MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendx | 2025-08-24 07:37:37+00:00
> Many of the scientists I spoke with for this story insisted that they didn’t feel their actions were political—and expressed concern over them being perceived as such. Although they were fighting back against the government, they told me, their intentions are to advocate for evidence. […] That decline in trust, Shariff predicts, will concentrate among those on the right, who “will see science as more politicized than they did before,” he said, “because it’s taking a side.”

The article is about defending scientific methods and the field as a whole and how that is shifting society to the right, not how scientific research is applied?

Besides that nobody claimed it was "new": What I think is new, unheard of before, that a US president is openly advocating against evidence-based science.
by gf000 | 2025-08-24 07:37:44+00:00
Well, you might want to read up on how OSs handle memory under the hood, and that virtual memory != physical, and that task manager and stuff like that can't show the real memory usage.

Nonetheless, tracing GCs do have some memory overhead in exchange for better throughput. This is basically the same concept as using a buffer.

-----

And can you tell which of these websites use Java from "the feel"? AWS cloud infra, a significant chunk of Google, Apple's backends, Alibaba, Netflix?
by mordae | 2025-08-24 07:38:28+00:00
https://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of...

(Unreasonable Effectiveness of Quasirandom Sequences)

has a section dedicated to spheres.

TL;DR: Generate two orthogonal sequences, map with sin/cos.

I think this method is currently state of the art. It provably doesn't clump in higher dimensions.

Also, it is blue enough for Monte Carlo.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-24 07:39:31+00:00
> With the advent of modern computing, we (as a species) have finally created a tool that can "think" recursively, to arbitrary levels of depth.

I don't know what this means; when a computer "thinks" recursively, does it actually?

The recursion is specified by the operator (i.e. programmer), so the program that is "thinking" recursively is not, because the both the "thinking" and the recursion is provided by the tool user (the programmer), not by the tool.

> If we ever do create a superintelligent AGI, I'd wager that its brilliance will be attributable to its ability to loop much deeper than humans can.

Agreed.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-08-24 07:39:43+00:00
This is what alot of people don't get. They think Kubernetes is a solution to everything. In reality all k8s is makes the mechanics a little easier.

But if you don't understand distributed systems, it almost makes it worse because its tempting to segment the system across dozens of microservices which all have to talk with each other and synchronize, and the whole thing becomes a buggy, slow clusterfuck.
by aubanel | 2025-08-24 07:39:59+00:00
The premise "LLMs have reached a plateau" is false IMO.

Here are the metrics by which the author defines this plateau: "limited by their inability to maintain coherent context across sessions, their lack of persistent memory, and their stochastic nature that makes them unreliable for complex multi-step reasoning."

If you try to benchmark any proxy of the points above, for instance "can models solve problems that require multi steps in agentic mode" (PlanBench, BrowseComp, I've even built custom benchmarks), the progress between models is very clear, and shows no sign of slowing down.

And this does convert to real-world tasks : yesterday, I had GPT-5 build me complex react charts in one-shot, whereas previous models needed more constant supervision.

I think we're moving goalposts too fast for LLMs, that's what can lead us to believe they've plateaued : but just try using past models for your current tasks (you can use use open models to be sure they were not updated) and see them struggle.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-24 07:41:17+00:00
I was troubleshooting some code of mine that talks to a product Adafruit has been selling for ten years. It turns out the documentation was just plain wrong. Thankfully Adafruit's source code was posted and I could quite confidently see the right way to do it, and submitted feedback on the documentation bug.

But I think this is a space where due to the relative ease and cheapness of putting out a product and often fixing it after the fact, there's less eyeballs on any given aspect of a board or the software loaded on it.

And a years younger me noticed the issue! But I worked around it instead of reporting it. This time I figured out the source of the problem... but the documentation has been wrong a long time in between. ;)
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-24 07:41:39+00:00
It’s the diversity and inclusion slippery slope again.

The initial idea was good and very much needed to eliminate (or at least heavily reduce) long-established racism/bigotry.

But the problem is that a lot of people started to abuse it as a virtue-signalling mechanism and/or a way to justify their jobs, leading to insanities like renaming the Git “master” branch.

I suspect AI safety is the same. There’s a grain of truth and usefulness to it, but no AI safety person will intentionally declare “we figured out how to make models safe, my job here is done”, so they have to always push the envelope, even towards ridiculous levels.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-24 07:41:53+00:00
I used a tool called Plucker for my Palm Vx. It could recursively download web pages and store as a single Palm database (PDB?) that was installed on the device and then the Plucker app could be used to read the pages.

I used it with Scrapbook in Firefox, to save a bunch of articles I wanted to read and export an index file that could then be used by Plucker to import those articles.
by jaggederest | 2025-08-24 07:42:25+00:00
Well, the point is, if it's not a hobby, you have to encode your preferences in lint and formatters, rather than holding onto manually messing with the output.

It's really freeing to say "Well, if the linter and the formatter don't catch it, it doesn't matter". I always update lint settings (writing new rules if needed) based on nit PR feedback, so the codebase becomes easier to review over time.

It's the same principle as any other kind of development - let the machine do what the machine does well.
by pydry | 2025-08-24 07:42:32+00:00
I find it is slightly slower (maybe 20%) than two individuals alone but the quality is quite a bit higher and the effect of this higher quality compounds over time (i.e. less tech debt -> fewer bugs, faster development on future code).

Im quite credulous of Kent Beck's claim that when categorizing the last ~15 bugs on a project with pairs and singles he found that all 15 were in code merged by an individual rather than a pair.

If it were an application you could just install I think everybody would use it. It demands psychological safety though, which most teams dont have, and is becoming less common these days.
by black_knight | 2025-08-24 07:43:03+00:00
Off topic, but I remember as a child I would play around with that kind of recursive thinking. I would think about something, then think about that I thought about it, then think about that I though about thinking about it. Then, after a few such repetitions I would recognise that this could go on forever. Then I would think about the fact that I recognise that this could go on forever, then think about that… then realise that this meta pattern could go on forever. Etc…

Later I connected this game with the ordinals. 0,1,2… ω, ω+1, ω+2,…,2ω,2ω+1,2ω+2,…,3ω,…,4ω,…,4ω,…, ω*ω,…
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-24 07:43:54+00:00
Technically speaking, you can get away with just a Bash tool, and I had some success with this. It's actually quite interesting to take away tools from agents and see how creative they are with the use.

One of the reasons why you get better performance if you give them the other tools is that there has been some reinforcement learning on Sonne with all these tools. The model is aware of how these tools work, it is more token-efficient and it is generally much more successful at performing those actions. The Bash tool, for instance, at times gets confused by bashisms, not escaping arguments correctly, not handling whitespace correctly etc.
Show HN: A "Catalog of Catalogs" for Unified Metadata
by apachegravitino | 2025-08-24 07:44:00+00:00
Most developers talk about unifying data. But in reality, data lives everywhere — in lakes, warehouses, databases, streaming systems, AI/ML pipelines. Trying to centralize or replace them is costly, slow, and often fails.

So instead of asking “How do we unify the data?” we asked: “Can we unify the metadata?”

That’s the idea behind Apache Gravitino — an open-source “catalog of catalogs” that sits above your existing systems and provides:

Unified metadata governance without replacing your stack

Federated access to diverse systems (SQL, NoSQL, lakehouses, ML/AI)

A lightweight, extensible platform you can contribute to and extend

Website: Datastrato

Code: Apache Gravitino on GitHub

We’d love feedback from HN: Does focusing on metadata instead of data solve a pain you’ve seen? What gaps do you think still exist in the “data & AI catalog” space?
by a_t48 | 2025-08-24 07:44:27+00:00
Definitely going to save this for later and come back to it after I get some more CUDA experience under my belt. It feels so nice right now making nice beautiful to use pipeline code w/ npp and some CUDA kernels here and there, the code is much faster than what it's replacing, but then I look at this guy getting down into the weeds of memory bank contention, prefetching, loop invariance, etc. Makes me feel like I'm playing with LEGO, I'm a little jealous.

The tip that Nsight can run on Mac over SSH is great, too. I've been capturing and viewing data over RDP, basically, will have to give it a shot next week.
by riedel | 2025-08-24 07:44:27+00:00
My experience with microcontrollers is not up to date. Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market. Things changed already with Advent of Arduino. Before that people wrote a lot of asm code inline and MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentations (sure some quirks and errata always appeared later, but as I remember they found their ways into data sheets and application notes). Particularly as binary blobs e.g. for network appeared the API went from well defined hardware interfaces to libraries, etc. Today it is even common for some of those domain specific IC that typically rather contain an MCU that you have to sign NDAs to get access to documentation of some parts.
by fifilura | 2025-08-24 07:46:40+00:00
I wanted to write a comment on this topic, but after several tries this thread is where I ended up because it describes my sentiment as well.

The arguments in the article are very compelling. But as soon as you choose Kafka you realize the things you hate.

Many of the reasons are stupid things - like it uncovers otherwise unimportant bugs in your client code. Or that it just makes experimenting a hassle because it enforces poking around in lots of different places to do something. Or that writing and maintaining the compulsory integration test takes weeks of your time.

Sure - you can replay your data - but not until you have fixed all the issues for that special case in your receiving service.

I think maybe my main gripe (for us) was that it was a difficult to get an understanding what is actually inside your pipe. Much easier to have that in a solid state in s3?

At the end of they day you get annoyed because it slows you down. In particular when you are a small localized team.
by Epa095 | 2025-08-24 07:46:46+00:00
We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.

But clearly there is a price for the standardisation, it makes progress slower. On the other hand it makes everyone's lifes easier. Just as with e.g electrical outlets in the house there is a time for exploration and innovation, and there is a time for standardisation. And we are ready for standardisation now, USB-c is good enough.
by danhite | 2025-08-24 07:46:58+00:00
This IRL now is very much in the spirit of Mark Stiegler's 1990 humorous thought piece takedown of the $ inefficiency of the B-2 ~stealth bomber by proposing ~everyone buys chances to down one by any means possible.

There is a proper citation below, but you can enjoy this quick read at his dusty website here :

http://www.skyhunter.com/b2.htm

The B-2 Lottery · Marc Stiegler · published in New Destinies, Vol. IX/Fall 1990 ed. Jim Baen (Baen 0-671-2016-3, Sep ’90 [Aug ’90], $3.50, 286pp, pb, cover by David A. Hardy) Original anthology of eight stories plus six non-fiction pieces on space and technology.
by samrus | 2025-08-24 07:48:44+00:00
> If you believe the bitter lesson, all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data

Id say better model architechture than more data. A human can learn to do things more complex than an LLM with less data. I think modelling the world as a static system to be representation learned in an unsupervised fashion is blocked on the static assumption. The world is dynamical, that should be reflected in the base model

But yeah, definitely not an engineering problem. Thats like saying the reason a crow isnt as smart as a person is becauss they dont have the hands to type of keyboards. But its also not because they havent seen enough of the world like your saying. Its be ause their brain isnt complex enough
by xg15 | 2025-08-24 07:50:29+00:00
Yeah. Anticheat systems are the "think of the children" of DRM. It's the one scenario where you can sell users the hostile takeover of their own computer as actually beneficial for them - because cheaters in multiplayer are a genuine annoyance - while ignoring anything else.

Of course the argument falls flat on multiple levels: It ignores other ways to prevent cheaters, like server-side detection or maybe developing a gameplay that is not based on channeling masses of anonymous strangers through the game world. It ignores that it doesn't actually solve the problem of cheaters. And it ignores that many games use anticheat for reasons that don't have to do with multiplayer at all, e.g. to keep players from bypassing in-game purchases.
by mwcampbell | 2025-08-24 07:52:14+00:00
Can we all please stop complaining about async Rust and just acknowledge that the problem they were solving was both really hard and urgent for the success of the language (particularly given priorities among the most well-resourced tech companies in the late 2010s)? All things considered, I think they did a good job. I certainly wouldn't have done any better. And the feature was well thought through, with years of work before it shipped.
by njredar676 | 2025-08-24 07:53:17+00:00
Hey, thanks for informing us about this.

I apologize if the first impression was crude -- I was in an hurry to get the engine out at this time. I understand that the Discord server simply consisted of a few channels (since then, I've cleaned that up).

I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns (GitHub ToS prohibits this, and I had to learn the hard way), so I eventually renamed my old account. I'll make sure to provide more resources under my account so it doesn't seem empty.

In regards to developer attribution, we will have a developer page as well as a resource hub so it seems more than an "account". I had not anticipated that people would look deeper into the account -- I had simply wanted to get the demo out, to show the concept.

On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once.

Once again, thanks for informing us about these issues. Perhaps, I will better prepare my future releases to avoid this issues, even if I was under time constraints. I think that there are great things that can be accomplished with this project.
by Pooge | 2025-08-24 07:56:05+00:00
> And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating

I say it countless times, but no. Data harvesting Big Tech put cookie banners everywhere and make the web frustrating for you. If they respected Do Not Track, they would not need to show you the banner. Instead, they don't take it into account and prefer to show you a banner that takes up all page instead of having a small banner that asks you if you want to agree to optional cookies.
by 9dev | 2025-08-24 07:56:14+00:00
You can never know whether anyone else is actually conscious, or just appearing to be. This shared definition of reality was always on shaky ground, given that we don’t even have the same sensory input, and "now" isn’t the same concept everywhere. You are a collection of processes that work together to keep you alive. Part of that is something that collects your history to form a distinctive narrative of yourself, and something that lives in the moment and handles immediate action. This latter part is solidly backed up by experiments; Say you feel pain that varies over time. If the pain level is an 8 for 14 consecutive minutes, and a 2 for 1 minute at the end, you’ll remember the whole session as level 4. In practical terms, this means a physician can make a procedure be perceived as less painful by causing you wholly unnecessary mild pain for a short duration after the actual work is done.

This also means that there’s at least two versions of you inside your mind; one that experiences, and one that remembers. There’s likely others, too.
by fulafel | 2025-08-24 07:56:15+00:00
> But I can't help but agree with a lot of points in this article. Go was designed by some old-school folks that maybe stuck a bit too hard to their principles, losing sight of the practical conveniences

I think this is a fine "fail-closed" way of language design. For example, Python has gone the other way and language complexity has gotten pretty bad since the small-language days. Trust what you are, don't try to please everyone, lest you become something like C++.

Clojure is good in this respect.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-24 07:57:10+00:00
you mention a key point. profession. programmer doesnt really imply professional programmer.

I'd aay if you do it for a living, certain tedious chores must be learned. the best programmers i know (professional) can all read code. they spent many junior years learning to read it, being on code auditing desk.... nowadays idk how the landscape looks, but for all of them they had to review and read code to find bugs before they were allowed to produce code (they all worked at same company ofc... so my view is limited!)

i do feel such discipline is needed. they can always poke holes on my code no matter how many holes i plug :) - i am semi professional. i write code for work, but not production code. (experimental). i never learned to audit code and feel that makes it impossible for me to truly create production grade code
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-08-24 07:58:11+00:00
Right, and as far as I know as well.

It's kind of exciting when you realize just how much there is to learn from the people who came before us. All of the most interesting, difficult problems of human minds and experiences are still almost just as pressing and difficult today, but many people had remarkable insights and made genuinely incredible progress in understanding things we tend to take for granted these days. Hard problems that we face literally every day, even.
by nosianu | 2025-08-24 07:58:53+00:00
On the other hand, if they were so much better, shouldn't those "red states" be the ones with the much better economies?

I'm looking at China and what environmental price in the form of polluted land they pay and will be paying for a very long time. The big problems in Western countries also all originated in times with less or no regulation of such things. Just because that's not in the headlines all the time does not mean the problem is any less while the public is not paying attention.

When "it works" and overall success is the only criteria, the Vikings and Mongols surely count as extremely successful. Regulation is meant to take the price into account, in the cases of those two peoples millions of dead and a lot of pillaging and conquering. Regulation is definitely a burden, if you don't have to care about anything but the bottom line it's much easier.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-24 07:59:38+00:00
study modern code bases of language you want to learn, and look first at their history to see if they are mature, came from a company, academics etc.

you should not only study 'good' code... how will you know what is bad code?

study code that does similar things to what u want (client/server/game/ai/datacrunching etc.) and study lot of it..different qualities, ages, and sources
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-08-24 07:59:58+00:00
I worked with XSLT a lot and I like it, but agree that a general-purpose programming language, preferably procedural, is more convenient and more powerful.

The reason XSLT is this way may be similar to why SQL is this way. SQL is declarative primarily because it isolates the user from concurrency. It would be much easier to write a procedure to fetch the data the way you want, but to write a concurrent procedure that does this safely and nicely among other such procedures would be much harder. XSLT was meant to be used with XML documents of unknown quality, so the logic of what is going on should be traceable. And XSLT did this rather well, given the constraints.

Upd: The constraints, as I see them, were that: the code will be written mostly by non-professionals (there were no professionals yet) so it should not be easy for them to get into an endless loop or otherwise shoot themselves in the foot. CSS faced similar constraints and was always rather awkward; nowadays it is also too complex and is only a formatting engine, not a transformation engine.

E.g. if XSLT was the main engine of the web CSS stylesheets would be unnecessary. The attributes could be placed on the elements themselves as this happens in XSL-FO. This would remove a major source of complexity; look at Tailwind, how popular it is, and why? Exactly because it removes an indirection step and instead of providing an external formatting rule merely formats an element directly.
by com | 2025-08-24 08:00:58+00:00
Get the downside risk people in tech to report to somebody who is accountable for managing downside risk at the same level of the CTO.

Typically an intelligent and tech literate CFO or Chief Risk Officer.

If the Head of Security and the CTO can’t come to a deal, it reaches the ExCo or board for a decision.

I call this “creative tension” and it works better than the alternative.
by dakiol | 2025-08-24 08:01:06+00:00
Pair programming exhausts me. When I write code alone, I usually have breaks every 20 minutes or so. I go for a short walk after 1h. I look out of the window every now and then. Sometimes I put some background music. When I’m doin pair programming I’m supposed to: think out loud, look at the screen 100% of the time, sit in front of the screen for at least 1h straight. Think at the same speed than my peer.

Not worth it for me. Don’t care if we together are more productive; I couldn’t care less. I care more about my eye sight, and sitting routine.
by wqaatwt | 2025-08-24 08:01:09+00:00
> the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.

It’s a quadricycle and not a real car, though.

Also I’d bet that VW/etc. executives are more fearful of Chinese equivalent’s of their mid/high-end models which cost the same as Europran manufacturer’s budget options.

Not tiny/ultra-budget/featureless vehicles which wouldn’t be that popular in Europe.

The issues with the Ami or anything similar or most cheap barebones models is that you can get a much nicer used car for the same price.

Modern cars are also much more reliable and last longer than they used to several decades back reducing the demand in the budget segment.