MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-11 23:07:24+00:00
Can't remember 98 having BSODs. Think that was a thing from NT4 on, and upwards.

98 just crashed, or showed something DOSish white on black before rebooting.

edit: Hrrm. According to Wikipedia it did. Still can't remember that, though.

Aye repent! Aye repent!
by tombert | 2025-08-11 23:07:31+00:00
I know that's the origin of why Clojure does its manual loop/recur thing, but I've grown to kind of prefer its explicitness. There's no ambiguity on whether it will TCO; it simply won't compile if it's not tail-call.

I don't agree that being able to turn off TCO in debugging is enough to call Guido's characterization "ridiculous". I often have to debug running production systems, and those are (hopefully) not deployed with debug compilations.

You're not wrong about loops not creating a stack trace; I guess what bothers me (and maybe Guido) is that with loops there's no expectation of a stack trace, while with a function call there is.
by EasyMark | 2025-08-11 23:07:53+00:00
I think the better option is wikipedia to pull all operations out of the UK that might be there and NOT block UK IP addresses. Stand up for the British people, thumb their nose at the British government. Let the UK put up a "Great Firewall of Great Britain" so the British people understand how close their government is flirting with fascism, while they still have time to remove the fascist leaning politicians.
by jemmyw | 2025-08-11 23:08:07+00:00
There are problems with every model, none of them are perfect. I've found Gemini to be very good but occasionally gets stuck in loops: it does, however, seem to detect the loop and stop. It's more cost effective than the Claude models, and Gemini has regular preview releases. I would rate it between sonnet and opus except it's cheaper and faster than both.

For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.
by adriand | 2025-08-11 23:08:45+00:00
I just did what you suggested and looked at Kinshasa and it looks HUGE to me. Endless rows of streets. Reminded me of Mexico City (and I just compared satellite imagery and they seem similar in that respect - and they are similar in terms of population). Big cities with few skyscrapers and tons of low rise buildings are quite common. In the west, Paris is an example of a populous city without many tall buildings.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-11 23:09:32+00:00
Agreed. Some people really like FP a lot, and I think it's underrated that the kinds of functions where TCO is applicable tend to be so simple that they are not really that inelegant when expressed imperatively. My true opinion is that relying on TCO is usually choosing ideological adherence to FP (or "code that looks cooler") over reliability/performance/communication.

That said, just as I'd expect experienced C++ programmers to be able to recognize others' code using RVO and be careful not to restructure things to break it, I'd concede that experienced FP programmers might be unlikely to accidentally break others' TCO. It's just that ad absurdum you cannot expect every developer to be able to read every other developers' mind and recognize/workaround all implicit behavior they encounter.
by submeta | 2025-08-11 23:10:21+00:00
There‘s text based and there‘s text based.

I keep my tasks in textfiles (markdown) as well. Not one, but several, for all kinds of projects. And I view my files in Obsidian, although I open them in neovim as well, searching via ripgrep, finding via fd, fzf, viewing via bat. All in terminal.

Textfiles are great.

Emacs + orgmode is also an excellent choice, but that’s all tied to Emacs. And Orgmode files do not render nicely in other editors/viewers. Besides it‘s overkill. Trying to do everything in one app. I prefer the Unix way. Do one thing and do it good.
by xp84 | 2025-08-11 23:10:23+00:00
> we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST

This seems to be an absolute epidemic across the state. Same with condos. It's like they assume that apartments of any kind are only for single people and maybe a couple with one child. In other words, people who are dragging the fertility rate down toward 50%.

When I pull up Zillow and look at rentals across a huge swath of the East Bay, there are 8,309 apartments listed (I filtered out houses and townhomes). I add one filter: 3+ bedrooms. The number drops to 784. Fewer than 10% (!) of apartments listed have 3+ bedrooms. (Also, a quick spot check of these seems to show a nontrivial amount that are actually just houses with faulty metadata.)

This puts a tremendous burden on low-income people, to have to foot the higher cost of maintaining a home and/or of an absurd commute, just in order to have enough space[1] to have more than one kid. That, or overpay to compete for one of the few bigger apartments, many of which are "luxury" oriented.

Meanwhile, the high-income can afford a house or a luxury 3br apartment, but they are mostly high-income because they've deprioritized family, putting in 10+ years of being DINKs. In my circle of upper middle class tech types, many of them are 35-38 before having their first kid. 1 kid is much more likely than 3 for people starting in their late 30s, so this drags down fertility rates even among the "high income" subgroup!

[1] I know opinions vary on whether it's good and healthy to have kids sharing rooms, though imho I don't want a son and daughter forced to bunk together as they get older, and calls to 'just share rooms' is giving "Own nothing and be happy."
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-11 23:10:35+00:00
That’s a great point. In my city, they started paving side streets with with in-house staff. They have dedicated funded budget, government can borrow cheaply, and they don’t need to price risk and margin.

Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather)

For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
by tarruda | 2025-08-11 23:11:12+00:00
> every time they needed support for a new model and had to update llama.cpp, an old model would break and one of their partners would go ape on them. They said it happened more than once, but one particular case (wish I could remember what it was) was so bad they felt they had no choice but to reimplement. It's the lowest risk strategy.

A much lower risk strategy would be using multiple versions of llama-server to keep supporting old models that would break on newer llama.cpp versions.
by lsaferite | 2025-08-11 23:11:19+00:00
I find Claude great at all of the boilerplate needed to get testing in place. It's also pretty good at divining test cases to lock in the current behavior, even if it's buggy. I use Claude as a first pass on tests, then I run through each test case myself to make sure it's a meaningful test. I've let it loose on the code coverage loop as well, so it can drill in and get those uncommon lines covered. I still don't have a good process for path coverage, but I'm not sure how easy that is in go as I haven't checked into it much yet.

I'm with you 100% on the boring stuff. It's generally good at the boring stuff *because* it's boring and well-trod.
by tombert | 2025-08-11 23:11:52+00:00
No, from the coder's perspective it looks like I'm passing an argument into a function. I suppose you could say that arguments in general are "mutable references", and I guess that's not necessarily "untrue", but that's not generally how I visualize it.

If I pass a persistent structure into a tail call, it looks like I'm passing a copy into there, in the same way that I might if I did something like `Math.abs(myValue * 3)`; the compiler converts it to a mutable reference but I see it as the same as passing a value.
by kenjackson | 2025-08-11 23:12:14+00:00
Ask most folks about the code generated by the compiler or interpreter and you’ll get blank stares. Even game devs now barely know assembly, much less efficient assembly.

There is still a place for someone who is going to rewrite your inner-loops with hand-tuned assembly, but most coding is about delivering on functional requirement. And using tools to do this, AI or not, tend to be the prudent path in many if not most cases.
by combyn8tor | 2025-08-11 23:12:15+00:00
Claude loves to delete comments. I setup specific instructions telling it not to, and yet it regularly tries to delete comments that often have nothing to do with the code we're working on.

It's so hit and miss in Rust too. When I ask it for help with a bug it usually tries a few things then tries to just delete or comment out the buggy code. Another thing it does is to replace the buggy code with a manual return statement with a comment saying "Returning a manual response for now". It'll then do a cargo build, proclaim that there are no errors and call it a day. If you don't check what it's doing it would appear it has fixed the bug.

When I give it very specific instructions for implementation it regularly adds static code with comments like "this is where the functionality for X will be implemented. We'll use X for now". It does a cargo build then announces all of its achievements with a bunch of emojis despite having not implemented any of the logic that I asked it to.
by jchw | 2025-08-11 23:12:20+00:00
On the KDE side, Wayland has been going pretty well. Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-tr...

For me the real conundrum was SwayWM vs KDE Wayland rather than any X.org session; I really felt like SwayWM was a good upgrade from i3wm and gave me a better desktop session with much less hacks. Hope to see wlroots push forward and support some of the newer Wayland protocols, it has started to fall behind a little bit, but I think it's good for alternative desktops.
by nerdix | 2025-08-11 23:12:27+00:00
They have already added Steam support to their Xbox PC app.

https://www.theverge.com/news/690967/microsoft-xbox-app-wind...

Its not a stretch to think that they will add Steam to the next gen Xbox. They are dead last in the console wars and have been for basically 2 generations. I don't think they will do it out of benevolence but I think they are the "throw shit against the wall and see if anything sticks" phase before just giving up and exiting the market.
by scosman | 2025-08-11 23:12:48+00:00
This is the comment people should read. GG is amazing.

Ollama forked to get it working for day 1 compatibility. They need to get their system back in line with mainline because of that choice. That's kinda how open source works.

The uproar over this (mostly on reddit and x) seems unwarranted. New models regularly have compatibility issues for much longer than this.
by busterarm | 2025-08-11 23:12:55+00:00
My career is practically built on the fact that other people 99% of the miss the simplest representation of the data/problem.

Just look at myriad ways that people implement something like checking win conditions in Rock, Paper, Scissors. Switch statements, conditional hell, etc.

...you can just do something as simple as stick Rock, Scissors, Paper into a circular list and compare to the next element. It's practically readable as plain English. No programming skill required.

If you need to code golf you can use modulo arithmetic, for a different kind of "simple", but then you lose readability.
by msuniverse2026 | 2025-08-11 23:15:05+00:00
neat! I did not like the part of the video where he touched the resin though. Most resins use TPO as the photoinitiator and 4-Acryloylmorpholine which have 'effects on fertility' (GHS H361f) are 'highly cytotoxic' and are 'toxic to aquatic life with longlasting effects' (H411). I really wish there were public PSAs or more warnings about this on the resin bottles themselves. Put a scary GHS pictogram bigger than the company logo on the front of the bottle just like cigarettes with bold text "AFFECTS FERTILITY" and you probably won't see people touching the stuff gloveless like its just randoom goo they found in their sink.
by mandeepj | 2025-08-11 23:15:10+00:00
Have you looked at agents from OpenAI and perplexity? Sure, they aren't perfect, but at the same time, they aren't far from near ready.

Does this simulation really required? There's another YC startup, they're processing PDFs I believe. They didn't train their systems on any simulation.

Edited to reword and add more context.
by leptons | 2025-08-11 23:16:01+00:00
No, it isn't. It's forcing developers to write native apps instead of web applications, which then lets Apple collect a significant percentage of any sales made through the app. This is why Apple is being sued for this by the DOJ, among many other abusive business practices.

I do not want to pay Apple for the privilege to develop a native app, as well as being forced to buy not just their mobile devices, but a full computer just to develop that native app on, when it could just be done as a web application. It's hurting me, a non-Apple user.
by orbital-decay | 2025-08-11 23:16:17+00:00
The author read the docs but never experimented, so they don't seem to have intuition behind the theory. For example, Gemini Flash actually seems to have deterministic outputs at temp 0, despite the disclaimer in the docs. Clearly Google has no trouble making it possible. Why don't they guarantee it, then? For starters it's inconvenient due to batching, you can see that in Gemini Pro which is "almost" deterministic but the same results are grouped together. It's a SaaS problem, if you run a model locally it's much easier to make it deterministic than presented in the article, and definitely not nearly impossible. It's going to cost you more, though.

But largely, you don't really want determinism. Imagine you have equal logprobs for "yes" and "no", which one should go into the output? With temperature 0 and greedy sampling it's going to be the same each time, depending on unrelated factors (e.g. vocabulary order), and your outputs are going to be terribly skewed from what the model actually tries to tell you in the output distribution. What you're trying to solve with LLMs is inherently non-deterministic. It's either the same with humans and organizations (but you can't reset the state to measure it), or at least it depends on a myriad of little factors impossible to account for.

Besides, all current models have issues at temperature 0. Gemini in particular exhibits micro-repetitions and hallucinations (non-existent at higher temps) which it then tries to correct. Other models have other issues. This is a training-time problem, probably unsolvable at this point.

What you want is correctness, which is pretty different because the model works with concepts, not tokens. Try asking it what is 2x2. It might formulate the answer differently each time but good luck making it reply with anything else than 4 on a non-schizophrenic temperature. A bit of randomness won't prevent it from being consistently correct (or consistently incorrect).
by wujerry2000 | 2025-08-11 23:16:32+00:00
I think this is totally going to be the case!

AI vibe coding tools already prefer some solutions over others, probably because of training data distribution/post training preferences. This is leading to massive revenue differences and growth compared to companies that have not optimized to be AI agent preferred/in their training data distribution.

I imagine something similar will happen over time, where companies who are in the training data distribution get used by agents more, while others who neglect this get slowly phased out because systems don't know how to use them (out of distribution).
by phba | 2025-08-11 23:16:48+00:00
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin. By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.

1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.

2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.

3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.

4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).

5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.

6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.

7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.

Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
by kibwen | 2025-08-11 23:17:19+00:00
> The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids"

This needs to be carefully qualified. Infant mortality rates for the first 99% of human history were so shockingly, stupefyingly high, that a woman might only expect to have about three of her children survive to adulthood (and maternal mortality rates were also so high that a woman wouldn't expect to survive more childbirths than 5 or 6).

What this means is that the human population was only marginally above replacement for the majority of human history. Human population didn't explode until the medicinal revolution.
by wujerry2000 | 2025-08-11 23:18:01+00:00
OpenAI agent is very impressive!

That being said, there are still a lot of use cases its not good at, and also looking at long trajectory tasks, enterprise work tasks, etc. I imagine those are all still very nascent.

I think we are still very early on computer use, being "production ready" requires probably close to 95%+ accuracy on most tasks and we're not there yet for most use cases.
by glhaynes | 2025-08-11 23:18:12+00:00
On both counts, I think it's actually IBM who didn't get the importance. Both of the 386 to OS/2 and how important quick-to-market hardware was (even if just for brand prestige) versus Compaq.

Microsoft always got it, and I feel certain the first release of NT (3.1) sold many times as many copies for x86 as it did for other architectures; and it was targeted for it as much as for any other arch.

It was actually Microsoft that saw early that OS/2 needed to exploit the 386 but IBM dragged their feet on it. A strategy similar to Windows/286 vs. Windows/386 would've made a lot of sense IMO. And probably helped IBM sell more 32-bit Micro Channel hardware early on!
by zenoprax | 2025-08-11 23:18:50+00:00
I tried 'todo.txt' and gave up when I needed more control over recurrency and other small details (I also missed being able to attach files to tasks for quick reference).

Currently setting up [DAVx5](https://www.davx5.com/tested-with) to be used with [jtx Board](https://jtx.techbee.at/sync-with-davx5#setup) and [Radicale](https://radicale.org/v3.html). It's quite a bit of overhead at first but then I can trivially manage my calendar and contacts afterwards.

CalDAV has provisions for [vTODO](https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-2-to-do-compone...) and [vJOURNAL](https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-3-journal-compo...) so my hope is that this is a durable FOSS solution to aid in getting out of some Google services.
by philipallstar | 2025-08-11 23:19:35+00:00
> Forgive yourself if you ever behave sub-optimally

Of course there's nothing to forgive. There's no need to course-correct against a way that almost no-one will feel.

> Tyranny starts with the best of intentions.

Placing an irrelevant (and untrue) statement such as this next to the point you're making to imply that it reinforces it is a bit manipulative.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-11 23:20:02+00:00
Several people in this thread are saying that tail recursion is superior to imperative iteration in that it explicitly specifies which variables may change in each iteration (assuming a broadly immutable language).

To the contrary, I'd argue that immutability isn't the only alternative to universal mutability: many newer imperative languages (such as Rust) have various forms of controlled mutability, where one must explicitly declare which variables may be modified by imperative assignments.

IME, controlled mutability captures just about all the benefit of immutable languages, without requiring any special data structures or sufficiently-smart compiler analyses to ensure good performance. I've never really understood the desire for tail-recursive versions of iterative algorithms, except for a prior commitment to functional programming.
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by churchill | 2025-08-11 23:20:16+00:00
Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue.

But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.

Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.

But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.

Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.

Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?