MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-08-30 18:32:46+00:00
Meh. This war was stale like nine years ago. At this point the originally-beaten horse has decomposed into soil. My general reply to this is:

1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the internet about it") is very well served.

2. Compression seems silly in the modern world. Virtually everything is already compressed. To first approximation, every byte in persistent storage anywhere in the world is in a lossy media format. And the ones that aren't are in some other cooked format. The only workloads where you see significant use of losslessly-compressible data are in situations (databases) where you have app-managed storage performance (and who see little value from filesystem choice) or ones (software building, data science, ML training) where there's lots of ephemeral intermediate files being produced. And again those are usages where fancy filesystems are poorly deployed, you're going to throw it all away within hours to days anyway.

Filesystems are a solved problem. If ZFS disappeared from the world today... really who would even care? Only those of us still around trying to shout on the internet.
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-30 18:33:28+00:00
The Bowling Alone book captured this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone? Personally, I subscribe to the idea the underlying cause is the loss of trust in American institutions (government, church, corporations, sports, unions etc.)

- Decline in trust undermines institutions, and the loss of institutions further reduces trust. - Rising inequality, political polarization, and lack of fairness & opportunity further reduce trust. - This results in withdrawal from in-person activities and the substitution of online "life".
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-30 18:34:24+00:00
>Almost everything you said was incorrect.

It's not at all incorrect. But you are clearly programmed very well. If I prove it to you, you will "yes, but" me to death. No thanks.

>Ah there it is. See, it doesn't matter what numbers or sources I cite to you because it'll all just be bullshit in your eyes. You've already made up your mind and nothing can convince you otherwise.

No, it is not that NO amount of evidence would convince me. It is that the arguments put forth by the mainstream are weak, indirect, and illogical. You seem to know that already, because you aren't even trying. I could be charitable and say this is just a difference of opinion, and maybe the vaccine did help some people. That is still far from a compelling reason to FORCE anyone to get it. Trust me, if COVID was actually bad and the vaccine was actually effective, you'd have been more afraid of other people trying to get the vaccine than you would be of the disease. A lot of people didn't want or need the so-called vaccine because they knew that it didn't work (well enough), and it had risks (in general, or for them), and that being forced to get a vaccine is a major civil rights violation.

>This is Facebook uncle-posting tier.

I think telling you what tier your comments hit would get me banned on here.
by supernuova | 2025-08-30 18:35:23+00:00
Yes, exactly! If you can trust that each unit is working in all the ways covered in the tests, you can focus on the unit you are developing and not have to keep the other unit in your mind while working on it. And if there is an untested edge case you think might be the cause, you can test that edge case independently from the unit where the issue is occurring, and confirm if it produces the expected result.

Good, trusted unit tests are the difference between encapsulation reducing or increasing/complicating cognitive load. (And similar but between components for integration tests).

That being said, there will be rare times that the issue is due to something that is only an edge case due to an implementation detail several units deep, and so sometimes you do still need the full picture, but at least it lets you save doing that until you're stumped, which IMO is well worth it if the code is overall well-designed and tested.
by mpalmer | 2025-08-30 18:35:41+00:00
The author's point could be made far more succinctly and clearly than this. I found the writing indulgent, overcomplicated and unfocused.

Overwrought prose (so many lists of three or more things! Why?) that takes fully half of its word count to get to the point, which is that LLMs are appeasing and solicitous by default. Not sure what else I'm supposed to take away.
by krapp | 2025-08-30 18:35:57+00:00
I agree with you, unfortunately there's nothing anyone can do about it. HN is just AI News now. It's even becoming normal to post AI generated comments, no matter how often people complain, even though it's against the guidelines. Soon people will defend it with the same passion with which they do refusing to read past the title.

Maybe it's time to step away and find some better curated alternatives, or spend time on other things.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-30 18:36:13+00:00
> It’s basically document signing with key pairs —- old tech that is known to work.

I understand the technical side of the suggestion. The social and practical side is inevitably flawed.

You need some sort of global registry of public keys. Not only does each registrar have to be trusted but you also need to both trust every single real person to protect and not misuse their keys.

Leaving aside the complete practical infeasability that, even if you accomplish it, you now have a unique identifier tied to every piece of text. There will inevitably be both legal processes to identify who produce a signed work as well as data analysis approaches to deanonamize the public keys.

The end result is pretty clearly that anyone wishing to present material that purports to be human made has to forgo anonymity/pseudonymity. Claiming otherwise is like claiming we can have a secure government backdoor for encryption.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 18:38:03+00:00
> no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old

We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t.

But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.
by turtletontine | 2025-08-30 18:38:10+00:00
I’ve been running btrfs on a little home Debian NAS for over a year now. I have no complaints - it’s been working smoothly, doing exactly what I want. I have a heterogeneous set of probably 6 discs, >20TB total, no problems.

*caveat: I’m using RAID 10, not a parity RAID. It could have problems with parity RAID. So? If you really really want RAID 5, then just use md to make your RAID 5 device and put btrfs on top.
by narrator | 2025-08-30 18:38:18+00:00
I think one unprecedented thing about how China operates is every single company is like a private military contractor with letters of marque and reprisal to do whatever the heck they feel like in the name of CCP world dominance. As long as it's patriotic, you can do absolutely whatever the heck you want to the other guys. Harvest their organs for profit, sabotage major infrastructure, hack absolutely everything, fund and supply and launder money for fentanyl production, etc. The kinds of things only the dirty tricks department of intelligence agencies are allowed to do in Western countries that they get called out and scandalized about when people find out about that.

Likewise, if you're Jack Ma and they don't like what poem you quoted, all your stuff is now theirs and there aren't any silly laws to protect yourself. Absolutely 100% goal oriented to the steady increase in power of the communist party and absolutely no higher principles apply.
by lossolo | 2025-08-30 18:38:46+00:00
I think OP is not entirely incorrect. Reproductive cells undergo processes like epigenetic reprogramming, which basically strips away many of the chemical marks (like DNA methylation patterns) that accumulate with age. That’s one of the reasons babies don’t start with the cellular age of their parents. Researchers can take adult cells, reprogram them back to an embryonic like state using Yamanaka factors (a set of four genes) effectively erasing their biological age.

I think scientists currently are testing ways to "partially" reprogram cells to make them younger while keeping their function. Early studies in mice have shown some reversal of aging signs.

Seems like an engineering problem more than an absolute limitation.
by anon-3988 | 2025-08-30 18:39:43+00:00
> Filesystems are a solved problem. If ZFS disappeared from the world today... really who would even care? Only those of us still around trying to shout on the internet.

Yeah nah, have you tried processing terabytes of data every day and storing them? It gets better now with DDR5 but bit flips do actually happen.
by cyclingsnake | 2025-08-30 18:39:58+00:00
Indeed it is a beautiful font. There are certain things in products (or life even) that just work as expected; I don't appreciate them while using them, but as time passes, and with a reminder such as this blog post, I can retrospectively see both the satisfaction I had using them, and how they contributed to the experience of that product as a whole. Attention to detail is truly important I guess.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-30 18:41:25+00:00
What are they going to get out of it? Everywhere you go on most campuses you're hammered with title IX messaging about how interacting with women in anything other than a cold professional way (which rarely results in sex, women don't want that) is harassment and can ruin your life. The only thing left then is getting drunk which is also a good way to ruin your life.

Why would they go?
by trentnix | 2025-08-30 18:42:24+00:00
Cognitive load and the benefits of simplification aren't just for systems and code. Reducing cognitive load is critically important in delivering good requirements. It enables engineers to focus on the technical and organization aspects of the solution, not interpreting the problem.

The fact is, despite all the process and pipelines and rituals we've invented to guide how software is made, the best thing leadership can do is to communicate incremental, unambiguous requirements and provide time and space for your engineers to solve the problem. If you don't do that, none of the other meetings and systems and processes and tools will matter.
by vaxman | 2025-08-30 18:42:30+00:00
IMHO, the real "morons" (your word) are those deploying Chinese-fabricated SoCs (like the latest ESP32, LinkStar, etc) and mainboards with Chinese-written BIOS/EFI/UEFI (like Zima) on what an increasing number of "influencers" deem "Raspberry Pi alternatives". Even when you cite the websites about things like "Moonbounce", there is a generation of workers in the Business now that become outwardly enraged and irrational about the risk and otherwise stick their head firmly in the sand while quietly knowing what they have done and will therefore likely continue to do is costing us the Country. Even if this effort wasn't part of VOLT, it certainly is consistent with the LAW in China that all companies must have CCP management and implement all requests required of them by that management. The worst part is that when you publicly confront these companies with this fact, for example, in Discord, they don't even deny it, they simply respond solemnly that "the other side does it too." (True, but our guys don't currently sell prisoner kidneys.)

Hey, I'll bet you never look at that WiFi-"enabled" power bank or HEPA/AC unit again the same way (or my favorite AI response du jour "Some Chinese scooters come with a microphone integrated into a GPS tracker or helmet, while others can be customized with aftermarket solutions. There is no single model called "Chinese scooter with microphone," but rather multiple products and approaches that fit this description.") Errbody worried about the talking LLM parrot AI and your vehicle dashboard always listening (or even watching), but that's not the most serious threat we face now.
by st3fan | 2025-08-30 18:43:28+00:00
Pretty sure this was not true for the longest time actually. Up to at least the mid 90s, both Apple and Microsoft had their own tools like Visual Basic/C/C++ and MPW on the Mac and none of those tools were free. You could get significant educational discounts or other deals but the tools cost real money.

Later, Xcode (or Project Builder) became pretty much free with the first release of MacOS X. You could buy a Mac and install all the tools to develop software. Very much in the spirit of NeXT. I am sure something similar happened for Microsoft around the same time.

And now of course all the tools both native from vendors + a large selection of additional third party tools are basiclly free for all major platforms.

(Disregarding things like 'app store fees' or 'developer accounts' which exists for both Apple and Microsoft but are not 100% required to build stuff.)
by guerrilla | 2025-08-30 18:44:17+00:00
> isValid = val > someConstant

> isAllowed = condition2 || condition3

> isSecure = condition4 && !condition5

> // , we don't need to remember the conditions, there are descriptive variables

> if isValid && isAllowed && isSecure {

> ...

>}

I literally relaxed in my body when I read this. It was like a deep sigh of cool relief in my soul.
by stickfigure | 2025-08-30 18:45:57+00:00
Social science studies are notoriously difficult and often contradictory even when the authors are honest and doing their best.

What other studies have been done on this subject, and did they reach similar conclusions? What evidence out there contradicts this study, and why should we give more weight to this evidence? "Pick the study that reinforces the point you are trying to make" is a classic.

From years of reading Scott Alexander I've become attuned to the difference between 1) someone trying to convince me of something or 2) someone trying to discover the truth. The tone of this article fits clearly into category #1. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but it should not be accepted at face value.
by dahart | 2025-08-30 18:46:54+00:00
Your comment made me think Mort represents efficiency, Einstein represents quality, and Elvis represents risk. The ideal combination is difficult, and it changes over time. If anyone knew what the ideal combination was, companies would never fail. Risk can get something started, and lack of it can eventually kill software. In fact, I would argue the vast majority of software we’ve seen so far dies an eventual death due in part to its inability to take risk and change and adapt - it might be not enough Elvis in the long term. Too much risk can kill something before it takes off and can undermine the ability to ship and to ship quality. Generally speaking my gut instinct was to (perhaps like you) align with and defend Morts; the business objective is the only thing that matters and pays the bills, and there is certainly a class of Morts that doesn’t write spaghetti code, and cares about quality and tries new things, but prioritizes work toward the customer and not code wonkery. Anyway… this is too probably abstract to be very useful and I made it worse and more abstract, but it’s fun to hypothesize!
by dvno42 | 2025-08-30 18:47:06+00:00
Definitely, I would hope these kinds of systems become less useful with more encryption. I imagine, these kinds of collections I mentioned above are just one of many angles used in an investigation with this particular angle being for correlation and supporting evidence against a request to bookface, cloudflare, etc.

edit these network devices probably also carry voip/voice trunks from enterprise and possibly carriers such as VZW. No telling if those are encrypted or not. If China is able to tap that using these CALEA systems, I could see how that would be a big deal for stealing IP/secrets.
by st3fan | 2025-08-30 18:47:17+00:00
"Smart authors generally write simpler code"

I don't like to generalize.

You are lucky then. I've definitely worked with super smart engineers who chose incredibly complicated solutions over more simpler and pragmatic solutions. As a result the code was generally hard to maintain and specially difficult to understand.

It is a real thing. And it generally happens with "the smart ones" because people who don't know how to make things complicated generally stick with simpler solutions. In my experience.
by p_ing | 2025-08-30 18:47:32+00:00
> All this leaves Windows curiously unchanged in the sense that Microsoft only cares to develop it when forced to by competition, and entirely changed by abandoning one of its symbiotic compatibilities with its corporate clients, that of manageable continuity.

This is an uninformed take given the number of architectures NT has resided on over it's 32 year history.

Microsoft has put NT on ISAs where a market was (MIPS, PPC) or they thought could be (Alpha, IA-64). Then some architectures become 'good enough' (AArch64) that they attract the attention of Microsoft and magically Windows appears. I don't see how competition (no desktop OS competes with Windows or x86) has "forced" Microsoft's hand, here.
by shykes | 2025-08-30 18:47:32+00:00
Basically, this is about implementing core AI primitives (chat completion, tool calling, context management) at the system layer, instead of the application or framework layer like it is today.

If you're curious to see one real-life implementation of this (I'm sure there are others), we're pretty far along in doing this with Dagger:

- We already had system primitives for running functions in a sandboxed runtime

- We added the ability for functions to 1) prompt LLMs, and 2) pass other functions to the LLMs as callbacks.

- This way, a function can call LLMs, a LLM can call functions, in any permutation.

- This allows exploring the full spectrum from fully deterministic workflows, to autonomous agents, and everything in between - without locking yourself in a particular programming language, library or framework.

- We've also experimented with passing objects to the LLM, and mapping each of the object's methods to a tool call. This opens interesting possibilities, since the objects can carry state - effectively extending the LLM's context from text only, to arbitrary structured data, without additional dependencies like complex databases etc.

Relevant documentation page: https://docs.dagger.io/features/llm
by AIPedant | 2025-08-30 18:47:33+00:00
You can say it’s exactly 1 plus or minus some small epsilon and use the completeness of the reals to argue that we can always build a finer ruler and push the epsilon down further. You have a sequence (meters, decimeters, centimeters, millimeters, etc) where a_n is the resolution of measurement and 5*a_(n+1) determines your uncertainty.

However, at each finite n we are still dealing with discrete quantities, i.e. integers and rationals. Even algebraic irrationals like sqrt(2) are ultimately a limit, and in my view the physicality of this limit doesn’t follow from the physicality of each individual element in the sequence. (Worse, quantum mechanics strongly suggests the sequence itself is unphysical below the Planck scale. But that’s not actually relevant - the physicality of sqrt(2) ultimately assumes a stronger view about reality than the physicality of 2 or 1/2.)
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-30 18:48:37+00:00
Virtual machines contain the blast radius. A good agent will be able to take advantage of zero days from within your system to crack you no problem, being a user makes this really easy. You'd have to carefully firewall its knowledge, but there are so many ways to get stuff on the internet (i.e. ask to download an encrypted version of the file in an obfuscated way from a service that can get past the gatekeeper AI). These things are going to be scary good at cracking systems, trust me, you are going to want things to be ironclad.
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-30 18:48:38+00:00
This is also true of interface/UX/interaction design. Most developers are really skilled at maintaining a higher cognitive load than most, and the interfaces that work best for less technical people often frustrate developers, who want everything in front of them, visible, at all times because they intuitively know what’s important. Interfaces created by developers might click with other devs, but often bewilder less technical people. It’s really hard to design a tool that less technical people can use intuitively to solve complex problems without wanting to throw their electronics out the window.
by Vosporos | 2025-08-30 18:48:47+00:00
> He has only forbidden you ˹to eat˺ carrion, blood, swine[1], and what is slaughtered in the name of any other than Allah. But if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding immediate need—they will not be sinful. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

[1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8.

https://quran.com/2?startingVerse=173
by vunderba | 2025-08-30 18:49:20+00:00
I had similar thoughts reading the piece - particularly as a writer who prioritizes the idea more than the decorative prose in which it is draped, but it might be better to think of this article as an "interpretation" comparable to Glenn Gould, Sviatoslav Richter, or Wanda Landowska performing the Well-Tempered Clavier.
by thwarted | 2025-08-30 18:49:55+00:00
> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.

There's that word "just".

There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?)

I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.
by pdimitar | 2025-08-30 18:50:49+00:00
> The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even.

O_o

Apparently I've been living under a rock, can you please show us a link about this? I was just recently (casually) looking into bolting ZFS/BTRFS-like partial snapshot features to simulate my own atomic distro where I am able to freely roll back if an update goes bad. Think Linux's Timeshift with something little extra.
by e40 | 2025-08-30 18:50:53+00:00
I read a year or more ago that the art of making glass eyes is being lost to the world. I don't remember the reasons, except that it's a difficult task and not enough people are learning it and maybe that insurance companies aren't paying enough/as much (so there's not an incentive to do it anymore). I remember seeing pictures of the products of these artists. They were something to behold. So beautiful.