources for your differing knowledge.

> No one expected the master to care for you or handle your healthcare.

Yes nobody is going to sue him. However when one of your prentices vanishes, there will be gossip, that's bad for business. Also I argued that this is bad for the master purely for economic reasons (sunken costs), because feeding someone is not cheap especially in the middle ages.

> It is true you was not paid and worked for food.

Yes and this is not something bad at all. It is just a different economy.

> Generally, they were unwilling to kick you off family, unless you was disobedient.

Yes and your father would claim you were disobedient to your master when you have not learned enough, as he has sent you there. That's why I would earlier that it's kind-of like you are now part of the master's family.
by cameronh90 | 2025-08-14 16:03:51+00:00
I'm not sure I'd describe it as a plateau. It might be, but I'm not convinced. Improvements are definitely not as immediately obvious now, but how much of that is due to it being more difficult to accurately gauge intelligence above a certain point? Or even that the marginal real life utility of intelligence _itself_ starts to plateau?

A (bad) analogy would be that I can pretty easily tell the difference between a cat and an ape, and the differences in capability are blatantly obvious - but the improvement when going from IQ 70 to Einstein are much harder to assess and arguably not that useful for most tasks.

I tend to find that when I switch to a new model, it doesn't seem any better, but then at some point after using it for a few weeks I'll try to use the older model again and be quite surprised at how much worse it is.
by Supermancho | 2025-08-14 16:04:36+00:00
> What a simplistic take on a much more nuanced set of issues and ideas than that from the Republicans and conservatives in general. "brown people"? What the hell does that generic, i'd say even coddlingly racist, label means specifically mean?

It's cut and dry. Plain racism, broadly and slowly applied. Don't try to notice, they hate that.

> All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses.

Ah yes, the foolish "state policy don't matter because you can get it somewhere else". Treating the issue lightly, is part of the problem. Now there's 1 less source BY POLICY and the noose tightens. Weaponizing policy is something politicians are prone to do.
by chollida1 | 2025-08-14 16:05:10+00:00
> This is such selective hindsight, though.

Ha;) Yes, when you provide examples to prove your point they are, by definition, selective:)

You are free to develop your own mental models of what technology and companies to invest in. I was only trying to share my 20 years of experience with investing to show why you shouldn't discard current technology because of its current limits.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-14 16:05:30+00:00
> but LLMs have really started to plateau off on their capabilities haven’t they?

Uhhh, no?

In the past month we've had:

- LLMs (3 different models) getting gold at IMO

- gold at IoI

- beat 9/10 human developers at atcode heuristics (optimisations problems) with the single human that actually beat the machine saying he was exhausted and next year it'll probably be over.

- agentic that actually works. And works for 30-90 minute sessions while staying coherent and actually finishing tasks.

- 4-6x reduction in price for top tier (SotA?) models. oAI's "best" model now costs 10$/MTok, while retaining 90+% of their previous SotA models that were 40-60$/MTok.

- several "harnesses" being released by every model provider. Claude code seems to remain the best, but alternatives are popping off everywhere - geminicli, opencoder, qwencli (forked, but still), etc.

- opensource models that are getting close to SotA, again. Being 6-12months behind (depending on who you ask), opensource and cheap to run (~2$/MTok on some providers).

I don't see the plateauing in capabilities. LLMs are plateauing only in benchmarks, where number goes up can only go up so far until it becomes useless. IMO regular benchmarks have become useless. MMLU & co are cute, but agentic whatever is what matters. And those capabilities have only improved. And will continue to improve, with better data, better signals, better training recipes.

Why do you think eveyr model provider is heavily subsidising coding right now? They all want that sweet sweet data & signals, so they can improve their models.
by e40 | 2025-08-14 16:05:44+00:00
Yeah, most of it is. I got a look behind the curtain when when my son got a master's. His PI was wrote a huge Python program then left and he inherited it. The new PI is completely clueless. They all have other, more pressing things to do, instead of doing proper software engineering.

When I was at UCB in the 80's, a lot of incredible things happened (Berkeley UNIX), but they had a LOT of staff members that did a lot of the work. And that had PhD students (Bill Joy, Sam Leffler) who were insanely smart and spent most of their time doing proper engineering on their projects. And, btw, I was one of those staff members. I saw all aspects of it, because the project I was on was used by a lot of people in the CS dept.

I wasn't actually criticizing anyone. I think it's just the way it is.
by blindriver | 2025-08-14 16:05:47+00:00
Can FASB please get rid of the term "going concern" and replace it with something more understandable? It has caused a lot of confusion for many companies and there's no need for it whatsoever. They can completely replace the term with something else like "Continuing Operations". It's really fucking easy, I don't know why they insist on that backwards terminology except maybe they enjoy the confusion it creates.
by jonahx | 2025-08-14 16:05:48+00:00
> Based on your experience, do you have any insight for whether, in the course of verbal/written instruction, it's better to start with concrete instances of a concept, and then give the abstract concept itself, or vice versa?

The abstract concept is meaningless without the concrete examples.

It is only mathematicians, who are accustomed to the abstract theorem being the final goal, who get confused about this. It's only possible to consider the "theorem first" approach as reasonable to the extent that you, or the students, already have the requisite concrete foundations to understand it. Which is to say: to the extent that it is not really "new".
by Myrmornis | 2025-08-14 16:05:54+00:00
I'm not sure why you're thinking that; perhaps you're remembering something from a few years ago, or perhaps you have a prior biased against ML/LLM solutions. The translations provided by Google Chrome of Chinese wikipedia pages seem great. For example, Linear Algebra

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BA%BF%E6%80%A7%E4%BB%A3%E6...

The problem, as I pointed out, is that readers of non-English pages are accessing a second-rate Wikipedia. For example: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9D%E7%A5%96%E5%AE%9A%E7...
by harmmonica | 2025-08-14 16:06:02+00:00
True "growth hacker" mindset. Our mission is to connect the people of the world. The TAM for that is ~8 billion. What if we could, overnight, increase the number of "people" in the world by orders of magnitude so that every one of those 8 billion people becomes connected to tens/hundreds/thousands of new connections without having to source new organic beings.

I'm not sure I'm being 100% sarcastic because in some ways it does solve a need people seem to have. Maybe 99% sarcasm and 1% praise.
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-08-14 16:06:02+00:00
This test is better with a function call, because it clearly shows the intent. Perf-wise, this function call will be inlined by any decent compiler. https://godbolt.org/z/chhM85vP3

Breaking a basic programming expectation for a specific class of values of a specific type is not a good thing, in my opinion.
by jwally | 2025-08-14 16:06:06+00:00
Judges 19–21. The account of the Levite and his concubine:

A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim goes to retrieve his concubine from her father’s house in Bethlehem.

On their return journey, they stop for the night in Gibeah, a Benjamite town.

The townsmen surround the house, demanding to “know” the man (sexual violence implied, similar to Genesis 19 with Lot).

The host refuses and offers his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead.

The mob abuses the concubine all night; she collapses at the doorway and dies by morning.

The Levite tells her to get up, sees she’s dead, then cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them throughout Israel to rally the tribes against Benjamin.
by ACS_Solver | 2025-08-14 16:06:08+00:00
Yes, BSD is a single coherent system but so are many Linux distros. It's just that we've come to accept bad documentation as the norm for Linux-based tools. In my experience there's several types of problems that are very common for Linux tools:

* Extremely short documentation. Everyone has seen these, a tool where the man page exists but provides almost no actual information.

* Unfriendly reference-type documentation. GNU programs are often guilty of this, coreutils certainly comes to mind. On the upside, it's usually comprehensive. But it's not good - it's a short description followed by a sequential list of every option, so the functionality is described in detail but there are no usage examples, no list of the most common options, or anything like that. Great reference, poor usage documentation.

* Too much info about ancient systems or historical details. Yes, it's great that many of these utilities are portable and can run on different systems or work with files from different systems. The man pages for zip/unzip mention MS-DOS, Minix and Atari systems, while defining the zip format as "commonly found on MS-DOS systems". The man page for less explains that it's a program "similar to more(1)" - completely useless info now - and mentions that it has some support for hardcopy terminals, again information that's not important enough for the first paragraph in 2025.

* Poor keywords in the description. There's the theoretically useful apropos command. My Xorg wouldn't start so I tried to remember how to start my wifi up. apropos 'wlan|wi-fi|wifi|wireless' doesn't mention nmcli, which I was thinking of, though it does at least provide the much more difficult iw command.

* Technical project-specific jargon that makes it easy to find the solution - if you already know it, that is. For example, Xorg documentation generally doesn't use the word "resolution". It's not in the xrandr or Xserver man page, and in the xorg.conf page it's only a reference to virtual screens. Because X uses the term screen size. That's fine, understandable and even accurate but most people would first search for 'resolution'.
by next_xibalba | 2025-08-14 16:06:32+00:00
Prior to the A.I. boom, Nvidia had a much, much more diverse customer base in terms of revenue mix. According to their 2015 annual report[1], their revenues were spread across the following revenue segments: gaming, automotive, enterprise, HPC and cloud, and PC and mobile OEMs. Gaming was the largest segment and contributed less than 50% of revenues. At this time, with a diverse customer base, their gross margins were 55.5%. (This is a fantastic gross margin in any industry outside software).

In 2025 (fiscal year), Nvidia only reported two revenue segments: compute and networking ($116B revenue) and graphics ($14.3B revenue). Within the compute and networking segment, three customers represented 34% of all revenue. Nvidia's gross margins for fiscal 2025 were 75% [2].

In other words, this hypothesis doesn't fit at all. In this case, having more concentration in extremely deep pocketed customers competing over a constrained supply of product has caused margins to sky rocket. Moreover, GP's claim of monopsony doesn't make any sense. Nvidia is not at any risk of having a single buyer, and with the recent news that sales to China will be allowed, the customer base is going to become more diverse, creating even more demand for their products.

[1] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual...

[2] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/a...
by xorcist | 2025-08-14 16:06:37+00:00
> is instincts are for negotiation and peace

That's a pretty wild statement given that he just invaded Iran. He's also made direct military threats towards allied Denmark, even in press conferences. There's also the less overt threats about making Cananda a US state and giving Ukranian land to Putin.

Pretty militant for the first six months, even from an objective historical context. Should he keep up that tempo for a full term of office, that would measure up with the more intervention oriented presidents including Nixon himself.