MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-12 19:39:24+00:00
You're not understanding the dichotomy. It doesn't matter what kind of encryption you use, the system you're asking for can be made much simpler than this: Just use the same token for everyone and only give it to adults. It needs no cryptography at all, it just needs to be a random string that children don't have. You don't need anything to do with cigarettes, just print it on the back of every adult's ID or allow any adult to show their ID at any government office.

But then anyone can post the token on the internet where anyone can get it, the same as they could do with anything cryptographic that you put on the back of cigarettes or whatever. Unless you have a way of tracing it to the person who did it in order to impose penalties, which is precisely the thing that would make it not private/anonymous, which is why they're incompatible.

If you're going to do one then do the first one -- just make it actually untraceable -- but understand that it won't work. It would never work anyway because there are sites outside of your jurisdiction that won't comply with whatever you're proposing regardless, so the thing that fails to work while not impacting privacy is better than the thing that fails to work while causing widespread harm, but then people are going to complain about it and try to impose the thing that does cause widespread harm by removing privacy. Which is why the whole thing should be abandoned instead.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-12 19:39:36+00:00
That's my anecdotal experience as well! Junior devs struggle with a lot of things:

- syntax

- iteration over an idea

- breaking down the task and verifying each step

Working with a tool like Claude that gets them started quick and iterate the solution together with them helps them tremendously and educate them on best practices in the field.

Contrast that with a seasoned developer with a domain experience, good command of the programming language and knowledge of the best practices and a clear vision of how the things can be implemented. They hardly need any help on those steps where the junior struggled and where the LLMs shine, maybe some quick check on the API, but that's mostly it. That's consistent with the finding of the study https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... that experienced developers' performance suffered when using an LLM.

What I used as a metaphor before to describe this phenomena is training wheels: kids learning how to ride a bike can get the basics with the help and safety of the wheels, but adults that already can ride a bike don't have any use for the training wheels, and can often find restricted by them.
by Arainach | 2025-08-12 19:39:44+00:00
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise.

The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
by nine_k | 2025-08-12 19:40:14+00:00
It only works if hiring H1Bs is cheaper, or otherwise much more appealing, so that paying the premium on an auction makes sense.

It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper.

If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.
by jama211 | 2025-08-12 19:40:37+00:00
I think you’re exaggerating a few things, and forgetting that even if expenses like housing are higher, not every cost scales with income. The price of many standard goods are very similar. Not to mention that for example if you have x% of your income left over after expenses, that’s still way more money in one situation over another.

You’re sounding very out of touch to be honest.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 19:41:16+00:00
Zero percent unemployment is viewed as a bad thing by almost everyone with a familiarity of the employment markets.

Zero percent unemployment means that no one without a job is looking for one. It means no new entrants into the job market (since by definition, you are unemployed the moment you start looking for your first job). And it means that no one is transitioning jobs or careers without a firm job offer in hand. It means that no business ever fails. It means that it is remarkably difficult to find employees. It means that there are no employees that quit instead of doing something immoral.

You should look into the different types of unemployment, as well as the definition of "unemployed", and specifically, frictional unemployment since you seem very unfamiliar with the base concepts.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-12 19:41:20+00:00
Marvin Minsky wrote forcefully [1] about this in The Society of Mind and went so far to say that trying to observe yourself (e.g. meditation) might be harmful.

Freud of course discovered a certain world of the unconscious but untrained [2] you would certainly struggle to explain how you know sentence S is grammatical and S' is not, or what it is you do when you walk.

If you did meditation or psychoanalysis or some other practice to understand yourself better it would take years.

[1] whether or not it is true.

[2] the "scientific" explanation you'd have if you're trained may or may not be true since it can't be used to program a computer to do it
by asveikau | 2025-08-12 19:41:45+00:00
I seem to recall the Hurd people talking about cool scenarios like filesystem drivers written entirely in user mode that don't require root. Something like that.

I booted it on real hardware sometime in the early 2000s, and it worked but was very anticlimactic.

I do know that the Mach microkernel they based it on (also the basis for Apple's XNU kernel) is considered dated. Later microkernels are supposed to have better performance.
by alexisread | 2025-08-12 19:41:49+00:00
Well the most well known one is Geos for the C64

https://youtu.be/_4nthOx8sA4?si=AiK9bRxRQwV3MB0f

There's also this Atari homebrew

https://youtu.be/T14dL9MeMHE?si=cGtsZGWILYi4jcql

And yes the IIGS had one

https://youtu.be/YvVFTpukAp0?si=UtvV3N_pKhxU-Tyb
by freedomben | 2025-08-12 19:41:56+00:00
I had a friend who got involved with Hurd many years back, and I asked him why he thought Hurd wasn't going to be a thing for non-hobbyists. He shared this (re-shared with permission but anonymously as he's still somewhat involved in GNU projects), which is just one guy's perspective of course. Would love to hear from others if this echoes their experiences.

> GNU is full of brilliant people who can write great code, but there are a few issues that I don't see fixing: Rampant disagreement and individuals who like to work solo. This can be good sometimes, but for a project with that scope it just isn't possible. The group is also aging and isn't getting new blood. This can be good because people have more free time, but it also traps us in old familiar/comfortable patterns that make onboarding younger contributors even more difficult than it already is. The philosophy is also quite rigid. For good reasons I think as more "permissive" licenses have been used to abuse users extensively, but the limitations do come up quite a bit, mainly with adoption. I think too many people are just scarred still from an earlier world where proprietary was often the only real alternative, and change is hard.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-12 19:41:58+00:00
There are times and places when service is greatly reduced because the work force is tied up in more profitable employment. Such as working in factories instead of doing butler type jobs.

One way of forcing this is making the minimum wage high enough that any venture has to make sure their workers have a high output. And some types of businesses become inviable as a consequence. Investment which would have gone to such ventures will instead go to other ventures, and workers become available for better jobs.

There's also significant down sides to this.
by tombert | 2025-08-12 19:42:03+00:00
Genuine question, as someone who has only ever played with Inferno and Plan 9 in virtual machines and only for brief periods of time in the process: what does Plan 9 actually buy you?

Like, I've read about how you can mount lots of things like filesystems and that sounds kind of neat but that also seemed like it might obscure latency and make things ridiculously slow, though it's entirely likely that I am misunderstanding how things work.
by mmackh | 2025-08-12 19:42:18+00:00
There’s something to be said about an independent system you can understand and expand. What I think will be next frontier in home computing is truly understanding and owning the systems that run a smart home and that comes with understanding the environment (sensor data, presence detection, etc.). We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface with multiple wireless protocols and state of the art sensors with not a lot of capital investment. If we think what can come beyond screens and imagine more ambient computing systems - maybe we’ll see new and interesting innovations
by ufmace | 2025-08-12 19:42:40+00:00
I agree. There's also the point of hardware dependance.

From all we've seen, the practical ability of AI/LLMs seems to be strongly dependent on how much hardware you throw at it. Seems pretty reasonable to me - I'm skeptical that there's that much out there in gains from more clever code, algorithms, etc on the same amount of physical hardware. Maybe you can get 10% or 50% better or so, but I don't think you're going to get runaway exponential improvement on a static collection of hardware.

Maybe they could design better hardware themselves? Maybe, but then the process of improvement is still gated behind how fast we can physically build next-generation hardware, perfect the tools and techniques needed to make it, deploy with power and cooling and datalinks and all of that other tedious physical stuff.
by Legend2440 | 2025-08-12 19:43:13+00:00
>in fact lots of standard big O complexity analysis assumes a von Neumann machine – O(1) random access.

In practice, this is a lie - real computers do not offer O(1) random access. Physics constrains you to O(sqrt N).

https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html
by tombert | 2025-08-12 19:43:44+00:00
Yeah, that's what I've always thought was interesting about microkernels; the ability to have a lot more stuff in user space always seemed like the obvious "correct" direction to me.

I played with RedoxOS a bit in a virtual machine a few years ago [1], and it seemed cool, so maybe that can be the logical successor to something like Hurd.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedoxOS
by nickpsecurity | 2025-08-12 19:44:09+00:00
We could probably add it to multilingual, training sets for A.I..

Previously, the ones trained on a thousand or more languages by Meta and Wycliffe used the Bible since it's the only complex, rich message translated to most, human languages. Which God said would happen to His authentic message. :)

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/meta-used-bibl...
by jraph | 2025-08-12 19:45:00+00:00
Yeah yeah, there was also SCIgen in 2005 (when 3 MIT students submitted a fake paper and got it accepted).

I believe the difference is scale. It's not just Wikipedia, it's the whole web. Billions and billions are burned (and it seems highly unsustainable, where previously, stuff was made to work in public labs - possibly with things like Grid5000, but that's nothing compared to what's training and running LLMs today). One fifth to one third of HN's front page is AI. The thing is mainstream and omnipresent (before 2022, that stuff was mostly people working in research and tech companies, the informed general public might have heard of ML).

Around 2015, we were there: https://xkcd.com/1425/ (explain xkcd says September 24, 2014)
by gruturo | 2025-08-12 19:45:39+00:00
So nurses, professors, teachers and artists will be in higher demand and they'll have to pay them a better salary to fill positions? which may attract people who currently avoid those career cause they lead to poverty? Yup I'm sold.

And as others said, add a cost factor to train an citizen for every H-1B issued. Actually, slap a 350% tax on all the salaries paid to H-1Bs except for the first 15 people (or, I don't know, 3% of the overall staff, whichever is higher) and make sure it's hard to game with shell companies, body shops and subsidiaries.

Precisely 0% chance it'll happen in the current administration, and it's anyone guess if there will be administrations after this one, but a few hours of additional thinking around this solution (this is the first 3 minutes roughly) could make it work way better. Remove limits, make it really expensive, give some rights to the people who come on it, use the money to address real shortages, and watch companies stop abusing it.

P.S. European here, with 0 interest in coming to work in the US.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-12 19:46:28+00:00
Where does the statement that "inference is profitable" come from? Several sources say they are burning cash, I'll quote the most reputable one:

https://www.ft.com/content/3c8cf028-e49f-4ac3-8d95-6f6178cf2... (Jul 25 2025)

"Despite their rapid growth, neither Anthropic or OpenAI is close to being profitable, with both burning cash to pay for the huge amount of computing power needed to train their models. They also face increasing financial demands in a fierce war for talent which has been accelerated by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg offering top researchers packages of $100mn in recent months."
by bluGill | 2025-08-12 19:46:58+00:00
The models can replace humans. They can't do it well, but it might be good enough. If you are tiny and just barely making money at all in your job you should evaluate if this cost cutting is good enough or not.

i'm getting the idea though the whoever she is - she is making good amount of money: she should demand a higher bar that I don't think llm's can meet today just because she can afford it and the risk that it matters is too high.
by kenjackson | 2025-08-12 19:47:19+00:00
You can make LLMs deterministic, but that's not a priority right now. In the same way we used to not capture dev environments and end up in situations where you couldn't rebuild a binary exactly because the OS version, the compiler version, the CRT version, etc... all changed -- of course that's a 20 year old problem now, but was a legitimate problem as recently as 2000.

And again, we're at a point in time where we do collaborate on the source code artifacts. But maybe we won't in the future. It assumes that we see AI progress, I can see a world where asking questions of the AI about the code is better than 99% of developers. There will be the John Carmack's of the world though who know better than the AI, but the common case is that we eventually move away from looking at code directly. But this does rely on continued progress that we may not get.
by benwills | 2025-08-12 19:48:02+00:00
URL shorteners significantly increased in popularity as Twitter did. There was originally a 140 character limit that became quite squeezed when adding most URLs, especially to blog posts where the title is part of the URL.

Later, adding things like analytics and tracking (eg: not just in social media, but also in email campaigns) became another reason to use them, especially for those less tech inclined.
by mgh95 | 2025-08-12 19:48:04+00:00
I have met people hired under the O1-A and they fit the bill pretty neatly. Think R1 profs publishing in Nature/Science/domain equivalents. If you have exceptional talent, you can 100% get in.

I think the issue is expecting a masters/phd to ensure access to th US labor market. This greatly distorts the fact that for most software engineering positions a bachelors is enough (if necessary at all), crowding the domestic market.

The US should not allow the pipeline of jr->sr engs to be culled for the sake of accessing cheap foreign labor. Given the necessity of software to run the modern economy, it really is a national security issue.
by bredren | 2025-08-12 19:48:42+00:00
Don’t rely entirely on CC. Once a milestone has been reached, copy the full patch to clipboard and the technical spec covering this. Provide the original files, the patch and the spec to Gemini and say ~a colleague did the work and does it fulfill the aims to best practices and spec?

Pick among the best feedback to polish the work done by CC—-it will miss things that Gemini will catch.

Then do it again. Sometimes CC just won’t follow feedback well and you gotta make the changes yourself.

If you do this you’ll be more gradual but by nature of the pattern look at the changes more closely.

You’ll be able to realign CC with the spec afterward with a fresh context and the existing commits showing the way.

Fwiw, this kind of technique can be done entirely without CC and can lead to excellent results faster, as Gemini can look at the full picture all at once, vs having to force cc to consume vs hen and peck slices of files.
by dang | 2025-08-12 19:48:47+00:00
Related. Others?

The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741269 - Feb 2017 (127 comments)

The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10358153 - Oct 2015 (58 comments)

The "high-level CPU" challenge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107221 - Jan 2008 (4 comments)
by foldr | 2025-08-12 19:48:53+00:00
>elections don't change anything no matter who wins [not you, but who I was responding to]

The Brexit referendum was in the 2015 Conservative party manifesto [1]. If Labour had won the 2015 election then there would have been no referendum and the UK would still be in the EU. Or if people had voted differently in the referendum, the UK would still be in the EU.

The person I was responding to suggests that elections have never changed anything in the UK within their lifetime. Unless they are less than 10 years old, this is clearly false.

[1] https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/files/conservativemanifest... (p. 30)
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-12 19:49:02+00:00
Not ragging on the author, but I'm always confused whenever I see a "make your own computer" project like this that doesn't start with hardware first. I mean, there's already seems to be a quite advanced OS for it and some detailed docs, but no physical "computer" to speak of, just a lot of mockups.

Why a hardware project at that point and not a virtual machine like pico-8?

I'm just saying, its kinda the opposite approach a hardware person would take.
by lpandong | 2025-08-12 19:49:43+00:00
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by geodel | 2025-08-12 19:49:56+00:00
Hearing from multiple sources that there is big uptick in "offshore / global development centers" in India to support US companies who are currently using H1B in sizable numbers.

With the increasing standardization of application stacks, automation, AI (seems mostly just hype), companies are thinking even if they need developers in larger numbers they can most definitely do with cheaper offshore developers.

So US government, offshoring nation's government and American companies and their vendors are ironically on same page that H1B is going out. Even if they have different benefit or loss with current system.
by tombert | 2025-08-12 19:50:11+00:00
No question, and especially now with Linux running on billions of devices (if you include Android in that at least), it would be kind of difficult to make a case for a brand new desktop operating system. A lot of the weird edge cases for Linux have been found and fixed and ironed out through decades of continued use.

I tried installing FreeBSD on a laptop years ago, which isn't really an "obscure" operating system or anything, but even that had a lot of compatibility problems with regards to drivers for wifi and GPUs, and even that would have a considerable head-start over something like Hurd if it were to try and take on the desktop world.
by gchadwick | 2025-08-12 19:50:12+00:00
This certainly rings true with my own experiences (worked on both GPUs and CPUs and now doing AI inference at UK startup Fractile).

> If there were a hypothetical high-level CPU language that somehow encoded all the information the microarchitecture needs to measure to manage memory access,

I think this is fundamentally impossible because of dynamic behaviours. It's very tempting to assume that if you can be clever enough you can work this all out ahead of time, encode what you need in some static information and the whole computation just runs like clockwork on the hardware, no or little area spent on scheduling, stalling, buffering etc. Though I think history has shown over and over this just doesn't work (for more general computation at least, more feasible in restricted domains). There's always lots of fiddly details in real workloads that surprise you and if you've got an inflexible system you've got no give and you end up 'stopping the world' (or some significant part of it) to deal with it killing your performance.

Notably running transformer models feels like one of those restrictive domains you could do this well in but dig in and there's plenty enough dynamic behaviour in there that you can't escape the problems they cause.
by preommr | 2025-08-12 19:51:05+00:00
I am curious which of the following (if any) you would define as alone:

1) one person but they take VC funding

2) one person but they use open source solutions

3) one person but they live with their parents

4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
by jacobr1 | 2025-08-12 19:51:09+00:00
Beyond code-gen I think some techniques are very underutilized. One can generate tests, generate docs, explain things line by line. Explicitly explaining alternative approaches and tradeoffs is helpful too. While, as with everything in this space, there are imperfection, I find a ton of value in looking beyond the code into thinking through the use cases, alternative approaches and different ways to structure the same thing.